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.
[youtube]wFfGde4mu5U[/youtube]
A video showing the arrest of the last Falun Gong practitioner
at Le Van Tam Park in Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday morning.
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.
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