[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 19268-19271]
[From the U.S. 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. Mr. 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

[[Page 19269]]

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, 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

[[Page 19270]]

     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.
       ``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

[[Page 19271]]

     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 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.

                          ____________________