Published by: World Tibet Network News Issue ID: 97/10/24
October 23, 1997
WASHINGTON October 23 (Reuters)-- A coalition of groups fine-tuned protest plans on Thursday to drive home diverse messages during Chinese President Jiang Zemin's coming eight-day U.S. tour.
Organizers focused on plans for an Oct. 29 rally outside the White House bringing together a wide range of protesters, including labor union leaders, anti-abortion activists, human-rights campaigners, Tibetan monks and Chinese dissidents.
The AFL-CIO, which links 78 U.S. trade unions with 13 million members, said its president, John Sweeney, would address the event to decry China's "persistent violation of labor rights, human rights, trading rights and environmental standards."
U.S. Park police have given the protesters permission to use the eastern half of Lafayette Park, the part farthest from Blair House, where Jiang will stay as President Clinton's guest across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, organizers said.
The Lafayette Park rally was scheduled to start at noon, just as Clinton and Jiang wind up 90 minutes of Oval Office talks before holding a joint news conference in the White House East Room.
The International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington-based advocacy group with close ties to the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual and political leader, said five busloads of their backers, 90 percent of them Tibetans, would arrive from New York City to join the protest.
Also scheduled to address the rally were anti-abortion activist Gary Bauer; Harry Wu, a human-rights activist who spent 19 years in the Chinese prison camp system; Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is co-chair of the congressional working group on China; and the actor Richard Gere, a long-time advocate of Tibetan autonomy.
Project Democracy in China, a coordinating group, said pro-democracy activists were planning as much as possible to tail Jiang's motorcade in Washington in five prison style wagons to remind people of the bloody 1989 crackdown on dissidents in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
Organizers said the smallest protests may await Jiang in Hawaii, where he arrives on Sunday on the first stop of the first U.S. tour by a Chinese chief of state in 12 years.
"We have demonstrations planned in every city that he's going," but fewer people lined up in Honolulu than elsewhere, said John Ackerly, director of the campaign for Tibet.
Other protest sponsors include the U.S. chapter of Amnesty International, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights and Human Rights in China, founded by dissident Chinese students.
Protest arrangements were still being made for Jiang's other stops, including Williamsburg, Virginia, a restored 18th century colonial capital where he will spend Monday night before flying into Washington.
Ackerly said Tibetan supporters in Washington had rented a 15-person van to travel to Williamsburg. He said local organizers nationwide were cashing in on China's negative publicity from the recently released Brad Pitt film "Seven Years in Tibet."
After Washington, Jiang will travel to Philadelphia, New York City, Boston and Los Angeles. To make it tougher for protesters, the Chinese embassy has released few details on Jiang's schedule in these cities.
"We should have the whole atmosphere guaranteed by the host country so that the visit should not be disrupted," Yu Shunning, the embassy spokesman, told reporters at a briefing about the visit on Wednesday. "To have the visit go off smoothly we should have an amiable atmosphere."
The president of the campaign for Tibet, Lodi Gyari, said on Thursday that he hoped Jiang was "grown-up enough" to understand that his group was not targeting its protests against him personally but against Chinese policies on Tibet.
Gere, the Hollywood star who chairs the campaign's board, will host 300 invited guests in champagne toasts at a "stateless dinner" on Wednesday night as Clinton and Jiang clink glasses at a state dinner a block and a half away. (Reuters)
