Beijing breaks up Falungong protests

The Straits Times Interactive

East Asia News APR 14, 2000

BEIJING -- Chinese police kicked and punched scores of Falungong members as they broke up a wave of carefully-coordinated protests by the banned spiritual movement in Beijing's Tiananmen Square yesterday.

More than 200 Falungong practitioners were detained in violent scuffles with police as the group, fearing a new crackdown by the authorities ahead of the anniversary of last year's protest, flooded the square.

The protests began shortly after 10 am when six separate knots of Falungong followers raised red and yellow flags with the label "Falun Dafa" simultaneously in different parts of the square.

The action caused mayhem, as large groups of uniform and plainclothes police sprinted around the central esplanade punching, kicking and shoving protesters into lines of police vans.

Nearly 90 minutes later, scattered protests were still going on, with at least four more banners raised by groups of between five and 10 people.

At least five van loads of protesters, many of them middle-aged women, were rounded up and driven off.

Police kicked many of them as they forced them into the vehicles, but the protests continued with at least two groups raising banners again in the vans.

The square was filled with several thousand people, many of them tourists, and police roamed the crowds confiscating films from those armed with cameras and asking everybody whether they were members of the Falungong.

Bemused tour guides carrying little coloured flags were descended upon by plainclothes officers and lowered the offending articles swiftly, as police screamed at tourists to move away from the scene.

The mass protest, one of the biggest by the movement since it was banned last July and labelled an "evil cult", comes days before the anniversary of the April 25 protest last year which saw about 10,000 followers in a silent demonstration outside the Zhongnanhai compound of the Communist leadership in central Beijing.

New York-based Falungong spokesman Gail Rachlin said: "They felt that the authorities were going to invade their homes so they thought they would make a pre-emptive strike."

She also said Falungong websites in the United States and Canada had been attacked by the Chinese government with an information overload this week.

Chinese police declined to respond immediately to the allegations.

The Chinese government has been strongly condemned by human rights groups and Western governments for the crackdown which is one of the reasons the United States has tabled a motion of censure against Beijing at the ongoing session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. -- AFP, Reuters

(c) Copyright Singapore Press Holdings Ltd, 2000. All rights reserved.