[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 188 (Thursday, December 8, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H8299-H8302]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CHINA ORGAN HARVESTING
(Mr. PITTS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. PITTS. Madam Speaker, an article in last Monday's Weekly Standard
reveals the systematic execution and harvesting of organs in China's
prisons.
The article provides firsthand accounts of the targeted elimination
of religious prisoners, prisoners of conscience, and political
opponents of the regime. Minorities, including Falun Gong, Uyghurs,
House Christians, and Tibetans have been executed, followed by organ
transplant surgeries--some being performed while the victims are still
alive, numbering in the tens of thousands.
Furthermore, foreign companies are already making investments to
benefit off of the thriving organ transplant market. Pharmaceutical
companies like Roche and Isotechnika Pharma have been involved in
clinical drug testing of transplant patients. A British firm, TFP Ryder
Healthcare, is proposing a medical facility that would include an organ
transplant center.
Before they follow suit, U.S. companies must understand the unethical
climate that exists in China. And our State Department and the U.N.
must treat these actions as an abuse of China's international
agreements and human rights of their own people.
[From WeeklyStandard.com, Dec. 5, 2011]
The Xinjiang Procedure
(By Ethan Gutmann)
To figure out what is taking place today in a closed
society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go
back a decade, sometimes more.
One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern
Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small
medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in
internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical
University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on
bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar
vehicles--clean, white, with smoked glass windows and
prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the
medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the
view from the side window of lines of ditches--some filled
in, others freshly dug--suggested that the hilltop had served
as a killing ground for years.
Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72
kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals.
Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30
minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant
within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution
would probably ruin the heart.
With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the
last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to
waste. It wasn't public knowledge exactly, but Chinese
medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals
volunteered their organs as a final penance.
Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open
and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their
uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching
slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the
right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was
laid down, he went to work.
Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail organs in
the van were slated for the profitable foreigner market, the
doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this kidney was
tissue-matched for transplant into a 50-year-old Chinese man.
Without the transplant, that man would die. With it, the same
man would rise miraculously from his hospital bed and go on
to have a normal life for 25 years or so. By 2016, given all
the anti-tissue-rejection drug advances in China, they could
theoretically replace the liver, lungs, or heart--maybe buy
that man another 10 to 15 years.
Body #3 had no special characteristics save an angry purple
line on the neck. The doctor recognized the forensics.
Sometimes the police would twist a wire around a prisoner's
throat to prevent him from speaking up in court. The doctor
thought it through methodically. Maybe the police didn't want
this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged killer,
a thug, or mentally unstable. After all, the Chinese penal
system was a daily sausage grinder, executing hardcore
criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor knew the
harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been committed, it
would be nice if the prisoner's body were allowed to rest
forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an
obstetrician's? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life,
as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or steroids. Or
maybe, he thought, they didn't want this man to talk because
he was a political prisoner.
Nineteen years later, in a secure European location, the
doctor laid out the puzzle. He asked that I keep his identity
a secret. Chinese medical authorities admit that the lion's
share of transplant organs originate with executions, but no
mainland Chinese doctors, even in exile, will normally speak
of performing such surgery. To do so would remind
international medical authorities of an issue they would
rather avoid--not China's soaring execution rate or the
exploitation of criminal organs, but rather the systematic
elimination of China's religious and political prisoners. Yet
even if this doctor feared consequences to his family and his
career, he did not fear embarrassing China, for he was born
into an indigenous minority group, the Uighurs.
Every Uighur witness I approached over the course of two
years--police, medical, and security personnel scattered
across two continents--related compartmentalized fragments of
information to me, often through halting translation. They
acknowledged the risk to their careers, their families, and,
in several cases, their lives. Their testimony reveals not
just a procedure evolving to meet the lucrative medical
demand for living organs, but the genesis of a wider
atrocity.
Behind closed doors, the Uighurs call their vast region in
China's northwest corner (bordering on India, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and
Mongolia) East Turkestan. The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic,
not East Asian. They are Muslims with a smattering of
Christians, and their language is more readily understood in
Tashkent than in Beijing. By contrast, Beijing's name for the
so-called Autonomous Region, Xinjiang, literally translates
as ``new frontier.'' When Mao invaded in 1949,
[[Page H8300]]
Han Chinese constituted only 7 percent of the regional
population. Following the flood of Communist party
administrators, soldiers, shopkeepers, and construction
corps, Han Chinese now constitute the majority. The party
calculates that Xinjiang will be its top oil and natural
gas production center by the end of this century.
To protect this investment, Beijing traditionally depicted
all Uighur nationalists--violent rebels and non-violent
activists alike--as CIA proxies. Shortly after 9/11, that
conspiracy theory was tossed down the memory hole. Suddenly
China was, and always has been, at war with al Qaeda-led
Uighur terrorists. No matter how transparently opportunistic
the switch, the American intelligence community saw an
opening for Chinese cooperation in the war on terror, and
signaled their acquiescence by allowing Chinese state
security personnel into Guantanamo to interrogate Uighur
detainees.
While it is difficult to know the strength of the claims of
the detainees' actual connections to al Qaeda, the basic
facts are these: During the 1990s, when the Chinese drove the
Uighur rebel training camps from neighboring countries such
as Kazakhstan and Pakistan, some Uighurs fled to Afghanistan
where a portion became Taliban soldiers. And yet, if the
Chinese government claims that the Uighurs constitute their
own Islamic fundamentalist problem, the fact is that I've
never met a Uighur woman who won't shake hands or a man who
won't have a drink with me. Nor does my Jewish-sounding name
appear to make anyone flinch. In one of those vino veritas
sessions, I asked a local Uighur leader if he was able to get
any sort of assistance from groups such as the Islamic Human
Rights Commission (where, as I found during a brief visit to
their London offices, veiled women flinch from an extended
male hand, drinks are forbidden, and my Jewish surname is a
very big deal indeed). ``Useless!'' he snorted, returning to
the vodka bottle.
So if Washington's goal is to promote a reformed China,
then taking Beijing's word for who is a terrorist is to play
into the party's hands.
Xinjiang has long served as the party's illicit laboratory:
from the atmospheric nuclear testing in Lop Nur in the mid-
sixties (resulting in a significant rise in cancers in
Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital) to the more recent creation in
the Tarim Desert of what could well be the world's largest
labor camp, estimated to hold 50,000 Uighurs, hardcore
criminals, and practitioners of Falun Gong. And when it comes
to the first organ harvesting of political prisoners,
Xinjiang was ground zero.
In 1989, not long after Nijat Abdureyimu turned 20, he
graduated from Xinjiang Police School and was assigned to a
special police force, Regiment No. 1 of the Urumqi Public
Security Bureau. As one of the first Uighurs in a Chinese
unit that specialized in ``social security''--essentially
squelching threats to the party--Nijat was employed as the
good cop in Uighur interrogations, particularly the high-
profile cases. I first met Nijat--thin, depressed, and
watchful--in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of Rome.
Nijat explained to me that he was well aware that his
Chinese colleagues kept him under constant surveillance. But
Nijat presented the image they liked: the little brother with
the guileless smile. By 1994 he had penetrated all of the
government's secret bastions: the detention center, its
interrogation rooms, and the killing grounds. Along the way,
he had witnessed his fair share of torture, executions, even
a rape. So his curiosity was in the nature of professional
interest when he questioned one of the Chinese cops who came
back from an execution shaking his head. According to his
colleague, it had been a normal procedure--the unwanted
bodies kicked into a trench, the useful corpses hoisted into
the harvesting vans, but then he heard something coming from
a van, like a man screaming.
``Like someone was still alive?'' Nijat remembers asking.
``What kind of screams?''
``Like from hell.''
Nijat shrugged. The regiment had more than enough
sloppiness to go around.
A few months later, three death row prisoners were being
transported from detention to execution. Nijat had become
friendly with one in particular, a very young man. As Nijat
walked alongside, the young man turned to Nijat with eyes
like saucers: ``Why did you inject me?''
Nijat hadn't injected him; the medical director had. But
the director and some legal officials were watching the
exchange, so Nijat lied smoothly: ``It's so you won't feel
much pain when they shoot you.''
The young man smiled faintly, and Nijat, sensing that he
would never quite forget that look, waited until the
execution was over to ask the medical director: ``Why did you
inject him?''
``Nijat, if you can transfer to some other section, then go
as soon as possible.''
``What do you mean? Doctor, exactly what kind of medicine
did you inject him with?'' ``Nijat, do you have any
beliefs?''
``Yes. Do you?''
``It was an anticoagulant, Nijat. And maybe we are all
going to hell.''
I first met Enver Tohti--a soft-spoken, husky, Buddha of a
man--through the informal Uighur network of London. I confess
that my first impression was that he was just another emigre
living in public housing. But Enver had a secret.
His story began on a Tuesday in June 1995, when he was a
general surgeon in an Urumqi hospital. Enver recalled an
unusual conversation with his immediate superior, the chief
surgeon: ``Enver, we are going to do something exciting. Have
you ever done an operation in the field?''
``Not really. What do you want me to do?''
``Get a mobile team together and request an ambulance. Have
everyone out front at nine tomorrow.''
On a cloudless Wednesday morning, Enver led two assistants
and an anaesthesiologist into an ambulance and followed the
chief surgeon's car out of Urumqi going west. The ambulance
had a picnic atmosphere until they realized they were
entering the Western Mountain police district, which
specialized in executing political dissidents. On a dirt road
by a steep hill the chief surgeon pulled off, and came back
to talk to Enver: ``When you hear a gunshot, drive around the
hill.''
``Can you tell us why we are here?''
``Enver, if you don't want to know, don't ask.''
``I want to know.''
``No. You don't want to know.''
The chief surgeon gave him a quick, hard look as he
returned to the car. Enver saw that beyond the hill there
appeared to be some sort of armed police facility. People
were milling about--civilians. Enver half-satirically
suggested to the team that perhaps they were family members
waiting to collect the body and pay for the bullet, and the
team responded with increasingly sick jokes to break the
tension. Then they heard a gunshot, possibly a volley, and
drove around to the execution field.
Focusing on not making any sudden moves as he followed the
chief surgeon's car, Enver never really did get a good look.
He briefly registered that there were 10, maybe 20 bodies
lying at the base of the hill, but the armed police saw the
ambulance and waved him over.
``This one. It's this one.''
Sprawled on the blood-soaked ground was a man, around 30,
dressed in navy blue overalls. All convicts were shaved, but
this one had long hair.
``That's him. We'll operate on him.''
``Why are we operating?'' Enver protested, feeling for the
artery in the man's neck. ``Come on. This man is dead.''
Enver stiffened and corrected himself. ``No. He's not
dead.''
``Operate then. Remove the liver and the kidneys. Now!
Quick! Be quick!''
Following the chief surgeon's directive, the team loaded
the body into the ambulance. Enver felt himself going numb:
Just cut the clothes off. Just strap the limbs to the table.
Just open the body. He kept making attempts to follow normal
procedure--sterilize, minimal exposure, sketch the cut. Enver
glanced questioningly at the chief surgeon. ``No
anaesthesia,'' said the chief surgeon. ``No life support.''
The anaesthesiologist just stood there, arms folded--like
some sort of ignorant peasant, Enver thought. Enver barked at
him. ``Why don't you do something?''
``What exactly should I do, Enver? He's already
unconscious. If you cut, he's not going to respond.''
But there was a response. As Enver's scalpel went in, the
man's chest heaved spasmodically and then curled back again.
Enver, a little frantic now, turned to the chief surgeon.
``How far in should I cut?''
``You cut as wide and deep as possible. We are working
against time.''
Enver worked fast, not bothering with clamps, cutting with
his right hand, moving muscle and soft tissue aside with his
left, slowing down only to make sure he excised the kidneys
and liver cleanly. Even as Enver stitched the man back up--
not internally, there was no point to that anymore, just so
the body might look presentable--he sensed the man was still
alive. I am a killer, Enver screamed inwardly. He did not
dare to look at the face again, just as he imagined a killer
would avoid looking at his victim.
The team drove back to Urumqi in silence.
On Thursday, the chief surgeon confronted Enver: ``So.
Yesterday. Did anything happen? Yesterday was a usual, normal
day. Yes?''
Enver said yes, and it took years for him to understand
that live organs had lower rejection rates in the new host,
or that the bullet to the chest had--other than that first
sickening lurch--acted like some sort of magical anaesthesia.
He had done what he could; he had stitched the body back
neatly for the family. And 15 years would elapse before Enver
revealed what had happened that Wednesday.
As for Nijat, it wasn't until 1996 that he put it together.
It happened just about midnight, well after the cell block
lights were turned off. Nijat found himself hanging out in
the detention compound's administrative office with the
medical director. Following a pause in the conversation, the
director, in an odd voice, asked Nijat if he thought the
place was haunted.
``Maybe it feels a little weird at night,'' Nijat answered.
``Why do you think that?''
``Because too many people have been killed here. And for
all the wrong reasons.''
Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The expensive
``execution meals'' for the regiment following a trip to the
killing ground. The plainclothes agents in the cells who
persuaded the prisoners to sign statements donating their
organs to the state. And now the medical director was
confirming it all: Those statements were real. They just
didn't take account of the fact that the prisoners would
still be alive when they were cut up.
[[Page H8301]]
``Nijat, we really are going to hell.''
Nijat nodded, pulled on his beer, and didn't bother to
smile.
On February 2, 1997, Bahtiyar Shemshidin began wondering
whether he was a policeman in name only. Two years before,
the Chinese Public Security Bureau of the Western city of
Ghulja recruited Bahtiyar for the drug enforcement division.
It was a natural fit because Bahtiyar was tall, good-looking,
and exuded effortless Uighur authority. Bahtiyar would
ultimately make his way to Canada and freedom, but he had no
trouble recalling his initial idealism; back then, Bahtiyar
did not see himself as a Chinese collaborator but as an
emergency responder.
For several years, heroin addiction had been creeping
through the neighborhoods of Ghulja, striking down young
Uighurs like a medieval plague. Yet inside the force,
Bahtiyar quickly grasped that the Chinese heroin cartel was
quietly protected, if not encouraged, by the authorities.
Even his recruitment was a bait-and-switch. Instead of
sending him after drug dealers, his Chinese superiors ordered
him to investigate the Meshrep--a traditional Muslim get-
together promoting clean living, sports, and Uighur music and
dance. If the Meshrep had flowered like a traditional herbal
remedy against the opiate invader, the Chinese authorities
read it as a disguised attack on the Chinese state.
In early January 1997, on the eve of Ramadan, the entire
Ghulja police force--Uighurs and Chinese alike--were suddenly
ordered to surrender their guns ``for inspection.'' Now,
almost a month later, the weapons were being released. But
Bahtiyar's gun was held back. Bahtiyar went to the Chinese
bureaucrat who controlled supplies and asked after it. ``Your
gun has a problem,'' Bahtiyar was told.
``When will you fix the problem?''
The bureaucrat shrugged, glanced at his list, and looked up
at Bahtiyar with an unblinking stare that said: It is time
for you to go. By the end of the day, Bahtiyar got it: Every
Chinese officer had a gun. Every Uighur officer's gun had a
problem.
Three days later, Bahtiyar understood why. On February 5,
approximately 1,000 Uighurs gathered in the center of Ghulja.
The day before, the Chinese authorities arrested (and, it was
claimed, severely abused) six women, all Muslim teachers, all
participants in the Meshrep. The young men came without their
winter coats to show they were unarmed, but, planned or
unplanned, the Chinese police fired on the demonstrators.
Casualty counts of what is known as the Ghulja incident
remain shaky. Bahtiyar recalls internal police estimates of
400 dead, but he didn't see it; all Uighur policemen had been
sent to the local jail ``to interrogate prisoners'' and were
locked in the compound throughout the crisis. However,
Bahtiyar did see Uighurs herded into the compound and thrown
naked onto the snow--some bleeding, others with internal
injuries. Ghulja's main Uighur clinic was effectively shut
down when a squad of Chinese special police arrested 10 of
the doctors and destroyed the clinic's ambulance. As the
arrests mounted by late April, the jail became hopelessly
overcrowded, and Uighur political prisoners were selected for
daily executions. On April 24, Bahtiyar's colleagues
witnessed the killing of eight political prisoners; what
struck them was the presence of doctors in ``special vans for
harvesting organs.''
In Europe I spoke with a nurse who worked in a major Ghulja
hospital following the incident. Nervously requesting that I
provide no personal details, she told me that the hospitals
were forbidden to treat Uighur protesters. A doctor who
bandaged an arm received a 15-year sentence, while another
got 20 years, and hospital staff were told, ``If you treat
someone, you will get the same result.'' The separation
between the Uighur and Chinese medical personnel deepened:
Chinese doctors would stockpile prescriptions rather than
allow Uighur medical staff a key to the pharmacy, while
Uighur patients were receiving 50 percent of their usual
doses. If a Uighur couple had a second child, even if the
birth was legally sanctioned, Chinese maternity doctors, she
observed, administered an injection (described as an
antibiotic) to the infant. The nurse could not recall a
single instance of the same injection given to a Chinese
baby. Within three days the infant would turn blue and die.
Chinese staffers offered a rote explanation to Uighur
mothers: Your baby was too weak, your baby could not handle
the drug.
Shortly after the Ghulja incident, a young Uighur
protester's body returned home from a military hospital.
Perhaps the fact that the abdomen was stitched up was just
evidence of an autopsy, but it sparked another round of
riots. After that, the corpses were wrapped, buried at
gunpoint, and Chinese soldiers patrolled the cemeteries (one
is not far from the current Urumqi airport). By June, the
nurse was pulled into a new case: A young Uighur protester
had been arrested and beaten severely. His family paid for
his release, only to discover that their son had kidney
damage. The family was told to visit a Chinese military
hospital in Urumqi where the hospital staff laid it out: One
kidney, 30,000 RMB (roughly $4,700). The kidney will be
healthy, they were assured, because the transplant was to
come from a 21-year-old Uighur male--the same profile as
their son. The nurse learned that the ``donor'' was, in fact,
a protester.
In the early autumn of 1997, fresh out of a blood-work tour
in rural Xinjiang, a young Uighur doctor--let's call him
Murat--was pursuing a promising medical career in a large
Urumqi hospital. Two years later he was planning his escape
to Europe, where I met him some years after.
One day Murat's instructor quietly informed him that five
Chinese government officials--big guys, party members--had
checked into the hospital with organ problems. Now he had a
job for Murat: ``Go to the Urumqi prison. The political wing,
not the criminal side. Take blood samples. Small ones. Just
to map out the different blood types. That's all you have to
do.''
``What about tissue matching?''
``Don't worry about any of that, Murat. We'll handle that
later. Just map out the blood types.''
Clutching the authorization, and accompanied by an
assistant from the hospital, Murat, slight and bookish, found
himself facing approximately 15 prisoners, mostly tough-guy
Uighurs in their late twenties. As the first prisoner sat
down and saw the needle, the pleading began.
``You are a Uighur like me. Why are you going to hurt me?''
``I'm not going to hurt you. I'm just taking blood.''
At the word ``blood,'' everything collapsed. The men howled
and stampeded, the guards screaming and shoving them back
into line. The prisoner shrieked that he was innocent. The
Chinese guards grabbed his neck and squeezed it hard.
``It's just for your health,'' Murat said evenly, suddenly
aware the hospital functionary was probably watching to make
sure that Murat wasn't too sympathetic. ``It's just for your
health,'' Murat said again and again as he drew blood.
When Murat returned to the hospital, he asked the
instructor, ``Were all those prisoners sentenced to death?''
``That's right, Murat, that's right. Yes. Just don't ask
any more questions. They are bad people--enemies of the
country.''
But Murat kept asking questions, and over time, he learned
the drill. Once they found a matching blood type, they would
move to tissue matching. Then the political prisoner would
get a bullet to the right side of the chest. Murat's
instructor would visit the execution site to match up blood
samples. The officials would get their organs, rise from
their beds, and check out.
Six months later, around the first anniversary of Ghulja,
five new officials checked in. The instructor told Murat to
go back to the political wing for fresh blood. This time,
Murat was told that harvesting political prisoners was
normal. A growing export. High volume. The military hospitals
are leading the way.
By early 1999, Murat stopped hearing about harvesting
political prisoners. Perhaps it was over, he thought.
Yet the Xinjiang procedure spread. By the end of 1999, the
Uighur crackdown would be eclipsed by Chinese security's
largest-scale action since Mao: the elimination of Falun
Gong. By my estimate up to three million Falun Gong
practitioners would pass through the Chinese corrections
system. Approximately 65,000 would be harvested, hearts still
beating, before the 2008 Olympics. An unspecified,
significantly smaller, number of House Christians and
Tibetans likely met the same fate.
By Holocaust standards these are piddling numbers, so let's
be clear: China is not the land of the final solution. But it
is the land of the expedient solution. Some will point to
recent statements from the Chinese medical establishment
admitting the obvious--China's medical environment is not
fully ethical--and see progress. Foreign investors suspect
that eventually the Chinese might someday--or perhaps have
already--abandon organ harvesting in favor of the much more
lucrative pharmaceutical and clinical testing industries. The
problem with these soothing narratives is that reports, some
as recent as one year ago, suggest that the Chinese have not
abandoned the Xinjiang procedure.
In July 2009, Urumqi exploded in bloody street riots
between Uighurs and Han Chinese. The authorities massed
troops in the regional capital, kicked out the Western
journalists, shut down the Internet, and, over the next six
months, quietly, mostly at night, rounded up Uighur males by
the thousands. According to information leaked by Uighurs
held in captivity, some prisoners were given physical
examinations aimed solely at assessing the health of their
retail organs. The signals may be faint, but they are
consistent, and the conclusion is inescapable: China, a state
rapidly approaching superpower status, has not just committed
human rights abuses--that's old news--but has, for over a
decade, perverted the most trusted area of human expertise
into performing what is, in the legal parlance of human
rights, targeted elimination of a specific group.
Yet Nijat sits in refugee limbo in Neuchatel, Switzerland,
waiting for a country to offer him asylum. He confessed to
me. He confessed to others. But in a world eager not to
offend China, no state wants his confession. Enver made his
way to an obscure seminar hosted by the House of Commons on
Chinese human rights. When the MPs opened the floor to
questions, Enver found himself standing up and speaking, for
the first time, of killing a man. I took notes, but no
British MP or their staffers could be bothered to take
Enver's number.
The implications are clear enough. Nothing but self-
determination for the Uighurs
[[Page H8302]]
can suffice. The Uighurs, numbering 13 million, are few, but
they are also desperate. They may fight. War may come. On
that day, as diplomats across the globe call for dialogue
with Beijing, may every nation look to its origins and its
conscience. For my part, if my Jewish-sounding name tells me
anything, it is this: The dead may never be fully avenged,
but no people can accept being fatally exploited forever.
____________________