The Portrait of angry "Olympic Host"--Police in China break up protest
by angry parents

-- Micky's HO: Any prospective Olympic games traveller need to think
twice before heading for Beijing. Who can say the cries of these
mourning parents in Sichuan are not the echos of those who lost their
children during the June 4th Beijing massacre in 1989. --

Police in China break up protest by angry parents

By Edward Wong
Published: June 3, 2008

http://img.iht.com/images/2008/06/03/chinaparentsa03_550.jpg
Parents, who lost children to the May 12 quake, kneeling outside the
court house in Dujiangyan, China, on Tuesday. (Ng Han Guan/The
Associated Press)

DUJIANGYAN, China: The police surrounded more than 100 parents here
Tuesday as the parents protested shoddy school construction that they
said had resulted in the deaths of thousands of children during the
recent earthquake here.

The police dragged away several crying mothers and harassed journalists
trying to report on the event, according to witnesses and photos of the
protest.

The standoff between the parents, many carrying framed photos of their
children, and the police officers, dressed in black uniforms, lasted for
several hours and ended with the parents walking off feeling both
intimidated and frustrated, some of those involved in the protest said.

"Because so many police surrounded us, we couldn't do anything, so we
went home," said one woman identified only as Li.

The protest took place outside a five-story courthouse in the center of
Dujiangyan and was organized by parents who lost their children in the
collapse of the suburban Juyuan Middle School. Most of the school's 900
students died.

The confrontational stand of the police and local government here in
this town, the scene of several major school collapses when the
earthquake struck May 12, is the strongest sign so far of growing
impatience among government officials about public airing of grievances
over the school issue.

Across the hardest hit areas of Sichuan Province in southwest China,
parents have been demanding investigations into why so many schools
collapsed while surrounding buildings remained standing.

Several Chinese journalists have said in recent days that officials from
the central government have told their news organizations not to
continue reporting on the issue of schools.

The growing number of protests over school collapses has emerged as the
greatest challenge to government officials in Sichuan, and the grieving
parents have become a potent symbol to many Chinese of the way
corruption has victimized ordinary people.

In some instances, local officials have begged parents to quiet down and
accept financial compensation for their dead children.

But a spate of government intimidation and censorship shows that the
civic empowerment that flourished after the earthquake could quickly
unravel.

Calls seeking comment that were made to the courthouse, the petition
office and city government headquarters in Dujiangyan went unanswered
Tuesday.

About 10,000 schoolchildren are estimated to have been killed in the
earthquake, whose confirmed death toll rose to more than 69,107 on Tuesday.

The government lists 18,230 people as missing.

Buildings around the Juyuan Middle School remained largely intact after
the earthquake while the school collapsed in a deadly rain of bricks and
concrete. Rescue workers and soldiers scoured the rubble for days
afterward but few survivors were pulled out.

Government intimidation of the parents organizing the protest Tuesday
began as early as the previous night, Li said in an interview. Li lost a
14-year-old daughter, Wang Ying, in the Juyuan collapse and agreed to
speak on the condition that only her last name be used because of fear
of government retribution.

Officials in the town of Juyuan visited with seven leaders of the
parents Monday night and persuaded six of them not to attend the Tuesday
protest, Li said. The visits came after parents carried out a protest
earlier that day demanding that Juyuan officials apologize for not
pushing rescue workers to keep searching for the bodies of children
classified as missing.

When the parents who did take part in the protest reached the
courthouse, they were confronted by the police in black uniforms. Four
or five reporters who were on the scene were taken by police into the
courthouse against their will, according to Li and a first-hand account
by an Associated Press reporter.

"There were so many police," Li said. "They surrounded the parents."

Huang Yuanxi contributed research in Dujiangyan.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/03/asia/quake.php