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International Community's Investigation Should Target All Prisons And Labor Camps in China

April 23, 2006 |   By Gu Cunfeng

(Clearwisdom.net) The Falun Dafa Association and the Minghui/Clearwisdom website established the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (CIPFG) after the Sujiatun Concentration Camp was exposed. The coalition demands a thorough investigation of all Chinese Communist Party (CCP) labor camps, prisons, hospitals and related facilities where Falun Gong practitioners are persecuted. Many people were shocked by the live organ harvests at Sujiatun Concentration Camp and yet prisons, labor camps and other concentration camps throughout China are the primary places where the CCP has been persecuting Falun Gong practitioners in the past seven years. Sujiatun is just one of many such facilities.

According to official data, right now, more than 670 prisons in China exist that are holding more than 1.5 million detainees; 300 labor camps are holding about 300,000 detainees. Not all of the people incarcerated at these facilities are criminals, and yet they have been deprived of all legal rights and are forced to work in factories or do heavy labor. CCP prisons are in fact torture chambers. Someone said that compared to CCP prisons, the most assailed Zhazitong and Baigongguan prisons built by the Nationalist Party that the CCP propagandized to incite hatred are "civilized prisons."

Citing a 2005 Time Magazine report, Chinese labor camps are "places outside the law" [paraphrase] where privileges and darkness exist outside the reach of law.

During the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong, the prisons and labor camps played highly efficient roles as accomplices. According to confirmed statistics on the Minghui/Clearwisdom website, since July 1999, 2,870 Falun Gong practitioners have died from the persecution. According to internal CCP data from October 2001 , at least 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners were illegally sentenced to prison, and more than 100,000 practitioners were sentenced to forced labor throughout China. Because the CCP could not justify the fabricated charges against Falun Gong practitioners, the most common practice has been to skip trial and send the practitioners directly to labor camps. As a result, the number of practitioners held at labor camps far exceeds practitioners held in prisons.

We cannot obtain the exact number of Falun Gong practitioners held in Chinese labor camps due to the CCP's information blockade and cover-up; but according to information from Chinese labor camps a few years ago, many labor camps held far more people than their capacity; major labor camps held between 5,000 and 20,000 people per camp.

Falun Gong practitioners are savagely tortured at these prisons and labor camps, tortures that include barbaric beatings, being locked in dungeons, a water dungeon, shocks from electric batons, force-feeding with concentrated salt water and feces, sleep deprivation, sexual assault, rape, forced injection and ingestion of nerve-damaging drugs. The methods are horrifying. They are also harvesting living Falun Gong practitioners' organs and cremating their bodies to destroy evidence, which is another persecution method that has not yet been fully exposed.

As early as December 22, 2000, an internal source revealed to the Minghui/Clearwisdom website that "some evil police officers in Mainland China are plotting with greedy doctors and looking to sell the human organs of Falun Gong practitioners for huge sums of money. Needless to say, their plans are cruel and heartless to the extreme." One source indicates that "a certain hospital in the city of Shijiazhuang specializing in Chinese medicine has received six such requests." According to information we have obtained so far, prisons and labor camps in Heilongjiang Province, Liaoning Province, Shandong Province, Fujian Province, Guangdong Province, Guangxi Province used to draw blood samples from Falun Gong practitioners for "a physical exam." A blood exam is an important part of tissue matching in organ transplants. Many Falun Gong practitioners were forced to submit to a physical exam before they were transferred, but non-practitioner detainees did not have to provide blood samples.

In the past few years, the number of organ transplants in China has increased rapidly. Between 1991 and 1998, only 78 liver transplant surgeries were performed in China. In 1999, 2000 and 2001, the number of liver transplants was 118, 254 and 486. In 2003, this number shot up to more than 3,000. An expert from the China Organ Transplant Research Association said that nearly 4,000 liver transplants were carried out in China in 2005, and nearly 10,000 kidney transplants were completed. More than 90,000 organ transplants have been carried out in China in the past decade. Tissue matches aside from close relatives are low--less than 5%. Even in the USA where organ donations are common practice, the average wait time for an organ transplant is about seven years. In China, many organ transplant centers clearly state that the wait time is only a few weeks or even shorter. Undoubtedly, these centers have a live organ pool. Chinese people generally do not donate their bodies or body parts. Although the CCP encourages the popular practice of illegal organ harvesting from executed prisoners, the number of all executed prisoners' organs would still fall far short of the demand. Where do the donor organs come from?

Jiang Zemin ordered the 610 Office to carry out systematic genocidal policies, "ruin their reputations, bankrupt them financially and destroy them physically," "Falun Gong practitioners beaten to death are counted as suicides," "Falun Gong practitioners tortured to death are to be directly cremated without identifying them." Authorities of prisons and labor camps often subject the practitioners to unusual physical exams. Many Falun Gong practitioners have disappeared without a trace. People have good reason to suspect that massive live organ harvesting has been carried out on Falun Gong practitioners. The exposure of the Sujiatun tragedy only confirms this suspicion.

According to a veteran military doctor from the Shenyang Military Zone, the Sujiatun concentration camp (now defunct) is only one of 36 similar such concentration camps in China. Right now, most practitioners are still being held in prisons, labor camps and detention centers. These Falun Gong practitioners are sent to the camps when "occasion calls for it." The fifth-largest camp, located in Jilin's Jiutai District, holds as many as 14,000 or more Falun Gong practitioners at a time. The largest camp, codenamed "672-S," is said to hold more than 120,000 people, among whom are Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience.

Therefore, in order to expose the complete truth about the CCP's organ harvesting from live Falun Gong practitioners and to expose its more than seven-year persecution of Falun Gong, and to obtain large amounts of evidence on the CCP's genocide and crimes against humanity, we must undoubtedly conduct deep and thorough investigations in all prisons, labor camps and concentration camps where Falun Gong practitioners are held, because those are the main places where the most horrible, unimaginable atrocities are taking place.