China Police Move African Students : Some Arrested After Stand-Off at Nanjing Guest House

Chinese police Saturday forcibly removed many students from among a group of about 130 primarily African foreign students at from a suburban guest house where they had been held since Monday.

Four were detained by police, at least 15 were returned to their campuses, 50 or more remained confined at the facility, and others were taken to unknown destinations, according to sources among foreign students and Chinese officials.

Some students were clubbed as about 350 police forced them to board buses at the isolated facility, according to five students who spoke with Western reporters on condition that their names not be used.

“Nothing was done voluntarily,” said a woman. “It was done physically, brutally.”

The official New China News Agency reported in the evening that a student from Ghana, Alex Dzabaku Dosoo, had been arrested for allegedly assaulting a Hehai University gatekeeper in a Christmas Eve clash. Three other foreign students were “summoned by local police for interrogation,” the news agency said.

Earlier Saturday, Liang Ruiju, president of the university, charged that the students had occupied the entire residential section of the guest house, barricaded the entrance and turned it into “an independent kingdom. “

Two African students denied, however, that this was true. The other two students spoke only very briefly with reporters.

“That’s crazy,” one student said, when told of Liang’s statement. “There was nothing like that.”

The students had been taken to the guest house Monday after the Christmas Eve campus clash that touched off anti-African street demonstrations in which students chanted “Down with the black devils.” As most of the students began lunch Saturday, they discovered that hundreds of police were outside the dining hall, an African student said.

Police Rush In

A group of uniformed police rushed in, grabbed a student leader and pulled him out, the student said. A student from Nepal said some students threw dishes at the police. The other students then left the building, some with their hands raised, he said.

“When we walked out, I personally saw one Congo student being beaten by six or seven policemen,” he recalled.

Chinese authorities told the students they had to return to their campuses, he said. “We tried to tell them it was not safe to go back to the schools,” the student added.

The students refused police demands that they separate themselves by school affiliation, and police spent five hours dividing them and loading them onto buses, the African students said.

About eight of the students, known to be viewed as leading troublemakers by Hehai University authorities, were loaded onto a separate bus, the student sources said. “They were taking them by force, and beating them,” an African student said.

A Nepalese student said that when his bus pulled out, there was still a group of Hehai University students standing outside the dining hall, surrounded by police.

A Hehai University official, who declined to give his name, said that about 50 African students from the school remained at the guest house this morning.

Authorities at Hehai and Nanjing Polytechnical Universities told reporters late Saturday evening that 15 or 16 students had been returned to those campuses. Nanjing’s streets and campuses were calm late Saturday evening, and there were no reports of any violence against students who had returned to campuses.

In Hangzhou, about 150 miles southeast of Nanjing, Kong Xiang-you, vice president of the Zhejiang Agricultural University, denied accusations by about 50 African students attending his school that university switchboard operators had spread rumors about the Africans being carriers of the human immuno-deficiency virus that can lead to AIDS.

The Africans, saying that the university had put out the false report to discourage Chinese, especially women, from socializing with them, admitted Friday that they had held a university official in one of their dormitories for some time to protest the slanders.