Scotland: A Weekend of Falun Dafa Activities During Edinburgh’s Lively Fringe Festival Period

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On Saturday 12th August, 2006, Scottish Falun Dafa practitioners set up a stall on Edinburgh’s busy main shopping street, Princes Street, alongside several street entertainment groups taking part during the lively atmosphere of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival period.

The activity was held to raise awareness of the horrific allegations that thousands of living Falun Dafa practitioners have had their organs harvested and sold for profit for medical transplants in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concentration camps all over China.

In July a former Canadian MP and Human Rights lawyer, David Kilgour and David Matas, published a report of their own independent investigations into organ harvesting from Falun Dafa practitioners. They came to the conclusion that there are more than 41,500 organ transplants performed in China since the persecution of Falun Dafa began in 1999 that cannot be accounted for and point to the very high likelihood of being the organs of practitioners.

Practitioners gave out more than two thousand leaflets to passers-by living locally and visitors from around the world. Many people, when they spoke to practitioners about the organ harvesting crimes against practitioners, read the leaflet or studied carefully the stand with posters about the persecution, were moved to sign the petition calling for the UK government to condemn the murder for organs and make their own investigations. Often there were queues of people waiting to sign the petition. Several people said how disgusting these crimes are that the CCP perpetrators are truly evil and warmly thanked the practitioners for informing them about this.

People also happily took the free Video CDs of “The Real Story of Falun Dafa” and the free DVDs of the “Nine Commentaries of the Communist Party”.

Many Chinese people passed by and gladly received information about organ harvesting and the DVDs of the “Nine Commentaries of the Communist Party”.

One man had just returned from Beijing, China on a work trip and had personally experienced the extensive internet censorship so was very aware of the suppression of the CCP.

During the afternoon thousands of anti-war demonstrators marched past the practitioners’ activity. It was a great opportunity to let more people know the facts about the persecution. As they passed by the marchers eagerly took leaflets, so fast it was hard to keep up distributing them!

On Sunday 13th August Scottish practitioners took part in “Fringe Sunday” a large event held in a park in central Edinburgh giving those performing in the Fringe Festival an opportunity to showcase their acts from all over the world including Native American musicians, Korean puppeteers and acrobatic street performers giving it an eclectic mix of colourful sights and sounds.

Practitioners showed the Falun Dafa exercises to a steady stream of interested onlookers, many of whom enquired about the Edinburgh free weekly exercise class and spent time speaking to practitioners about the exercises and the benefits to mind and body from following Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance, the principles of Falun Dafa. Practitioners handed out many leaflets explaining the exercises and the background to the persecution. People were very shocked to find out the depth of depravity of the persecution and signed the petition. Many people said that they believed that the Chinese Communist Party was afraid of freedom of belief and only wanted to control people out of fear of losing power.

Several Chinese people took photographs of practitioners performing the exercises and took information about the persecution.

One man who had been to Nanjing, China wanted to know why the persecution had started. When he found out that it was due to Jiang Zemin’s irrational jealousy he understood why the CCP would be afraid of large numbers of people having other beliefs than just Communism.

One thing that is common with Western people is that as soon as they hear that a large group of people had beliefs that differed from the atheist Communist ideology they understood immediately that this group would be persecuted.

A couple of practitioners went and spoke to people at the stall for Amnesty International Scotland. One lady said she was already aware of organ harvesting and had read the Kilgour report and had spoken about the issue on the radio.

It was a very successful weekend displaying the beauty and peacefulness of Falun Dafa and raising awareness of the horror of the persecution.

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