(Clearwisdom.net) Since 2003, Beijing City's "610 Office" and police stations arrested many older Falun Gong practitioners. In the past, many of them had various diseases, many of which were serious or life threatening. However, since practicing Falun Dafa their health conditions had either been greatly improved or even completely healed. The corrupt police sent these practitioners to detention centers and then to forced labor camps.
While the policemen and officials from Beijing's "610 Office" saw the older practitioners as burdens, nonetheless they didn't hold back in persecuting them. At the Chaoyang Detention Center, several older practitioners have been sent to the dispatch center three times and sent back for health reasons each time. There was a 58-year-old woman who had hemiplegia (partial paralysis), could not move freely and had constipation. The police did not give her rice, rather, every day they only gave her corn soup with a little salt. She was only allowed to use "the ditch" to relieve herself. (The lavatory ¨C 'the ditch'- is usually a manure pit with two cement boards on top. The two cement boards have a 20cm (8 inches) gap between them, and the setup looks like a ditch in the ground. It is usually very dirty.)
Practitioners sent to forced labor camps usually first went through "intensive training" in the dispatch center first. College students often visited the women's labor camp, and occasionally foreigners came. The courtyard looks like a garden; when visitors came, there would be music playing in the courtyard. People who were detained for forced labor would be gathered together in the conference hall, watching TV. Nobody would know that it was a show staged by camp authorities for the purpose of deceiving people into thinking conditions were good there.
Many Falun Gong practitioners have been physically and mentally tortured there. There is no Sunday in a labor camp: As long as work orders arrived, they had to work from the early morning into the evening, just before bedtime. Many people suffered loss of eye-sight, chronic neck pain, and tendon inflammation. Steadfast practitioners would be surrounded by drug addicts and kept away from other people. They were 'punished' by being made to stand in a fixed position for over 20 hours and were given just one piece of cornbread per meal. If a practitioner did not give up her belief after several months, she would be sent to the so-called "Intensive Assault Unit".
In the "Intensive Assault Unit", as early as 3 or 4 a.m. the sounds of beatings and cries could be heard. One could feel the terror in the air. A drug addict who had been to the labor camp four times boasted, "I've been in the Intensive Assault Unit. There was a Falun Gong [practitioner] who endured a lot. She was not allowed to sleep for 9 days straight. As soon as she closed her eyes, we would beat her." The police simply ordered those criminals to brutally torture Falun Gong practitioners. A police officer named Xu from the Intensive Assault Unit said publicly, "Forced labor re-education is an administrative measure to forcibly transform people. If you refused to be transformed, we will have to force you to transform."
June 30, 2004
