cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/53106188

Thirty-seven years after massacre, Beijing continues to suppress its memory while extending its crackdown on dissent

Opinion piece by British human rights lawyer Benedict Rogers.

It is said that you can judge a government by the way it treats its citizens. As we remember the day when, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government turned its guns on its own unarmed people peacefully demonstrating for democracy in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and in cities across China, let us never forget that China’s dictatorship is a murderous, criminal regime that rules through fear and the barrel of the gun.

Indeed, let that iconic image of “Tank Man” — the brave, unknown, unarmed civilian who confronted the tank on Chang’an Avenue near Tiananmen Square — stay uppermost in our hearts and minds as we commemorate the Tiananmen massacre this week.

The exact death toll is disputed, but the Red Cross reports at least 2,600 people died on June 4, and British diplomatic cables claim as many as 10,000.

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History matters, and when we forget the tragedies of modern history — the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulags, South Africa’s apartheid, Pol Pot’s heinous genocide in Cambodia, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen massacre and other atrocities — our civilization is in trouble.

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The first reminder is from the mothers of the Tiananmen dead and wounded.

In a statement released last week by Human Rights in China, the mothers of the victims reminded the world that “this was a tragedy caused entirely by the government at that time, one that gravely violated China’s Constitution, violated the most basic principles of humanity, and trampled upon the civil rights of its citizens. Precisely because it was an act of state power, this human calamity remains, 37 years on, no closer to resolution. To this day, the government continues to evade responsibility, refuse redress, and suppress all public discussion of what took place.”

Moreover, the Tiananmen Mothers observe, “despite extraordinary advances in information technology, truthful accounts of the June Fourth Massacre remain inaccessible within China. People cannot discuss it openly or mourn it publicly. Even commemorations held by the victims’ families have long been subject to intense surveillance. This reality has left many young people unaware that in June 1989, in Beijing, soldiers opened fire on unarmed students and civilians. It is as if nothing ever happened.”

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All of us with the freedom to do so — democratic governments, independent media, civil society and ordinary people across the free world — must take up the Tiananmen Mothers’ message and ensure that the massacre 37 years ago is never forgotten, and that their demands for justice and accountability are pursued.

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Just five days before the Tiananmen massacre anniversary, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at a screening of a new film about one of the CCP’s other egregious barbarities: forced organ harvesting.

The film, State Organs, is a compelling overview of the practice of forced organ harvesting — which the independent China Tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, declares a “crime against humanity.”

And when you take the evidence of the China Tribunal, together with the subsequent Uyghur Tribunal, as well as numerous reports on the human rights crisis in Tibet, the persecution of Christians, the repression of dissidents over the past three decades or more, and the dismantling of Hong Kong’s promised freedoms, you find a CCP state that lives up to the values it exhibited in Tiananmen Square in June 4, 1989: barbarity, inhumanity, criminality, murder, torture, and — in some specific instances — crimes against humanity and genocide. That criminal regime is still in power in Beijing today. And it should be held to account.

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