DATE=12/19/1999 TYPE=CORRESPONDENT REPORT TITLE=MACAU PROTEST (L) NUMBER=2-257286 BYLINE=ROGER WILKISON DATELINE=MACAU CONTENT= VOICED AT: INTRO: Police in the Portuguese enclave of Macau have detained about 30 members of the Falun Gong exercise and meditation group hours before the territory reverts to Chinese rule following nearly four and a half centuries under the Portuguese flag. VOA correspondent Roger Wilkison reports the Falun Gong adherents were staging a peaceful demonstration to protest Beijing's crackdown on the movement. TEXT: The Falun Gong members -all of them ethnic Chinese but none of them a resident of Macau-chose the park in front of the territory's best known gambling casino to carry out their protest. They performed slow motion exercises before a crowd of reporters before police showed up. At first, police seemed unsure of how to handle the protest. They let one old woman in the group leave but detained three other people and surrounded the remaining Falun Gong adherents to cordon them off from journalists. The demonstrators, including a seven-year-old girl, then sat down in the lotus position and medidated while recordings of Falun Gong leader Li Hongzhi played on a tape recorder. After a half hour, police moved in, removed the protesters and hauled them away in a minibus. /////SOUND OF POLICE SHOUTING AND PUSHING///// Before she was detained, 31-year-old accountant Zhen Jianling told reporters she joined the demonstration to protest Beijing's five-month crackdown on the group. /////ZHEN ACTUALITY///// I feel it's unfair for the Chinese government to treat a hundred million people, to treat a hundred million people like that. It's impossible. /////END ACTUALITY///// Falun Gong claims to have 100 million members. But Beijing says there are no more than two million. China describes the group as an evil cult and has vowed to crush it. It has reportedly arrested thousands of Falun Gong adherents and packed many of them off to labor camps. Ms. Zhen, a Chinese national living in Australia, says she is protesting those arrests. /////ZHEN ACTUALITY///// A lot of the practitioners are still in jail, maybe more than ten thousand people. I don't know. /////END ACTUALITY///// Although Falun Gong is not banned in Macau, police have threatened to snuff out any unauthorized protests that might disturb the territory's handover to China later Sunday. On Thursday, they turned back four Falun Gong adherents who arrived by ferry from Hong Kong with the intention of staging a similar protest. Macau police have been criticized for not doing enough to stamp out gangsters who have been warring over dwindling casino profits. But they showed on Sunday that they will spare no effort to crack down on peaceful demonstrators who offend Beijing. At the stroke of midnight (11:00 AM,EST), China will reassume control of Macau after 442 years of Portuguese rule. The presidents of both countries and about 25-hundred specially invited guests will be on hand for the ceremony. Macau will become a semi- autonomous special administrative zone of China -like neighboring Hong Kong- and will keep its own government, laws and free-market economic system. (signed) NEB/RW/PLM 19-Dec-1999 03:30 AM EDT (19-Dec-1999 0830 UTC) NNNN Source: Voice of America .
