2015-01-29
Protesters gather in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 2, 1989.
AFP
A mother who lost her 19-year-old son during the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement hit out on Thursday at foreign governments for not revealing information about the massacre much sooner.
Speaking in response to recently released Canadian diplomatic cables revealing eyewitness accounts of killings by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Beijing, Zhang Xianling demanded to know why foreign governments hadn’t published what they knew about the crackdown years ago.
“Their notions of humanity and justice have their limits,” said Zhang, a prominent member of the Tiananmen Mothers victims’ group.
“Why didn’t they speak out about this at the time?” she said. “It seems that they are still afraid of what the [ruling] Chinese Communist Party might do.”
Zhang said she still doesn’t know whether her son Wang Nan died instantly after being shot on a street to the south of the Square, or whether soldiers prevented an ambulance from taking him for emergency treatment, as one account suggests.
Meanwhile, analysts said the trove of diplomatic cables unearthed from Canadian archives by the Ottawa-based Blacklock’s Reporter news website, are unlikely to have much impact on Beijing’s official line on the bloodshed.
The cables, the result of a freedom of information request by Blacklock’s journalist Tom Korski, give a glimpse of the horror of Beijing-based diplomats as the government put an end to several weeks of student-led protests on Tiananmen Square.
Harrowing accounts
One Telex described the crackdown as “savage,” while others cited harrowing interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses as the army drove columns of tanks into the heart of Beijing and fired automatic weapons at unarmed citizens.
“An old woman knelt in front of soldiers pleading for students; soldiers killed her,” the Canadian Embassy in Beijing reported in a Telex sent back to headquarters.
Another cable said: “A boy was seen trying to escape holding a woman with a 2-year old child in a stroller, and was run over by a tank.”
It said the PLA tank “turned around and mashed them up,” while PLA soldiers “fired machine guns until the ammo ran out.”
Bullets had also “ricocheted inside nearby houses, killing many residents,” the account said.
The number of people killed when PLA tanks and troops entered Beijing on the night of June 3-4, 1989, putting an end to weeks of mass protests that paralyzed central Beijing, remains a mystery.
Not all the victims were civilians, as citizens in some areas took makeshift weapons to fight back. Canadian cables refer to bodies being dragged out of a Beijing canal which appeared to be those of garroted soldiers.
Chinese officials once put the death toll at “nearly 300,” but the central government, which labeled the six weeks of pro-democracy protests a “counterrevolutionary uprising,” has not issued an official toll or list of names.
New era of repression
Canadian diplomats, writing shortly after the massacre, said it appeared to have ushered in a period of political repression.
“It was probably thought that the massacre of a few hundreds or thousands would convince the population not to pursue their protests. It seems to be working,” one cable states.
A Telex dated June 15, 1989, reported: “The country is now being controlled by a group of vicious elderly generals and the government is run by people who will blindly follow their orders.”
It added: “The situation looks grim at best.”
Another cable said: “They are now entering a period of vicious repression during which denunciations and fear of persecution will terrorize the population.”
A quarter-century later, the ruling Chinese Communist Party still bans Tiananmen-related public memorials, and some high-profile activists detained for marking the 25th anniversary of the crackdown in May 2014 remain behind bars today.
