June 04, 1999	atimes.com

China Dissident pressure for Tiananmen trial By Farhan Haq NEW YORK - Chinese pro-democracy activists in the United States marked the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre with renewed calls this week for the trial of former Premier Li Peng and other leaders linked to the 1989 crackdown. One decade after Chinese tanks entered Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989, and crushed a student-led demonstration there, the pro-democracy movement remained dispersed, with members under arrest, kept under tight watch in China or exiled abroad. ''A part of our hearts has died forever,'' Li Lu, a veteran of the Tiananmen demonstrations, said of the communist government's action 10 years ago, which saw hundreds of pro-democracy activists killed. The pro-democracy movement has had a new rallying point this year: the effort launched last month by two mothers of Tiananmen Square victims to file suit against Li Peng and other top officials for murder and indiscriminate use of force. ''Ten years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the perpetrators still have not been brought to justice,'' Xiao Qiang, executive director of Human Rights in China, said in New York. ''The Chinese government must acknowledge that the 1989 crackdown was a criminal action'' as a first step toward restitution, Xiao argued. In addition, rights groups are demanding that Beijing allow an impartial tribunal to investigate the 1989 crackdown, which the Chinese government claims was needed to maintain law and order. Last month, two Chinese women who lost their sons at Tiananmen - Ding Zilin and Zhang Xianling - submitted evidence, including a list of the names of 155 victims, to China's Supreme People's Procuratorate in an effort to sue the Communist leadership. Ding, who spoke from Beijing to reporters Tuesday by an Internet hook-up, said that so far she and Xiang had found the names of 160 victims who were killed, and another 70 people crippled during the crackdown. But she added that families who continue to press for investigation of the massacre face harassment. ''We are not allowed to speak openly about the facts of how our loved ones were murdered, and we cannot mourn our dead in public,'' she said. That is why, she said, there needs to be a suit against Li Peng, who signed the martial law order that brought troops into Tiananmen Square. Li, since replaced by the more moderate Premier Zhu Rongji, was ''directly involved in carrying out the decision'' and ''has inescapable responsibility for its consequences,'' Ding said. The case has been far from easy to pursue, even a decade later. ''The two mothers were blocked seven times by police'' when they tried to submit their suit last month, said Liu Qing, chairman of Human Rights in China. ''Only when they risked thier lives by rushing to flag down a speeding official car were they able to deliver the complaint." Prospects that the suit will succeed are slim indeed, given Beijing's official line that the crackdown was a ''correct response'' to rising unrest. Yet the effort is part of an overall campaign to stand against the continued persecution of those who protested at Tiananmen, some activists claim. Zhang Yalai, a former researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who was wounded at Tiananmen and came to the United States in 1992, argued that even donations of humanitarian assistance to the massacre victims are routinely blocked by Beijing. ''I am here to appeal to the Chinese government to stop interrupting the international efforts of assisting the Tiananmen victims,'' Zhang said Tuesday at a commemoration of the massacre at New York's New School for Social Research. ''I am not talking about 10 years ago - I am talking about their sufferings right now, at this very moment." Ding Zilin, he noted, is under constant surveillance, and her bank account has been frozen by the Chinese authorities. Other efforts to channel aid to the victims have been blocked, he said. ''I fail to understand how compassion could possibly endanger state security, unless the government has very little confidence in its own power,'' Zhang contended. Human Rights Watch has used the anniversary to renew its call for the release of some 2,000 political prisoners who were accused in the post-Tiananmen crackdown of ''counter-revolution'' - an offense that last year was formally abolished by the Chinese government. ''The most important task of the international community now is to support the efforts of those inside China fighting on behalf of the Jun. 4 victims,'' said Sidney Jones, Asia director of Human Rights Watch. ''This means ensuring that they are seen and heard by reducing state controls on the media, including the Internet,'' she said. ''It means getting international access to the huge Chinese prison system." Ultimately, argued Wang Dan - one of the main student leaders in 1989, who was exiled to the United States last year - the outside world must press China's leadership to seek a reversal of its own verdict on the crackdown. ''To seek justice for those who were killed at Tiananmen Square is the mission of humanity,'' he said. (Inter Press Service)

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