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Wednesday, April 21, 2004 |
TORTURED CHINESE PASTOR PLEADS FOR PRISON TRANSFER BEFORE HE IS KILLED
By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
CHINA (ANS) -- Chinese Pastor Gong Shengliang of the South China Church has begged to be transferred from his current prison, telling his sisters "If you are able in any way, please transfer me to another prison -- otherwise just come and pick up my corpse."
He made this plea during his sisters' ten minute visit to Hongshan Prison, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, where he is currently being held, according to a report from the U.K-based Christian human rights organization Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW).
The report has emerged through China Aid Association, whose sources said Gong was unable to walk into the visiting hall and had to be carried in by four other inmates. One of the sisters asked the guard for an explanation and was told that he fell washing windows. The guard said he was washing windows inside the prison, but that he fell outside the building.
When Gong was asked about the injury he looked at the guard and then replied reluctantly "Yes, I fell." He is accompanied everywhere he goes by two guards, making the account of his falling from a window even less credible.
When one of the sisters complained to the prison director, Sun Wenquan, about Gong's injuries, the director told her that Gong is a model prisoner in all ways but one, namely that he refuses to denounce his Christian faith and will not stop praying and preaching.
His sisters, who could only speak to him via a telephone as they were separated by two layers of glass, also asked why he did not write letters anymore. He replied "I don't have the strength to write. When I pick up my pen there are lots of troubles."
CSW has asked supporters to urgently write to and fax the Chinese authorities in order to urge his transfer and improved treatment. CSW has also been lobbying at the UN Commission on Human Rights on his case.
Alexa Papadouris, Advocacy Director of CSW, said: "The Chinese authorities' treatment of Pastor Gong is appalling. His conviction is unjustifiable in the first place and in addition he has been relentlessly pressurized, beaten and mistreated in a way that totally disregards universally accepted norms of justice and decency.
"We call on the international community to act quickly to put pressure on the Chinese authorities to stop mistreating Pastor Gong, to ensure his transfer and to re-examine his case as a matter of real urgency."
BACKGROUND
Pastor Gong, leader of the South China Church, was sentenced to death at the end of 2001. However, following an international outcry, his case was reviewed and he is now serving a sentence of 'life in prison'. He has been held in Jingzhou Prison in Hubei Province, central China, since December 2002. Many of his fellow church leaders are also serving lengthy sentences.
Torture and sexual abuse were used by officers to extract confessions and evidence. In June 2003 Pastor Gong was beaten into a coma in Jingzhou Prison, China. He suffered severe internal injuries and was bed bound for weeks.
His family and fellow church leaders issued a message which said: "The prison authority brainwashes him every day, forcing him to give up his faith and plead guilty...In addition, the prison authority keeps pressing Pastor Gong both psychologically and spiritually. No one is allowed to contact him and talk to him...By this they attempt to destroy Pastor Gong's faith and will...For almost two years since he was arrested, his mind and body have suffered serious hurt. We feel regrettable over what the prison authority has done to him and deeply worried about the mistreatment Pastor Gong has gone through."
The Chinese authorities consistently persecute religious groups which do not belong to state-sponsored religious organizations.
For more information, please contact Richard Chilvers, Communications Manager, CSW at richard.chilvers@csw.org.uk or ring 020 8329 0045 or visit www.csw.org.uk. CSW is a human rights charity working on behalf of those persecuted for their Christian beliefs. They also promote religious liberty for all.
. 4:42:31 PM 
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UZBEKISTAN: Should Christians be shot? |
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By Igor Rotar, Forum 18 News Service |
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Amid a major crackdown, eleven Protestants in Nukus were questioned at the public prosecutor's office and pressured to convert to Islam. They were also threatened with being shot, though the city prosecutor, M. Arzymbetov, subsequently denied this to Forum 18 News Service. The prosecutor also tried to have a Protestant, Iklas Aldungarov, expelled from his university medical course, but the university rector, Oral Ataniyazova, has resisted the pressure. "How and what Aldungarov believes is his own personal business, and we do not have the right to interfere with it," she told Forum 18. She added that a very large number of young people in the region are becoming Christians. "Evidently, the Christian churches have managed to set up a competent, well conceived operation here. I do not think that is a bad thing. Let's see the mosques here work as well as the Christian churches." Pressure on Protestants elsewhere in Uzbekistan is also continuing. [read more...] |
Google It!. 4:41:12 PM
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THE FORGOTTEN ALLIES
By Kok Ksor, President, Montagnard Foundation, Inc.
Special to ASSIST News Service
VIETNAM (ANS) -- For our people – the Montagnards - the Vietnam War did not end in 1975. The war continues today in a somewhat different manner, but it just as savage. This Easter Vietnam has launched a brutal persecution against my people - my people who served as allies to American during the 1960s and 70s.
Many of the ethnic groups that live in Vietnam are indigenous tribes that have inhabited the peninsula for thousands of years, moving from the coast to the so-called Central Highlands. Those populations, who are known with the French name of Montagnards, are my people and we have our own culture, tradition, economic peculiarities and today many of us are also Christian. In the 1920s, many Montagnards had been converted to Christianity by Western missionaries. After the Communist takeover, our ancestral homelands were seized by the government, our leaders executed or imprisoned in labor camps and we as a people were denied the freedom to practice Christianity.
On Saturday, April 10, this Easter, against an order of the Communist Government of Hanoi, some 150,000 Montagnards went to the city of Buonmathuot in Vietnam's Central Highlands and staged a peaceful demonstration to celebrate Easter. After only a few hours, Vietnamese soldiers, mixed with the police and Vietnamese civilians, attacked the praying crowd, beating demonstrators with electric batons, throwing rocks, and shooting with rifles. Dozens of demonstrators have been reported dead by our people and many have their legs and hands broken. There are reports of people being decapitated. The latest news relayed to us by survivors estimate at around several hundred the number of dead bodies left in the city and in the surrounding coffee plantations. These figures cannot be verified however, as the Central Highlands have been completely sealed off by the Vietnamese authorities and nobody, not even monitors of the United Nations, can access the region.
I warned my people not to demonstrate knowing how the police would react, but, their desperation prevailed and they decided to worship Christ in public. They told me that they cannot wait “because they are killing us now and we cannot take that anymore." For the last three years we have been receiving pleas from help from our people and they regularly report electric shock torture, arrests and killings. Our people knew that celebrating Easter would have triggered harsh consequences. I urged them to pray peacefully in the spirit of Christianity and to use the non-violence principals proposed by Gandhi. And, knowing my people from the bottom of my heart, I am sure that they, men, women and children prayed with peaceful devotion. The police, with the help of the army, took full advantage of the situation and unleashed a violent repression. For days and days, I have received reports that Vietnamese police and soldiers, unprovoked, attacked my people by shootings and beatings.
At the beginning of the year, the US State Department reported that “Ethnic minority, unregistered Protestant congregations in the Central Highlands and in the northwest provinces continued to suffer severe abuses.” In May 2003, the US International Commission for Religious Freedom stated that “the increased repression of religious freedom has been reportedly sanctioned at the highest levels of the Vietnamese government.”
The European Parliament has also regularly denounced the oppressive character of the Vietnamese regime highlighting the total lack of religious freedom in the Country. Thanks to the support of some MEPs, among them the founder of Italy's Radical Party – Marco Pannella, the President of the European Commission - Romano Prodi and also the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs clear statements have been made denouncing the current situation and questioning also the relationship that European countries have with Hanoi.
In these hours, the United States government is trying to obtain access to the Central Highlands in Vietnam. According to news agencies reports, US Ambassador Raymond Burghardt said Monday. “It's obviously best to have people visit the area in order to find out what's going on and not have to rely on rumors or third-hand reports [...] If you close off an area, people just assume the worst and you end up with people who may not be your friends giving interpretations that very likely will contain a lot of inaccurate information,” he added.
If, and when, Ambassador Burghardt will be allowed to visit the region, he, together with the rest of international community, will finally realize that what we have been saying since the end of the Vietnam War is not secessionist propaganda, but a cry for freedom.
I must say also that our people have no word for independence in our language. We do however, have a word for freedom. And it is only basic freedoms that we want.
We supported America in its struggle against Ho Chi Min, paying with thousands of lives; and the US has assisted many of us in the past and today, they allow us to live a decent life in America, but our families, friends and heart is also in the Central Highlands and we need to help our people there now.
Especially the Special Forces veterans, who served their country, they know us well. We Montagnards who served side by side with them during the war also greatly respect them and it is many of these same honorable soldiers who support us today.
But since 1975, the Vietnamese Communist government has been carrying out a very sophisticated campaign of ethnic cleansing against our people. The government confiscates our ancestral lands and forces us to live a life of poverty. If we raise our voice in protest they arrest and persecute us. Today our people are trapped in our villages and being forced to escape to Cambodia vacating what is left of our ancestral homelands. Unless the international community intervenes, we fear Hanoi will persecute us even more driving us into oblivion. We pray that a concerted effort of European and American pressure can put an end to the repression and allow our people to live in peace and freedom.
Google It!. 10:56:54 AM
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AILING DISSIDENT'S FATHER SEEKS HIS MEDICAL PAROLE [RFA]
HONG KONG, April 19, 2004—A Chinese dissident jailed for posting articles on the Internet calling for a re-assessment of the Tiananmen Square crackdown is suffering from worsening health after repeated beatings and hunger strikes in jail, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports. Wang Jinbo, 32, was sentenced in December 2001 to four years' imprisonment for subversion by a court in the northern province of Shandong. His father recently applied for medical parole for Wang, he said in an interview. [more]
Google It!. 10:34:52 AM
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Deaths of 25 Falun Gong Practitioners Verified in March [FDI]
excerpt:
...One of those killed in March was Daqing City-resident Mr. Li Yuanguang, 34. He died weighing less than one hundred pounds after prolonged torture, leaving behind his wife and a family bankrupted by police extortions.
Mr. Li nearly dropped out of college due to severe kidney problems. After he started practicing Falun Gong his health greatly improved and he continued his studies, earning a master’s degree. Before Falun Gong was banned, Mr. Li received government recognition for contributing to his hometown.
After traveling to Beijing’s Office of Appeals in 1999 Mr. Li was repeatedly harassed by police. Police abducted him from his home on April 24, 2001 and sent him to the Sha District Detention Center. There, officers forced him to sit on a metal chair, thumped his eyes, placed lit cigarettes in his mouth, force-fed him drugs, inserted mustard into his nose, stomped on his body and fingers, and subjected him to other abuses.
To protest the inhumane treatment, Mr. Li went on hunger strike. He was then repeatedly force-fed – a violent procedure that has been the direct cause of death in 10% of all verified killings of Falun Gong practitioners.
In a terrible condition, Mr. Li was released from detention only to pass away at home.
“The frequency and consistency of the torture and murder cases throughout China underscores the fact that this is a premeditated campaign directed by high ranking officials,” says Falun Dafa Information Center spokesman Mr. Erping Zhang, “not simply the crimes of a few overzealous prison guards.”
The March reports indicate that many of the guards received bonuses for torturing practitioners. Criminal inmates also tortured practitioners in order to gain an early release.
Torture methods include dousing practitioners with cold water, leaving them outdoors in freezing temperatures, shocking them with electric batons, depriving them of sleep, starving them, and tying them in agonizing positions. [more]
Google It!. 10:29:55 AM
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Vietnamese Christians arrested and deported from Cambodia [Ekklesia]
Cambodian police have arrested and deported 160 Christians who crossed the border illegally to escape violence in their country last week.
The Christians are members of a Vietnamese ethnic minority known as the Montagnards.
An estimated 400 Christians were killed during peaceful and prayerful demonstrations in the Central Highlands of Vietnam over the Easter period. Thousands of Montagnards took part in the protests.
It was feared at the time that the incident might spark a refugee movement, with people heading for the Cambodian border. The Cambodians had however closed the border to refugees. Three years ago, police crushed similar demonstrations in the area, prompting a mass exodus to Cambodia.
Now, unidentified human rights workers stationed on the border in north-eastern Cambodia have said they have received reports that police arrested 100 Christian tribes people in Mondulkiri province on April 12, and another 60 two days later, The Cambodia Daily reports.
[more]
. 10:19:37 AM
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© 2004 Radio Free China
Last Update: 5/1/2004; 10:20:23 AM
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