Ireland: Falun Gong Practitioners Commemorate the "4.25" Peaceful Appeal (Photos)

(Clearwisdom.net, April 28, 2004) On April the 25th, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the "4.25" peaceful appeal, Irish Falun Gong practitioners went to the Chinese Embassy in Dublin to practise Falun Gong exercises, and displayed banners reading "Falun Dafa, Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance" and "Bring Jiang Zemin to Justice".

Irish Falun Gong practitioner Zhao Ming said, "We often practise the exercises outside the Chinese Embassy and thereby the staff of the Embassy have become more and more accustomed to our appeals. Since the message we convey in our appeals is to bring Jiang Zemin and his accomplices who persecute Falun Gong to justice, as opposed to aiming at the government, more and more officials in the Chinese government have come to know that this persecution is wasting money and not supported by the people's hearts, and that it is not the entire Chinese Government's decision".

Ming also added, "I started to practise Falun Gong as early as 1994. All the senior practitioners in Beijing know that the suppression of Falun Gong is actually a long-premeditated scheme. The first article criticising Falun Gong was published in the Guangming Daily in 1996, which was an unfounded defamatory criticism of the kind frequently used during the Great Cultural Revolution period. What was stated in the article was entirely untrue. Therefore, as long as these kinds of articles were published, many Falun Gong practitioners felt they must clarify the facts to the newspaper editors responsible for publishing these defamatory articles. If we had not explained the facts, the persecution would have been initiated long before."

At the end, Ming said: "In fact, the Ministry of Public Security had conducted two nationwide surveys before 1999. During the surveys, the Ministry labeled Falun Gong as a [defamatory term omitted] and tried to collect evidence in order to persecute Falun Gong. However, it didn't find anything because Falun Gong is a righteous belief. Therefore, it was completely wrong for Jiang to orchestrate a campaign of persecution targeting Falun Gong when he had no basis to do so. Before 1999, Falun Gong already publicly displayed a high moral quality in both word and deed and these characteristics were also demonstrated after the persecution against Falun Gong was launched in July, 1999. I personally believe after the persecution is ended, there will be several hundreds of millions more people practicing Falun Gong, far more than the one hundred million that was estimated before the persecution!"

Source: http://www.clearharmony.net/articles/200404/19291.html

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/4/27/73245.html

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