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A Picture is Worth a Million Lives
Silent images of emaciated Falun Gong practitioners scream for world attention
(Leeshai Lemish 8/22/2004 18:42)
LOS ANGELES (FDI) – In 1992 media footage showing starving men behind barbwire fences led to global outrage and reaction to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.
32-year-old Ms. Wang Xia before the persecution of Falun Gong began in China. (left) After suffering 2 years of repeated torture and beatings, Wang was reduced to 45 lbs (right) and is in critical condition.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.
Mr. Zhang Zhong was arrested and tortured for trying to expose human rights atrocities over state-run T.V.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.
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COMMENTARY - Aug. 23, 2004
Falun Dafa Information Center, www.faluninfo.netBackground
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa (about), is a practice of meditation and exercises with teachings based on the universal principle of "Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance." Practiced in over 50 countries world-wide, Falun Gong has roots in traditional Chinese culture. With government estimates of as many as 100 million practicing Falun Gong, China's Communist leader Jiang Zemin outlawed the peaceful practice in July 1999 (report). Since that time, Jiang's regime has intensified its propaganda campaign to turn public opinion against the practice while imprisoning, torturing and even murdering those who practice it. The Falun Dafa Information Center has verified details of 1,027 deaths (reports / sources) since the persecution of Falun Gong in China began in 1999. In October 2001, however, Government officials inside China reported that the actual death toll was well over 1,600. Expert sources now estimate that figure to be much higher. Hundreds of thousands have been detained, with more than 100,000 being sentenced to forced labor camps, typically without trial.
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