Paris delivers blow to French Olympic charm offensive

The Dalai Lama has been made an honorary citizen of Paris.

On Monday the city’s council passed a resolution made be the mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, to bestow the symbolic title on the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet.

The timing couldn’t have been more pertinent or sensitive. It came just hours after the arrival in China of the first of three emissaries to be sent this week by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

He’s going all out - short of getting on a ‘plane himself – in a full blown diplomatic charm offensive to try to ease tensions after several days of anti-French protests in town and cities across China.

That job may well have been made a little more difficult by the decision back in Paris, which Delanoë - a leading candidate to win the race to become the national leader of the opposition Socialist party later this year – said showed support for the people of Tibet and their struggles.

Sarkozy’s centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) party is in the minority in the French capital and had opposed the adoption of the resolution.

In a double whammy, unlikely to have been welcomed by Sarkozy, his emissaries or more importantly the government in Beijing, Paris councillors also bestowed honorary citizenship on the dissident Chinese political activist Hu Jia. Earlier this month Chinese authorities sentenced him to three years imprisonment for inciting subversion of the state.

Hours before the vote in Paris, the first of Sarkozy’s three emissaries had arrived in the Chinese city of Shanghai.

Christian Poncelet, the president of the French Senate, was in the city to deliver a personal letter from Sarkozy to the wheelchair-bound athlete, Jin Jing.

She has become a powerful symbol of anti-French sentiment in China ever since pictures were transmitted of pro-Tibetan protesters trying to grab the Olympic torch from her during her leg of the now infamous relay in Paris.

In the letter Sarkozy said he condemned the attacks that had been made on Jin Jing as she tried to protect the torch and understood why the Chinese felt hurt by the incident.

Later this week both former French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and Sarkozy’s chief diplomatic advisor, Jean-David Levitte, are due to arrive separately to continue the Gallic charm assault.

The president himself still hasn’t made the one gesture that would surely take the steam out of any of the “spontaneous” anti-French demonstrations, neither officially sanctioned nor condemned by Beijing. Namely making up his mind to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics games in August without setting any conditions for Beijing to reopen talks with the Dalai Lama.

That of course would require a certain loss of face as far as the French president is concerned, All he has said on the matter so far is that France would do everything to encourage talks, and that he would make a decision on what conditions he might attach to his attendance based “in light of the resumption of such a dialogue.”

Those words don’t seem to have worked their magic so far and given Sarkozy’s unwillingness to make a decision one way or the other, he is perhaps only succeeding in making a diplomatic spat even more complicated to resolve.