Asia Cast

Asia Cast for Saturday 29th September

Crowds taunted and cursed security forces barricading central Yangon on Friday to try to prevent more mass protests against Myanmar’s fourty-five years of military rule and deepening economic hardship.

Potentially deadly games of cat and mouse went on for hours around the barbed-wire barriers in a city terrified of a repeat of 1988, when the army killed an estimated three-thousand people in crushing an uprising in the former Burma.

Few Buddhist monks were among the crowds, unlike in previous days, after soldiers ransacked ten monasteries on Thursday and carted off hundreds inside.

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The Voice of America (VOA) reported on September the twenty-fourth that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) confirmed that 99.9% of stimulants imported into the United States are from China.

There are thirty-five Chinese factories providing raw materials for underground labs in the United States to produce illegal stimulants that are banned for sports competitors.

Experts believe that the information in the report is especially sensitive as China is going to host the 2008 Olympics, and this creates another challenge for them. Observers are waiting to see whether the Chinese Communist authorities will take action, and even if they do, will they be able to enforce the law?

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On September the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, members of the Chinese delegation and European Parliament (EP) met at the Parliament headquarters in Strasbourg, France.

Edward McMillan-Scott, Vice President of the EP and Falun Gong practitioners Jane Dai and her daughter were interviewed by several major media at the EP headquarters. They spoke about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) eight-year-long persecution against Falun Gong and stressed the violence of the illegal live organ harvesting from practitioners.

One of the important topics in the talk between Beijing and the EP is the eight-year-long persecution of Falun Gong in China. The CCP requested to talk to McMillan-Scott alone. McMillan-Scott has been a long time supporter of Falun Gong and he has demanded that the international society should investigate into live organ harvesting from practitioners.

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On the twenty-sixth of September, Beijing authorities dismantled the petitioners¡¯ village at Beijing South Railway Station, leaving many of them in the open air under the rain.

Thousands of petitioners from various parts of China left their homes to appeal to the Beijing authorities in hope of rectifying their wronged conditions, causing them to miss the gatherings with their families during the Moon Cake festival.

Eyewitnesses told of the petitioners¡¯ village being jam-packed with people and with reporters from nearly ten foreign presses arriving for interviews.

The Chinese officials on site banned the reporters from conducting their interviews even when they presented their journalist certificates.

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On the twenty-seventh of September eyewitnesses provided information to journalists of a fireworks warehouse which exploded on the eighteenth, killing more than one-hundred people and injuring many working on the site.

The explosion was found to be caused from incorrect handling of liquid gas which was placed upside down.

The authorities quickly blocked the information from the public by removing all posts related to the incident from the internet.

The local media also shielded the severity of the incident and hid the actual figures of the dead and injured.

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Once again defying his captors, human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng sent a 16-page open letter to the U.S. Congress in which he calls attention to the abuses of the regime in the preparation to host the Olympic Games.

His letter was read aloud at a news conference in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capital Hill on September the twentieth.

At the aforementioned press conference, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, praised Gao’s voice for the “dislocated, the abandoned, and the oppressed.” The 10th term Representative said the regime passed up the opportunity to make the Olympics a time for greater openness.

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