China’s Own Unit 731?

If true, this report removes China’s human rights issue to a whole new depth of depravity.

There is a horrifying story going around the world: In the northeast of China, thousands of prisoners are being held, so that they can be killed for their organs. The prisoners are practitioners of Falun Gong, the meditation-and-exercise system. The facility at which they are being held — called a “concentration camp” or a “death camp” — is at Sujiatun. Chinese human-rights activists believe that this name should cause the same shudders as Treblinka and the others.

Whether China will immediately permit the ICRC to inspect Sujiatun and investigate these allegations is a real test of its commitment to becoming a member of the civilized world. It would also convict China of rank hypocrisy, thus cheapening some very legit grievances about Japan’s debt to history.

This statement from the article also struck me; it could just as well have been written about North Korea:

And I recall what Robert Conquest, the great analyst of totalitarianism, once told me: The world has seldom wanted to believe witnesses. Ten, 20, or 30 years later, maybe, but rarely sooner.

Testimony out of the early Soviet Union was scoffed at; these were “rumors in Riga.” Tales of the Holocaust were Jewish whining. When escapees from Mao spilled into Hong Kong, they were “embittered warlords.” When Cubans landed in Florida, they were “Batista stooges.” And so on.

I wonder if Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch will be as vocal about this as they were about Gitmo. Or whether they’ll give it the “footnote” treatment they’ve given to North Korea.