Former Uighur Surgeon Discloses Live Organ Harvesting in China
NTD TV, 20 December 2011
A Uighur refugee and former surgeon, Enver Tohti, spoke with NTD about how he harvested organs from Uighur prisoners who were still alive. Tohti is the first surgeon to admit to personally performing live organ harvesting—a practice that is believed to be used on prisoners of conscience in China.
At a recent rally in England, Tohti recounted what took place 16 years ago when he was asked to remove organs from an executed prisoner.
[Enver Tohti, Former Uighur Surgeon]:
“At that time, my first instinct was that the person was still alive. Although he was executed, the bullet hit the right side of the chest. They did not shoot the left, where the heart is, but targeted the right, so the person would remain alive until after we remove the organs.”
Author and rights advocate Ethan Gutmann featured Enver Tohti and several other Uighurs in a report titled “The Xinjiang Procedure,” published in The Weekly Standard earlier this month. It’s the latest report on the systematic live harvesting of organs by the Chinese regime, which Gutmann says began as early as 1991.
According to Gutmann and others, like Canadian rights advocates David Kilgour and David Matas, the practice continues today on other groups as well. Kilgour and Matas published a report alleging that the Chinese regime is harvesting organs from live Falun Gong practitioners—a spiritual group the Chinese regime has been persecuting since 1999. Gutmann, who has also investigated the allegations, estimates about 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been victims of live organ harvesting.
For Enver Tohti, these allegations are a reminder of a past he’d rather forget.
[Enver Tohti, Former Uighur Surgeon]:
“After learning about the Communist Party’s live organ harvesting, I realized that’s exactly what I had taken part in, and I feel extremely guilty. I personally performed these surgeries to remove livers and kidneys… I hope to forget this ever happened, and I often pray that I would be forgiven. I knew nothing at the time when I carried out these foolish acts. I seek forgiveness, there’s nothing else I can say.”
China’s organ transplant industry has expanded rapidly since around 2001. The regime openly admits to using organs from executed prisoners, but does not disclose the number of executions it carries out each year.