Finland: Falun Gong Practitioners Commemorate Persecuted Practitioners

On the evening of August 8th, 2008, Helsinki Falun Gong practitioners held a candlelight vigil on the roadside along the Boulevard la Croisette in the city centre to commemorate the Chinese practitioners who have been persecuted to death by the Chinese Communist regime in mainland China. They also condemned the Chinese regime’s escalation of the persecution against Falun Gong under the excuse of hosting the Beijing Olympics and called on the people around the world to eliminate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and put end to the persecution.

Finnish Falun Gong practitioners hold activities in Helsinki	A candlelight vigil is held along the roadside

A practitioner silently commemorates one of her fellow practitioners who was persecuted to death

The opening ceremony was held on that same day, but according to the data released by the Falun Gong Information Centre last July, the Chinese regime has stepped up efforts to arrest Falun Gong practitioners under the excuse of hosting the Olympics. Since December 2007, at least 8,037 Falun Gong practitioners were illegally arrested in China’s 29 provinces, special municipalities or autonomous districts. Among others, over 500 of them were arrested in Beijing, and over 300 of them were sent to force labour camps for two and a half years of incarceration without trial.

The eye-catching banner reading Falun Dafa is good, the photos of the practitioner being persecuted to death and the glittering candlelight attracted a lot passersby’s attention. Some accepted flyers and stopped to read them attentively, others took pictures of the scene and still others even crossed the street to sign the petition to support Falun Gong.

A Falun Gong practitioner named Jiang said, “Since the CCP started to persecute Falun Gong in 1999, every Falun Gong practitioner who steadfastly believe in the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance, whether inside or outside China, has been regarded by the evil CCP as the “most dangerous enemy.” The approaches taken by the CCP to persecute Falun Gong include frame-ups, cruel torture, brainwashing, kidnapping, detention, jail terms, re-education in forced labour camps, etc. Moreover, it even harvested organs from living Falun Gong practitioners for profit and cremated their bodies to eliminate the evidence, regardless of humanity.

Though there are not so many Chinese Falun Gong practitioners in Finland, three of them were once illegally imprisoned in China. Among others, Lu Shiping was illegally arrested four times, and was once incarcerated in the notorious Wanjia Forced Labor Camp in Harbin for 20 months. A Chinese student by the name of Qi Lihe, who returned to China in early 2002, was secretly kidnapped by plain clothes police in his residence in Shenzhen in September, 2006. He was secretly sentenced to three years in jail in June, 2007, and he is currently confined at the Beijiang Prison in Shaoguan City, Guangdong Province, under severe persecution. In addition, four other practitioners’ family members or relatives had been imprisoned or are incarcerated illegally at present. Among them, Zhang Weijie, the father of Chinese student Xu Mosangzi, who came to Finland in 2007, was kidnapped on his way home after work by the police from the Wuhan Security Bureau’s Fist Division on March 20th 2007. He had been confined in the Hewan Forced camp on February 11th, 2008, by the special agents from the Wuhan Security Bureau’s First Division, and is now imprisoned in the Wuhan Municipal First Detention Centre. Jin Zhaoyu is a Falun Gong practitioner who just arrived in Finland from Zhengzhou City, Henan Province, China on July 10th to visit her relatives. Her mother Chen Zhenping was illegally arrested after the police from the Dongwuyuan Police Station on Garden Road, Zhengzhou City, searched her home on the evening of July 9th. Her younger sister has been destitute and homeless since then.

Ms. Jiang also said that while commemorating the Falun Gong practitioners who were persecuted to death, they were also exposing the CCP’s atrocities on the eve of its collapse. In particular, the large scale arrests of Falun Gong practitioners in the run up to the Olympic Games further indicated the CCP’s fears of its dissolution and the fact that over 40 million Chinese people have denounced the CCP and its affiliated organisations. This mania is simply the momentary struggle before its collapse. Eventually the world people will understand the truth that the best approach to dissolve the CCP is to put an end to the persecution.