Lodi Gyari, 69; longtime emissary of Dalai Lama
Lodi Gyari, who escaped Chinese oppression in Tibet as a child, then spent his life as a tireless advocate for his native land and people, becoming an emissary of the Dalia Lama in negotiations with the government of China, died Oct. 29 at a hospital in San Francisco. He was 69.
The cause was liver cancer, said Lesley Friedell Rich, an official with the International Campaign for Tibet, which Gyari once led.
Born in a tent surrounded by snowcapped mountains, Gyari (pronounced “Gary”) was descended from a long line of chieftains and resistance fighters, including his grandmother and an aunt who raised him. He was considered a reincarnated lama in the Buddhist religion and, as a child, helped guide his family out of their homeland after China seized control of Tibet in the 1950s.
He and his family fled to northern India, where many Tibetans formed an exile community in Dharamsala, under the spiritual guidance of the Dalai Lama. Gyari, who studied in monasteries in Tibet and India, was drawn from an early age – like his ancestors – to the cause of Tibetan freedom.
In 1970, he helped found the Tibetan Youth Congress, which remains the largest political organization of Tibetans in exile. Gyari, who became a skilled English-language writer and speaker, was a translator for Tibetan resistance fighters training in the United States, then became the editor of a Tibetan-language newspaper and an English-language publication, now known as the Tibetan Review.
At first, he was an advocate of complete sovereignty for Tibet, which had been an independent nation before China’s Communist-led revolution of the late 1940s. He became active in the Tibetan government-in-exile in India and, at age 30, became the speaker of its parliament and later a cabinet officer.
The exile government – the Central Tibetan Administration – is not an officially recognized body, but it carries considerable moral authority in the West. Gyari became, in effect, the leading diplomat of the global Tibetan exile community.
As China tightened its control over Tibet, Gyari sought to draw attention to the plight of his people, first at the United Nations and later in Washington, where he was posted as the Dalai Lama’s special envoy in 1990.
Tempering his earlier calls for Tibetan independence, Gyari became a champion of the Dalai Lama’s more moderate “Middle Way” approach, which sought political and cultural autonomy for the Tibetan people within the framework of the Chinese constitution.
In Washington, Gyari coordinated the Dalai Lama’s visits to the United States, including meetings with several presidents. He also carried Tibet’s message to the State Department and Congress.
He helped secure congressional funding for the Tibetan people and their causes, totaling almost $200 million from 1991 to 2011. He was also a leading advocate for the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002.