Address (revised) by Hon. David Kilgour
at
International Symposium on Forms of Repression in
Communist Regimes
Brancoveanu Monastery
near Fagaras, Romania
13 July 2007
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Canada reportedly has more citizens of origin in the
former Soviet bloc as a percentage of our population than any other NATO member
country. The various themes of the papers given in summary form at this
conference are thus of particular importance to many Canadians too.
My own admiration for all of you
across Romania who risked your lives to stand up to the various armed forces of
Ceausescu's regime during December, 1989 is enormous. What cruel and inhuman violence
was meted out by his supporters even in the final
days.
I still recall being with hundreds
of Romanian-Canadians and others outside the Romanian embassy in Ottawa the
night the regime fell. As many of us as could get into
the building were suddenly invited in, although on earlier nights we were clearly unwelcome.
Role of civil society in
illuminating past
Your
civil society organizations should teach continuously about your 45-year
experience with totalitarianism. For example, one of many things I've learned as
a visitor is that as late as 1944 the Romanian Communist party had only about
1000 members, which no doubt explains in part why the Russian soldiers then in
your country required so much violence to impose their model of totalitarianism.
Second, as Stefan Caltia, painter and professor at the University of Arts,
Bucharest observes, "Communism in Romania was not a doctrine, it was a system by
which a group sought to enslave everyone else in the
country".
Professor Caltia also explained to
some of us what happened to the farming village in which he lived. Before
collectivization of agriculture in the 1950s, the residents farmed all the land
they owned with pride, vigour and care. When they were forced into collectives
in the 1950s, only about half the land was cultivated; he as a teacher was even
obliged to go door-to-door at about 9am each day to try to wake villagers up to
go to work. When the land was reprivatized in the 1990s, many ties with the land
had unfortunately been broken and others had left the community, so even less
land is used productively today. The experience in his village was evidently
repeated generally throughout rural
Romania.
And this is just one example of how the regime sought to
deprive individuals of their identities and to distort the natural course of
life. Your symposium offered many
more examples of this kind, so the experiences of the Romanian anti-Communist
resistance can be compared with those in other countries.
Some of us visited
the Fagaras Fortress- a historical monument of the 14th century- that functioned
as a prison mainly for officials arrested after 1948, for those who formed the
local resistance in the nearby mountains, and for other dissidents who opposed
the imposition of Communist control over the region.
I was impressed by the pride that your foundation,
the 'Negru Voda' Foundation, your Academy and your Institute of
Communist Crimes Investigation have in all anti-Cmmunist resistance in this
special part of the country- Fagaras Land- and by the fact that you want to keep the memories alive through setting up a Museum of the
Communist Repression.
China Today
Restored and other democracies can
learn much from today's China as a case study of what might still be occurring
as well in eastern Europe and
elsewhere in the absence of the events of 1989. The important book, Mao-The
Unknown Story, by Jung Chang (author of Wild Swans) and Jon Halliday, for
example, quotes Mao saying about his vital role in installing the Kymer Rouge regime in Cambodia in
1975:
"Pol Pot, its leader, under whom
up to one quarter of the Cambodian people perished in the space of a few years,
was a soul-mate of Mao's. Immediately after Pol Pot took power, Mao
congratulated him face to face on his slave-labor-camp state: 'You have scored a
splendid victory. Just a single blow and no more
classes.' What Mao meant was that everyone had become a slave."
Mao and Tibet
The book makes clear that the leader whose portrait and
corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in Beijing was one of the cruellest
despots in all of recorded history. The authors conclude sadly that Mao
was "responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other
twentieth-century leader."
Given your own experience with an invading army, it seems
worthwhile to illustrate Mao's own methods with neighbours from Chapter 42 of
the book, which deals with how he treated Tibet. Briefly, his food seizures from
Tibetans in the late 1950s were so severe that they understandably rebelled.
This pleased him because, as he wrote, "...this makes it possible to solve our
own problems through war." He then allowed the then very young Dalai Lama (who
became an honorary citizen of Canada last year) to escape to India in order to
avoid inflaming world opinion and began his war of terror against
Tibetans.
The Panchen Lama, the
second-ranking spiritual of Tibetans, who initially welcomed Mao's soldiers into
Tibet, wrote in 1962 that his people were herded into canteens, where they were
fed "weeds, even inedible tree bark, leaves, grass, roots and seeds." Years
later, he revealed that 15-20
percent of all Tibetans-perhaps half the adult males-were imprisoned, where they were "essentially worked to
death."
The misery inflicted on Tibetans
differed only in degree from what Mao did to many of his fellow citizens across
China. For example, more than 35 million Chinese died needlessly of
starvation during his bizarre "Great Leap Forward" in the late 1950s.
World Peace
On the important subject of world
peace, I might also note from the book that in 1960 at a meeting of Communist
leaders from 51 countries in Bucharest Russia's Khrushchev refuted Mao's
contention that war was necessary to bring about socialism: "Only madmen and
maniacs can now call for another world war.' The Russian leader also told Mao's
delegate at the meeting, Peng Zhen, "Since you love Stalin so much, why don't you take his corpse to
Peking?" He also told his colleagues, "When I look at Mao, I see Stalin, a perfect copy."
The history since 1949 of Mao's party in China was written
with continuous bloodshed, corruption and deception. Virtually everything its
leaders do-then, now or whenever-is designed to extend their exclusive hold on
the levers of government. This is why Mao's heirs seek to perpetuate positive
myths about him and to minimize the terrible things he did to his own people and
foreigners alike: if the Chinese people knew the truth, his party would lose any
remaining legitimacy to govern the country .
Chinese People Today
No doubt like all of you, I have
the highest admiration for the people of China and their millennia of hard work,
accumulated wisdom, success with agriculture, myriad inventions, international
exploration, art, literature, philosophies and Confucian harmony earlier in
governance. In spite of its rich history, China's totalitarian government,
combined in recent years with "anything goes" capitalism, have created terrible conditions for most of
both the people and the natural environment throughout the country. China is its
people, not its unelected government.
In 1975, after more than a quarter
century of absolute power, Mao admitted privately that China was the poorest
nation on earth. Since 1978, Deng Xiao-ping, whom Mao twice purged from
the party leadership, managed to reverse the disasterous economic policies. One
consequence of Deng's 'anything goes' model of capitalism, however, was that the
people of China are today exploited probably more than any other population on
earth. They are also kept down by millions of officials, police and soldiers. As
the Nobel prize laureate, Amartya Sen, puts it, economic growth that pays no
attention to the welfare of its own people is nothing.
Consider this quote from The Nine
Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party: "The CCP does not hold universal
standards for human nature...It does not believe in God (and) does not respect
physical nature. 'Battle with heaven, fight with the earth, struggle with
humans-therein lies endless joy'-the party motto during the Cultural
Revolution." So many good citizens of all ages were killed by Mao's Red Guards
during the 'Cultural Revolution'; an entire generation was also denied formal
education. The reason for the entire initiative by Mao, as now
documented in the Jung Chang-Halliday book, was to create an atmosphere of
terror across the country so that he could carry out a Stalin-like purge of his perceived enemies.
The pre-1949 culture
in China respected loyalty and a host of other values. Confucianism (which Mao
detested), Buddhism and Taoism encouraged stability. Taoism encouraged
truthfulness; Buddhism, compassion; Confucianism, loyalty, acceptance and
benevolence. Given that the Falun Gong's practices are based on similar
principles, it is not surprising that its practitioners across China have been
persecuted mercilessly now continuously since the summer of 1999. This has
included virtually every known method of torture, from whips, electric shocks,
burning with open flames or lit cigarettes, being hung on walls, sexual
assaults, rapes and murders. The UN rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, reported last year
that two-thirds of the torture victims in China are Falun Gong prisoners of
conscience.
Report: Bloody Harvest
The Falun Gong was declared an
'enemy' of the party only after the government had actively promoted its healthy
lifestyle and meditation for several years, Falun Gong practitioners continue to
be in effect murdered by medical personnel across China for their vital organs.
The independent revised report on this new crime against humanity by David Matas
and me can be accessed in about 18 languages atorganharvestinvestigation.net.
Our revised report of January with
its appendices is 178 pages long in one edition, so I'll
summarize here its major findings only briefly:
Since launching our independent investigation in May, 2006
at the request of the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in
China, Matas and I have concluded to our horror that the government of China and
its agencies in numerous parts of the country have "put to death a large but unknown number of Falun Gong
prisoners of conscience.
Their vital organs, including
kidneys, livers, corneas and hearts, were seized involuntarily for sale at high
prices, sometimes to foreigners, who normally face long waits for voluntary
donations of such organs in their home
countries."
Falun Gong practitioners do a combination of five physical
exercises and spiritual principles based on "truth, compassion and forbearance".
The latter contain similar principles as Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. It
grew in numbers from virtually nothing in 1992 to more than 70 million practitioners across China
at the end of the nineties by one government of China estimate.
In the summer of 1999
for reasons which seem mostly rooted in totalitarian paranoia, the party
unleashed a campaign of media vilification and persecution which continues to
the present. The invented rationale was that Falun Gong was an "enemy of the
state" and an "evil cult", although in
reality its practitioners in fact were non-political until attacked and have
none of the characteristics of a cult.
Falun Gong practitioners have
since been arrested in huge numbers; they are imprisoned in 're-education camps'
almost always without charge or trial and many have been tortured and forced to
work long hours in manufacturing facilities until they renounce their beliefs.
Thousands of named practitioners have died as result of torture. Only Falun Gong
prisoners among the general prison population are regularly blood tested and physically for a terrible
reason which is now evident.
Virtually all organs transplanted
in China come from executed prisoners, but this group comprises both convicted
individuals and Falun Gong practitioners. The latter are rarely convicted of
anything. Unlike convicts, they are in effect murdered by doctors and nurses
with toxic inoculations and scalpels to provide organs for tissue compatible
organ recipients, who pay large amounts of money for the organs (ranging from $30,000 US to $180,000 for
a kidney-liver combination).
No Smoking
Guns
The seizing of organs in China
from Falun Gong practitioners is done in operating rooms. The victims are killed
in the process and their bodies are cremated. The medical perpetrators of these
acts are guilty of crimes against humanity and highly unlikely to confess.
Fair-minded persons considering our evidence as a whole can, as we do, have 'gut
level certainty', as one law professor referred to criminal convictions based
largely on compelling circumstantial evidence, that these crimes have taken
place and continue to occur. Smoking guns exist mostly on television.
Our terrible conclusion comes not
from any one of the thirty three pieces of evidence we have now considered, but
from the combination of all of them. All of the thirty
three however, are verifiable and in most cases are incontestable. Five representative samples
are these:
1- Falun Gong
practitioners constitute a huge prison population which the government vilifies,
dehumanizes, depersonalizes and marginalizes even more than prisoners condemned
to death upon conviction for capital offences (numbering more than 60 offences,
including tax fraud).
2-We had
callers telephoning hospitals and other institutions across China, posing as
family members of persons needing organ transplants; in a wide variety of locations the
respondents said that Falun Gong prisoners were the source of the organs.
3-The ex-wife of a
surgeon told us that he had personally removed the corneas from approximately
two thousand Falun Gong practitioners in Shenyang city in northeast China
during the two-year period before October, 2003 and we found her statement to
be credible.
4-Waiting times for
organ transplants in China are astonishingly short-a matter of days or weeks,
strongly suggesting a bank of living "donors" available for organ tourists.
Everywhere else in the world waiting times are measured in months and years.
Hospital websites in China
self-incriminate by boasting of very short waits for all organs on payment of large fees.
5-Transplant recipients told us that military personnel do
operations in both military and civilian hospitals. The website of the Organ
Transplant
Centre of the Armed Police General Hospital Centre in Beijing boldly says: "Our Organ Transplant Center is our
main
department for making money." One organ recipient in Asia
told us that he was brought fully seven kidneys by a military surgeon before the
eighth
was found to be compatible with his body tissue and anti-bodies. Eight human beings died before he got his usable
kidney.
In summary, the evidence
that these crimes have been occurring across China is simply overwhelming. The
government of China has to date produced no effective response to our report.
Conclusions
Confirmed
By
announcing on April 6th this year that as of May 1st there will be no more trade
in human organs, the government of China unintentionally confirmed the grisly
truth of the conclusion by many, including our report. Matas and I, of course,
hope that this latest edict will stop the killing of Falun Gong prisoners of
conscience both before and after the Beijing Olympic Games. Given the vast sums
of money involved, the
indications that the military operate outside the health system and the obvious
linkage of this announcement to concern about the now indelibly termed "Genocide
Olympics", we remain sceptical that much will change in a crime against humanity
that has gone on across China now for about six years.
The government of China has a
history in this area of announcing policies and laws which sound fine in
principle to the internationalcommunity but are then not enforced. This
announcement will mean nothing if the practice of organ harvesting from
non-consenting 'donors' for huge sums of money continues.
The Chinese Deputy Health Minister
Huang Jiefu, speaking in Guangzhou in mid-November 2006, denounced the selling
of organs of executed prisoners, saying, "Under-the-table business must be
banned." Yet the practice had already been banned in law on July I, 2006 and by
policy long before that, so his speech was an official acknowledgement that the
previous bans were ineffective. We worry that this announcement of a change in
the law is nothing more than a political cosmetic, a piece of propaganda with
its eye fixed firmly on cleansing the party's terrible human rights reputation
before the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the minds of prospective foreign visitors.
"Draw Lessons from
Facts"
This brings me to The
China Fantasy by an American, James Mann, which criticizes the common
presumption that the CCP is bound to move towards democracy, political
liberalization and respecting human rights. Mann thinks the elites in cities
like Shanghai and Beijing might turn out to want to perpetuate authoritarian
governance in China, contrary to the three decades-old assumptions of American
politicians in both parties, business executives, sinologists and diplomats. His
book argues that it is time to stop overlooking the party's human rights abuses, the
crushing of political dissent at home and support for pariah regimes abroad.
Dunn asserts that if
China becomes a democracy the chances of a military confrontation of any kind
anywhere would disappear immediately. As well, the 1.3 billion residents of
China deserve the right to choose their own government rather than continue with
an unelected party "with a long, unsavoury, violence-prone history, a love of
its own privileges and a weakness for corruption."
There is also the role of the CCP abroad, which, Dunn
notes, undermines democratic values continuously. It gave Robert Mugabe an
honourary degree in China and economic help to his government, although his
regime is one of the most brutal and corrupt anywhere on earth. It is the
principal backer of the military junta in Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi
continues under house arrest 16 years after she and her
supporters won an open election. When Uzbekistan president Islam Karimov ordered
a murderous crackdown on demonstrators in 2005, China's government shored him
up. In Sudan, where reasonable people long ago concluded that the Bashir regime
has been conducting crimes against humanity if not genocide in Darfur for years,
the CCP is one of his major backers, especially at the UN Security Council.
Recently China sent several hundred "engineers" to Sudan, but no-one has any
doubt that this sudden interest in stopping the ongoing killing and raping is
related only to the "Genocide Olympics" about which Darfur supporters like Mia Farrow continue to raise public
awareness.
Olympic Games
Dunn thinks the media hype surrounding the 2008 Olympic
Games will dwarf all earlier ones. He asks pointedly if the "world's car
manufacturers and beer companies (will) want to sponsor television coverage of
the Olympics that dwells on the unpleasant side of China-the sweatshops, the
poverty, the political prisoners, the corruption and the environmental
disasters? Not likely." He queries if the Beijing games will follow the terrible
precedent of the Berlin Olympics of 1936.
The presence of a huge international media corps in Beijing
could help to spur political demonstrations by democracy activists, religious
groups, including Falun Gong, Tibetans, Uighurs, aggrieved workers and farmers,
but only if they can penetrate the security designed to keep them away from the
television cameras. Dunn: "Would-be protesters will be kept out of Beijing (or
if they live in the city, they may be thrown out of Beijing). Crowds will not be
allowed to gather; if they do, they will dispersed before they can make it to
any public space. The police will be especially rough on groups seeking access
to Tiananmen Square, which has been off limits to protests since 1989."
The real
test will come after the foreigners have left Beijing, says Dunn. How many of
any changes in China's political system hinted at on the eve of the Games will
be implemented? Will the democratic world successfully integrate China to our
norms? Or will the business community in Canada and elsewhere have to continue
to explain why they are kowtowing to a regime that rather recently ordered tanks
to fire on unarmed citizens and which since 2000 has been killing Falun Gong
prisoners of conscience without trial and selling their organs for cash to organ tourists? Is this corporate social
responsibility to some CEOs?
Dunn
correctly stresses that the real problem with the business community is "Who's
integrating whom?" How many Canadians have lost their livelihoods as a result of
this integration, including, for example, 800 Goodyear Tire employees near
Montreal who saw their tire plant close a few months ago because someone thinks
they can manufacture tires more cheaply in China? I noticed only recently
that a lot of tires made in China, among other consumer products, are being
recalled in the US for safety reasons because of indicated manufacturing defects.
Conclusion
We democrats around the world must
be neither complacent nor over confident. There are still about 45 dictatorships
in the world, which do much harm to both human beings and the natural
environment.
Look at
what the government of China, for example, is doing to its own people, including
independent journalists, human rights activists, democrats, religious
communities, Uyghurs, Tibetans and many others. In respect of the large Falun
Gong community, as mentioned, it is simply inconceivable that the government
hosting the Olympic Games in one part of its capital city next year could be
simultaneously killing some of its own people for profit in another district of
the same city. This terrible commercial practice must stop
now.
Whether in Romania, China or Canada, human dignity is
ultimately
indivisible across our shrunken world today.