Festivities, detentions on Lunar New Year

Festivities, detentions on Lunar New Year

BEIJING (AFP): Asia ushered in the Year of the Dragon Saturday
with celebrations and hopes of economic recovery, but the
festivities were marred as Chinese authorities moved in on a
Lunar New Year protest staged by the Falungong sect in Beijing.

Chinese communities on the mainland, Australia, Hong Kong,
Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan, Vietnam,
as well as Koreans who observe the Lunar New Year, visited
temples and lit incense sticks, praying for a rebound in the
region after two years of economic downturn. Thousands of Hong
Kong people lined up to witness a gala parade.

Human rights groups said in Beijing police detained hundreds,
and possibly thousands, of practitioners of the outlawed
Falungong movement, including a US citizen, in a crackdown on a
Lunar New Year protest.

"A friend of mine was arrested last night and about 1:55 a.m.
she called me on her cellular phone and told me she was detained
with between 2,000 and 3,000 (others)," Hannah Li, a Falungong
member, told AFP.

Frank Lu, head of the Hong Kong-based Information Center of
Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China, said at least 300
Falungong followers had been rounded up Friday and early Saturday
in Beijing, including some Westerners.

Police vans criss-crossed Tiananmen Square Saturday morning,
stopping to detain anyone in a meditation stance or sitting in
the lotus position.

Falungong, led by exiled guru Li Hongzhi, preaches Buddhist
and Taoist maxims and advocates clean and healthy living.

In Shanghai, official press reports on the eve of the new year
said prosecutors hurried to wrap up large numbers of cases so as
to enter the Year of the Dragon with a clean slate.

But a bloody side of the annual rite is a surge in executions
before the holiday, as the penal system seeks to empty its death
rows.

Liz Whitelam, of the Amnesty International Hong Kong death
penalty group, told AFP Saturday: "China continues to be a great
worry in its use of capital punishment ... particularly at this
time of the year.

"It seems to have become a tradition leading up to big
celebrations like national day and Chinese new year."

China also used the Lunar New Year to reiterate its claim to
rival Taiwan. Premier Zhu Rongji said in a message Friday that
Beijing will carry out its "sacred mission" to reunify with
Taiwan as soon as possible.

The Lunar New Year had particular significance for the ethnic
Chinese in Indonesia, freed for the first time from Soeharto-era
laws that had for decades confined celebrations to the insides of
temples and their own homes.

Celebrations in Bandung, the capital of West Java province,
were centered in the city's oldest temple which also houses the
local branch of the Indonesian Council of Confucianism.

Ethnic-Chinese, though estimated at some 3.5 percent of
Indonesia's 210 million people, hold a disproportionate amount of
the country's wealth and have been the target of what is
euphemistically called "social jealousy" and worse -- destruction
meted out in anti-Chinese rioting.

In Jakarta, crowds of ethnic Chinese flocked to temples with
incense and flowers.