Photo: Grigory Pashukevich

Alexander Gudimov of Youth Yabloko is stopped by the police as he approaches the Chinese Consulate.

Anti-Torch Protests Thwarted by Massive Security

By Sergey Chernov

Staff Writer

As the Bejing Olympic flame passed with pomp through St. Petersburg on Saturday, small protests against human rights abuses in China were curbed by the authorities despite having either been previously agreed with the administration or not requiring such agreement under Russian law.

Unlike in London and Paris, where the relay was overshadowed on Sunday and Monday by protests against the Chinese government’s ongoing brutal clampdown on demonstrations in Tibet, in which exiled Tibetan leaders claim up to 150 people have been killed, St. Petersburg authorities attempted to prevent or suppress even solitary protests.

Security officials in Paris snuffed out the Olympic torch and carried it through Paris in the safety of a bus at least five times Monday as protests against China’s human rights record turned the relay into a chaotic series of stops and starts, The Associated Press reported.

However, St. Petersburg’s relay two days earlier saw thousands of police and OMON special forces deployed, as classes in schools were canceled with students dispatched, in a Soviet-style arrangement, to demonstrate enthusiasm along the torch’s route.

Police sources refused Monday to release the number of officers involved.

Yelena Kim, a pro-Tibet activist, who held a solitary picket with a self-made poster that showed Tibetan, Chinese and Russian flags and read “The Culture of Each Nation is Priceless” near the Park Inn Pribaltiiskaya Hotel was detained on the grounds that the hotel is private property, she said by phone on Sunday.

According to Kim, she was taken into a nearby police precinct where her photograph was taken and poster confiscated.

Previously, the administration had agreed to a 10-member picket in defense of Tibet scheduled on Friday, having moved it from the planned site in front of the Chinese Consulate to Pionerskaya Ploshchad, but on the eve of the protest Kim and the other organizers were asked to go to Smolny, where the city administration resides, and were pressed by state security officers to postpone the rally, she said.

“If the number of people present exceeds ten people, it will be considered an unsanctioned meeting and dispersed,” she quoted an officer as saying. Kim said she is now organizing a pro-Tibet meeting to be held later this month or in early May.

Alexander Gudimov, the deputy chairman of the local branch of Youth Yabloko, the youth section of the democratic party, was arrested as he was heading to the Chinese Consulate with a poster saying “Stop Killing,” both in Russian and English, with five Olympic rings made of barbed wire attached to it.

“As I was approaching the consulate, 50 or 100 meters from it, two policemen noticed me and stopped me, without introducing themselves, then a police truck came, men jumped out and thrust me into it without any explanation,” he said by phone on Sunday.

Gudimov said Youth Yabloko had originally intended to hold a picket near the so-called “Chinese Garden,” a group of Chinese-style structures surrounding a Chinese restaurant on Liteiny Prospekt, but the administration demanded that the demonstration be rescheduled to another date — contradicting the law which allows the administration to suggest other locations for pickets but not dates.

“They said we must postpone it because of the Olympic Torch relay, even though in reality the site was far from the relay’s route,” he said.

“We’re opposed not to the Olympics, but to human rights violations in China,” said Gudimov.

“China has always been infamous for human rights violations, but in this case we’re protesting against what happens in Tibet, against killings of peaceful citizens at demonstrations. As we know from history, wars were stopped for the sake of the Olympics, but now China isn’t trying to do anything; it only suppresses any information.

“We are also indignant about the politics of our own authorities, who claim, as [speaker of the Federation Council Sergei] Mironov put it, that all this is an attempt to ‘tar’ China.”

“We’re addressing sportsmen, but politicians — to boycott the official Olympic events,” said Gudimov, adding that information about human rights violations in China is censored in the Russian media.

“People without access to the Internet don’t know about it because China is seen as our ‘comrade’ now, and you can’t hear anything about it on television or radio, except [on radio station] Ekho Moskvy.”

Local anarchists did not apply to the authorities for permission to demonstrate, but placed a banner showing the Olympic rings torn apart and reading “Freedom to Tibet” on the railroad bridge over a busy highway near Lesnaya metro, in the north of the city.

A St. Petersburg-based Vietnamese practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice, who stood on Palace Square, where festivities were held, with a small flag with the emblem of a Reporters without Borders’ campaign — showing the Olympic rings in the form of handcuffs — was arrested after he showed a pamphlet of the CIPFG (Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China) to two Russians, he said.

The activist, who asked to have his name withheld, said he spent 26 hours in a police precinct, accused of “swearing in public” and received a fine on Monday.

The pamphlet publicized the Global Human Rights Torch Relay, an alternative relay, launched on the initiative of the CIPFG in Athens, Greece last August to draw attention to human rights abuses in China.

“The Olympic Games are incompatible with crimes against humanity in China,” said the pamphlet.

According to the director of a local Falun Gong school, Irina Oshirova, two other activists were detained on Palace Square.

“Wherever Chinese delegations go, a lot of pressure is put on local authorities not to have Falun Gong practitioners wearing yellow shirts or buttons in sight — but they know how to respond to this pressure with dignity in the other countries,” she said.

Since the crackdown on the spiritual practice began in 1999, estimates of the number of Falun Gong adherents who have died in custody due to torture, abuse, and neglect ranged from several hundred to a few thousand, according to a U.S. Department of State report in 2007 on human rights practices in China. The CIPFG estimates the number at 3,000.

Last year, Russia deported two St. Petersburg-based Falun Gong practitioners, in spite of their UN refugee status and the repression they faced in China.

The police denied that any anti-torch protesters were detained.

“Six people were detained for violating the law on meeting regulations on Saturday, but none in connection with the relay,” said Vyacheslav Stepchenko, spokesman for the Interior Ministry in St. Petersburg, by phone on Monday.

Ex-Soviet political prisoner, Cambridge-based Vladimir Bukovsky, who was in the city this week to take part in the New Agenda for Democratic Movement opposition conference on Saturday, campaigned against the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980 after he had been exchanged for a Chilean communist leader and flown, hand-cuffed, to Zurich in 1976. He had spent 12 years in Soviet prison for opposing the government.

With Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, who spent 18 years in Chinese prison for his political activity, and German TV journalist Gerhard Loewenthal, a Nazi concentration camp survivor, Bukovsky addressed the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in an open letter called “Don’t Reward Beijing’s Tyranny,” when China’s candidacy was being considered in 2001.

“The three of us addressed the IOC asking it not to repeat historical mistakes; there were Olympic Games in Berlin under the Nazis and in Moscow under the Communists, and it only got worse for everybody, so don’t repeat it again,” he said last week.

“Holding the Olympics in an unfree, totalitarian state not only strengthens these regimes, giving them a certain respectability they haven’t deserved, but moreover, as a rule, serves as a cause for increasing repression.

“Before the Olympic Games in Moscow, the city was cleansed of ‘undesirable elements;’ thousands were sent out of Moscow just because they were considered ‘undesirable.’ It means holding the Olympics is directly connected to repressions against people — and this cannot be allowed.”

Bukovsky described the IOC as a “non-democratic, private” organization, which is difficult to influence.

“I know about this, because I was campaigning for the boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow, and we did achieve something in the end; there was a partial boycott,” he said.

“We dealt a lot with the IOC, you just can’t influence them; they don’t listen to anybody, they don’t want to know anything — for them it’s a commercial activity. They make money out of it and that is all, they don’t want to discuss it.”

But while it is not possible to force the IOC to reconsider its decision, it is possible to prevent leading politicians from going to the opening, Bukovsky reasoned, referring to recent statements by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy that they may not attend the Beijing Games in August.

“It’s already working,” Bukovsky said.