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Organ Trafficking During Times of War and Political Conflict are missing.” According to the UN ambassador, bodies were exhumed from shallow graves in an undisclosed location in Iraq, and were missing kidneys and other organs. "We have bodies”, he said. “Come and examine them.” These allegations followed earlier international reports that ISIS had opened a medical school in its main stronghold in Syria and that doctors there had been forced to remove organs from prisoners of war, including Iraqis across religious and ethnic divides: Sunni, Shia, Christian, and Turkman. There were also reports of medicated executions by ISIS during which transplant organs were taken. This would be similar to the medicated executions of prisoners (many of them allegedly political prisoners) in China who continue to be harvested. Reports that ISIS/ISIL was using organs as an additional source of income and simultaneously as a display of power (like beheadings) were also being considered. When asked by CNN to comment on these reports, I took a deep breath, thinking that this was perhaps one battle in which I did not wish to be involved. Nonetheless, I told CNN that ISIS was not the first militant organization or state to exploit the bodies of political prisoners for organs or tissues for the purposes of transplantation, research, or power: “The demands for organs and tissues”, I said, “was insatiable." Similar cases today include the allegations by the Council of Europe (Marty, 2010) of kidnapping, murder, and medicated executions with kidney removal in secret detention camps in Kosovo and Albania of political prisoners—Serbs and other minorities in Kosovo—at the end of the Kosovo War. During initial United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) investigations, witnesses testified that kidneys were removed during executions and flown to Turkey. Some witnesses were murdered, forensic data was lost or destroyed, and the investigations interrupted. In September 2011, the Chief Prosecutor, Clint Williamson of the Special Investigative Task Force (SITF), concluded that a small number of these cases could be substantiated. Today, EU prosecutor, David Schweindeman, is poised to lead a bicameral Tribunal (with the government of Kosovo) on war crimes committed by the KLA, including harvesting organs from prisoners of war. Trafficking for organs is not uncommon in war zones... International Affairs Forum Dangerous Rumors Trafficking for organs is not uncommon in war zones, areas dealing with political conflict, transitional states, as well as regions suffering through natural disasters, like the earthquakes in Turkey and Haiti. These conditions create public chaos that provides a cover for illegal harvesting and plundering of the bodies of the dead. However, at the same time, these conditions can stir up rumors of organ harvesting, without any forensic evidence. Of course, some of these allegations are false, based on moral panics, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the anxiety and “worst fears” of vulnerable populations and ethnic groups. For many marginalized populations across the world—who have 126
International Affairs Forum Fall 2016 experienced the disappearances of their loved ones, and to whom almost anything could be done to them, even the theft of organs—their fears are based on a real sense of existential insecurity. There were, for example, allegations of illegal organ harvesting by the Israeli humanitarian field clinic set up in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. A spokesperson for the UK Liberal Democratic Party called for a parliamentary investigation of the allegations, which were later dismissed as political propaganda from Iran and Palestine. However, the rumors were actually fueled by the presence in Haiti of both US and Israeli religious organizations that proposed airlifts and adoptions by foreign families of the alleged "tens of thousands of Haitian children" orphaned by the earthquake. Organ theft and child theft are often linked in rumors. In this instance, speculation was fueled by humanitarian interventions to rescue children whose parents were wrongly presumed to be dead in the initial chaos. Rumors of organ stealing have led to mob lynching of foreigners suspected of adopting poor and disabled children for their organs. Several of these rumors led to violence and international diplomatic problems in Central America and Moldova in the early 2000s. But, as recently as 2014 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a woman was attacked and killed by a mob after her photo was posted on Facebook alleging that she was kidnapping stray children with the intent to kill them for their organs. US-Mexico Borderlands and Drug and Organs Trafficking Along the US southern border with Mexico, there is a string of barrier fences that were signed into law by George W. Bush. It is almost 700 miles long. If it can be said that there is a great migration from war torn countries in the Middle East into Europe, there are also war-ravaged refugees in Baja, California from the drug cartel infested states of Sinaloa and Michoacán. In 2010, I contacted FBI agents about a private hospital in Baja, California where illegal transplants for North Americans were taking place. I also told them about a Mexican refugee, Adriana Gil, who contacted me through her partner for help in filing her complaints of kidnapping, torture, sex slavery, and child trafficking for organs at the hands of a brutal drug cartel. Then living in Riverside County in Southern California, we agreed to meet on the campus of UC Riverside. The story seemed outrageous, one that, under ordinary circumstances, I would have rejected at the outset. Perhaps the woman was suffering from recovered memories of some kind of trauma, but what would be her motive in calling Organs Watch? She said that she wanted the horrendous crimes to stop. She wanted to speak with police, the FBI, or whomever I could contact. So, accompanied by my daughter, a historian of Mexican colonial and contemporary religious studies who had herself been forced to leave one of her field sites following threats from the local cartel, we spent a day in the company of Ms. Gil and her protective companion. Her story began when she was a young mother used as a sex slave for several years by a drug cartel. She said she was hand delivered to the cartel by her current boyfriend. She had been raped repeatedly and was tortured. She showed me her scars, including burns from cigarettes and cigars. She decided to escape across the border into southern California after a drug lord named “Juan”, had groomed her to scout for children in poor schools and day care centers and to abduct them for kidney trafficking. Although most of Adriana’s story was validated by immigration officials and by the trauma center where the vigilantes had treated Adriana for her PTSD resulting from her torture, they could not validate her insistent story that she was asked to scout and to kidnap small children for the cartel Fall 2016 127
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Fall 2016 Volume 7, Issue 2 CORRUPT
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HUMAN TRAFFICKING 73 Interview with
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Special Themed Issue: Editors’ In
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9 Corruption - Security: Forging US
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Corruption: Is the Right Message Ge
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New Methods to Engage Civil Society
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New Methods to Engage Civil Society
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Treating Health and Pharmaceutical
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Treating Health and Pharmaceutical
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Global Anti-Corruption Conditionali
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73 Interview with Dr. Myria Vassili
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Page 140 and 141: Interview with Ms. Taina Bien-Aimé
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Page 160 and 161: REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES Corruption
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Page 166 and 167: Shen, Anqi (2015). Offending Women
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