Under Pressure from the Chinese Embassy, Police in United Arab Emirates Bar Practitioners from Revealing the True Facts about Falun Gong

On the 17th of January, 2005, four Falun Gong practitioners and I, all from Australia, attended the celebration of the annual Dubai Festival in the United Arab Emirates. With permission from the organiser, we went to Dubai's Global Village to introduce Falun Gong and clarify the truth of the persecution. This year's celebration was especially grand, and exhibits from more than 70 countries in the Global Village's exhibition hall attracted 300,000 local and overseas visitors. Our exhibit had banners and posters just inside the first doorway. We passed out information on Falun Dafa to the crowd, and almost everyone accepted our materials. Then a Chinese national came to have a look but refused to take our materials, and there was another Chinese person sitting down at a distance observing us the whole time.

Some time later, an official of the Global Village came to tell us that they had received a demand from the Chinese Embassy, and that we had to leave and could not pass out materials on Falun Gong at the Global Village. After we explained to him the facts of the persecution, he said we could talk about it the next day at noon. As we were getting ready to leave, two plainclothes United Arab Emirates police officers suddenly appeared and wanted to check our passports. After checking our passports, they asked us to leave immediately. Shortly afterwards we saw the two police walking into the Global Village office with the Chinese person that was sitting at some distance observing us. When we were moving our things out of the Global Village, the two police came out and wanted to make photocopies of our passports. They also took away our materials against our wishes, including some 30,000 flyers in Arabic and English that we picked up from the printing shop that morning.

This was the second time practitioners were harassed by the Chinese Embassy in the United Arab Emirates. In 2002, when Ms. Wang Yuzhi was distributing flyers to people in the United Arab Emirates exposing the persecution she suffered in Wanjia Labour Camp in China, the Chinese Embassy put pressure on United Arab Emirates authorities to have Wang repatriated to China. Later, the Canadian government intervened and rescued her, letting her depart to Canada.

Chinese Embassies and consulates all over the world often interfere with Falun Gong practitioners' activities. The pressure they exert on local authorities has caused the local police, who did not understand the truth, to take some unwise actions. We believe that as more and more people and governments understand the truth about Falun Gong, the world will widely condemn the Chinese Embassies' reproachful conduct.