Report in the German “Mannheim Morning News” newspaper

Compassionate helpers are turned into victims – Three Heidelberg Falun Gong members demonstrate in China for the release of a friend and are themselves incarcerated

By Stefanie Ball of our editing team

Shortly after 2:00 p.m. Beijing time (7:00 a.m. in Germany) the contact was broken off. Until then, Steffi Koerper was able to keep the Berlin Falun Gong Information Center up to date via her cell phone. The seventeen-year-old Heidelberg native, together with her 22-year-old sister Caroline and her father, Mr. Hubert Koerper and four other Falun Gong members from Germany had flown to the Chinese capital to demonstrate for religious freedom at Tiananmen Square. Merely a few minutes later, after Steffi Koerper had reported how another group of Western practitioners were loaded into a police vehicle, we heard sirens through her cell phone, then a brief scream – and then nothing.

Mrs.Edith Koerper had remained at home in Heidelberg with her two youngest children and is in contact with the Foreign Office. But even they do not yet have any news of the incarcerated Germans. “They will undoubtedly be interrogated and then hopefully be sent home to Germany on the next available airplane,” Mrs. Edith Koerper told our paper. At least that was what took place last November (2001) when 35 German and one foreign Falun Gong member protested against the persecution and slandering of Falun Gong, which began in 1999. The group had barely displayed a banner with the Chinese and English wording, “Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance,” the usual mass showing of police forces at Tiananmen Square sprang into action. There were scuffles; the demonstrators were herded into a bus, incarcerated.

“We knew that it might be dangerous to fly to Beijing, but we had to do something,” said Edith Koerper. This family has practiced Falung Gong for the past four years. Hubert Koerper, a trained and certified massage therapist, found out about qigong through acupuncture massage, a traditional Chinese art of breathing techniques, and finally found Falun Gong. The name is a combination of “Fa Lun,” the law wheel, and “Qigong.” These traditional methods of exercises include three principles, the pillars on which the whole system of teaching is based, namely “Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance.”
There are no outside precepts to follow. Except in China, the meditation movement is freely practiced worldwide and considered as completely harmless.

Germany has approximately 2,000 Falun Gong followers. The numbers worldwide are said to be 100 million, 70 million of them in China where the movement was founded in 1992. Only seven years later 10,000 Falun Gong followers created worldwide consternation and created complete confusion for Beijing’s leaders when they demonstrated in front of the seat of government. In 1999, China declared Falun Gong a dangerous, undesirable group. Since then, almost daily are followers of Falun Gong arrested in China. Some human rights representatives even speak of brutal abuses and tortures [against these people].

As had many others been incarcerated before her, so it happened on January 5th, 2002 to Mrs. Xiong Wei, former student at the Technical University/Berlin and a friend of this Heidelberg family. “The persecution had escalated during the past few months; the only help anymore can only come from abroad,” said Edith Koerper. A “peaceful appeal” as their luggage, Steffi, Caroline and Hubert Koerper went on their way to the “Middle Realm,” to meet with other Falun Gong followers. In the end they were more than 40 who challenged the “Chinese government “to guarantee freedom of conscience and to effect the release of all incarcerated Falun Gong practitioners.”

In the meantime they have to deal with their own release. “We hope that all will end well,” added Edith Koerper.

February 15, 2002

(Original text in German)