Década de Coraje: Cosecha sangrienta en China - Parte 4

In 10 years, we're looking at genocide in China. Over 3,000 Falun Gong practitioners are confirmed dead, killed from torture and abuse in custody. This is really serious. This is an evil crime. This number comes from phone calls and emails from the family and friends of the dead. Their stories are compiled by Falun Gong volunteers and hosted on an online database. But this number is only part of the story. Many people simply disappeared after the persecution began, sent to prisons on catch-all crimes like endangering national security, or simply carted off to labor camps without the formality of a trial. The exact number is unknown, but that number is nevertheless a symbol of the new China, and of what the rest of the world is willing to ignore. This program attempts to answer the question, what happened to the people who disappeared? Who were they, and where did they take them, or where did they die? Because in my mind, they're dead. The evidence is incomplete. The witnesses, impossible to verify. But for a handful of people, connecting the dots may be easier than the world is ready to believe. This is a form of evil we have yet to see on this planet. This is a new form of evil. It's utterly horrifying. It's like, my God, this really is taking place. Numbers are symbols. They represent anything and everything. But they also hide what they represent, like a mask. If all we have is a number, it's impossible to see the real picture. China is a country of numbers. It's home to over a billion people, more than any other country in the world. According to Amnesty International, last year China carried out over 1,700 executions, far more than the rest of the world combined. But there's one number that is still unknown. An X-factor. It's the number of Falun Gong practitioners that have disappeared since July 20th, 1999. But the numbers don't matter to Chen Teng. Born in China's Weifeng city, he was just 11 years old when the government made his family disappear. My family was just me, my mom, and my grandma. After the persecution began, my mom got arrested six times. And I got arrested twice when I was 11, along with my family. Chen's family had appealed for Falun Gong and were punished. In 1999, his grandmother was taken into custody. He never saw her again. For a long time after my grandma was persecuted to death, I didn't even know she was dead. It was just by chance I heard about it during a family conversation. I was really upset because my grandma raised me since I was little. I was really upset. After appealing to the central government in Beijing, Chen came under pressure from his teachers to denounce Falun Gong. Fearing he would be arrested again, he quit school, and at 13 years old he left home. Police went to talk to my teacher at school and asked for me to be expelled. My teacher was looking for me and I had to quit school. I left home and was basically homeless for six years after that. I haven't seen my mom since the beginning of 2004. For five years Chen moved around from place to place, sometimes staying with other Falun Gong practitioners and sometimes sleeping on the streets. For those five years he lived in fear of being taken away by the police. Back then, I was just trying to keep from getting arrested by the Chinese police. But at the time, even though I didn't have a stable place to live, compared to the other Falun Gong practitioners in China who were being held by the CCP, I still felt I was in a much better place. Now 21, Chen seemed uncomfortable being on camera. It could have been the cameras or the western reporter. He's only been in the US a few months and speaks no English. He was tired too. He usually sleeps now after working a third shift at a printing press in Jersey. But although he didn't say much, Chen's story speaks powerfully about the courage and helplessness of Falun Gong refugees. After going overseas, they have no way to search for their loved ones. And if they go back they could be arrested themselves. Their friends and family members who disappeared are invisible to us. They are not counted among the living or the 3,000 confirmed dead. But while their stories will never be told, there may be a way to represent them as a number. And it all began three years ago with the first allegations that China may be harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience. I'm really worried. I really hope she's safe. In 2006, the Epoch Times newspaper published interviews with two Chinese expats identified only as Annie and Peter. Annie claimed that her husband had been harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners at this hospital in northeast China's Shen Yun City. Peter likewise claimed he had investigated the story for a Japanese newspaper. But when U.S. officials visited the hospital, they couldn't find anything unusual. What happened at Sujitan is really still a completely open question. The fact that they didn't find anything didn't really prove anything. I mean, by Chinese construction standards, they were there three weeks later. Who knows? There's a million ways to sort of fill in the cracks by then. The allegation itself was difficult to believe, and the theatrics that surrounded the story didn't help. On one clear spring day in Washington, while Annie and Peter told their stories at a Falun Gong rally in McPherson Square, a couple blocks away, Dr. Wenyi Wang interrupted an official visit by the Chinese president, shouting at former U.S. President Bush to stop him from killing. Dr. Wang had earlier confronted Hu's predecessor after slipping through his security cordon in Malta. This was a huge problem in the way Falun Gong presented it. They presented it as a big shocking revelation, whereas in fact they should have said, well, this is a big shocking revelation, but you know what? It's hardly surprising. Hardly surprising. Because a Chinese government official admitted in 2005 that many Chinese donor organs come from executed prisoners. Hardly surprising. Because UN Special Rapporteur Manfred Nowak estimated that Falun Gong made up half of China's labor camp population, and that torture was widespread. Hardly surprising, yet impossible to believe, and the mainstream media were reluctant to report it. But a couple months later, the story was back in the news with the publication of the bloody Harvest Reports. 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. Written by a human rights lawyer, David Matus, and a retired Canadian politician, David Kilgore, the original report listed 18 areas of evidence. It was later revised to include a total of 33 areas of evidence. At the center of it all was a number. We estimate that in the period between 2000 and 2005, there are 41,500 transplants which have no other explained source. The number was based on one simple calculation, that the number of organ transplants in China tripled after the persecution of Falun Gong began, with no new source of organs. But there was a problem. The numbers were squishy. China doesn't publish the total number of executions or transplants. For executions, Kilgore and Matus used Amnesty's figures of confirmed executions. But other estimates range from 5,000 all the way up to 15,000 executions a year, more than 20 times the rest of the world combined in 2008. For the total number of transplants, Kilgore and Matus quoted one Chinese official, Shi Bingyi, who estimated that 90,000 transplants had been performed in China as of 2005. But in the documentary re-examining the David's report, produced by Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV, he denied making such claims. But Shi's quote can still be found in an archived version of the Jiankangbao website. In their response to the United Nations inquiry into organ harvesting, the Chinese government stated, to date no Chinese authority has compiled official statistics on organ transplants. But this report published by the World Health Organization tells a different story. The report is a summary of a meeting of government authorities from different Asian Pacific nations on organ transplantation. The meeting was chaired by the Chinese Vice Minister of Health, Dr. Huang Jiefu. China's country presentation was delivered by a Deputy Director General for the Chinese Ministry of Health, Dr. Meng Cun. In the report, Dr. Meng gives detailed statistics of the number of transplants in China from 1993 to 2005. This is a direct contradiction of China's 2008 claim that, no, Chinese authority has compiled official statistics on organ transplants. A blatant misrepresentation of what they themselves were doing, and as I said, could only be credible to somebody who had, was not paying any attention to the issue whatsoever and used the Chinese response as their sole source of information. We decided to call the Ministry of Health in Beijing to see if they would tell us the number of transplants. And to help, we brought in someone with experience dealing with Chinese officials, Dr. Wenyi Wang. Posing as an editor of a Chinese medical journal, she asks officials from China's Ministry of Health to give her the total number of transplants. You're dealing with a police state that lies. They simply lie and they conceal. And there are a lot of credulous outsiders who will accept that. Dr. Meng also claimed in the 2005 report that there had been a rapid evolution of transplantation programs across China over the past decade. But this report from the Chinese Liver Transplant Registry shows that Chinese liver transplants only increased significantly after 1999, when the persecution of Falun Gong began. From 1999 to 2005, the number of liver transplants in China increased by 40 times, and 98% of them were cadaveric. Moreover, the graph shows that China continues to perform around 2,000 liver transplants a year. The number for 2009 looks lower, but according to the website's homepage, there have been an additional 400 liver transplants since the report's publication. So 2009 is on track for another 2,000-plus liver transplant year. Unfortunately, the registry's report doesn't include any data on other types of transplants. But if we apply the growth rate of liver transplants from 1993 to 2009 to the statistics provided by the Chinese Ministry of Health, we can estimate the total number of transplants performed in China since the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999. It comes out to around 130,000. But the question remains, where do the donor organs come from? Even the highest execution estimate of 15,000 a year can't possibly account for China's estimated transplant volume after 2003. The number of transplants also only increased significantly after the persecution of Falun Gong began. Moreover, the execution rate in China is supposed to have fallen since 2007. But from 2007 to 2008, the number of liver transplants in China actually increased. So what we see is a dramatic decrease in what the Chinese government say is their sole source and a maintenance of transplant volumes. So how is that explicable? I mean, where is this coming from? So it looks to me, just based on the statistics, that the organ sourcing from Falun Gong practitioners is going up rather than going down. Since they published the Bloody Harvest report, Kilgore and Matus have traveled around the world lecturing on their findings. And although the Chinese government rejects their conclusions, they do pay attention to them. Besides the Phoenix TV documentary, both Kilgore and Matus report interference from Chinese consulate and embassy personnel. Matus told NTD about one Chinese police officer who suggested that he could be assassinated. This particular time when I was at the Gold Coast, they were doing this live stream and there was, you know, maybe a couple of hundred people in the room and there was a couple of hundred people in China that were listening to it. And then I gave a speech and there's a question and answer session afterwards. And they were taking questions from China as well as from the audience in the room. And so one of the guys who's from China, he says, he asked me a question. He says, I'm from the Internet Police. You are running the risk of being killed for what you're doing. And his question was, are you not afraid? So my answer was, you know, you can't shoot the messenger and solve the problem. The problem is the facts of the situation, not that I'm talking about. The numbers are one side of the story, but numbers can never tell the whole story. The other side is the words and stories of Chinese refugees. Falun Gong refugees have a motive to talk. They want to end the persecution of their group in China and have the world force China to lift the ban on Falun Gong. But for Ethan Gutman, who interviewed over 100 mostly Falun Gong refugees, what stood out most weren't the graphic descriptions of torture, but the casual mention of a blood test. They mentioned a physical exam. And one of them mentioned a physical exam that was very... She mentioned that she was going to go on with her story. She wanted to talk about torture. She wanted to talk about her faith. But she started talking about this exam a little bit. And I asked her, well, you know, what did they look at? And she said, they looked at my eyes, among other things. They had shined a light in her eye, clearly examining the health of the cornea. But they didn't do this. There was no peripheral vision test. There was no follow the... No light, nothing. No sense of actually checking brain function. It turned out that a lot of things hadn't happened. They didn't look at her genitals. They didn't look at anything. They didn't tap her knee to see if her reflexes were there. All they did was take blood tests, look at her eyes, feel around her kidneys, and do an electrocardiogram. I mean, this was... And the blood tests were sizable, like eight vials of blood. It became obvious after a series of these interviews, this was definitely going on. Now, occasionally I'd have to throw out an interview, just literally say this didn't happen, because I felt the person was a little too eager to please me, didn't remember that well, might be sort of trying to remember things. But most of these people didn't have any sense of where I was going with these questions. They honestly didn't. In fact, they always wanted to talk about something else. And I was always the one sort of bringing them back to this. First, I was taken to the Harbin Public Security Hospital. This public security hospital was a military hospital, especially for the examination of inmates on death row. After I was taken there, I saw many Falun Gong practitioners, all male, in very good physical conditions, who were undergoing exams there. So after we saw each other, we realized we knew each other, and the police immediately separated all of us. First, they examined my kidneys, testing my blood, examining my liver, skin, and eyes. After the examinations, they diagnosed that my body was diseased. Putting together the blood tests with reports that Falun Gong prisoners, who refused to identify themselves to authorities, had disappeared from the labor camps where they were held, made us drew the conclusion that China had built up a living organ bank of detained Falun Gong prisoners, who are murdered to order whenever a Chinese hospital needs an organ. And what happened to the disappeared? As far as we know, they're still there in these camps. Many of them are killed through organ harvesting, but the rest are still there, and they're the organ databank for China. But even with all the 33 kinds of evidence in the Kilgore Matis report and the testimony of over 100 Chinese refugees, it still seems impossible to believe. But it wasn't too much for many Chinese hospitals to admit over the phone to Falun Gong practitioners posing as the relatives of patients needing transplants. A few years ago, Dr. Wenyi Wang and others from the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong had organized practitioners to call Chinese hospitals. They posted transcripts and recordings of their conversations online, but some critics suggested that the transcripts were not credible because of the secrecy surrounding the Chinese transplant industry. But in Phoenix TV's documentary, one doctor admitted that he had been interviewed. In the documentary, Dr. Liu is given only a transcript of the interview, not the original recording. But NTD obtained the sound of the original telephone conversation, in which Dr. Liu tells a very different story. In the last analysis, while it's true we haven't found a bloody scalpel and we don't have solid numbers, what we already know is enough to paint a picture of a very dark world. A sick, messed-up side of Chinese society that journalists don't report on and expats rarely see. It's true that we don't have any real proof, but if it's all just one big misunderstanding, why doesn't China release the number of executions and the number of transplants? One of the kind of confounding things I found about this report is the sheer silliness of the Chinese reaction. You know, if they had something, if they had an answer, that would have countered our report. I assume they would have given it. And the fact that they gave no answer led me to believe they had no answer.