Americans Create Stir With Tian An Men Memorial : China: Three members of Congress stage a brief ceremony for victims of 1989 protest. Police detain some journalists.

Three members of the U.S. Congress staged a demonstration Wednesday in Tian An Men Square, complete with cloth flowers, a small banner and a brief speech to television cameras and dozens of Chinese onlookers.

The quick memorial to those who died during the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing ended before paramilitary police standing nearby realized what was happening.

Several visibly nervous young police officers then sought, with little success, simultaneously to disperse the crowd, keep the American politicians from leaving and prevent television crews from continuing to record the scene.

Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Ben Jones (D-Ga.) and John Miller (R-Wash.) were allowed to walk away after a few minutes of confusion that was aggravated by the language barrier. Some American television journalists were detained for about 90 minutes.

The three began their demonstration near the Monument to the People’s Heroes, in the center of the huge square; each of them held a white artificial rose. White, in China, is the color of mourning.

“These three flowers symbolize liberty, justice and democracy,” Jones said, looking into the television cameras that the Americans had alerted. “Those who died here on June 4, 1989, did not die in vain. They were martyrs to these principles that we all hold dear, and they were catalysts to the extraordinary changes that we see taking place throughout the world. And so we leave this remembrance to these young people and to their cause--to their memory, for it is a memory which still burns bright, and it is a cause which will never die.”

As Jones completed this short statement, he unfolded and displayed an approximately 30-inch by 10-inch black cloth on which was written, in English and Chinese: “To those who died for democracy in China.”

Jones, Pelosi and Miller then stepped toward the Monument to the People’s Heroes and set the white flowers down on the pavement. A paramilitary police officer guarding the monument came rushing up, told the Chinese crowd to leave and grabbed the three flowers.

As onlookers continued to mill around, some police officers tried to block the lenses of the television cameras. At one point, an officer reached out to Miller’s shoulder.

“He half grabbed me and half slapped me and yelled at me in Chinese,” Miller said later.

Jones said that although “they seemed to want to detain us,” at this point he decided it was best to “just walk away.”

There were no U.S. Embassy staff member with the group in the square. After the incident, all three portrayed what they had done as being something small and almost private.

“It was certainly not intended to provoke,” Jones said. “It was a very small, private matter. We were surprised how many press showed up. I’d mentioned it to one or two. But it was to be a very small, a very brief and a very solemn occasion, and it was.”

Pelosi, visibly shaken as she walked through the square to the car that took them back to their hotel, said that she felt the police had “overreacted.”

“We’ve been told (by Chinese officials) for two days now that there’s freedom of speech in China,” Pelosi said. “The description of China that we’ve received for two days led us to think that it wouldn’t be any problem for us to go have a private moment in front of the monument. So I think that there was an overreaction to it. I thought it was a tourist attraction, and that’s typical of anything you would do in front of a monument in any city in the world.”

The three members of Congress head a delegation sponsored by the Democracy for China Fund, a U.S.-based organization of exiled Chinese dissidents and American supporters. They were hosted by the Chinese People’s International Friendship Assn.

Delegation members said that the main purpose of their visit was to focus attention on China’s two most prominent political prisoners, Wang Juntao and Chen Zimin, who are serving 13-year sentences for their roles in helping to organize the pro-democracy demonstrations that engulfed Beijing in the spring of 1989.

Speaking at a Wednesday news conference before visiting Tian An Men Square, Pelosi said that although the delegation had been refused permission to visit the two, they had been told by Minister of Public Security Tao Siju that the National People’s Congress will soon consider the question of allowing international humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross to monitor the condition of Chinese prisoners.