(Clearwisdom.net)

According to journalist Lauren Comiteau's December 2 report from Amsterdam in VOA (Voice of America), the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague has sentenced a Bosnian Serb officer, former Captain Momir Nikolic, to 27 years in prison for participating in criminal massacres. The sentence was even greater than prosecutors requested. According to the report, Nikolic was the first Serb officer to admit involvement and plead guilty for the deaths of more than seven thousand men and boys at Srebrenica. After the sentence was announced, Nikolic broke down and cried.

According to the judge, neither the lawyers nor the prosecutors had requested a sentence sufficient to pay for the crimes he accepted responsibility for. VOA quoted Judge Liu Daqun's statement "He saw with his own eyes the separation of men from their families; he heard the cries of children as they saw their fathers taken away; he saw the fear in the eyes of the women pushed on to buses as they knew that the fate of their fathers, husbands, and sons were beyond their control."?

According to the VOA report, Liu Daqun and other judges believed that Nikolic was at the center of the criminal activity, and rather than resisting orders to help murder thousands of men and boys, he played an integral, proactive role.

According to the report, Nikolic pleaded guilty to one count of persecution earlier this year and agreed to testify against his former colleagues. In exchange, prosecutors dropped all other charges against him, including genocide.

After reading the VOA report, we think of the brutal persecution in China, and the torture and killing of Falun Gong practitioners conducted by Jiang Zemin and his criminal groups over the past four years. These criminals will soon be forced to take responsibility for their actions.

According to incomplete statistics from unofficial channels breaking through the Chinese government's news block, 824 Falun Gong practitioners have been tortured to death since July 20, 1999. Death cases have been reported in over 30 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the Central Government across China. According to April 12, 2003 reports by Minghui.net, provinces with the highest death toll are: Heilongjiang Province, Jilin Province, Shandong Province, Liaoning Province, Hebei Province, Hubei Province and Sichuan Province, in descending order. Among those tortured to death, 48% were female, and 26.5% were elderly practitioners, between 50 and 70 years old. This still leaves many unaccounted for. According to official Chinese communist statistics, by the end of October 2001, up to 1600 Falun Gong practitioners had died in detention, at least 6000 were illegally sentenced to prison, over 100,000 had been sent to forced labor camps, and thousands were tortured in mental hospitals by forced injections of nerve-damaging drugs. Numerous Falun Gong practitioners have been abducted and detained in brainwashing centers in different areas, where they are subject to mental torture. Even more are subject to beatings, bodily abuse, and financial extortion from "law-enforcement" officers.

Names, addresses and criminal details for those who illegally persecute Falun Dafa practitioners are being collected and recorded. These criminals will be punished to the full extent of the law.