China says she protests too much

Sunday focusA mother whose protest during the Olympic Games landed her in a Chinese jail says it was worth it for the publicity.

The Free Tibet protester Amanda 'Mandie' McKeown arrives at Heathrow Airport in London after being released from detention in Beijing.

Amanda McKeown does not seem the sort of person who could annoy one of the most powerful governments in the world. But that is exactly what Ms McKeown, known as Mandie to her friends, did. With a few dozen others, from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, she took on the Chinese government during the Olympics by waving flags and unfurling banners demanding that Tibet should be given its freedom from Beijing. Ms McKeown, 41, is the mother of two young children who lives quietly in Bristol, in the south-west of England, with her husband, Don Cary. She has spent her life working for good causes, such as a charity that helps street children in developing countries. Her husband works for a charity for disabled children.

For making what was, by Western standards, a low-key protest, Ms McKeown, who describes herself as "incredibly law-abiding", was arrested, sworn at, sentenced to 10 days' detention and interrogated for 23 hours. In two sessions, lasting four and seven hours, police filmed her to show, she says, she was not being mistreated. In a third session lasting 12 hours, she says she was strapped to a metal chair. The police did not film this, she says. She then spent two and a half days in a prison cell with 11 other foreign women. She spent her time walking from wall to wall, playing cards, looking forward to small meals of rice, and making sure she filled a bottle with water when the supply was turned on for just 15 minutes every day.

None of this ranks alongside the horrors experienced, for example, by Iraqis who crossed Saddam Hussein, but Ms McKeown admits she was "terrified". Finally, thanks to the intervention of Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, who was in the city to watch the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, and because of an international outcry, she was deported, along with a German and eight Americans who had also been detained by the Chinese for demonstrating about Tibet. This weekend, back in Bristol with her son, Hamish, aged five, and daughter, Niamh, three, Ms McKeown says her detention was probably the best thing that could have happened because it meant the Free Tibet campaign won widespread media coverage. The detention also showed, says Ms McKeown, that China's pre-Games pledge that it would allow peaceful protests were, in fact, worthless.

Until her group was arrested, the Chinese had simply deported Free Tibet campaigners - 42 in all - who had waved flags and hung banners. After a brief flurry of publicity, the media lost interest. Most of the 5,000 or so foreign journalists in China were there to cover sport, not politics. Journalists based permanently in Beijing were more sympathetic to the campaigners, but there was little appetite, amid the sporting dramas in the Bird's Nest and other stadiums, for stories about the military clampdown in Tibet, the disappearance of more than 1,000 people since violent protests in March or the obliteration of Tibetan culture. One British journalist, John Ray, who reports from Beijing for ITV News, managed to broadcast a story that was not about British medal winners after he was arrested and manhandled by police when he was filming a flag-waving demonstration. But that was an exception.

The 10-day sentence handed out to Ms McKeown changed all that. Suddenly Tibet, ruled by China since 1950, was back in the news. The US government said it was "disappointed" by China. Even the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which had always insisted that China's style of government was not its concern, was unsettled. Ms McKeown says: "Looking back, it was great for the campaign because it kept Tibet on the news agenda. But it was terrible at the time. I have never had any trouble with the police. I think I once had a speeding ticket for doing 36mph in a 30mph zone.

After all those interrogations, I was delirious with fatigue. I had not slept [for] 52 hours. When they put me in the cell at 9am, I just wanted to go to sleep. But they shouted at me, 'No sleeping. You must wait until night.' I had to sit up straight and stay awake." It is estimated there are 120,000 Tibetans in exile in India. There are 8,000 in the US and small groups scattered around the world. There are many organisations, run by Tibetans and sympathisers, dedicated to raising awareness of what is happening in Tibet. These groups have slightly different agendas - some focus on lobbying politicians, others on arranging protests, others on helping Tibetans in distress - but all are impoverished. What they lack in money, however, they compensate with enthusiasm. The Free Tibet groups had tried to persuade the IOC that it would be wrong to award the Games to Beijing since they feared the Chinese would turn the Olympics into a propaganda tool.

But once that decision had been made, these groups decided it would be pointless, and probably counterproductive, to campaign for a boycott. This was the 21st century and the tit-for-tat boycotts of the 1970s and 1980s, when the Cold War power blocs battled through sport, were over. The ostracism of apartheid South Africa by international sport could not be repeated. Anne Holmes, campaign manager for the Free Tibet Campaign, says: "We knew that the days of boycotts had gone. We did not want to try and stop young athletes, who train so hard, going to the Olympics. But we wanted to have a presence in China, to remind the world [of] what was happening in Tibet."

For the next seven years, these groups debated and planned their protests. They knew it would not be easy for activists to get visas to China. They also feared that demonstrations would be broken up within minutes. They said security was vital, so protesters would have to operate in small groups. Protests had to be visually striking, to appeal to the media. They opted for flag waving and banner unfurling. They decided to target very tall buildings in Beijing, so that it would take time for the police to climb and dismantle the offending symbols. The sight of Chinese police clambering up poles and towers would also appeal to the media. Ms McKeown is a graduate of London's prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS. She could probably have had a successful and lucrative career in business or the media, but instead opted for charity work. In 1999, she became a full-time campaigner for Tibet, a country and a people she had fallen in love with when she was at SOAS. The group organising the protests was Students for Free Tibet, which is based in New York. Set up in 1994, it has about 50,000 members, concentrated in the US and Europe, where, it says, "social activism" is well established. Ms McKeown was invited to help the group to organise its protests. It would pay her air fare and help with her accommodation, but otherwise she would not receive any money. She was surprised when China gave her a visa. She also expected to be turned back at the airport and thinks she got into China because she is known within the Tibet protest movement as "Mandie", while her passport gives her full name, Amanda. Many others, she says, were not so lucky and were turned back at the Beijing airport. Still, by the start of the Games, about 70 Free Tibet campaigners were in place in China. Under pressure from the IOC, and urged by its public relations advisers in New York to make a gesture to show they understood the right of protest, Beijing said it would establish three sites where demonstrations could take place during the Games. But only Chinese nationals could apply for permission. Ms McKeown says the movement wanted no part of this. They could not ask a Chinese to apply on their behalf since it would have unpleasant consequences for that person. And, anyway, Ms McKeown says, peaceful protests should not require licences. "We were right to be suspicious," she says. "There were 77 applications to stage protests and all were refused. Two elderly Chinese ladies who wanted to protest that their homes had been confiscated without compensation to make way for Olympic building were arrested." She says she was careful in Beijing. "We all had our separate roles and did not communicate unless it was necessary. We had teams. There were the flag and banner teams. We had people who filmed, usually in groups of two. I handled the media, I told journalists when and where we would be protesting." Everything was fine, she says, until the middle of the second week. "If we just got a flag out and waved it the police would be on us in seconds. But we had more luck when we had a big climb. It took them time to deal with that." About midnight on the night of Wednesday, Aug 20, the Chinese decided they had had enough of these irritating visitors. With three men, a Tibetan-German and two Americans, Ms McKeown prepared to unfurl their usual Free Tibet flag near the Bird's Nest stadium. "We didn't even get to raise the flag. The police were there too fast," she says. Having been sworn at by the police, who knew enough English to make it clear they did not think much of the activists, the four were taken to a disused university building. There, they were questioned separately. "The first session lasted for four hours. There were five of them. They filmed me," says Ms McKeown. "They didn't even give me a glass of water. They wanted to know everything: names, e-mail addresses. I decided to tell them anything that was in the public domain, that they could find out using the internet." The second session lasted seven hours. She was offered burgers, chicken nuggets and a Chinese egg roll. As a vegetarian she only ate the roll. She still thought, she says, she would be deported immediately and was looking forward to seeing her children. Then they told her she would be detained for 10 days. "I was very upset, " she says. "I was scared." The four were taken to a detention centre, where Ms McKeown was questioned again. For 12 hours, she says, she was strapped to a chair and interrogated. "It was really heavy stuff. I just wanted to go home." At 9am on Friday, Aug 22, she was escorted to a cell, where 11 foreign women, being held on a variety of visa and passport charges, were being held. "There was a Burmese girl who had been there for five months. She did not have a passport. There was a Mongolian who said she had been there for three years," she says. But there were no more questions. By now, although she did not know it, the Chinese government had realised it had blundered and given the faltering Free Tibet campaign a huge publicity boost. Ms McKeown spent Friday, Saturday and much of Sunday walking up and down the cell, playing cards and sipping water from her small bottle. Late on Sunday afternoon, the police said they would deport her. But first, she had to buy a plane ticket for £1,400 (Dh9,330). "They had a machine and I gave them my credit card. I also bought a ticket for one of the guys." There was a surreal twist at the airport. "The plane wasn't leaving until the early hours, so they brought in a television so I could watch the closing ceremony," she says. This weekend, the Free Tibet movement is considering how it can build on this unexpected public relations success. "We have to sit down and think carefully about new campaigns," says Ms Holmes. "Our only regret is that the Chinese people think the Games were a triumph, a coming-out party for their country." [e-mail]