MYANMAR: There are desperately poor people in Myanmar who have no choice but to turn to hawking their internal organs on social media just to survive.
One such person is Maung Maung (not his real name), who said he went on Facebook and offered to sell his kidney. Maung Maung was detained by the military junta for weeks and had lost his job. His wife had taken out loans for them to survive.
Broke and penniless, he said selling his kidney was the only way out of their dire situation.
In an interview with CNN, he said, “In that moment, I felt life was so harsh. There is no other way I could survive other than to rob or kill people for many. My wife was the same; she didn’t want to stay in this world anymore. But only for the sake of our daughter, we stayed.”
A few months after he ‘advertised’ that his kidney was for sale, in July 2023, he made the journey to India for the transplant surgery.
A rich Chinese-Burmese businessman purchased it for 10 million Burmese kyat (USD3,079). This was nearly twice the annual average income in Myanmar.
According to a CNN report, Myanmar’s poorest have started selling their organs on Facebook and travelling to India for the transplants with the help of agents, breaking the laws of both countries in the process, as selling organs is illegal.
The news agency found at least three Burmese language Facebook groups and two dozen people involved in the organ-selling industry. These included purchasers, sellers and agents.
Facebook (now Meta) does not allow content that lets users sell or buy human body parts.
Poverty at an all-time high
After Myanmar’s militia took over, more than half of the country’s 54 million people live in dire poverty. The United National Development Programme (UNDP) reported that this figure has doubled since 2017.
As the sale of organs is illegal in India, donations are permitted only among relatives, with some exceptions. Because of this, agents forge records, family trees and use lawyers and notaries for their nefarious schemes.
Authorization
Myanmar’s embassy in New Delhi also has to review the paperwork to allow the operation, and the case is then passed on to the hospital or state authorization committee. The committee is then supposed to check documents, family photos and bank statements for verification.
CNN reported that it had reached out to Myanmar’s embassy in New Delhi and the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare but did not get a response.
According to the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation, in 2022, some 10,000 kidney transplants with live donors were done in India. However, CNN could not confirm how many transplant surgeries involved Burmese patients.
One agent who wanted to remain anonymous said that the Burmese embassy in India and the authorization committee know that the documents are often forged.
“It is an act of saving a life; it is not a bad thing,” said the agent, who himself had received a kidney the same way last year.
Featured image by Depositphotos