708 Female Practitioners Are Being Tortured in the Balizhuang Forced Labour Camp

708 female Falun Dafa practitioners are currently being illegally held at the Balizhuang Forced Labour Camp in Baoding City, Hebei Province.

Labour camp officials impose inhumane living conditions, personal humiliation, and numerous forms of torture including extended forced labour to force practitioners to renounce their belief in "Truth-Compassion-Tolerance." They incite criminal inmates to disallow practitioners to sleep, perform beatings and force practitioners to curse Dafa and Teacher. As part of a comprehensive brainwashing programme, the guards and criminal inmates formed a "strict-monitoring" team.

Practitioner Yuan Guihua is from Fuping County, Hebei Province. In 2002, she was illegally sentenced to three years in Balizhuang Labour Camp solely for distributing Dafa truth materials. She firmly believes in Dafa and Teacher and refuses to cooperate with the persecution imposed on her. She conducted a hunger strike to protest the inhuman treatment she was forced to receive. As a result, she was sent to the "strict-monitoring" team. Prison guards tied her onto a bed, shocked her with high voltage electric batons, prohibited her from using the toilet, and force-fed her on numerous occasions. Furthermore, the guards incited the criminal inmates to strip her and ruthlessly beat her with a thick bamboo stick. As a result of the torture, Yuan Guihua's entire body became swollen and her right arm became numb from the handcuffs. Two months into the hunger strike, she vomited blood and fell unconscious. Fearing that they would be held responsible if she died, the prison guards released her.

There are two team heads, one with the last name Li, and another named Zhang Guohong. They are responsible for directing inmates to torture practitioners using various vicious means. Practitioners imprisoned at Balizhuang Labour Camp are not released unless they give up their belief, even though they complete their term. Instead they will be transferred to the "610 Office" [an agency specifically created to persecute Falun Gong, with absolute power over each level of administration in the Party and all other political and judiciary systems] to be tortured further until they renounce their belief.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2003/6/1/51384.html