"Crime of the century thus far"

In Quillette, Aaron Sarin writes about organ harvesting in China.

In June of this year the China Tribunal delivered its Final Judgement and Summary Report.1 An independent committee composed of lawyers, human rights experts, and a transplant surgeon, the Tribunal was established to investigate forced organ harvesting on the Chinese mainland. These rumours have haunted the country for years—lurid tales of the fate suffered by members of the banned Falun Gong religion after being taken into police custody. Their organs, so the rumours go, are cut from their bodies while they are still alive, and then transplanted into waiting patients.

The Tribunal examined these claims, extending the group of victims to include Uyghur Muslims (among others), and its findings were unambiguous. “On the basis of all direct and indirect evidence, the Tribunal concludes with certainty that forced organ harvesting has happened in multiple places in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and on multiple occasions for a period of at least twenty years and continues to this day.”2 Further to this, “the PRC and its leaders actively incited the persecution, the imprisonment, murder, torture, and the humiliation of Falun Gong practitioners with the sole purpose of eliminating the practice of, and belief in, the value of Falun Gong.”3 The Tribunal was also able to conclude, “with certainty,” that the Communist Party has been responsible for acts of torture inflicted on Uyghurs.4 These acts were found to constitute crimes against humanity.5

...All Falun Gong practitioners appearing as witnesses before the Tribunal were also able to describe the torture they suffered in detention. While none of these testimonies could be independently verified (for obvious reasons), the level of detail was striking, as were the similarities in the accounts. Prisoners were stripped, beaten, and kept awake for as much as 20 days at a time. Electric batons were used as a matter of course.15 The Final Judgement and Summary Report includes a vivid description of the ordeal of practitioner Jintao Liu: “They shoved faeces into his mouth. They forced a toilet brush handle into his anus. They pushed the handle so hard that he couldn’t defecate… They woke him at night by pouring cold water on him, or by piercing his skin with needles.”16 Women were given pills that stopped their menstrual cycles and caused disorientation, and many of them suffered mental breakdowns.17 Rape was routine: the prisoner Yin Liping told the Tribunal that she was locked in a room with more than forty men of unknown identity in the Masanjia Labour Camp on 19 April 2001, and raped by all of them.18

...The evidence points to the crime of the century thus far, and a crime that bears comparison with the worst of the last century. “Victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge, or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse,” in the Tribunal’s blunt assessment.35 One of the chief culprits for this crime must surely be China’s leader at the time of the Falun Gong crackdown—the psychopathic Jiang Zemin. “Beating them to death is nothing,” Jiang is reported to have said. “If they are disabled from the beating, it counts as them injuring themselves. If they die, it counts as suicide!”36 Equally culpable are his most enthusiastic lieutenants: Bo Xilai, Wang Lijun, Zhou Yongkang.

However, the guilt is also shared by many ordinary individuals: surgeons, officials, prison guards, police. And they know it. “We are all going to hell,” said a Chinese medical director to a policeman who was working with him at the execution grounds, according to the latter’s testimony to Ethan Gutmann.37 Judgement has been delayed for the time being. But these crimes have been well documented by many brave individuals now, and the condemnation of history is inevitable. Eventually children across the world will read in their school textbooks about the Falun Gong Holocaust of the early twenty-first century, and everyone will know the names of the main perpetrators.

Read more here.