Thursday, May 17, 2012

Chen Guangcheng's elder brother speaks of ordeal

English translation based on YouTube video of interview with Chen Guangfu and his wife, conducted by Hong Kong-based iSun Affairs magazine on May 12, 2012.

Chen Guangfu
Chen Guangcheng's elder brother

Shortly after we turned off the lights, I heard a car stop outside. As soon as I heard the car at that time of the night, I knew it must have come for me. I knew they wouldn't let me off the hook after Chen Guangcheng left. So I quickly put on my clothes. As soon as I put on my pants, they broke into that outer door. Then they broke into the inner door, too. Two doors were broken into, very quickly.

Then they shouted: "Are you Chen Guangfu?" I said yes. Without warning, before I even got to put on my jacket, they covered my head with a hood, bent my arms behind my back and carried me out. As the hood was not properly put on, I could still see a little and realized they had also broken into the room on the east side. They had two groups of people breaking into my house simultaneously.

Then, sandwiched between two men, with another pushing my head down -- I figured there were four to five of them in total -- I was pushed into a car and driven to the office of the Yinan County Economic Crime Investigation Team. Having already cuffed me in the car, they placed me in a chair upon arrival. They chained my feet to the chair while my hands remained cuffed behind my back and raised upward.

They started slapping my face. None of them was in police uniform and they just asked if I knew what was going on. I said: "I don't know." They kept slapping, only on one side of the face. Then someone started pinching my rib cage and stamping on my foot with his leather shoe. Finally I said: "Is this because Guangcheng left?" They said: "Then why were you playing dumb earlier?" I said: "If this is about Guangcheng leaving, I can tell you everything."

So I told them everything. They wrote everything down, repeatedly. This thing involved many people. I didn't want to implicate others so I insisted I was the one who rescued him. I was not cooperating in exposing or talking about others, but it seemed they had already had some leads. They said: "It's fine that you don't want to talk about others, but let us remind you about someone -- do you know Liu Yuancheng from Xishigu Village?" When I heard that, I realized they had already known something.

I resisted for a long time but finally gave in. I hadn't planned to hide anything anyway. Since Guangcheng had already left, other details were rather meaningless. I was just reluctant to expose those who had helped Guangcheng, but they had already known something. They started reminding me of the names, one by one, knowing that I wouldn't volunteer information. Eventually I told them the whole thing. They interrogated me for two days and three nights.

During interrogation, they told me the guy in charge was Ma Chenglian (phonetic), the Communist Party secretary responsible for law enforcement in the county and also the police chief. He told me: "Something major happened in your house after you were taken away. I am not making this up and I'm telling you as the police chief that your son injured Zhang Jian with a kitchen cleaver. Zhang suffered more than 20 cuts and his survival isn't guaranteed yet. Your son also attacked two other guards." After telling me that, he said: "All this was caused by you because you helped Guangcheng escape. If you hadn't helped Guangcheng escape, such things wouldn't have happened in your house."

Since I knew him from before, I asked: "Secretary Ma, I respect you and hope you will answer me one thing truthfully -- did my son injure people in our own courtyard or on the streets?" He said it was in the house -- he said clearly it happened in the house. Then I said: "So he didn't chase people to the streets to attack them." They all laughed, and asked if I was thinking about hiring lawyers to claim my son had acted in self-defense. So I heard about my son injuring others while in jail.

When I returned home, I saw a lot of blood stain over there (pointing to the wall behind him). I think Secretary Ma was right that it happened in the house. The injured ran toward the door, leaving blood near the doorway.

Ren Zongju
Chen Guangfu's wife

They dragged (my son) inside and started beating him -- so many of them attacking a single man. They were so ferocious some stuff fell to the ground. Blood was steaming down my son's face, also on this thighs with flesh exposed beneath broken pants. He said me: "Ma, I have to run." My husband had left some money for me and the notes fell to the ground amid the chaos. Fortunately, nobody else had noticed. So I picked up the money and gave it to my son. I just said: "Take the money."

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