A terror state

Faced with clear evidence of Chinese torture, Nicolas Sarkozy is wrong to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics, says Edward McMillan-Scott

Earlier this month, French president Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the European parliament on his priorities for France’s six-month EU presidency, a day after MEPs debated relations with China and one month before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing.

Many MEPs hope that there will be a political boycott of the ceremony, as increasing reports of massive purges of dissidents and religious activists filter out of China. The regime is using terror as never before to control dissent. But Sarkozy’s earlier decision not to attend the opening ceremony after the events in Tibet last March has apparently been reversed because of renewed talks between the regime and the Dalai Lama’s representatives. He should think again.  

Tibet is a country that deserves to be freed from the oppression it has suffered since the Chinese occupation in 1949.  Instead, the devout and quiet Tibetan people see their monks being imprisoned in their hundreds for taking part in the March riots.  Such riots are now common across the whole territory ruled by the most vicious and murderous regime the world has ever known.

The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for 70 million deaths of its own people, 38 million through deliberate starvation. The growth of internet use, despite the thousands employed by the regime in the ‘great firewall of China’ has also seen a new activism. One group collected more than 10,000 signatures for its ‘We want human rights, not the Olympics’ campaign, before the organiser was imprisoned.

I have submitted a dossier to the UN on torture and religious freedom in China.  It details the treatment of some of the people I had contact with during my last visit to Beijing, in May 2006. My tour guide in Beijing, Cao Dong, was one of hundreds of thousands of one religious group which the UN rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, believes make up the majority of torture victims.

Falun Gong is a harmless and popular Buddha-school set of spiritual exercises, which was founded in 1992. By 1999 the movement had between 70 to 100 million adherents when the paranoid premier Zhang Zemin decided to persecute it. A Gestapo-like network of ‘610 Offices’  in most towns and cities, named after the 10 June 1999 decree which initiated the scourge, systematically arrests, imprisons and tortures these innocent people, whose watchwords are ‘truthfulness, compassion, forbearance’.

The popularity of Falun Gong is in part the belief by all practitioners I have met that they have been cured of some malady, which is important in a country without a health service. Practitioners neither smoke nor drink, and many believe that executed practitioners have been the source for the 40-60,000 recent extra organ transplant operations, a profitable monopoly organised by the People’s Liberation Army.

Earlier this year, the regime announced that it was moving to lethal injection from execution by a bullet through the head – the mouth was propped open to minimise damage, but still a messy way to kill.  It is not hard to understand this change.  In one province alone, 16 buses have been specially adapted to perform on-the-spot eviscerations.

If we had known what was already taking place in Germany’s camps in 1936, the Olympics would not have taken place in Berlin. There is ample evidence that the regime in Beijing is guilty of what amounts to genocide against sections of the population under its control.

A boycott of the games, held under the Olympic banner of ‘universal fundamental ethical principles’, is the least we can expect of our leading politicians.