Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Tuesday presented a prize to Austrian mountain climber and writer Heinrich Harrer, who wrote of his real-life experiences in his best-selling book ”Seven Years in Tibet”.
Harrer escaped to Tibet from a British prisoner of war camp in India during World War II and befriended the Dalai Lama, then a young boy. His book was filmed in the 1997 Hollywood movie of the same title, starring Brad Pitt.
The Dalai Lama presented Harrer with the International Campaign for Tibet’s Light of Truth Award, which honours people who have helped bring the situation in Tibet, which has been under Chinese rule since 1951, to international attention.
The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against the Chinese, and formed a government-in-exile in northern India. The Dalai Lama and Harrer came onto the stage of Graz congress centre in eastern Austria holding hands, and the Dalai Lama congratulated Harrer in a moving ceremony.
”I am happy to see my old friend Heinrich Harrer again. I met him when I was 15 or 16 years old at a very turbulent time in my life. Now he is 90 but he still seems to be in very good health,” he said.
”We represent a community based on freedom, compassion and being there for one another. We are strictly against violence, and I think we get this much support and sympathy because we are against violence,” he added.
Harrer, who left Tibet in 1952, described the country as his second home, and his time there as the happiest of his life. ”There was no more beautiful place in the world, nowhere were the people more satisfied. The happiness of their souls carried over onto me. Their welcome and happiness were more than I can describe,” he said.
The Dalai Lama is in Graz leading the annual Kalachakra ceremony, which promotes peace and tolerance, and to which some 8 000 people have come from 70 countries across the world. – Sapa-AFP