Legislators hope to raise awareness of Falun Gong
plight
By ROY KILKEARY
Legislative Gazette Staff
Writer
Mon, Jun 11, 2007
In China, a lung is worth $150,000 and a
heart is worth $130,000, according to a human rights report titled Bloody
Harvest: Revised Report into Allegations of Organ Harvest of Falun Gong
Practitioners in China.
The report, written by Canadian human rights
lawyer David Matas and former Secretary of State of the Government of Canada for
the Asia Pacific Region David Kilgour, alleges that organs are harvested from
Falun Gong practitioners while they are still alive, cremating the corpses
afterward to hide evidence of the harvest, and sold to “organ tourists” who
visit the country, paying huge sums of money for a guaranteed organ match in a
fraction of the time of other waiting lists.
The authors of the report
held a press conference last week to call for the creation of legislation and
regulations requiring organ recipients to find out where their organs come from,
as well as promoting awareness by issuing advisories from both private and
public health institutions.
“We need to share with the rest of the world
what has transpired,” said Assemblyman Michael Benjamin, D-Bronx.
The
National Kidney Foundation has already issued a statement on its Web site that
it is “deeply concerned” by the organ harvesting allegations.
Falun Gong
is a spiritual, religious and exercise movement in China which some, including
the government of the People’s Republic of China, regard as a dangerous cult.
Others would suggest that, while having a charismatic leader named Li
Hongzhi, it is not a cult because practitioners are not coerced into their
beliefs nor financially obligated, and function as integrated members of
society, and advocates a strict philosophy of non-violence.
Kilgour
described a scenario relayed to him from one “organ tourist” who paid $20,000
for a guaranteed kidney match and visited China, where four kidneys were tested
against his without a match. Upon his return visit two months later, there were
four more kidneys tested against his with the eighth being a match, reportedly
from an “executed prisoner,” though the report describes military doctors
selecting names from a list and returning two to three hours later with a
kidney.
Kilgour, along with concerned citizens and relatives of Falun
Gong practitioners, spoke at a press conference at the Legislative Office
Building last Tuesday, urging legislators to take any action possible to bring
awareness to the current situation.
Haitao Xu, a practitioner of Falun
Gong and former citizen of China from the Guangdong Province, spoke about his
wife’s experience with persecution from the Chinese government.
He
described his wife, now exiled in Malaysia, being arrested at a protest and
noticing that other Falun Gong practitioners who refused to give their names
disappeared. This, coupled with the fact that his wife and others were given
medical exams including blood tests and X-rays while detained, lead Xu to
believe that some of the prisoners that disappeared had been used for organ
harvesting.
“Shortly after my wife returned home, the female Falun Gong
practitioner’s mother came to our home trying to find out about her daughter.
She told us that her daughter never returned after being arrested. When thinking
of the Chinese Communist Party’s hideous practice of organ harvesting from
living Falun Gong practitioners, I think it is quite possible that this female
Falun Gong practitioner had become a victim,” said Xu.
The Chinese
Embassy to the United States of America described Falun Gong, in a recent press
release, as a subversive cult which “belittles religion to raise its own
status,” and that the leader uses “lies and fallacies to manipulate the minds of
the Falun Gong practitioners and caused needless deaths of large numbers of
practitioners.”
Assemblyman Marc Alessi, D-Manor Park, said there should
be “a huge effort to educate the medical community.”
“This is people
being appraised for their value as human beings,” said Alessi. “It’s the worst
form of slavery.”
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