This past week has seen yet another massacre in China -- this time not by the People's Liquidation Army but by the state police, opening fire with live ammo, into a crowd of civilians, Ã la Tiananmen Square. This time, the crowd was simply made up of helpless villagers -- farmers and fishermen of Shanwei, seeking compensation and justice for land that was illegally taken away from them to build a new power plant, generated by COAL. Get my Geography students to tell you what kind of pollution that would cause, and how many new cases of leukemia have been caused by land stolen from villagers are given to industries that pour all manner of chemicals and poisons ion the limited water supply of China. This has been brewing since May 2005. Dongzhou has a population near 30,000 and during the action last week, protests swelled from '100 or 200 people' to a number near 10,000 (33% of the town).
English: Roadside billboard of Deng Xiaoping at th...
English: Roadside billboard of Deng Xiaoping in fr...
English: Roadside billboard of Deng Xiaoping in Du...Riot police were first sent in on Monday, Dec. 5, to put down the unrest on the part of the first 100 - 200 protestors. Then matters escalated on Tuesday when authorities detained three organisers, and this prompted thousands more villagers to respond; perhaps as many as 10,000 according to a Radio Free Asia report. At 17:00 on that day, 2,000 - 3,000 paramilitary and riot police arrived to attack the village as has been the case time after time after time over the last number of years. Additional equipment used in the operation included machineguns, and one or more tanks. The main massacre occurred in front of the power plant, occupying the original land that was seized. Reports on the number who were killed have varied, from a low of three (guess what, that's what the government's claims, but...
Update.
According to the New York Times (http://nytimes.com/2005/12/17/international/asia/ 17china.html) the government's cover-up of the dozens of villagers it massacred on December 6 is so "carefully planned that the small town looks like a relic from the Cultural Revolution, as if the government had decided to re-educate the entire population." It goes on to say that just like 35 years ago, today there are banners everywhere, "with slogans in big red characters proclaiming things like, 'Stability is paramount' and 'Don't trust instigators'" (unless of course they come heavily armed and in the pay of the government).
Residents of Dongzhou, a small town "now cordoned off by heavy police roadblocks and patrols", have said that they had "endured beatings, bribes and threats at the hands of security forces in the week and a half after their protest against the construction of a power plant was violently put down." Bodies of the dead have not been returned because they were "so riddled with bullets that they would contradict the government's version of events." What is most disgusting is that the government has blackmailed its own people that if they must explain the murder of their relatives "they should simply say their relatives were blown up by their own explosives." This is the government that has been seen as worthy of hosting the 2008 Olympics.
The article goes on to say that "(i)f the family members speak this way they are being promised 50,000 yuan ($6,193), and if not, they will be beaten and get nothing out of it."
"The story is being spread around the village that people were not killed by bullets, but by bombs," said one man interviewed Friday by telephone. "That's rubbish. Everybody knows they were killed by gunfire."
In something reminiscent from the Nazi era, if they don't lie about their families' deaths at the hand of its own state forces, they don't get the bodies back.
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