The business of selling human organs, extracted from live and illegally detained prisoners by the Chinese government is going on unchecked, Voices Against Autocracy reported. Medical practitioners around the world, governments, and universal bodies like the World Health Organization (WHO) must work to put an end to this “inhuman and disgusting practice.” Experts in an international webinar on “Forcible Harvesting of Human Organs in China” have warned the world community that this practice in China was so far limited to extracting human organs from Falun Gang, Uyghur, Tibetan, and Christian prisoners, according to the report.
However, the growing business competition among Chinese medical institutions and the greed of Chinese officials is now giving rise to kidnapping teenagers from poor Chinese families and killing them for organ extraction, as per the Voices Against Autocracy report. During the webinar held on 17 December, experts, including Dr Enver Tohti Bughda, Jennifer Zeng and Ethan Gutmann expressed surprise that patients in other countries have to wait for months and years and have to spend huge money to get a transplant of their heart, kidney, lungs, cornea or other organs like pancreas and spleen, however, in China, patients get these organs at a short notice and that too at a lower price, as per the news report.
The participants in their respective presentations showed that the practice was limited only to “extracting organs from the bodies of freshly executed convicts and prisoners of conscience” till the 1980s. However, the practice gained momentum when Chinese President Jiang Zemin began a countrywide crackdown on Falun Gong, a popular organisation whose members believed in living a simple and healthy life through meditation, Yoga-like physical exercise, and abstaining from smoking and drinking alcohol. Jennifer Zeng, now a popular TV anchor in the US, recalled her own one-year-long detention in a labour camp of Falun Gong followers. Zeng said that the medical history and blood profile of around 2 million Falun Gong prisoners were conducted and a “national database was prepared for the use of hospitals with organ transplant facilities.”According to Voices Against Autocracy report, Ethan Gutmann said, “By 2002 it had become a common practice that patients from rich countries like Germany could fly into Shanghai and get their liver transplanted within four hours with a fresh liver of perfectly matching blood profile. This simply means that the victims, identified through the blood profile data from the data bank, were picked up from detention centres and supplied to the hospital for organ harvesting.”
Gutmann while sharing details of satellite imaging of Uyghur detention camps and first-hand witnesses from the region said that Chinese authorities had established nine new crematoriums attached to each such camp in 2018. He said that they were manned by 50 Chinese guards each. “I wonder why they needed crematoriums for their Muslim subjects who are supposed to be only buried after death?” Ethan Gutmann said, claiming that it only shows that Chinese authorities would burn the bodies to wipe out any trace of the killings after extracting the organs.
Recalling his days as a doctor in Xinjiang, Dr Enver Tohti said that he thought it was normal and good that organs were extracted to save the life of some patients when the liver and kidneys of the executed person were taken out. Tohti further said, “But only after migrating to Britain I realized that it was a crime against humanity.” “In Urumchi when the local Uyghurs found that a doctor who was an Uyghur and who spoke their own language, then many of them would quietly bring their teenage child to me and ask me to check if any of his organ was taken out during the child’s detention in the Chinese camp,” he recalled.
Dr Tohti further said, “Out of about one hundred such cases, brought to me, I was shocked to discover that in three such cases the boy had surgery marks on his belly and one of his kidneys was missing.” Jennifer Zeng, who now hosts her own China-focused YouTube channel, said the CCP in 1999 realized that Falun Gong was becoming more popular than the Party. Hence, Chinese President Jiang Zemin ordered a crackdown on Falun Gong and millions of practitioners were arrested. According to Zeng, she was arrested and lived in a labour camp with about 900 inmates for about a year.
However, Zeng managed to escape to Australia in 2001 and could know about the severity of the organ business from other escapees. Chinese government always avoids mentioning the real source of human organs, she said adding that a new alarming trend in China is finding roots in the human organ trade.
As per the Voices Against Autocracy report, a mother in Sichuan province sent her teenage son to throw garbage but he did not come back for days. “Finally, his mutilated dead body with vital organs missing was discovered a few kilometres away from home,” it said.
