by Perple Lu ( jishi [at]
sbcglobal.net )
San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, Friday May 23rd
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/05/23/18501910.php
Tatiana Kostanian, founder of MHONA International, a nonprofit group for the disabled, has taken up a personal mission to collect one million signatures to end involuntary organ harvesting in China before the August Games. Her petition website is: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/928204536. She also wills to hold a town-hall meeting in San Jose, inclusive of people of all disabilities and transplant patients to speak out about global and local human rights issues with a highlight on involuntary organ harvesting.
"I am asking students, civilians across the United
States and globally to join with us in a town meeting," said Tatiana A.
Kostanian, a disabled San Franciscan, who has taken it as a personal mission to
collect one million signatures, including from the disabled and the severely
disabled, to end organ harvesting in China. "Our voices, lives are the least and
last invited in on both local and global issues."
At 65, wheelchair
bound, and on life support, Kostanian, who spends her time visiting physicians
and the Mayor's Disability Council in San Francisco, nevertheless, took up a new
mission to help save the myriads of lives who are in danger of involuntary organ
harvesting. According a Canadian human rights lawyer and coauthor of an
independent organ-harvesting investigation, David Matas, transplant tourism
banking on the organs of Falun Gong practitioners has become a billion-dollar
industry.
�We have concluded that the government of China and its
agencies in numerous parts of the country, in particular hospitals but also
detention centres and 'people's courts', since 1999 have put to death a large
but unknown number of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience,� concluded Matas and
coauthor David Kilgour in their January 2007 revised report after examining 33
elements of proof and disproof, including phone calls to Chinese hospitals,
donor recipient interviews and corroborated studies.
Thirty-five years
ago, Kostanian started her work with a support group for survivors of violent
trauma. "I have had in my life, every conceivable issue thrown my way�from
toddler-hood to my late age of 65," said the founder of MHONA International, a
nonprofit group for the disabled. Having faced multiple challenges in getting
around, of not being heard, and not being included, Kostanian finally took up
the issue of universal human rights.
Together, four sides of Kostanian's
family experienced the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian genocide, and the
Holocaust. "As a family, we've faced communist tyranny, treachery, traitors,
torturers," Kostanian recalled. "I have faced extremes of rape, torture and
starvation, abuses as a child into adulthood from a father who was tortured by
the communists in Russia."
After attending the Human Rights Torch Relay
in San Francisco in early April, she soon came up with the idea for a
million-signature Internet petition. "What I want to do is to gather signatures
from around the globe of both people who are disabled/profoundly disabled as
well as friends and families," wrote Kostanian on April 13, to stop "the
extremes of abuses, torture and killing actions of the Chinese Communists, as
well to stop the selling and harvesting of organs, tissues, of the Falun Gong
and other prisoners incarcerated in the Chinese communist's Gulag Prisons and
Slave Labor Camps."
On May 1 Kostanian set up her own petition website.
"Yes, I'm on life support, but I can't sit back ready to die, without giving
something of definite purpose," she said. "I believe it is time for our lives to
step forward and show the world what we feel, think about these crimes against
humanity as individuals and as disabled communities."
Her mission to
collect a million signatures was only the beginning, however. Kostanian showed
up in her wheelchair in San Francisco's Union Square again on May 10 to collect
signatures. She recalled many people who passed by the table, shocked to see a
picture of a woman terribly charred from electric shock tortures, started to
talk and to ask questions, but then suddenly looked away and said, "This has
nothing to do with me."
"In that moment of their statement, it is I who
look shocked, not quite believing that any human being can walk away and deny a
simple signature that just might be the key to stopping the continuum of
genocide in operation in Mainland communist China," she later recounted.
"We may have less of finances, or every day needs met, but our hearts,
our very conscience is not empty in wanting our message to reach every available
heart," she said, referring to the community of disabled.
But some
people have also been particularly quick to offer their signatures. They include
tourists, locals and young children.
"Organs from the poorest of the
poor to give to the rich. Disgusting!" Sherri O'Connor of Canada left her
signature and commented on Kostanian's petition website on May 15.
Another signer, Kathleen A. H. of Arizona wrote, "It is barbaric, and
we, as human beings should be held accountable for such savage acts against
other humans!"
Isabella Hillmayr from Greece wrote of the prisoners of
conscience on the website, "Your thoughts and mind is free, while your body is
imprisoned�my spirit is with you."
With only three months to go and less
than 200 signatures so far, Kostanian is not daunted. "I will not sit back � and
let my voice, or the voices of my sisters and brothers � who gave up the
ultimate, their life, and their organs and tissues, to say we can't gain a
million or more signatures," she wrote on May 10.
"I want to see if we
might be able to reach out to some people of leadership in San Jose as well,"
she said on May 13, referring to a global town meeting of disabled and
non-disabled people alike. "It has to be done and pulled together by the people,
not by leaders of governments, or nations, but by the heart of everyday human
beings."
Tatiana Kostanian's petition website is: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/928204536