South Africa is mulling a visa application by the Dalai Lama, International Relations Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said on Tuesday.
“Our mission in New Delhi has received a visa application from his holiness the Dalai Lama and, like all other high profile or ordinary visa applications, this application is under process,” she told reporters at a government cluster briefing in Pretoria.
“That's how much I can say for now about the application.”
Nkoana-Mashabane was taking part, via video from Pretoria, in a government cluster briefing in Cape Town.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has invited the Dalai Lama, who was refused entry into the country two years ago, to his 80th birthday celebrations in Cape Town on October 7.
He has warned that the government would “shoot itself in the foot” by again refusing his fellow Nobel Peace laureate entry into South Africa.
“I mean it’s so sad to think that we have had a kind of experience of repression that we have had, in that we should want to kowtow to a hugely repressive regime that can dictate to us about freedom and things of that kind.
“For oldies like us... it just gives us a sadness,” Tutu said last week.
In 2009, South Africa barred the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader from visiting the country to attend a peace conference for fear of jeopardising ties with China, a key trade partner.
Nkoana-Mashabane said earlier this month the Dalai Lama was welcome to visit South Africa, and described the earlier the refusal to allow him entry as a case of poor communication by the government.
The Dalai Lama has lived in exile in India since fleeing Tibet during a failed uprising in 1959.
He accepts Chinese rule, but Beijing accuses him of being a separatist and opposes his regular meetings with foreign leaders. - Sapa