Today marks the tenth anniversary of the most systematic persecution
of one group since the Nazi persecution of the Jews. As a European
Parliament Vice-President and longest-serving member of its Foreign
Affairs Committee, I have for three years campaigned to draw attention
to the brutal and systematic persecution by the Chinese regime of
practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddha-school spiritual movement with
70 - 100 million adherents in 1999. They have been persecuted, simply
because Falun Gong is popular, by the most paranoid, brutal and
arbitrary regime in world history, which has killed 70 million of its
own people, 38 million through deliberate starvation.
I write to urge you to initiate an inquiry into the systematic process
of imprisonment without trial, escalating torture and the murder of
thousands of innocent people under torture. This goes beyond man’s
inhumanity to man: it amounts to genocide under Article 2 of the
Genocide Convention. The age of impunity is over and those who know
what is taking place in China look to you to take action.
As US Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter said, when told in 1942 by
the Pole Jan Karski of what was happening in the Nazi death camps, “I
did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe
him. There is a difference." Secretary-General, there is plenty of
evidence of genocide in China, if only you would care to look, or
listen to the UN rapporteurs on torture and religious freedom.
Falun Gong is a spiritual and meditation movement that echoes
traditional Chinese beliefs that humans are connected to the universe
through mind and body. The Chinese Communist Party describes it as a
'cult', whereas international jurisprudence suggest that a ‘cult’
should include financial commitment, alienation from family,
disciplined organisation, brainwashing, anti-social behaviour etc,
none of which apply to Falun Gong. Like all chi-gong (spiritual
exercise) groups, Falun Gong has a ‘master’ whose book of exercises
published in 1992 remains the only financial commitment for most.
My campaign began in May 2006, when I visited China on a fact-finding
mission in preparation for a report on human rights and democracy for
the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee. In Beijing, at
great personal risk to them, I interviewed two former prisoners,
Falun Gong practitioners Cao Dong and Niu Jinping. Cao Dong was
subsequently arrested and convicted of ‘meeting a distinguished
foreigner’. He was sent to Tianshui prison, being tortured to recant
his religious convictions and to denounce his meeting with me. Niu
Jinping appealed to me on behalf of his wife, Zhang Lianying, who had
been in Beijing Forced Women's Labour Camp since June 2005, and so
severely tortured that she suffered a coma in April 2007. The latter
were subsequently re-imprisoned as part of Beijing’s pre-Olympic
round-up.
Another of my contacts was Christian human rights attorney Gao
Zhisheng, sometimes known as the ‘conscience of China’, who
represented a number of Falun Gong practitioners after his
investigation into their persecution in 2005. Well-known in China for
publicly denouncing the regime, especially for corruption, he wrote an
open letter to the European Parliament through me in September 2007
(see Annex below) and another to the US Congress. He was then
sentenced to prison on a charge of "subversion". After being
temporarily released into house arrest, he was re-imprisoned and in
2008 so severely tortured that he twice tried to commit suicide.
After his wife and children escaped through Thailand to the USA in
January 2009, Gao was abducted by security forces and his whereabouts
are currently unknown.
Gao’s friend Hu Jia, an environmental activist, was another of my
contacts who was arrested and imprisoned in 2008 after he gave
evidence by telephone to the European Parliament’s Human Rights
Committee. He was then awarded the European Parliament’s annual
Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Expression. Hu Jia’s wife Zeng Jinyan
was named as one the 100 most important people on earth by Time
magazine for her blogs in support of Hu Jia’s activities.
These are only a few examples drawn from my own experience, but they
demonstrate the extent of the Communist regime's paranoia and
brutality against any activity which could threaten or destabilise it.
On 25 April 1999, 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners spent a day in
peaceful protest in Beijing after police brutality against fellow
practitioners in Tianjin city: people who were there have told me that
this event was almost certainly organized by the security forces as a
justification for the persecution which then began.
Falun Gong practitioners are usually imprisoned under 'administrative
detention' with no trial: often they refuse to give their names to
protect their families. As members of a banned 'evil cult' they
suffer particularly harsh treatment, often at the hands of other
prisoners and even Falun Gong who have recanted (to demonstrate their
rejection of the practice). Ex-prisoners I have met, having ipso facto
recanted, have suffered sleep deprivation for a period of weeks, then
forced to stand motionless for several days, being prodded with sharp
objects to keep them awake, followed by progressively brutal
treatments involving electric prods - always including the genitals -
excrement and general beatings. Zhang Lianying, who suffered a coma,
wrote me a list of the 50 progressive tortures she suffered, which I
submitted to the UN Rapporteurs on Torture and Religious Freedom, Dr
Manfred Nowak and Mrs Asma Jahangir, both of whom I have met on a
number of occasions:
http://www.boycottbeijing.eu/resources/Nowak+and+testimony+080708.pdf
Manfred Novak believes that some two-thirds of those undergoing
're-education through labour' in China’s prison camps, modelled on
the Soviet Union’s gulag, are Falun Gong practitioners. In testimony
to the US Congress this year, Mr Harry Wu, a former inmate and now
director of New York’s Laogai Research Center, estimates that there
are some 900 such camps with between 3 – 6 million incarcerated.
Falun Gong outside China maintain contact with prisoners and record
their torture and torturers where either can be identified: records
exist of more than 3,000 who have been tortured to death since 1999.
Of particular concern is that only Falun Gong - who neither smoke nor
drink - are routinely blood-tested and blood-pressure tested in
prison: this is not for their well-being. They thus become the prime
source for the Peoples' Liberation Army's lucrative live organ
transplant trade: more than 40,000 additional unexplained transplants
have been recorded recently in China since 2001. Although using body
parts from executed prisoners has been routine in China (in one
province alone there are 16 specially-converted evisceration buses)
many believe, as I do, that live Falun Gong prisoners are quarried for
their body parts. Indeed, Cao Dong told me that after his best friend
disappeared from their prison cell one evening, he next saw his dead
body in the morgue with holes where body parts had been removed.
Ten years later, the campaign of brutal repression of Falun Gong -
once encouraged by Beijing for the wellbeing reportedly experienced by
its adherents - shows no sign of easing. In my view, the persecution
of Falun Gong amounts to genocide as defined in Article 2 of the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole
or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part;"
It is clear that Falun Gong are to the Communist regime what the Jews
were to the Gestapo. Although millions died in the gulag it was from
starvation, not systematic torture and liquidation as in China today.
In your capacity as Secretary General of the United Nations, and on
this ten-year anniversary, I urge you to take action to put an end to
the persecution of Falun Gong in China.
Edward McMillan-Scott MEP Yorkshire & Humber, UK, Conservative
Vice-President of the European Parliament
Tel private +44 1386 552366 mobile: +44 7785 263007
ANNEX Letter to Edward McMillan-Scott from lawyer Gao Zhisheng,
translated by intermediary:
From Beijing, China: received via email September 7 2007
Dear Mr. Scott,
How are you? Writing to you is the only way of communication that I
have at present. Although it is somewhat primitive or old fashioned,
it is still much less primitive than the way my family and I have been
handled by the Chinese Communist regime since last year. Their open
disregard of human feelings and conscience in their confinement and
harassment against us is simply because we try to stick to human
feelings and conscience.
During such long period of loneliness, your words of concern have
often been passed over, though the passing over itself has been also
quite primitive. Yet, to my family, it is as if a thread of bright
sunshine tearing through dark clouds to reach our hearts. On this
occasion, please accept our appreciations!
Deep in my heart, I have never thought of gratitude for your
persistence of condemnation against present-day Chinese evil
dictatorship. In my opinion, we are common warriors conquering
darkness.
The Chinese Communist regime continues as an unprecedented evil regime
on this planet. Its presence in China is the direct source of all
sufferings and injustice there. Its history is one of committing
countless crimes and covering these countless crimes. In recent years,
its economic expansion, which has been gained at the expense of
sacrificing the environment, human justice, human ethics as well as
fundamental human nature, has generated for the dictatorship even more
brutality and fearful powerfulness.
The ethical values and conscience of the entire human race is being
eaten away through “trade relations, Olympic Games” and other “state”
visits. Mainstream politicians from the West are aware of the current
phenomenon of gaining interests at the expenses of human traditional
ethic values. This interest over fundamental ethics and virtue has
become a common practice of international politics. Under this
situation, anything unrelated to economic interests has been openly
neglected for a long time.
About Chinese Communists’ bloody persecutions against Falun Gong,
diplomats from all major countries in the world are all well aware of
it yet they have also dreadfully and miserably become a part of the
silent community on the entire mainland China. Compared with silence
from Chinese people, the one from foreign governments looks especially
disgusting. To some extent, this indifference paves the way for the
Chinese regime’s ruthless crackdown against domestic dissidents. The
whole human race will pay a huge price for this numbness, because it
has become a shocking humanitarian issue instead of a pure political
one.
Today, I am not writing to compliment you, or to release my own
complaints. The struggle against the Chinese Communist dictatorship is
one for the human race, for lightness or for darkness, for
civilization or for savageness. The cruel reality warns us that our
peaceful struggle should never be relaxed! In today’s mainland China,
changing the dictatorship peacefully has become a common wish.
Dear Mr. Scott, human civilization has entered current era, but this
era seems to have no relation with Chinese Communist regime. Although
it has got the technology to enter space, it has no intention,
politically speaking, to give up its jungle games. Now Chinese
Communist Party is preparing its 17th National Party Congress. Its
preparation is totally operated in darkness, while its subjects are
like animals or private property handed over to the next ruler. This
power succession like the mafia’s has lasted since Mao. The only
change is today’s successors are all in Western suits. We must work
hard to change it, even if it is purely for the humanitarian value.
Dear Mr. Scott, when freedom finally arrives in China, I invite you to
drink wine in Beijing, real good wine [in their first telephone
conversation McMillan-Scott said he would give Gao vintage whiskey].
Best regards,
Gao Zhisheng