Rally and March in Manhattan Call for Human Rights in China

NEW YORK - With recent reports of a horrifying concentration camp in northeast China where Falun Gong practitioners are killed by the harvesting of their organs, Pro-Democracy advocates and Falun Gong practitioners took to the streets of Manhattan. About 4,000 marched down Broadway on March 25, handing out flyers, holding signs, and playing live music.

Falun Gong activist Jared Pearman, who emceed the rally, said "This is a rally to change history!

"The recent discovery of the Sujiatun concentration camp has really brought this to another level of urgency," said Pearman.

According to an investigative report released earlier this month by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), a large number of people who refuse to give up the peaceful meditation practice Falun Gong have been secretly abducted to and imprisoned in Sujiatun concentration camp. Because Falun Gong practitioners are not regular death-row inmates with predetermined execution times, the timing of the organ harvesting is determined by when organs are needed by the hospital.

Falun Gong practitioners perform as part of a march in New York City on March 25 calling on the Chinese Communist Party to stop suppressing the people of China (Evan Mantyk/Epoch Times).

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While the march included more festive elements put on by Falun Gong practitioners—dancing women holding lotus flowers and an impressive 160-person marching band called the Celestial Band—its overall tone was of reprimand for the Chinese Communist regime, which took power in China over 50 years ago. The march included groups of people with black gags around their mouths and simple signs on their shirts reading: "Chinese People" or "Sujiatun Concentration Camp." In the back of a large pickup truck, actors dressed like doctors reenacted the organ harvesting done on live Falun Gong at Sujiatun.

"I can't believe the U.S. government is letting people get away with this," said one elderly man watching the march.

Rally speakers also highlighted the recent wave of 9 million resignations from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The resignations began pouring in following the publication of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party by The Epoch Times in November 2004. The commentaries expose the CCP's crimes and malicious nature.

"The Chinese people as a whole are standing up to change the course China is on and today we rally to support the 9 million who have quit the CCP and demand change," said Pearman.