15 minutes with…the Canadian foreign minister turned campaigner against illegal organ transplants
“Warning to all transplant patients”
Need a transplant? Order the organ by phone, the donor will be killed, and the part will be brought to you. If the stories are true, it would be the ultimate, grotesque Chinese take-away:
Human rights groups have long alleged that China harvests the organs from executed criminals to use in patients elsewhere, without their or their families’ consent.
But recent allegations go a step further. Campaigners are saying that large number of members of harmless spirituality movement Falun Gong – banned in China – who have been hauled off the street or parks for practising their belief system and are being hoarded in labour camps indefinitely for no other purposes than as live sources for organs. When their organs are needed – by a rich foreigner or Chinese – they are taken into hospital, killed and have their organs harvested.
All the useful internal organs - kidneys, livers, hearts, corneas – are
allegedly removed in sequence by a team of doctors. The bodies are thrown into large incinerators to obliterate all traces of them. Their families do not know where they are, since they were taken off the street without warning.
The organs are then transplanted into rich Chinese and overseas patients, who have communicated their need for a transplant via Chinese websites offering organs. A kidney can costs 60,000 dollars. A large number of rich
foreigners, including British people, are said to travel to China every year for transplant operations.
The stories have circulated since April, when the Falun Gong practitioners in the west started to raise the alarm. There was considerable scepticism in the western media, but the dapper, patrician David Kilgour, 65, a former Canadian MP and deputy foreign minister with responsibility for Asia, decided to investigate further, accepting an offer to do so from a Washington NGO specialising in human rights abuses in China.
Along with another Canadian lawyer, respected human rights specialist David Matas, co-director of the Canadian Helsiinki Watch human rights monitoring organisation, they conducted their investigation independently from Falun Gong – neither is an adherent - and have travelled around world capitals in the last few weeks to present their findings. We caught up with him after speaking to MPs and peers in the House of Lords, where Lord Thurlow, a former British high commissioner to New Zealand and Nigeria, a diplomat with 40 years’ experience, introduced the former cabinet minister as a “man of rare integrity”.
What evidence is there that this is happening?
It is in the nature of the allegations that they are difficult to prove or disprove. The best evidence is eyewitness testimony, yet for this alleged crime there are unlikely to be any eyewitnesses. The victims do not survive, and the perpetrators are unlikely to confess! Those reporting on human rights in China are thrown into jail, and the Red Cross is not allowed to visit prisoners.
Proof can either be inductive or deductive. Criminal investigation usually works deductively, connecting bits of evidence to form a coherent whole. We did have some deductive evidence – from investigative phone calls to Chinese hospitals, but there was a whole, bigger picture.
Like what?
There has been an official policy of prosecution, harassment, arrest and detention of Falun Gong members since 1999.
Falun Gong was founded in China in 1992; it is a peaceful spirituality and exercise movement, often called Chinese yoga, which grew quickly in popularity. Before the movement was banned in 1999, its millions of adherents gathered regularly in parks and streets to do their exercises. Then, in 1999, president Jiang Zemin banned the movement. Though avowedly non political, the movement was seen as a threat to the Communist party’s control over Chinese hearts and minds. The head of the so-called 6-10 office set up to deal with the movement told 3,000 officials in the Great Hall of the People that the new policy on Falun Gong would be to “defame their reputations, bankrupt them financially, destroy them physically”.
According to the US state department China report of 2005, the police run hundreds of detention centres, with 340 re-education through labour camps alone having a holding capacity of 300,000 persons. The report also estimated that the number of Falun Gong practitioners who have died in custody is at least several hundred but could be as many as several thousand. Local government everywhere was given the authority to implement Beijing’s orders to demonstrate to the Chinese population that practitioners committed suicide, killed family members and refused medical treatment. There have been reports on practitioners were shocked into standing for hours on end with electric truncheons and forced to undergo re-education classes for 16 hours a day for weeks in order to renounce the movement.
What other inductive evidence do you have?
In recent years, China has been carrying out many more transplants than identifiable sources. There are very few voluntary donations in China; because of the culture surrounding death. Assuming that every executed official death row prisoner has organs removed - with or without consent being given – that still leaves a shortfall of 41,000 transplants in the last six years. You have to combine this with the fact that Falun Gong prisoners are officially blood tested, unlike other prisoners – this is a prerequisite for transplants. They are not told why. There is also the fact that Chinese organ transplant websites advertise to customers that suitable organs can be had within weeks. Because compatibility rates are so low, the waiting time in Canada for an organ is months or even years, suggesting that, in China, there is a large available pool of live donors.
The following websites in China are among those offering organs to international customers. www.ootc.net; http://en.zoukiishoku.com. Here is an excerpt from the latter website: “It may take only one month to receive a liver transplantation , the maximum waiting time being two months. As for the kidney transplantation , it may take one week to find a suitable donor,the maximum time being one month. Although the procedure to select a donor is very strict,, the transplant operation will be terminated if the doctor discovers that there is something wrong with the donor's organ . If this happens, the patient will have the option to be offered another organ donor and have the operation again in one week.”
One week. Compare that to – again – the 32 month wait in Canada,
Do you have any testimonial evidence?
We interviewed one highly credible witness, a woman who worked as an administrator in a hospital in north-eastern China. She has now fled to the West. She says her surgeon husband had told her he personally removed the corneas from over 2,000 anaesthetised prisoners between 2001 and 2003. None of the donors survived since their other vital organs were removed at the same time. Although this is a second hand testimony, I talked to the woman at length and the detail and depth of her descriptions of her husband’s activities leave me in no doubt that she is telling the truth.
What about the telephone calls to Chinese hospitals that you detail in your report?
One Mandarin-speaking researcher called a number of hospitals to ask whether they had Falun Gong patients . One Dr Zhou of the Guangzhou military region hospital told her that he had some type B kidneys from Falun Gong, but would have several batches before May 1 and no more until May 20 or later. Chief Physician Song at the Oriental Organ Transplant centre said his hospitals had more than ten beating hearts. The caller asked if he meant live bodies and Song replied “This is so.” Our report has transcripts of a number of calls to different hospitals across China saying similar things.
Do you have any recommendations what to do?
Countries need to pass laws that require doctors to report patients who obtain trafficked organs. We have some support here from the British Transplantation Society. The chair of its ethics committee, Stephen Wigmore, who thinks the use of executed prisoners’ organs probably happens and condemns it.
Chinese transplant surgeons should be banned from attending international conferences. Human rights organizations should be allowed to inspect re-education camps and interview prisoners.
And what if China doesn’t comply with inspections?
The point of leverage will be the Olympics, to be held in Beijing in 2008. Should we boycott the games? Do Olympians really want to be visiting a country where these barbaric operations go on? We are convinced that thousands of innocent individuals belonging to a peaceful organisation have been in effect executed by medical practitioners for their organs, with the profits going to doctors and the local gangs whop run transplant hospitals, but ultimately sanctioned by the Chinese government which wants to exterminate Falun Gong. It is organised murder.
