World News
“I don’t know if these materials will get into your hands. What I am going to do is to restart the hunger strike… if I don’t hear from you by 5pm on 5/21/2003.” — Dr. Charles Li
In a joint letter to Illinois Members of Congress, 80 Illinois state representatives urged their federal counter-parts to “vigorously support” the class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Illinois against former Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin.
Dr. Charles Li, a U.S. citizen and practitioner of Falun Gong, has been on hunger strike since May 27, and was force-fed since May 31 in a hospital inside the Nanjing Prison, China.
Mr. T. Kumar, Director of Amnesty International, Asia Pacific Affairs, said that AI recently learned about the lawsuit charging Jiang Zemin with genocide that was filed in Chicago. They have contacted the plaintiffs and will work with them to prosecute Jiang.
According to a U.S. consulate official in Shanghai, an American being held in a Chinese prison is on the fourth day of a hunger strike to peacefully protest severe human rights violations.
“What Falun Gong is showing in Mondo Verde is not inciting or spectacular. Some people are sitting there meditating, that’s all. Falun Gong wants to clean the spirit so that people can use their own strength and feeling. That seems to be a sensitive subject to a communist government.”
On May 19, 2003, the WPA issued the following statement entitled “Memo on the Issue of Alleged Political Abuse of Psychiatry in China.”
There have been new cases of abuse and torture of Falun Gong practitioners in mental hospitals, some concluded in death, after almost four years of persecution the torture and killing of the practitioners continue.
At the end of 1990s, however, just when I was about to close my research, the suppression of Falun Gong suddenly began in 1999. Many reports provide evidence that detained Falun Gong practitioners are forcibly locked in mental hospitals.
The photo is an unfinished painting entitled, “Lotus Flower” that Mother had painted and left for us prior to her return to China.
