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
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