(Minghui.org) Radio NZ host Wallace Chapman interviewed Mr. David Kilgour on May 18, 2015, about the recently screened documentary “Human Harvest.” The interview illustrated more details of the systematic organ harvesting in China.
(Quoted from the transcription)
Chapman: Claims of a gruesome and shocking practice in China is a subject of a recent documentary“Human Harvest,” which features Canadian Nobel Peace Prize nominees David Matas and David Kilgour. The film has won a prestigious U.S. Peabody award, given for excellence in storytelling in the electronic medium.
David Matas and David Kilgour say that hospitals in China have killed tens of thousands of prisoners of conscience, mainly Falun gong practitioners, to harvest and sell their organs.
David Kilgour is a Canadian former member of parliament. He was deputy speaker and Secretary of State. He has followed the organ harvesting issue for years, writing a book about it with David Matas called “Bloody Harvest – The killing of Falun Gong for their organs.” He and David Matasalso received the Human Rights prize of the International Society for Human Rights in Switzerland.
First tell me. It’s interesting how the issue came to light. People were going to China to receive an organ and the question was being asked, “How is China able to get so many organs available to them at one time?”
Kilgour: Exactly. There was a doctor in Israel Jacob Lavee. He was one of many (Israeli doctors). He had a heart patient who was going (to China for a transplant), I think two weeks later (the patient returned). Then they said, “How can they have a heart for you in two weeks from now?”
And he did more questions, and he figured out what was obviously happening, which was that someone was obviously going to be killed on the day of the transplant. And to his enormous credit, Dr. Lavee and the Israel (government) passed laws making it illegal to buy a trafficked organ from… they didn’t have to say China, because China is the only country where this happens.
And what we’re hoping is that countries like New Zealand and Canada will pass similar laws that will bar New Zealanders or Canadians from buying trafficked organs from anywhere. Don’t even have to mention the word China as I said, because they’re the only country in the world where this happens.
C: And so what was happening was that the numbers were not adding up, weren't they? You would need 100,000 people sitting in prison just to generate this volume of organs.
K: Out of the 10,000 transplants a year, we’d need a bank of a 100,000 live “donors” sitting around waited to be killed for their organs. It’s a hideous thought and it’s one that I wish everyone in New Zealand and Canada knew was going on, because it is going on.
C: Does China not have an organ donor system? Like other countries? Like in the UK you can wait for months, maybe years, but they have an organ donor system.
K: It’s very much against the culture in China for people to give organs, so when they set up their trial system, I think they had 37 organs donated in the one year, I think in 2010. So it’s not as though they do not have an organ donor system at all. They may have one on paper, but it does not work at all.
They get their organs from executed prisoners, some of which have been convicted of capital offenses. We’re convinced that very, very many of them, the majority of these are coming from prisoners of conscience like Falun Gong, who have been convicted of nothing. Just sit in forced labor camps, waiting to be tested every three or four months to see how their organs are by doctors.
Then when someone comes from Auckland or Wellington, or Ottawa, they check the computer base and see what the match is for a particular recipient. Then someone is killed literally like a lobster in a horrible restaurant so this person can come back to NZ or Canada with a new heart or a new liver.
C: And you have the stories, don’t you? And they are harrowing. I must say it was shocking watching the film “Human Harvest.” One surgeon he couldn’t take it any longer and he broke down to his wife, allegations of people being beaten and then taken to a part of the hospital, a military guard with a gun standing at the door, and then the patient being operated on – if you can call it that – under no anesthetic. Tell us about what happens.
K: You’re referring to the Sujiatun matter and that’s a chapter in the book. Anyone can get that chapter on Sujiatun simply by going to David-Kilgour.com and going to the report. It’s available in 21 languages. You can simply go down to Sujiatun and they can read exactly what happened. But as you said, the doctor, the figure was 2,000 cornea removals of Falun Gong practitioners between 2001 and 2003. His wife said, “You must stop this.” And he did to his credit. Some of the details in the film which you’re describing are almost beyond belief that this could be happening. But they were and it continues to happen in China.
C: Allegations have been made, that this is so lucrative for China that it even forms a major income component for China’s entire health system. Does that ring true? How profitable do you think?
K: You get all kinds of estimates. It’s probably a billion dollars a year for the doctors and the nurses and the hospitals and the people who fly the organs from rural place like Sujiatun to Shanghai where the recipient is sitting in a hospital.
It’s a huge amount of money and yes you’re correct that the health system was in great financial difficulty. It’s helped the hospital system. But it’s also enriched a lot of doctors and the People’s Liberation Army, who have been very active in moving these organs.
The doctor we spoke about was doing the cornea operations. He was paid the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of US dollars for doing these operations. He eventually fled and he ended up in Canada. His wife is in the United States.
C: Is there much descent among doctors and surgeons? I mean what we’ve seen and what we’ve experienced in the film that I’ve just watched is so shocking, so awful, that you’d just wonder why any surgeon would ever go near something like this.
K: It’s an ethical question and there’s no law in China on this question, and there’s enormous financial incentive with everyone involved, police, pilots, as they say.
Sadly, it seems the medical ethics don’t exist in China. And this is one of the consequences of that. And this is why, people like the NZ Medical Association should have nothing to do with these vile practices. They shouldn’t take reports from these doctors. They shouldn’t let pharmaceuticals go to China from NZ.
We should all make it as hard as we can for this vile practice to continue, which we call a new crime against humanity. It’s just unbelievable that this could be happening in the 21st century, and so few people seem to understand that it’s happening. I think that more people around the world seem to understand that it is happening.
For example we just had a hearing in Brussels recently. Excellent hearing. And I think it is pretty widely known - and in no small part because of films like the “Human Harvest” that’s won the Peabody award, which will be presented in New York in two weeks.
C: The heart of the story, too, is an aspect of Chinese society that’s called Falun Gong. Every week down at the bottom of Queen Street in Oakland, the largest city in NZ, there is a small display of Falun Gong members who have signs to protest.
A couple of months ago, they enacted a whole play about organ harvesting. That’s where they first captured my attention. But not much is known about Falun Gong. Who are they?
K: I think it’s the NZ Herald – one of the papers came to our press conference. One of them took photographs. One of the senior reporters was there. We thought this was great because this would get word out about what was going on. This was a number of years ago.
Eventually there wasn’t a single word that appeared in the Herald about the matter. I don’t know why the media in New Zealand, at least one particular media, didn’t see fit to write the story. I think the story has gone broadly enough. For example in Canada, Europe, and the United States, now the story is well known. It’s also well known that the government party state in China, they have no coherent defense to any of this now. Except they accuse us of being anti-China.
David Matas and I, and you, we’re not anti-China. We’re simply trying to stop a crime against humanity that continues to this day.
C: Tell me a little more about Falun Gong.
K: Falun Gong is a group that basically didn’t exist before 1992. It’s an inheritor, if you like, of Buddhism and Taoism, with some very light exercises which attracted so much interest in China that by the mid-90's there was between 70 and 100 million people practicing Falun Gong. It spread around the world. I believe it’s in 130 countries.
I’m not actually Falun Gong myself but I have enormous respect for what they do, and their principles of “Truth, Compassion, and Forbearance.” So I guess it was a combination of the numbers in China. There were more Falun Gong practitioners than members of the Chinese Communist Party by 1999.
And their principles, such as Truth, Compassion, and Forbearance, that simply horrified the president at the time Jiang Zemin. And he declared war on them, and the war continues 15 years later. They’re not giving up.
They are having a huge gathering in New York City this weekend. We had Falun Gong day four or five days ago and we had 600 practitioners. There were MPs from all parties speaking to them, greetings from every spot on the political spectrum. So the battle is being understood in places like Canada.
C: Finally, how many Falun Gong members do you think have been killed for their organs in China? Is there an estimate?
K: A friend of ours, called Ethan Gutman, has written a book called “The Slaughter.” He spent seven years writing it. He estimates that between year 2000 and 2008, about 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners were killed for their organs.
He has gone beyond what David Matas and I did. He’s looked at Uighur, house Christians, and Tibetans, and he estimates that about 2,000 of them were killed for their organs.
So it’s a very large group of people. If it’s 65,000 or 2,000, that’s too many.
Obviously I’m urging you and your listeners. Nobody from NZ or Canada should go anywhere near China to get organ, and should make it as hard as they can, including their government, for the government of China to peddle this line, that it’s not happening.
It’s obviously happening, and the evidence that it’s happening is overwhelming. We’ve got something like 33 different kinds of evidence that it’s happening. I was a prosecutor for almost ten years, and the evidence is overwhelming that it’s happening. Don’t let anyone in NZ tell you it isn’t happening. Because it is.
Addendum:
David Kilgour is a Canadian former Member of Parliament. He was the Deputy Speaker and Secretary of State. He and David Matas also received the Human Rights Prize of the International Society for Human Rights in Switzerland.
Category: Organ Harvesting
