Organ harvesting allegations persist
| Copyright 2006
The Calgary Herald, a division of Canwest MediaWorks Publication Inc. All Rights Reserved The Calgary Herald (Alberta) August 9, 2006 Wednesday Final Edition SECTION: THE EDITORIAL PAGE; Barry Cooper; Pg. A14 LENGTH: 2497 words HEADLINE: Organ harvesting allegations persist BYLINE: Barry Cooper, For The Calgary Herald BODY: Former Edmonton MP David Kilgour and David Matas, a Winnipeg lawyer, have spent the past few weeks on the road. They hit Hong Kong, Washington, New York and several European cities to discuss a 63-page report released about a month ago on organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China. So far as the Chinese government is concerned, Falun Gong is an "evil cult" that has been banned since 1999. Falun Gong is no doubt a political as well as a purely spiritual force in China, though members deny this. It might be better to say that, by being a spiritual movement external to the perverse spirituality of the Chinese government, they are by definition also a political force. The Kilgour-Matas allegations are pretty awful. Last spring, an NGO called the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China asked them to look into the charge that state employees in the People's Republic were killing Falun Gong practitioners to remove organs and tissues for transplantation. Mutilated corpses were then said to have been cremated, thus destroying autopsy evidence. If individuals were in the business of killing people to get their organs, it would be murder. Murders are dealt with through criminal justice procedures designed to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. When the charges deal with state-sanctioned killings, we are dealing not with criminal behaviour but a political attack on the integrity of the human person. In such cases, circumstantial evidence carries great weight. As with the Nazi doctors who performed fatal experiments on camp inmates, we can speak of "crimes against humanity" but this is an extension of conventional criminal law. In China, the ordinary prohibitions against freedom of expression and assembly are well known and uncontroversial. Conventional measures that, for example, view dissent as treason become acts of totalitarian domination when human beings are considered as raw material. Without respect for the human person, nothing prevents the state looking at the bodies of their political enemies as living but superfluous organ banks. Kilgour and Matas were not permitted to go to China, but interviewed several individuals outside the country with credible and hair-raising stories. Some were Falun Gong, some were not. They made phone calls to Chinese hospitals where surgeons confirmed that Falun Gong prisoners were the source of livers and kidneys. Such involuntary sourcing helps explain short wait times for transplantation. "Viscera providers," as the website for the Chinese International Transplantation Network Assistance Centre in Shenyang put it, "can be found immediately." At Changzheng Hospital in Shanghai, it takes only a week to obtain a fresh liver. In Canada, it is close to three years. Since livers can be used for only about 12 hours after they are removed from living "providers," there must an ample pool of convenient live bodies available for quick harvesting. At $100,000 for a new liver, organ harvesting is a profitable business. Kidneys sell for about $65,000 each, a new heart about $150,000. For cultural reasons, Chinese are reluctant to donate organs posthumously, and no organized system of organ donation exists. So where do the kidneys come from? Partly from family donors (under one per cent) and partly from the recently executed bodies of ordinary criminals (less than five per cent). This leaves the source of thousands of kidneys unaccounted for. Of course, that Falun Gong members are the origin of the missing organs is only an allegation. But as Kilgour and Matas note, it is the only allegation out there. No other group such as Tibetans or Uighurs has been identified as a likely organ pool. The Chinese embassy claims these allegations are Falun Gong disinformation. It would be in the interest of the Chinese government to let Kilgour and Matas (or any other credible international observers) investigate. For westerners who look upon China as nothing but a potentially big customer, the probability that they are in the business of killing political dissidents to create a lucrative human viscera market is part of the moral cost of doing business there. With the Beijing Olympics scheduled for 2008, the civilized world might recall that the Moscow games were cancelled in 1980 on less horrific grounds than these. Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a Fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute. |