Falun Gong Issues Open Letter to President Bush on Eve of Hu Jintao Visit

Mr. President,

There are times in history when a single act can affect the fate of millions. This is one of those times.

You may have seen recent reports that Chinese authorities are enriching themselves from the sale of Falun Gong practitioners’ internal organs and that they have set up dozens of concentration camp-like facilities for harvesting these organs. These reports tell us that China’s repression of Falun Gong is far more extensive, more brutal, and more horrifying than previously thought.

This is why we must request that you demand two things of Hu during your upcoming talks.

First, that he open up for international investigation all labor camps, prisons, hospitals, mental hospitals, and related facilities in China, and that he do so immediately.

Second, that he allow the recently-formed Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (CIPFG) and its team of international investigators to enter China, and guarantee their safety. The CIPFG, led by the Falun Dafa Association and Falun Gong’s MingHui website, has over the past seven years built a sprawling communications network inside China unlike any other. As Chinese who once lived under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule, the CIPFG organizers have first-hand knowledge of the CCP’s vast array of tactics of repression, both blatant and covert. If the evidence is there, CIPFG will know where and how to find it.

Mr. President, taking these steps could save the lives of thousands of men and women who remain in Chinese detention. At any moment these persons could be killed for their organs or tortured to death. The Chinese Communist leadership places no value on their lives.

Atrocities beyond imagination have been committed against tens of millions of the Falun Gong in China for almost seven years. Our Congress has, on four separate occasions, passed resolutions condemning the suppression of Falun Gong in China. It has called on the executive branch to take a firm stance. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and, one year after another, our own Department of State, have documented the horrors that the Falun Gong have experienced.

There are now over 44,000 documented cases of torture and over 2,800 documented cases of deaths from torture and abuse. We continue to receive reports of women being raped in police custody and children having parents taken away. The stories the victims and their families tell are heartbreaking. All this simply because they follow a belief system consisting of quiet meditation and the development of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance in oneself–a belief system that China’s communist atheist leadership perceived as a threat to its totalitarian control.

If you do not confront Hu Jintao on the atrocities China has committed against the Falun Gong specifically, it stands to compromise America’s own moral position and send the wrong message to Beijing. Let us instead tell the Chinese people that America has not forgotten them in their hour of greatest need, or better yet, let us show them.

Please honor our request by asking these two things of Hu. In your role as leader of the free world at this time in history, you are in a unique position to positively influence the lives of millions.

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,

The Falun Dafa Information Center