SOURCE: RECORD STAFF
BYLINE: MIRKO PETRICEVIC
BODY:
Ben Yang was prepared for Iceland' s customs officers to quiz him about what he had packed in his bags, not in his brains.
When the Kitchener man flew north to Reykjavik in June, he didn' t expect to be asked to identify his religion.
A practitioner of Falun Gong, the spiritual movement begun in China in 1992 and also known as Falun Dafa, Yang was asked to step out of the queue at customs on his arrival. He was taken into a room and asked several questions, including whether he was a member of Falun Gong.
"I told them I refuse to answer this kind of question," Yang, now back home, said in a recent interview. "This is another form of persecution." More than 70 million people in China practised Falun Gong before the government labelled the movement an [slanderous term used by Jiang regime] and violently clamped down on practitioners three years ago.
Yang and about 50 other practitioners went to Iceland to protest a state visit by Jiang Zemin, China' s president. They were detained overnight, then released following protests by Icelanders -- and after they agreed not to protest anywhere near Zemin.
While Yang was sitting in detention in Iceland, his wife, Jie Guo, back home in Kitchener, was worrying, she said, that freedom to travel for all religious people may be in danger.
The actions of Iceland' s police also worry Janet Epp Buckingham, director of religious liberty for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, an umbrella group representing evangelical groups across the country.
In a telephone interview from her office in Ottawa, Buckingham said she was surprised when Falun Gong members were at first denied access to a western democratic country.
"There seems to be some co-operation across Europe about (religious freedom) issues as well and that is a worrisome trend."
Falun Gong practitioners say they are concerned that Iceland' s police received names of individual practitioners from Chinese authorities.
Iceland' s ambassador to the United States, however, has said that information was garnered from European police agencies, not from China.
Oskar Thormundsson, chief superintendent of police at Keflavik International Airport in Iceland, said in a telephone interview that getting information from other police forces is a routine practice. But he wouldn' t say which agencies had given Iceland its information.
Travellers were asked if they were Falun Gong practitioners, he said, because police were trying to head off protesters.
A person' s religion is irrelevant and police don' usually ask people to identify their religion, he said. But in this case Falun Gong members are known to protest wherever Zemin travels.
They "could have been a sports group for all I could care," Thormundsson said.
Almost all Falun Gong protests around the world have been peaceful events, so he didn' t believe any of the practitioners travelling to Iceland were criminals, Thormundsson said. [..]
Iceland has only about 700 police officers in total, Thormundsson said, so the police expected to be outnumbered by thousands of protesters. […..]
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