Speech from the Vice-Chairman of “European Friends of Falun Gong” at a Press Conference to Commemmorate April 25th

Six years ago, on the 25th April 1999, 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners appealed to the Chinese government against the curbing of their basic human rights by gathering in a peaceful protest in Beijing. As a result the Chinese government, under the leadership of then President Jiang Zemin, began its brutal persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China. We know that so far at least 1,880 practitioners have died as a result of torture of one form or another at the hands of the authorities since then, while many thousands more still languish in prisons and labour camps throughout the country, unsure of their eventual fate.

Today, six years later, Falun Gong practitioners are still here, staging their peaceful appeal to the Chinese government for their freedom of belief. From this six years’ peaceful appeal of Falun Gong practitioners and the brutal persecution of the CCP towards them, we have witnessed the inhuman nature of the CCP. We have to ask, in twenty-one century today, could CCP meet the requirement of international human right standard? Maybe it is the time for the world to see the true nature of the CCP.

The Epoch Times newspaper, run by Chinese ex-patriots living in the west, recently published its Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party, in which it exposed the truth about the horrific history and nature of the party over a period of many decades, a period in which its leaders have ordered the murder of countless numbers of its own citizens for daring to speak out against it, or for not following its strict, dogmatic principles of one-party control. Since the publication of the Nine Commentaries, over 1 million Chinese have officially renounced their ties to the party in the last few months, which is a turning point in human history, a symbol that the long and dark control of the Chinese Communist Party is coming to an end, and a signal for the beginning of a new era.

The CCP has reacted in predictable fashion by ordering the large-scale arrest of many Falun Gong practitioners and their families. Homes have been raided and Falun Gong material confiscated in a move which is reminiscent of a bygone age, that of Nazi Germany and the worst periods of Stalin’s Russia in the middle of the last century.

We implore the Chinese authorities to stop the persecution immediately and to bring to an end one of the most scandalous periods in the history of the Chinese nation and the Chinese Communist Party. We in the west must do all we can to put pressure on the Chinese government to relent in its latest attempt to intimidate Falun Gong practitioners and to undermine their physical and psychological well-being. The Chinese authorities must be made to realise that the continued torture and murder of innocent people can only be detrimental to the future of the nation, irrespective of whether the CCP survives this heavy loss of membership, and that it goes against all principles of decency towards fellow human beings.

European Friends of Falun Gong, 24th April 2005.