Bulgaria: Support for Practitioners from the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee

The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) supported Falun Gong practitioners in Bulgaria. This happened during a press conference organised on July 20th, 2006, marking seven years of the persecution of Falun Gong in China by the Communist regime. During the event Mrs. Juliana Metdieva, Editor-in-Chief of the BHC magazine “Objective”, gave a speech. She said that the persecution of Falun Gong is the cruelest crime. She added that Falun Gong is a unique way for people to live a harmonious, adequate and natural life. In her opinion, for the persecution to be stopped there has to be publicity and she categorically stated that on behalf of BHC she would help practitioners with everything - in their efforts to enable more people in Bulgaria to know what is Falun Gong and to condemn its brutal persecution.

Unfortunately, the media didn’t express interest in the event, for which they had received invitations two days before, and remained silent about the facts announced by practitioners, as well as to the launching of the Bulgarian version of the European Falun Gong website Clearharmony: www.bg.clearharmony.net.

In informal conversations, representatives of various media openly share to practitioners that the Chinese Embassy in Sofia interferes and not just once: Embassy officials send faxes with false and slandering information about Falun Gong to the media every time some newspaper or TV exposes the atrocities done by the Communist regime in China.

A week before the event, practitioners sent letters to many NGOs, media and government institutions, in which one more time revealed the facts about the organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners for profit further to the report of the two Canadians David Matas and David Kilgour. They also gave information about the recent support from the European parliament.

Letters with similar information was sent to all 240 MPs in the Bulgarian parliament – practitioners asked for support, but so far none has been answered. In 2003, after interference from the Chinese Embassy in Sofia, the former Parliament Secretary cancelled an exhibition of a renowned Australian artist Mrs. Zhang Cuiying, whose paintings are on the walls of the European parliament. Mrs. Zhang is a Falun Gong practitioner and had been in a Chinese labour camp for eight months for appealing to the Chinese government to stop the persecution and who was later released with the help of the Australian government. She was invited to hold the exhibition in the building of the Bulgarian parliament on behalf of Mrs. Snezhina Chipeva, a MP from the then ruling party National Movement Simeon II. Just a day before the opening, the exhibition was cancelled and an investigations of the media revealed that was due to the interference of the Chinese Ambassador. However, the exhibition was held in the Hungarian Cultural Institute and with great success.