To commemorate the lives of the victims killed at the Sujiatun concentration camp and to demand that it be shut-down, hundreds of protesters from Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Houston, California, Australia and Denmark gathered behind the White House in Lafayette Park on Monday afternoon, March 27.
It had been two weeks since the first revelation came out about the existence of this prison which adjoins the Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, and where all the prisoners were Falun Gong practitioners whose organs were extracted for commercial profit and their remains disposed of in a crematorium.
There was urgency at the rally because the participants believe that practitioners were still being held at Sujiatun and would be murdered unless the international community demanded an investigation and compelled an end to the atrocities. Mr. Hu Zhihua from New York City spoke about his brother, Hu Zhiming, who is a Falun Gong practitioner and was imprisoned for 4 years (2000-2004). Last September, he was taken away again and Mr. Hu has not spoken to his brother since then. Now he is very distraught over the likelihood that the lack of communication means his brother is dead and his organs were extracted while he was alive. He worries that his brother is (or was) held at the extermination camp where no one is known to have left alive.
At the rally it was pointed out that the Chinese communist regime takes a materialistic view of human life and feels no restraint towards taking thousands of executed prisoners' organs and selling them on the world market. The medical community's complicity in these extractions was held up for special scorn.
Many of the speakers picked up on the cry, "Never Again," the phrase that came as a result of the Holocaust, and said we must really mean it this time. Dr. Zheng Qu, scientist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said, "This was the cry of the entire civilized world after the horrors of the Holocaust. If there are any important lessons that we want our future generations never to forget, I believe this is one of them. Silence is not neutral when genocide and slaughter are going on. It is instead, as Albert Einstein put it, being 'guilty of complicity'."
A letter was read aloud at the rally from the various Falun Gong associations across the country:
"Due to the [Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s] tight cover-up of their crimes, very limited information can be known at the moment. Some say there hasn't been much evidence. But historically, after painful reflection upon many cases such as the Nazi's massive killing in concentration camps and the genocide in Rwanda, we only wish that we had intervened earlier. 'Never again' is exactly happening again."
Besides the urgency and sadness there was also great indignation that these events are occurring and the world stands by and does nothing. Many speakers likened the situation to the time in Germany when the Jews were gassed and shot and the world did nothing. One speaker pointed out the parallels between the two regimes, Nazi Germany and the Chinese communist regime. The former held a meeting on January 20, 1942, at Lake Wannsee in Berlin where the "Final Solution" was discussed in detail for resolving the "Jewish Question," as it was called. Before that conference, the assumption was that the Jews needed to be moved from the Fatherland and live separately. The "Final Solution" meant they really intended to exterminate the 11 million Jews residing in Europe.
Similarly, Falun Gong practitioners are considered a "problem" by the Chinese communist regime, and refuse to give up their beliefs despite being placed under immense pressure in brainwashing centers and work camps. Faced with the failure in forcing Falun Gong practitioners to sign "Guarantee" statements that they would not practice anymore, the Chinese communist regime has as its "Final Solution" the murdering of innocents and the harvesting of their organs.
Guiming Guan, who was the most renowned tenor in China and now resides in California, sang a mournful song, accompanied by his wife, "Commemoration of You One More Time" in memory of those who died at the Sujiatun Concentration Camp. Afterwards, Mr. Guan played on his trumpet, the song, "Please Sit by My Side" and a poem was recited that strongly conveyed solidarity and purpose emerging from the atrocity.
Attorney Ning Ye from New York spoke with great emotion about Sujiatun concentration camp and surprised everyone when he kneeled on stage facing the photo of the remains of Wang Bin. The photo shows an incision along the collar bone that indicates the chest cavity had been opened up. Attorney Ye said he was following a traditional Chinese practice of honoring someone who had made a sacrifice for him and the Chinese people. Since the rally, a Foreign Ministry spokesman from the Chinese government denied the existence of the Sujiatun death camp, and invited reporters to visit Shenyang where the camp was allegedly set up. However, while the Chinese communist regime took two weeks before responding to the charges, this gave them ample time to move the Falun Gong prisoners out.
No one denies, however, the huge number of transplants in China — somewhere around 10,000 per year, and in order to do this, the organs must come from somewhere. The ease with which one can secure a kidney - typically two weeks — is completely adverse to the long wait of many years that is necessary in the free world.
Dr. Morton Sklar, attorney and Executive Director, World Organization Against Torture/Human Rights, has filed lawsuits against Bo Xilai, who is currently the Minister of Commerce for China, but until February 2004, was governor of Liaoning province, which Sklar said has the largest number of Falun Gong practitioners detained in China. It was no surprise therefore to attorney Sklar that the death camp was located in Liaoning province in Northeast China, and that as governor, Bo Xilai would have had to know and approve what was going on.
D.J. McGuire, president of China Support Network and author of the book Dragon in the Dark: How and Why Communist China Helps Our Enemies in the War on Terror, saw the Sujiatun concentration camp and the Chinese communist regime's duplicity as part of a larger war:
"…[W]e must look beyond the United States, beyond Communist-controlled China, to the battle between the democratic world and the tyrannical forces it fights in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the globe. The latter have fallen under the bloody banner of 'terrorism;' the main perpetrators are well known: al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, the mullahcracy in Iran, the Assad family in Syria. What is not as well known is that all of these forces of evil —plus the northern Korean nightmare run by Kim Jong-Il— have received aid and support from the Chinese Communist Party for years, including military and, in the case of the Iranian mullahs, even nuclear support."
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