CCD Board Member David Kilgour: Crimes against Humanity Make China Unfit to Host Olympic Games
August 16, 2007 | Printer Friendly

David Kilgour, CCD Board Member and former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific (full bio), recently called attention to the evidence of organ harvesting in China, identifying such atrocities as cause for boycotting the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  Kilgour argues that China’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, and especially the charge that this persecution extends into their execution and the sale of their organs, violates the Olympic Charter and other international agreements protecting human rights and human dignity, making China unfit to host the 2008 Olympic Games.  He concludes that the historical precedent for boycotting the Games is strong, and unless China ends these killings, nations should refuse to participate. 
 

Statement by Hon David Kilgour at a public forum at King George Hotel, Constitution Square, Athens, Greece
7th August 2007
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...Any national government whose medical professionals are executing without any species of prior judicial proceeding members of an officially disapproved spiritual community, as has been occurring for more than half a decade across China to numerous Falun Gong practitioners, is self-evidently unsuited to host the Olympic Games in its capital city.

If agents of the same government are selling the vital organs-livers, kidneys etc-of such prisoners of conscience for high prices and often to organ tourists, the case for a games boycott or shunning by governments, spectators, prospective event sponsors and athletes becomes even more compelling under the Olympic Charter and a host of United Nations instruments dealing with human dignity for all people.

I hasten to stress here that the Falun Dafa community present in approximately seventy countries is not calling for a boycott or shunning of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The boycott effort is coming from others of us who are deeply worried about the worsening state of human rights in China generally.

The government of China has continuously denied that it is engaged in organ seizure
activities, which David Matas has termed "a new form of evil on this planet". It has, however, not responded to the 33 kinds of evidence Matas and I have gathered in various parts of the world as proof in our revised report (available in 17 languages at organharvestinvestigation.net). It was not any of the 33 in isolation but the combination of all of them that led us to the chilling conclusion we reached.

Among the sources of proof and disproof we examined were these:

The waiting times for organ transplants in China are astonishingly short, days and weeks, contrasted with months and years in the rest of the world. Hospital websites in China boast short waits for all organs for those who can pay large sums.

Corruption is a major and continuing problem in China, large profits being made from transplants and the general lack of control. The prices charged foreigners vary from US$ 30,000 for corneas to 180,000 for liver/kidney combinations.

President Jiang Zemin, then leader of the governing party and government in China, decided in the summer of 1999 that the then estimated 70-100 million Falun Gong practitioners in the country posed a threat to the government. He declared a brutal war, which involved imprisonment, systematic torture and forced labour for thousands of practitioners. The media demonization and dehumanization of Falun Gong practitioners across the country since mid-1999 appears to have exceeded what was directed at persons convicted of capital offences.

Based on my own observations of Falun Gong practitioners in the about 35 of the countries where they now live, it is clear that there are profound differences in the value systems of Falun Gong and the CCP. For example, the guiding principles of the first are Truth, Compassion and Forbearance. Those of the latter are closer to polar opposites. It is also clear that practitioners were determinedly non-political across China until the persecution began in mid-1999.

The government of China gave its military-the PLA-the authority to raise money privately. It is now heavily involved in organ transplants but operates outside the rules of the civilian health system. Transplants are performed in military hospitals and in civilian ones by military personnel.

Falun Gong practitioners have been arrested in huge numbers since mid-1999 and held without trial until they renounce their beliefs. Our report names more than three thousand Falun Gong practitioners who died as a result of torture; if the government is willing to murder large numbers of them through torture, it's easy to accept that it will do the same crime through organ seizures.

Many Falun Gong practitioners, seeking to protect their families and work colleagues, refuse to give their names upon arrest, thereby becoming especially vulnerable. Only Falun Gong prisoners are regularly blood tested and physically examined for a terrible reason which is now evident.

The usual sources of organs for transplants in China-executed convicted prisoners, donors and brain dead persons-come nowhere near in numbers to explaining the rapidly rising number of transplants across the country since the persecution began and are the only other explanation for where the 'donors' come from.

In researching our report, Matas and I had persons calling calling hospitals and detention centres throughout China posing as family members of persons who needed organ transplants. In a wide variety of locations, those who were called asserted that Falun Gong practitioners (reputedly healthy because of their exercise regime) were the source of the organs. We have recordings and telephone bills for these calls.

We also interviewed the ex-wife of a surgeon from Sujiatun who had said her husband personally removed the corneas from approximately 2000 anaesthetized Falun Gong prisoners Sujiatun hospital in Shenyang city in northeast China during the two year period before October, 2003. Her testimony was credible to us.

There have been two investigations independent from our own which have addressed the same questions we have addressed whether there is organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China – one by Dr. Kirk Allison of the University of Minnesota, another by a European Parliament Vice-President, Edward McMillian-Scott. Both have come to the same conclusion we did. These independent investigations corroborate our own conclusion.

Conclusion:

The hardship a Games boycott would create for the affected athletes is enormous. The consequences for humanity, however, of having Olympic Games go ahead in the capital of a country where innocent Chinese citizens continue to be murdered for their vital organs are even greater. If the killing seizes across China, this particular call (my own) for a boycott will also cease.

The invasion of Afghanistan by Russian troops caused a boycott by some countries of the 1980 Games in Moscow. In hindsight, all nations should have boycotted the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but at the time most governments claimed not to know what Hitler had in mind. Today, we do know only too well what the government of China has in mind for its Falun Gong community because of what it continues to do to them. This is a vitally important difference between 1936 and 2008.
 
Thank you