My Story of Persecution in the Changchun Weizigou and Fenjin Labour Camps

By a Falun Gong Practitioner from China

I am a Falun Gong practitioner from Changchun City. I was sentenced illegally to one-year imprisonment in a labour camp and detained there for another half a year after my original 'term' was due. When I was in the Weizigou Labour Camp, I was always beaten and cursed everyday while I was digging ditches. The guard there beat me using a long stick while they kept on yelling "hurry up, hurry up." Once I was called into a room where a prisoner I didn't know asked me if I still practised Falun Gong. After I said yes, he started punching and kicking me. He used the hard heel of a heavy leather shoe to hit the top of my head and clutched my throat and dug my eyes with his fingers. He broke a new bottle of mineral water over my head, and the water poured down on my swollen face. I knew it was the prison guard who instigated him to do this.

On July 2000 all the determined practitioners were transferred to the Fenjin Labour Camp. Once we got there, Captain Yin of the labour camp told us they were carrying out intensive management, those who didn't yet give up practising Falun Dafa must give it up. They forced seven people to sit on a small bed, with one person in another's arms and one leg on another person's leg. In this way no one can really sit down and we had to keep this posture from early morning until 2- 3 a.m. this suffering was beyond description. Sometimes when we fell asleep, we would be immediately punished, we were tortured back and forth in this way. The labour camp put more than eighty practitioners in a "special education brigade" and carried out isolated management [solitary confinement]. We were not allowed to meet with relatives and forced to do "military calisthentic" drills everyday, they also instigated the prisoners to beat us. One practitioner named Bai was beaten so badly he could only stay in bed because his leg lost feeling for many days. Another practitioner's spleen was badly damaged, to the point where he passed out three times. He rolled from his bed to the ground in terrible pain at midnight, losing control of his bowels and bladder and this made a mess all over his body. Only after this was he sent to the hospital. Under high pressure in isolation, we were not allowed to talk to each other, and were under monitoring even when we went to the washroom. Sometimes we didn't know the reason why we were called out and beaten. Because we were not allowed to talk, we suffered tremendous physical and mental torture. We requested to report the situation to the higher authorities, but nobody passed on the message.

It was very hot in August, when we twenty practitioners were forced to sit on the small bed, one leaning against another. Because the door and windows were shut tight, the heat from our bodies created a high temperature in the room. Once the labour camp planned to hold a meeting for practitioners and let some former practitioner who gave up their belief give fictitious lectures. Some practitioners claimed they wouldn't go, so they were dragged out and shocked with electric batons. Several policemen punched and kicked each practitioner. I saw the guard's electric baton was broken from beating people too hard. I didn't want to attend this meeting either, so some prisoners pressed me on a chair and broke my hand. Watching the practitioners being so viciously beaten, from the podium the political commissar and head of the labour camp remained impassive. On the road away from the meeting, I saw the faces of many practitioners were swollen and unrecognizable.

Once the head of the Judicial Department named Lang came to Fenjin Labour Camp. He held a meeting and said to us: "You see these flyers circulating outside saying how vicious this labour camp is. When did we treat you like this here?" Three practitioners stood up one after another (among whom Han Yuzhu was later tortured to death) talking about how several guards beat them in the Vice Captain's office and how the guards took off practitioners' pants and jackets and shocked them with electric batons, etc. Hearing these, Lang changed the topic immediately. He was afraid more people would stand up one by one to expose how evil the Fenjin Labour Camp was.

Once a guard named Fan made me come to his office. He shut closed the door, then began punching and kicking me. He had drunk a lot, and forced me to come to his office again and tried to force me to give up cultivation. He punched and kicked me hard. My chest was seriously hurt and I couldn't roll over for half a month. The perpetrators used every means to torture us and they beat and cursed us at will. Practitioners protested the torture by starting a hunger strike. On the fifth day of the hunger strike, we were force-fed. A group of prisoners pressed me to the ground, one of them pinched my nose to force me to breath with my mouth, then they used nails and screwdrivers to pry open the my teeth. They used one third of a drinking bottle as a funnel and through which they fed corn paste to me, this method can easily choke people. Nails and screwdrivers pried a practitioner's teeth loose when he was force-fed. Another practitioner called Wang Xianyou never returned after he was force-fed. Later we learned he died from the torture used on him during his force-feeding.

Once a newspaper published a picture saying a person came back home and dug a hole in his yard and took Falun Dafa books out from it and handed the books to authorities. The picture showed that he stood beside the pit and the books were around him. In Fenjin Labour Camp, we asked him about this. He said the prison guards and police had him dig a hole beside the wall of the labour camp and forced him to stand beside the hole. They put a lot of books around the hole and took a picture of him. They fabricated a lot of propaganda there in this way.

Source: http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2001/11/8/15528.html