Letter to UN General Secretary Kofi Annan from Swedish Falun Gong Practitioners

September 6, 2001

á

General Secretary Kofi Annan

United Nations

c/o Swedish Parliament

Dear Mr. Annan:

Falun Gong practitioners in the Nordic countries send you our warmest regards.

Since last Friday, Swedish practitioners, like many others around the world, are doing hunger strikes outside Chinese Consulates and Embassies to symbolize the hunger strike being conducted by 130 women in the Masanjia Labour Camp in Shenyang Province. Those 130 women have absolutely no other way to let people know of the injustice they are suffering, from having their sentences extended arbitrarily beyond July 23^rd, the end of their one year terms. Masanjia is known to be one of the worst camps for torturing Falun Gong practitioners. The guards there have been rewarded for their "good work," which includes stripping 18 female practitioners and throwing them into the men's cells.

Since July 20^th, 1999 when the persecution of Falun Gong in China began, the hundreds of thousands of practitioners who have been tortured, jailed, and brainwashed have gained the respect of the whole world. They have never resorted to violence, but have tried only to explain the truth to their captors. If you read the personal accounts on www.clearwisdom.net, you will discover how, even when their lives have been torn apart in every conceivable way, practitioners still compassionately try to help the authorities who persecute them to realize that they are hurting themselves by hurting others, because the heavenly principle has not changed: that good will be rewarded with good, and evil with evil.

Practitioners do the following things in their every day lives:

• try to live up to the highest standard of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance.
• try to do the best they can at all times;
• try to remember to always think of others first
• try to look inside their own hearts first, to see if something has not been done properly, and then try to rectify it.
• try to study the teachings of Falun Gong daily, and do the five sets of meditative exercises, to work towards making the body, mind and spirit clean and clear. It is stressed in the teachings that no one can force another to practice cultivation. It is up to the person to do or not to do.

Please think about it. What will become of this world, if we let evil destroy people's wish to become good by following the universal principles of truth, compassion and forbearance? What kind of world will we have?

The Swedish government has recently answered our appeals with the words: "We all have a common responsibility to dare to stand up for religious freedom and human rights. Wherever human dignity is being violated, we have to dare to defend it and rehabilitate it."

The hearts of the people who created the United Nations expressed the great possibility for a world where people everywhere can live their lives with freedom of belief, and freedom of expression. Today, the United Nations has the possibility to call upon the people of the world to restore those basic freedoms to practitioners of Falun Gong currently being persecuted in China.

Yours sincerely,

on behalf of Falun Gong practitioners in Sweden