CHINA MARKS U.N. ANTI-DRUG DAY WITH EXECUTIONS, PUBLIC RALLIES

BEIJING - China marked a United Nations anti-drug day Tuesday by executing
at least 59 people, burning narcotics and staging mass rallies nationwide.

"Drug abuse, drug trafficking are indeed very terrible problems of our
day," U.N. deputy spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said at U.N.
headquarters in New York. "It affects the whole world, it spares no
country, rich or poor."

He said a 1998 U.N. convention provides the legal framework for the fight
against drug trafficking but "as far as I am aware the convention does not
provide for the application of the death penalty."

Thousands of people attended a rally at a stadium in Kunming, capital of
southwestern Yunnan province, where 20 drug traffickers were sentenced to
death, said a city police official.

Using remote-control detonators, officials ignited 2 tons of confiscated
heroin placed in large metal pans and doused with gasoline. State
television showed the spectacle live on its noon news broadcast.

The executions were carried out immediately afterward at a separate
location, the Kunming police official said.

Chinese authorities have executed hundreds of people since April in a
renewed crime crackdown labeled "Strike Hard" by the government that allows
speeded up trials and broader use of the death penalty.

European Union diplomats in Beijing, monitoring reports in Chinese
state-run media, have tallied more than 1,000 executions and many more
death sentences in the crackdown on violent and gang-related crime.

Executions are usually carried out in China by a gunshot to the head.

Separately on Tuesday, eight people in the central city of Wuhan and eight
people on the southern island of Hainan were executed for drug trafficking.

Yunnan authorities also executed Li Shaoju, a citizen of Myanmar, on Monday
for smuggling more than 135 kilograms (300 pounds) of heroin, opium, and
morphine from Myanmar to China, newspapers reported.

In coastal Fujian province, five Taiwanese citizens were executed Monday
for attempting to smuggle crystal methamphetamine _ also known as "ice" to
Taiwan. Eighteen heroin traffickers were also executed Monday in Chongqing,
a city in southwestern China, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

China has detained 15,000 suspected drug dealers and seized 2.2 tons of
heroin, 1.2 tons of opium, and 2 tons of "ice," in the first five months of
the year, state media reported.

In particular, "ice" and ecstasy are being produced in larger amounts, Jia
Chunwang, the Minister of Public Security said in comments published in the
English-language China Daily.

The number of registered drug addicts in China has risen to 860,000 in 2000
from 681,000 in 1999, according to the Ministry of Public Security.