Beijing tightens security for anniversary of '89 crackdown (Roundup)

Jun 3, 2009, 18:04 GMT

Beijing - Chinese police intensified security on Beijing's streets and at the homes of dissidents Thursday for the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the 1989 democracy movement.

Dissident Zeng Jinyan said police refused to allow her to leave her Beijing apartment while hundreds of extra police and security guards were posted in and around Tiananmen Square, the focal point of the 1989 protests.

Just after midnight on Thursday, uniformed, plain clothes and paramilitary police patrolled the perimeter of the vast, empty square and several kilometres of Chang'an Avenue, the main road that runs across the northern edge of the square.

From around 10:30 pm, several dozen police and about 40 journalists stood around a building in Muxidi some 4 kilometres east of Tiananmen Square where members of the Tiananmen Mothers group had planned to mourn relatives who died near the building 20 years ago.

Ding Zilin, a co-founder of the group, told the German Press Agency dpa earlier that she planned to arrive at Muxidi at 11 pm if the police allowed her to mark the death of her 17-year-old son there, as they had done for the past two years.

But no mourners had appeared by midnight, possibly indicating that, as Ding said she feared, the police had prevented her from leaving her home. Ding's home telephone went unanswered just before midnight.

   Authorities have also blocked several websites usually accessible in China, including BBC News and the Twitter networking site.

Zeng said on her blog Wednesday that she argued with the authorities for nearly six hours to be allowed to leave her home, but her protests were fruitless.

'Today and tomorrow I have absolutely no way to go out, so I have cancelled the meeting I planned for my mother's birthday today,' Zeng said.

   She added, however, that the attitude of the plainclothes police officers was 'not bad' after such a long confrontation.

   'Apart from resolutely stopping me from going out, they used 'nice words' to persuade me to calm down,' she said.

Zeng's husband, fellow dissident Hu Jia, was presented in absentia with the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought last year. China sentenced Hu to three and a half years in prison in March 2008 for 'inciting subversion of state power.'

   Beijing police placed other prominent dissidents under virtual house arrest and persuaded others to leave the city before the anniversary, activists said.

   Police in the eastern city of Taizhou near Shanghai detained dissident writer Wu Gaoxing Saturday after he wrote an open letter urging the government to pay compensation to himself and others imprisoned for organizing protests in 1989, the US-based group Human Rights in China reported.

   At least six rights activists were put under police surveillance in the south-western city of Guiyang, the group said.

   Beijing-based dissident Qi Zhiyong, who lost a leg after he was shot during the 1989 crackdown, told the German Press Agency dpa that he was under virtual house arrest last week, his telephone was 'under surveillance' and his internet connection 'paralysed.'

   Another rights activist told dpa that police had questioned some of the 19 intellectuals and other activists who attended a recent seminar and commemoration of the 1989 democracy movement in Beijing, which ended when troops with tanks and live ammunition moved through Beijing overnight on June 3-4, 1989, reportedly killing hundreds of unarmed civilians who allegedly blocked their route.

   Ding, a retired university professor, said state security police had also visited her.

   The police prevented her from attending a memorial meeting of the Tiananmen Mothers, an informal group of relatives of people who died in the 1989 crackdown, Ding said.

   She said the police told her that Bao Tong, an outspoken former Communist Party official who was jailed after the 1989 protests, and his wife had agreed to leave Beijing.

   Human Rights in China said Beijing writer Yu Jie was also placed under house arrest Sunday.