Belgian Media report on the Falun Gong Activities during the EU-summit held in Ghent, Belgium

On Friday 19th October 2001, Falun Gong practitioners gathered together in the important Belgian town of Ghent where the European heads of state were meeting. The activity included group exercise in the Zuid-Park in Ghent, distributing flyers, collecting signatures and clarifying the truth to people. The following newspaper reported the event:

GENTENAAR [Belgian newspaper]: Protest against brutal persecution

Falun Gong is looking for support.

Behind the statue of King Albert in the Zuid-Park a group of 300 people were performing rhythmic slow movements. It was a group of followers of the Chinese philosophy of Falun Gong. The group was using the EU-summit to ask for attention to the brutal persecution of their movement in China.

“Falun Gong is a philosophy that has been passed on from master to student for centuries and was only made public in 1992 says Matthias Slaats, one of the (up till now) few practitioners in Ghent.
“This method for refining mind and body became very popular very quickly in China, with the support of the communist regime. That was normal, because through following this philosophy you want to do everything better. One becomes healthier and can work more. But when the philosophy had more followers than the communist party, the regime started to violently persecute the practitioners.”

Principles
In America the repression of Falun Gong is already well known, in Europe hardly. That’s why a group of a hundred Chinese people, mainly Taiwanese, are travelling through Europe in a bus. On Friday they came to Ghent on the occasion of the EU-summit to ask for attention to their problems. For this demonstration also 200 fellow spiritual practitioners from all over Europe came to Ghent.
Falun Gong is based on three principles: truthfulness, compassion and tolerance, our guide explains. The practitioners try to incorporate these principles better and better in their lives. The practice of rhythmic movements is helping to do that. The practitioners living in Ghent come to practise these every Sunday morning in the Zuid-Park (in reality it is the Citadel-Park). “There are only 5 exercises. Everyone quickly knows the different movements by heart. The Chinese music, with the Chinese instructions is not essential. It mostly gives the rhythm.”