A top Chinese political activist held under strict house arrest ahead of the Tiananmen Square massacre's 15th anniversary has urged the public to challenge the government's "lies and fraud" over the June 4 crackdown.
Nobel Peace Prize nominee Ding Zilin, 67, leader of the Tiananmen Mothers group, said in an unusually bold statement that Chinese people should dispute the Communist Party's view that the crackdown was needed to maintain stability and usher in a period of strong economic growth.
"We must now in equally clear and unequivocal terms tell these leaders: The massacre that took place in the Chinese capital in 1989 was a crime against the people, and a crime against humanity," Ding said on the website of the New York-based Human Rights in China (HRIC).
"This massacre not only seriously violated the Constitution of this country and the international obligations of a sovereign state, but also transformed a habitual disdain for human and civil rights into an unprecedented act of violence against humanity," she said.
Hundreds of people, perhaps more than a thousand, were mowed down in the streets of Beijing as the army used tanks and machine guns to end six weeks of student protests centered on Tiananmen square in the heart of the capital.
Ding, whose son died after being shot in the back during the bloody put-down of the pro-democracy demonstrations, said that she had been under house arrest since Tuesday.
"The police came to my home on May 25, they said that I cannot leave the home except to buy food, when several of them follow me to the market," she said by telephone.
"They had no legal documents and they could not cite which laws were being used to restrict my freedom of movement, they only said that the orders had come `from above.'"
Ding's Tiananmen Mothers group, made up of relatives of the massacre's 182 known victims, has waged a largely fruitless campaign to seek redress from the government.
The movement has collected vast documentation and pictures of the crackdown and called on the government to account for the hundreds of other victims who have not been publicly named.
"Speak the truth, reject amnesia, seek justice, appeal to conscience," her appeal said.
"A system that retains power through lies and fraud is despicable, but changing it requires a sustained rationality," it said.
Ding also said the recent police surveillance on her and her group was an effort to prevent them from filing another legal complaint on June 4 with the Supreme People's Procuratorate against former premier Li Peng (
The complaint was signed on behalf of 126 people who lost loved ones during the massacre.
She said two policemen told her that under the new generation of leaders headed by President Hu Jintao (
Besides Ding, several other Tiananmen Mothers were under house arrest as were a large group of other dissidents, Human Rights in China said.
"The Chinese authorities have no legal basis whatsoever to deprive these people of their personal liberty, nor do they have the right to prevent the Tiananmen Mothers from filing a legal complaint," HRIC president Liu Qing said in a separate statement.
"This latest crackdown shows that the Chinese authorities have made no progress in the recognition of human rights or rule of law since they butchered unarmed civilians 15 years ago," Liu said.
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