AFP: China's Crackdown on Falun Gong Takes on Draconian Proportions

BEIJING, Feb 13, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) A section called Bureau 610 is in charge of suppressing the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual sect, and following the detention of more than 1,000 members of the group at Tiananmen Square on January 1, its duties have taken on a drastic new look.

"It's like a Russian pogrom," one Western diplomat said, referring to the organized means by which Tsarist Russia decimated the country's Jews last century.

"They are going after Falun Gong followers in an unabated and methodical fashion," he told AFP.

Following the January 1 protests, Bureau 610 issued orders for local government and police to take all necessary measures to prevent Falun Gong followers making similar protests on Tiananmen Square during the Lunar New Year holiday and the March parliamentary session.

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"Previously they would imprison the hard core followers and try to 're-educate' and then release the marginal believers, but now it appears that even the marginal believers are getting lengthy prison sentences," the diplomat said.

During the 18-month crackdown police have obtained the names and addresses of thousands of Falun Gong followers they have arrested and re-arrested, allowing the state to set up surveillance at their homes.

Falun Gong followers in Beijing told AFP that before the Lunar New Year, police and officials from local neighborhood committees came to their homes either to detain them or make them sign statements promising to end their public protests.

"They are using a variety of methods to control them, including pressure by local police, neighborhood committees and work units," Frank Lu, of the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy told AFP.

Lu said China's reform-through-labor detention centers were also witnessing a large rise in detainees since January, but the actual numbers were hard to estimate because of the secret nature of police and judicial systems.

"They are also making families responsible for the actions of other family members through the use of economic penalties," he said.

Such sanctions include firing family members from state-run enterprises and institutions, withholding salaries and retirement pay and refusing promotions, health care and education benefits, Lu said.

The newly-intensified crackdown also calls on police in jails and detention centers to step up efforts to "re-educate" the followers.

This often means an intensification of torture and beatings aimed at making followers sign written denunciations of the group, Lu said.

The information center has documented the deaths of 112 Falun Gong followers in police custody since the beginning of the 18-month crackdown, while reports of prison beatings of group members in prisons is widespread.

Meanwhile a new propaganda campaign has also saturated the state-run press, alternating between incessant footage of the self-immolation on Tiananmen Square with condemnations and denunciations of the group from every sector of Chinese society.

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