The Washington Times
China's hidden policy of executing prisoners of the forbidden quasi-Buddhist
group Falun Gong and harvesting their organs for worldwide sale has been
expanded to include Tibetans, "house church" Christians and Muslim Uighurs,
human rights activists said Monday.
In a news conference on Capitol Hill, several speakers, including attorney David
Matas of B'nai Brith Canada and Ethan Gutmann of the Foundation for the Defense
of Democracies, said their investigations have unearthed a grisly trade in which
an estimated 9,000 members of Falun Gong have been executed for their corneas,
lungs, livers, kidneys and skins.
They likened the practice to the Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners in World War
II concentration camps, which included using them for sadistic medical
experiments and taking the gold fillings from the teeth of corpses.
The newest wrinkle, they said, is that organs from other religious prisoners -
specifically dissidents from China's Christian, Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist
communities - are also being harvested to satisfy an insatiable global demand.
"These groups are useless to the state," Mr. Gutmann said. "They are toxic, so
you can't release them. But they're worth a great deal of money in terms of
their organs."
Organs from just one person can fetch a total of $100,000 on the worldwide
market, he added.
The charges of organ harvesting and its spread to other religious and ethnic
groups were made by the researchers and activists based on their extensive
interviews with former prisoners and families of prisoners, and based on
analysis of statistics, including health numbers, released by the Chinese
government.
Although the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners has been documented as
early as 1992 by Chinese dissident Harry Wu's Laogai Research Foundation, it was
not until 2006 that the Epoch Times, a Falun Gong publication, accused the
Chinese government of using its adherents for the practice.
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