The Chinese Saga of Olympic Shame Continues....... David Matas Reflects
on Organ Harvesting - An Epoch Times interview

David Matas Reflects on Organ Harvesting
An Epoch Times interview

Aug 06, 2007

http://en.epochtimes.com/news_images/2007-8-6-nat71461736-copy.jpg
Lawyer David Matas gestures as he speaks during a press conference.
(Woody Wu/AFP/Getty Images)

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The Epoch Times caught up with David Matas, the co-author with David
Kilgour of "Bloody Harvest: Revised Report into the Allegations of Organ
Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China," on June 20, after he
had given a speech at the University of Minnesota, where he graciously
agreed to an interview.

ET: Mr. Matas, could you tell us what you are doing here in Minnesota?

David Matas: I came here to speak at a hospital at the University of
Minnesota―"Organ Transplants in China" that's the title of the speech.
And also while I'm here I've met with various people, the staff of
Senator Coleman and the staff of Senator Klobuchar. So that's basically
what I'm doing.

ET: And who invited you to come and speak on this?

DM: It was the University of Minnesota hospital transplant center. [The
U of M Program in Human Rights and Health cosponsored the event.].

ET: I would like to ask you what prompted you to take on this project of
organ harvesting in China initially?

DM: I am a human rights lawyer in Winnipeg. I was asked to do it by a
non-governmental organization, the Coalition to Investigate the
Persecution of Falun Gong. I am interested generally in human rights and
I was familiar with the persecution of Falun Gong. I knew they were
being persecuted in China.

I also knew by the very nature of the allegation that it would be a
difficult one for human rights organizations to come to grips with
because normally human rights organizations like witnesses, and don't
like to act unless there are witnesses, but by the very nature of the
allegation, [I knew] there were not going to be any witnesses. So I
thought that I could maybe make a contribution to this. And I have done
similar things in the past―human rights reporting and writing.

ET: Are you a Falun Gong Practitioner?

DM: No, and I have not been paid to do this report by the Falun Gong
community. And we [David Kigour and David Matas] are not necessarily
doing what the Falun Gong wants, but are forming our own independent
judgment and using our own words. We are acting on our own behalf.
Although both of us belong to many organizations, we are not speaking on
behalf of these organizations. We are trying to be independent, outside
experts. We do not try to accommodate anybody else.

ET: I have read some criticism about certain pieces of evidence in the
report "Bloody Harvest." Are there portions of the investigation that
you would consider incontestable?

DM: In coming to the conclusion that we did, all of our evidence is
independently verifiable. There is nothing in that report that somebody
who wants to do their own research cannot check and see for themselves.
In fact most of the evidence comes from the government of China, from
their websites and their statistical reporting. So I would say that the
evidentiary foundation is incontestable. I suppose that what you could
debate are the analysis and the conclusion. We conclude that based on
the evidence, that this is what is happening [organ harvesting].
Somebody else may want different, or more, evidence.

Also, because I am a lawyer, I am used to hearing disagreements. In a
typical day, as soon as I argue in court, somebody gets up and disagrees
with everything that I say. So I am quite used to hearing people
disagree with me, and I am well aware of what is a plausible
disagreement and one that is implausible. And I have heard many
disagreements with our report, but none of them are what I would call
tenable. Most of the disagreements, if not all, come from the government
of China or from people who are somehow identified with the government
of China and are being supported or prompted by the government of China.
This in itself does not undermine the points that they are making, but I
think it does show that these people are not disagreeing with our
investigation out of intellectual analysis, but out of a set position.

And the kinds of arguments they come up with are hard to take seriously.
One of the common forms of argument that I hear, and I've heard this
over many months, and in many different forms, is that they will put
something in quotations, say that we said it, and then disagree with
what is in the quotation, but you can look in our report, its not there,
what they quote us as saying. So when people say "David Matas said
this", and I don't say it, then that is not a serious argument, but a
very common argument.

For example, I was just in Israel speaking about this issue at a
hospital there, and the Chinese embassy circulated some material in
opposition to our report at the hospital where we were speaking, and I
read it. And what it said is that our report is based on rumors. What
they would do is quote something from our report, but then add to the
quote the phrase "it is said that," but that phrase, "it is said that,"
is not in our report. This phrase "It is said that", gives the
appearance that we are relying on something without identifying the
source, when in fact, in the report, we do identify the source. So what
they do is remove the source, replace it with the phrase "it is said
that," and then accuse us of fomenting rumors.

This will not convince anybody who is seriously interested into looking
into the merits of the report.

ET: Earlier today at the office of a senator, you mentioned that there
were three incontestable points of evidence…

DM: When I say incontestable…What very often happens when I am dealing
with governments, politicians, parliamentarians―these are people who
don't have the time or the energy to sit down to go through the report,
and they are not sure whether or not it is true.

The way we come to our conclusions is to accumulate a lot of relevant
evidence, and then look at it altogether to come to our ultimate
conclusion. All the relevant evidence is incontestable. But for someone
to determine if all of this is real depends on sitting down and going
through all of this, and it takes a bit of time and effort.

What I say to them to short circuit this process is "you don't have to
worry about this, we did the work and you can check it if you want" and
we have had people who have done that, including [University of
Minnesota's Dr.] Kirk Allison, and others. But if they don't have the
time to do that, there are three things that are clear, simple, and
obvious. One is that the Falun Gong are being persecuted, the second is
that the source of the majority of all organs in China is prisoners.

ET: And how do you know that?

DM: Because there is no system of organ donation in China. And also we
have the deputy minister of health of the government of China, Huang
Jiefu, who makes a statement in a conference in China, and this is in
our report, that apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of
the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners. He also goes on to
say that under the table business has to be banned.

And the third incontestable point is that the precautions that should be
in place to prevent this type of practice are not in place, not in
China, nor around the rest of the world.

ET: If the situation of organ harvesting does indeed not exist, would it
be possible for the government of China to step forward and say, "here
is the evidence, this phenomenon does not exist"?

DM: Well sure, they would presumably know where the organs come from.
They would have a far better likelihood of explaining the source than we
would, and it's one of the strange things, although I've seen many
Chinese government responses to our report, none of them touches that
issue. They never say, "The organs do not come from Falun Gong, they
come from somewhere else". They never say that. That would be the simple
and obvious way to refute the report, if indeed the report is refutable.

The sheer feebleness and silliness of the Chinese government's response
to our report does nothing to undercut our convictions that our
conclusions are true and in fact does reinforce them.

ET: I've also read that this report is somehow anti-China or insulting
to the Chinese people, how would you respond to that?

DM: Well, what is China? China is its people and China is its territory,
but primarily China is its people. It's certainly not insulting to the
people of China. Quite the contrary, the people of China are the
victims. It would be insulting to the Chinese people to ignore their
victimization. It is, of course, critical of the Chinese Communist
Party, but the Communist party is not China. The communist party is a
government that rules by force, is not elected, does not represent the
people of China, and violates human rights. This is a communist tactic,
to identify the communist party with China itself. The Communist party
is very different from China. Because it does not represent China, It
only represents itself.

ET: What has been the response of the medical community regarding this
issue.

DM: Well the medical community on the whole is horrified, because it is
an abuse of their profession. The transplantation society has issued an
ethical statement basically saying, no transplants from prisoners
period. They do, though, seem to put the onus on anybody claiming that
there is harvesting from prisoners. In other words they want proof that
this is happening before they cease contact, where it should be the
other way around. As long as there is suspicion or reason to suspect
that there is this organ harvesting, there should be no contact. And
since the reality is that virtually all organ harvesting in China comes
from prisoners, then there should be no contact with China, that should
be the ethical principal. No contact in the transplantation area with
China. And that is not the current stance.

With the World Medical Association, I know that they are actively
considering expelling China from the WMA, its on the agenda for the
meeting coming up in October, in Copenhagen, but they have not expelled
China yet and I think they should have, but at least they are actively
considering it.

I have been going to a lot of hospitals at the invitation of doctors who
are very concerned. I've spoken at hospitals in Montreal, Israel,
Belgium, in Mumbai and here as well, so we are getting a fair amount of
medical concern, but I think there could be more.

ET: Is your investigation continuing? And is there going to be a third
revision to the report?

DM: Well yes it is continuing because we continue to get more evidence.
So we are talking about a third version. But my view is that we should
do the third version in a book form. The report is geared more toward
parliamentarians, government officials, and politicians and there is a
real pressure to keep it very short. I thought it would be useful to
have a version that deals with the issue in a more expansive form. One
that tries to answer all the questions rather than trying to just get
people's attention who don't have a lot of time. And it should also be
more accessible to the general public and the general reader than our
current report is.

ET: When the first evidence of organ harvesting came to light. The U.S.
Embassy in China took a tour of the "scene of the crime" in a hospital
in Sujiatun and found nothing suspicious and this piece of evidence has
been frequently used to discredit the entire report. How do you respond
to that?

DM: Well the first reaction by the Chinese government came out the very
same day as our report did. And their response was that it was all
untrue, when they obviously could not have even read it. Their second
reaction was after they read it and all they had to say was that there
were two errors in the report, that we got two names of cities wrong in
two provinces, which we corrected, and it has nothing to do with the
allegation. What happens is people pick up on silly little things
because they just don't want to deal with it. Obviously the government
of China does not want to deal with it. And others as well, for other
reasons. There is a lot of economic interest in China. If you accept our
report as true, it is hard to sit back and do nothing, and so many
people find an easy excuse to do nothing.

Our report is not about Sujiatun, it's about what is happening in China
generally. The reason Sujiatun arises is because the ex-wife of a
surgeon with the pseudonym "Annie" said that her husband had been
harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners from 2001 to 2003. Now
when someone goes there in 2006, almost three years later, the fact that
they don't see anything does not mean anything. Indeed, even if they
were to go there a week later or even an hour later, the operating room
would be cleaned up and I would not expect anybody to find anything
there, especially after its in the papers and the Chinese government has
a chance to put on a show.

There is another thing to mention about Sujiatun, There was an
unfortunate mix up that we write about in our second report, we have an
appendix about it. There was a sequence of stories in the Epoch Times, I
think on 3-16 and 3-23 of 2006. The 3-16 story interviewed an individual
with the pseudonym of "Peter", who talked about a detention area in
Sujiatun where Falun Gong practitioners where being held, and he said
that their organs were being harvested and he went on to describe the
detention area…a three meter tall brick wall with barbed wire on top
with a steel door and so on.

In the second week there was a follow up story, an interview with
"Annie," who talks about her husband doing operations in a hospital in
Sujiatun. Now you can read the stories and see that although "Peter" and
"Annie" are talking about two different facilities, the reporter in the
second story assimilates the two, and although "Annie" is talking just
about the hospital, the questions are being asked about the
concentration camp, and Annie did not correct the questions, she just
answered the questions, so these questions in the interview had the
assumption built into them that the facility that "Annie" was talking
about was the same facility that "Peter" was talking about. And although
they are both talking about organ harvesting, they are talking about two
different places.

Then the U.S. Consulate goes to the hospital and they can see that there
is no wall around the hospital and they can say "not as described,"
anybody can see that. But if someone wanted to deal with this issue
seriously I think they could pierce through this. In any case this
confusion caused a problem, and created an easy way out for anyone who
did not want to deal with this issue.

ET: You have recently returned from a trip to Israel, and before you
returned I heard it reported that you made a request to the Israeli
ministry of foreign affairs to expel the first secretary of the Chinese
embassy for incitement of genocide, is that correct?

DM: I raised this issue at a meeting with the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. The reason this came about was created by a strange sequence of
events. The Chinese embassy had heard about this event held at an
Israeli hospital and asked the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry to ask
the hospital to cancel it, which they did not. They also asked the
Foreign Affairs Ministry to ask the hospital to cancel the invitation to
me, which again, they did not. Finally they asked the Israeli Foreign
Affairs Ministry to cancel the invitation to a Falun Gong practitioner,
who was to sit on the panel, which in this case, they did.

When the Chinese embassy found out that the event was continuing and
that I was speaking, they asked to come to reply, and they did, and I
have no problem with that, and they attacked me and again I have no
problem with that, but they also attacked the Falun Gong, spewing out
this anti Falun Gong propaganda that we see all the time, "Falun Gong is
an evil cult," Falun Gong is responsible for mass killings, and so on.
To me, this is incitement to hatred, which is in turn leading to these
killings of the Falun Gong.

We have identified by name, 3000 different individuals who have been
killed by torture, in addition to the tens of thousands, by our
estimation who have been killed due to organ harvesting, all because
they are Falun Gong. So in my view this is genocide and this type of
propaganda is the incitement to genocide. So I have reason to believe
that Israel has good reason to be displeased with this individual and
that he should be expelled.

ET: You mentioned earlier some recommendations that the U.S. State
Department could make to travelers to China for medical transplant,
could you explain that?

DM: The U.S. State Department has a travel advisory for China, You can
go to its website and see it. It talks about a wide variety of things to
alert travelers going to China. But when it comes to Organ Harvesting,
nothing―nothing is there, and it should be there. I would say there
should be a link to our report. I would say there should be a statement
that organs are coming from Falun Gong practitioners, or at least a
statement that organs are coming from prisoners and that prisoners are
non-consenting. If you get an organ transplant in China, someone is
being killed. I think there should be warning like that.

ET: Speaking of consent, is there such a thing as consent for organ
donation from a prisoner?

DM: No and this is something that the Transplantation Society has been
very good at. They have put out a statement saying that there is no such
thing as meaningful consent from a prisoner. Because of the restrictions
of liberty in a prison environment, it is impossible to ascertain
whether prisoners are truly free to make independent decisions, and thus
an autonomous and informed consent for donation cannot be obtained.
Therefore the Transplantation Society is opposed to any use of organs
from executed prisoners. Obviously if you are dealing with Falun Gong
practitioners, there is no consent, but whether it is a Falun Gong
practitioner held prisoner or a death row inmate, it is unethical to
take organs from either one of them.

ET: My final question, are you advocating a boycott of the Beijing games?

DM: Well what I'm advocating is an end to organ harvesting in China from
Falun Gong practitioners. Now, I'm prepared to support any effort that
would help that. If a boycott of the Olympic Games is used for that
purpose, to advocate an end to this practice, I would say yes. To me it
is inconsistent to the Olympic spirit to ignore this. There are
different ways the Olympic games can be used to put the issue across, I
would like to see the Olympic committee… well, as you know, there are a
number of people in China who cannot participate in the Olympic games in
any way, including Falun Gong practitioners. They can't compete, they
can't coach, they can't attend, they can't even be in the neighborhood.
I think the Olympic committee should be protesting that.

The Olympic games represent a form of contact with China, I think that
we should take advantage of that contact to raise this issue, no matter
who is being contacted and no matter in what context. This is happening
because the people in China and the government of China are allowing it
to happen, and if there is enough protest from enough people, both in
and outside of China, it'll stop. The Olympic Games represent a way to
get the message in or out―that this is happening. I think a boycott is
one way of doing this.

ET: Thank you very much.

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