Killed for Organs - China's secret state transplant business

"We call it a new form of evil in the world. It's never been done by any government in the past, to take a large group of its own people and say, 'We're going to kill you, without any kind of a trial, and we are going to sell your vital organ parts.'" "An individual from the United States or Canada, for example, could anticipate undergoing transplantation on a specified date." "It's a crime against humanity. It's abhorrent and it needs to stop." Killed for Organs: China's Secret State Transplant Business "If you're going to go to China and you're going to get a liver transplant during the three weeks you are there, then that means someone is going to go schedule an execution, blood type and tissue type the potential executee, and have them ready to go before you need to leave." "Starting at the end of 1999 the number of transplants taking place just exploded." China carries out more organ transplant surgeries than any country besides the United States. But unlike other countries, China has no effective organ donation program. That's because culturally, Chinese people believe the body must stay intact even after death. China's Deputy Minister of Health, Huang Jiefu, has suggested that there are 7,000 transplants every year from the deceased. And that more than 90% come from executed prisoners. The number of criminal executions in China is classified as a state secret, but Amnesty International's estimate is about 1,700. "The numbers just didn't add up. There is just too large of a discrepancy there." With only 1,700 executed criminals and no effective donation system, where do the rest of the organs come from? Zhao Shuhuan was put in a Chinese labor camp because she practices Falun Gong. "Every labor camp I went to, they would give us a physical exam. They would take our blood and test it. Every labor camp did the same thing." "We estimate that in the period between 2000 and 2005, there were 41,500 transplants which have no other explained source." "I am absolutely convinced that over a long period from 1999 onwards, organ harvesting from prisoners has been taking place, especially of Falun Gong." "The policewoman took us the hospital affiliated with the Masanjia Labor Camp, and I understood they were testing our urine and our blood for liver function." "Doctors would come into the camps. They would look in their eyes, they would examine their organs with ultrasound and the like, and they were the only people in these camps who were medically examined thoroughly." In 2006, two Canadians, international human rights lawyer David Matas and former Secretary of State for Asia Pacific David Kilgour started to investigate allegations of forced organ harvesting in China. They found at least 52 points of circumstantial evidence, including websites of Chinese hospitals offering matching organs in less than a week. "It's just not possible unless you have an unlimited source of organs. And these are people who are alive. We are talking about live donors. The actual transplant surgery itself was the form of execution. These were living people that were killed for their organs." "It makes you think of some grotesque restaurant, where you go in and you pick your lobster in a tank. But these are human beings we're talking about." "The military is making money off of it, the hospitals are making money off of it, the middlemen are making money off of it. And we talk about money; we're talking about a multi-million dollar operation." Journalist and author Ethan Gutmann decided to carry out his own independent investigation. "We had witnesses of disappearances, people who had been examined and had disappeared, busloads, entire prison wards which had been emptied out. The signs began to look like something much, much bigger." Like Tibetans and house Christians, millions of Falun Gong practitioners are being persecuted in China for their beliefs. In 1999, Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin issued orders to "Break them financially, ruin their reputations, and destroy them physically." Since then, thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have disappeared without a trace. "What happened to the [people who] disappeared? As far as we know, they are still there in these camps and many of them have been killed through organ harvesting, but the rest are still there. And they're the organ data bank for China." "Around 1999, there were around 150 transplant centers. Six or seven years later they had 600 transplantation centers. This is an increase of 300% within such a short period of time without an organ donation program." "Military hospitals get watched in China. There's nothing they can do without the Party Central taking note of what they're doing. Was this run by triads? No. This was run by the state. This was *** and it came from the state." "This is a crime against humanity. We should do our best to identify those specific individuals who are engaged in this, and put them on the list of people who deserve to be brought to justice." "In 2006 when this came out and we realized that they were killing prisoners of conscience for their organs, it was doctors that took the front line in trying to stop this." "Every day, there are a dozen people that are executed or killed for organs in China. So we have to bring out the message. We have to inform medical doctors to stop this practice." But it's not only the medical community that's getting informed. The US State Department mentioned allegations of forced organ harvesting in its annual human rights report on China in 2011 for the first time. On October 3rd, 106 U.S. Congressional representatives signed this bipartisan "Dear Colleague" letter to the State Department, demanding they reveal information on organ harvesting that they may have obtained from their sources in China. "This barbaric human rights abuse must be stopped, but to stop it we first have to further expose it." And with even more petitions circulating online, the issue is starting to get worldwide attention. But more needs to be done.