A car tour, raising awareness about the ongoing campaign of persecution against Falun Gong practitioners in China, made a stop at the municipal building in Port Hardy on Saturday, July 30.
What generated the call to action was a June 22 report released by Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas, former Canadian secretary of state David Kilgour, and investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann, revealing that Chinese Falun Gong practitioners (Falun Gong is an ancient meditation practice for improving mind and body. The practice’s most visible aspects are its five gentle exercises, which are highly effective ways to improve health and energy) are being killed to supply China’s organ trade.
The researchers estimated that up to 1.5 million Falun Gong practitioners have been killed since 2001 in this illegal state-sanctioned organ-trafficking practice.
"Right now we're doing a car tour across vancouver island," said Spokesperson Carrie Gilkison during an interview at the car tour's Port Hardy stop. "We've gone to Port Alice and Port McNeill already, and there are simultaneous tours going on in other parts of Canada, too. The Communist Party of China (CPC) have been killing people for their organs and then selling them to people that need transplants. The CPC is killing innocent people."
For Gilkison, this is a personal matter "For two reasons. They're persecuting Falun Gong practitioners by forcefully taking their organs, and I've been a Falun Gong practitioner since 2002. And in a way they're persecuting the people that go there for transplants, including Canadians, which I am also, so that's why I have a strong interest in letting Canadians know about this issue."
Gilkison added that this should matter to Canadians because "any of us could go to China needing an organ and not realize someone has been killed for it. Maybe they won't tell you anything when you go there to get the transplant, but it's possible that you would find out years later that someone was killed for that organ, and for a lot of people that would be very difficult information to live with. we want to protect people here, but we also want to protect people living in China, and that's what we're doing by raising awareness on this tour."
The CPC has been persecuting Falun Gong practitioners since 1999 by "arresting people from their homes, taking them off the streets, and they haven't committed any crimes, they practice peaceful meditation to look within and try to improve themselves. This kind of meditation practice is not a crime, and really a part of the traditional chinese culture," said Gilkison, adding that the level of organ harvesting is "on the scale of genocide."
"We're doing these tours to try and talk with the local government, and we really want to appeal to people's sense of conscience and human rights," Gilkison said. "We know that the Canadian government really cares about their citizens, and I think they would want to protect them from going to China and getting an organ that was harvested, which would be psychologically harmful to them. China's a country that aspires to be a world power, but if it wants to be respected in the world, it needs to end these atrocities against it's own citizens. Murder for organs has got to stop."