ABC (Australia) Interviews David Kilgour About Their Report on Live Organ Harvesting in China
Reporter: Tony Jones
August 15, 2006 Transcript TONY JONES: Well, David Kilgour was a member of the Canadian Parliament for
26 years until January this year. During that time he served in many roles
including Secretary of State for Asia and the Pacific in the years 2002 and
2003. Prior to entering parliament Mr Kilgour practiced law, worked as Crown
Prosecutor in Manitoba. Mr Kilgour joins us now from our Canberra studio. Thanks
for being there. DAVID KILGOUR, FORMER CANADIAN MP: Good to be here, Tony. Can I speak to what
... you were just saying, in just a minute? TONY JONES: I'll give you the opportunity to do that. I just want to [say]
this to you, it does seem to me, reading your report in detail, there are only
two possibilities here. One is you've uncovered a new form of evil we're yet to
see and the other is you've been taken in by an incredibly sophisticated hoax
that would make the 'Hitler Diaries' seem simplistic by comparison. How are we
to know which it is, because having read your report I'm completely uncertain. DAVID KILGOUR: I'm surprised because just about everyone who has read it from
Europe, from Brussels to Berlin to Paris to London that I've spoken to is
persuaded [that] any reasonable person reading the report would think that we
are right. As you know, we give 18 different kinds of evidence. Mostly the most
convincing, as you know, is the people in these institutions telling us,
essentially, that they have Falun Gong prisoners ready and available to be
harvested and we give websites in China telling people who can come and have
organ transplants within a week. We give, for example, today I was... a resident
of Canberra, Chen Yang, was telling us how she was treated abominably while she
was in a work camp, but only the Falun Gong prisoners were examined carefully
medically, with blood tests, their computer-assisted blood transplants. From the
18 kinds of evidence we looked [at]the case is simply overwhelming. As terrible
as this is, this is happening on a large scale in many locations in China. TONY JONES: There is evidence from people who have been imprisoned and who
are now free, that they saw fellow Falun Gong practitioners in prison given
extensive medical testing and that is corroborative evidence to what you've been
saying, isn't it? DAVID KILGOUR: Yes, but my colleague who is here actually with me from
Europe, the Europe Parliament, McMillan Scott, Edward McMillan Scott -
Vice-President of the European Parliament, by the way - was in China recently,
as you know, and somebody he met there had told him he had seen his best friend
with his organs removed. This man has disappeared and that's why McMillan Scott
is here with me in Australia because he's so concerned this could happen to a
person who speaks to a visiting MP. TONY JONES: Alright. It's so important. Let's go straight to an examination
of the evidence, including the evidence that you just cited earlier about the
phone calls. You have in your report a series of transcripts of telephone
conversations with various senior doctors, hospital and medical staff in
different parts of China. An unnamed person you call M, secretly records those
calls, at least one group of them. Now, the people on the other end of the phone
appear [to confirm] details of the allegations that political prisoners are
being kept as a kind of live organ bank of healthy donors for sick people with
enough money to get transplants. Tell us why you believe these recording, these
critical recordings, were not fabricated. DAVID KILGOUR: Well, people who I've listened to them. I don't speak
Mandarin, but I've listened to the tapes with an independently hired
interpreter. I had the transcript in my hand and he translated to me from the
text, as he heard it, the digital recording, and I had the text in front of me
and he signed off that these reports were accurate and I'm satisfied, having -
as a former prosecutor having examined very carefully how these were done. We
looked at phone records; we looked at all kind of things to make sure they were
fairly and properly done. I don't think there's any basis whatsoever for
thinking these are a hoax or some kind of attempt to pull the wool over
anybody's eyes. TONY JONES: Let's go through it a little more. Evidently the person called M
puts in calls to a senior public security official in Zhangxi [Guangxi]
Province, a senior physician in Shenyang, a senior surgeon in a Beijing army
hospital, and over the phone to someone they've never met and evidently not
spoken to before, they begin to spill out quite openly what you would think
would be state secrets. I can't understand why anyone would do that. DAVID KILGOUR: That's a good question. I, of course, asked that, too. The
reality is that she called a great many hospitals and as I understand it many of
the people were smart enough to say they shouldn't say this, but about 15 across
the country people were either vain enough, or foolish enough or honest enough,
to fess up to what was available. And as you probably know from the transcripts
sometimes they will say "we're not supposed to talk about that" or
"it's a state secret," or this or that. But in about 15 institutions,
which we cite in the report, people were candid enough to spill the beans on a
system that the human mind, I don't think, could have invented. TONY JONES: How was M representing herself in these phone calls, because that
is unclear in the report? DAVID KILGOUR: I went over that very carefully with her as well. She was
representing herself as somebody who was seeking an organ for a member of her
family and she was speaking, of course, in Mandarin. The person did not know
that she was calling...from where in China she was calling, did not know, in
fact, she was calling from North America. TONY JONES: Did you do any cross-checking to verify that the people
supposedly on the other end of the phone are actually the people reported as
being in those conversations. A senior doctor in the Beijing army hospital, for
example. One could check the numbers, one could go back and find it. Is this the
same voice? DAVID KILGOUR: We have checked the numbers and in some cases where we've
called back - in fact, one extraordinary case, we were able to get through. Not
"we", they were able to get through to the incinerator where bodies
were burned and the man in the incinerator admitted this was happening. I mean,
China is such a big country and the system is so massive, they weren't able to
tell everybody, "Don't say a word." I have [no] doubt if somebody
called now everybody has been told to say nothing. In fact, one of the
colleagues told me she rang recently and the person hung up immediately when
they heard her on the other end of the line. It will not work now, I'm quite
satisfied, but as recently as June, Tony, these calls were being put through and
in some cases these extraordinary admissions were being made. TONY JONES: Who is putting the calls through? Because you say
"they". Did you have an investigative staff? DAVID KILGOUR: Two people. One in Canada and one in Boston, actually. These
people did it very carefully. We have the digital recordings. We've made them
available to any serious person who wants to look at them, or listen to them. TONY JONES: And are governments looking at this material? Is this going to
intelligence services, people who would be able to do all of the checking and
cross-checking that is necessary? DAVID KILGOUR: I'm more than happy to make them available to governments.
We've been appealing to governments, including your own government here in
Australia - we will be tomorrow - to take this very seriously. We're two
volunteers, by the way. We weren't paid for this. We spent two months on it, but
we'd like to see the UN do an inquiry and organisations like Amnesty
International. We've cooperated fully with Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. We'd
like to see a UN investigation into this thing in the way they have the
resources and people to do it. TONY JONES: Since you've raised it, who will you be talking to in the
Australian Government tomorrow? DAVID KILGOUR: Well, we are meeting with - some of these are private meetings
so It's probably better not [to] say. I'd certainly like to meet with Mr Downer.
Mr Downer and I both know each other quite well. I very much hope he'll make
time to meet with us on this. We're meeting with government MPs and with
Opposition MPs. It's certainly not a partisan issue. We think it's an issue of
human rights and doing the correct thing for the people of Australia, who are
for standing up for principle. TONY JONES: The Australian Government has a close relationship and serious
trading relationship with China. Are you sure you can convince them that this is
serious enough that they should overlook that in order to examine, or seek to
have examined these allegations? DAVID KILGOUR: Well, of course. Does anyone in Australia think that China is
going to stop buying natural gas from Australia because [of] Australia saying
that this has got to stop immediately? The lever we have, as you know is we've
got the Olympic games in two years and if Australians will say this has to stop
and I think that - and if other governments do this as well, Canada, and the US
and Europe, I think they will stop. And at least the practice will end until the
Games start. We all have to speak up on it. We can't all simply sit back and
say, "They might [not] buy our natural gas" , which is nonsense. TONY JONES: David Kilgour, if the UN and independent governments conducted an
investigation and proved that the Chinese state had murdered thousands of
political prisoners, there would be no Olympic Games in Beijing, would there? DAVID KILGOUR: Well, that's a very interesting question. I would like to
think not, but at this point all we're really hoping, short-term wise, is to get
the practice to stop. And I'm absolutely convinced it's going on a large scale
across China and it has to stop immediately. TONY JONES: Back to the evidence.
You find corroborative evidence to support your transitions in transplant
statistics and in information founded on actual hospital websites. Can you
explain that evidence to us briefly. DAVID KILGOUR: There's one particular website that's called a China
International Website. There are six languages on it. I went on it the other
night and it basically says that viscera donors - these are soft organs of the
body - are available immediately. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that with
the waits in Australia, Canada and elsewhere, if it is anybody who can provide a
kidney or a liver immediately, we think, sadly, has to have a human group of
people waiting to have their organs harvested and there's no other explanation
we can come to. The figure we came up with is the 41,000 basically unaccounted
for transplants since 2000. That was the year that Falun Gong began -- TONY JONES: Let's go through that. When you say "unaccounted for",
you mean one can work out who the transplant donors were in all the other ones,
but there are 41,000 transplants for which you cannot work out who the donors
are? DAVID KILGOUR: Executed prisoners, brain-dead patients and donated organs. As
you know in Chinese culture people do not donate their organs. It's a very, very
small number of donated organs. It comes up with about 41,000. We're not saying
it is 41,000 people have died because, as you know, you can take many more than
one organ from a person. You can take seven or eight. TONY JONES: You are saying thousands of people have died? DAVID KILGOUR: Thousands, yes. TONY JONES: Let's go, if we can in the time we left, to the most
controversial piece of evidence. The testimony of a former wife of a surgeon who
is alleged to have taken - the surgeon, that is - have taken more than 2,000
corneas from the eyes of live prisoners or in fact prisoners who were killed and
then rolled into an operating theatre so he and other surgeons could remove
organs. DAVID KILGOUR: Yeah, actually I went over this carefully with her. It's the
corneas from 2,000 human beings. And it happened in the Sujiatun hospital that
she referred to at the outset at this interview. And her husband did that over a
2-year period - believe me, I went down to visit with Mr Wu. I spent - I had
lunch with him, I had dinner with him. We had a very long talk about this- TONY JONES: You are talking about Harry Wu now, cause we've switched topics
slightly. I was about to ask you about Harry Wu. Harry Wu is an activist in this
area, as people know. He says this can't have happened, he's sent his
investigators to this area. There is no giant underground facility, which she
appears to refer to, where thousands of people could have been kept, no
concentration camp and he just says it couldn't have happened there. DAVID KILGOUR: Well, everything that Harry has said - and believe me I have
gone over this very carefully with him and I have great respect for Harry Wu.
Everything that Harry is talking about happened after March the 9th, when,
basically, the whistle was blown by two individuals. We're talking about things
that happened before March the 9th and that's really the fundamental difference
between them. But the reality is that her husband, over a 2-year period, told
her - until he refused to do it anymore - that he had taken corneas from 2,000 -
approximately 2,000 human beings. People say you can't do that many operations,
but as we've discovered, you can take corneas out of a person's body in about 20
minutes. As somebody worked it out for us, he could have done this in about 83
days, working very hard for 83 days. So to suggest that he couldn't have done it
in a 2-year period is not true. TONY JONES: She says that he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from
doing these operations, that prisoners were wheeled in virtually in front of the
surgeons, killed with a lethal injection and- DAVID KILGOUR: Potassium. TONY JONES: ..potassium to stop the heart, and then the body was wheeled into
different surgeries and different groups of surgeons supposedly pulled out other
organs. Is that correct? DAVID KILGOUR: She also says that initially that's what happened, what you
just said, but eventually, when people became so desensitised, they would all do
it in the same operating room. The people taking the heart would come into the
same operating room and take the heart out once the corneas had been taken out
and the liver and the kidneys and so on. TONY JONES: Have [you]verified the existence of this doctor that she
supposedly was married to? Have you made attempts to contact him and find out
whether he can confirm this story? Because it is second-hand right now. DAVID KILGOUR: I would very much like to do so but as you can appreciate,
he's outside of China right now, in fact I know what country he's in. But as you
can also appreciate, he's basically taken part in the murder of about 2,000
people and that's a crime against humanity. It's a terrible thing to do and if
he comes forward, I'm sure he's worried that he'll be denied refuge in the
country he's taken - he's living in at the moment. And his wife, as you know, is
also outside the country - former wife. TONY JONES: Her story is like a sort of ghastly, gothic horror tale and it
goes on. And she says that assassins employed by the local health authority, she
believes, tried to kill her and her husband, that she was stabbed in that
attempt. He escaped unscathed - her former husband, that is, escaped unscathed.
It's at that point where I start to wonder about her story, because the logic of
it is the health authorities would have to kill all the doctors and all the
nurses and personnel involved in these operations. DAVID KILGOUR: Well, you'll recall that his problems started after he refused
to do any more operations and you'll also recall that the SARS epidemic hit
China in 2003 and he was one of the several doctors who were sent to Beijing to
deal with the SARS epidemic there. And I think you probably noticed he said he
thought he said he would not return from it. But in fact he did survive the SARS
epidemic and came back and then these things happened. I'm not - I wasn't there,
I'm not sure what happened, but I did sit with her for a long, long time and I
was persuaded that she was doing her best to tell the truth as she saw it. And
why else would she say that she had - her husband had been stabbed? She also,
you will recall, said her mother worked in the health system. So that's, I
believe, how she found out about this. TONY JONES: Presumably, if there is a chance to investigate all these
matters, you want an independent investigator to look at all these matters, it
would be fairly easy to corroborate the steps that you've gone through here with
this story, because there must have been a lot of people involved. But have
there been any attempts so far by the UN or by anybody, by all the human right
groups you've talked about, to actually examine the detail of this - or the US
Government or its officials? DAVID KILGOUR: Well I've actually met with the US State Department and with
Amnesty International in London, their head office, and with Human Rights Watch
in New York and I'm quite encouraged that all three of those groups, along with
others, are going to try to get to the bottom of this, but there is no doubt
that the UN rapporteur on torture, Manfred Novak, in Vienna, is the one that
should be dealing with it. I'm working with him, too, so I'm optimistic that
these inquiries will be done. But in the meantime, this ghastly process has to
stop and that's where Australians calling their MPs and you and I and others can
do our utmost to make sure the Chinese government knows that this is totally
unacceptable conduct. TONY JONES: Will you be seeking to speak to the Australian Prime Minister
about this? It's so extraordinary these allegations. They have to be tested in
some way, don't they? DAVID KILGOUR: Yes, but you know, too, that in fact [a person] just died in
Canada a few months ago - a man who at the age of 19, got out of Auschwitz and
told the world what was going on there in, I believe, 1943. And the world said,
"This can't be happening." And he said, "It is happening."
And nobody believed him. We all know what was happening in Auschwitz and, yeah,
I find them extraordinary as well. But, as I say we've looked at it as carefully
as we can and we've come to the regrettable conclusion that it is happening, and
it's happening on a large scale and as I say, it's got to stop now. TONY JONES: David Kilgour, we'll obviously follow your talks over the next
few days with Australian politicians and we thank you very much for taking the
time to test these...have these questions, put to you and test the allegations
on Lateline. DAVID KILGOUR: Thank you for having me, Tony. Source http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1715849.htm
Chinese version available at
http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2006/8/19/135946.html
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