China

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Labor camps routinely release practitioners on the brink of death to avoid responsibility; most die days after release.

Between November 2003 and January 2004, reliable sources in China reported details on 64 Falun Gong practitioners who died from severe torture suffered in Chinese detention centers and labor camps.

Deaths from torture and abuse were reported in 17 provinces throughout China, from Heilongjiang to Guangxi; from Sichuan to Beijing.

Torture techniques reported include severe beatings, electric shocks, force-feeding torture, and injections of nerve-damaging drugs. Among the reported deceased was a 70-year-old woman and a 33-year-old man.

According to witnesses and those familiar with the cases, all but one of the deaths was the result of severe beatings or torture. In one case, a woman from Yitong County, Jilin Province reportedly “fell” from a tall building while in police custody.

Released, Only to Die at Home

In 23 of the cases, the victims died of their injuries shortly after being released from custody. Falun Gong practitioners thought to be near death are often released by Chinese authorities hoping to avoid responsibility for the deaths. In many cases, the victims die within days or even hours of their release.

According to knowledgeable sources in China, each forced labor camp operates with a “death quota:” That is, the number of Falun Gong practitioners that are allowed to die in the forced labor camp as camp authorities take them through the violent “transformation” process to force them to renounce Falun Gong. Additionally, each forced labor camp is rewarded for making a Falun Gong practitioner renounce his or her belief in Falun Gong. Consequently, labor camp officials often aim to avoid forfeiting one of their death quota numbers for a dying Falun Gong practitioner without first obtaining their bonus reward from making him or her renounce Falun Gong.

These sources say a practitioner can only be considered to have fully renounced Falun Gong when he or she has written multiple statements denouncing the practice as well as assisted in persecuting fellow Falun Gong practitioners.

Northeast China Remains Deadliest

China’s northeastern provinces remain the deadliest overall. Of the 884 total number of verified deaths (reports / sources), Heilongjiang Province accounts for 15% with neighboring Liaoning and Jilin Provinces each accounting for approximately 11% of the total.

Shandong Province, situated southeast of Beijing, also accounts for approximately 11% of all deaths.

The name list of those whose deaths were reported in the last three months are: Xie Wenping, Gao Shiping, Li Shuli, Wang Ruxing, Meng Xiao, Zhao Guo’an, Li Aiping, Tang Meijun, Li Xuelian, Wang Defeng, Yan Hai, Ma Lizhi, Guo Jifang, Zhao Yanxia, Shen Lizhi, Bai Hong, Gu Chunaying, Chen Guijun, Liao Minghui, Yu Guizhen, Song Ruiyi, Ye Wenying, Liu Chengjun, Li Xiaoyuan, Wu Yuan, Wang Congbu, Yu Chunhai, Yang Shulan, Deng Huiqun, Song Youchun, Yuan Xiangfan, Zuo Guoqing, Wu Simin, He Guozhong, Zhang Congmin, Li Xindi, Li Liang, Pan Siyuan, Li Li, Xuan Deqiong, Zhang Dabi, Xiao Peifeng, Li Deshan, Chen Changfa, Li Chouren, Ma Guilin, Lu Guifang, Li Jun, Guo Sulan, Wang Jiguo, Song Yonghua, Xuan Honggui, Zhang Xiaodong, Tian Junrong, Sun Yanqin, Li Yutong, Li Ruqing, Lu Bingshen, Zhou Liangzhu, Lu Xiufang, Lu Xingguo, Zheng Libo, Zhou Caixia. http://www.faluninfo.net

Background Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, 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 884 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.

Net Dissidents Jailed in China

February 24, 2004

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Julia Scheeres, Wired Magazine: As part of an ongoing attempt to clamp down on Internet speech, the Chinese government sentences five members of the Falun Gong religious group to prison for posting an article critical of authorities.

In its ongoing repression of Internet speech, the Chinese government has sentenced five Falun Gong members to prison for posting an article to a discussion board that accused authorities of mistreating a jailed colleague.

In a terse news story, the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, stated Feb. 19 that a court in western Chongqing found the three men and two women guilty of “vilifying the government’s image through spreading fabricated stories on persecution of cult practitioners” and had given them prison terms of five to 14 years.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group that monitors free speech worldwide, has called for the release of the now 22 Falun Gong members imprisoned for publishing news on the Internet about the outlawed spiritual movement…

“The crackdown on members of this spiritual movement is completely unjustified,” said Julien Pain, who researches Internet speech issues for the group. “The five Internet users were convicted for posting online what is already very well-known to human rights organizations, that members of Falun Gong are systematically tortured in prison.”

Falun Gong — a spiritual discipline that combines exercise and meditation — had an estimated 70 million adherents before President Jiang Zemin outlawed the movement in 1999, calling it a doomsday cult. Activists say more than 800 Falun Gong members have died in police custody since the ban.

The Feb. 19 sentencing is symptomatic of the communist government’s struggle to control online content in a country that is second only to the United States in number of Internet users. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, 79.5 million Chinese are connected to the World Wide Web.

As China’s Internet economy burgeons, so have the government’s attempts to battle “subversive” content on home computers and in the country’s 110,000 cybercafes. According to some estimates, China employs 30,000 technocrats to police the Internet.

Laws regulating the Internet include the expected prohibitions on software piracy and the creation of software viruses, but also nebulous phraseology, such as a ban on “harmful information” that “spreads superstition,” said Bobson Wong, a specialist in Chinese Internet culture.

“The problem with China’s Internet restrictions is that they’re so vague,” Wong said.

“Most people know that there are certain taboo topics that can’t be discussed online — Tiananmen, Falun Gong, criticism of high-level officials. Anybody who is even remotely affiliated with these topics tends to be prosecuted.”

Amnesty International recorded the arrests of 54 people between November 2002 and January 2004 for online activities ranging from calling for government reform in a chat room to signing an online petition for the release of a Falun Gong member.

In a recent report, the group said it believed this number is merely a fraction of the real number of people detained in China for expressing their views online. In May 2003 alone, for example, Xinhua reported that more than 100 people were arrested for “spreading rumors” about SARS over the Internet or through phone text messages.

In addition to forcing ISPs and Internet cafes to use filtering software, government minders hand delete individual messages from discussion boards and change the domain name server records of forbidden sites so visitors are rerouted to authorized pages.

To thwart censorship, many Internet users employ proxy networks, which act as portals to other sites and allow users to hide their computers’ IP addresses. Bill Xia, a Chinese immigrant who founded a North Carolina company that created a proxy network called DynaWeb, says “tens of thousands” of Chinese use his product every day.

“The Internet gave dissidents a useful means to avoid state censorship, in a country where there’s no independent media,” said Pain, the Reporters Without Borders researcher. “The Chinese authorities are trying to censor the Internet and to track down cyberdissidents. But given the huge amount of information that is being published, they can’t succeed totally.”

Sonam set free (Buddhist News Network)

February 2, 2004

Original article no longer available…

After hectic mobilization from Buddhist activists, mainly from California, the detained Tibetan nun Sonam who came to the United States seeking asylum has been released from a central Virginian jail.

Sonam, the Tibetan nun detained in a central Virginian jail, was released yesterday.

An anonymous source have requested well wishers cautions that while the appeal process is still moving forward, she asks that everyone to keep up the momentum during this incredible time of opening and major press coverage.

Here’s some of what [local Buddhist woman] shared this morning:

She got a call yesterday from her contact at Radio Free Asia asking to please pick up Sonam from the prison. They let Sonam out, and there was much crying and hugging.

“The sweetness in that jail is beyond belief.”

Sonam will be staying with a Tibetan women; [local Buddhist woman] plans to take her to a doctor next week.

Apparently, Senator Diane Feinstein called Tom Ridge’s office twice yesterday from California to say the situation was upsetting and that they had to do something about it. This perhaps says something about the mobilization that has been going on California!

See also: Tibetan nun’s path to asylum hindered

Human rights group asks China to halt Tibetan monk’s execution

February 1, 2004

Original article no longer available…

Buddhist News Network: Human Rights Watch on Monday exhorted China to overturn a terrorism conviction against a well-known Tibetan monk and halt plans to execute him “on what appear to be trumped-up bombing charges.”

In a report prepared for release Monday, Human Rights Watch said the Tibetan monk, Tenzin Delek, appears to have been targeted for death as a champion of Tibetan Buddhists and a loyal follower of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader living in exile in India.

A Chinese court convicted Tenzin Delek, 50, and an alleged co-conspirator of terrorism for a series of bombings in 2001 and 2002, including one in the city of Chengdu that seriously injured one person.

“The trial was procedurally flawed, the court was neither independent nor impartial, and the defendants were denied access to independent legal counsel,” said Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group based in New York City.

China has attempted to diminish the role of Buddhist religion and culture in the lives of Tibetans, and closely controls all religious activity. It bans some Christian and Muslim groups and labels Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that gained millions of adherents in the late 1990s, as an “evil cult.”

But the possible execution of a Tibetan Buddhist leader is likely to bring China renewed global scrutiny of its repression of religion and its use of the death penalty.

China executes more people each year than the rest of the world combined, according to human rights monitors, usually with a gunshot to the back of the head.

The convicted Tibetan monk, Tenzin Delek, is known by his followers as a tulku, or reincarnation of a revered monk, or lama, in his native region in China’s southern Sichuan province bordering the Tibet Autonomous Region. He also carries the honorific “rinpoche,” which means “precious jewel.”

His popularity among ethnic Tibetans in Sichuan grew as he helped build new monasteries, small schools, medical clinics, an orphanage and old-age homes, Human Rights Watch said.

“Tenzin Delek was an advocate for the social, cultural, economic and religious rights of local residents,” the 110-page report said.

“He took a public position on harmful environmental practices in the area and expressed views that had been outlawed by the central government … such as loyalty to the Dalai Lama and other forbidden religious ideas,” the report said.

Security agents arrested the monk at the Jamyang Choekhorling monastery four days after the Chengdu bombing on April 3, 2002, the report said.

After an alleged co-conspirator in the bombings, Lobsang Dondrup, was executed in January 2003, Britain, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, Poland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States promptly decried the action.

Both Lobsang Dondrup and Tenzin Delek declared their innocence in the bombings. Tenzin Delek was sentenced to death, but the sentence was suspended for two years. An appeal was denied early in 2003 and his death is likely to occur later this year.

Human Rights Watch called on China to free Tenzin Delek, release all evidence in the case against the two men, and allow a “credible, independent investigation” into their arrest and trial.

It also called for China to “end the practice of holding secret or closed trials or appeals (and) allow family members, journalists, and independent observers to attend all court proceedings.”

The report noted that Tenzin Delek lived in India from 1982 to 1987, where the Dalai Lama and some 100,000 Tibetans fled into exile in 1959 after Chinese troops crushed uprisings on the Tibetan plateau, and that his prestige upon returning to Sichuan “may have alarmed Chinese officials.”

The Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

Tibetan nun’s path to asylum hindered (Washington Post)

January 26, 2004

Original article no longer available

Test of faith continues in a Virginia jail

David Cho, Washington Post: Sonam always feared her devotion to Buddhism would land her behind bars in her native China. As it turns out, she is serving a long term in jail — not in East Asia but in central Virginia. The 30-year-old Buddhist nun, who grew up in a Tibetan village near the foot of Mount Everest, fled to the United States last August after family members had been tortured and friends jailed for their faith, she said. But when she arrived at Dulles International Airport and requested asylum, federal immigration officials detained her and placed her in the local jail in this small city outside Richmond.

Sonam, who is known by that one name, has been here ever since except for a brief visit last November to a court room in Arlington where a federal immigration judge granted her asylum. But even as she was hugging her attorney in celebration, the lawyer from the Department of Homeland Security announced that she was appealing the case.

Sonam was then shackled and returned to her cell, where she waits for her next court date, which is likely to be in the fall at the earliest, her attorney said.

Sonam is among thousands of asylum seekers who have fled persecution in their homelands only to be jailed in the United States, a new report by the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights shows.

Mandatory arrest
By law, the Department of Homeland Security detains all asylum seekers who arrive without proper documents. But since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal immigration officials have also been denying parole to these immigrants and appealing rulings in their favor, a practice that can keep them locked up for years, according to the report, which monitored the department’s activities for a year and details scores of cases, including Sonam’s.

Homeland Security officials deny they are trying to keep asylum seekers behind bars, although they acknowledge that long incarcerations occur. They say they are reviewing their practices in response to the report and are tallying statistics on how many asylum seekers have been detained, refused parole or seen their cases appealed.

“Even a well-balanced policy can get out of kilter on an individual case because someone has exercised poor judgment,” said Asa Hutchinson, the Homeland Security Department’s undersecretary for border and transportation security.

At the same time, he and others say there is concern that a terrorist could slip into the country under the guise of an asylum request.

“People who come here may have no legitimate [reason]. They are here for economic reasons or for criminal reasons and have been trained to assert asylum,” Hutchinson said.

“That requires us to be careful and . . . sometimes it makes people more skeptical of asylum cases than they should be.”

Flight and fear
Last week, during an interview at the Riverside Regional Jail, Sonam spoke of her journey to the United States that began with a desperate, eight-day walk to Nepal across snow-capped mountains and ended with her first ride on an airplane, which frightened her so much she couldn’t look out the window.

Sonam Singeri, a Tibetan working for Radio Free Asia who has befriended Sonam, was at the interview to translate. As soon as Sonam walked into the visitors’ room and saw Singeri, she collapsed into her arms and sobbed uncontrollably.

“It’s so lonely. It’s so hard. Why is this happening?” she cried out, Singeri said.

Sonam told a story of flight and fear. She said her father had been jailed in Tibet and tortured with electric shock. She described hiding from police patrols as she made her way across the Himalaya Mountains to Nepal, where she lived for three years.

But even there, she said, she worried about her safety. In May, the Nepalese government began to round up Tibetan refugees and send them back to China, where they were sure to face prison and torture, she said.

Even after asylum seekers such as Sonam have convinced immigration judges that they are bona fide and pose no threat, Homeland Security lawyers continue to press appeals in many cases, the Lawyers Committee report says.

‘Sending a message’
“They are indefinitely detaining asylum seekers who have already been granted relief, who present no risk, who have often been tortured in their home countries,” said Archi Pyati, who works in the Lawyers Committee’s asylum program.

“We are sending a message that in the United States . . . we don’t hope that asylum seekers find their way here because if they do they will find themselves in a very difficult situation and in prolonged detention.”

Immigrants seeking asylum in this country must prove not only their identities but also that they are in danger in their native countries.

Sonam’s case was appealed because she did not have enough documentation to back up her story, according to a brief filed by Homeland Security attorney Deborah Todd. The fact that Sonam lived in Nepal for three years indicated that she could have safely stayed there and did not need to come to the United States, Todd argued in her appeal.

Asked to comment, a spokesman for Homeland Security said the department does not talk about ongoing cases.

Sonam said she had no way to get identity documents in Nepal because the government does not recognize refugees from China. She feared that she would be deported to China along with other Tibetans who were being sent back at the time. So she sought a way to get to the United States.

Using the money she had made as a seamstress before she joined her monastery in Nepal, Sonam booked a flight through Calcutta to Dulles.

After she was jailed in Virginia, her attorney, who has taken the case pro bono, twice asked the Department of Homeland Security to release her from detention, arguing that Sonam poses no danger. But immigration officials denied both requests without much explanation, according to Sonam’s attorney.

Tears without speaking
The hardest part of her life these days is that she cannot speak or understand the language of the inmates or guards. (She is also illiterate in her native Tibetan tongue). She has not been able to have a conversation with anyone since her hearing last November and wept as she recounted her seemingly endless days of silence and isolation in jail.

“I live in a prison but always in my mind, I hold onto a picture of his Holiness [the Dalai Lama] in my heart,” she said. “This prison has become my monastery.”

An hour into the interview, a guard tapped the window of the visitors’ room. It was time to go.

Sonam shed a few more tears. It might be months before her next conversation. She hugged Singeri again and then followed the guard back to her part of the jail where she does not speak, cannot understand anyone and where she waits in her prison within a prison.

See also: Sonam set free

A fancy for Falun Dafa meditation

January 20, 2004