The Gateway, 02/01/07
Olesia Plokhii
Concerned with allegations of organ
harvesting in China, David Matas and David Kilgour, along with three other
speakers, brought evidence and first-person accounts to the University of
Alberta’s International Week.
David Kilgour is a former MP and was
Canada’s Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific region from January 2002 to
December 2003. David Matas is a Winnepeg lawyer who specializes in immigration,
refugee and international human rights.
In July 2006, the two men
released an independent report on the allegations of organ harvesting of Falun
Gong practitioners in China. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong is often referred to as
Chinese yoga and is based on a philosophy founded on three values: truthfulness,
compassion and forbearance. Kilgour and Matas were asked by The Coalition to
Investigate the Persecution of the Falun Gong in China, a NGO registered in
Washington, DC with a branch in Ottawa, to investigate accusations that state
institutions of the People’s Republic of China were involved in the harvesting
of organs from live Falun Gong advocators, killing them in the process.
According to the report, former Chinese president Jiang Zemin sought to
eradicate all Falun Gong practitioners due to their perceived threat against the
political hegemony of Chinese national identity in the late 1990s.
“[Falun Gong followers] were too numerous and their values were too out
of synch with the values of the people running China,” Kilgour explained.
Findings showed that after banning Falun Gong in 1999, an anti-Falun
Gong force left 830 000 Falun Gong practitioners incarcerated. This included
sending thousands of Falun Gong adherents to prisons and labour camps.
The report includes transcripts of phone conversations conducted with
Chinese surgeons admitting to the use of organ harvesting from living Falun Gong
practitioners. The report also contains a shocking interview with the ex-wife of
a Chinese surgeon who admitted removing corneas of Falun Gong practitioners,
until he too was targeted for knowing too much.
The Chinese government
has adamantly denied the validity of the report. And in July 2006, Zhang
Weidong, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Ottawa, denounced it as “biased
and groundless” at a press conference.
But Winston Lui, (a Calgarian who
escaped China two years ago and was imprisoned four times since 1999 for his
affiliation with Falun Gong), disagrees. Lui says that after being subjected to
brainwashing, he was psychologically tortured into denouncing his belief of
Falun Gong in 2003.
“In fear for my life, I signed a statement against
my will denouncing my beliefs,” he said, explaining that his wife is currently
serving a twelve-year sentence in Beijing after searching for Falun Gong
material on the highly censored Internet in China.
Mr E Zhang, an
ex-Chinese citizen in attendance at the seminar, suggested that since there’s no
free press in China, state propaganda dominates opinions of the populace. He
said that in 2000, China spent over US $8 million working with Yahoo, Nortel and
Google to install firewall systems promoting stringent Internet censorship.
Working as volunteers since May 2006, Matas and Kilgour’s report
concluded that there has been, and continues to be, organ seizures from
unwilling Falun Gong practitioners. It goes on to state that since 1999, Zemin
and his agencies have put to death a large but unknown number of Falun Gong
prisoners by involuntarily seizing their vital organs.
Allegations of
organ harvesting from Falun Gong adherents surfaced after the source of 41 500
transplants in China between 2000–2005 remained unexplained. The report states
that the number of executed prisoners, from which the government admits to
performing live organ transplants, together with the number of known willing
donors came nowhere close to the number of transplants that were performed. In
fact, in 1998, the Orient Organ Transplant Centre website conducted only nine
liver transplants compared to 2248 in 2005. In Canada, the total number of all
organ transplants in 2004 was 1773.
“When you are dealing with the
harvesting of organs in an operating room and the body is cremated afterwards,
that evidence is non-existent because there are no witnesses, no autopsies, the
perpetrators are licensed offenders, and the records are not made available to
the public,” Matas said.
“This market in China for organs is an
international market. The supply is Chinese, the demand is international,” Matas
explained.
He said that Canada should legislate for specific ethical
standards among the medical professions so that our health-care system doesn’t
cover post-surgery costs for local recipients of harvested organs. Another one
of his suggestions was limiting transplant tourism by eliminating pharmaceutical
commerce with organ-transplant hospitals in China. Matas also stressed the
importance of informing the travelling public of the deadly risks involved with
organ harvesting in the region.
Kilgour and Matas spoke of both
political dissidents of the regime and concerned human rights advocators
vanishing out of thin air and never being seen again.
In China,
legislation made the practice of harvesting non-consenting donor organs illegal,
but, since its passing on 1 July, 2006 the law has yet to be inforced.
Cut Rate Organs
According to Kilgour and Matas,
the practice of illegal transplants yields huge profits. Their report outlined
the following claims and listed prices per organ in US dollars at:
Kidney: $62 000
Liver: $98 000-130 000
Liver/Kidney: $160-180
000
Kidney/Pancreas: $150 000
Lung: $150 000-170 000
Heart: $130
000-160 000
Cornea: $30 000
• Corruption is a major problem
across China. State institutions are often run for the benefit of those in
charge of them, rather than for the benefit of the people.
• In China, organ
transplanting is a very profitable business, but it’s impossible to trace the
money line.
• Besides Falun Gong, other prime targets of human rights
violations are Tibetans, Christians, Uighurs, democracy activists and human
rights defenders.
• In 2006, patients in need of liver transplants had to
wait an average of two weeks in China, but the median waiting time for a kidney
in Canada was 32.5 months in 2003.
• Sources of transplants are considered a
national secret in China.