Yoko Kaneko's Submission to the UN

Thank you respected Mr. Chairman,

My name is Yoko Kaneko. I was born in China. I am now residing in Japan. I am a practitioner of Falun Gong. I travelled back to China from Japan on May 24th 2002. I was arrested and detained in a labour camp without trial only for handing out Falun Gong fliers on the streets in Beijing. I was released last year.

Here I wish to raise a few examples of the way I suffered during the one and half years’ detention.

In the Police Hospital, the police tried to force me to give up my belief. They handcuffed me to a bed. The handcuffs were so tight that my wrists bled. They not only inserted a tube through my nose into my stomach for force-feeding but also used a catheter so that I would not go to the toilet. At that time, I was menstruating. They put me on a plastic sheet with my lower body naked and exposed.

I was handcuffed to that bed for almost twenty days in the hot summer, lying in my own perspiration, sticky sludge and the discharge from my lower body. When I was finally released from the bed, I could not get off the bed by myself and could not walk. The skin on my entire back was in a state of putrefaction.

In the labour camp, deprivation of sleep and brainwashing made my blood pressure increase up to 270, which made me become almost blind. They sent me to another hospital so that doctors could examine the bottom of my eyes by exposing them to strong light for a long period of time. My eyes felt sore and extremely painful. Afterwards I could not bear to see light and felt intensely dazzled.

In the labour camp, some other Falun Gong practitioners were deprived of sleep for more than twenty days. Drug addicts were allowed to torture practitioners at will. We often heard horrible screams at night. Some women were tortured into losing their sanity.

I once watched a video recording in the labour camp of a talk by a self-proclaimed scientist Mr. Yusheng Wang, who often slandered Falun Gong in the public media. Wang summarised the evolution of techniques of brainwashing Falun Gong practitioners and promoted the torture of deprivation of sleep. What shocked me most is that yesterday; I saw this person speaking and slandering Falun Gong in the UN Human Rights Plenary Meeting!

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all.