The Dalai Lama will be the keynote speaker at the Newark Peace Education Summit, which runs from Friday through Sunday. The downtown summit will feature panel discussions of international peace activists and local community leaders.
Now 75, the Dalai Lama fled in 1959 into exile in northern India, where he is still based. China has occupied Tibet since 1950 and claims that the region has been part of its territory for centuries. Many Tibetans, who are linguistically and ethnically distinct from Han Chinese, say they were effectively independent before that.
The Dalai Lama reiterated Thursday that he was pushing for a high degree of autonomy for Tibetans under Chinese rule, not separation from China. He is set to turn over his political leadership to a newly elected prime minister of Tibet's government-in-exile by the end of May.
The Dalai Lama has been on a tour of the United States, but organizers of the Newark peace summit said it was important to him to include on his tour a place like Newark, a city of 280,000 residents that has been trying to reverse decades of violence.
Asked how the messages of the summit - which will have panel discussions involving Nobel laureates and celebrities including Goldie Hawn - would reach young people in Newark struggling in violence-plagued neighborhoods, the Dalai Lama said violence, especially among the young, was an acting out of extreme frustration.
"At age 16, I lost my freedom. At age 24, I lost my own country. There's a lot of difficulties there. There are sufficient causes to be angry," he said. "But [it's] no use. Too much anger spoils, destroys [one's] own life, and anger won't solve the problem."
The conference was organized by Robert Thurman, U.S. cofounder of the Tibet House in New York, and billboard company owner Drew Katz, a philanthropist who has made significant contributions to Newark's anticrime efforts.
