Axis of Evil: Human Trafficking

629 Pakistani girls sold as brides to China

By KATHY GANNON

In this May 22, 2019 file photo, Sumaira a Pakistani woman, shows a picture of her Chinese husband in Gujranwala, Pakistan. Sumaira, who didn't want her full name used, was raped repeatedly by Chinese men at a house in Islamabad where she was brought to stay after her brothers arranged her marriage to the older Chinese man. The Associated Press has obtained a list, compiled by Pakistani investigators determined to break up trafficking networks, that identifies hundreds of girls and women from across Pakistan who were sold as brides to Chinese men and taken to China. 

LAHORE, Pakistan — Page after page, the names stack up: 629 girls and women from across Pakistan who were sold as brides to Chinese men and taken to China. 

The list, obtained by The Associated Press, was compiled by Pakistani investigators determined to break up trafficking networks exploiting the country’s poor and vulnerable.
The list gives the most concrete figure yet for the number of women caught up in the trafficking schemes since 2018.
But since the time it was put together in June, investigators’ aggressive drive against the networks has largely ground to a halt. 

Officials with knowledge of the investigations say that is because of pressure from government officials fearful of hurting Pakistan’s lucrative ties to Beijing.
The biggest case against traffickers has fallen apart. 

In October, a court in Faisalabad acquitted 31 Chinese nationals charged in connection with trafficking. 

Several of the women who had initially been interviewed by police refused to testify because they were either threatened or bribed into silence, according to a court official and a police investigator familiar with the case. 

The two spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution for speaking out.
At the same time, the government has sought to curtail investigations, putting “immense pressure” on officials from the Federal Investigation Agency pursuing trafficking networks, said Saleem Iqbal, a Christian activist who has helped parents rescue several young girls from China and prevented others from being sent there.
“Some (FIA officials) were even transferred,” Iqbal said in an interview. 

“When we talk to Pakistani rulers, they don’t pay any attention. “
Asked about the complaints, Pakistan’s interior and foreign ministries refused to comment.
Several senior officials familiar with the events said investigations into trafficking have slowed, the investigators are frustrated, and Pakistani media have been pushed to curb their reporting on trafficking. 

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals.
“No one is doing anything to help these girls,” one of the officials said. 

“The whole racket is continuing, and it is growing. Why? Because they know they can get away with it. The authorities won’t follow through, everyone is being pressured to not investigate. Trafficking is increasing now.”
He said he was speaking out “because I have to live with myself. Where is our humanity?”
China’s Foreign Ministry said it was unaware of the list.

An AP investigation earlier this year revealed how Pakistan’s Christian minority has become a new target of brokers who pay impoverished parents to marry off their daughters, some of them teenagers, to Chinese husbands who return with them to their homeland. 

Many of the brides are then isolated and abused or forced into prostitution in China, often contacting home and pleading to be brought back. 

The AP spoke to police and court officials and more than a dozen brides — some of whom made it back to Pakistan, others who remained trapped in China — as well as remorseful parents, neighbors, relatives and human rights workers.
Christians are targeted because they are one of the poorest communities in Muslim-majority Pakistan. 

The trafficking rings are made up of Chinese and Pakistani middlemen and include Christian ministers, mostly from small evangelical churches, who get bribes to urge their flock to sell their daughters. 

Investigators have also turned up at least one Muslim cleric running a marriage bureau from his madrassa, or religious school.
Investigators put together the list of 629 women from Pakistan’s integrated border management system, which digitally records travel documents at the country’s airports. 

The information includes the brides’ national identity numbers, their Chinese husbands’ names and the dates of their marriages.
All but a handful of the marriages took place in 2018 and up to April 2019. 

One of the senior officials said it was believed all 629 were sold to grooms by their families.
It is not known how many more women and girls were trafficked since the list was put together. 

But the official said, “the lucrative trade continues.” 

He spoke to the AP in an interview conducted hundreds of kilometers from his place of work to protect his identity. 

“The Chinese and Pakistani brokers make between 4 million and 10 million rupees ($25,000 and $65,000) from the groom, but only about 200,000 rupees ($1,500), is given to the family,” he said.
The official, with years of experience studying human trafficking in Pakistan, said many of the women who spoke to investigators told of forced fertility treatments, physical and sexual abuse and, in some cases, forced prostitution. 

Although no evidence has emerged, at least one investigation report contains allegations of organs being harvested from some of the women sent to China.
In September, Pakistan’s investigation agency sent a report it labeled “fake Chinese marriages cases” to Prime Minister Imran Khan. 

The report, a copy of which was attained by the AP, provided details of cases registered against 52 Chinese nationals and 20 of their Pakistani associates in two cities in eastern Punjab province — Faisalabad, Lahore — as well as in the capital Islamabad. 

The Chinese suspects included the 31 later acquitted in court.
The report said police discovered two illegal marriage bureaus in Lahore, including one operated from an Islamic center and madrassa — the first known report of poor Muslims also being targeted by brokers. 

The Muslim cleric involved fled police.
After the acquittals, there are other cases before the courts involving arrested Pakistani and at least another 21 Chinese suspects, according to the report sent to the prime minister in September. 

But the Chinese defendants in the cases were all granted bail and left the country, say activists and a court official.
Activists and human rights workers say Pakistan has sought to keep the trafficking of brides quiet so as not to jeopardize Pakistan’s increasingly close economic relationship with China.China has been a steadfast ally of Pakistan for decades, particularly in its testy relationship with India. 

China has provided Islamabad with military assistance, including pre-tested nuclear devices and nuclear-capable missiles.
Today, Pakistan is receiving massive aid under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a global endeavor aimed at reconstituting the Silk Road and linking China to all corners of Asia. 

Under the $75 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project, Beijing has promised Islamabad a sprawling package of infrastructure development, from road construction and power plants to agriculture.
The demand for foreign brides in China is rooted in that country’s population, where there are roughly 34 million more men than women — a result of the one-child policy that ended in 2015 after 35 years, along with an overwhelming preference for boys that led to abortions of girl children and female infanticide.
A report released this month by Human Rights Watch, documenting trafficking in brides from Myanmar to China, said the practice is spreading. 

It said Pakistan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, North Korea and Vietnam have “all have become source countries for a brutal business.”
“One of the things that is very striking about this issue is how fast the list is growing of countries that are known to be source countries in the bride trafficking business,” Heather Barr, the HRW report’s author, told AP.
Omar Warriach, Amnesty International’s campaigns director for South Asia, said Pakistan “must not let its close relationship with China become a reason to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses against its own citizens” — either in abuses of women sold as brides or separation of Pakistani women from husbands from China’s Muslim Uighur population sent to “re-education camps” to turn them away from Islam.
“It is horrifying that women are being treated this way without any concern being shown by the authorities in either country. And it’s shocking that it’s happening on this scale,” he said.

China's crimes against humanity

The Truth about China’s Persecution of Falun Gong
By ETHAN GUTMANN
People practice Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong, meditation and exercises before a protest march against the Chinese government, outside City Hall in Los Angeles, Calif., October 15, 2015. 

There is a certain transgressive thrill in pulling the tail of a sacred cow. 

In that sense, Ms. Tolentino’s piece “Stepping Into the Uncanny, Unsettling World of Shen Yun” (March 19, 2019) is a compliment, a flare in the New York sky that Falun Gong, as a victim group, has finally achieved sacred-cow status. 

But even tail-pulling has an unwritten etiquette: If I wanted to write a critique of, say, traditional Jewish Passover food, I would stick to things such as the texture of gefilte fish rather than condemning the Seder or questioning the existence of the Holocaust. 

And I suspect Ms. Tolentino would agree with me.
Ms. Tolentino was essentially writing a critical dance review of Shen Yun Performing Arts while sprinkling a little snark on — in her view — the cornball conventions of Chinese theater and Falun Gong’s suspicious refusal to adopt Western, politically correct norms. 

Yet her argument suddenly took a weird detour, delivering a skeptical judgement on the charges of Chinese State organ harvesting of Falun Gong (“many experts dispute this”).
Why did she do this? 

Two reasons: A moment of transgressive pleasure is followed by guilt, and guilt must be answered by justification — perhaps the victim group is not really a sacred cow after all? 

Or they have brought their suffering upon themselves? (You know, through hypocrisy or not answering her emails or something). 

The second reason is that even a cursory glance at the credible claims surrounding Chinese organ harvesting will establish that this is not the Holocaust.
Indeed, it’s closer to the Spanish Inquisition — a convert-to-the-Communist-Party-or-die scheme that has spanned two decades and picked up four victim groups on the way: the Uyghurs in 1997, Falun Gong in 2001, Tibetans and House Christians in 2003. 

Overall casualty rate? 

Probably just under that of the Syrian Civil War. 

Tolentino is right; that’s only a fraction of what the Nazi death camps produced in a just a few years.
Yet Ms. Tolentino had many choices in her brief Google search. 

On one side, she found me, and David Kilgour, and David Matas — two Jews and a Presbyterian who have investigated this subject for 13 years and have published books on the subject. 

On the other, she found a Washington Post journalist who, during his brief posting in Beijing, wrote a single story on this issue, with a single quote from a Chinese lawyer (“he had never heard of organs being harvested from live prisoners, as Falun Gong claims.”)
That Chinese lawyer represents Falun Gong detainees in China. 

And that means he is a very brave man — particularly at a time when Chinese lawyers are routinely being thrown into prison, “Black Jails,” and even labor camps. 

Yet even very brave men don’t stand up all that well to electric cattle prods, so it is not surprising that the lawyer didn’t remember hearing anything from his clients about the most politically sensitive issue in China, the state-sponsored organ harvesting of political and religious dissidents.
Ms. Tolentino had choices. 

I’m not surprised that she did not read our published works. 

That can take a month. 

But she could have quoted the New York Times; their previous star China reporter, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, seamlessly fluent in Chinese, wrote six stories on this issue. 

Ms. Tolentino could have easily found that our own House of Representatives passed a resolution in 2016 condemning China for harvesting dissidents, citing our “credible and persistent reports” — as did the European Parliament. 

She could have quoted from the ongoing London China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, probably the most respected human rights prosecutor in the world. 

Again, Ms. Tolentino is right: There is a rival herd of experts who dispute our findings out there. 

But with over a million Uyghurs incarcerated over the last year, blood-and-DNA-tested, ready for organ-tissue matching, those experts are very quiet these days.
Gefilte fish has many memories for me. 

I could write an essay about Jewish food and it might be just as evocative — and critical of how corny the whole Seder thing can be, and emotionally mixed — as Ms. Tolentino’s feelings about the Shen Yun dance performance. 

But the force of my writing still wouldn’t give me the standing to publish in The New Yorker on the Holocaust. 

Only intensive study and the relentless, challenging, scarring, tedious, and exhaustive interviews of witnesses can do that.
I suspect that the author had a nice, mildly transgressive piece in hand. 

Pull the tail a little, maybe even tip the whole cow. 

Then she “stepped into” something, “uncanny and unsettling.” 

It wasn’t Shen Yun, or Falun Gong — or a cowpie for that matter. 

No, it was something evil, with a whiff of the gas chamber about it, something she did not understand. 

And she panicked, but she went ahead and did it anyway. 

I have no clue as to why her editors went along on that midnight ride, but they did. 

And in doing so, they failed their readers — and millions of prisoners of conscience as well.

China's crimes against humanity

Two Canadian lawyers take Chinese organ-harvesting claims to Australia 

By Rod Mcguirk

David Kilgour, former prosecutor and Canadian secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific, and David Matas, human rights lawyer

Two Canadian lawyers came to Australia’s Parliament House on Monday to persuade lawmakers to pass a motion urging China to immediately end the practice of organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
David Kilgour, a former prosecutor and Canadian secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific, and David Matas, a human rights lawyer, have published evidence they say shows that China performs an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 transplants a year, with organs primarily taken from Falun Gong practitioners, Muslim Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists and Christians.
China says it performed 10,057 organ transplants last year and has not harvested organs of executed prisoners since January 2015.
The U.S. House of Representative passed a resolution in June calling on the State Department to report annually to Congress on the implementation of an existing law barring visas to Chinese and other nationals engaged in coercive organ transplantation. 

The resolution also condemns persecution of Falun Gong, a spiritual group China calls a cult and has outlawed.

The European Parliament passed a similar declaration in July calling for an independent investigation of “persistent, credible reports on systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience” in China.
Kilgour said the Australian government was reluctant to accept evidence of large-scale, forced organ harvesting in China. 

Kilgour blamed Australia’s close economic ties with China, its largest trading partner.
“The greatest amount of skepticism seems to be in Australia,” Kilgour said.
Kilgour and Matas first published a report on organ harvesting in China in 2006, which became the basis of their 2009 book “Bloody Harvest. The Killing of Falun Gong for their Organs.”
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade First Assistant Secretary Graham Fletcher told a Senate committee last month that he had doubts about the credibility of Falun Gong reports of forced organ harvesting.
Amnesty International’s Australian spokeswoman Caroline Shepherd said the London-based organization had not done its own research into organ harvesting in China and supported United Nations’ calls for an independent investigation of such allegations.
The Australian Health Department said at least 53 Australians travelled to China for organ transplants between 2001 and 2014.
Matas said it was not possible for such a large organ-transplant industry to thrive without the support of the Communist Party.
“This is an institutionalized, party-driven scheme, with an institutionalized cover up,” Matas said.
Around 200 Falun Gong practitioners demonstrated outside Parliament House against forced organ harvesting on Monday as Matas and Kilgour addressed a meeting of lawmakers from several political parties.