Geneva, 20 March 2001

Demonstration: More than a thousand members of Falun Gong assembled peacefully yesterday in front of the Palais des Nations. Among them was B., a peace-loving native of Geneva.

She has been practising the Falun Gong exercises for five years now. Like more than a thousand practitioners, mainly Asian, B. from Geneva came to practise in the public yesterday on the Place des Nations, in defiance of the ban on demonstrating in front of the UN. This is her quiet and peaceful way of condemning the arrests of many members of the movement in China.

This peace-loving retired teacher discovered Falun Gong by chance, "like most of our members," she says. "We are quiet people. The spreading of the practice tends to be by word of mouth." There were some flyers distributed here and there in Geneva, but no actual advertising of the movement. There are roughly more than 500 members in Switzerland overall. B. has never had the impression that she was joining a cult. "It is totally irrelevant and I would like people to stop using the word when they talk about Falun Gong. It's just a philosophy of life. There is no hierarchy, no worshipping. No one asks the people who come to practise the exercises for anything - neither their telephone numbers nor their addresses; I just know them by their first names. They are completely free to stay or to leave when they like. We don't ask for money either; there is no membership fee." Indeed, no charge is made for most of the gyms in the Geneva schools where members meet.

Discreet though she is, B. has come to the Place des Nations in full view of everyone. "It's our way of reacting against the torture in China," she says. "Quite frankly, do you find it normal to ban peaceful people from getting together and put them in prison for doing just that?" She is moved by a deep sense of injustice, but there is not a trace of anger in her face. This evening or tomorrow, B. will find her way to a gym and will go through her exercises again in order to attain the inner peace she aspires to, free from any coercion.