(Clearwisdom.net) On January 17, 2005, four Falun Gong practitioners from Australia attended annual Dubai Festival in the United Arab Emirates. With permission from the organizer, they went to Dubai's Global Village to introduce Falun Gong and clarify the truth of the persecution.
Exhibits from more than 70 countries in the Global Village's exhibition hall attracted 300,000 local and overseas visitors. The Falun Gong exhibit had banners and posters just inside the first doorway. Practitioners handed out information on Falun Dafa to the crowd. A Chinese national who came to have a look refused to take anything, even as another Chinese person sitting down at a distance observed the whole time.
Some time later, a Global Village official came to tell us that they had received a demand from the Chinese Embassy that we had to leave and could not pass out materials on Falun Gong in the Global Village.
After we explained the facts of the persecution to him, he said we could talk about it the next day at noon. As we were getting ready to leave, two plainclothes United Arab Emirates police officers suddenly appeared to check our passports. After checking them, they told us to leave immediately.
Shortly afterwards we saw the two police officers walk into the Global Village office with the Chinese person that had been sitting at some distance observing us. When we were moving our things out of the Global Village, the two officers came out and wanted to make photocopies of our passports. They also took away our truth-clarification materials against our wishes, including some 30,000 flyers in Arabic and English that we had picked up from the print shop that morning.
Chinese embassies and consulates all over the world often interfere with Falun Gong practitioners' activities. The pressure they exert on local authorities has caused the local police, who did not understand the truth, to sometimes act unwisely. We believe that, as more and more people and governments understand the truth about Falun Gong, the world will widely condemn the Chinese embassies' reproachful conduct.
