Give the Chinese students their history back!

Press release 1 June 2007

Give the Chinese students their history back!

*In 1989 the Chinese students were massacred on the Square of the Heavenly Peace.
The students had been occupying the square for months in an attempt to press
the Chinese government to take steps towards democracy and to fight against corruption.
But on 4th June 1989 the regime threw in the army against the students.

*The story is banned in China, but all the students' newspaper articles, fliers
etc. have been collected by the democracy movement in Hong Kong. These collections
of documents have now been scanned and put on the Internet from where they can
be downloaded for free, see
http://www.aidoh.dk/4june89

*Many of the young dissidents imprisoned in the wake of the crackdown are still
in jail and no longer young. Nevertheless the world's leaders are doing ´business
as usual´ with the totalitarian regime in Beijing. They are considering cancelling
the weapon's embargo and other sanctions implemented as a protest against the
massacre.

*Thousands of Chinese students are studying at universities and other institutions
of education in the West. Most of them do not know their own history. Therefore
we invite all pro-democracy institutions and scholars to download and print out
this documentation or burn it on a CD, place it on the shelves of their libraries
and hand it out as a gift to their Chinese students on 4th June, the anniversary
of the Tiananmen massacre. In this way we can make a contribution to preserve
the memory of the victims and maybe inspire a new generation of Chinese to democracy
as a possibility also for China.

*We call on everybody to support this initiative and to mail this appeal to other
institutions of education where there are Chinese students or others who might
be interested in preserving and distributing the knowledge about the Tiananmen
massacre.

*The initiative of this appeal and informative campaign is a co-operation between
the democracy movement in Hong Kong and Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot who has
put up an 8 metre high Pillar of Shame in Hong Kong to commemorate the Tiananmen
massacre.

The documents about Tiananmen: http://www.aidoh.dk/4june89

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