SIGHTINGS



Beijing Vows To Crush
Falun Gong - Members Defiant
10-30-99

 
BEIJING (Reuters)- Chinese police dragged six middle-aged female Falun Gong protesters out of Tiananmen Square by the hair on Friday as the group continued its protest for the fifth straight day.
 
The protest came a day after members of the banned meditation movement stepped up their defiance against a government crackdown by appealing for international help.
 
According to witnesses, police kicked and pulled the women into a waiting minivan. The confrontation was unlike previous days, when protesters stepped into police minivans without resistance. On Friday, the women sat down in the square and clung tightly to each other.
 
One woman was picked up by her hair and feet and thrown onto a police minivan as a crowd of up to 200 people, including tourists from abroad, watched.
 
The women remained silent, but police identified them as adherents of the Falun Gong.
 
Accounts of police brutality
 
On Thursday, in an extraordinary move, nearly 30 Falun Gong members invited six international journalists to a secretly arranged news conference in suburban Beijing.
 
Dozens of Falun Gong practitioners gave accounts of persecution and police brutality during the news conference.
 
An 11-year-old boy said he was expelled from school because he refused to stop practicing Falun Gong.
 
A 31-year-old hairdresser showed off her wrists, which were still bruised >from being handcuffed, with one arm over her shoulder, the other behind her back, in Beijing on October 17.
 
The hairdresser and another woman described an 11-day hunger strike that left one follower nearly too weak to breathe.
 
Seven reporters contacted by e-mail about the news conference first met at a restaurant on one side of Beijing. The reporters were then escorted to a suburban hotel by the members. One wall of the conference room held a poster of group founder Li Hongzhi in a saffron robe.
 
Party vows to crush Falun Gong
 
China's Communist Party, meanwhile, declared that Falun Gong was a cult and vowed to show no mercy in crushing it.
 
Falun Gong is a blend of traditional meditation, slow motion exercises, and Buddhist and Taoist ideas. The group has organized more than 300 protests since April 25, when 10,000 members besieged Communist Party headquarters, demanding official status for the group.
 
China banned the group on July 22, and has arrested dozens of members for trying to mount protests across China since that time.
 
Chinese President Jiang Zemin recently compared Falun Gong with groups like the Branch Davidians in the United States, and Aum Shinrikyo in Japan. Aum killed 12 people in a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The Davidians' 51-day standoff with the FBI in 1993 ended with the deaths of 81 people.
 
Practitioners of Falun Gong have said violence is not a part of their philosophy.





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