How Museums in Central and Eastern Europe Tell the Complicated Story of Life Behind the Iron Curtain
Apr 24
The Long Road To Confronting China’s War on Religion: Part II
“Last month [the International Society for Heart & Lung Transplantation] held its annual gathering in Denver, where it amplified its condemnation of China to the medical establishment and the world. The opening session featured a presentation by Ethan Gutmann, the leading field researcher on China’s forced organ harvesting and a senior research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Gutmann last year testified to Congress that an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghur Muslims are killed annually for their organs. A revealing finding focuses on a former SARS hospital in Aksu, Xinjiang. Gutmann discovered that the facility has a detention camp for 33,000 people built around the hospital with a large crematorium less than a kilometer away. The hospital is served by an airport with a dedicated “fast lane” for expressing organs to hospitals throughout China.
“One Uyghur man said he drove by the crematorium every day, and the smell was a common complaint among local workers,” Gutmann told Congress last year.
In his book, “The Slaughter,” Gutmann shows how the horrific organ removals first took place with criminal executions of all types of prisoners and then ramped up after the Chinese government’s 1999 crackdown on the Falun Gong.
Gutmann has based his findings on more than 20 interviews with former prisoners in Chinese detention camps who have since fled the nation, along with accounts from relatives of organ-harvesting victims. Other public witnesses include a former Chinese surgeon, Dr. Enver Tohti Bugdha, who has testified to Congress and other international panels that, back in 1994, he regrettably performed an organ extraction on a prisoner who was still alive under orders from Chinese officials.”
