Foreign Activists Manage to Pierce China's Broad Security Apparatus

CEREMONIAL SPECTACLE: Bus passengers take in the Olympic torch during its three-day parade through Beijing. The months-long relay ends tomorrow with the ceremonial lighting of the Olympic flame. (China Photos Via Getty Images)

To prevent such protests inside their own borders, Chinese authorities recently threatened to take away one female activist's two babies as she tried to enter the country. A Tibetan woman surnamed Kemo was returning to China on July 18 after nearly two years in the United States, where she had had two children. She was stopped by a passport control officer, escorted to an interrogation room and asked whether she had ever participated in political protests.

"Yes, but a long time ago," Kemo said she replied, speaking on the condition that her first name not be used. Officers then showed her computer printouts of photos of her participating at various U.S. protests. "You are lying to us," an officer told her.

Officers pried the children away from her, slapping her and one of her children when he clutched her purse strap to prevent her from being taken away, she said.

The officer then gave her a choice: accept deportation and buy plane tickets to take her children back to the United States or go to jail and lose her children. After she bought the tickets, police escorted her to the next flight to New York and returned her children on the jetway to the airplane.

On Wednesday, in another quiet but short-lived protest, Tibetan activists invited a group of foreign correspondents to a small Beijing hotel to view a movie promoting Tibetan independence. An attempt to show the movie a second time was interrupted by authorities, forcing cancellations of other showings that had been planned through the day, organizers said.

At Tiananmen Square, pre-screened groups with passes were allowed entry to see the Olympic torch carried around at the beginning of a three-day parade through the city that ends Friday with a ceremonial lighting of the Olympic flame. Yao Ming, the basketball star, carried the torch out of the Forbidden City, passing under a portrait of Mao Zedong and out onto the vast Tiananmen esplanade. A Central Chinese Television helicopter hovered overhead and People's Armed Police formed a security cordon between spectators and the torchbearers.

According to Students for a Free Tibet, four protesters sneaked into an intersection near the stadium at dawn. Two climbed up a pair of lampposts and unfurled their banners about 6 a.m. One was about 60 feet above the street, the other about 20 feet above the street, when they opened up their protest signs, the group said.

Kate Woznow, the group's campaigns director, said one banner stated "One World, One Dream: Free Tibet" in English. The other stated "Tibet Will Be Free" in English and "Free Tibet" in Chinese, she said in a telephone interview.

The official New China News Agency, in a short dispatch on the incident, said the banners hung for 12 minutes before police arrived and hustled the protesters away "for investigation." Quoting police, it said all four were British citizens, three men and a woman who entered China on tourist visas.

Students for a Free Tibet, however, identified the two who climbed up the lampposts as Iain Thom, a 24-year-old Briton from Edinburgh, Scotland, and Phill Bartell, a 34-year-old U.S. citizen who lives in Boulder, Colo. Lucy Marion, a 23-year-old Briton from Cambridge, England, and Tiran Mink, 32, a U.S. citizen from Portland, Ore., "provided support" on the ground and watched out for police, Woznow said.

The banners were visible for nearly an hour before police intervened and took the four away, the Tibet activist group said. "Their current whereabouts are unknown," it added in a statement.

The four were led away by police but not arrested, according to Chinese authorities. In the past, foreigners involved in such protests have been held for a short while and then deported under Chinese regulations that make protests illegal except with prior authorization from police.

Correspondents Jill Drew in Beijing, Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi, Michael Abramowitz in Bangkok and Nora Boustany in Washington contributed to this report.