The International Campaign for Real History

Posted Monday, June 7, 2004

[] Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech
[] Alphabetical index (text)
AR-Online

Quick navigation

[images added by this website]

The Arizona Republic


Thursday, June 3, 2004

 

Tiananmen Square

Chinese tanks, flattened tents and debris, Tiananmen Square, June 1989

New Account debunking "massacre" at Tiananmen

by Robert Marquand
Christian Science Monitor

Beijing -- On the 15th anniversary of one of the most cataclysmic events in modern China, a wealth of eyewitness testimony and interviews suggest that one stubbornly popular picture of what happened in Tiananmen Square needs revision: There was no massacre of students in the square. Standard histories such as that by Yale's Jonathan Spence, as well as the recent groundbreaking Tiananmen Papers, suggest that Chinese soldiers did not fire on students before they left the square in the early hours of June 4, 1989.

click for origin

David Irving comments:

I HAVE seen other seemingly reliable accounts of that day which suggest that the massacre story is western propaganda.

A massacre did take place in Beijing 15 years ago, eyewitnesses say -- just not in Tiananmen. What is famously known as the June 4 massacre actually began on the evening of June 3. The night was cool and windless, eyewitnesses remember.

The student uprising that shocked China's leadership with calls for democratic reform and that captured the attention of the world was nine weeks old by then. One exhausted protest leader remembers retiring at 10:15 p.m. on June 3 in one of hundreds of makeshift tents in the square, unaware, in a pre-cellphone era, that army columns were already rolling in on a westerly road.

In two hours, from midnight t 2 a.m., the slightly riotous, unorganised festival of meetings and exhilarated free speech in the square became a grim confrontation with an army that surrounded the students and that was using live rounds against citizens in neighborhoods all over the city.

Early wire reports, including a second-day account by a Tsinghua student, now widely regarded as disinformation, and several assertions to the media by student leaders who were not present, planted some of the misconceptions that persist today.

A British reporter (who left the square at 1:30 p.m.), for example, wrote a widely read account based entirely on secondhand sources who claimed a massacre took place in the square.

As few as ten foreigners actually witnessed events in the square during the crucial early-morning hours of June 4, according to eyewitnesses interviewed by the Monitor and an unpublished 52-page document complied entirely in the weeks after by Robin Munro (then of Human Rights Watch) and Richard Nations (a Le Monde reporter) of 14 testimonials of journalists, diplomats and students present in the square after midnight.

Man, stopped tanksDespite orders that the People's Liberation Army was to clear Tiananmen Square using whatever means necessary, there is no credible eyewitness testimony of a massacre of students there. No eyewitnesses at the Monument to the People's Heroes, where students were centered, ever saw one.

No "rivers of blood" flowed in the square. No rows of students were mowed down by a sudden rush of troops, as reported in European, Hong Kong, and U.S. publications in the days, months and years that followed. The actual number of students and citizens killed in the square may be as low as a dozen, according to the documents and the eyewitnesses. The medical tent in the square, originally used to comfort student hunger strikers, reported at least ten deaths.

Rather, between the morning hours of 4:45 and 6:15, about 2,000 to 3,000 students filed off the square through a cordon of troops, protected by a line of their own ranks who linked arms. There was, however, a massacre in Beijing, during the four days starting June 3.

It took place at street intersections, in Hutong neighborhoods, in the alleyways around the square and in the western part of the city, where resistance to the deployment of the army was strongest. Moreover, the victims were not only students, but ordinary people who were outraged that the soldiers of a people's army had been given warrant to shoot the people.

Tiananmen Square massacre links

The above item is reproduced without editing other than typographical

 Register your name and address to go on the Mailing List to receive

David Irving's ACTION REPORT

or to hear when and where he will next speak near you

© Focal Point 2004 F Irving write to David Irving