Chinese police dragged away more than 100 parents yesterday while they were protesting the deaths of their children in poorly constructed schools that collapsed in last month’s earthquake.
The parents, many holding pictures of their dead children, were pulled down the street away from a courthouse in Dujiangyan, a resort city northwest of Sichuan’s provincial capital of Chengdu.
“Why?” some of them yelled. “Tell us something,” they said as black-suited police wearing riot helmets yanked at them.
The parents had been kneeling in front of the courthouse yelling, “We want to sue.”
“The parents were here to give their report to the court,” said one police officer who refused to give his name.
Calls to local police were not answered yesterday.
Accusations that students died in the May 12 earthquake because of shoddy school construction have galvanized anger and grabbed public attention, and also worried the government.
President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and other top leaders have been shown repeatedly on state television visiting children in makeshift schools.
Officials said the May 12 earthquake destroyed 7,000 classrooms.
Many parents have accused contractors of cutting corners when building the classrooms, resulting in schools that could not withstand the 7.9-magnitude quake. Pictures of collapsed schools surrounded by buildings still standing have fueled anger.
More than 270 students died when one high school collapsed in Juyuan, near Dujiangyan. The Southern Metropolis News quoted a rescuer as saying that rubble from the school showed that no steel reinforcing bars had been used in construction, only iron wire.
Yesterday’s protest happened while Chinese leader Li Chang-chun (李長春), the country’s fifth-ranked ruler, was touring the city.
The official Xinhua news agency said Li was checking heritage sites damaged in the earthquake.
An official from the foreign affairs office of the local government, Zao Ming, said: “This is not a good place to do interviews ... In a disaster like this, there will be a lot of opinions. The government will solve their problems.”
There were several Japanese reporters at the courthouse. One witness who did not want to be identified said the police told the parents: “The Japanese are reporting bad things about you.”
A reporter and two photographers covering the protest were forcibly dragged up the steps into the courthouse by police trying to prevent them from seeing the demonstration.
The confirmed death toll for China’s worst disaster in three decades was 69,019, and more than 18,000 people are still missing, the government said. The quake also left 5 million people homeless.
Meanwhile, Xinhua said authorities have delayed for two days a bid to divert water from a huge lake formed when the quake sent landslides tumbling into a river in Beichuan in northern Sichuan.
Water levels in the lake had been rising steadily and threatened to flood surrounding areas, prompting authorities to evacuate nearly 200,000 people already uprooted by the quake.
But Xinhua said with little rain forecast for the next several days, rescue workers were not likely to start draining off the water until tomorrow. The work had been expected to start yesterday.
Workers have already used heavy earth-moving equipment to dig a runoff channel to remove the water. The government is worried the newly formed lake could burst, sending a wall of water through a valley.
In an indication of how difficult rescue conditions are in parts of Sichuan, there is still no sign of a helicopter that crashed nearly three days ago while ferrying survivors. Thousands of soldiers have been combing remote mountains in search of the military helicopter.
The Russian-designed Mi-171 transport was carrying 19 people, 14 of them people injured in the quake, when it flew into fog and turbulence and crashed on Saturday near the epicenter of the quake in the town of Wenchuan, state media reported.
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