[Editor’s notes:
according to the latest news, China has told WPA to postpone the trip for 3 months.]
According
to the message sent out through an NGO established last year in New York, China
Psychiatric Watch, that Further to last month message, a plan for WPA and
SP joint meeting (visit) in Beijing on April 4, 2004 was accepted by the Chinese
Minister of Health and the CSP for examining the records, interviewing patients
and their families or doctors who were involved in the examination of those patients
after obtaining their consent and access to what is required for those cases that
allegedly were subjected to psychiatric abuse.
This delegation will be
a technical, independent, unbiased taskforce
China Psychiatric Watch
pointed out that in July 1999, the Chinese government under Jiang Zemin’s
leadership started a nationwide suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
During this political campaign in the past four years, with the goal of changing
people’s belief, the government resorted to its propaganda machinery, to
financial control, terror and violence to savagely persecute Falun Gong practitioners
in Mainland China. During this period, the government’s use of mental hospitals
and psychiatric misuse in the abuse of Falun Gong practitioners was the cause
of great concern for international human rights groups, mental health organizations
and professionals who are concerned with the development of psychiatry in China.
The American Psychiatric Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrics
in UK and the World Psychiatric Association passed resolutions to request
China to stop persecuting Falun Gong practitioners and political dissidents through
psychiatric means, and sent delegates to investigate the situation.
This
delegation will be a technical, independent, unbiased taskforce, totally supported
financially by the WPA central fund, aiming to achieve the appropriate answers
for the alleged abuse of psychiatry on Falun Gong practitioners. Accomplishing
this mission successfully will close a long-standing conflict and will lead to
formulate recommendations to be presented to the general assembly during the XIII
WCP in Cairo, Egypt from September 10-15, 2005.
Currently, people do
not fully understand the Chinese government’s psychiatric abuse of Falun
Gong practitioners
China Psychiatric Watchfurther stated that The
Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry, an organization that played an important
role in ending psychiatric abuse of political dissidents in the former USSR,
jointly published the book Dangerous Minds with Human Rights Watch,
which describes in detail China’s psychiatric abuse of Falun Gong practitioners.
However, the average person is not yet aware of the scope and extent of cruelty
carried out in this persecution.
The torture methods include forcibly locking
healthy Falun Gong practitioners up in mental hospitals and injecting them with
strong psychiatric drugs, which severely damage their central nervous systems,
their liver functions and even lead to death. Large groups of Falun Gong practitioners
are sent to drug rehabilitation centers, mental hospitals or labor camps, where
they are isolated from the outside, deprived of sleep, forced to watch brainwashing
videos and tortured to “reform” their minds. The government also passes off violent
and sadistic psychiatric patients as Falun Gong practitioners on TV and in newspapers
in order to mislead the public and incite hatred against Falun Gong. The government
orders “experts” and “scholars” who lack professional ethics to make up theories
and deceive the public in order to justify and cover the persecution.
Preliminary
investigation of Falun Gong practitioners who suffered tortures in Chinese labor
camps and were later rescued and moved to foreign countries shows, although they
have lived in free and democratic countries for two or three years, they still
exhibit post- traumatic symptoms, including nightmares and disturbed sleep. Their
memory of past sufferings and reaction to and avoidance of things that remind
them of their traumatic experiences severely affects their health and ability
to live a normal life.
China successfully covered up crimes by organizing
foreign reporters to visit pre-arranged labor camps
On July 7, 2001,
the Taipei Times web version published an article by Zhang Qingxi, a professor
in the Economics Department of National Taiwan University and Zhang Jinhua of
the Journalism Department from the same school, which related the Chinese government
inviting Western journalists to visit pre-selected labor camps. The article stated,
“in order to prove to the outside they did not persecute Falun Gong practitioners,
Beijing recently invited Western journalists, including journalists from Taiwan,
Hong Kong and Macao, to visit the Masanjia Labor Camp in Liaoning Province and
the Tuanhe Labor Camp in Beijing.”
China accused overseas Falun Gong practitioners
of making up charges against Chinese labor camps. During this visit, reporters
from Taiwan didn’t detect a trace of terror in the labor camps. In fact,
they didn’t look like labor camps at all. The South China Morning Post
described the visit as “a magnificent show in a dreamy prison.” The reporter heard
soft music and smelt fresh air, docile deer was roaming in the rose garden, and
chickens and rabbits were running around.
The article pointed out, “Other
than this manipulated visit, what other freedoms do these journalists from free
worlds have in China?”
Survivors in the free world remind people of
whitewashed visits to labor camps
In November 1999, Falun Gong practitioner
Dr. Tang Jian went back to China during her vacation. While she was at a friend’s
apartment in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, chatting with a few Falun Gong
practitioners, the police broke in and arrested all of them without showing any
legal documents. She was detained for fifteen days; first in the Tianhe Detention
Center, and then in the Yuexiu Detention Center, simply because she was a Falun
Gong practitioner. At the Tianhe Detention Center she started a hunger strike
to protest her illegal detention and to get back her freedom. The guards pressed
her on the ground and put shackles on her feet. They then inserted a large tube
full of highly concentrated salt water into her mouth, and held her nose tight
so that she couldn’t breathe until they forced all the salty fluid into her
stomach. She almost suffocated to death during this procedure, and her stomach
hurt so much that she vomited for a long time afterwards.
She felt very
sad after reading the story, “China Shows Reporters’ Forbidden Camp,” in
the newspaper on May 23, 2001, because it is quite possible that even more innocent
people will be tortured and killed as a result of this article’s widespread
publication in the Western press. She said, “My own experience as a Falun Gong
practitioner in a detention center tells me that the Chinese
government staged
the “media tour” of the Masanjia Labor Camp in order to deceive the world.”
The
Chinese Communist government has a long history of covering up any bad thing they
don’t want the world to see. They insist that no one was executed for politically
incorrect beliefs during the Cultural Revolution, and that no students were killed
at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Now they say that no Falun Gong practitioners
have been tortured at the Masanjia Labor Camp. If a government is willing to paint
the grass green to impress and deceive the International Olympic Committee, would
it not also be likely to whitewash what it is doing to Falun Gong practitioners
in its labor camps?
The Nazi government of the World War II-era Germany
staged show tours of concentration camps in order to deflect growing scrutiny.
That same government hosted the 1936 Olympic Games to bend world opinion its way.
Now, just a few decades later, we see Jiang Zemin’s government putting on
a similar show in his labor camps. Meanwhile, China will stop at nothing to win
the 2008 Olympics bid, because Jiang Zemin believes that the Games would, like
an effective show tour of the camps, lend his brutal regime the legitimacy it
seeks. We should know better by now.
SARS in China remains an enigma
According to Liberty Times’ reporter Chu Jingwen June 6, 2003 report
from Taipei, on June 5, Taiwan National Security Bureau held a cross-bureau meeting
regarding the SARS epidemic. According to information the Taiwan National Security
Bureau has in hand, the epidemic is still severe in Mainland China, yet the Chinese
government continues to lie as it claims reports are made on bay areas, the inland
regions have zero cases, and the World Health Organization didn’t
send inspectors to China. Using Datong, Shanxi Province, as an example, the death
toll there according to the Taiwan National Security Bureau is greater than 70,
but according to the Chinese government, it’s seven.
The report says
the Taiwan National Security Bureau officials pointed out explosive community
infections hit Beijing, but China blocked related news. A community-wide pandemic
hit Beiyuanjiayuan in Chaoyang District, Beijing, but the patients were transported
out of town for treatment in order to cover up the epidemic. The situation in
Shenyang City was also very serious, but the Chinese Ministry of Health did not
have related information.
The May 26, 2003 issue of Time magazine
revealed how Shanghai intentionally violated World Health Organization
policies by using much more strict standards for diagnosing SARS to keep the numbers
low. The magazine said the Shanghai government promised the WHO that it would
change its standard for diagnosing SARS, but the real number of cases remains
to be seen. One month before the report was published, WHO experts said Shanghai
followed internationally agreed standards of sanitary measures, but two days later,
local health officials in Shanghai notified hospital personnel that old diagnosis
standards will not change. When China’s commercial centers such as Shanghai,
Guangzhou and Beijing were being severely affected by SARS, only eleven suspected
cases, seven confirmed cases and two death cases were reported in Shanghai. In
contrast, Beijing announced people who intentionally spread the SARS virus can
be sentenced to death.
Also worth of mention is that the news of the SARS
explosion in Guangzhou City was first sent throughout the country through private
cell phones that the government had not yet censored.
Western journalists
successfully expose previous cases of persecution
As the Chinese government
clamps down on circulation of information, it publicly tells its citizens they
can avoid contracting the deadly SARS virus by washing their hands and wearing
a mask. It also claims that Falun Gong practitioners who were tortured to death
in labor camps and brainwashing classes “died from heart disease or suicide.”
Of
course, not all truth was covered up. Ian Johnson, a former Wall Street Journal
correspondent in Beijing won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting
for his journalistic essays on Falun Gong. He wrote a series of reports on the
torture death of Ms. Chen Zixiu, a retired employee of a car parts company. These
reports were published on April 20, 2000.
The Wall Street Journal‘s
managing editor, Paul Steiger, commented that Johnson’s reports were “a tremendous
example of courage and determination, to get a story in the face of strong police
force’s pressures against the reporting, combined with very sensitive and
powerful writing.” He also pointed out that in order to prevent police surveillance
and harassment, Johnson often had to make detours around other cities, constantly
change his cell phone numbers and live in common family homes.
Finally,
he was able to tell the world a tearful, blood-stained story about how common
people were tortured and oppressed by China’s state machinery. After completing
the reports, Johnson left China, where he can never again be a correspondent.
Call for Dafa practitioners to provide more details on persecution in mental
hospitals and drug rehabs
Stopping the persecution is the responsibility
of Dafa practitioners, therefore, Clearwisdom editors hope more Falun Gong practitioners
and their families in China can step forward and use their authentic names to
provide details about their sufferings in mental hospitals and drug rehabs,
By
Clearwisdom reporter Chu Tianxing
Posting
date: 31/Mar/2004
Original article date: 29/Mar/2004
Category: World
News
