Falun Gong practitioners from Vancouver stopped in Castlegar on a car tour to raise awareness about forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China on Wednesday.
While they were in town they stopped in at the Castlegar and District Community Health Centre, City Hall, Selkirk College and the Castlegar and District Public Library, sharing their message as they went.
The car tour was undertaken by practitioners of the spiritual discipline of Falun Gong across Canada, according to a press release issued by the group. The tour travelled across “various provinces” where practitioners held press conferences and tried to meet with MPs, MLAs and mayors. According to the same press release, the tour was in response to a report published on June 22 by Canadian human rights activists David Kilgour and David Matas, and investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann.
In “Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update,” the authors ultimately conclude that “the Chinese Communist Party has engaged the State in the mass killings of innocents, primarily practitioners of the spiritually-based set of exercises, Falun Gong, but also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and select House Christians, in order to obtain organs for transplants.” The work is an update of their previous texts about organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience: Bloody Harvest by Kilgour and Matas, and The Slaughter by Gutmann.
Participants in the car tour called for an end to the persecution against Falun Gong practitioners in China that began in 1999, and called for the arrest of Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese leader who they claim began the persecution.