According to a new documentary, China harvested livers, kidneys, corneas and even hearts from tens of thousands religious prisoners while they were still alive and the world is paying no attention.
Rumours of the live organ trade in China first surfaced in 2006, and have been supported by human rights lawyers, witnesses and even surgeons who admit having performed the operations.
But claims that supporters of the Falun Gong faith are having their organs sold to wealthy transplant tourists from all over the world are still not taken seriously.
The documentary, Hard to Believe, offers the first sustained examination into why the world is so willing to turn a blind eye to 'one of the most catastrophic human rights violations in our time'.
The spiritual Falun Gong sect began in the 1990s and within seven years an estimated 100million people had joined the practice.
But the Chinese regime launched an aggressive crackdown on the sect in 1999, fearful of such a large group of people unified in their faith.
On July 20 1999, security forces abducted and detained thousands of people who had been identified as Falun Gong leaders. It was the start of a brutal and systematic campaign to eradicate the sect through a combination of propaganda, imprisonment and thought reform that often resulted in the death of the prisoner.
For director Ken Stone, the most compelling testimony is from Dr Enver Tohti, a native Uyghur from the west China province of Xinjiang.Dr Tohti reveals in the documentary the chilling details of his own involvement in the live-organ harvest, in a testimony that he also gave to the European Parliament.The doctor – who now works as a taxi driver in London – was a young surgeon in Xinjiang province, when in 1994 he was taken to an execution site. There, he found a Falun Gong prisoner lying on the ground with a gun-shot wound.
The wound was non-fatal and the prisoner would have made a full recovery, according to the surgeon's horrifying account.But even so, he was told by his superiors to remove the man's organs from his living body, before being warned to 'remember nothing happened today'.
China has strong motivation to keep at bay the allegations of organ-harvesting, which has been dubbed by Canadian investigators a 'billion dollar business'.
DM
