As the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan community in exile in India, the Dalai Lama is arguably the world’s most celebrated refugee. And as the head of the Tibetan Buddhist order, the Nobel Peace Laureate has been a channel of compassionate care for persecuted communities around the world. It was doubly jarring, therefore, to hear him say, at a conference in Malmo (in Sweden) last week, that while Europe had a “moral responsibility” to help refugees, in the final analysis, these refugees should return home to “develop their own countries”. More controversially, he said that Europe “belongs to Europeans”. Such a nativist formulation tragically mirrors the worldview of the far-right, which recently made electoral gains in Sweden.

Even if it rings true in a realpolitik sense, such an uncharacteristically unfeeling articulation represents a fall from grace for the Dalai Lama, whose moral authority as a voice of conscience springs from the uncompromising tone of his public pronouncements. That may account for why his comments have inflamed liberal opinion around the world. The most charitable explanation one may proffer is that they represent an aberration that goes against the core values he stands for.

It is, however, harder to trot out the same alibi for another Nobel Peace Laureate — Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who last week defended the sentencing of two Reuters journalists for reporting on the killing of Rohingya villagers by security forces. This apologia for militarism represents the latest instance of her forsaking the principled positions she held during her years of house arrest under military rule. It is never a pretty sight when cherished icons fall off their pedestals. That it should happen when the space for a liberal worldview is shrinking rapidly is doubly tragic.

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