Argentina: Radio Station "The Island" in Buenos Aires Reports on the Persecution of Falun Dafa in China (Part 2)

On October 5th, 2004, Martin Bermudez on "The Island", a radio station in Argentina, once again hosted a special program entitled, "You Will Remember Me" to report on Falun Gong. The following is a translated transcript of this program.

You will remember that during the military government here, information really did not circulate in Argentina; we all remember this. Every single person listening to this program at this moment will remember the lack of information during that period, which is the result of clamping on the press, the disappearance of journalists, and all the kinds of pressure put upon the news media.

I remember a conversation I had, at that time, with my cousin who lived in Barcelona. She told me that she was horrified by the things happening in Argentina. I told her, "But no, Laura, it's not like this, you're wrong." And she told me, "You have no idea what is going on in Argentina, you are not allowed to know."

Many years later I realised that she was right. Even she herself did not know how right she was concerning all of the information which was hidden from us, of what was happening in Argentina of which we were not aware of. When the news media and the political power are concentrated together, when the press is being suppressed and its rights violated, when journalists disappeared, when people are tortured, any citizens could be the object of manipulation. In Argentina, there were thousands of missing persons and even if there were only one, state terrorism is still atrocious.

Every time you hear about someone being persecuted in a country and in that country it is not possible to express this fact and one has to go to other parts of the world to manifest, then remember the repression during the military government, remember how it was like, remember the demonstrations for human rights and for the missing persons all around the world while we here in Argentina thought that everything was all right, because Argentines are "righteous and humane."

Let this serve as an analogy to what is happening to Falun Dafa and to the Chinese at this moment, what it means to be persecuted and in your country no one can know about it.

We repudiate absolutely any type of persecution, repudiate any type of pressure on the news media, which is what the press is suffering in China at this moment for not being able to communicate anything, and the pressures exercised by the Chinese government on other countries to not talk about Falun Dafa. We also repudiate anything which goes against the freedom of press; for us this is a violation of a right of any citizen.

Typical Nazi or Argentinian military tactics, terror, state terrorism, totalitarian, authoritarianism: that were how things were in Argentina; the toll was 30,000 missing persons. In China the figure must be more or less the same, or more, as there are so many millions of Chinese.

Someone could say, "China is far away, China is another world." Nevertheless the world is bringing China to a position of power. No one can avoid doing business with China. It is worrisome that president Kirchner made a speech based on the defence of human rights in United Nations just after he went to China and arrived back in Argentina with good expectancies, thinking that doing business with China can be a solution for us. The dichotomy which he planted in his speech was very clear: either defend human rights or we do business with China. The same dichotomy is facing many countries in the world today.

When someone tells you how wonderful it is to do business with a country, remember what happened during the military government, when many countries did not want to do business with Argentina because of human rights violations. And give it thought, whether we should take note of this lesson and do exactly the same.

Maybe our position of neutrality serves to show us as a pacifist country. As for in what we can be neutral, in what we may not be neutral, comes only to this: defend the ones being tortured, because we ourselves also were defended by others when we were being tortured."