(Clearwisdom.net) Huang Gang, a Falun Dafa practitioner from Fushun City, Liaoning Province, had gone to Beijing in October 1999 to “clarify the truth” about Falun Gong. He was arrested and incarcerated. In December 2000 he was arrested again for printing Falun Gong information. The court in the Shuncheng District in Fushun, Liaoning had sentenced him to 15 years. Mr. Huang was sent to the Second Prison in Shenyang in November 2001, where he was tortured. He is now locked up in the Fourth Ward at the Second Prison in Shenyang City.
The following is Huang Gang’s statement relating his experiences, and a letter of appeal to the International Justice Court.
Dear Sir,
My name is Huang Gang, and I am 35 years old. I live in the Jian’an Community on Jiangjun Street in the Shuncheng District of Fushun City, Liaoning Province. On December 16, 2000, my district's court officials sentenced me to 15 years in prison for printing Falun Gong truth-clarifying materials. I am presently locked up in the Shenyang Second Prison's Fourth Ward. I strongly protest this unjust sentence by agents from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I request unconditional release. The reasons are as follows:
First, the CCP has fabricated all of the charges against Falun Gong to justify the persecution. It violates our human rights that the Chinese Constitution protects. The CCP deprives people of freedom of belief and freedom of speech. I have clearly observed the CCP’s violations of law with my own experiences during the last few years. These violations have severely hurt my family and me, both physically and mentally.
I started practicing Falun Gong in November 1995. Falun Gong was attractive to me for its different organizational style than other qigong practices. It is free of charge, and practitioners can come and go as they wish. It doesn’t trick people into joining by making false promises, such as healing illnesses and developing supernatural abilities. Falun Gong gave honest answers to us! The content of the book “Zhuan Falun” also drew my attention. I have since started practicing Falun Gong and have obeyed the laws of “Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance” in my daily life. After a few years of cultivation I concluded from the changes in myself and other practitioners that Falun Gong is remarkably effective in improving people's mental states and its capacity to heal illnesses. Because of this, more and more people started practicing Falun Gong.
This cultivation system has a following of people from different social levels and different age groups. Practitioners have different jobs and many different experiences. But they have the same understanding of Falun Gong, which is that Falun Gong improves one’s body and mind and benefits society. However, when more and more people learned of Falun Gong and practiced it, Jiang Zemin’s gang launched the persecution in July 1999.
On October 7, 1999, my Falun Gong practitioner wife and I went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. The train was stuck in Jinzhou City for an hour, because the police were trying to stop all the practitioners who were on their way to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. The police ordered everyone whom they suspected to be a Falun Gong practitioner to curse Falun Gong. The person would be arrested if he or she refused to do so. They somehow missed me, and I arrived in Beijing without any trouble.
We stayed in Beijing for about a month. I saw many Falun Gong practitioners beaten and arrested by Tiananmen Square police officers. My wife and I, along with other practitioners, were tricked into the trap set by the CCP—the Appeals Bureau. We went to the Appeals Bureau to petition for Falun Gong. But as soon as we got into the yard, we were arrested. The officers refused to listen to us. They merely asked where we were from. After registering, we were forced to sit in the yard and were forbidden from speaking with each other.
There were almost 100 practitioners in the yard, and more kept arriving. I saw policemen talking on cell phones. Twenty minutes later, a Fushun policeman took another Fushun practitioner and me away. We were taken to the Fushun City Liaison Office in Beijing, where more than 100 practitioners from Fushun were held. We were locked up in two 270-square foot rooms. Policemen asked us how much cash we had. They confiscated all the cash without providing any receipts. I had 3,000 “yuan,” and it was all taken away.
After one day they sent us back to Fushun City. I was held in the local police station for 15 days. They charged me with "damaging the public order." I refused to sign my name on the documents. They sent me to a detention center in Fushun. My wife was sent to a drug rehabilitation center.
I was not released on the 15th day. They took me out of the detention center on the 17th day, but didn’t let me go home. Instead, they took me to a Shuncheng District Police Department office in Fushun. My mother was there with family members of other practitioners. The Shuncheng District Political and Judiciary Committee secretary and several officials and policemen were in that office, too. They ordered me to write a “guarantee statement,” promising that I would never go to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong and would no longer practice Falun Gong. They told me that I would be sentenced to a labor camp if I refused to write such a letter. Some practitioners asked the officials the reason why we cannot appeal for Falun Gong, since appealing is a citizen’s right. The practitioners also asked why we cannot practice Falun Gong, since we all have the right to freedom of belief. The officials said it was an order they got from their bosses, and they had no choice.
Several practitioners were taken to the labor camp for refusing to write the letter. Due to the pressure from my family and others, I wrote the letter and paid a 6,000 yuan deposit. After I got home, my work supervisors and government officials often came to harass me. I lived like that for a year. During that year I had to endure pressure from people who did not have a correct understanding of Falun Gong. Moreover, I had to suffer from the self-condemnation. To protect my own interests I had given in to the evildoers and had written the letter, although I knew that Falun Dafa is good.
By September 2000 I could no longer live with the self-condemnation. I encouraged myself to step forward and clarify the truth to people. I initially posted truth-clarifying information on my own. Later I met fellow practitioners Hu Guojian and Hu Weidong, and we clarified the truth together. We were arrested on December 17, 2000, because we had a cultivation experience sharing conference at a practitioner’s home. I have been incarcerated ever since.
I was persecuted physically and mentally during the six years of incarceration. The police tortured me many times. The most severe incident occurred on the second day of a Chinese New Year holiday. The police took me from the detention center to a trial room. They took off my clothes, shoes and socks, and forced me to sit on a metal chair, clad only in underwear. The temperature outside was minus 4 degrees F (-20 Celsius). There was not any heat in the room. Nonetheless the police officers still kept the door open. They could not open the window, because it was frozen shut. The police threatened me and attempted to force me to renounce Falun Gong, but I refused. Then they started beating me. They punched my neck, the inside of the hand and chest. Later they choked me and punched me in the back.
I don't remember how long they tortured me. I only remember that all of them were sweating and tired. One of them said, “My hands hurt.” Then he found an electric baton and started beating me with it. He wore a set of insulated rubber gloves, but the baton still shocked him occasionally. I was tortured like that for 20 hours. Then I was sent to the Fushun City Forced Labor Camp, where I was held for one month.
Their purpose of sending me to the labor camp was to “reform” me. Chen Feng, a policeman in the First Section of the police department, in charge of reforming Falun Gong practitioners, told the labor camp police in front of me that they must “reform” me in one week.
It felt like I was in hell during that month. More than 400 practitioners were in that labor camp, more than half of them women. I was locked up in a room with 20 people. Only two other practitioners and me were not “reformed,” meaning that we did not renounce practicing Falun Gong. All the others in the room were either “reformed” practitioners or common criminals.
After I got into the room the curtain and door were shut. The common criminals and the “reformed” detainees split into two teams to torture the two practitioners. They forced me to watch the whole process. They pushed practitioners’ heads against their knees and stretched their arms against a wall. They named this kind of torture “flying.” Practitioners asked them, “What right do you have to do this?” They didn’t listen. Some of them held the practitioners’ heads and hands, and some of them whipped the practitioners with belts. When they were tired, other people took turns. They cursed Falun Gong when beating practitioners. They beat us so hard that the belts broke. They also slapped the practitioners’ faces with shoes.
Practitioners were unable to move their legs after one night of torture. Their foreheads had become purple and black and their eyes were swollen. However, the torture didn’t end, because they were not “reformed.” On the second day, they tortured these two practitioners again. I saw that both were bleeding, but the policemen didn’t stop until one yelled, “Stop. He's biting his tongue!” Then they found that one of the practitioners would rather bite his tongue than say bad things about Dafa.
When they were torturing practitioners and the practitioners’ screams echoed in the hallway, guard Jiang Feng was playing a guitar and singing pop songs in the hallway. The torture was being carried out under his orders.
Faced with such horrible threats and pressure I wrote another guarantee letter. They ordered me to write a letter admitting guilt and a letter slandering Falun Gong. I told them that I cannot slander Falun Gong. They said that they would write a letter for me and I just needed to sign it. After I signed the letters, I was sent back to the detention center.
As soon as I left the labor camp, I started to have regrets about everything I had done. I wrote a solemn declaration, declaring void all the statements I had made in the labor camp, but the detention center refused to publish my declaration. I protested the unfair treatment by doing the Falun Gong exercises. They immobilized my hands and feet on a wall for many days, until I agreed to no longer do the exercises. I was forbidden from doing the exercises, reading Falun Gong books or talking about Falun Gong with other people.
I was held in the detention center for 11 months. On April 4, 2001 I had a trial, but the sentence was pronounced seven months later. People told me that the reason they didn’t arrive at the sentence right away was because there was no related law they could base the sentence on. Moreover, the court "judge" didn’t have the right to pronounce sentence. Instead, agents from the 610 Office Political and Judiciary Committee had made all the decisions, including arrest, sentencing, and where to imprison me. My lawyer told me, “Huang Gang, you better plead guilty. Otherwise you will be sentenced to many years. The district court cannot make any decision. Everything is controlled by the 610 Office.” She was right. The 610 Office sentenced me to 15 years. My appeal was also rejected.
In November 2001 I was sent to the 20th Ward of the Second Prison in Shenyang, a division for holding Falun Gong practitioners. We were forbidden from doing the Falun Gong exercises, reading Falun Gong books, or talking to other practitioners. Policemen ordered the criminals to monitor us around the clock. We had to stay in certain rooms and could not visit each other. The criminals were also ordered to watch us in all the public places, such as hallways and bathrooms. We were forbidden from having pen and paper, nor could we speak of Falun Gong when eventually writing to our families. Two policemen monitor us when meeting with our families during the monthly visiting day, and we cannot tell our families about Falun Gong, or the way we are treated in the prison. If the family members are also Falun Gong practitioners, then they cannot visit us. If a practitioner did the exercises, criminals and policemen would push him to the ground. The criminals often beat practitioners. A practitioner surnamed Song was beaten and his kidney was injured. Criminal Jiang Yuanfu kicked practitioner Fatie's genital area, causing him injuries and bleeding.
Whenever this kind of thing happened, we asked the criminals, “You are criminals. Who gave you the right to beat us and keep us from doing the exercises?” The criminals said that the police ordered them to do so. We asked the policemen, “Even if we were guilty of something, the criminals have no right to beat us. How can you authorize the criminals to supervise us and allow them to beat us?” The policemen refused to answer and said that they had ordered criminals to monitor us because the police cannot stay with us around the clock.
Many practitioners have protested the persecution using different methods. I had been locked up in a solitary cell for three months. Practitioners started a hunger strike to protest, and then I was released. During those three months I was treated especially badly. The size of the dark room was a mere 6 square feet. They fed me corn meal mush, a piece of corn cake and some preserved vegetables. I was forbidden from washing my face or taking a shower, and I could only use the bathroom twice a day. The police often forced me to stand straight for a long time. They also assaulted me with electric batons. My hands and feet were often immobilized for long periods of time.
They stretched my limbs and immobilized me on the ground for more than 20 hours, and criminals often beat me. Many practitioners were held in the solitary cells. Some of them were there for three months, and some of them even longer than six months. Since they did not have proper nutrition and were in the dark rooms for a long time, they became very weak. Their gums bled, and some of them developed skin diseases. Some practitioners were tortured to death.
I only give a few examples, but actually there are many incidents of policemen and criminals violating the laws and our human rights. It happens every day.
I need to emphasize one thing in the end. The Second Prison deprived me of the right to appeal. I tried many times, but each time they told me that they cannot submit my appeal to the court, their excuse being that I talked of Falun Gong in the letter of appeal so they could not submit it for me.
All I have said above is just the tip of the iceberg. These are my own experiences, and I did not exaggerate. The reason I want to expose this is because I want to prove that the CCP is violating the laws, and that the persecution is wrong. I hope that international human rights organizations, human rights lawyers and all people with a sense of justice will help us to stop the persecution as soon as possible, so that the reputation of my Master and Dafa will be restored and incarcerated practitioners will be released.
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