Olympic Inhumanity

There’s only one difference between the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Nazis ripped organs out of live victims after the Olympics. But the Chinese have been harvesting organs from live victims for seven years prior to the Olympics, according to native German Torsten Trey, M.D.

“Aribert Heim, also called ‘Dr. Death’ killed [his victims] by injecting gasoline or poison in their hearts; he removed organs from victims without anesthetics; after administering lethal injections, he timed death with a stopwatch,” said Dr. Trey.

Trey, spokesperson for Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), said that the situation before the Beijing Olympics is worse than the Berlin Olympics.

“Chinese hospitals advertised on the Internet they could offer scheduled transplantations within two-to-four weeks,” said Trey. “In the western hemisphere the waiting time usually amounts to several years.”

Trey said that people in Asian countries don’t usually donate organs, and in China there is no public organ donation program. When questioned in 2005, the Chinese Vice-Minister of Health, Huang Jiefu, claimed that organs come from executed prisoners.

However, David Kilgour and David Matas, two Canadian international human rights lawyers, did not accept Jiefu’s claims. Instead, they conducted independent investigations, and the results were startling, Kilgour said.

“…Since 2001 the government in China and its agencies have killed thousands of Falun Gong practitioners, without any form of prior trial, and then sold their vital organs for large sums of money, often to ‘organ tourists’ from wealthy countries,” said Kilgour.

Recently, the Chinese Medical Association informed the World Medical Association that foreigners may no longer obtain transplants in China. But the Falun Gong are still suffering.

Kilgour said that if the Falun Gong aren’t dead, the Chinese are working them to death. He said they work for up to sixteen hours per day with “no pay and little food and many sleeping in the same room.” This violates World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, he said.

“The labor camps, operating across China since the 1950s, allow Party members to send anyone to them for up to four years with neither hearing nor appeal,” said Kilgour. “The camps are remarkably similar to one’s in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.”

Like Stalin and Hitler’s governments, the Chinese government does not value human life.

“These deaths would not be occurring if the Chinese people enjoyed the rule of law and their government believed in the intrinsic importance of each one of them…,” said Kilgour.

Most importantly, China has violated the Olympic Charter, which speaks of a “respect for universal fundamental ethical principles,” argued Kilgour.

“The Olympic Games and human rights movements worldwide share the same goals: respect, unity, dignity and equality among the entire human family,” said Kilgour. “When these are violated by a host government, the Olympic ideal is dishonored.”

Most Americans don’t feel the effects of thousands of dead Falun Gong, but they do suffer when their own children are murdered. Dr. Torsten said that over 100 Americans have been murdered in the past three years in China.

“On April 14, 2005…Darren Russell, a U.S. citizen who worked as an English teacher in south China suddenly died after he openly criticized inhuman conditions at his school,” said Torsten. “…Shortly before he died, he called his mother and said he was forcibly relocated, that his passport was taken away…”

Chinese officials said Russell died in a car accident, but an autopsy report in the U.S. showed that Darren had from a “blunt force trauma to the head.” “The affected families may wonder why one should celebrate the Olympics under these conditions,” said Dr. Torsten.

Torsten and Kilgour question why President Bush has chosen to attend the Olympics with other violators of human rights—Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Cuba’s Raul Castro. However, boycotting is the only option according to Dr. Torsten.
“I can only come to the conclusion that….to prevent further killing, a boycott of the Games is justified. … [a boycott] would still be better than the tragedy that is lining up behind all the restrictions and suppression,” said Dr. Torsten

Kilgour also urged Americans to boycott the Olympics. “I’d ask you to reflect on the state of human of human dignity in Tibet, Burma…and across China to decide if you think an Olympiad should be held in Beijing this summer,” said Kilgour.

Kilgour said that “for the party-state in China, it has everything to do with politics and its quest for legitimacy at home and abroad.” And because corporate sponsors such as Coca-Cola, Kodak, Visa and 63 others support the Olympics, China will legitimately continue violating human rights, Kilgour argued.

“Communist China has had a history of massive, jaw dropping cruelty towards its own citizens,” Kilgour wrote in his report “Bloody Harvest,” found online at http://organharvest.investigation.net. “The Communist regime has killed more innocents than Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia combined.”

Dr. Torsten said that the Olympics should not be about politics, but rather, something much more valuable—human life. “The basic right to live is not a question of politics; it is part of our human existence.”

“…Having experience in the Emergency Room and the [intensive care unit], I can say the space between life and death is very narrow; in the situation between life or death, there is no room for diplomacy,” said Dr. Torsten.

Melinda Zosh is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.