| Published: Saturday 13th August 2005 |
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By German practitioners
At the end of July, Horst Koehler, President of Germany, and his wife went on holiday to Cham in Bayern. On the first day of their holiday, President Koehler publicly invited local people and tourists to visit the Arber with him and climb to the peak of the hill. On learning the news, local Falun Gong practitioners felt that this was a good opportunity to see the president on such an occasion and tell him about Falun Gong face to face while handing him a petition.
The activity of Falun Gong practitioners on that day received supports from all sides. Besides those practitioners who learned about the situation making suggestions and sending righteous thoughts in support of the activity, Mr Roermer working for the local International Human Rights Association drove practitioners to the Arber. We reached the mountainside of the Arber when the President was holding a press conference. After knowing our reason for coming, the police introduced us to the related personnel. After reading the petition, even those tourists who did not know us helped us look for room among the crowded media personnel in order to approach the President.
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| President Koehler, together with his wife, was warmly shaking hands with everybody | A Falun Gong practitioner with the petition in his hand talked with Mrs Koehler |
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| Paper lotus flower and bookmark |
On the way to the peak of the hill, a practitioner was walking towards Mrs Koehler. After first introducing himself, the practitioner gave her a little lotus flower handmade by Falun Gong practitioners. Hanging from the little lotus flower was a bookmark about the “Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance International Art Exhibition” together with details of when and where the Art Exhibition would be held in Cham. Mrs Koehler was pleased to accept the small gift and told the practitioner that she already knew that Falun Gong practitioners are being persecuted in China. After that she listened to the recent situation about Falun Gong.
On the peak of the hill, Mr Roemer and the Falun Gong practitioner all got good opportunities of separately handing their petitions over to the president surrounded by many media reporters, and separately expressing their hopes that the President would try his best to release the innocent who have been illegally detained by the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China. This March, Falun Gong practitioner Jiang Renzheng was sentenced to three years imprisonment when the German Government sent him back to China. The petition handed over by the Falun Gong practitioner included the detailed information about Jiang’s case.
In the petition was the story of a Chinese national who was brought up during the reign of the CCP and now practises Falun Gong. They spoke of freedom of speech in the western countries and freedom in faith and in the media together with her own experience after thoroughly reading the “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party”. In addition, the practitioner also hoped that the President would see the beauty and purity of Falun Gong during his holiday and he was given a little paper lotus flower with a bookmarker as a gift. The President was very pleased and said that he would find out the whole story of the case. His retinue also guaranteed that the practitioner would receive a reply from the president.
The next day, footage of the Falun Gong practitioner talking to Mrs Koehler was broadcast by a TV station in Bayern. A director of a local company in Cham said he praised the bravery of practitioners when he was reading in the newspaper about a Falun Gong practitioner who was the wife of one of his employees handing over the petition to the President.
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Chinese version available at http://www.yuanming.net/articles/200507/43895.html