Vietnamese Police Continue to Harass Falun Gong Practitioners
By Stephen Gregory
Epoch Times Staff
Oct 10, 2011
With seven arrests
and the breakup of a group activity on Sunday morning, police in Ho Chi Minh
City (Saigon) in Vietnam continued a campaign of harassment of Falun Gong
practitioners instigated by the Chinese regime.
At around 8:30 a.m., several uniformed police came to Le Van Tam Park and
ordered some 25 Falun Gong practitioners gathered there to disperse. Plain
clothes police were also on hand. The practitioners have come to the park on
Sunday mornings for years to practice the Falun Gong
exercises
and study Falun Gong texts together.
Police started spraying water on the ground, said one of the practitioners. Most
of the practitioners then stood up and left, but seven practitioners did not
leave. The police
arrested
those seven, some of whom were sitting on the ground meditating. The police
carried those who continued to meditate to a police van, and took all seven back
to the police station.
When asked why
they were being arrested, the police replied that if more than five people
gather, they must obtain permission, said the source. Vietnamese practitioners
say there is in fact no such law.
By 4 p.m., four of
those who had been arrested were released. One of those, upon her release, then
sat outside the police station and began to meditate, said the source. The
police responded by twisting her wrists and pulling her hair, forcing her to
leave.
Two of the seven
who were arrested did not have their i.d.s with them and the police transferred
them to the Social Protection Center—a facility used for housing the homeless
and teen runaways. The whereabouts of one of the seven arrested practitioners
remains unknown.
Vietnamese
practitioners say that detaining them in the Social Protection Center is a
tactic used by the police to harass them. The police treat practitioners caught
without their i.d.s as though they are homeless without allowing them to prove
otherwise. One of the practioners said that 11 months ago she was held in the
Social Protection Center for seven days in this way.
This latest
incident in Le Van Tam Park follows upon other arrests that were made in this
park and outside the Chinese Consulate in Ho Chi Min City on Oct. 6.
Practitioners had gathered to peacefully protest the scheduled trial of two
Falun Gong practitioners. The two had been arrested by the Vietnamese government
at the prompting of the
Chinese Embassy for shortwave broadcasts they had aired into China.
For almost a year, practitioners who gather outside the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi
to protest the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China
have reported regular
harassment, including beating by thugs who appear to be working in
consort with police.
The practice of Falun Gong originally spread to Vietnam in 2000 and faced no
official opposition. In 2006 police began asking practitioners not to do the
Falun Gong exercises in public and not to distribute Falun Gong books and
materials about the persecution of Falun Gong in China. Since then, official
pressure on the practitioners has gradually increased and recently become more
intense.
A three-page, 2009 memo from a provincial division of the Public
Security Ministry to local
police departments
obtained by The Epoch Times
shows that
this harassment has been directed by the Vietnamese central government in an
effort to placate the Chinese regime.
The memo reads in part: “Spreading Falun Gong in Vietnam and spreading the
information about China’s persecution of practitioners in China directly affects
the diplomatic relations between Vietnam and China … .
“The government and the ministry of investigation and security gives direct
orders to stop the practice of Falun Gong in the country to avoid problems with
China. It orders officials they must deal with the situation when they detect
it.”
The suppression of Falun Gong in Vietnam demanded by the Chinese regime is part
of a pattern of efforts by the Chinese regime to interfere with Falun Gong
worldwide. This interference may involve Chinese consular officials direct
actions or, as in the case of Vietnam, pressuring local officials to act. Falun
Gong is practiced in over 100 countries, and most countries ignore Chinese
officials’ requests that they interfere with Falun Gong.
Falun Gong practitioners say that the harassment outside China is an extension
of the campaign of persecution waged inside China.
In July 1999, the
then head of the Chinese Communist Party, fearing the popularity of Falun Gong
and the possibility that the Chinese people would increasingly prefer the
beliefs of Falun Gong to communist doctrine, ordered a campaign to “eradicate”
the practice.
According to the
Falun Dafa
Information Center (FDIC), hundreds of thousands of practitioners are detained
in China at any one time. FDIC can confirm the deaths of 3400 practitioners from
torture and abuse, but estimates the actual death toll from the persecution to
be in the tens of thousands.
With
reporting
by Thanh Le.
chinareports@epochtimes.com
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