Speech of a Senior Human Rights Activist Against the Persecution of Falun Gong

The former Director of Amnesty International Ireland between 1989 and 2001, Mary Lawlor, who is currently Director of the human rights organisation Front Line, gave a speech at a seminar in the UK Parliament on 18 July. Her speech has been excerpted below:

The persecution of Falun Gong -- part of the pattern of China's abuse of power

Over 70 years ago, on March 18^th 1926, a group of unarmed citizens and students petitioned the Beijing government. In a chilling foretaste of what was to happen again and again, troops opened fire on them. Forty died in the ensuing massacre. Lu Xun, one of China's most renowned writers and thinkers, who died in 1936, called that day the darkest since the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911 and wrote from the depth of his despair: "Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood."

Sixty-three years later, students, academics, workers, and many other citizens gathered in Tiananmen Square, the scene of so many pivotal events in China's history. Another dark day in China's long and troubled history was about to dawn.

And so we look around today, and what do we see? Freedom of association remains tightly controlled. Any group -- a trade union, a religious congregation or a spiritual meditation group, an anti-corruption monitoring group, or even a book club, can get into trouble if it tries to operate independently. The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party seems obsessed with maintaining its grip on political power, while at the same time trying to prop up its credibility by promoting economic reforms and market openings. The preoccupation with preserving social stability is a perennial aspect of one-party rule, but it has been fueled in recent years by a rise in worker and farmer protests, serious urban unemployment, and separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjang. It is also related to the succession struggle now underway in Beijing in the run up to next year's Communist Party Congress.

On April 3^rd of this year, President Jiang Zemin announced the launching of another major "Strike Hard" anti-crime campaign, making it clear that the authorities are determined to preserve social stability at all costs. The first such anti-crime campaign took place in 1983. Local authorities are given broad discretion to crack down on organised crime and corruption, suspected separatist, dissidents and others, using expedited arrest, trial and sentencing procedures. In the past, these campaigns have resulted in large-scale human rights abuses as even the minimal protections and legal safeguards in Chinese law are disregarded, and arbitrary arrests and summary executions become routine.

But even before the "Strike Hard" campaign, throughout the past year the Chinese government systematically suppressed independent political activity of all kinds. It tightened controls on unofficial religious activity as potentially subversive, while singling out the Falun Gong meditation group for particularly harsh repression. Members of the China Democracy Party have been given prison terms ranging from five to ten years.
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So it is not difficult to understand why the Chinese persecute practitioners of Falun Gong. The Chinese government does not permit any organisation to exist unless they are under government control -- particularly one the size of Falun Gong. I imagine the thinking is: if 10,000 people -- well disciplined -- showed-up on your door step as they did on the 25^th of April 1999, and stood quietly from dawn until late into the night outside the compound of the Communist Party Leadership in Beijing and you didn't have a clue from your security apparatus, you would be alarmed too.

The Leadership is concerned about instability. Falun Gong included communist party members and members of the Security Forces. President Jiang Zemin is trying to retain, behind the scenes, power after 2002 and he is looking to his place in history -- which will not be so great if the Party loses even more legitimacy and its place in the hearts and minds of the Chinese population. So two years ago, the Ministry of Civil Affairs labelled Falun Gong an illegal organisation and accused it of spreading "superstition" and "endangering social stability". The crack down intensified in October when changes to the law were introduced to outlaw cults and the governments campaign to crush the Falun Gong has continued unabated since then. Despite the crack down, many Falun Gong practitioners have continued, individually or in groups, to hold exercise sessions in public, usually as a form of silent protest against the banning of the movement or the imprisonment of practitioners. Some of these silent protests have been held outside important seats of government or in places with political significance such as Tiananmen Square in Beijing. They have been attended by large groups of people, including significant numbers of elderly people and women, and have been entirely peaceful. The government has declared these sessions to be "illegal assemblies" or gatherings of people to "besiege ... state organs, enterprises and institutions" which disrupt "normal social order".

Thousand of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained across the country for peacefully protesting against the crack down. Many have been sent to labour camps without charge or trial for periods of up to three years detention for a re-education through labour. Others have been detained repeatedly by police, and fined, threatened or dismissed from their job. Many of those detained, subsequently reported being held in poor and unsanitary conditions, and being beaten or otherwise ill-treated in detention, some have died as a result of ill-treatment. Trials of Falun Gong leaders have resulted in prison sentences ranging from 2 to 18 years. And I could go on and on about the persecution of the other so called "heretical" organisations such as the purging of Qi(chi) Gong based groups, which promote meditation exercises, similar to Falun Gong... and the religious persecution of Protestants and Catholics who are not part of the officially sanctioned Chinese Catholic church.

But behind all the factual reporting and statistics on numbers of Falun Gong practitioners who have been persecuted, lies the individual with his or her unique history and his or her unique hopes for the future. People like Zhao Ming who went home from Trinity College Dublin, where he was a post-graduate student, for holidays and ended up under house arrest. According to reports, he was sent to a labour camp where he was subjected to vicious beatings after which he was unable to walk normally. It seems his torturers forced him to sit in a basin, and shoved him under a bed while the torturers sat on the bed. And all of this because he had the audacity to believe in Falun Gong.

Zhao Ming has a right to:

Article 18 of the UDHR -- freedom of thought, conscience and religion; Article 19 -- freedom of opinion without interference; Article 20 -- freedom of peaceful assembly and association; and Article 5 -- no one shall be tortured or subjected to cruel inhuman or degrading treatment.

When I read that Zhao Ming broke house arrest to attend a rally in Tiananmen square, it brought back to me all the emotions I felt, as I stepped over the barriers into Tiananmen Square some years ago knowing that the tanks had rolled in crushing the students, their tents and bicycles to death in the 1989 pro-democracy movement.

Over the years, a variety of groups and individuals have attempted to promote and protect Human Rights; all have been repressed by the government, often in ways that flout or abuse even Chinese law. But despite this intimidation, new voices for Human Rights are still being raised on a regular basis.

...the voices of China's conscience and hope, repeatedly gagged and always rising again in endless relay, verify the words of Lu Xun, China's most illustrious rebel: "As long as there shall be stones, the seeds of fire will not die."

Simon Leys The Burning Forest