The New Year is here. At this time of celebration, with the deepest respect, all Dafa practitioners from Holland send New Year greetings to our honourable, compassionate and great Master.

On December the 10th 2003, International human rights day, the annual “Sarov Symposium” was held in St. Petersburg. Human rights organisations, city congressmen and the media attended the symposium. Representatives of the Russian Falun Dafa Association were also invited to attend and to give a report about Falun Dafa. After learning the facts, those in attendance were “deeply shocked”.

This was the third time that Falun Gong practitioners had come to this city to hold information days. There was a obvious difference between this activity and the first two in that many people came to the booth out of their own initiative to learn the facts about the persecution and to sign their names to the petition form entitled “Bring Jiang to Justice”. Many people also enquired about the place and time for learning the Falun Gong exercises.

Lu Jinhu covered Mr. Huang's head with a piece of cloth and violently jerked, rubbed, and shook Mr. Huang's head until he felt dizzy, vomited, and could not move his head and neck anymore because his cervical vertebrae were broken. He was then sent to the hospital in the forced labour camp. When practitioners in the "Enhanced Torture Team" spoke out for Mr. Huang, the police even denied the persecution and said that Mr. Huang was suffering from a bone spur.

The psychotropic drug Thorazine is an anti psychotic drug and used in the treatment of psychiatric patients. Thorazine may result in rather severe side effects, such as irreversible neurological disorder, global deterioration of mind and mental faculties, general dulling of awareness, emotional numbing, and cognitive dysfunction.

Lawless doctors have been torturing firm Dafa practitioners with injections that damage the nervous system. Due to this, many practitioners have become impaired. Some have lost their sensory capabilities, some have incurred mental problems and have become uncontrollable; their voices have changed and they can't walk steadily.

Mr. Yang Baochun's hand was often handcuffed to the head of one bed while the other arm was forcibly stretched out and cuffed to the head of another bed. Mr. Yang would be cuffed like this for one day and one night. He once wrote a letter to complain about the police atrocities being committed against him. Team leader, Wang Feng discovered the note and had dozens of inmates surround Yang Baochun and beat him with rubber batons, electric batons, and kick him. The beating and torture lasted for more than half an hour, resulting in wounds covering his entire body.

After long periods of being chained to a pole, the metal handcuffs cut deep into her flesh, and Ms. Liu's ankles and wrists were bleeding badly. To make the situation more difficult for her, her tormentors even prevented her from using toilet facilities. As the filth and odour became unbearable, they then wrapped her up in a big plastic bag and tied her up with ropes to prevent her from moving. To keep her quiet, one of the persecutors bashed her head with a rod. To humiliate her further, they stripped off her clothes one day, and tried to take a photograph of her.

Recently when I was browsing China's news web, I noticed that there have been several reported self-immolation incidents in Tiananmen Square in recent months. It is interesting to note that the media and related governmental departments have dealt with these recent incidents in a completely different manner from how they handled the 2001 self-immolation incident, which they attributed to Falun Gong. I have compared these two different types of self-immolation incidents from several perspectives.

On December 29, 2003, Falun Gong practitioners in northern California rallied and held a candlelight vigil in front of Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, demanding that Jiang and the killers of Liu Chengjun be brought to justice.

'Recently, a local Seoul court officially accepted a criminal lawsuit against Jiang Zemin and Luo Gan that was filed by a South Korean citizen, Falun Gong practitioner Zhang Shu...The lawsuit was applied for under the Korean national criminal law and the international convention about preventing and punishing the crime of genocide enacted in 1951.'

A practitioner said that Falun Gong practitioners' actions were selfless. They were helping the Chinese people deceived by the dictator's lies to see the truth. Liu Chengjun and other practitioners risked their lives to bring the truth to the public with wisdom and courage.

The first Overseas Falun Dafa Young Disciples' Cultivation Experience Sharing Conference was held on December 27, 2003 at Shipai School's Auditorium in Taipei. Nearly 1,200 young Dafa disciples, their parents and guests from Japan, Malaysia and areas across Taiwan attended the conference.