GENEVA—Protestors staged back-to-back rallies on April 3 and 4 in Geneva, each demanding that the United Nations address recently revealed allegations of concentration camps in China, where people are routinely killed for their organs. The April 4 protest also celebrated the almost 10 million Chinese that have shown their disdain for the Chinese communist regime by quitting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and related organizations in the past year-and-a-half.
"We've heard very serious reports about imprisonment, torture, of the members of Falun Gong, and we've heard that there are camps in China where even the organs and the eyes and the kidneys and other items of the human body are…extracted for the use of the high dignitaries and others in the Chinese People's Republic," said Dr. Charles Graves, Secretary General of Interfaith International, a UN-accredited NGO, at the April 3 event.
Organized by the Falun Gong meditation movement, the April 3 march and rally wound its way through the heart of Geneva, ending across from the Palais Wilson—the headquarters of the High Commissioner on Human Rights Louise Arbour.
Approximately 500 people attended the event, which featured traditional Chinese drummers celebrating the beauty of the practice, as well as protest banners and women in white, each carrying a photo of a Falun Gong adherent, who was killed at the hands of Chinese security officials. The protestors stayed in front of the Palais Wilson for over ten hours. In the evening they held a candlelight vigil to mourn their lost compatriots.
On April 4, a slightly smaller group walked in an Epoch Times -sponsored march to the Place de Nations, the front entrance to the UN headquarters in Geneva. At the head of the parade, nine ghostly statues were carried, each representing an aspect of the persecution of the Chinese people by the CCP that is addressed by the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party . A number of the demonstrators identified themselves as taking part in the Global Relay Hunger Strike—the peaceful resistance movement to end state violence in China initiated by famed China human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng.
"We have all experienced such things; many people in Latvia were sent to concentration camps under the dictatorship of the Communist Party… I hope Chinese people can clearly recognize what in fact the Communist Party is, and free themselves from [it]…as soon as possible," said a Latvian protester on April 4.
Another demonstrator, Polish economist Tomasz Kowalski, detailed in a speech an experience of visiting the Nazi concentration camp museum in Auschwitz in his youth. He recalled how the roomfuls of possessions and hair from inmates that had been killed at the site had made a particularly strong impression on him—and how the recent China concentration camp reports remind him of this ghoulish legacy.
"This should never be allowed to happen again," he said of using human beings as commodities for profit, in particular of killing them when they become no longer "useful."
Swiss National Councillor Oskar Freysinger wrote a letter of support to the protestors, naming communism itself a "crime against humanity."
Clandestine Camps
In early March, a former Chinese journalist told The Epoch Times about Sujiatun, a concentration camp in Shenyang, the capital of China's northeastern province of Liaoning. He claimed this hidden camp held up to 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners as a ready supply of human organs for transplants—with many already having been vivisected and killed once their organs were extracted.
"We note that Shenyang in Manchuria is far from the center of the Han Chinese, and perhaps some of these prisons far away are being used to keep these practices [i.e. organ harvesting] secret from the population," said Graves, at the April 3 protest.
Since the initial disclosures on Sujiatun, two more witnesses came forth with further information. The third, who described himself as a Shenyang military zone doctor, said last week that at least 36 concentration camps exist throughout China, many of which are linked by secret military transportation routes. He alleged that one camp, in Jilin province, holds as many as 120,000 Falun Gong practitioners, prisoners of conscience and felons.
Recent revelations of large-scale underground military installations in the Shenyang area have added further questions to the activities at Sujiatun and nearby.
Chinese authorities waited two weeks before denying the existence of the camp, leading to suspicion that this time was used for a cover up.
"A slaughter to destroy witnesses/victims of the concentration camps is happening," said a recently published statement on the Falun Gong Clearwisdom.net website.
The statement, published by the Integrated Committee to Investigate the Secret Sujiatun Concentration Camp and the Facts of the Persecution of Falun Gong in China , alleges that at least eight hospitals in China are speedily doing as many organ transplants as possible before new transplant legislation comes into effect on July 1.
"To every individual, involved in any way, in those heinous acts of harvesting and selling human organs from live Falun Gong practitioners, the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) will track down each and every one of you, no matter how long it takes, no matter how far and wide we have to search, and we will bring each of you to justice," said a WOIPFG representative at the April 3 rally.
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