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Sunday, March 12, was a beautiful warm day to celebrate. The Saint Patrick's Day parade marched along Constitutional Avenue and then in the late afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial another kind of celebration occurred. A rally celebrated the passing of the nine million mark of Chinese quitting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). One of the main sponsors of the rally was the Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP, which supports the Epoch Times Tuidang (Quit the CCP) website.
To add to the festivity of the rally was a 200 person marching band, calling itself the "Celestial Band," an appropriate name for the high spirit with which it plays. Comprising of mostly Chinese, the "Celestial Band" had just performed "Falun Dafa is Great," "America the Beautiful" and other compositions in the St. Patrick's Day parade, to applause and acclaim from spectators along the parade route. In a San Francisco parade last month, a passerby described that each song this band played seemed to be able to thoroughly cleanse both the heaven and earth.
The celebration mood was dampened, however, by the recent news of the discovery of a secret concentration camp outside of Shenyang, in northeast China. Based on an in-depth Epoch Times interview of an investigative journalist, the bare essentials of the story are that the camp holds 6,000 or more prisoners, who are systematically killed for their organs, which are then sold for profit on the outside.
The name of the camp is " Sujiatun Concentration Camp ." It contains a crematorium to dispose of the bodies (and hide the evidence), and no prisoner has ever left the camp. Many doctors are seen going in and out of the camp, and the victims are all Falun Gong practitioners. The unusually large number of doctors working there reflects the camp's practice of killing prisoners for their organs.
Shocking though this account is, the news was not totally unexpected. Word of concentration camps for Falun Gong practitioners has circulated for several years. Also, it is common practice in China for the organs of executed prisoners to be "harvested" for sale.
Joe Segal, a Legislative Analyst for a U.S. Congressman, promised to take the issue of the concentration camp to the "highest levels of the U.S. Congress." Being Jewish, much of his family was destroyed by the Nazi Holocaust. He shouted, "No death camps in China."
Timothy Cooper, Executive Director of Worldrights , said, "If what has been reported is accurate, then Shenyang has become the Auschwitz of China. But this time, unlike the situation during the Second World War in Nazi Germany, America must not fail to act. America must not fail to confront these atrocities—unimaginable in any civilized society." He said a "whole new level of depravity is being practiced by the CCP."
Cooper also had some specific ideas of what needs to get done. "…[W]e call on the US government to investigate these allegations and release satellite photographs of the concentration camp in Shenyang for the world to see. And we call on the U.S. Congress to hold hearings and investigate. And finally, we call on the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. Louise Arbour, and her agents to make immediate inquiries of the Chinese government and for the International Red Cross to seek immediate access to the camp."
Zhang Tianliang, columnist for The Epoch Times , offered, "All the things that CCP is doing is not to avoid its collapse, but to postpone it." He explained that is why the high-ranking CCP officials are trying to get more money and hide abroad. "Luo Gan [head of the '610 Office' which persecutes Falun Gong], was trying to buy some real estate in Argentina. Zeng Qinghong [Vice-President of the PRC] too."
Lawyer Gao Zhisheng Leads World-wide Hunger Strike Protest
Wei Jingsheng, a well-known Chinese dissident who was imprisoned by the Communists for 18 years, spoke in favor of a hunger-strike movement that is building to 10,000 in China and outside, to oppose the brutality of the CCP. The hunger strike relay was first proposed by Gao Zhisheng, a leading attorney in China who has been prevented from practicing law and is constantly being watched by the CCP. In November the Beijing justice department closed Gao's law firm and suspended his license for one year. Gao's suspension was due to his refusal to retract an open letter he wrote to Hu Jintao in October condemning abuse of Falun Gong practitioners.
Wei spoke of how the CCP spies like to "stir up internal dissent." The way they work, he explained, is to exploit the natural differences that exist among people and groups. Since the CCP doesn't tolerate differences, it sees the tolerance of its opponents as a weakness for them to take advantage. Zhang Tianliang said the CCP uses 100+ agents to harass and chase Gao Zhisheng. "It is sufficient to use 10 agents, so why does the CCP use 100+? The main reason from my analysis is that they need that many people to supervise each other. If ten people are used, each will have more opportunity to speak with Gao Zhisheng, and they may be changed by Mr. Gao. They may be touched by Gao's morality and even quit CCP."
At the rally, the similarity between Sujiatun concentration camp and the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau were frequently alluded to. Courtney Dowe, a singer at the rally, summed the predicament of us all: "What if I was alive when it happened? Well, we are and it is happening. We have to do what we can to stop it."
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