China Covers Up the Dongzhou Massacre

Subject: Chinese Olympics and Human Rights
Date: 12/17/2005 2:34:40 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: kitchen@hellskitchen.net
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China Covers Up the Dongzhou Massacre

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The Chinese government is doing everything possible to prevent the outside world from learning of the massacre of protestors in the village of Dongzhou, in the Pearl River Delta just north of Hong Kong. Howard Stevenson reports for the New York Times:
... the government had decided to re-educate the entire population. Banners hang everywhere, with slogans in big red characters proclaiming things like, �Stability is paramount� and �Don�t trust instigators.�

Many facts remain unclear about the police crackdown on a Dongzhou demonstration on Dec. 6, which residents say ended in the deaths of 20 or more people, but one thing is certain: The government is doing everything possible to prevent witnesses� accounts of what happened from emerging.

The government forces are playing for keeps. Residents speak of having 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. Others said that the corpses of the dead had been withheld, apparently because they were so riddled with bullets that they would contradict the government�s version of events. And residents have been warned that if they must explain the deaths of loved ones � many of whom were shot dead during a tense standoff with the police in which fireworks, blasting caps and crude gasoline bombs were thrown by the villagers � they should simply say their relatives were blown up by their own explosives.

So much for any illusions that the regime is turning over any new leaves for the present. There is undoubtedly a a gain in personal freedom continuing slowly if not steadily. But when push comes to shove, old ways return. The only way the regime will permanently change its repressive behavior is if there is a price to be paid. That is why the world�s attention must be focused on Dongzhou. The regime is attempting a cover-up precisely because it fears this attention.

Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics on the theory that China�s opening to market forces has made it an ordinary or normal state. Of course, the Olympics were held in Hitler�s Germany and the USSR, so a free and democratic society doesn�t seem to be prerequisite to fitting in with the so-called Olympic ideals.China is very heavily depending on the Olympics to legitimize it in the world�s eyes. It isn therefore important that the Dongzhou Massacre be raised as in issue in determining the fitness of Beijing to host the athletic festival.

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New York Times

Chinese Pressing to Keep Village Silent on Clash

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: December 17, 2005

SHANGHAI, Dec. 16 - Ten days ago, the sleepy fishing village of Dongzhou was the scene of a deadly face-off, with protesters hurling homemade bombs and the police gunning them down in the streets.

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Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
In Dongzhou, where some residents
say the police killed 20 or more
demonstrators during a clash last
week over building a power plant,
people drove under banners on
Wednesday encouraging them
to obey the law.

Now, a stilted calm prevails, a cover-up 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. Banners hang everywhere, with slogans in big red characters proclaiming things like, "Stability is paramount" and "Don't trust instigators."

Many facts remain unclear about the police crackdown on a Dongzhou demonstration on Dec. 6, which residents say ended in the deaths of 20 or more people, but one thing is certain: The government is doing everything possible to prevent witnesses' accounts of what happened from emerging.

Residents of Dongzhou, a small town now cordoned off by heavy police roadblocks and patrols, said in scores of interviews on the telephone and with visitors 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. Others said that the corpses of the dead had been withheld, apparently because they were so riddled with bullets that they would contradict the government's version of events. And residents have been warned that if they must explain the deaths of loved ones - many of whom were shot dead during a tense standoff with the police in which fireworks, blasting caps and crude gasoline bombs were thrown by the villagers - they should simply say their relatives were blown up by their own explosives.

"Local officials are talking to families that had relatives killed in the incident, telling them that if they tell higher officials and outsiders that they died by accident, by explosives, while confronting the police, they must make it sound convincing," said one resident of the besieged town in an interview. "If 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."

Another villager, who, like other residents, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear or reprisals, said families of the dead who agreed to invoke accidental explosion as the cause of death had been offered $15,000 each.

"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."

The bomb story was also being spread at a hospital in the nearby city of Shanwei, where villagers injured in the protest are being treated. Plainclothes police surrounded a Chinese man who entered the hospital seeking to see the wounded, denying him access to a tightly guarded ward even when he said his relative was among the injured. Later, hospital staff members told the man that the injured had all been warned to stick to the same story, of being injured by their own explosives.

The attempt to enforce a concocted story may help explain why residents have reported difficulty in recovering the bodies of their loved ones.

The official New China News Agency has said that only three people were killed and eight others injured when security forces shot at protesters, so the existence of more bodies riddled with bullets could destroy the official version of events and provide proof of tremendous force against a lightly armed, if restive, crowd.

"The relatives went in tears to the county offices to search for the dead and missing, and they were beaten by electric truncheon, wounded and dispersed," one resident said.

"They offered 50,000 yuan, and told us we could only get back the body at night and bury it on the mountain immediately, without any mourning ceremony or fireworks, without anyone knowing about this," a relative of Wei Jin, a man killed during the demonstration, said in an account of an attempted bribe involving his relative's corpse.