A 13-year-old US boy campaigning to turn the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea into a peace park tried to get the Chinese president’s attention yesterday, staging a brief protest near Tiananmen Square before being led away by police.
Jonathan Lee unfurled a sign saying “peace treaty” and “nuclear free DMZ children’s peace forest” as he stood outside Tiananmen, or the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Less than a minute later, a man presumed to be a plainclothes police officer grabbed Lee’s sign and waved away watching journalists, who had been contacted by Lee’s family ahead of time.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Three or four uniformed police officers then hurriedly escorted Lee and his mother away without commotion.
Police held the pair and a few hours later Lee and his mother, Melissa Lee, returned to their hotel. Then, the two, as well as the boy’s father and sister, checked out of their rooms at the Courtyard Marriott, a hotel receptionist said.
Joel Clark, a documentary filmmaker who traveled to China with the Lees, said an e-mail he received from Mrs Lee suggested that they had been told to leave China.
“They escorted us here to the hotel and we are free to leave ... today,’” Clark quoted the e-mail as saying. “Police are waiting downstairs.’”
The boy, from Ridgeland, Mississippi, is trying to persuade the leaders of North and South Korea, China and the US to work for reunification of the two Koreas.
“Hopefully my picketing will touch them in a way, so they’ll really consider peace, you know, between North and South Korea,” Lee said in an interview on Friday with the documentary filmmaker. “I guess I’m just trying to do, you know, what God would want: making peace.”
His father, Kyoung Lee, said in a written statement yesterday that his son has sent letters to US President Barack Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, but had not been able to give a letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤). That, the father said, made the Tiananmen protest necessary.
Passionate and strong-willed Lee is the latest, and perhaps youngest, activist to try to bring peace to the heavily militarized Korean Peninsula.
Lee made a rare visit to North Korea in August to propose his idea of a “children’s peace forest” in the demilitarized zone and was taken on a tour of the 4km wide buffer zone, which is sealed off with electric fences and studded with land mines. A hoped-for meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il did not materialize, although Lee said the officials forwarded to Kim a letter from him.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees