Jiang brings kind words, protests

Chinese President Jiang Zemin began his Baltic tour June 10 in Latvia, where he hopes to establish closer political and economic ties between China and the Baltic states.

His Latvian counterpart, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, urged Latvian businessmen to do more to attract Chinese interest in Latvian goods and services.

"We discussed the necessity of creating a silk road between China and Europe," Vike-Freiberga said of her meeting with Jiang, referring to the trade route which once linked Europe with China.

The Latvian president suggested that one end of the silk road might end in Latvia's three port cities of Riga, Liepaja and Vent-spils.

Kong Quan, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said China was interested in increasing the shipment of goods through Latvia's ice-free ports to Western Europe, noting that 2.7 million tons of commodities were shipped through Latvia to China in 2001.

Vike-Freiberga expressed Lat-via's support for China's "One China" policy, thus acknowledging China's sovereign claim to Taiwan, noting that China never acknowledged the Soviet Union's claim to Latvia and that the Chinese government was quick to acknowledge Latvian independence in 1991.

Zemin expressed the Chinese government's support of Latvia's efforts to gain membership to the European Union and NATO.

The press conference with both presidents was closed to reporters, who could only watch it on closed-circuit television from another room in the Presidential Palace. But in a separate press conference with reporters after Jiang had left the palace, Vike-Freiberga said it would have been inappropriate for her to condemn China's human right's record during the Chinese president's visit.

"I expressed an interest and wish for a dialogue to go on in China, not only between China, Taiwan and Tibet, but also between different religious and ethnic groups or people of different political convictions," she said.

Latvian followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement were prevented from demonstrating on June 11 as Jiang led his delegation in song in Riga's Doma Cathedral.

The 20 members of the Latvian chapter of the Falun Gong, which is outlawed in China, were refused permission to mount a demonstration because "there were recommendations from the Latvian security services to do this event another day," Guntars Kukals, spokes-man for the city of Riga, told Agence France-Presse.

Police closed off the entire square in front of the cathedral, blocking people from reaching many central Riga offices during the visit by Jiang and his delegation of more than 150 people.

Journalists were not allowed to question Jiang, but Latvia's state-owned television station did show footage of the Chinese president leading his delegation in song from the keyboard of the cathedral's 19th century organ, one of the largest in Europe.

Falun Gong members were angered over how Latvian authorities kow-towed to their Chinese guests.

Jiang "tries to control all our mass media and government structures but not all Latvian people agree with it," said Anatolij Po-lishchuk, a representative of Lat-via's Falun Gong.

Jiang travelled to Tallinn on June 12, after which he will visit Iceland before coming back for a stop in Lithuania.