Atrocious Surgical Mass Murder Charged China’s Trade in Falun Gong Body Parts

CounterPunch, Oct 1-15, 2006, VOL 13, No.17

By Larry Lack

It’s no secret that China’s government has been conducing a national propa- ganda and police campaign, marked by mass arrests and widespread torture, against the movement known as Falun Gong.

It’s also no secret that for at least a decade the internal organs of convicts executed in China have been “harvested” by surgical teams and sold to transplant patients, many of them foreigners who travel to China for organ transplant operations.

A report published this July in Canada reveals that over the past five or six years China’s thriving transplant trade has come to rely heavily on another source of human organs than those executed as criminals. This second source is the bodies of Falun Gong devotees, thousands of whom are held in secret prisons throughout China for practising their religion.

In their Report Into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China, Canadian immigration lawyer David Matas and David Kilgour, a former member of Canada’s Parliament who is also a lawyer, present a rigorous and convincing indictment of China’s lucrative illicit trade in human body parts. Their report implicates hundreds, and possibly thousands of Chinese officials in the illegal confinement and commercial slaughter of a group of Chinese citizens whose only “crime” was their involvement with a nonviolent spiritual movement, which the Beijing government is attempting, by its own account, to “eradicate”.

Months of research, including interviews with Chinese doctors and officials and with Falun Gong survivors, refugees and exiles, brought Kilgour and Matas to a terrible conclusion. “The allegations here”, they write, “ are so shocking that they are almost impossible to believe”. But the wealth of carefully corroborated evidence compiled in their report effectively supports their finding that “there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners.”

The Kilgour/Matas report combines eyewitness accounts with a wealth of supporting evidence suggesting that beginning in 2000 or 2001 Chinese doctors, hospitals and penal authorities have collected and sold thousands of corneas, hearts, livers, kidneys, skin and other organs removed from living Falun Gong prisoners. And this illicit industry, Kilgour and Matas believe, is probably still murdering and dismembering imprisoned Falun Gong “donors” and selling their organs to well-heeled clients/patients, some of whom opt for surgery in China specifically because they want organs from healthy, living donors rather than from brain-dead patients.

Kilgour and Matas, who are not Falun Gong practitioners, interviewed informants in China and exiled Falun Gong practitioners in several other countries and gleaned information from Chinese hospital and organ transplant websites. Their report includes appendices of carefully footnoted information on China’s campaign to crush the Falun Gong, quoted from the Falun Gong website as well as from official sources in China and human rights groups and media outside China. The wealth of statistical data and information in these appendices verifies the scope and extreme brutality of China’s ongoing campaign to demonize and destroy the Falun Gong and strengthens the report’s central conclusion that Falun Gong practitioners have been and are being killed so their organs can be sold for profit. It also confirms the Kilgour-Matas report’s conclusions regarding the complicity of large numbers of Chinese medical professionals, army and court officials in the organ trade, and the trade’s market-driven preference for selectively excising the organs of healthy Falun Gong practitioners, especially men in their thirties.

Falun Gong sources claim that about a hundred thousand of the movement’s followers have been imprisoned for alleged subversion or other crimes against the state, that a similar number have been sent to forced labor camps, and that a large but unknown number of practitioners have disappeared. They also claim that some arrested Falun Gong disciples have been sent to psychiatric hospitals where they have been injected with experimental psychotropic drugs, nerve poisons, and drugs or chemicals that cause recurring and excruciating pain. The Clearvision Net website of the Falun Gong recently stated that “According to incomplete statistics, within the past (seven) years beginning on July 20, 1999, more than 2,898 practitioners have been verified as having been tortured to death in over 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities.”

In the atmosphere of official secrecy, denial and repression that shrouds contemporary politics in China, reliable numbers, documentation and other smoking gun evidence are often hard to find. Despite these obstacles, Kilgour and Matas’ lawyerly insistence on multiple corroborating sources lends credence to their claim that thousands of arrested Falun Gong practitioners have been and probably still are warehoused in secret detention centers so their organs can be sold as transplant customers arrive.

According to the Kilgour-Matas report’s sources, after their arrival at the detention centers, some of which are located underground in the vicinity of hospitals or ordinary prisons, Falun Gong detainees are subjected to prolonged physical examination. Released and exiled former Falun Gong prisoners have reported that since most of them had previously experienced beatings and other severe mistreatment at the hands of their keepers this sudden interest in their health, often including whole body X-rays, electrocardiograms, heart, liver and kidney checks, eye examinations, and ultrasound assessments, was both surprising and unnerving.

Samples of the Falun Gong prisoners’ blood are drawn, forcibly if they resist, and over time they came to understand why this is so important, for organ transplant recipients and donors must share the same blood type.

When detention centers are notified that certain organs are required by hospitals and transplant clinics, prisoners whose blood types match those of waiting patients/customers are taken from their cells to operating rooms. There, according to an informant who worked as an administrator at a hospital where, she reported, her former husband, a neurosurgeon, removed corneas from approximately 2,000 Falun Gong victims, the prisoners are initially injected with a drug that stops the heart. Various organs are then removed in sequence by a team of surgeons working in separate rooms. To maximize profits, a computer network determines which organs are required for waiting customers. According to several of the report’s informants, once all of the victims’ readily salable parts have been removed, the pillaged corpses are incinerated in hospital boiler rooms to eliminate physical evidence of the operations. The extracted organs are shipped to transplant centers where other doctors implant them.

Partly because of the deep seated antipathy of the ruling Chinese Communist Party to any belief or activity with a spiritual dimension, and partly because Falun Gong, an unsanctioned spiritual movement, had attracted thousands of followers, the ruling party has put a high priority on its effort to stigmatize and destroy the movement not only as an allegedly dangerous cult, but also as a treasonous criminal conspiracy. The frequently stated determination of China’s government to “eradicate” Falun Gong has even extended beyond China to include threats and harassment of practitioners in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Because in China Falun Gong is widely reputed to offer improved health, strength and vitality to its devotees – a belief that even Chinese officials seem to share – its practitioners’ internal organs are thought to be especially vital and serviceable. Consequently, according to sources cited in the Kilgour-Matas report, they are highly prized and are specifically requested by some transplant seekers. The report includes quotes from phone interviews, in which doctors reassure the interviewers (who were posing as potential customers) that the organs they transplant are from living donors who are healthy because they practice Falun Gong.

The report mentions that many of those who are arrested for their ties to the Falun Gong movement refuse to identify themselves to the authorities because they fear that their family members and friends may be targeted by the government’s inquisition. Kilgour and Matas point out that this self-imposed anonymity may make these prisoners more likely to be tortured or executed — or selected as potential organ “donors”.

Among the key evidence supporting the Kilgour/Matas report’s conclusions are statistics from the China Medical Organ Transplant Association and China’s National Pharmacy Net. These figures show that starting in the year 2000, when persecution of the Falun Gong on a very large scale began, the number of transplant operations performed in China increased enormously, from a total of about 18,500 in the six year period, from 1994 through1999, to a total of about 60,000 from 2000 through 2005.

Using figures from Amnesty International, Kilgour and Matas show that less than a third of the 60,000 organs transplanted from 2000 through 2005 can be accounted as having come from executed convicts, on whom the government does keep and publish statistics. Executed convicts are the only known and readily identifiable source of transplant organs in China, where voluntary family organ donations are very rare, providing at most one per cent of all transplanted organs. Thus, the sources of more than 40,000 of the 60,000 organs transplanted in China from 2000 through 2005 – the years of the most intense persecution of the Falun Gong – are unknown and, Kilgour and Matas point out, cannot be accounted for by published statistics.

The report also notes that “Hospital web sites in China advertise short waiting times for organ transplants” and that “waiting times for organ transplants... in China appear to be much lower than anywhere else.” They quote a recent advertisement (now archived on the web) from the China International Transplantation Assistant Centre (sic) website, which boasts that “It may take only one week to find out the suitable (kidney) donor, the maximum time being one month,” along with the website’s additional claim that “If something wrong with the donor’s organ happens, the patient will have the option to be offered another organ donor and have the operation again in one week.”

Similarly, in April 2006 the Oriental Organ Transplant Centre’s website advertised that for liver transplant patients “the average waiting time is two weeks,” and the website of Changzheng Hospital in Shanghai claimed that its “average waiting time for a liver supply is one week among all the patients. “ (These quotes have been deleted from the websites where they formerly appeared, but the Kilgour-Matas report cites where the archived original versions can be found.)

In most parts of the U.S.A. and Canada, waiting times for organ transplants range from several months to two years or longer. Kilgour and Matas point out that “the median waiting time for a kidney in Canada was 32.5 months in 2003, and in British Columbia it was even longer at 52.5 months”, and that “if as indicated (in the Canadian Organ Replacement Register) the survival period for a kidney is between 24 (and) 48 hours and a liver about 12 hours, the presence of a large bank of living kidney-liver ‘donors’ must be the only way China’s transplant centers can assure such short waits to customers. The astonishingly short waiting times advertised for perfectly matched organs would suggest the existence of both a computer matching system for transplants and a large bank of live prospective ‘donors’. The advertisements do not identify Falun Gong practitioners as the source of these organs. But there are no other identified sources.”

Based on these circumstances, Kilgour and Matas observe that “even if the Falun Gong as the (source) of these organs is only an allegation, it is the only allegation we have. No other large body of people... have been identified to us as sources of organs sufficient in numbers to meet the large number of transplant demands now being made and met in China.”

Other evidence, much of it found in the report’s appendices, is quoted from Falun Gong publications, media sources, and reports from various human rights organizations. The appendices include numerous graphic personal and eyewitness descriptions of the tortures inflicted on Falun Gong prisoners. Described by Falun Gong survivors and former prisoners in China, the U.S., Canada, and France, the torture methods used against the Falun Gong include techniques such as depriving prisoners of clothing and sleep and subjecting them to cold temperatures, aggressive and violent interrogations, repeated beatings often inflicting acute and agonizing injuries, cutting and piercing of sensitive body parts including sexual organs, hanging prisoners for long periods by their arms or legs, stress positions, gang rapes, injections of experimental drugs and chemicals that cause excruciating pain, and other assaults on and violations of Falun Gong prisoners.

As long ago as August 5, 2001, the Washington Post foreign news service published an article by John Pomfret and Phillip P. Pan that appeared under the headline “Torture is Breaking Falun Gong: China Systematically Eradicating Group.” Since then scores of published reports have chronicled the Falun Gong persecutions, and western governments, including that of the U.S., have chronicled the excesses of cruelty that characterize China’s criminal suppression of an innocent spiritual movement.

But to date there has been no effective response from the United Nations or from any group of governments. Aside from the often heroic efforts of some human rights groups, nothing effective has been done to focus attention on a campaign of terror.

On September 14, 2006, David Kilgour and David Matas followed up Kilgour’s presentation to the National Press Club in Washington with a press conference in the rotunda of the U.S. capital. The following week, Kilgour and other defenders of the Falun Gong addressed an international human rights meeting at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva. But western media coverage remains low-key, occasional,and almost entirely relegated to the back pages of “mainstream” newspapers. The China bureaus of western television and radio networks broadcast plenty of news from China, but any effort to report on the persecution of the Falun Gong produces indignation, threats, and severe harassment from China’s government and its ruling party. Canada’s national radio network, CBC, recently upgraded its Beijing bureau and posted one of its top political reporters, Anthony Germaine,to head that bureau. But in more than six months of regular reporting from China, Germaine has not mentioned the Falun Gong or the Beijing government’s effort to “eradicate” it. If Germaine or any other reporter tried to report on this subject, he and the CBC would probably be expelled from China.

America’s trade deficit with China reached $68 billion in July and shows no sign of easing. Wal-Mart , Home Depot and thousands of other mass marketers,corporations and businesses in both the U.S. and Canada are heavily dependent on trade with China. And as Google’s recent capitulation to China’s insistence that it exclude all mention of the Falun Gong from its “service” to computer users in the People’s Republic demonstrates, western reporting about the persecution of the Falun Gong and other human rights issues can be very significantly affected – in this case eliminated – by economic pressures and government threats to restrict the activities of information providers if they refuse to comply with orders specifying what they may and may not report about.

The Kilgour/Matas report ends with a list of reasonable recommendations as to how governments and the international community should be responding to the trade in human organs obtained by the slaughter of prisoners that is going on in China. Will the United Nations or any western government conduct a serious inquiry into this infernal industry that is tolerated and to a significant extent operated by the Chinese government? Will western countries even consider the simple step of prohibiting their nationals from traveling to China to take advantage of that country’s abundant supply of organs extracted from living prisoners? CP

Larry Lack is a writer living in New Brunswick, Canada.