For the CCP, removing and selling organs from prisoners of conscience is a huge business. Democratic countries should stop looking the other way.
by Mal Mitchell
An atrocity going on today, which is relatively little known of or believed as actually happening, is state-sanctioned mass murder, torture, and money-making from forced organ harvesting in China. It is imperative that the realities of this become widely known, and that effective international action be taken urgently in response.
The primary victims are prisoners of conscience, Falun Gong practitioners in particular. A second major group evidently being readied for harvest is Uyghur Muslims. There is evidence too that Tibetan Buddhists and some Christian groups are among the victims. Whether for their ethnicity or beliefs, these groups have been ruthlessly targeted for the ideological challenge they represent to the Chinese Communist Party, especially in the case of the swelling numbers of Falun Gong followers. What these people with different spiritual and religious focuses have in common is a dedication to ideals such as compassion and truth—to human values, as distinct from CCP-style nationalist expansionist materialism. As victims, these people are killed in the process of having their organs removed, and their remains are subsequently incinerated.
The perpetrator of this atrocity is the machinery of the Chinese Communist Party, operating on an industrial scale. It is now thought that there may be something in the region of 60,000–100,000 such transplants every year, with hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, and corneas for sale in an industry worth billions of dollars. This is über-big business for China, with its wealthier citizens besides rich people from the USA, UK and around the world getting these transplants—some surely knowing, some less aware, where their donated organs are coming from. Some countries have taken measures against such “transplant tourism,” including Taiwan, Israel, Spain, and Italy. Others remain complicit in this crime against humanity.
Genocide?
The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Last year The China Tribunal, an independent tribunal led by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, concluded that forced organ harvesting was taking place in China and had been doing so on a mass scale for many years, noting: “there is a duty on those who have the power to institute investigations for, and proceedings at, international courts or at the UN to test whether Genocide has been committed. They should act immediately to determine accountability for any acts contrary to the provisions of the Genocide Convention.”
The China Tribunal itself stopped short of concluding that “genocide” as such was taking place, given how the intent is not so straightforward, since the CCP’s forced organ harvesting is not just about wiping out Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs and others—it is also about economically exploiting, making vast sums from their organs. In other words, this “bonus” commercial component for China cunningly works to hinder the straightforward charge of genocide. In any case, the tribunal deemed China a “criminal state.” The question of genocide has yet to be determined by the UN.
Strategic Complicity
Keenness to continue and expand trade with China tends to make it too inconvenient for governments and the private sector to properly examine the available evidence of forced organ harvesting. Might they act otherwise if they believed history would duly see them come to shame on this issue? It seems they as yet continue to hope they will get away with wilfully ignoring the evidence—much as so many governments once branded Nelson Mandela a terrorist, and happily continued doing business with South Africa, supporting its apartheid regime. Such amoral self-interested styles of government and business naturally facilitate injustices and, ultimately, mass atrocities.
Given the lack of moral leadership on this issue from political quarters, could an international public outcry turn the economic tables and thereby change the course of this monumentally shameful situation? Surely so. But who knows how loud, how effective, such a cry could get at this time, in a world where discourse and attention are so taken up with other concerns… We can only start with looking into this for ourselves, and duly calling it out to anyone ready to listen.
