HKiMail --- iNews
Tue , 3 October 2000
Plainclothes police officers subdue a Falun Gong member after protests by the outlawed sect were staged all over Tiananmen Square during National Day celebrations.
SPORADIC protests by outlawed Falun Gong followers continued in Tiananmen Square late last night, hours after police had broken up a larger demonstration to mark National Day and arrested about 1,000 people. The followers took advantage of the tens of thousands of mainland tourists who had gathered in the morning on the square in central Beijing to mark the 51st anniversary of communist rule to make the most of their protests.
The police were forced to round up the protesters as they appeared throughout the day, witnesses and a human-rights group said, and a nationwide crackdown was also going on. Defying official warnings and the heavy security measures, hundreds of protesters unfurled yellow banners reading "Falun Gong is good" at about 8.30am in the square, immediately after the official flag-raising ceremony.
They also threw yellow pamphlets into the air, with some striking meditation poses in defiance of the order prohibiting people from practising Falun Gong in public, witnesses said. Scuffles immediately broke out as the police, both in uniform and plainclothes, tried to round up the slogan-chanting sect members, some of them children.
The policemen, dressed in new blue uniforms intended to smarten up their image, kicked, punched and pushed the protesters, herding them into buses and vans waiting to take them away.
Even the experienced riot police found it difficult to quash the demonstrations, with the protesters split into scores of groups of about 50 each. As one group was being subdued, another would begin protesting in another part of the huge square.
The chaos, witnessed by thousands of astonished onlookers, eventually led to the police closing the square for about an hour, a huge embarrassment for the authorities on such a festive day. As the arrested protesters were taken away in buses and vans, they could be heard shouting "Falun Gong is not a crime."
Witnesses said the authorities must have had hundreds of armed police and at least a thousand uniformed and plainclothed officers mingling with the tourists on the square, but they were outnumbered by the practitioners. Some of the protesters even managed to escape during the scuffles, disappearing in the mass of bewildered onlookers.
A family of Falun Gong practitioners said they had travelled 200 kilometres from the northern city of Tianjin to rally against the authorities' decision to ban the group. They said that a retired cadre of a state-run construction materials supplier had also taken part in the protests.
United States-based Falun Gong spokeswoman Gail Rachlin said the demonstrations were organised to call on the Beijing authorities to stop torturing its members. Similar protests were also held in New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Paris.
Despite the arrests, which Xinhua News Agency mentioned briefly, Ms. Rachlin said thousands more were pouring into Beijing to carry on the protest.
She said a nationwide crackdown was under way, with reports of arrests in Changchun and other cities. A Beijing resident confirmed the police were taking action against the Falun Gong, saying that security checkpoints had been set up at all major railway stations and long-distance bus terminals in an attempt to stop the followers from converging on the capital.
The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said the police had detained 600 followers over the past two weeks in adjacent provinces to prevent them travelling to Beijing.
Minghui.ca - the official website of Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi - posted a notice on September 20 calling on "all Chinese members of the Falun Gong to peacefully demonstrate in Tiananmen Square" and asking President Jiang Zemin not to launch another round of suppression during the National Day holidays.
The Falun Gong was branded an "evil [religion]" and outlawed in July last year following a protest by about 10,000 of its practitioners at the central leadership compound of Zhongnanhai in April.
About 230 local Falun Gong followers staged a silent protest outside the Convention and Exhibition Centre (in Hong Kong) last night following news of the arrests in the capital.
All dressed in yellow T-shirts, they held up banners decrying the suppression of the Falun Gong and exercised peacefully outside the National Day cocktail reception in Wan Chai.
3 October 2000 / 12:40 AM
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Time for tolerance
The massive protest, and the violence it sparked, in Tiananmen Square by Falun Gong followers yesterday has again exposed serious problems in the strict controls that have been in place since the pro-democracy demonstrations 11 years ago.
2 October 2000 / 12:00 AM