1 of 6 | Protesters gather at a rally to mark the 35th anniversary of the Chinese military crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square near the Shinjuku station in Tokyo, Japan, on Saturday. Photo by Keizo Mori/UPI | License Photo
With the anniversary looming, relatives of those killed in what is commonly referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre in China have written a letter to Chinese leader Xi Jinping calling for accountability.
“We will never forget the lives that were lost to those brutal bullets or crushed by tanks on June 4, 35 years ago,” reads the letter, authored by the group Tiananmen Mothers. Advertisement
The group of bereaved relatives writes a similar letter annually, calling for official government accountability, as well as transparency surrounding the actual death toll and compensation families of the victims.
It also encourages others to write to Chinese officials, calling out human rights violations and campaigns for the “immediate and unconditional release of those still imprisoned in connection with the 1989 protests.”
Beginning on the evening of June 3, 1989, Chinese military troops and tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to quell unrest after weeks of negotiations failed to end pro-democracy protests at the Beijing landmark.
With martial law declared, the military clashed with some 50,000 protestors through the following day, resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries. Figures related to the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand. Advertisement
China’s ruling Communist Party took steps to control the flow of news out of Beijing and has scrubbed the incident from the official record. Discussing the massacre is forbidden in China and links to websites with information about it are blocked by the country’s Great Firewall.
“Those who disappeared, whose relatives couldn’t even find their bodies to wipe away the blood and bid them a final farewell,” reads the letter by Tiananmen Mothers, which is specifically addressed to Xi.
“It is too cruel that this happened along a 10-kilometer stretch of Chang’an Boulevard in Beijing in peacetime.”
Over the years, the group’s letters have not gotten official replies.
This year’s letter was published Friday.
