From Torture to Triumph: The Path Forward
July 24, 2018 - FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL
She can't even speak English, but the laminated poster she holds -- as the tears stream down her cheeks -- says everything. The picture is of her husband, a living skeleton lying back on the bed, every one of his ribs protruding. He stares back with empty eyes -- a sharp contrast to the happy "before" picture Chi Lihua's daughter is holding next to it. She explains, through interpreters, that this is all they have left of Xu Dawei. He survived eight years in a Chinese prison for practicing Falun Gong, only to be released, meet his daughter for the first time -- and die 13 days later.
It was the torture, she says from experience. Chi was imprisoned too, once for passing out Falun Gong fliers and again for holding a promotional banner. She talks about being hit in the face with batons, beaten on her back, and forced to squat through the entire night. Her husband, she says, suffered eight years of it -- but it may as well have been a lifetime. She and her 16-year-old daughter are alone now, having lost Xu, her brother, and both parents to the same persecution in China. It's a story, she says soberly, that the Falun Gong community knows well. In just a three-year span, 933 people have been sent to prison -- where they'll be lucky to survive under a government that's said to harvest organs from "living Falun Gong prisoners" to cope with the country's current shortage.
Xu's nightmare is just one of the harrowing testimonies that world leaders heard at the events surrounding the State Department's first-ever ministerial on religious liberty. Pastor John Cao's is another. As the Associated Press tells it, he paid just three dollars for the trip that would cost him his freedom. For years, he and other members of the house church movement would take a bamboo raft from its hiding spot in southern China and cross the river into Myanmar, where he'd built more than 15 schools, carrying nothing but notebooks, pencils, and Bibles. It was barely a 30-foot journey, but the distance felt a lot greater when, on one Sunday afternoon last March, he saw something waiting for him on shore: Chinese security agents.
"Decades of work in China's clandestine house churches and unofficial Bible schools had prepared the prominent 58-year-old Christian leader for this moment. He quickly threw his cell phone into the water, protecting the identities of more than 50 Chinese teachers he had recruited to give ethnic minority Burmese children a free education rooted in Christianity. But Cao himself could not escape."
Although John is married to an American citizen (with sons who live in North Carolina), China decided to make an example of the man who'd brought so much hope to the people of Burma. He was sentenced this past spring to seven years in prison. A month earlier, the government cracked down even harder on the country's Christians, refusing to let the pastors of underground churches leave the country at all. Jamie, his wife, spoke this morning. Her husband has lost more than 60 pounds and has been cut off from seeing his family or attorneys. She, like Chi and so many other hurting families, pleads for the world's help in stopping abuse like this.
The abuse, Tahir Hamid explained, takes many forms. Uighur Muslims like him have been forced to defile their faith, "modify their dress, shave their beards, eat pork, and serve alcohol." Or, Razia Sultana, described, the abuse could be barbaric and physical -- like the horrors we've witnessed against the Rohingya.
There, she tells the audience, rape is used as a weapon. In most villages, victims like "M" explain, the attacks are methodical. After strangling her two-year-old son and throwing his body to the ground, she told at least one reporter, "The soldiers forced her back into the house. When she saw them undoing their pants, she pressed her hands over her eyes.
They stomped on her stomach and feet, and one after another they raped her. She felt like she was dying."
In the months since soldiers attacked their way through Myanmar, hundreds of babies have been born to girls as young as 13. In some places, the women are shunned. Some hide their pregnancies, tying scarves painfully tight around their growing stomachs. "Theirs," Kristen Gelineau writes, "is a misery spoken of only in murmurs."
Today, the Trump administration -- and leaders from around the world -- are giving a voice to those murmurs. To advance the cause of religious freedom, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, "we need all these voices to work together." Our goal, he explains, is simple: "to promote the God-given human right to believe what you want to believe."
It's a big task, Ambassador Sam Brownback agreed. "We must commit to using all the might, and all the machinery, and the moral authority we have to stop those nations and actors who trample on free souls."
But, he said, just hosting this gathering will go a long way to lifting the spirits of the millions of hurting people around the globe.
"...Think for just a moment about those people in various countries around the world right now who are praying that we're successful. They've heard maybe something's taking place, that somebody's starting to look at this – that somebody's interested in their plight. They have no way out. They can't see a way out, but they know someone is... starting to get organized, and you give them hope that they'll have a better day. That it's coming."
For more on this historic conference, check out the schedule and live stream for the next two days here.
Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.
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