Editorials
Thursday, February 26, 1998CHINA'S violations of human rights are legion, but for sheer grisliness nothing matches the extraction of organs from executed prisoners for sale. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps after criticizing the Communist government, described this horrifying program in a lecture in Honolulu last year, illustrating his talk with a documentary film made by the British Broadcasting Corp. in China. The sale of executed
prisoners’ organsNow two men have been arrested in New York on charges of attempting to profit from the sale of corneas, kidneys, livers, pancreases and lungs harvested from executed prisoners. Wu said he told the FBI about the operation after videotaping a meeting with one of the men in a Manhattan hotel.
The suspect, Cheng Yong Wang, boasted that he could guarantee delivery of body parts for American patients who could travel to China. "He didn't feel any regret or any sorrow," Wu said. "It was just like he was cutting the pig meat at a meat market. He's a butcher, a human beings' butcher."
According to Wu, Wang described himself as a prosecutor in Hainan Province and showed notarized documents as proof. He claimed he could guarantee body parts from at least 50 of the 200 prisoners executed annually in Hainan.
The government of President Jiang Zemin denies that it allows the sale of prisoners' organs, but if there is a ban it is not being enforced. Thousands of prisoners are executed in China every year, mostly by firing squad. Amnesty International says China executed more than 4,300 people in 1996, more than the rest of the world combined.
There have been reports that the firing squads are instructed to aim at the head to avoid damaging organs that could be transplanted. Foreigners needing transplants are brought into China for the operations.
Harry Wu has been heroically campaigning against these atrocities and others committed by the Beijing regime, at great personal risk. If the federal prosecutors can win convictions on the basis of the evidence he obtained, it will make it very difficult for the apologists for China to deny that the grossest violations of human rights are being committed there. And it will help Americans understand what kind of a government we are dealing with.
IT may have been inevitable that the common scene of an emergency vehicle crossing intersections with sirens blaring and motorists nervously trying to pull out of the way would result in a tragic collision. Fire investigators now are trying to determine what possible false move or misapprehension resulted in the death of a 27-year-old Makiki Heights woman after the car she was driving collided with a fire engine. Emergency perils
The engine, responding to a reported cardiac arrest, was being driven east on Wilder Avenue when it broadsided Tracey Teruya's mauka-bound car on Kewalo Street. Teruya, a postgraduate student in physical therapy and a champion gymnast, was fatally injured in the crash. She had been returning home from grocery shopping when the accident occurred.
According to Fire Department officials, the fire engine entered the intersection through a red light, while Teruya had the green. Half of Honolulu's fire companies are equipped with Opticom, technology that allows drivers of emergency vehicles to change traffic signals on their routes, but the engine involved in the collision lacked that equipment.
Guidelines allow ambulance, police and other emergency vehicles to go through red lights but not at high speeds. Motorists are supposed to pull over to the roadside upon seeing or hearing an emergency vehicle responding to an emergency. Unfortunately, motorists are unpredictable, sometimes because of sirens being drowned out by car stereos in air-conditioned cars with windows closed, other times guessing wrong about the direction of the siren.
The tragedy of Tracey Teruya's death should be a reminder to emergency-vehicle drivers that responding to emergencies can be as perilous as the emergencies themselves. Motorists need to avoid conditions that prevent them from hearing sirens and, when they do hear sirens, to avoid any guesswork about their direction by simply pulling over.
THE effects of changes in tax rates are an iffy proposition. Because so many factors are involved, nobody can be sure that the hoped-for benefits will materialize. That is one reason why there is so much opposition to the proposed increase in the general excise tax. Time-share tax
Despite assurances that the accompanying cuts in personal and corporate income taxes and increased tax credits will offset the GET hike, small business people are skeptical. They fear they will be hurt by having to tack the increase onto their prices. It's not an unreasonable concern.
Similarly officials of nonprofit groups are alarmed by the proposal to eliminate their exemption and slap a 1.5 percent tax on their sales as a way to reduce the proposed increase on business. It's a terrible idea.
However, there is one proposal for a tax increase before the Legislature that clearly makes sense, not so much as a revenue-producing idea but as a matter of equity. This would impose the equivalent of the hotel room tax on time-share units.
A House bill would impose a 6 percent occupancy tax on the fair-market rental value of time-share units. A Senate measure approved by the Consumer Protection Committee would leave it to the Ways and Means Committee to set the tax rate.
Time shares are part of the tourism industry. They should bear as heavy a tax burden as hotels. It's only fair. And a tax could generate some much-needed revenue.
Rupert E. Phillips, CEO
John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher
David Shapiro, Managing Editor
Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor
Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors
A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor
