On Sunday the 7th of August, Spanish daily newspaper El Dia de Cordoba published the following article about the persecution of Falun Gong in China by the Chinese communist regime.
A Journey for Freedom
Finnish model Pia Maria Sandas, who recently visited Córdoba, relates how in China, for spiritual and religious reasons, there are many broken families, torture victims and exiles.
By Belén Porras
More than 2,600 people have been killed in China over the past six years for practising the meditation system Falun Gong, but it is estimated that over 10,000 people have been tortured to death, 200,000 jailed and over 1,000 forced into mental institutions. The abuse of human rights in this Asian country has reached the extreme limits with people being persecuted, tortured and thousands killed and forced into exile, making it border on the limits of genocide.
Falun Gong is a peaceful discipline based on the three principles of truth, compassion and tolerance. For this, and due to the situation being unsustainable, Pia-Maria Sandas, a Finnish ex-model and practitioner of this discipline for the past five years, takes advantage of her position as the international representative of a cosmetic label to travel to over 45 countries and denounce this persecution. Pia, who recently visited Córdoba, explains that one of her motivations to fight for this cause was the death of one of her friend’s husband.
“Dai was living exiled in Australia with her daughter Fadu when her husband was detained by the Chinese Government for practising Falun Gong, and was then tortured and found dead,” Pia explains. Dai learned about her husband’s death via the Internet. Pia also states that “with the details that I know about the situation, it would be a true crime to do nothing.”
This meditation and exercise relaxation technique, which was born in 1992 and is now practised in over 78 countries, spread very quickly through China until it grew to more than 70 million practitioners. This large number and the ability to mobilise independently began to worry the Chinese Government. The repressive machine did not delay in going to work. In 1998, Falun Gong was banned and labelled a [slanderous term omitted] by the Chinese Government — a government that had previously admired and granted Falun Gong many awards — because now the number of practitioners greatly surpassed the number of members of the Communist Party.
The persecution began in July of 1999 and in the first three days more than 30,000 people were detained and sent to labour re-education camps in which they tried to eliminate the semi-religious group through forced labour and propaganda sessions. One of the more shocking and tragic cases is of “a woman who was tortured to death together with her eight month old baby boy,” Pia relates. As in this case, the repression by the Beijing Government systematically violates human rights.
Despite promises of change, many organisations continuously denounce the double face that China displays, and they have initiated legal actions from democratic countries so that the responsible agencies will take action. In Spain, the followers of this technique have not remained silent in the face of theses injustices and a lawyer from Valladolid, Carlos Iglesias, has filed three lawsuits in the National Court of Spain for torture and genocide against practitioners of this discipline in China. Pia believes that “one always has to keep hope, and that with the end of communism will come an end to this situation”. Meanwhile, she and many Falun Gong followers are working on bringing awareness to societies around the world about the situation in China where neither life nor liberty is respected and about the Chinese Government that tortures and kills in an indiscriminating manner.
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