Scott Stanfield
Record staff
A province-wide campaign is underway to bring awareness to the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners in China, where human organs sell for five or even six figures.
Courtenay lawyer Clive Ansley, who lived and worked in Shanghai for 14 years, addressed the issue Thursday during the Island portion of the campaign against the practice.
“For 17 years, the Chinese party state has been murdering hundreds of thousands of healthy prisoners in military and state hospitals in order to provide instant organs for party leaders and wealthy, foreign tourists,” he said at the demonstration at the Sid Williams Theatre plaza. “This is the most barbarous crime against humanity that we have seen since the Holocaust.”
Ansley criticizes governments and western corporate media for largely ignoring the issue.
A recent report — Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update — concludes that 60,000 to 100,000 yearly transplants have occurred in China since 2000. It says the main source of the transplants are non-consenting prisoners of conscience, particularly incarcerated practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline. The report also claims the Communist Party of China and hospitals are implicated in transplantation abuse.
“The world has been horrified to hear of this practice, but it is time to move beyond shock to action,” said Carrie Gilkison, who is leading the Island campaign. “That is why we’re calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make ending forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience a priority of his upcoming trip to China in September.”
Courtenay Mayor Larry Jangula applauds the efforts of Gilkison and other campaigners.
“The murder of people simply to harvest their organs must stop,” Jangula said. “I’ve had people ask me what that has to do with the Comox Valley. It has everything to do with the Comox Valley because we have people who live in the Comox Valley who naively go to China to get these organs, thinking they’re getting them from someone involved in a traffic accident, when that is absolutely not the truth.”
Ansley said “potential customers” are not facing long waits for organs in China, often assured that a new heart or kidney can be provided in a week (a long wait is a month). Once a tissue sample is provided, a computer match is made, and someone in the “herd of living, healthy donors that is kept alive for the occasion is then selected by computer and systematically murdered on operating tables in hospitals all over China.”
“The weight of evidence now makes silence equivalent to complicity,” Gilkison added. “China aspires to be a world power, but if it wants to be respected in the world, it needs to end these atrocities against its own citizens. Murder for organs has got to stop.”
While the car tour winds its way around the Island, a simultaneous tour is taking place throughout mainland B.C.
Visit endorganpillaging.org for more information about the subject.
