Tianjin Women's Prison Uses Brutal Persecution Methods on Falun Gong Practitioners
May 2, 2008
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By a Falun Dafa Practitioner in China
(Clearwisdom.net) Tianjin Women's Prison authorities have been closely
following Chinese Communist Party directives the past eight years and have
brutally persecuted Falun Gong practitioners. For those practitioners who refuse
to give up their belief in Falun Gong, the persecution is even more severe. I
got to know the most common methods of torture they use on Falun Gong
practitioners while I was detained there. They are listed below:
Mental Torture
- Use of threatening conversations to force practitioners to give up their
beliefs, bringing pressure and fear to bear on practitioners.
- Forced brainwashing. Practitioners are forced to watch TV programs that
defame Falun Dafa every day at a certain time in order to confuse and
"transform" them.
- Forcing practitioners to write the Three Statements (The
so-called Repentance Statement, "Guarantee
Statement" and "Thought Report Statement"). If the
statements do not meet the requirements, the practitioner must write them
again.
- Use of strict monitoring and control. They use monitoring equipment and
"personal monitors" to supervise the behavior of practitioners.
That means that apart from keeping watch on the movements of Falun Gong
practitioners with monitoring equipment, they also arrange for two or more
criminal inmates to constantly supervise the behavior of practitioners. They
follow them wherever they go, even when they eat, sleep or go to the toilet.
Practitioners are not allowed to talk to anyone. They are not allowed to do
the exercises or to read Falun Dafa books. If they still refuse to give up
their belief after a certain amount of mental torture for some time, they
will then begin physical torture on the practitioners.
- Extend prison term at will. When the prison term is up, if they think the
practitioner doesn't have a proper attitude, is not transformed completely,
or is too stubborn, then they will not release the practitioner and will
extend her prison term. By doing that, they want practitioners to know that
without giving up their belief, they will not be able to walk out of the
prison or may even die there. The purpose is to force practitioners to give
up their belief in Falun Dafa.
Torture by Starvation
They don't give enough food to practitioners, so practitioners are often
hungry every day. They only give two minutes for practitioners to finish their
meal. If you haven't finished in two minutes, you must stop eating. Thus, Falun
Dafa practitioners are starving every day and living in tension. They use this
method to weaken a practitioner's willpower. At the same time, they force
starving practitioners to do hard slave labor to further weaken their bodies,
hoping practitioners will give up their belief under this long-term severe
torture.
Physical Torture
- "Three Straight One Stare" method. The so-called "three
straight" means the practitioner's head, chest and lower leg must be dead
straight while sitting on a small plastic bench with holes. "One
stare" means both of the practitioner's eyes must stare in front of them
(or watch a propaganda program on TV that defames Falun Dafa or listen to a
prison guard teaching a lesson). At the same time, both of the practitioner's
hands must be placed on her knees. They would also place an object between her
legs. If she dropped that object, she would be beaten. They have to sit like
that from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., not being allowed to move for 15 hours.
Especially in summer, one would suffer more by sitting on the small plastic
bench with holes for a long time. One would sit there until one's bottom was
sore and the skin was broken, and that kind of suffering is unbearable. This
is a torture method that does not require the person who does the torturing to
even move his hand. The prison guards used that method on me for over forty
days.
- Being forced to stay up all night. They would question a practitioner and
torture her for the whole night until she could not stand any more and was
forced to give up her belief.
- Brutal beatings. They usually lock up practitioners alone in a small cell
and then beat them until they are covered with cuts and bruises all over to
try to force the them to give up Falun Dafa..
- Damage from force-feeding. They use injurious force-feeding methods on those
practitioners who resist the persecution with a hunger strike. They can
force-feed a practitioner any way they like and anytime they like. Some
practitioners on hunger strikes were hovering between life and death.
- Being tied on a "dead person's bed". The four limbs of the
practitioner are stretched out and tied to the bed. The practitioner cannot
move at all. Neither is he or she allowed to get up to eat or drink. Sometimes
they are not even allowed to go to the bathroom, and they have to have a bowel
movement in their pants.
- Torture from coldness. They don't allow practitioners to wear cotton-padded
coats or to cover up with cotton-padded quilts on cold days. They cuff the
practitioners and let them deliberately suffer from the cold.
For instance, Falun Dafa practitioner Xie Guiqing was detained at Tianjin
Women's Prison. Because she refused to give up her belief, she was brutally
tortured by the prison guards. The prison guards ordered prison inmates and
"personal monitors" to lock Xie Guiqing up in a cold, small cell at
the service team. They tortured her with brutal beatings, making her suffer from
coldness, starvation, cuffing, not being given water, not being allowed to go to
the toilet and being tied up on the dead person's bed, etc. When Xie Guiqing was
trying to resist the persecution with a hunger strike, they injured her by
force-feeding and left the tube used for force-feeding in her stomach for a long
time. Thus, a healthy person was tortured into a critical condition and was sent
to the hospital for treatment. But as soon as she came back to the prison, the
prison guards continued persecuting her until she was near death. To avoid
taking responsibility, they finally let her family members take her home, but
Xie Guiqing died two days after she was released.
This is what the Chinese Communist Party claims to be the "patient,
careful and spring breeze" kind of education methods used on Falun Dafa
practitioners. This is what they claim as the "best human rights
period" in history.
Because the persecution of steadfast Falun Dafa practitioners is often
concealed and hidden from the general public, there are many more physical
torture methods that still have not been exposed.