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Hosting Olympics and Committing Crimes Against Humanity Are Incompatible
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Hosting Olympics and Committing Crimes Against Humanity
Are Incompatible
Statement by Hon David Kilgour at a public forum
at King George Hotel, Constitution Square, Athens, Greece
7th August 2007
...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 ¡V 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.
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