Ms. Zou Ruxiang, 57, Tells of Being Tortured in Baimalong Forced Labour Camp, Where She Became Disabled and Lost Her Memory

My name is Zou Ruxiang. I'm 57 years old, and I was born in Pingjiang County, Hunan Province. From 2001 to June of 2002, because I practise Falun Dafa, I was arrested and sent to Baimalong Forced Labour Camp, where I was tortured in inhuman ways. I was taken to a mental hospital, where they injected me with unknown drugs. I lost all my memory for a period of time and almost died. Now I am exposing the crimes committed by those in the Baimalong Women's Forced Labour Camp in Zhuzhou City.

I cannot recall many of the horrible deeds the guards did to me in Baimalong Forced Labour Camp. Originally I weighed about 130 pounds, but in 2002, when my husband carried me home, I weighed less than 55 pounds. I was totally paralysed, I could not see, and I had lost my memory. It has been more than four years now. My memory is still only partly recovered, my vision is very poor, and I still limp when I walk. I can only remember bits and pieces of the persecution from my partially recovered memory and from what others have told me.

In the summer of 2001, when I was first sent to Baimalong Forced Labour Camp, because I requested to practise the Falun Gong exercises, the guards locked or tied me up for long periods of time, which lead to scabies all over my body. However, they still wouldn't untie me. Instead, they took off my clothes and put sulphur cream on me. They continued torturing me like this and would not let me shower. I resisted with a hunger strike. Seven or eight guards then pulled me to the medical treatment room and held me on the ground. They force-fed me by sticking a sharpened bamboo tube into my mouth. They held the bamboo tube firmly and brutally rotated left and right and then poured porridge in. One of my teeth in the back broke off. The blood, together with the porridge and the tooth, were all forced in. I was all stained with sticky blood.

The second time they force-fed me, I lost another tooth. When I felt my tooth breaking off, I had the thought that I must expose their evil deed and was able to free myself. I pulled out the bamboo-tube and spat out the bloody porridge and the tooth all in front of them. This kind of brutal force-feeding has happened to several hundred practitioners in this forced labour camp. It has caused many cases of suffocation. As for losing front teeth or injuring the stomach or oesophagus, it happened all the time. It also directly lead to the immediate death of Dafa practitioner Zuo Shuchun from Changsha City.

Later in the day , a guard took me to a big empty room to question me. He wasn't happy with my answers, and three or four guards came out from another room and punched my upper body hard. It hurt a lot, but it didn't rupture the skin or make it swollen. I said: "You all are hurting me. I don't care much, but it will not be good for you." But a guard said: "Who hit you? We didn't see it. We don't hit people in this place." Another said: "How about sending you to a hospital to check?" I wouldn't go, but they forced me onto a car and drove me to a mental hospital. They pulled me into a room and held me on the bed. That time, I clearly saw many medicine bottles, strings, and sticks on the ground. There was also a transfusion rack with many full bottles. However, there were no doctors or nurses.

They tied me up and then hit me to knock me out. I didn't know how many days passed. When my husband came to pick me up, I had become blind in both eyes, all memory lost, and entirely paralysed. I was barely conscious. I felt that I had heard my husband call me once and felt that I was perhaps sleeping on my husband's shoulder. When I woke up again, I was at home.

At that time, I couldn't move at all. In the beginning, I thought it was at night the whole time: I didn't know I was already blind. I felt a scar on the back of my head. It was perhaps from being hit with a stick to knock me out when I was in the mental hospital. I was a healthy and good person, but within a little over a year, due to the inhuman tortures in Baimalong Forced Labour Camp, I became a near-death disabled person. Later people told me: "Your husband had to go pick you up twice. The first time, probably because you were still somewhat conscious, they were afraid that you would reveal how they tortured you when you returned home, so they wouldn't let your husband pick you up. When they saw that you were unconscious and nearly dead—totally paralysed with white foam coming out of your mouth and that your whole hip was festering—then they let you go home. They didn't really want you to get home alive; they hoped that you would die on the way back, so they wouldn't have to worry that you would disclose their evil deeds."

Here, I want to accuse the guards in Baimalong Forced Labour Camp even though, because I have lost my memory, I don't remember their names. I call for fair and just trials for these murderers, who are supposed to execute the law but instead violate the law, severely trample on human rights, and have caused many deaths and injuries. I demand they take responsibility for the damage inflicted on me and face legal consequences.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2007/2/9/148589.html