De Standaard (Belgian Newspaper): Falun Gong appeals in Brussels

Three years after the start of the Chinese repression against Falun Gong, the Belgian practitioners hold a peaceful appeal at the Chinese embassy in Brussels. This way they want to remember the Chinese persecution of thousands of practitioners.

Followers define Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, as an old form of Qigong where the cultivation of body and mind trough meditation is at the centre. Through striving for the three principles “truth”, “compassion” and “forbearance”, the practitioners try to go back to their true self, to become one with the three principles in the end and to acquire insight in one’s self.

The founder of Falun Gong is Li Hongzhi, who states that the philosophy behind Falun Gong since 1992 in China is a non-political and non-religious movement. Although Falun Gong is not based upon a fixed organizational structure, 100 million practitioners spread over 52 countries have joined the movement.

Because the Chinese political authorities feel threatened by the growing popularity of the movement, president Jiang Zemin announced in July 1999 an official prohibition on the practice of Falun Gong. After the intervention of Prime Minister Zhu Rongji during a peaceful action of Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing on April 25, 1999 Jiang began to suspect that a political rival amongst the leaders of the Communist Party formed the brain behind the movement.

INTERVIEW

Falun Gong practitioners: “We were brainwashed, tortured and humiliated”

25/04/2002

By Eef Peeters

BRUSSELS – “My cellmates pushed me on the floor. One of them held me while another pinched my nose shut and poured a liquid in my mouth. Because I couldn’t breathe, I had to swallow. I felt the liquid going to my stomach and lungs. I was lucky. Many prisoners died this way.”

Zhao Ming (30) is one of thousands of victims of the repression of Falun Gong by the Chinese Government, since 1999. After his speech to the United Nations in Geneva and a protest in Germany, he also visited Belgium together with Zhizhen Dai (34) to tell his story.

During 22 months Zhao was detained, questioned and tortured. Due to the pressure from the Irish Government and international organizations, the Chinese Government released Zhao last month. He now lives in Dublin, where he again picked up his studies of Computer Sciences at Trinity College.

Just like Zhao, Dai feels it is necessary to speak out in name of the Falun Gong practitioners who are still persecuted in China today: “They killed my husband. How can I remain silent any longer?” Her husband was arrested four times in total since president Jiang Zemin in July 1999, officially prohibited the practise of Falun Gong. His body was found last year in an abandoned cabin in a suburb of Guangzhou.

Zhao and Chen each went to Beijing twice to appeal the persecution of Falun Gong to the government. In May 2000 Zhao was sent to the Haidan “re-education camp”. A week later he went on a hunger strike to protest against his illegal arrest. But his cellmates were forced to feed him liquid food.

When Chen held a banner about Falun Gong during a protest on Tiananmen square in Beijing, he also was arrested. “As a penalty the police sent him to the “re-education camp” of Yanqing, where he was given electroshocks regularly. When he was weakened in such a way that he could die any moment, they let him go”, tells Dai. He got arrested again four days later. Since then Dai has never seen her husband again.

A month after his arrival in the “re-education camp”, Zhao was sent to the Tuan He Labour camp. “That’s where they torture Falun Gong practitioners, so they will renounce their beliefs. The mildest method they are using, is to make the Falun Gong practitioner study anti Falun Gong propaganda 13 hours a day.”

“In the first month I was in the labour camp, 10 cellmates beat me up. I couldn’t walk for two weeks. My cellmates were never punished. On the contrary, they were rewarded with a decrease of their penalty. Later, someone told me that the police forced them to beat me.”

Another often-used method is to deprive the prisoners of sleep for weeks. “During two weeks I was not allowed to sleep. Every time I fell asleep, guards had to wake me up in turns. The next few days I was allowed to sleep one or two hours a night on a chair. Later they forced me to crouch more then 10 hours a day. Because I did not give in, five policemen tied me down on a wooden bed two weeks before my release and gave me electroshocks”, Zhao reports.

On March 12, Zhao was released. “Then I saw how badly my family suffered as well. The day I returned to Dublin, they were convinced that it was the last time they would see me. ‘Please don’t ever come back’, they told me when I went on the plane.”

Almost one year after her husband’s death, Dai still travels around the world to unmask China’s repression: “The last time that our little daughter saw her father, she was nine months old. I don’t know which impact these cruelties will have upon her life. That’s why I call upon everyone to stop this violence. Because if we can’t stand up for our children, who will?”