(Minghui.org) Recent reports from numerous news agencies have spotlighted the Chinese regime's forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners in China. Following CNN and The Globe and Mail, the second largest Canadian newspaper, both Dagens Nyheter and Sveriges Television (SVT) have also covered this severe human rights violation.
Based in Stockholm, Dagens Nyheter is the largest newspaper in Sweden, and SVT is the Swedish national public TV broadcaster.
Dagens Nyheter: Darkened Genocide
“Prisoners belonging to ethnic and religious minorities in China, including followers of the spiritual movement Falun Gong that was banned by the Communist Party in 1999, were reportedly having their organs harvested after they disappeared in the country's legal system,” reported Dagens Nyheter on July 11 in an article titled “Report: China mass-extorting organs from prisoners of conscience.”
“They are arbitrarily detained prisoners of conscience. They disappeared and their organs were used for transplant,” explained David Matas, human rights lawyer and investigator who called this atrocity a “darkened genocide.”
Together with David Kilgour, a former Member of Parliament who served as Canadian Secretary of State, they published a report in 2006 and then a book in 2009 titled Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China.
“This [forced organ harvesting] has been going on for a long time and it happens on a massive scale. We have now published an update of our previous reports indicating that the extent of organ harvesting is much greater than we had previously thought,” added Matas.
According to the update, which was first released in Washington D.C. on June 22, the communist party reported about 10,000 transplants every year. But Matas and other investigators found that the actual number is about 60,000-100,000 per year.
“The Chinese government makes no secret of the fact that many organs come from executed prisoners, but they do not tell who these prisoners are.” Matas and others made the estimate based on statistics from individual hospitals in China.
“The authors [of the update] also had access to testimony from released prisoners who told us that they were tortured and threatened with getting their organs taken if they did not renounce their faith,” the article reported, “Falun Gong is a popular spiritual movement based on Chinese qigong traditions and was seen [by the communist party] as a threat.”
SVT: One of the Biggest Blackout Areas in Human History
Ethan Gutmann, an American investigative journalist, said forced organ harvesting in China is one of the biggest blackout areas in human history. After following it for years, he wrote a book on these crimes—The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China's Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem.
He began his research after reading the book, Bloody Harvest, from human rights lawyer David Matas and former Secretary politician David Kilgour, both from Canada.
Since 2006, information leaked to the outside on widespread organ harvesting, which was linked to China's transplant industry. Matas and Kilgour began to examine this and later the three of them joined forces for further investigations.
“The new results are striking, in fact, very disturbing,” wrote the report, “The three investigators have found that there are more than 800 hospitals in China that perform transplants. The total capacity is between 60,000 and 100,000 transplants annually.”
Normally, imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners have no medical care in Chinese prisons. On the contrary, there has been much evidence on how guards abuse, torture, or use other means to mistreat them. “However, quite a few Falun Gong practitioners who had been released told us they had to repeatedly give blood samples.”
The investigators believe the purpose of doing so is to check for blood type and tissue matches with a potential transplant patient somewhere in China.
Unfortunately, this occurred because Chinese officials wanted to kill two birds with one stone. “First you kill Falun Gong practitioners under the order of Jiang Zemin, former party chief who started the persecution in 1999, to eradicate this group, and at the same time bring profits to hospitals and other bodies.”
“Since then, Matas and Kilgour, and later also Gutmann, worked hard to spread the light in the darkness, but there is still much to uncover,” wrote the report.
The report asked that Swedish politicians, journalists, lawyers, human rights activists and others look into the atrocities. “We can bring those responsible for the crimes accountable, and prevent more innocent lives from being lost, because the Chinese Communist Party does not respect human life.”
Category: Organ Harvesting
