‘We have to stand up for moral issues and human rights’
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- Published on Friday, August 12, 2016
Photo by Christine Waddell. Falun Gong practitioners (from left) Jason Liu, Paula Liu, Amy Liu, Robert Christiani and Yue-Zhao stopped in Neepawa on Monday as part of a cross-Canada campaign to raise awareness about the forced organ harvesting that underpins China’s thriving transplant industry.
By Kate Jackman-Atkinson
Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press
On Aug. 8, five Falun Gong practitioners stopped in Neepawa as part of a cross Canada trip to raise awareness about forced organ harvesting in China. According to a recent report, most of the organs used in China’s burgeoning transplant industry are harvested from prisoners of conscience, many of whom are Falun Gong practitioners.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. It’s a Chinese spiritual practice rooted in Buddhism that includes meditation, gentle exercises and moral teachings. While at one time, it was publicly taught and supported by the Chinese government, that all changed in 1999. At that time, there were about 70 million Chinese practitioners, more than there were members of the Communist Party, and then Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin grew worried that it would become a threat to the party’s total control and the country’s officially atheist state. In July 1999, a campaign was launched to arrest and eradicate practitioners.
Source of organs can’t be explained
Jason Liu, who was part of the group who visited Neepawa, was arrested in 2000 and was put into a forced labour camp for two years. He knew of at least three practitioners who were beaten to death during incarceration.
Harsh treatment isn’t the only threat faced by practitioners. A report by renowned Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer David Matas and former Secretary of State for Asia Pacific, Hon. David Kilgour, released in 2006, found that between 2000 and 2005, the source of 41,500 organ transplants in China could not be explained. Their evidence pointed to the “large scale organ seizure from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners”.
Along with journalist Ethan Gutmann, the two released an update on June 22, 2016, called Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter, which found that the Chinese Communist government is continuing to kill practitioners in order to harvest their organs. China has a thriving business in transplant tourism, where high fees paid by both Chinese and foreign patients help generate large profits for hospitals. Given their lifestyle, organs from Falun Gong practitioners are seen as healthy and they are plentiful, given the high levels of incarceration.
Matas and Kilgour’s research estimates that between 960,000 and 1.5 million transplants were performed since 2000. While the Chinese government claims that the organs come from death row prisoners, Bloody Harvest examined the number of transplants done in hospitals throughout China and found that number far exceeded the number of death row inmates. They found that most of the organs were sourced from prisoners of conscience, primarily Falun Gong, but also Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans and House Christians.
Falun Gong practitioners who have escaped talk of multiple blood tests and medical examinations that lead to no treatment. Given the short wait times patients experience to find a match, Bloody Harvest found that prisoners of conscience are being used as a pool of available organ donors and most donors were alive at the time their organs were harvested. Additionally, because there isn’t a nation-wide matching system, in the vast majority of cases, only one organ is taken from a donor.
International pressure
Across the world, governments have stood up to condemn the Chinese government. In 2013, the European Parliament passed a resolution opposing forced organ harvesting. In 2016, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution condemning China’s state sanctioned forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience. In 2015, the Canadian Parliamentary Subcommittee on International Human Rights adopted a motion condemning the practice and calling for an immediate end to the state-sanctioned organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China, but there isn’t yet a Government of Canada bill to that effect.
Paula Liu, who was also in Neepawa, said, “As Canadians, we have to keep pace and stand up for moral issues and human rights… [There’s] a need to stand up and help stop the issues going on in China.”
This summer, different groups of Falun Gong practitioners are going to 250 towns and cities across Canada in order to raise awareness. The campaign started on July 20 in Toronto and will end later this month. After their stop in Neepawa, the group was headed to Brandon and Dauphin.
The groups would like to see Canadians call on federal, provincial and municipal governments to condemn the Chinese Communist regime for its persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, mass killing and the practice of organ harvesting; they want the Chinese government to consider the criminal complaints filed against Jiang Zemin by more than 180,000 Falun Gong practitioners and their families; they want to urge the Chinese regime to open to international inspection all detention facilities holding Falun Gong practitioners and they want Canadians not to partake in transplant tourism and unwittingly become complicit in the crime.
