Silent images of emaciated Falun Gong practitioners
scream for world attention
|
1992 media footage showing starving men behind barbwire fences led to global outrage
and reaction to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.
It
is long overdue for the media to show the world pictures of what is happening
to Falun Gong practitioners in China today.
International
media broadcasted images of policemen violently arresting Falun Gong practitioners
on Tiananmen Square at the outset of Jiang Zemin’s persecution in 1999-2000. Yet,
as this story grew repetitive or less “breaking,” these images disappeared from
worldwide newspapers and television shows.
Many outside of
China have come to believe that the brutality against Falun Gong has also gone
away.
Nothing could be further from reality. The brutality
has simply shifted from the public eye to behind concentration camp walls.
Ms.
Wang Xia (pictured above) was sent to a Mongolian forced labor camp simply because
she openly talked to people about Falun Gong. After going on a hunger strike to
protest her detention and abuse she was injected with unknown drugs, force fed,
shocked with electric batons, hung and beaten. The once 120 pound woman now weighs
45 pounds and fades in and out of consciousness. A person in charge of the prison
said in front of several guards to: “Move her to the mortuary for cremation!”
|
Mr. Zhang
Zhong (pictured left) was arrested in 2002 for seeking to expose Jiang’s persecution
and the misinformation that props it up by tapping into a cable TV broadcast signal
to show programs about the human rights abuses against Falun Gong practitioners.
Zhang was shackled, hung up, and pricked with needles until he vomited blood.
As a result of the torture he became unable to digest any food and vomits whatever
he eats. He urinates blood and has had only four bowel movements over the past
six months.
Let the World See
The
Chinese government continues to refuse international inspections. Reporters, human
rights activists, and many other courageous individuals in China who have sought
to expose the atrocities in labor camps are being sent there themselves. (news)
We
do not have footage from within these labor camps as we do from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib,
but we have many photographs taken by torture victims after they are sent home
to die.
Every one of these photos comes at the risk of people’s
lives, and yet – through exposing what the perpetrators do not want the world
to know – every one of these photos has the potential to save lives.
After
five years of persecution and a death toll most likely at several thousand, we
call upon the international media: let the world see with their own eyes what
is happening to Falun Gong practitioners in China.
Posting
date: 25/Aug/2004
Original article date: 24/Aug/2004
Category: News from
China
