Tears in Heaven - Organ Trafficking in Asia
The Asian Crime Century briefing 30
Organ trafficking in Asia has been highlighted in the past week in Indonesia after the police arrested 12 people, including a police officer and an immigration officer, who were involved in sending 122 Indonesians to Cambodia to sell their kidneys. A senior Jakarta police officer stated that the victims included factory workers, teachers, and executives, most of whom lost their jobs during the pandemic and agreed to sell their organs because they needed money. Each victim was promised 135 million Rupiah for a kidney, which is less than US$ 9,000. It is illegal in Indonesia to sell human organs.
The immigration officer arrested is from Bali and is accused of falsifying documents for victims to travel overseas, for which he received around 3 million rupiah (US$ 200) for each person he helped smuggle to Cambodia. The police officer arrested is from Bekasi city police and is accused of helping the traffickers evade police investigation.
Buyers for human organs are typically in more wealthy countries, often Singapore, Malaysia and China. Also as part of the same case it was reported that a 41 year old Indonesian man sold his kidney to an organ trafficking ring in 2019, then joined the group to assist other Indonesians to do the same. His kidney was sold to a buyer in Singapore.
More shocking, in January this year in Makassar, South Sulawesi in Indonesia, two teenagers were arrested by police for attempting to sell the organs of a dead 10 year old boy who they had murdered. The boys, aged 14 and 17, tried to sell the organs to an overseas website that promised payment for human organs.
In April this year, a Taiwanese man was detained by a 29 year old woman who was an old school friend but was working for a fraud group. The woman met her former schoolmate for a reunion, plied him with rice wine until he was drunk, and then handed him to the fraud group for a price of US$326. The group tried to open savings bank accounts under the victim’s name, but as he was so drunk the bank staff were suspicious and this failed. As a last resort, the gang advertised the victim’s organs for sale through an agent known as a “car dismantler” (code for an organ harvester) using the Telegram app and asking for a quick sale. Undercover police officers were posing as buyers for human organs and took action against the gang before the victim’s organs could be harvested.
In March, the authorities in Pakistan took action against a group selling kidneys to wealthy foreigners. Police and Rangers from the Health Department raided a hidden clinic in Rawalpindi and arrested over ten people including doctors and nurses. Two buyers of the organs were also arrested, one from Saudi Arabia and one from Afghanistan. The gang sent agents to small villages and towns in the Punjab province to convince poor people to sell their organs, with a fee of around US$3,000 paid to the donor. The cost of the sale of the organ is around US$50,000, illustrating the huge profit margin for criminal gangs involved in the trade.
The forced removal of organs in Pakistan continues to be a serious problem. In January the police rescued a 14 year old boy from an underground laboratory after he had a kidney removed. The gang that kidnapped the boy had been luring youngsters with promises of well paid jobs, but after entrapping them removing their organs, mainly kidneys, for sale. The boy woke up next to a man on a stretcher next to him. Pakistan outlawed the commercial trade in human organs in 2010, imposing a jail term of up to 10 years and fines in the hope of curbing the sale of organs to rich overseas clients.
The high demand for human organs and the limited supply from donors is evident in wealthy countries such as Japan where there is a chronic shortage. In February this year, the 62 year old head of a not for profit organisation in Japan was arrested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department after persuading a Japanese man to travel to Belarus for a liver transplant in Belarus at a cost of US$250,000. The police stated that the organisation had arranged for people to travel to Bulgaria, Belarus and the Kyrgyz Republic for organ transplants. The arrested man arranges organ transplant operations overseas but had not obtained approval from the health minister and hence was in breach of the Organ Transplant Law. There is clearly a shortage of organs available for donation legally in Japan, and in 2022 organs were removed from only 108 individuals diagnosed as either brain-dead or in a state of cardiac arrest, but around 16,000 people in Japan are waiting for available organs.
In China there have been concerns regarding the organ trafficking trade for many years. In January this year, police in Qianshan county in Jiangxi Province, found the body of a 15 year old student who had been missing for three months hanging in a warehouse near to his school. The case was classified as suicide, but there was speculation on social media as the teenager was one of ten who had disappeared in recent months and may have been the victim of organ traffickers. There have been a spate of missing teenagers reported in China, notably since loosening of organ transplant rules in September 2022.
In some parts of Asia the sale of organs seems to be endemic. The Hokse village in eastern Nepal has been nicknamed “Kidney Village” as so many people only have one kidney. Poverty drives people in the region to sell their organs, especially kidneys, to groups that operate internationally to provide organs to wealthy clients around the world. In 2007, the Nepalese government banned the sale of kidneys in exchange for money but this pushed the business even further underground and into the control of organised crime groups.
The organ trafficking is part of increasing transnational organised crime in Asia that includes multiple business lines operated by criminal groups. The business lines include human trafficking, online (and telecom) fraud, online sexual services, and online illegal betting and gambling (by far the highest revenue activity which is a major source of funding for other criminality). The centres of this epidemic of organised crime are now Myanmar and Cambodia, although the victims are poor and desperate people from many countries across Asia.
The Jakarta police established a human trafficking task force in June this year to combat the activity, and in this short time have rescued 2,195 trafficking victims and arrested 865 people accused of involvement in people trafficking. Highlighting the plight of poor people trafficked, the Indonesian Migrant Worker Protection Agency reports that only 4.6 million of the 9 million Indonesian migrant workers currently overseas were officially registered by the department, and almost 2,000 Indonesian migrant workers had died in the last three years from abuse or illness.
It has been clear for several years that there is a fraud epidemic in Asia, which has expanded as organised crime groups have added business lines in concentrated criminal hubs, notably in the Philippines (for illegal online betting and associated business), Cambodia and most recently Myanmar. The organised crime concentrated business hubs with online fraud, illegal betting, online sex services, people trafficking, and drugs may have added human organ trafficking as a convenient revenue stream. Only a major expansion of regional cooperation between law enforcement agencies can challenge this organised crime growth. This will take more than agency to agency assistance, and needs a new regional law enforcement body with collaboration from all nations in Asia.