generalspeaking

“Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update”

"This is extremely difficult research to have done."
"It’s a mammoth system. Each hospital has so many doctors, nurses, and surgeons. That in itself isn’t a problem. China’s a big country. But where did all the organs come from?"
Li Huige, professor, medical center, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany

"There is no other plausible explanation for the sourcing of this number of organs than the killing of Falun Gong [and to a lesser extent, the killing of Uyghurs, Tibetans and House Christians] for their organs." 
"The ultimate conclusion of this update, and indeed our previous work, is that China has engaged in the mass killing of innocents."
David Kilgour, David Matas, Ethan Guttman: Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update

The report analyzed all known organ transplantation centers in China—over 700 of them. (Illustration by Jens Almroth/Epoch Times)

"To be able to complete such a large number of organ transplant surgeries every year, we need to give all of our thanks to the support given by the government. In particular, the Supreme People’s Court, Supreme People’s Procuratorate, Public Security system, judicial system, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Civil Affairs have jointly promulgated laws to establish that organ procurement receives government support and protection. This is a one-of-a-kind in the world."
China Medical University, Shenyang -- transplant center website

And unique in the world as well in that the industrialization of human organ transplants has been handed over to the Chinese military and security agencies to be responsible for. By the standards and values they feel entitled to exercise, the program is a resounding success; hence the pride of China Medical University. The staggering number of organs and their transplantation in a country which until 2014 had no official medical voluntary organ program, is difficult to comprehend.

In fact, when David Kilgour and David Matas began their investigation years ago, their contention that organs were being harvested from prisoners and from living involuntary donors went unheeded because the controversial claims were just too difficult to believe. But the two persevered, collecting evidence, interviewing Chinese with insider knowledge, to bolster their claims, resulting in a 2009 publication: Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China.

This latest report is a blockbuster at 564 pages with several thousand footnotes. It lists all organ transplantation centres in the country they are aware of and that's 700 of such centres, counting the number of beds in each, the transplant numbers they advertise, the use of anti-rejection drugs and anything else that is pertinent to their case. Which includes surgical staff, training programs, infrastructure, wait times and with this data, an estimation of the number of transplants performed was posited.

Over one million.

The report relies in part on information drawn from the testimonies rendered by whistleblowers, along with Chinese medical papers in translation to conclude that some of the organ donors may have still been alive at the time that their organs were removed. A former paramilitary police officer who witnessed a live harvest operation without the use of anaesthesia and a former health care worker from Jinan gave additional valuable testimony.

Plainclothes police arrest Falun Gong practitioners on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1999. (Compassion Magazine)

According to former Canadian cabinet minister David Kilgour, senior legal counsel of B'nai Brith David Matas, and London-based journalist and foreign policy analyst Ethan Guttman, whose books on the subject have been banned in China, it is prisoners of conscience, mostly practitioners of Falun Gong who are the targets of organ extraction by government agencies. China has become well known as a travel/vacation/organ transplant destination for foreigners desperate for an organ transplant. 

"When you were a kid, did you ever pick up a big rock and see all this life underneath it—ants and insects? That’s what the experience of working on this report has been like."
"They’ve built a juggernaut. We’re looking at a gigantic flywheel, which they can’t seem to stop. I don’t believe it’s just profit behind it, I believe it’s ideology, mass murder, and the cover-up of a terrible crime where the only way to cover up that crime is to keep killing people who know about it."
Ethan Guttman, author of The Slaughter, 2014.

Mr. Guttman's research concluding in the publication of his book in 2014, estimated that 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been killed to recover their organs for transplant to further China's organ market prospects, over the past few years. Hospital records, medical journals, databases translated from Chinese all helped to confirm that the estimates were judiciously on the cautious side. Amnesty International under-
estimated that in 2008 1,066 people were sentenced to death which is when death row organ extraction occurs.

Whenever Beijing is questioned over the 'rumours' of organ extraction from such sources by international medical associations among other NGOs, citing the disparities and fraudulent official numbers relating to its transplant industry, Beijing draws itself together in umbrage that it could be suspected of such inhumane practises. But it is undeniable that it places those it accuses of challenging its authority under arrest, and sentences to death political adversaries, including Falun Gong members who simply want to practise their contemplative form of religion.

The harvesting of organs is from that pool of helpless victims, to feed China's burgeoning industry of serving the international community represented by desperate people in need of organ transplants and prepared to travel to China to acquire there what a voluntary national organ donation scheme at home has been incapable of providing for them. State-controlled and -operated, the truth is a slippery eel that slides into the backwater of deceit and coverups, conveniently washed by the happy news that China's transplant program is wildly successful for recipients.

"I had to explain it in detail to a German friend who’s a bioethicist, who deals with many challenging international topics. She literally couldn’t believe me, and asked, 'Why didn’t I know about this already'?"
"This is very emotive for me [speaking of her close friend who suffered liver failure due to hepatitis requiring a transplant within three days if she was to live]."
"She was extraordinarily lucky to get one in that timeframe. But to do 46 of them in a row? It’s hard to think of another plausible explanation, apart from killing on demand."
Wendy Rogers, bioethicist, Macquarie University, Australia

Labels: China, Controversy, Human Rights, Medicine, Survival

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, June 23, 2016