Tiananmen: 20 years of silence and oppression

We have to remember Tiananmen Square.

It's two decades to the day since the Chinese people demanded their freedom from the despotic, mass-murdering junta that rules their nation.

It's twenty years since they stood in Tiananmen Square and sang songs and demanded that the Communist dictators quit power.



It's twenty years since the power-hungry psychotics turned tanks on their own people and murdered them for asking to be free, killed them, jailed them, sent them to re-education gulags where they were tortured horrendously.

It's twenty years in which more terror has been inflicted on the people of occupied Tibet, the Uighur nation, and the other minorities within the Maoist monolith.

Twenty years in which the hypocrites of the West facilitated China's leadership by hiring their slave labour, buying their bloodstained products at dirt cheap prices, handed back free Hong Kong and Macao into their anti-democratic hands and helped them block the internet from reaching their people, and let them hold a propagandist Olympics that will go down in history as stomach-churning as Hitler's Berlin Games in 1936.

Twenty years in which their template for terrorising their own people has been exported elsewhere, to other stubborn juntas who will not countenance democracy or liberty or freedom of choice, in places like Burma.



It is not anywhere near as long since I was in China. But the people there still yearn for freedom.

We cannot allow the Chinese government to exercise their blanket control over information. We cannot let them rewrite history. We cannot permit the spirit of Tiananmen to be ignored.

Because one day, the proud Chinese people will be free from the sixty year nightmare of Maoism, and they will legitimately say:

"Yes, for much of that time, we bowed to the terror and let ourselves be ruled. But one day we rose and sought our freedom, and we were brutally beaten down. And you in the West did nothing. Rather than insist on our freedom as you did for the people of South Africa, you instead rewarded the Communist cadres and made them millionaires."

Remember Tiananmen. Remember what they did.

Remember how democracy was stillborn in China twenty years ago, and how we still trade with the murderers.

Could this be the beginning of the end?

The Chinese themselves are now rising up against the police state apparatus of the ruling Communist Party junta.

In Gansu, some of those protesting may well be Tibetan or from some other ethnic minority.

But in Sichuan, they are Han Chinese, albeit not of the type to kow-tow to the whims of Beijing. In my experience, the Sichuanese are as fiery as the chilis they dose their famous cuisine with.

Hopefully, the solidarity they are showing with their Tibetan neighbours will be as potent and long-lasting.

The Beijing Junta can no longer lie that the protests are in anyway being co-ordinated by what they pathetically call the 'Dalai Lama clique'. Now it is Chinese who are protesting for their freedoms too, taking a lead from the Tibetans.

Hopefully this will now spread to the Eastern cities. Specifically, it would be fantastic to see people protesting the dictatorship in Shanghai and Beijing.

While some might have trepidations about a second Tiananmen Square massacre, I personally suspect that simultaneous, sustained protests in the West and the East would be sufficient to finally bring down the most murderous regime in human history.

What cannot happen is for there to be any wavering outside of China. Gordon Brown must ignore the Chinese and meet with the Dalai Lama. We in the privilege of European democracies must keep the pressure on the Chinese.

Write to the Department of Foreign Affairs demanding a statement of condemnation from Dermot Ahern. And boycott the Beijing genocide Olympics.

Juntas don't vote for voting rights for all

Trocaire director Justin Kilcullen has called on the Irish Olympic Committee to consider a boycott of the Beijing games in protest at the Chinese authority's tacit refusal to put pressure on their fellow-travelling Military Junta in Burma.

At the Burma Action protest in Dublin on Saturday, Mr Kilcullen stated that the Olympics had gone to China in the hope that holding such an open and global event would encourage the Chinese Communist Party to move faster on providing basic human rights to the citizens of China.

"However China hasn’t kept up its side of the contract," he said, and who can disagree?

I've written before about how China has denied its people even access to information about themselves and the regime they suffer under, by firewalling the internet.

Their pals in Burma have gone one step further and switched net access off throughout the country in the hope of preventing images of their brutality leaking to media outlets outside of Burma.

I've spoken in the past about how China has abused its military might by occupying a sovereign nation's territory and seeking to wipe them out culturally and politically.

Of course, The Karen people of Northern Burma might well see a parallel there in their own fate. They have fought an intermittent insurgency against the illegal military junta for years. They have reaped genocide as their reward.

I've even highlighted how China has behaved in exactly the same way to its own internal demands for democracy as the Burmese Junta are doing now - with military force and the shooting of unarmed, peaceful protesters.

It is therefore foolish to expect such a regime to exert pressure on an identical one to encourage a democratic process. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas, and military juntas don't vote for voting rights for all.

Nevertheless, as I wrote last week, the Chinese are in a major quandary on this one. They cannot be seen overtly supporting the suppression of a people's demand for freedom, especially by such an internationally unpopular regime.

The world has spoken in relation to Burma, but it must keep speaking out if the UN mission to Burma is to achieve anything. It must also keep speaking out in order to force change in Burma, not only for the benefit of the people of Burma, the Burmese, the Karen, the other ethnic minorities.

It must keep speaking out because only when Burma is free of this horror, can we hold out a slender sliver of hope for the people of Tibet, for the people of China itself, all of whom yearn for their own sovereignty and for democracy, for human rights and freedom.

So for all of those reasons, we should support Trocaire's call for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics.

Chinese bad habits

The Chinese government are telling their people to quit their bad habits in advance of next year's Olympics in Beijing.

Reuters reports that citizens are being warned not to swear, spit or litter, and to learn how to queue in a line properly.

Such a terrible pity that it's not the other way round. I've little doubt that the Chinese people would only love to tell the Government to quit their bad habits, which are a lot more serious that clearing your throat in public or failing to line up neatly.

Invading sovereign nations like Tibet and subjugating them, for example. That's a very nasty habit of the Chinese Communist Party.

Or stifling all dissent by murdering or incarcerating anyone who dares protest against any aspect of the regime. That's a very nasty habit dating back to the time of that crazy old psychopath, Chairman Mao.

Starving the people in needless famines, that's probably the most nasty of the habits of the Chinese one-party government. They've done it repeatedly too, causing tens of millions of deaths.

And rewriting history to suit their own ends, so that everything they don't like, such as the KMT's leading role in defeating the Japanese during the war, or the Tiananmen Square democracy massacre of 1989, gets airbrushed out of their history. That's a tremendously nasty habit right there.

There are plenty of bad habits that ought to be corrected before China is permitted to hold a global event like the Olympics. But spitting and swearing are the least of them, I'd suggest.

Boycott the Beijing Olympics.

Remembering Tiananmen

I've been looking for an excuse to blog again about China, and it looks like the ageing Junta in charge of the world's fastest growing economy have given me one.

The editor of the Chengdu Evening News - a paper I've seen, but being unable to read Mandarin, I can't vouch for its quality one way or the other - has been sacked for publishing a one-line classified ad.

What heinous statement could this advert have made, for it to have cost the job and career of a regional newspaper editor? What horrific sentiment could it have contained, for the state to have sent dozens of people out on the street to retrieve copies of the paper, or for a crack investigative team to have flown from Beijing to get to the bottom of the issue?

Here's what the microscopic ad on page 14 of yesterday's paper said: "Saluting the strong mothers of victims of 64."

If you're still confused, let me add that 64 refers to the fourth of June. If that's still unclear, and it probably would be for most of us in the West, then it's probably important to recall that on the fourth of June 1989, the Chinese Junta sent tanks into Tiananmen Square to mow down protestors who were demanding more democratic rights.

Tiananmen Square was the nerve centre of the liberation movement that was smothered at birth. As freedom spread across the former communist world of Eastern Europe that same year, it was strangled with tanks in Beijing.

For 18 years, any mention of how the state mowed down their own people in the name of dictatorship has been brutally silenced in China. And now that they run Hong Kong too, they're also seeking to silence dissent in the most democratic part of their realm.

The South China Morning Post and the Standard, Hong Kong's main English language papers, reported extensively on a major row last month when Beijing puppet Ma Lik sought to play down and joke about the Tiananmen massacre.

At least in Hong Kong, the massacre is still remembered each year, and thankfully there was a predictably irate response from pro-democracy campaigners to Ma Lik's comments that people couldn't have been minced by tanks in the square and that the death toll was greatly exaggerated.

For us in the West, it would be all too easy to forget that China is the world's biggest police state, intent on smothering the democratic rights of its citizens with violence. It is all too easy to visit Beijing, tour the forbidden palace and other sights, forgetting how the students were mowed down by their own government.

It would be easy to ignore the occupation of Tibet and the denial of full democracy to Hong Kong.

Beijing desperately wants us to forget all of these things, and is spending billions on hosting the Olympics next year in an attempt to convince us that it is a respectable world power now.

It isn't. If you need proof of that, ask the editor of the Chengdu Evening News, if you can find what re-education camp he's been sent to. Ask the mothers of those murdered by the state in Tiananmen Square on June 4th 1989.

Frankly, I'm not normally a fan of boycotts. But these Olympics should be boycotted by all decent thinking people, in order to show solidarity with the Chinese people and not with their corrupt ruling class.

Unlike the joyous atmosphere of Athens in 2004, which I attended, the Beijing Olympics will be built on fear, denial of human rights and the threat of murder. Hardly the spirit of the Olympics, is it?

And while the people of China face the threat of incarceration for merely mentioning Tiananmen Square, it is incumbent on the free world to remember it for them. To remember it, and ultimately to hold the Communist Party ruling elite responsible for it.