"Трудно за вярване" | Документален филм носител на 14 Филмови награди

I'm sure to the conference it looked very strange and very Chinese. To me, I look at it a little differently. As somebody who studied this, I feel the weight of a body, many bodies, upon their shoulders. Okay, well, thank you very much for coming to report on this event. The reason we are here today is because the World Transplant Conference is taking place in San Francisco. China has a huge number of transplants, largest in the world after the U.S., but no explanation of the sourcing. They have said prisoners sentenced to death and then executed, but they don't give numbers. I was a skeptic of the idea of forced live organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience. I did not believe it when I first heard the story, but the evidence is unmistakable. And here we have a lot of Falun Gong practitioner survivors from the torture and persecution. I was in the labor camp, the Tonghe labor camp in Beijing for three years. Every three months we got a blood test, and only Falun Gong practitioners got a blood test. So they sent me to a military hospital and they do all the physical exam for me. The police told me that I need to do the physical exam for you. And I said, I'm quite healthy, I don't need a physical exam. But then they, like, took the blood test. The police said, well, every Falun Gong practitioner has to take this blood test. I think it's a matter of education. People are very busy, but once people find out the magnitude of this crime, A lot of these people are operated without, it's not voluntary, and sometimes not even anesthesia, medication, and just wipe out, you know, take all the organs out and then burn the body. We know that the majority of these organs are coming from prisoners of conscience, not just Falun Gong, Uyghurs, Tibetans, House Christians. Does that follow our values? Is that part of American values? Is that a medical value? There remains an abuse, a concern, a debate within the transplantation society about what to do with it. But I think this goes much further than the medical community. It has to go to the political community as well. No one can ignore this issue. Think of this story as a murder mystery. Murder seems to have been committed, perhaps tens of thousands of murders. The mystery is why so few people seem to be paying attention. I'm Ethan Gutman. I'm an American, born in Chicago. I'm half Jewish. I was at Brookings for a while. I was at Free Congress Foundation for a while, all the Washington gigs. I live in London now. Over time I became very interested in China. I worked as a journalist, and I'm very good at one thing, which is infiltration. So I'm very good at infiltrating groups. I think that's because people believe that I'm basically honest and fair. I was in Beijing when the Falun Gong crackdown occurred on 9-1-9. I watched it happen. I didn't know what I was seeing, and I found it very disturbing. I could be a tourist, a lost tourist. I watched all the babies get thrown into buses. I suppose this was sort of the sleeping Jewish genetic code or something, which I found, I felt this was sort of a horrible thing, and nobody really wanted to look at it, and nobody wanted to talk about it. Even the journalists didn't really want to talk about it very much. I found that very disturbing. Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, was a relatively new spiritual practice that taught truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Its roots are in Buddhist philosophy. Started by one man in 1992, there was no formal organization or leadership, but Falun Gong captured the public imagination. The best estimates are that in just seven years, it had grown to 100 million practitioners. China's leader saw that as a threat. Falun Gong was the biggest issue in China, domestically. And that sense of Falun Gong as the biggest issue in China led me to the next step, where I started working on some articles, a potential book, maybe down the road. China's government said Falun Gong was a dangerous cult. If practitioners recanted their beliefs and promised to stop practicing Falun Gong, they were released. Gutman says hundreds of thousands did not. The 1999 crackdown led to a massive expansion of China's labor camp system. I am saying that about half a million to a million Falun Gong are in the Lao Gai system, that is, in detention in China at any given time. That's the first really shocking number to most people, half a million to a million. One of my first interviews was with three women who had just come out of labor camp in China. They didn't speak a word of English. And one of the women was a very sort of salt-of-the-earth kind of woman, about my age, 56 or something. She started talking about her experiences, and along the way she said, well, you know, I was tortured, then they gave me a physical, and then they took me and put me in this room, and then I was tortured some more, and I was just like, wait a minute, let me hear a little bit about this physical. And I kept bringing her back to it. And she kept getting increasingly annoyed. It's like, you stupid white guy, don't you get it? I mean, I'm talking about torture, I'm talking about hunger striking, I'm talking about my resistance and my spiritual awakening in prison. I mean, they were serious issues. She had a lot to say, but her exam said much more than she was saying. I mean, it was absolutely uncanny. She described an exam, when I really questioned her about it, that made no sense from a medical standpoint. It was as if somebody was checking the health of her organs. And nothing else. I could find no medical explanation. I've talked to many doctors. I've never found any kind of other... There's no other explanation for what was happening. And the most telling, of course, was the eyes, that they shined a light in her eyes. Did not do a peripheral vision test, did not do anything involving eyesight. They were just checking the corneas. And I admit that a chill passed over my spine. I said, this is... I didn't say it aloud, but a chill went down my spine. Oh, my God, this is real. This is in labor camp. Basically, people get starved and beaten in labor camps. They don't get sent to top-flate hospitals. Guttman started to write articles on allegations that Falun Gong practitioners in labor camps were being killed for their organs. The money is quite extraordinary. And so when you start moving to political prisoners, you're talking about something that's kind of pure profit. And so you are talking about, you know, up to $200,000, say, per person. China's government has always denied it. Guttman kept plugging away on the story. I was giving a talk at Westminster. It was sort of an informational talk, and it was open to the public. There were a couple of MPs there, as I remember it. And we opened it up for questions, and this man stood up and said, I did this. I performed a surgery on a living human being. And I raised my hand. And they called me. I said, what I'm going to say is not a question. Also, it's not common. I want to tell you a story. This is sand from the desert near my hometown. And sometimes I open it and smell it and say, oh, this is my homeland. My homeland, I think it is the least known place on earth. If you look at the Chinese map, at the northwest corner, there's a place called Xinjiang, and that is my homeland. This is the oldest mosque, probably in Central Asia. The Uyghurs are a Turkic people in what the Chinese call Xinjiang, what they call East Turkestan. The complication for the Uyghurs, they are in a very complex position. They are in a, they're almost like the Ukraine was in European history. They're right between great empires. They're between China, they're between Russia. The Chinese came in under Mao and basically took over the country. The hospital I worked is called the Central Railway Hospital of Rumchi. And I started working as a doctor since 1986. At the beginning, I was a general surgeon. We do everything. Chinese law allowed for organs to be taken from prisoners sentenced to death, murderers and the like, but it was not a common practice. Serious criminals are often not suitable donors because their health is poor. In July 1995, Toti says his boss asked him to assemble a field surgery team. And he said, can you, tomorrow morning, can you bring that mobile operation equipment and two or three nurse and wait for me at the hospital gate? And I said, what I'm going to do? And he said, well, something exciting. Toti says his team followed the chief surgeon to the Western Mountain execution ground. So my chief surgeon said, you wait behind this hill. You wait here. And you come out after you hear the gunshots. I don't really know how much time passed. Gunshot. So I said, go, go, go. Let's go, let's go, let's go. So we rushed in. It seemed to me they knew what's going to happen. And they just took the body and opened the door. Toti says the man lying before him is still alive. And my surgeon said, okay, Dr. Henry, that is your job now. Do as quick as possible, remove liver and kidney. From my common sense that I understood that I don't need to wait for anesthetic. So you don't need, you don't worry if you hurt or if you damage the organ next to it because you don't care. This patient, this man died not because of the shot. That shot to his right. They tried to avoid this heart. Right. So generally, if you receive one shot to the right, you can survive. He received shot to the right, and I removed his, and his dead. Chief Surgeon, they took these things and they put into special box. I had never seen such box, too. And they said, okay, now you take your team back home. And remember, nothing happened today. I didn't feel guilty. This is bad guy. He was condemned to death. But after I left China, after my eyes and my mind opened to the West and my, what is called, perspective, it's something, it's changed, totally changed. Then I said, oh my God, that is since I committed a crime. For many years, I feel guilty. I didn't know who he was, his name, or if he is Uyghur or he is Chinese. If he is Uyghur, then I might guess he is Muslim, so I might pray for him in the mosque. And I said, what if he is Buddhist? So now, when I see a temple, I go in and light a candle and pray. If I see a church, I go in, also go in to pray. When I heard Ethan that time, I did feel that this is the right time to bring this out because if it continues to stay in the bottom of my heart, my heart might not be able to carry all the way. I need to let it come out. So that day was the first day I confessed. On that day, did you feel a weight? I said, finally, I said that. I said, finally, now the whole world knows it. Cutty has since testified several times to various governmental bodies in Europe. What I'm certain is this kind of organ experiment started from Xinjiang quite early. And I think, I guess there's a reason that nobody in the world is standing for us. Xinjiang means new territory to Chinese. It doesn't mean, you know, East Turkestan. It doesn't mean somebody else's. It's new territory, new frontier. To me, this was one of these major stories. It was really important. Sure, it goes back a long ways. Sure, it goes back to 1995. Nonetheless, if you want to get to the essence of what happened here, you have to see how this developed over time. If you even want to understand Nazi Germany, you have to understand, they did not start with the Jews. They started with cripples. They started with people who were mentally challenged. And then once they realized that the public could kind of accept that, they started moving to the next measures. So I think it's very important to look at how these things develop and how societies can come to accept them at all and how can medical establishments particularly come to accept them. And Enver Tati is the missing link on that because he shows you that anything is possible. For Tati, life in England has not been easy. Because his English is limited, he was never able to obtain a medical license. He is currently a bus driver. By 2000, Falun Gong practitioners were disappearing into labor camps in mass numbers. At the same time, Chinese hospitals began promoting their organ transplant expertise. I'm David Meadeth. With me is David Kilgore. We've been asked to investigate allegations that there has been harvesting of organs of Falun Gong in China. David Kilgore is a former member of parliament and former cabinet minister for Asia Pacific. And I'm a Winnipeg lawyer doing immigration, refugee and international human rights law in Winnipeg. And we have now done our investigation and we're producing this report. And I didn't know whether it was true or not. And so my task initially was to try to figure out a way of approaching the issue so I could either prove it or disprove it and not just walk away and say, I don't know. The number of executions in China varied widely depending on who was counting. But Meadeth says no matter which number he used, the number of executions and the number of organs didn't add up. The transplant volumes increased substantially after the persecution of Falun Gong began. And I mean, there's a lot of other evidence, but the most likely explanation for the increase is the Falun Gong. We pursued every investigative trail we could find. In the report, you will see that there are 18 different avenues of proof and disproof we considered and evaluated. Our bottom line conclusion, after considering everything as best we could, was that the allegations are true. We believe them to be true, that this harvesting is indeed happening. Meadeth and Kilgore issued their report in 2006. Since then, Meadeth has continued to investigate and tried to spread the word. For me, one of the most chilling things was the blood testing, organ examination, which was happening only to Falun Gong and nobody else. And I'd meet these Falun Gong practitioners around the world who basically didn't understand it, weren't interested. I mean, what mattered to them was they were arbitrarily detained, that they were tortured, they were asked to recant. And to them, I mean, the blood testing was just an incident. I would ask them about it, and they all, everywhere, without talking to each other, without knowing each other, said the same thing. Meadeth says what made Falun Gong organs especially attractive was the practitioners' healthy lifestyle. They do not drink or smoke. On many of the recordings of phone calls made to more than 100 Chinese hospitals, doctors assure callers that transplant organs are from healthy Falun Gong practitioners. Chinese officials say the recorded phone calls are a hoax. The Falun Gong, when they were arrested, originally it was a catch-and-release system, and they'd be sent back to their home community and victimized there. What had happened is then they'd go back and protest again, and the second time they wouldn't say who they were or where they were from in order to protect their home environment. Meadeth says the effort to protect family members and friends from harassment resulted in hundreds of thousands of unidentified people in prison. This huge population, extremely vulnerable. Family didn't know where they were. Jailers didn't know who they were. They weren't going to release them without recounting. And they became this vast sea of expendable humanity. Meadeth says that vast sea brought in vast sums of money. His report laid out what Chinese hospitals were charging Westerners for each organ. $30,000 for corneas, $62,000 for kidneys, and more than $100,000 for livers or hearts. Meadeth says he found no smoking gun, but believes more than 40,000 people were killed for their organs in a six-year period. I mean, what's the explanation for the increase of transplants? And originally, I mean, they have a bunch of kind of implausible scenarios, but one of them, they said, well, we had a lot of doctors trained in the West who came back, and were able to do more transplants. Well, that explains how they could do it, but it doesn't explain where the organs were coming from. That part of the debate is over. It is not up for discussion as to whether murder for parts is taking place. It's now just a question of whether we're going to continue to put up with it. Art Kaplan is one of the leading medical ethicists in the country. And while he was convinced, the report received just a bit of attention elsewhere in the U.S. People are mostly concerned about what happens in their own backyard or their neighborhood. And to get people concerned, I mean, I've heard of Falun Gong before. They don't know what it is. There's a tendency not to get involved. As an international human rights lawyer, I think it's important for people to reach across linguistic, cultural, geographic divide to express a common humanity and solidarity. I mean, that's what human rights is all about. The year was 2005. A patient of mine who has been hospitalized in my department on top priority list for heart transplant for almost a year came to me one day and told me, Doc, I have to tell you that I was told, so he said, by my insurance company to go into China in two weeks' time as I'm scheduled to undergo heart transplantation on a specific date. And I looked at him and I said, Do you listen to yourself? How can they schedule a heart transplant ahead of time two weeks? He said, I didn't bother to ask. That's what they told me. That's what I'm going to do. Until the day not a single Israeli went to China to undergo heart transplant. Many Israelis underwent kidney transplant before. And being a heart transplant surgeon, I always thought, well, probably they're going to China and a poor Chinese farmer is selling one of his kidneys in order to make the economic status of his family better. I didn't pay attention. But this patient, as I said, was the first who was scheduled to undergo heart transplant. And that's obviously a totally different story, let alone the fact that he was told to come on a specific date. And sure enough, the guy went to China and got his heart on this very same date that he was promised ahead of time. So this led me for the first time to find out what's going on. How can the Chinese offer people heart transplant ahead of time? After reading Matus and Kilgore report, and again, after looking at the numbers, the numbers didn't fit. I mean, you cannot explain the number of transplant just by using organs from executed prisoners. It simply doesn't add up. So once Kilgore and Matus brought this new information, it all made absolute sense. What I found out more was the fact that not only this particular Israeli, as similar to the previous kidney transplant, the Israelis went to China, doesn't have to pay a cent out of his own pocket because his medical insurance and sick funds cover fully, reimburse fully the entire operation, which made the Israeli participation in the process de facto as if we are looking at what's going on in China as ethical and legitimate. Israel's health care system covered the entire cost of the operation, which Levy found wrong. And hopefully we'll be able to implement some of the ideas that were raised here into the new law, because after all, that's what's going to make the difference. Together with our friends at the Israel National Transplant Center and with our Ministry of Health, we sat down at the same time to write up what hasn't been done before, the new Israeli organ transplant law. We included a clause which totally bans any reimbursement of any illegally procured organ anywhere in the world. And the law went into act in 2008. The Jewish state couldn't live with this. They could not live with the idea of religious dissidents being slaughtered. America should be following that example. They were right. They were the first country to do this. I am not surprised that Israel was number one, but I think that owes a lot to Jacob Levy. Being a son of a father who was a refugee from a concentration camp from Nazi Germany, I felt the need to do what hasn't been done at the time when my father has been there. Because if the world would have known about what's going on there, if there would have been good people elsewhere in the world, history could have been changed. And this was what motivated me into doing all this. And I'm sure that part of the answer to why did the Israeli people stop going to China after the law, in spite of the fact that they can still do it out of their own pocket, has to do somehow with the history of our people. Israel's law passed even though the Chinese government denied allegations of organ harvesting, and even though the Matis-Kilgore report could only estimate the number of those killed. I don't think the numbers, the millions there or the tens or hundreds of thousands here makes a difference. It's a principle of taking the life of innocent human beings and just killing them for their conviction, for their belief. It's as simple as that. So I think what Levy did was a game-changer. And I'm hoping to see the same thing happen in Australia, then Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Westminster, Berlin, U.S. In Spain, they changed the law after our report came out. In Australia, they changed the policy for training of transplant doctors from China after our report came out. In Malaysia, they stopped paying through the health system for anti-rejection drugs for people who go to China for transplants after they come back. So there's been a number of changes around the world. In the United States, these changes were barely noticed. One reason may be how Falun Gong practitioners tell their story. On many city streets around the world, you'll see them. They often wear yellow shirts. They push literature at passers-by, demonstrate at public events, and tell stories of torture. Two male policemen, they were put me taped, handcuffed me to that position. Both of my hands was handcuffed to the top upper bed. I went through all kind of torture. I was handcuffed and then tortured physically, almost died. The Chinese government continues to say Falun Gong is a cult. For many Westerners, Falun Gong does look foreign and sometimes disconcerting. This attempt to characterize practitioners of Falun Gong in any way whatsoever is just kind of a stereotype. What you're dealing with is a victim community. And, I mean, you don't expect the victims to be journalists, researchers, human rights defenders. I mean, all they can tell you about is their own personal experience. It's like faulting the Somalis for not talking convincingly enough about clan warfare, or the Syrians about not talking authoritatively enough about Assad. I mean, it's unrealistic to expect the victims to shoulder the burden of presenting their case. I was blood tested. Not only blood test, chest x-ray, and blood pressure, and eye test, and kidney test, everything. We are just outside the Chinese embassy. And this is our vigil to raise awareness about the persecution of Falun Gong in China. And this persecution lasted for over 14 years. And it's still going on. It's not only the persecution. Now the worst thing is the organ harvesting. The Chinese embassy vigil in London has been going on seven days a week, 24 hours a day, since 2002. I've been doing it since 2001 because I started practicing Falun Gong in 2001. I read about the persecution and I thought, well, what's all this? It touched something inside me. If it's gone so far without the persecution stopping, then there's something seriously wrong with humanity. It must be. I'm amazed that the world is turning a blind eye, basically, to mass murder going on in China. And all because they owe loads of money to China. And I was thinking, this is absolutely incredible, isn't it? So we're standing here doing this and no one else is doing it. This has been a complicated story from the beginning. Make no mistake about that. There are language difficulties, there are cultural difficulties. These are not cute and fuzzy figures like the Tibetans. There's one final reason, which is the way Falun Gong presented itself. Look, a lot of Falun Gong are coming out of the mainland, right? So they have a tendency to use Chinese Communist Party methods of propaganda or press. This is the way they know. But they're not going to work so well over in the West. When things are stated, they are stated in kind of extreme ways. The difference is, of course, when you sit down and actually talk to these people, they're perfectly literate and mindful. They just have a different perception of how media is supposed to run. And it's taken them a while to learn the Western method, which is quite different. The story of Xiaodan Wang is a case in point. Xiaodan's father was a prominent Falun Gong practitioner in Beijing. He was one of the very first to be arrested in the 1999 crackdown. Xiaodan was going to school in the U.S. when she saw her father on CNN being sentenced to prison for 16 years. It was just like a day of crying for me. And I remember very, very vividly, I was just like kneeling down on the floor. And this is like a big TV. And I just touched my dad's face because CNN was broadcast like on a rotating schedule. And so I just, I just touched his face. I just felt like, I just felt my whole world has changed. The shy 18-year-old girl slowly became an activist. To society, like teachers, doctors, musicians, they were all tortured to death. And I really want to make things right for my dad because he's been accused and he's been wronged and everything happened to him is so unfair. A college student was touched and decided to do a documentary about her struggle. I'd been working on different things to stop the persecution. It just felt a little abstract for the American people. When you talk to them about a hundred million people being persecuted, families torn apart in China, it's like it starts to get more and more removed from the reality that they know. There's no face to it, you know. So when I heard this story about her and her dad, I realized that this was a totally different angle. Jeff helped Xiaodan create a website, freemydad.org. They fell in love and eventually married. Xiaodan says because her father was relatively well-known, she was never worried that he would be killed for his organs. Her campaign focused mostly on her father and the persecution, not organ harvesting. But the two issues are closely linked. When I first tell people about organ harvesting, I think that they are shocked. It's a disbelief. But those conversations don't seem to go very long. I think that people, I don't know if they don't believe it or they can't fathom it enough to want to carry on a conversation about organ harvesting. I mean, this is a new form of evil. When there's a new form of evil, people don't want to accept it. When I first heard of organ harvesting, I felt it was beastly, like acting to its own citizens. But I just said there's no more standards anymore. I was really outraged. I think this is pure evil. Yeah, this is definitely pure evil. Yeah. And he looked like this. After 15 years in prison, Xiaodan's father was released in late 2014. She hopes Chinese authorities let him come to America. He's very old now. He's 66. And, you know, personally, I really want him to be here because it will make my life much easier. And all I remember was he spoils me when I was young. And, you know, that feel of being protected by a dad and always have somebody to rely on, I want to have that again. But I think this time I have to take care of him. When she was young, her father bought her a piano. Xiaodan hasn't played for years, but she has begun practicing for the day that she can play for her father once again. I hope people who really watch this documentary, they could act up and stop this organ harvesting in China. It's really surprising that after so long, after so many years, the press coverage has actually diminished. And it was a lot in the beginning, and then it's diminished to almost nothing. And it's just shocking to me that with more and more evidence mounting about things like organ harvesting or the labor camp system, that the coverage becomes less and less. It should be getting more and more. And the public outcry for the U.S. to do something about it should be getting stronger. I was giving a congressional testimony, along with a couple of other people, on this. I gave my testimony, and all of a sudden Rohrabacher started pounding the table and saying they're cutting people up while they're still alive and ripping apart their bodies. And then he started pointing at the press and saying, where is the press? I am Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. I represent the 48th Congressional District in California, which is right along the coast here in Huntington Beach. Not only right along the beach, but Rohrabacher is to the right of most of his fellow Republicans, at least when it comes to China. Nobody in Washington, except a few of us, want to confront China on its gangstrous activities, on its evil activities. What we've had is now businessmen become the advocates of trying not to get the Chinese Communist government mad and are angry at us. So now what you see in both parties, further to the right and further to the left, are likely to be more active on human rights issues. That's always been part of the China dynamic. The mushy middle is the constant in China relations, is that you usually have a left-right alliance. You have the left who are interested in human rights. You have the hard right who cares about religious freedom. And the mushy middle usually cares about the money. The truth is, they're looking at it from the corporate interests. If you want to end a meeting in China, if you're in a meeting with a Chinese government official, all you have to do is mention the words, the following Congress meeting is over, and they're leaving and they won't say goodbye. There's no handshake. That's all you have to do. It is the third rail of Chinese politics. China's big, it's powerful, it's rich, and it's got connections everywhere. A lot of the mainstream are concerned by that, multilateral trade, geopolitical interests. Human rights tends to take a back seat. And whereas the extremes, well, they tend to be more principled. In an attempt to raise more awareness, HR 281 was introduced into Congress in 2013. The resolution expressed concern over credible reports of systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting. Yeah, I think that it's going on. I think it's going on at a big time, and the people over there know about it. We see this as one of the evils of our time, conducted by a gangster regime that does not deserve to be treated like an economic and political partner. The House will be in order. 245 representatives, more than half the House, agreed to co-sponsor. But resolutions alone do not have the power to change foreign policy. My name is Louisa Cohen-Griva. I'm here at the NED, vice president for programs. I've worked for a long time on Asia programs. Really glad to see you, and thank you for coming. Today we are here to hear from Ethan Gutmann, whose book, The Slaughter, is released today. So here's our chance to hear from Ethan, what's in the book, and what is the evidence that he has compiled? What do we think of it? And then to also ask ourselves, if we're persuaded, who else needs to be persuaded? Blood testing, not just one little vial. At the same time the House was considering H.R. 281, Gutmann was pushing his brand new book at an event in Washington. Now I am estimating in the book that 65,000 fallen gone were harvested for their organs between 2000 and 2008. Now that does not mean that many more haven't been harvested since that time. There were lobbyists, human rights staffers, and members from China's dissident communities. I hope there will be strong attention paid to this organ harvesting and concern from the U.S. government, especially from the U.S. Congress. Otherwise, the less the U.S. as a superpower expresses concern regarding to the organ harvesting, more of the Chinese government will see this as a green light to further commit crimes against humanity. No one from the major media was there, but a reporter for the Epoch Times was. I write about China, I write about the Communist Party, I write about CCP policies, I write about organ transplant issues in China. The Epoch Times was originally founded by a handful of fallen gone practitioners in Atlanta. It's now published in more than 30 countries around the world. We don't identify ourselves as a fallen gone paper. We resist that characterization because we don't teach fallen gone, we don't speak for fallen gone. In the ways that matter most, we don't see ourselves as a fallen gone paper. Do other media want to say, you know, yes, you have an agenda? Yeah, we get that some. We're covering things that they're not covering, and we're covering things in ways that they're not comfortable with. And so it's easier to dismiss someone rather than to look at the merits of what they're reporting. This series of stories delves deep into a topic ignored by other media outlets, but handles it just as deftly as its bigger brethren. In 2013, Robertson received an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his reporting on organ harvesting. Look at the Kilgore Matis report. Things don't add up. You don't see exactly what's happening, but everything is pretty obvious. Like, you know, you saw the guy with the murder weapon go into the room. You went in later and there was a victim, and that other fellow is gone. I found the phone calls simply irresistible because you can hear the people talking. You know, they're not faked calls. Like, you know, it's a nurse or a doctor that's being contacted by someone who's a relative of a person who needs a transplant, and they're saying, you know, I've heard that you've got organs from Falun Gong people which are healthy, and can you confirm that, and how can I be sure? And, you know, the doctor is reassuring them and even boasting and guaranteeing the quality, guaranteeing the time. And, I mean, it's a case closed. The organ harvesting story is a story about Falun Gong. Falun Gong is the most sensitive issue for the Chinese regime. No one in the mainstream press that have offices inside China are covering it inside China. Reporters in Beijing can't do the story without... They can do little bits of the story, but they can't really do this story without losing their job. And because of that, they're missing what is driving events in China, and they're missing the story of what is one of the most catastrophic human rights violations in our time. And the assumption is this is old news. China human rights is always stale news. The assumption is there's compassion fatigue among the readers. There's assumption is that Falun Gong is not of interest in some way. It's very Chinese. They're not wrong about some of this. David Matis said, this is a form of evil never seen on this planet before. But they've been killed in a way that violates everything that we think is sacred. The dignity of their body, the role of the doctor, the role of what the state should be. It's not just mass murder. It's this particular kind of mass murder. Pursuant to Clause 4 of Rule 1, the following enrolled bills were signed by Speaker Pro Tempore Harris on Wednesday, December 17, 2014. Despite having 245 co-sponsors, H.R. 281 never came up for a vote. It died when the 113th Congress adjourned. The chair declares the second session of the 113th Congress adjourned, signee die. This is a crime against humanity. I mean, does anyone have any problem in condemning ISIL for cutting the heads off of 25 Christians in Libya? It was a brutal act. Well, that was awful. But there are hundreds of people, if not thousands of prisoners. They're being put in jail by the thousands and the brutality and murder of these people. And then letting the government, the gangsters who are doing this, make a profit at it. I mean, how obscene is that? The environment would be completely different if the media were covering the story. Imagine that resolution not coming to a vote if the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, PBS, CNN were regularly covering organ harvesting. It wouldn't be possible. Somebody would ask the majority leader, how come H.R. 281 is not up on the docket? Somebody would ask, and they would be embarrassed. But now there's no price to pay because that discussion isn't taking place. This is what a press is supposed to do. Who owns the media in our country? If you're trying to figure out why something is covered or not covered, figure out who owns the media. How many films have you seen that portray China as the bad guys? And this is an evil, evil regime. It's the world's worst human rights abuser, but I haven't seen many movies about it. It has been, to date, difficult to get attention paid, and I think there are two reasons. It's a little bit hard to believe that it could be so, that doctors are complicit with the kind of atrocities that we know are happening in prisons. And it's difficult, so if that's your question, it is difficult to get attention paid, but also what do you do about it? Obviously, I as one person living in Winnipeg am not going to get worldwide media attention on this issue. I mean, it's difficult enough to get media attention in Winnipeg. But if you get more people involved, then it helps, because, well, after a report came out, Torsten Trey founded this NGO called Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting. Last year, we initiated a petition to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Within five months, we collected 1.5 million signatures in more than 50 countries. Asking them to launch an investigation to look at some of these allegations, now, I mean, yes, they are allegations. I mean, I think the overwhelming evidence, from my perspective, is that these allegations are true. But the lack of access, the lack of transparency, it's difficult to get firm details. And what we were requesting was that the UN Human Rights Office was to investigate this. The petition asked the UN to unravel the mystery and conduct an independent investigation into allegations of organ harvesting. I mean, I was part of the group that went to Geneva to hand it in, and we had the press conference afterwards. We really felt that this was going to be a major change. 1.5 million signatures seemed to be probably one of the biggest petitions they'd ever had. We've had nothing back. Almost as if, you know, there was 1.5 million signatures. That petition is just, it's almost like it's never happened. After the petition to the United Nations seemed to go nowhere, Sharif made an appeal in the American Journal of Transplantation, asking medical professionals to take a stand. What we've argued in this is there is a big difference between someone who, you know, gets executed because they've murdered 15 schoolchildren versus someone who's executed simply because of their beliefs. We think of them as prisoners, but a prisoner in China could be a political dissident, someone who holds a religious or spiritual belief that's unpopular. Getting killed because you're a prisoner, against your will, with no permission, that seems to me to be a core violation of what I've called the dead donor rule. In the U.S., in Europe, you have to be dead first in order to be an organ donor. In China, they make you dead, and that crosses the ethical line. What we are classing these as crimes against humanity, and medical crimes against humanity. Now, if this was to happen in any other country, in any other form or fashion, we'd be a lot more forceful with regards to this, and we haven't been quite as forceful on this issue in China, and we just need to raise awareness of it even more. People who are expecting this to sort of just be solved naturally, by all we have to do is sit back and they'll fix it, this is wrong. The West has to take a role, and the one role the West can do is say, these are our values, we cannot go beyond this. There are certain lines we can't cross, this is a red line, that's an absolute red line. Yes, I can maybe understand that. Life is tough if your kidneys have failed. At the World Transplant Congress in San Francisco, Sharif, Gutmann, and Matus took part in a presentation held by Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting. You need to send a strong message out, you simply cannot do this. The evidence will only continue to accumulate, and eventually there will be a slow shift in the generally accepted opinion on this topic, and then it'll be like, oh wow, they killed like tens of thousands of prisoners of conscience for their organs, that's really bad. What are we doing about this? Like I imagine that will happen at some point, right? It has to. Only a handful of the 7,000 doctors at the Congress were there. Small audience, reaching to the choir, even if a lot of doctors don't show up for the major conference, it's possible that they're aware that these activities are taking place, and it increases pressure. Whether you're a doctor or a nurse or a dialysis technician, anybody involved in transplantation, you need to be informing patients that participation as a transplant tourist is ethically inappropriate, despite the fact that as a patient you may really need a transplant. When you participate in organ tourism, you are inserting yourself into a network that you really shouldn't be in. We cannot be talking about a transplantation system where these organs are being taken in this way. You cannot benefit people and bring life to people by essentially murdering someone. It's simply just a beggar's belief, when you think about it. So don't ask me how a physician can take part in this. They're either a physician or they're acting as murderers. As simple as that. Look, this is the most destructive thing you can do to a society, is to take their most trusted members. Everybody, universally, everybody knows doctors are the most trusted members of society. What is significant here is that this is a superpower which has suddenly taken its most trusted population and turned them into these monsters. Guttman's book got respectable reviews, but sold only a few thousand copies. Unlike another book about organ transplant in China, a bestseller in development to become a Hollywood movie. This is Larry's Kidney, which was a book by a very funny guy, Daniel Asa Rose. He's a good writer. This book caught my eye because it's about taking his really kind of awful cousin Larry to China to get a kidney. The story includes a Chinese transplant doctor who assures Larry that the donor is a 31-year-old man who murdered an entire family and who is scheduled for execution. To me, if I heard that in China, I'd say that's a lie. What he's describing probably was a 31-years-of-age Falun Gong practitioner most likely, in this case, maybe a Uyghur. But this worked as an advertisement to say China's open for business. That's what this book did. And that's a problem. That's a mark against him. He can make up for that by participating in the movement to stop this kind of organ tourism. That's my feeling. This is the mitzvah. This is what you have to do. Enver Toti, the surgeon-turned-bus driver, says it's been 20 years since he removed the organs from that live prisoner. There remains a mystery why so few people have ever heard about the thing he says he cannot forget. This is my experience. This is a real, true story. If you keep silence, this tragedy will continue. People, they just don't want to touch this evil. Because if you touch this evil, maybe at the end of the day, you may not be able to tackle the consequences. That is my guess.