Franconia Post: “A CITY HALL WELCOME FOR FALUN GONG MARCHERS”

Daily 50 km across Europe

Hof (a city in Bavaria/Germany) – Since September 22, groups of Falun Gong practitioners from China are on the road, to raise awareness among the European populace to their precarious situation in their native country. On November 7th, three [Chinese] university students in Germany began their so-called “SOS-march” from Berlin to Munich. On Monday they had arrived in Hof and visited the Lord Mayor, Mr. Dieter Dohla. The reason for their “world-wide rescue march” is the urgent plea to all governments and their citizens to rescue the [Chinese] Falun Gong members.

The interpreter for the group, Berlin’s Humboldt University student Guang Yang said that “Falun Gong is a peaceful Buddha-cultivation school for body and mind, based in traditional Chinese culture, incorporating the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance. According to Miss Yang, the Chinese government at first supported Falun Gong, but banned it in 1999. The reason? The Chinese government viewed the ranks of Falun Gong practitioners who had swelled to 70 million as a threat.” “They feared they would lose control of the Chinese citizen’s hearts and ideology,” so she said. To underscore her point, she told the Lord Mayor, Mr. Dohla, that the Chinese regime since October to date has tortured 311 practitioners to death. Additionally, 100,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been arrested; over 10,000 have been sent to forced labor camps, and several thousand had been sent to psychiatric facilities, all without due process of law.

The best known of these cases is probably a man named Zhao Ming, a student at Dublin’s Trinity College. As the interpreter told us, he was sentenced without due process of law in July 2000, to spend time doing forced labor in a re-education camp. Originally he was supposed to be released in May of 2001, but his detention period was arbitrarily extended because, in spite of the tortures, he faithfully adheres to Falun Gong.

As a final act, the group asked the Lord Mayor to sign a petition to the Federal Republic of Germany in which they plead to intercede for the freedom of Mr. Ming and to prevent further murders on Falun Gong practitioners, a request Mr. Dohla gladly honored.