April: Uyghur groups protest in Brussels, Belgium.

1 Million Uyghurs in Danger of Forced Organ Extraction?

“We only see women and children walking the streets of Xinjiang Uyghur’s grand city of Kashgar, there are hardly any men. That’s because the men have been taken to concentration camps. My two brothers and my aging father have been arrested, and I don’t know where they are nor whether they are still alive.”

So said Dolkun Isa, the leader of the World Uyghur Congress, in his message to Japan in April.

Unending Uyghur Arrests

There have been reports that since the spring of 2017 over 1 million innocent Uyghurs have been arrested and taken to ‘reeducation concentration camps’.

“But ‘reeducation’ is just a name,” said Isa. What goes on inside is similar to the Nazi concentration camps back in WWII. Prisoners are brainwashed with communist ideology, and many people die under the harsh living conditions”.

The Beijing government threatens Uyghur students that their families will be thrown into prison if they do not return immediately. Many of these students go missing after they reenter Xinjiang Uyghur.

When Mao declared the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he invaded East Turkestan and established the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Later they settled large numbers of Han Chinese in the area and now over half of the Uyghur region population consists of Han Chinese.

“The Han settlers removed and prohibited the Uyghur language, culture, religion, customs and history,” explained Isa. “Speaking the Uyghur language and practicing Islamic rites were prohibited, and religious facilities – such as mosques – and traditional world heritage buildings were destroyed. The Uyghur people are now facing the crisis of disappearing from world history”.

Ever since 9/11, the Beijing government has reinforced their predominance over the Islamic Uyghurs in the name of “counter-terrorism”. Oppression further intensified when Chen Quanguo, who was the Communist Party Secretary of Tibet, became the Secretary of Xinjiang Uyghur in 2016.

Methods of oppression are developing on a daily basis. They have now introduced millions of surveillance cameras all over the cities, and the government can track each vehicle with GPS. Inspection checkpoints are placed every few hundred meters where armed police officers make random inspections of smartphones. They check to see that passers-by haven’t used religious language in their messages or downloaded prohibited apps.

Additionally, the authorities have collected data on 90% of the Uyghur population (19 million people) including DNA, blood samples, fingerprints and eye-colour. They use this data in their surveillance methods. Xinjiang Uyghur has become one massive surveillance society experiment where the latest technology is used in tandem with human police officers.

1.2 Million Tibetan Victims

This inhumane oppression of the Uyghur people is very similar to the tragedies in Tibet. Tibet was another country that was invaded immediately after the People’s Republic was founded. 3000 People’s Liberation soldiers advanced into the Tibetan capital of Khasa, which was followed by invasions of the other major cities. When the Tibetan people resisted, the People’s Liberation Army tortured or slaughtered them.

According to the Central Tibetan Administration, there have been 1.2 million victims in the 30 years since invasions began in 1949.

The Chinese Communist Party declared that Buddhism was poison and destroyed 98% of Tibet’s Buddhist monasteries in 2 years.

“Tibet is still under martial law,” says political scientist Pemo Gyalpo who defected from Tibet to Japan. “It is forbidden for more than 5 people to gather. That’s why those people commit self-immolation as an individual’s act of protest against the Beijing government. More than 120 people have commit self-immolation since 2000”.

Tibet had its religion taken away, and those who resisted were massacred. And this history is about to repeat itself in Xinjiang Uyghur.

Falun Gong Organ Hunting

In addition to minorities like the Tibetans and the Ughurs, Falun Gong practitioners are experiencing the worst human rights oppression in history. The Beijing government calls them a “cult” and imposes all manner of oppression on them. Many are imprisoned or have simply gone missing.

For around 10 years Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas has collected countless pieces of evidence that point to the ghastly fact that the imprisoned Falun Gong members have their organs extracted by force.

Large-scale arrests of Falun Gong practitioners began in 1999, and it is no coincidence that the number of organ transplantations in China started to climb in 2000. What is also absurd is that while the average waiting time is 7 years in Canada, 5 years in the U.S., and 3 years in the U.K., in China it is a mere 15 days. This can only be explained if China has a huge “organ bank” that they can draw from at any time.

The Beijing government alleges that they get 90% of their organs from executed criminals. The number of death sentences in China, however, is 2000 per year. The number of transplant operations they perform far exceeds this number.

According to the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), 96 hospitals in China perform 2000 to 3000 transplant operations per year. Just adding these makes it around 192,000 operations per year. If we consider that one liver transplant costs the patient around USD100,000 we can see how big this business really is.

The climbing number of operations, the absurdly fast waiting time, and the government’s inconsistent answer: the evidence all points to the hidden truth that China holds a huge stock of people they can kill to take their organs.

Of the many testimonies, perhaps the most shocking was the one from the ex-wife of a surgeon in a Chinese hospital. Underground in a hospital in Sujiatun district in Liaoning, she said, thousands of Falun Gong members were detained. Their organs were extracted while they were still alive, and this was a daily occurrence.

Are the Uyghurs the Next Target?

The photograph below taken in 2017 shows a priority lane saying “Special Passengers/ Human Organs Transport Lane” in Kashgar airport, Xinjiang Uyghur. There is such a large number of organs that are transported out of Xinjiang Uyghur that they require a priority lane for it.

It was also in 2017 that mass arrests of Uyghurs began. The Beijing government has over 1 million Uyghurs imprisoned in their “reeducation concentration camps”, and it is clear what they have in mind next.

2017: a priority lane marking at Kashgar airport. Former surgeon Enver Tohti, whose job in 1995 was to extract organs from executed criminals in China, says that the priority marker signifies how frequently organs are exported from Xinjiang Uyghur.

Faith Is the Key to Stopping Human Rights Oppression

Why does the Beijing government continue this intense oppression of human rights? It all boils down to one cause: it is because China is a materialist atheist national that denies the existence of a Creator God.

For them, humans are mechanical objects: killing the resisters and making money from their organs is all part of effective business skills.

Humans, however, are God-created souls. Each one is endowed with divine dignity. The concept of human rights stems from this religious truth.

Part 2 of this series are interviews with activist who strive for democracy and human rights in China.