OVER 200 FALUN GONG PRACTITIONERS DEMONSTRATE IN ROME

the event, promoted by Hands Off Cain and the Transnational Radical Party, kicked off in Piazza Montecitorio. The demonstrators gathered in front of the Italian Parliament to denounce the persecution of Falun Gong adherents by the Chinese authorities.
Wearing their distinctive yellow T-shirts, and seated on the ground in the lotus position, Falun Gong enthusiasts practised meditation and various spiritual exercises. The silence was broken only by the sound of relaxing Chinese music for over three hours. The gathering was then addressed by the promoters and Italian and European MPs who turned up to voice their solidarity.
Hands Off Cain’s general secretary Sergio D’Elia warned against the use of the international anti-terrorism alliance by the authoritarian regimes to crackdown harder against their internal dissenters.
“The alliance unites the liberal democratic countries on the one hand and the totalitarian, fundamentalist, dictatorial regimes on the other,” D’Elia said.
“The risk is that the fight against terrorism is used to legitimise the breaches of human rights and the persecution of political rivals. This goes for the Chinese authorities against the Falun Gong, the people of Tibet, the Uighurs, and the Taiwan independence movement, as much as it goes for the Russians against the Chechens.”
Erping Zhang, international spokesperson for the Falun Gong movement, said a new crackdown on Chinese Falun Gong practitioners will kick-off on October 1, China’s national day, on President Jiang Zemin’s orders.
Since the start of the repression in July 1999 to August 2000, Falun recorded over 100,000 arrests, 270 deaths from torture, over a 1,000 internments in psychiatric institutions and a further thousand practitioners sent to labour camps, Zhang said.
European Member of Parliament Emma Bonino talked of the importance of fighting terrorism and fundamentalism but underlined the necessity of defending civil liberties, mainly freedom of conscience and freedom of opinion.
Kunlun Zhang, a Chinese Canadian sculptor, and Cuiying Zhang, an Australian Chinese artist, shared their experiences of torture and imprisonment in China because they refused to renounce Falun Gong.
Hands Off Cain had also appealed for a concrete initiative in favour of Falun Gong through a parliamentary resolution. The motion is being promoted by Senator Natale D’Amico, the chairperson of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Commission Gustavo Selva and the Deputy Speaker of the Chamber of Representatives Alfredo Biondi, who all expressed their support personally to the practitioners present in Rome for SOS Falun Gong campaign.
The activity-packed day continued with a march from Trinità dei Monti to the Chinese Embassy spearheaded by MEP Marco Pannella. Despite his presence, the Embassy refused to receive an open letter to the Chinese authorities the demonstrators tried to deliver. Pannella tried to deliver the letter as an ordinary post-boy but the Italian woman who answered the intercom declared she had strict instructions not to receive any letter from Falun Gong. Pannella defined the incident “grotesque” and the woman a “political prisoner within the embassy”.
The Falun Gong adherents reacted by calmly meditating.