Finland: Despite Five Years of Brutal Persecution, Falun Gong Practitioners' Belief in Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance stays Firm (Part 2)

Five years ago, on the 20th of July 1999, Jiang Zemin launched the persecution of Falun Gong. In the middle of the night women and men, throughout China, were forcefully taken from their homes. What they faced was an indoctrination process consisting of scare tactics, brainwashing, and other forms of coercion meant to break their belief.

Even though Jiang’s regime have used countless inconceivably brutal methods of torture to force Falun Gong practitioners to give up their belief and have executed the policy, "death of Falun Gong practitioners from beating is nothing and shall be counted as suicide" and "the body shall be directly cremated without investigating the person's identification." Falun Gong practitioners have stayed firm in their belief in Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance.

Five years is a long time for people who suffer persecution constantly, some of the Falun Gong practitioners who have endured brutal torture and cruel mistreatment have died of torture, others have been sent to labour camps for up to eighteen years. To date, 1006 practitioners have been confirmed as having been tortured to death.

To let more people become aware of what is going on in China, Falun Gong practitioners in Nordic Countries organised on Sunday 18th July 2004, a Live Anti-Torture Exhibition in Helsinki to expose the torture methods used on Falun Gong practitioners in the Chinese labour camps and prisons and at the same time they also demonstrated the peaceful practice of Falun Gong.

Two of the practitioners who took part in this exhibitions had their own experience from the persecution. Both of them were in China when the persecution began. Their parents were illegally detained. One of them said that he didn’t know where his mother was for half a year. Because his mother didn’t want to give up Falun Gong practise she was later sentenced to five years in a labour camp. The other young practitioner said that his parents were kidnapped and a classmate told him that the Police were looking for him. When hearing that he had to leave the school to escape from the Police. Since then he hasn’t been able to get in touch with his parent. In this exhibition one of them had to play the policeman. It surely wasn’t easy in the beginning to play the evil Chinese policeman who torture practitioners, but to let more people be aware of the brutality of this persecution, someone had to play the bad guy. Their hope in taking part in this exhibition is:

To help more Chinese people see through the lies of Jiang’s regime.

To call for support from the people to stop this persecution.

To let people themselves see right from wrong.

To help all innocent Falun Gong practitioners return home and be reunited with their families.