Lawmaker’s Comments Cause Uproar

By WILLIAM FOREMAN

HONG KONG – A leading Hong Kong lawmaker tried to calm an uproar Wednesday over his comments that China’s bloody crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests was not a massacre.

Pro-Beijing legislator Ma Lik’s remarks made the front pages of most major newspapers in Hong Kong, which also printed file photos of mangled dead bodies in Beijing’s streets after the military assault that killed hundreds, possibly thousands.

Ma, leader of one of Hong Kong’s biggest political parties, told Hong Kong reporters on Tuesday that "gweilos," local slang for "foreigners," shouldn’t be allowed to decide what really happened at Tiananmen, the South China Morning Post newspaper reported. Many accounts of the bloodshed, which was denounced around the world, have come from foreign media.

"We should not say the Communist Party massacred people on June 4. I never said that nobody was killed, but it was not a massacre," the newspaper quoted Ma as saying during a news conference about political reform.

"A massacre would mean the Communist Party intentionally killed people with machine guns indiscriminately," Ma was quoted as saying.

Journalists covering the crackdown described tanks and troops armed with machine guns fighting their way into the city and suppressing the protests. Four days afterward, an announcer at the Beijing Radio station read a report that troops had killed thousands of people.

"The most tragic event happened in the Chinese capital, Beijing. Thousands of people, most of them innocent civilians, were killed by fully armed soldiers," the announcer said.

Ma also said he doubted accounts of tanks running over bodies and grinding up corpses like meat, the Post and Ming Pao Daily News reported.

His remarks angered Wang Dan, one of the students who led the Tiananmen protest. In an e-mail to The Associated Press, Dan said Ma was "utterly devoid of a conscience." He took particular offense at Ma’s skepticism over the bodies crushed by tanks.

"There are photos that prove this. They’ve been published in many books. Hong Kong can easily see them. If Ma Lik doesn’t believe them, then he can lay down under a tank. If he’s not turned into grounded-up meat, then I will apologize."

Pro-democracy lawmaker Cheung Man-kwong said Ma was "cold-blooded."

Even some colleagues in Ma’s party – the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong – were uncomfortable with his comments.

"Our chairman has stirred up an argument," said Lau Kwong-wah, a DAB lawmaker. "If this caused some unnecessary damage and debate, the DAB is willing to apologize."

Ma toned down his remarks Wednesday morning during an interview with government-run RTHK radio.

"What I meant is to look at the incident rationally. It happened a long time ago. I was not insulting those who lost their lives in Tiananmen Square to fight for democracy," he said.

But he added, "The description of the June 4 incident as a massacre and a river of blood, I think all these are not complete and correct views."

Beijing has rejected calls by dissidents and others to revisit Tiananmen. The Communist government has officially classified the seven-week demonstrations as a counterrevolutionary riot and has never made full disclosure of the events.

Tiananmen is an extremely sensitive event in Hong Kong because it happened in the run-up to the former British colony’s return to Chinese rule. The news that Chinese troops and tanks had crushed the student-led protest in Beijing horrified Hong Kongers.

Many in Hong Kong sympathized with the protesters’ calls for political reform, and mass demonstrations were held here against the crackdown. The military assault also stoked fears that China would rule Hong Kong with an iron fist after the city’s handover to China in 1997.

As Hong Kong prepares to celebrate the handover’s 10th anniversary on July 1, the city remains much freer than the mainland. Political protests are common, half the legislature is directly elected and the media frequently criticize the government and Beijing.

Such civil liberties are permissible under Hong Kong’s "one country, two systems" arrangement, designed to give the city a wide degree of autonomy from the Communist mainland.