Germany: The Munich Beer Festival Attracts Tourists to an Anti-Torture Exhibition

The 18th of September was the opening day of the 171st Munich Beer Festival, which lasts for sixteen days. Tourists from all over Germany and the world travelled to Munich to take part and the city was constantly busy. In Marienplatz in the city centre, Falun Gong practitioners from Munich and Bavaria held an information day and anti-torture exhibition to show people how Jiang Zemin uses his regime to persecute Falun Gong practitioners in China.

On one side of the exhibition, graceful music and exhibition boards informing people that Falun Dafa is spreading all over the world caught people’s attention. They stopped to have a look and accepted the leaflets handed to them by the practitioners. On the other side of the exhibition, there was a re-enactment of practitioners being tied up on a tiger bench and locked up in a cage. Standing nearby was a policeman with a fierce look. The acting conveyed to the people that all these things are happening in China’s forced-labour camps. People were shocked: many were gazing at the scene with their eyes wide-open and couldn’t believe that this is happening every day in China. When being told what was being shown here was only the tip of the iceberg and the real persecution in China is even crueller than this, people were furious and signed their names on a petition to bring Jiang Zemin to justice.

The Jiang Zemin Regime has persecuted Falun Gong practitioners for over five years since July 1999. Tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been forced to sign their names on a guarantee to give up practising Falun Gong. Many of them have been taken to be brainwashed because they refused to sign and many of them have been taken to forced labour camps to be “re-educated”. At present, over 100,000 practitioners are imprisoned in all sorts of forced labour camps and mental hospitals. 1047 Falun Gong practitioners have been tortured to death. Numerous practitioners have been forced to leave their homes or families, and have lost their jobs.

The Jiang Regime has used the whole of China’s state apparatus and propaganda machine to conduct a campaign of annihilation against Falun Gong and deprived those who practise of their basic human rights. In order to escape condemnation from the international community, the persecution has changed its form recently. The regime has tried to hide the persecution and suppression of Falun Gong practitioners even more deviously.

In the past few months, reports about practitioners being tortured have come one after another. Gao Rongrong was electrically shocked on the face for seven hours and tortured to the brink of death in Longshan forced labour camp; Wang Xia became a human skeleton in Linhe City Inner Mongolia; Wang Guijin, who had been pregnant for nine months, was forced to have an induced labour in Huaiyang County Henan Province: These are the unbelievable facts. At present Jiang Zemin has a lawsuit brought against him for crimes of torture, genocide and crimes against humanity by practitioners from many countries all over the world.

Upon firs seeing the exhibition, two Germans said, “Oh, it is the Falun Gong religion.” On hearing this, a practitioner told them not to believe the Jiang Regime’s slander, and told them what Falun Gong is and why Falun Gong has been persecuted in China. After hearing the facts, they went to the petition board to sign their names at once.

A tourist group from Northeast China approached the exhibition and a western practitioner went over and gave them some leaflets. Among the tourists there was one who had interviewed Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong. When the western practitioner told him that Mr. Li is a good person, that tourist was stupefied at first and then his memory seemed to return quickly. He said, “Yes, he is a very good person,” showing a pure-hearted smile.

People’s longing for Dafa was encouraging to everyone. The ones, who were playing the roles of tortured practitioners and evil policemen, held on silently although they had been in the scorching sun for several hours. Many practitioners were too busy to take lunch because they wanted as many people as possible to hear the truth. A young Chinese student, when he began looking at the anti-torture exhibition, was very angry and started shouting that the practitioners were losing the face for the Chinese people. The practitioners patiently told him the whole story of the persecution, from the self-immolation deaths in Tiananmen Square that Jiang staged to frame Falun Gong and the Jiang Regime’s crimes of genocide, to Falun Gong practitioners’ peaceful opposition. Finally, that young man became quiet and took a Video-CD and some leaflets with him. He said that he would watch the video and read the materials carefully when he got home.