Showing posts with label mass murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mass murder. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

Tiananmen Square Massacre: 36 years later still no justice or freedom.

 “This is for the lost souls of June 4th.” - Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 2010

 

Thirty six years ago the Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement that had taken to the streets in April of 1989 and occupied Tiananmen Square for months was violently crushed by the Chinese communist dictatorship beginning on the evening of June 3, 1989. By dawn on June 4, 1989 scores of demonstrators were shot and killed or run over and crushed by tanks of the so-called "People's Liberation Army."

 A 2017 declassified British diplomatic cable revealed that "at least 10,000 people were killed. The Chinese Communist regime still defends committing this massacre, and is punishing those who seek to remember and observe the date.

George Orwell wrote in "As I Please" in the Tribune on February 4, 1944 that "[t]he really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future." 

We are witnessing this attempt to silence the victims, erase and rewrite the history of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the crackdown and massacre that began on June 3, 1989 through social media and in the real world. People are being arrested for engaging in silent, nonviolent protests in remembrance of students and workers murdered by the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) on orders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

Making this known is the most effective method to combat it by amplifying the voices of those impacted, and who continue to demand justice. Below is the 2025 declaration by the Tiananmen Mothers, translated by Human Rights in China. 

The Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote that "[t]he struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."  This is the challenge presented by the Chinese Communist Party in its effort to erase the mass protests, months long occupation and crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and across China. It is also why we must remember and honor courageous Chinese dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo martyred for his commitment to nonviolence and democracy.

If you are in the Washington DC area then join the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation on June 4 at 8:00pm at the Victims of Communism Memorial located on the corner of New Jersey and Massachusetts Avenues to honor the legacy of the brave men and women who stood for freedom, and paid the ultimate price, at their annual Tiananmen Square Massacre candlelight vigil 

Please also share over social media documentary information on what happened. For example, the three hour 1995 documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, provides an over view of the entire protest, and its context in Chinese history, and it is available online. The BBC in 2019 provided a more concise synopsis of the crackdown which is shared below.  

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Monday, June 3, 2024

Tiananmen Square Massacre: 35 years later still no justice or freedom.

  “This is for the lost souls of June 4th.” - Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 2010


Thirty five years ago the Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement that had taken to the streets in April of 1989 and occupied Tiananmen Square for months was violently crushed by the Chinese communist dictatorship beginning on the evening of June 3, 1989. By dawn on June 4, 1989 scores of demonstrators were shot and killed or run over and crushed by tanks of the so-called "People's Liberation Army."

 A 2017 declassified British diplomatic cable revealed that "at least 10,000 people were killed. The Chinese Communist regime still defends committing this massacre, and is punishing those who seek to remember and observe the date.

George Orwell wrote in "As I Please" in the Tribune on February 4, 1944 that "[t]he really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future."

We are witnessing this attempt to silence the victims, erase and rewrite the history of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the crackdown and massacre that began on June 3, 1989 through social media and in the real world. People are being arrested for engaging in silent, nonviolent protests in remembrance of students and workers murdered by the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) on orders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Making this known is the most effective method to combat it.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote that "[t]he struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."  This is the challenge presented by the Chinese Communist Party in its effort to erase the mass protests, months long occupation and crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and across China. It is also why we must remember and honor courageous Chinese dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo martyred for his commitment to nonviolence and democracy.


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Saturday, June 3, 2023

Tiananmen Square Massacre: 34 years later still no justice or freedom.

 “This is for the lost souls of June 4th.” - Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 2010


Thirty four years ago the Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement that had taken to the streets in April of 1989 and occupied Tiananmen Square for months was violently crushed by the Chinese communist dictatorship beginning on the evening of June 3, 1989. By dawn on June 4, 1989 scores of demonstrators were shot and killed or run over and crushed by tanks of the so-called "People's Liberation Army."

 A 2017 declassified British diplomatic cable revealed that "at least 10,000 people were killed. The Chinese Communist regime still defends committing this massacre, and is punishing those who seek to remember and observe the date.

 George Orwell wrote in "As I Please" in the Tribune on February 4, 1944 that "[t]he really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future."

We are witnessing this attempt to silence the victims, erase and rewrite the history of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the crackdown and massacre that began on June 3, 1989 through social media and in the real world. People are being arrested for engaging in silent, nonviolent protests in remembrance of students and workers murdered by the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) on orders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Making this known is the most effective method to combat it.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote that "[t]he struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."  This is the challenge presented by the Chinese Communist Party in its effort to erase the mass protests, months long occupation and crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and across China. It is also why we must remember and honor courageous Chinese dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo martyred for his commitment to nonviolence and democracy.

Last night participated in a candlelight vigil hosted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation where I listened to eyewitnesses who were present in the square in 1989, and those persecuted today for holding vigils in remembrance.

This blog will continue to do its small part by sharing the 2023 declaration by the Tiananmen Mothers, and translated by Human Rights in China.

Tiananmen Mothers: “We Persist in Our Three Demands as Always: Truth, Compensation, and Accountability 
— On the 34th Anniversary of the June Fourth Massacre” （Statement）

Essay by the Tiananmen Mothers

May 27, 2023

HRIC Note: On the 34th anniversary of the June Fourth Massacre, the Tiananmen Mothers have authorized Human Rights in China to publish this essay. See our website for more information on June Fourth and the Tiananmen Mothers.

[Translation by Mi Ling Tsui]

The year 2023 marks the 34th anniversary of the June Fourth Massacre that unfolded on the night of June 3-4, 1989, on the ten-mile-long Chang'an Avenue in Beijing, the capital of China.

Though 34 years have passed, for us, family members of those killed, the pain of losing our loved ones in that one night has tormented us to this day, in a nightmare that has never let go. In a time of peace, the Chinese government flouted the world’s condemnation and brazenly mobilized the nation’s military power against unarmed students and ordinary people, in a massacre that shocked the world—the June Fourth Massacre. We, families of June Fourth victims, will not relinquish our determination to seek justice for our loved ones every single day that the authorities refuse to make public the truth about the massacre—until justice is done.

Since the 33rd anniversary of June Fourth, in 2022, seven members of our group have passed away (one of them died of old age and physical decline in the first half of the year, and the other six died in the second half of the year). Every time we heard the news of the passing of a fellow family member, we were struck with great sorrow, especially because we could not visit the families of the deceased immediately due to pandemic restrictions. Our hearts are heavy, with no relief.

As we commemorate our loved ones on this 34th anniversary of June Fourth, we honor the deceased family members here—in order to restore history, bear witness to how the victims were killed, recall the harm and suffering inflicted on the victims’ families by the troops who perpetrated the massacre, and so that people can know their misery and remember their desire and unwavering determination to defend their lawful rights and seek justice for their loved ones. Although their lives are gone, their final wishes are still with us.

[ Full document here ]

Signers (116)

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, December 28, 2017

British diplomatic cable "Minimum estimate of civilian dead 10,000." in Beijing's 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre

The truth of Beijing's June 1989 massacre declassified

Tiananmen Square in June of 1989
Massacres under communist regimes are seldom accidental but methodically planned out. Two high profile examples from Cuba back up this assertion. First the "13 de Marzo" tugboat sinking on July 13, 1994 that claimed 37 lives had been prepared and deliberately planned out in advance. The Brothers to the Rescue shoot down on February 24, 1996 was planned out weeks in advance and practice runs were carried out by the Castro regime's MiGs. Two weeks prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping observed: “Two hundred dead could bring 20 years of peace to China.” A recently declassified British diplomatic cable reveals that "at least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army's crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989." This blog has remembered the events of those terrible days over the years and the continuing repression in China today.

Chinese military cracking down in June of 1989 in Beijing
Agence France Press reported some of the horrors contained in the diplomatic cable:
The document, made public more than 28 years after the event, describes injured girls being bayoneted, bodies being ground up by armoured vehicles and human remains being flushed into the sewers. "Minimum estimate of civilian dead 10,000," the then British ambassador Alan Donald said in the secret telegram to London seen by AFP at Britain's National Archives.
Crushed remains of a June 1989 victim

Quotes taken from the document itself:

"The 27 Army APCs [armoured personnel carriers] opened fire on the crowd before running over them. APCs ran over troops and civilians at 65kph [40 miles per hour].”

"Students understood they were given one hour to leave square, but after five minutes APCs attacked. Students linked arms but were mown down. APCs then ran over the bodies time and time again to make, quote ‘pie’ unquote, and remains collected by bulldozer. Remains incinerated and then hosed down drains."


"27 Army troops had used dum-dum bullets and snipers shot many civilians on balconies, street sweepers etc for target practice. "

"27 Army ordered to spare no one. Wounded girl students begged for their lives but were bayoneted.
A three-year-old girl was injured, but her mother was shot as she went to her aid, as were six others.”

"1,000 survivors were told they could escape but were then mown down by specially prepared MG [machine gun] positions."

"Army ambulances who attempted to give aid were shot up, as was a Sino-Japanese hospital ambulance. With medical crew dead, wounded driver attempted to ram attackers but was blown to pieces by anti-tank weapon."

"27 Army officer shot dead by own troops, apparently because he faltered. Troops explained they would be shot if they hadn’t shot the officer. "

"Minimum estimate of civilian dead 10,000."

Despite all of this the United Nations Human Rights office "dangerously handed over to China the names of four human rights activists slated to attend a Human Rights Council session" in 2017. Below are copies of the just declassified document.



 


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

The Rising Body Count in Cuba

In a conversation with a skeptical progressive this past week, the following questions was raised: "I'm curious to know exactly how many of the opposition has the regime killed or imprisoned over the past 50 years? My hunch is that it is far less than you would have one believe." 

Executed in Santiago de Cuba by the Castro regime in 1959
My immediate response was that a full accounting is impossible and upon further research discovered that this position is held by experts who keep track of fatalities incurred by all kinds of regimes in power. Nevertheless, there are a range of estimates of opposition or dissenters killed that are in the thousands and tens of thousands. Between 1960 and 1966 there was an insurgency in the mountains of the Escambray that fought the Castro regime made up mostly of farmers and Revolutionary Directorate rebels that had fought the Batista Regime demanding a democratic restoration. The dictatorship called it the "War against the Bandits." Tom Gjelten in his book Bacardi and the Long Fight for Freedom gives an account of what took place:
The peasants in the Escambray Mountains, an independent group even during the anti-Batista struggle, took up arms again, this time in opposition to the government's heavy hand. Castro had taken a lesson from Batista's hapless efforts at counterinsurgency, however, and he responded to the Escambray guerrillas with more force and ruthlessness than Batista had dared employ. With the guidance of Soviet counterinsurgency experts, Castro sent thousands of army troops into the mountains to pursue the guerrillas. Captured Escambray insurgents were often executed on the spot, and in a move reminiscent of the Spanish army's "reconcentration" strategy during the independence war, Castro ordered the relocation of entire villages where the guerillas enjoyed mass support. The villagers were moved en masse to western Cuba, where they could be closely monitored. 
 The guerrillas were eventually exterminated and the uprising was crushed by 1966. The full number of dead may never be known. In addition, for the Castro regime, merely wanting to flee the country was considered an offense and was often punished with death. Taking all this into account, below is my response.

Raul Castro preparing one of his victims for execution
A conservative estimate gives the range, according to Matthew White in his website Necrometrics, at between 5,000-12,000 Cubans killed by the Castro regime compared with Chileans killed by the Pinochet regime which number 3,197. Rudolph Joseph Rummel, a political science professor at the University of Hawaii and an expert in Democide (murder by government) also takes into account the Cuban boat people who have died fleeing the dictatorship and estimates 73,000 dead Cubans between 1959 and 1987. In The Black Book of Communism in chapter 25 "Communism in Latin America" by Pascal Fontaine states that in Cuba between 1959 through the late 1990s "between 15,000 and 17,000 people were shot." All these are conservative numbers. The Cuban Archives place the number at 100,000.

Extra-judicially executed by the Castro regime on July 13, 1994

Matthew White in the introduction to his 2011 book, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities explains that:
An exact body count is hard to come by for Castro’s regime in Cuba, but no one has ever suggested that he killed the hundreds of thousands necessary to be considered for a slot on my list. Many infamous brutes such as Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Vlad the Impaler, Caligula, and Augusto Pinochet easily fall short, as do many well known conflicts such as the Arab-Israeli wars and the Anglo-Boer War.
The logical question a skeptic would ask is why is Fidel Castro placed in the company of the above named historic villains. The answer can be found in well documented archives stretching back to the beginnings of the dictatorship.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in their April 7, 1967 special report on Cuba documented that on May 25, 1963 the Castro regime issued orders to the armed forces that any peasant seen out of their home after 8:00pm and before 5:00am be executed without a trial by an official of the army or the militia. They also provided numerous examples of young Cubans who were detained and summarily executed.

The IACHR also documented the October 24, 1964 armed invasion of the Uruguayan embassy in Cuba by forces of the Cuban government in order to machine gun to death four Cubans that had sought asylum there.

On the dawn of May 27, 1966, around six in the morning until sunset, about six in the afternoon they were, executing, by firing squad and with single shots (coup de grâce) in the fortress of La Cabaña in Havana, political prisoners, civilians and military. The firing squad was composed of three members of the militia and one officer. The severity of these events is even greater, when one adds that the executed were previously subjected to the procedure of blood extraction to replenish the Blood Bank. On the above mentioned May 27, 166 Cuban civilians and military were executed and subjected to the medical procedures for drawing blood at a rate of an average of 7 pints per person. This blood is being sold to Communist Vietnam at a rate of $ 50 per pint. Relatives to see their imprisoned loved ones also had to "donate" blood.

The IACHR also reported that on October 23, 1966 a group of young Cubans tried to flee Cuba swimming from the populated coast of Caimanera to the Guantanamo naval base. The "Frontier Batallion" of the Cuban government pursued them and shot them with automatic weapons killing three of the four of which two were identified:Pedro Baraña age 35 and Francisco Arcano Galano age 21. Their bodies were found floating in Guantánamo Bay. The same type of action was denounced in 1993 with the addition of grenades used against defenseless swimmers.

There are pages and pages of such documented events in IACHR special reports on Cuba from 1962, 1963, 1967, 1970, 1976 , 1979 and 1983.

Furthermore, the killings and unnecessary deaths continue to the present day below is a small sample over the past decade and a half:
Even so, the body count estimates are only taking into account Cubans who have died as a result of the dictatorship ignoring the regime’s international missions and its non-Cuban victims.
Fidel Castro and Mengistu Haile Mariam convicted of genocide
For example, according to Matthew White who cites William Eckhardt’s statistics on World Military and Social Expenditures 1987-88 (12th ed., 1987) between (1972-80): 15,000 civilians + 21,000 military = 36,000 deaths with 17,000 Cuban troops at the height of interventions assisting their close ally Mengistu Haile Mariam. The aftermath before Mengistu's departure rose to more than a million and a half dead. Haile Mariam is today a convicted war criminal hiding out in Zimbabwe with another close ally of the Castros, Robert Mugabe. The Castro brothers had a direct role in an African genocide.
 
Fidel Castro with Reynaldo Benito Antonio Bignone Ramayón
 "President" Reynaldo Benito Antonio Bignone Ramayón photographed with Fidel Castro. He was the military dictator of Argentina between 1982 and 1983 and had a close working relationship with the Castro regime. On April 20, 2010, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of 56 people in a concentration camp.

In Argentina during the same period the Castro brothers trained and placed urban guerrillas in the country creating the conditions of political instability that led to the consolidation of a brutal military junta that murdered 30,000 Argentinians in a Dirty War then forged an unusual alliance with the same military junta, to the detriment of the very people it had trained, to block efforts at the United Nations to document all the disappeared people and hold the military dictatorship accountable.

In addition to international missions formally carried out by the Cuban military the Castro brothers have a five decade tradition of training, funding, and organizing urban guerrilla groups and terrorists to advance their revolutionary agenda.

Finally, the Castro brothers also have a track record of supporting brutal regimes around the world such as Communist China, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sri Lanka, and Syria while undermining international human rights standards at the United Nations Human Rights Council in coalitions with many of these countries.

Whether the body count is 12,000 or 73,000 or even 100,000 of one thing everyone can agree it is still rising.

Meanwhile the least one can do is to listen to the testimony of the survivors and of the loved ones of the victims.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)