Hong Kong - An estimated 55,000 people took part in a
candlelight vigil in Hong Kong Monday to mark the 18th anniversary of
the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.
Crowds poured into the city's Victoria Park on a hot, clear
evening to join in the peaceful and evocative annual event, the only
public memorial of the 1989 killings that is allowed on Chinese soil.
Organizers estimated that the turnout at the vigil at around
55,000 people, 15,000 more than last year.
Numbers were believed to have been boosted by a row over a
pro-Beijing politician's claims last month that the 1989 killings
could not be called a massacre because troops had acted to maintain
social order.
Massive crowds filled six football pitches as they streamed into
Victoria Park where speeches were delivered and banners held up
calling on China to revise its official verdict on the Tiananmen
Square protestors.
People in Hong Kong were horrified by the events of June 4, 1989,
when Chinese troops and tanks brutally crushed a student uprising,
killing hundreds and possibly thousands of protestors.
The massacre had a particular poignancy for people in the city of
6.9 million, then still a British colony but only eight years away
from reverting to Chinese rule in 1997.
Although it is now part of China, the annual Tiananmen memorial
and other anti-government protests are allowed because of Hong Kong's
status as a special administrative region where citizens have freedom
of speech.
Earlier Monday, members of the pro-democracy April 5th protest
group led by legislator Leung Kwok-hung, marched to the Beijing
Liaison Office in Hong Kong to lay a wreath commemorating the June 4
killings.
Leung said: 'It was a massacre. Those students were killed in cold
blood. I don't think any government on earth has the authority to
kill people in that way. It is not a matter of politics. It is a
matter of human rights.
'In Hong Kong we still have freedom of expression. It is not like
mainland China. When you go on the internet, it is forbidden for any
website to mention say anything about June 4.'
Meanwhile a pro-Beijing politician in Hong Kong said Monday it was
wrong to call the Tiananmen Square crackdown a massacre.
Speaking on a radio debate on the 18th anniversary of the crushing
of the student movement, Peter Wong said the term massacre applied to
incidents like ethnic cleansing in the Balkans conflict.
'We all saw what happened in Tiananmen Square,' said the outspoken
Hong Kong delegate to China's law-making body, the National People's
Congress.
'The (soldiers) didn't go there deliberately to kill people. The
intention of the government was to maintain the order of the
(capital) of the country.'
Wong's remarks follow controversial comments by another
pro-Beijing politician, Democratic Alliance leader Ma Lik, that the
1989 incident was no massacre as it is popularly called.
China has resisted calls to apologize for the 1989 killings or to
reverse the official verdict that the crackdown was necessary to
maintain social order.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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