Thursday, February 01, 2007 By Martin Barillas
Canadian investigators released a report January 31 that makes shocking allegations about China's totalitarian government. Long-rumored and feared, it appears that China may have indeed added to its catalogue of crimes against humanity that of actually "harvesting" - that is to say, removing - organs from unwilling human beings. According to the report, members of the Falun Gong- a native spiritual movement in opposition to the communist government - are especially targeted. [Editors' note: Falun Gong practitioners oppose and resist the persecution, but have never sought political power.]
David Matas, a human rights lawyer from Ontario Canada, and David Kilgour, a former Canadian Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific region, conducted the investigation at the request of the Washington DC-based Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of the Falun Gong.
The Chinese Deputy Minister of Public Health, Huang Jiefu, admitted at a conference held in the Philippines in 2005 that organs are indeed taken from executed prisoners. However, it was this week that the Health Ministry spokesman Mao Qunan admitted, despite previous and repeated denials, that organs are being "harvested" from prisoners. That this unethical practice is extended specifically to Falun Gong members is an issue that this latter-day Mao has managed to skirt.
Anyone who has paid attention to China over the last decade will have noted the considerable gains in wealth and productivity in the world's most populous country. That China has displaced a good number of manufacturing and garment jobs from the US and other countries is also no secret. Fortunes are being made in China on the backs of workers who are not allowed to dissent or organize. And fortunes are being made in the West, especially by retailers such as Wal-Mart and Kmart, who sell goods produced by exploited labor to willing Americans and Europeans.
But it would seem that the West has forgotten just how murderous the Chinese government has been since Mao Tse-tung came to power in the early 1950s. According to the Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Steph�ne Courtois, et al., Chinese communists have been responsible for killing more innocent people than either Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin were able to do in total. Millions of peasants, intellectuals, missionaries, political enemies, and others were swept up into China's decades-long murderous rampage. Women who bear more than the one child allowed by the Chinese government are forced to abort their unborn children. Christians who belong to churches of which the government disapproves must worship in hiding for fear of beatings, torture, long prison sentences, and disappearances. Tibetan Buddhists fleeing from their Chinese-controlled homeland are shot as they try to escape to neighboring Bhutan, India, and Nepal.
As the recent report on organ-harvesting notes, China directs its ire especially at the Falun Gong, Christians, Tibetans, Buddhists, and minorities. But it is Falun Gong that receives special attention. Those of Falun Gong who self-identified were treated viciously after the famous Tianamen Square protests. Once arrested, they were tortured and taken to their home districts where their family members and co-workers were also singled out for having been exposed to the Falun Gong contagion.
Patients receiving harvested organs such as livers and kidneys come from China and abroad. They are told to report to surgery just scant hours before going under the knife. Often conducted at night, surgeons and attending nurses remain anonymous while patients are not allowed to see any documentation that the organs received are from volunteers. In the cold calculation of China's ever more prosperous communist masters, the transaction of organs harvested from prisoners (presumably having had the organs removed while they were still alive) is an merely an efficient and profitable use of a human resource that would otherwise go to waste.
There is little evidence left of these crimes. The bodies of victims are cremated and no word is given to loved ones of their disposal. The operating rooms where the murders and transplants occur look like any others.
The report had to rely on testimony from the recipients of organs, statements by the Chinese government, as well as Falun Gong. The authors did not visit China to conduct the investigation but have offered to go in order to corroborate or disprove the horrific allegations.
But it all bears the mark of veracity. After the horrors of the Holocaust, no thinking person can entirely discredit reports of murder at the hands of totalitarians. You the reader are therefore warned: Just as in the late 1930s and during the Second World War when reports came out of Germany of the gassing of homosexuals, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and mental cripples, you must take heed. The people of China cry havoc. Will they be heard?
Info: Report on Organ Harvesting in China
Martin Barillas is a former US diplomat and human rights observer who served in Latin America, Europe, and the US. He is Religion News editor for Spero News and blogs at HispanoBizantino.
http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=7720&t=Murders+in+China+to+
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Category: Organ Harvesting
