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Organ Harvesting Real Dystopian Reality for Uyghurs in Chinese Concentration Camps

Uyghur photo

Source: Extranewsfeed.com

Tursun gets out to tell her story to the world

Back in January CNN broke the story of alleged re-education (read: concentration) camps that the Chinese government were placing Muslim Uyghur minorities in. Numbers are unclear, but from 800,000 to possibly 2 million Uyghurs may have been detained in camps that the Chinese foreign ministry is refuting as “complete lies told with ulterior motives”. They prefer the term “vocational training center”. But leaks are getting out, like one Mihrigul Tursun who told a tale of detention and torture to the US Congressional Executive Commission on China in 2018.

The Uyghurs who have experienced it describe the experience as “cultural genocide” with camps giving forced lessons on Communist party propaganda and region-wide bans on Uyghur customs and traditions. In early January, Chinese authorities led a carefully supervised tour to show some activities in these centers, where the inmates were seen taking Mandarin lessons, painting, dancing, and singing the song “if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands”.

What happened to Tursun, you ask? Well, she was returning to China from Egypt with her eight-week-old triplets when the authorities stopped her for questioning. After they took away her babies and detained her for 3 months, she was told upon her release that one of her sons died in an operation. They gave her no explanations as to why they took her babies, or needed to put them in a hospital, or why they had scars at the base of their necks. They then took away her passport and kept a watchful eye on her.

The nightmare continues

Two years later, they returned to take her to the concentration camp. Inmates ranged from 17 to 62 years of age, and the camp was so crowded people had to take turns sleeping and standing.

Finally, Tursun was able to get released with the help of the US government. But if only the problems were as simple as that.

Uyghur DNA and blood type database?

There were later reports that Uyghurs were being offered “free health checkups” except that all that was done was a blood collection, without telling the patients what their results were. This week, an exiled Uyghur oncology surgeon from Urumqi decided he had to speak out on what was happening in the concentration centers.

Organ Harvesting

Enver Tohti recalls when he was called to remove a lived and two kidneys from an executed prisoner. Except the prisoner wasn’t dead yet. The Chinese execution squad had shot him through the right chest so he would have time to remove the organs while the man was still alive, in order to keep the organs fresh. He was to remove the organs without any anesthetic, too.

That happened in 1995. Years later, he released how widespread and systematic this process had begun, and in 1998 worked with a British media company to report on how cancer rates were spiking among Uyghur workers who were laboring in a Nuclear testing facility.

Tohti believes that this practice of organ harvesting sprang from a strong demand from wealthy Saudis. According to him, demand far outweighs supply, which would explain the compulsory blood sample collections from Uyghurs, to create a “live organ-matching database”.

Demand on the Black Market

After all, according to the director of Saudi Center for Organ Transplants Dr. Shaheen, 410 Saudis had purchased organs from black markets in China, Egypt, and Pakistan. And according to the European Parliament’s public health committee, illegally harvested kidneys can go for as much as USD $165,000 each.

It’s now possible to see signs on the floor of airports such as in Xinjiang that gives priority access to people transporting human organs.

Organ sign China photo

Source: Epoch Times

There is little more dystopian that I can think of than this kind of government-sanctioned DNA database of Uyghurs to allow for the systematic incarceration for human organ harvesting and all kinds of other torture than this story.

As journalist CJ Werleman points out in his article covering this story,

“These crimes against humanity are every bit as horrific as they are unimaginable, but given Uyghur activists have described to me and many others how Uyghur Muslims detained in concentration camps are being subjected to gang rapes, sterilization programs, systematic torture, forced marriage to Han Chinese citizens, forced disappearances and executions, there’s every reason to believe claims of live-organ harvesting barely scratch the surface of what is the largest cultural genocide of Muslims in modern times.”