SAN FRANCISCO—About one mile from the World Transplant Congress (WTC), taking place Aug. 2–6 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, another group gathered to talk about the dark side of organ transplantation.
Practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong rallied on Aug. 2 in Harry Bridges Plaza to raise awareness about the Chinese communist regime’s nationwide organ harvesting industry, in which doctors murder prisoners of conscience to sell their organs for profit. Falun Gong practitioners, who have been severely persecuted in China since 1999, are the main victims of this crime.
“We estimate that more than a million Falun Gong practitioners have been killed over the past 26 years to harvest their organs,” Torsten Trey, medical director and founder of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), said at the rally.
Trey said the scope of the killing calls to mind Nazi Germany. Behind him a banner read “Immediately Stop Nazi-Style Atrocities Committed by the Communist Party.”
“In China, the forced organ harvesting is the equivalent of the gas chambers, killing Falun Gong practitioners so that they cannot testify, cannot speak, cannot share what they believe in,” he said. “But only a few doctors, few transplant doctors, have actually taken notice or known about forced organ harvesting as it takes place in China. This has to change!”
As Trey spoke, another group of Falun Gong practitioners stood outside the Moscone Center, holding banners and passing out fliers to the some of the 5,000 doctors, scientists, and health care workers attending the conference.
In early 2006, The Epoch Times exclusively reported that a whistleblower, using the alias “Annie,” said that her ex-husband, a Chinese surgeon, had removed the organs of living Falun Gong practitioners held in a facility resembling a concentration camp in Sujiatun, Liaoning Province.
In July 2006, two Canadian lawyers, David Kilgour—a former Canadian Cabinet minister and renowned defender of human rights—and David Matas released an independent report that found credible evidence of systematic organ harvesting in China, mainly from Falun Gong practitioners.
Retired professor Litong Shi, 82, was incarcerated for a few days in Shijing Mountain, Beijing, around New Year’s Day in 2001. Shi said there were eight other female Falun Gong practitioners with her, and they were forced to undergo blood tests and medical examinations after being brutally tortured.
Shi sought asylum in the United States in 2012.
Several other Falun Dafa practitioners from the Bay Area stated at the rally that they had experienced suspicious blood tests while detained.
Lu Jianhua said she had experienced multiple forced blood tests over five years of incarceration starting in October 2000.
“There’s one time that was scary when we were escorted for blood testing, a lot of guards with guns watching, everyone drew two large tubes of blood,” Lu said at the rally.
Lu escaped from communist China after being released from prison, and she managed to get to the United States in 2006 with the help of UNHCR in Thailand.
In another case, Duo Xu said he was arrested in April 2016 in his own home and was forced to take a blood test the next day. Xu told the authorities he did not want to become a victim of organ harvesting, which the local police didn’t deny was happening. Xu arrived in the United States in 2017 and was granted asylum.
Ali Centurion, neurologist and vice medical director of DAFOH, told The Epoch Times that the unethical organ harvesting still continues in China.
“There were websites that you could pull up even just a couple of years ago advertising organs in English, Arabic, and Russian, getting an organ in one or two weeks.” Centurion said. “It’s just not possible to provide an organ in such a short period of time, even today.”
Centurion said his own mother and brother had had transplants in the United States and Spain, where they'd experienced nominal waiting times of three to five years.
The only reasonable explanation is that there’s a very large pool of organ “donors” in China ready to be killed, he said.
DAFOH Booth Denied
DAFOH, the nonprofit that provides the medical community and society with “objective findings of unethical and illegal organ harvesting,” was founded in March 2006.The organization said it requested to have a booth at the WTC, but its application was denied with the explanationn that the event organizers had decided to take a “different direction” this year.
Trey said, “We are worried that these are steps of medical censorship where the leadership of the hosting organizations don’t want the other attending doctors to learn about forced organ harvesting.”
DAFOH members have to stand in the free speech kiosk outside the conference room to try to reach out to attending doctors.
“It is an uphill battle and surprisingly the most obstacles that we face are coming from the medical community and specifically from the transplant community,” Trey said.
“It’s sad to hear or to see these crimes have taken place and they have not ended yet, but we are now very hopeful,” Centurion said.
Countries including Israel, Taiwan, Spain, England, and Canada have passed legislation against forced organ harvesting, according to Centurion.
In the United States, two bills, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act and the Falun Gong Protection Act, have passed the House.
“We’re very hopeful the United States will also be taking a strong stance against these abuses,” Centurion said. “A lot is taking place, a lot of efforts and more awareness.
“The Chinese government is still hiding it and they deny it but we need to keep on exposing it. ... And once enough people know about it, we'll help bring these atrocities to an end.”
