(Minghui.org) With the recent international exposure of forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners, it has become clear that many forced labor camps and prisons in China have participated in this unimaginable atrocity.
While detained at the Heizuizi Women’s Forced Labor Camp in Jilin Province, I once had my blood drawn for no clear reason. I am now sharing my experience so that medical experts can use it as reference in their efforts to further expose the crimes of forced organ harvesting.
In May or June 2009, the labor camp gathered all Falun Gong practitioners who had arrived during the previous few months. We were ordered to line up in seven rows. The guards then gave each practitioner two tubes, each measuring about 7-8 centimeters in length and 2 centimeters in width. We overheard the labor camp doctors say that these tubes had been imported from the U.S. We were not told why we had to have our blood drawn.
Somehow they were unable to get any blood from the first practitioner in line. One female doctor, who was very rude and inpatient, uttered swear words. They thought something was wrong with the needle, but couldn’t figure out how to fix it. After they exhausted all options, they dismissed us. Not long thereafter however, they summoned us back and began the blood drawing again. They inserted one tube onto the needle and then took it out when it was filled with blood. Without pulling out the needle from the vein, they then inserted the second tube onto the needle to draw more blood. Just like that, each of us had two tubes of blood drawn, yet we were never given any blood test results.
Strangely, the labor camp didn’t collect blood samples from detainees who were not Falun Gong practitioners. As a matter of fact, they never cared about the well-being or health of any detainee. The guards usually turned a blind eye when someone asked for medical care. When they finally responded to a sick person’s plea, they often administered obsolete medicines no longer prescribed by doctors. If a detainee had a severe medical condition, she had to get approval from the guards and prove that she had enough money in her account to cover expenses, and then wait for more people to become ill so the guards could drive a carload of people to the hospital at once.
In April or May 2010, another suspicious incident occurred one day between 9 and 10 a.m. While working with us in a workshop, a Falun Gong practitioner in her thirties was suddenly taken away by the guards and didn’t return until 3:00 p.m. We were all very worried about her. When she came back, she told us that labor camp officials had tried to force her and a couple of other detainees from other teams to go to the hospital. She refused since she wasn’t sick and had not requested medical care. The guards insisted, but she kept saying no.
During the standoff, the labor camp doctors deceived her into believing it was just for a regular checkup. Based on her description, several of us who were from the local area figured out that she had been taken to the medical school-affiliated hospital located on Jiefang Boulevard. She told us that the hospital doctors had run a battery of tests on her and eventually claimed that she must be hospitalized immediately to treat a heart condition. Before she began practicing Falun Gong, some ten years prior to this incident, she did suffer from heart ailments, but she never experienced any heart trouble after becoming a practitioner.
She firmly refused the hospitalization order, so the labor camp guards had to take her back. The guards later demanded that she pay more than 300 yuan in medical expenses. She argued that she had never asked to be treated in the first place, and that the labor camp had forced her to go to the hospital. In the end, the labor camp authorities dropped the issue.
How shameful it is for the labor camp officials to drag detained practitioners to the hospital and then order them to pay for medical expenses! With forced organ harvesting being exposed, I can’t help but think that the above-mentioned practitioner’s hospitalization order was related to organ harvesting. Could it be that her insistence on not being hospitalized helped save her life?
Category: Organ Harvesting
