Forget Not the Beijing Olympics’ Victims

It is now clear that the Beijing Olympics Games did not help to improve human
rights in China.
On the contrary, unknown thousands of innocent people have fallen victim to
the Beijing
Olympics. Knowing that it had the Olympics secured, the Chinese regime not only
refused to
honor the promise it made to improve human rights when it bid for the 2008 Olympic
Games,1 but
it used the Olympics’ security as a pretext to apprehend, torture, and
murder people who had
already suffered prolonged human rights violations in China.

One group of victims that the Chinese regime particularly targeted in the year
leading up to the
Beijing Olympics is Falun Gong practitioners.2 The Chinese regime has consistently
denied
persecution of other groups, but has publicly vowed to “eradicate”
Falun Gong. In April 2007, a
secret document of the Public Security Department listed Falun Gong among 11
groups that were
to be monitored and prohibited from attending the Olympics.3 In February 2008,
the Beijing
Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad issued an internal instruction
to
“strictly monitor and control Falun Gong.” Following these instructions,
Chinese authorities all
over the country intensified the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.

In the following pages, we document the names and details of the arrest of over
10,000 Falun
Gong practitioners in the name of the Beijing Olympics’ security. To fit
within a reasonable space,
we provide only a small number of the descriptions of how these victims have
been violently and
even fatally abused in custody. Because of the Chinese regime’s restrictions
on the flow of
information, the atrocities are feared to be much worse.

The report can be found at below site:
http://www.falunhr.org/reports/PDFs/BeijingOlympicsPersecution.pdf

These people have committed no offense. The majority of them were abducted
when the police
broke into their homes. Many were taken from their work. Some middle school
and high school
students were arrested in their dormitories and classrooms. They could not possibly
threaten the
Olympics from where they were arrested; many were hundreds or thousands of miles
away from
the venue.

The incarceration of Falun Gong practitioners was not at all to keep them away
from the
Olympics; it was to coerce them into renouncing Falun Gong. To that end, all
of the arrested Falun
Gong practitioners were severely tortured; some were beaten to death hours after
their arrest.
When their family members asked for their release, the authorities replied,
“After the Olympics.”
However, large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners are still in custody, long
past the Olympics.
It should be clear from this report how the Beijing Olympics was used by the
Chinese regime to
intensify its persecution of Falun Gong. The same Olympics tragedies have happened
to others,
including Tibetans, Uyghurs, Christians, and human rights lawyers and defenders.

In presenting this report, and the evidence that it contains to show the deterioration
of human rights
in China, we remind those who rationalized rewarding the Olympics to Beijing
as an opportunity
to help human rights in China that they have a responsibility to come to the
rescue of those who
suffered the consequences of their failed rationalization.

This failed Olympics rationalization is but the latest entry in the long list
of similarly failed
rationalizations of the U.S. and the West’s policy of economic engagement
with Communist
China.4 There have been numerous so-called opportunities over the past twenty
years to help China
to improve its human rights, yet with the passing of each opportunity, more
victims have fallen to
the Chinese regime’s human rights violations. Meanwhile, the makers of
the engagement policy
have simply walked away from the victims and moved on to the next “opportunity.”

Human rights improvement requires having a heart for the victims, a sense of
responsibility, and
the courage to stand up for what is right, rather than the excuse of so-called
opportunities.
By repeating the same failure in China’s human rights and continuing to
profit from these
“opportunities” for financial gain, the economic engagement policy
has become modern
democracy’s worst example of hypocrisy. The complete lack of accountability
also makes it
modern democracy’s worst example of irresponsible politics.

It may therefore be fitting that beyond the Beijing Olympics there is no opportunity
in sight to
“help” improve the human rights situation in China. Instead the U.S.
and the West are supplicating
China to help them financially in the current deep financial crisis, as evidenced
by the recent
pleading of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for China to continue buying
U.S. debt. Going
further than President Clinton’s delinking of human rights from trade with
China, Secretary
Clinton has openly delinked human rights from all China policy, stating that
“those issues” can’t
interfere with our more important goals, that “our economies are so intertwined,”
and that, “We are
truly going to rise or fall together. We are in the same boat and thankfully
we are rowing in the
same direction.”

Secretary Clinton is candid in openly admitting what human rights really means
to the U.S.’s
China policy, an inconvenient interference with other more important goals,
yet it is sobering to
see the top diplomat of the leader of the free world avow such a Faustian contract
to rise or fall
together with the most tyrannical regime of the world. Such a pledge is a betrayal
not only to
human rights, but to the very core of American values. Had America’s Founding
Fathers cast aside
“those issues” like unalienable rights, America would not have been
conceived in liberty but
remained intertwined with Great Britain. Had President Lincoln refused to let
“those issues” like
equality interfere with other “more important” goals such as avoiding
a war and preserving a much
more intertwined economy, the Union could just “rise or fall together”
with the South, and there
would be no President Obama.

However, more is at stake. Few may have noted how closely the collapses of Freddie
Mac &
Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, AIG and others followed on the heels of the Beijing
Olympics to
bring about the present financial crisis, and fewer may have considered that
these scourges were
not coincidental. Throughout history people with demonstrably higher moral standards
have been
more introspective in enlightening to the significance of tribulations. President
Abraham Lincoln,
in another mightier scourge, noted that the powerful interest of slavery was
somehow the cause of
the Civil War, and that both the North and the South at some point had contributed
to the
prolonging of that interest – “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend
this interest was the object for
which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government
claimed no right to
do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” Even when
the Civil War came, most
looked for “a result less fundamental and astounding.” Lincoln, however,
saw that “The Almighty
has His own purposes,” and that if God willed that the Civil War continue
“until all the wealth
piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil
shall be sunk, and until
every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with
the sword, as was
said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments
of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether.’”

The U.S. and the West’s economic engagement policy with China may be less
overt than the old
slavery but no less immoral, for behind the pretext of human rights improvement
is the profit from
outsourcing to China’s modern slavery.3 The Chinese regime not only entices
the U.S. and the
West to outsource to its modern slavery, but also bankrolls American consumers
to buy China’s
cheap slave-labor products by lending money to the U.S. through bond purchases.
If the profit
extracted from America’s old slavery had to be wiped out through the Civil War,
could the
financial gains extracted from China’s modern slavery at the expense of
the Chinese people’s
worsening rights be treated differently and written off by selling more bonds
to China? If the
current financial crisis is a warning of our moral decline in profiting from
China’s modern slavery,
what might be at stake in continuing down this wrong path? Needless to say,
it is when a country is
less inclined to believe in higher principles that its officials will consider
to “rise or fall together”
with a godless and criminal regime. But will the higher principles be less true
just because we
believe in them less? Will God be less just merely because human beings become
less spiritual and
more material?

It may be expedient and even tempting to remain silent to the Chinese regime’s
human rights
abuses in exchange for some financial gains, but, wittingly or unwittingly,
those who place lining
their pockets over values are themselves victims of the Chinese regime’s
crimes against
conscience.5 Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Christians, and human
rights lawyers
and defenders have been victimized and lost their freedom because of their refusal
to conform to
the abusive regime, but those who choose to be in the same boat and rise and
fall with such an
abusive regime have lost their conscience.

In presenting this report and asking the free world not to forget these victims,
we hope the free
world may come to see its own falling victim to the Chinese regime’s crimes
against conscience.
This report is also a tribute to Falun Gong practitioners’ courageous defense
of human conscience.
The information contained in this report did not come easily. Many Falun Gong
practitioners in
China have risked all to expose the violations they or fellow practitioners
have suffered. Their
reports must not be taken lightly, lest the values of hope, courage and human
beings’ most
fundamental right to conscience be forsaken. It is our earnest hope that in
helping them the free
world will find its way back to the true spirit of humanity.

Source: www.consciencefoundation.org

Posting date: 28/Feb/2009
Original article date: 27/Feb/2008
Category: Media Report

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