The United Nations held the 10th U.N. Human Rights Council session in Geneva March 2-27. An organization called Falun Gong Human Rights (FLGHR) arranged for a number of Falun Gong practitioners who the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had persecuted to attend the meeting. They told their stories, thus helping the listeners to understand the brutality the CCP committed against them.
Delegates from numerous governments and human rights organizations developed a deeper understanding and many were moved to tears as they listened attentively to the practitioners’ personal stories of torture and abuse.
As the CCP continually denies its severe human rights violations, many do not fully realize the severity and the scale of its persecution of Falun Gong and other groups. When the victims showed the scars from being tortured and discussed their suffering, it helped the U.N. delegates understand the reality taking place in China under the CCP.
One example is Falun Gong practitioner Ms. Haiyan Wang from Guangdong Province. She was a fashion designer, living with her family before the persecution started in 1999. After the persecution started, the CCP detained her six times, put her into a labor camp twice, searched her home twice, and extorted money from her family members twice. In one incident on June 13, 2002, when she distributed materials about Falun Gong in a shopping center, 610 officers beat her and threw her to the ground, causing damage to her right eye and her brain. The 610 office was created by the CCP to oversee the wide scale effort to persecute Falun Gong.
She lost consciousness, but the police did not send her to the hospital. Instead, they took her back to the detention center to continue persecuting her. When they finally hospitalized her the next morning, the doctor found her eye tissue had been bruised, she had lost hearing in her left ear, and she suffered pain and partial paralysis in her legs. The doctor recommended immediate hospitalization, but the CCP, afraid that she would expose their torture of her, pulled out the IV and oxygen tube and brought her back to the Guangzhou Dongshan Detention Center.
Ms. Wang’s ordeal continued until 2005, when she managed to escape on foot to Thailand and eventually to the United States. Due to the lack of medical attention, she became permanently blind in her right eye.
Ms. Wang nearly died four times; the CCP forced her husband to divorce her and extorted 17,000 yuan from her family; yet even in Thailand, she spent 408 days in the Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok.
When Haiyan Wang told the delegates about her and her fellow practitioners’ experiences, many of them were moved to tears.
Falun Gong practitioner Mr. Hongchang Liu was detained seven times. On Feb. 9, 2001, the police beat him so severely that they broke his ribs. He managed to escape from prison, and remained homeless to avoid arrest. After being homeless for 97 days, they found and arrested him, sentencing him to five years in prison.
During those five years, Mr. Hongchang suffered beatings, brainwashing, and torture. He was also a witness when five Falun Gong practitioners, who had been detained with him, were tortured to death.
New Zealand practitioner Ms. Yu Wang appealed for her mother Ms. Lijin Zhu, who was arrested on Feb. 1, 2009. She is being held in the Banqiao woman’s labor camp in Tianjin.
Dr. Shizhong Chen, Chairman and spokesperson for FLGHR, introduced the victims to many U.N. delegates. Dr. Chen pointed out that very few manage to escape from China as Ms. Haiyan Wang and Mr. Hongchang Liu did. Out of a population of 1.4 billion, nearly one thousand practitioners who the CCP has persecuted have escaped. Every one of them witnessed their fellow Falun Gong practitioners being persecuted or even tortured to death.
Likewise, there are several thousand overseas Falun Gong practitioners like Yu Wang, whose family members have been persecuted in China. As this suggests how extensive the persecution really is, Dr. Chen appealed to the U.N. that society should help Falun Gong practitioners, because they are the defenders of human conscience.
