A large-scale genocide occurred during World War II. When the Nazis persecuted the Jews, they used the elderly and young Jewish people as human machines in their factories. At the beginning, the western world, including the United States, did not recognize this persecution. People of the west said they were waiting for additional evidence and the persecution was allowed to continue. During the 2 to 3 years that the world was waiting for additional evidence, an additional 2.5 million Jews were killed by the Nazis.

Accumulating evidence today supports the fact that doctors at Sujiatun hospital are currently harvesting healthy organs for transplant from living Falun Gong practitioners without their consent. Information provided from witnesses at the hospital, investigation reports of the World Organization for Investigating the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) and investigative reports of the Epoch Times are among the pieces of evidence that large-scale live organ harvesting from healthy Falun Gong practitioners is occurring in China today.

Additional supporting evidence emerging after the two initial reports by the Epoch Times on this atrocity strongly suggests that the Sujiatun hospital is not the only facility in China at at which these illegal transplants occur.

These facilities and the brutal crimes against humanity committed within them are now being compared to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. WOIPFG reports suggest that similar facilities for the harvesting of healthy organs from living Falun Gong practitioners now exist in the cities of at least 8 provinces in China.

The Epoch Times quickly realized that this crime was more than a just a standard news story. It was a large-scale genocide being committed by the state. It was a crime against humanity. The story exposed by the Epoch Times is beyond the scope of the imagination of any decent human being. It is an evil state of affairs that deserves investigation by the global community. The purpose of this report is to help insure the rescue of those Falun Gong practitioners still being detained as prisoners at these organ harvesting centers and throughout China.

Looking at different reports of supporting evidence in this case is like looking at an apple from different perspectives. People see evidence differently when viewed from different angles. No one yet has the ability to see the entire picture. Witnesses have repeatedly emphasized that the currently revealed facts are just the tip of the iceberg. It is natural that some readers may find it difficult to understand because some of the details have not yet been fully investigated.

One of the witnesses at Sujiatun is the ex-wife of a surgeon at the hospital. She has been evading the authorities for several years. Only after she finally escaped to the United States was she gradually able to step forward and tell her story. For her, the painful process of telling her story is also a process of getting rid of the fear of painful retribution by authorities from which she has suffered for all these years. We believe more facts and information will soon emerge in support of her account of the atrocities at Sujiatun.

Because the evil nature of removing healthy organs from living Falun Gong practitioners was very secretive, some reporting details may be incomplete. Faced with such atrocities, we hope that the public will understand if these first reports are unable to tell the whole story. The world should not allow these crimes to continue and grow worse while waiting for additional evidence to complete the investigation. Even if there is only a 1% possibility of reports being accurate, this crime against humanity deserves immediate global attention and investigation.

On April 3, senior Canadian diplomat and China expert Brian MacAdam said: "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denied the existence of the Sujiatun Concentration Camp as expected." He said "One could find 2.1 million records when searching 'China denies' on Google." MacAdam gave several examples of past false denials by the CCP: "After taking control of China in 1949, the facts denied by the CCP include 1) the great famine during which 20 to 43 million citizens starved to death, 2) the system of re-education through labor, 3) the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, 4) the SARS epidemic, 5) bird flu, and today 5) the harvest of healthy organs from Falun Gong practitioners for transplant to waiting patients." MacAdam pointedly noted that the first ones who denied the holocaust were the Nazis.

On March 27 (last week) Rudolph Vrba died in Vancouver. Vrba and Alfred Wetzler were two of the first Jews who managed to escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. In April 1944, they had presented to the allies the first detailed reports of the extent of the holocaust in Europe including details of the atrocities committed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. MacAdam suggested that "Forgetting the past would make history repeat itself."

According to MacAdam, "As first-hand witnesses, Vrba and Alfred Wetzler had written a shocking and detailed report about the crimes against humanity and the human slaughter that had been committed at Auschwitz. However, at that time in history, many people did not believe that the report was accurate. As a result, the information in the report was suppressed. Subsequent to the release of this report, during the time between May 15 and July 7, 1944, an additional 437,000 innocent Jews were sent to the Auschwitz death camp.

MacAdam thinks that the world should not allow these current crimes against humanity in China to continue simply because we are waiting for additional supporting evidence. MacAdam recommended the Canadian government begin investigations immediately.

1. According to witnesses, in 2001, about 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners were detained in the Sujiatun District, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province.

At the beginning, they were held in one-story houses in the back of the hospital. These houses were very simple—similar to those normally built for construction workers. These houses were later dismantled. The detained Falun Gong practitioners housed there were transferred to a new location.

Hospital staff members have reported that the Sujiatun hospital has a large underground basement area. Very few employees at Sujiatun hospital have permission to enter the underground structure. Hospital staff have suggested that the detained Falun Gong practitioners previously held in the one-story houses were transferred to these basement areas.

The estimate of there being 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners imprisoned at the hospital came from a hospital staff member who was in charge of logistics, supplies and procurement. This staff member had determined that the requisition of basic supply materials had suddenly increased in 2001. The number of patients implied by the requisitioned amounts was far above what would have been required to meet the needs of the officially registered patients at the hospital at that time. The 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners estimated to be imprisoned at Sujiatun at that time is based on these numbers. The actual number present may be higher or lower than this estimate. Some practitioners may have been transferred to other hospitals for harvesting of their organs for transplant at these other locations.

Witnesses from the hospital staff at Sujiatun described the overcrowding of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners in the underground basement areas: "Everyone is squeezed together. Maybe there is no room after one comes back from the restroom."

Detained Falun Gong practitioners are reportedly numbered, just as the Jews were numbered in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

The estimate by the logistics staff member must be considered in the light of the regular situation of detention for Falun Gong practitioners. The consumption of food is one or two meals per day, rather than 3 meals per day. The conditions there are rather harsh.

2. There is an underground defense facility in the Sujiatun Area. (Please refer to The "Underground World" in Shenyang http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-4-4/40034.html for more details.) The Chinese official media publicized those facilities. The medical centers near the Sujiatun Hospital have harvested organs from living Falun Gong practitioners. These hospitals include but are not limited to:

The Shenyang No. 6 People's Hospital The Hospital Affiliated with the Liaoning Chinese Medicine Hospital The Shenyang Hospital of Infectious Disease

3. Currently, organ transplants are being performed in Chinese hospitals that do not meet the official standards for such procedures. According to official Chinese standards, only level 3 hospitals are qualified to perform organ transplants. However, the official Guangdong Satellite TV station reported in 2004 a case of a Hong Kong family seeking organ transplant in Guangzhou. The patient was scheduled for a kidney transplant at Yanling, a level 2 hospital. The transplant was performed by a plastic surgeon. The plastic surgeon had no previous training in urology or in performing a kidney transplant.

Quite a few hospitals in Shenyang indicate that they have live kidney sources. A few hospitals have confirmed that they use organs from Falun Gong practitioners. Please refer to details in the reports of WOIPFG. ( Investigative Report of Human Organ Harvesting from Living Abducted Falun Gong Practitioners at the Sujiatun Concentration Camp (Part II), March 30, 2006 )

The China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center at the Hui-Gong Street, Shenhe District, in Shenyang City announces on its English web site: "It may only take one week to find the suitable donor, the maximum time being one month because for a kidney transplant there needs to be an organ with a compatible HLA match".

In contrast, the average wait time for a matched kidney in the U.S. is 2 years.

The Tianjin Oriental Organ Transplantation Center, one of the largest transplantation centers in China shows its achievements (please refer to the graph below). It indicates that the number of organ transplantation cases sharply increased in the time period of 2001 to 2004. Medical professionals reason that their must be a large live organ bank in the Shenyang area considering that some organs have only 24 – 48 hours of survival time and that it takes only a short time to find matching organs.

4. The ex-wife says that her ex-husband sometimes performed 3 live organ removal operations per day when he was involved. Organ removal or live organ removal had been done by neighborhood hospitals as well. She estimates that 4,000 were killed in 3 years. Because of the CCP's policy of "not being accountable for killing Falun Gong practitioners," surgeons involved may be those without adequate experience or surgeons affiliated with other hospitals. The witness says that she often saw unknown doctors in the hospital who were affiliated with other hospitals.

5. Those who receive these organs are usually from Southeast Asian countries such as Japan. Some are from Australia and the U.S. Some patients have operations in Shenyang. Removed organs include not only kidneys and livers, but also skin, bone marrow, and corneas. Skin and corneas can be stored perpetually.

Recently, the Department of Health in Japan and Malaysia issued statements and asked China to investigate the death of their citizens after receiving organ transplantation in China. This may have happened because Chinese organ transplantation hasn't strictly followed medical standards. Some organs may be out-of-date.

6. The Falun Gong practitioners detained in the Sujiatun Hospital were transferred from Dabei prison and other prisons. Many of such Falun Gong practitioners were peasants. They don't have any power in the society. They are easy to deceive. They come from all over China. The witness says that no Falun Gong practitioners who were sent to the hospital for organ removal came out of the hospital alive. About 4,000 people had been killed by the time she left the hospital in 2004. It was estimated that the number of detained Falun Gong practitioners had reduced to 2,000 at that time.

According to further information, Sujiatun is not the only facility performing live organ removals of Falun Gong practitioners. Other hospitals in Shenyang City perform similar illegal operations. Victims of live organ removals may come from the Liaoning Thrombus Treatment Center of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine. Eight provinces and cities have similar facilities (WOIFPG report). A Shenyang military zone doctor says that in the Jiutai Area in Jilin Province alone, more than 14,000 Falun Gong practitioners were detained.

7. According to Minghui web site, from July 20, 1999 to July 2001, about 7 million Falun Gong practitioners went to Beijing to appeal. In the months around July 2001, many Falun Gong practitioners gathered in Beijing urban areas. 300,000 is estimated to be the peak number of practitioners staying in Beijing; if those staying in Beijing's suburbs is considered, the number rises to around 700,000. A 1998 Shanghai TV program reported before the persecution that 100 million Chinese were practicing Falun Gong.

In order to avoid their family/friends being persecuted because of them, the detained Falun Gong practitioners refused to submit their names and regions. The witnesses say that people detained there are called by numbers, not names.

8. Through investigation, the first witness to come forward, the TV journalist know as "Mr. R.," realized that all the victims are Falun Gong practitioners. The ex-wife of a surgeon said that every surgeon involved in the live organ removal scheme knew that the victims were Falun Gong practitioners. When the doctor asked if it would be murder since these people were alive, leaders in the Department of Health said no one would be accountable for the death of Falun Gong practitioners. This is helping to "cleanse" the nation. Detained Falun Gong practitioners are unidentified.

9. This is a crime sponsored by the State. Witnesses indicate that participants in this scheme are health care professionals, correction officers, armed police, labor camp personnel and organ brokers, and the number is large. Even the doctors were carefully chosen. Usually they were orphans of communist army soldiers or people who have close ties with those in the scheme. Even the doctors who once participated in this scheme now face the danger of being killed for the sake of destroying evidence.

The surgeon who is the ex-husband of the staff member who came forward as a witness didn't want to continue his involvement. When he made this decision, he began to receive life-threatening phone calls. Once, he survived an assassination attempt. A few doctors disappeared without a trace. All participants are afraid of being killed. A few surgeons left China after having plastic surgery done.

In China, it is impossible to report such news. Even when an insider has decided to quit news outlets outside China may be reluctant to publish. Mr. R has met with several big mainstream media outlets in Japan. The reporters understood and believed his story was true, but they said that this article would not be published because of the relationship between Japan and China.

Sixty years ago, fewer Jewish people would have been killed if more people had stepped forward in the name of justice and courage. At least, the extent of persecution would have not been that extensive. Our efforts today become so significant to those whose lives are in danger. But if we choose to keep silent about what the Chinese Communist Party has done and continues to do, or wait for more "hard evidence," the same tragedy from 60 years ago could become true today.

It is our obligation to stop these state-sponsored crimes.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-4-7/40196.html

The horrors of the Sujiatun death camp were prefigured and made possible by the system of harvesting organs that has been present in China for two decades.

That system treats prisoners as raw material to be exploited for profit. It hopelessly confounds the roles of courts and doctors. Courts are given incentives by the transplant industry to schedule executions. Doctors become de facto members of the criminal justice system. Instead of having as their only priority healing the sick, doctors become assistants in executions.

According to traditional Chinese beliefs, only a whole body can go on to the next life. For this cultural reason, or because the Chinese Communist regime has never really tried to develop a system of voluntary organ donation, there are almost no voluntary donors of organs in China.

According to Professor Tsuyoshi Awaya of Tokuyama University in testimony given before the U.S. Congress in 1998, from the beginning organ transplants in China have depended on organs from executed prisoners.

In 1983 the immuno-suppressive drug cyclosporine was approved for use, greatly increasing the chances of successful transplant operations. Also in 1983, a series of "crackdown on crime" campaigns began, which resulted in a large increase in the number of executions of prisoners and thus a big supply of available organs.

These two developments provided the occasion for the birth of China's regime of organ harvesting.

In 1984 six agencies, including the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Public Security, issued a secret directive that was published for the first time by Human Rights Watch: Asia in its report on "Organ Procurement and Judicial Execution in China." "Temporary Rules Concerning the Utilization of Corpses or Organs from the Corpses of Executed Criminals" continues to this day to govern the procedures for harvesting organs in China.

Organ harvesting involves collusion between security agencies and medical officials that the rest of the world considers grossly unethical, and the treatment of prisoners that is considered not only unethical but inhumane. Organ harvesting is therefore carried out in secrecy.

This directive stipulates that "The use of the corpses or organs of executed criminals must be kept strictly secret…"

In order to assure secrecy, "a surgical vehicle from the health department may be permitted to drive onto the execution grounds to remove the organs, but it is not permitted to use a vehicle bearing health department insignia or to wear white clothing. Guards must remain posted around the execution grounds while the operation for organ removal is going on."

This directive appears to protect the rights of the prisoners by assuring that organs may only be taken from them with consent. In fact, prisoners retain no rights to their own bodies.

According to the directive, organs may be used if any one of these conditions is met: "1. No one claims the body or the family refuses to claim the body; 2. The executed criminal has volunteered to have his corpse provided to a medical treatment or health unit for use; 3. The family consents to the use of the corpse."

These conditions are hardly strict. Even so, it is always the case in China that the rules as written down, even in secret documents, are not necessarily what counts.

A report in the South China Morning Post in January 2000 on liver transplants at Sun Yatsen Hospital in Guangzhou Province quoted one of the transplant doctors as saying "Consent is not an issue."

Indeed, when a death sentence is handed down, the convicted prisoner is also stripped of all political rights, which immediately nullifies the guarantees provided in the 1984 directive.

Harry Wu of the Laogai Foundation explained in testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1998, the time and location of executions are kept secret, which means the family has no opportunity to make a claim for the body. They are simply given the ashes after it has been cremated. Or, families may be offered "pennies" for consent, and, as a cadre told Wu, "see if they dare say 'no.'"

The prisoner may give consent, but under the extraordinarily coercive conditions on death row in a Chinese jail, the giving of free and informed consent is not possible. The prisoner may be offered a slightly less painful regime of confinement if he consents, and at the same time knows more brutal mistreatment may follow upon refusal.

Dr. Wang Guoqi, in testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2001, described one execution gone wrong in which he skinned a prisoner who was still alive.

There are numerous accounts of organs being harvested from prisoners who are still living. In some cases, organs have been taken before the execution. In other cases, the execution by gunshot has been deliberately bungled to assure that organs are not damaged.

The use of lethal injection, which has been introduced in China over the last five years, may seem to be more humane than execution by gunshot. But it is also more sure—no organs are damaged by lethal injection. This method is preferred by China's transplant doctors.

The number of executions in China is considered a state secret. Amnesty International can verify 2,468 executions in China in 2001. It estimates the actual number of executions to be far higher, perhaps as many as 10,000 each year. Liu Renwen, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, recently stated that he believed the number of executions each year to be around 8,000.

70 offenses in China may now incur the death penalty, including theft and embezzlement. Four men in China were recently executed for falsifying VAT tax reports. Among those executed each year are prisoners of conscience. Because of the widespread use of torture to coerce confessions, and the general failures of the criminal justice system, a large percentage of convictions are believed to be false.

Organ transplants in China are big business. Visit http://www.bek-transplant.com/en/index.htm and one will find an English-language website set up to assist those seeking transplants in China.

Prices vary, but transplants do not come cheap. According to an article in the Daily Telegraph , a transplant middleman offered a kidney transplant for $40,000. In an article in the Globe and Mail , a middleman quotes a price of $125,000 for a new kidney.

In any case, the money by the transplant patients is spread widely. Once in China, the patients are expected to offer "red envelopes" of cash to all their doctors and nurses. Doctors involved in the transplant pay judges and bailiffs. Everyone profits, and everyone has a stake in keeping the system going.

Harry Wu in the introduction to "Communist Charity," the Laogai Foundation's report on organ harvesting, reflects on how this system could come into existence. "The materialistic philosophy of the Communist Party sees human life as coming from matter. They think life has no value. In their re-education camps some people became so hopeless they took their own lives. Then the official would say 'death only makes a piece of dirt smell.' During my 19 years in re-education camp, I heard this line innumerable times.

"If even life and freedom do not have any value, let alone the dead, and the organs of the dead, then this is the basic perspective of Chinese Communist regime's use of the organs of death row inmates."

By Stephen Gregory