Υποστηρίζουμε και δημοσιεύουμε εδώ την έκκληση του ακτιβιστή ανθρωπίνων δικαιωμάτων Jens Galschiot σε συνεργασία με το Κίνημα Δημοκρατίας στο Χονγκ Κονγκ ενάντια στην απαγόρευση από το κινέζικο κράτος οποιασδήποτε αναφοράς στη σφαγή της Τιεν Αν Μεν. Στεκόμαστε αλληλέγγυοι στους κινέζους δημοκράτες που παλεύουν ενάντια στο κτηνώδες φασιστικό καθεστώς της χώρας τους και τιμούμε την 22^η επέτειο της ηρωικής δημοκρατικής εξέγερσης της πλατείας Τιεν Αν Μεν. Καλούμε τους δημοκράτες να σπάσουν τον τοίχο της σιωπής που έχει επιβληθεί από την κινέζικη κυβέρνηση για την εξέγερση της Τιεν Αν Μεν.

Help mark the 22^nd anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. In 1989 the Chinese students occupied the Tiananmen Square in Beijing for months in an attempt to press the Chinese government to take steps towards democracy and to fight against corruption. But on 4^th June 1989 the regime threw in the army against the unarmed students.

Give the Chinese their story back. 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 Chinese and English documents have now been put on the Internet from where they can be downloaded for free.

Many of the young dissidents were imprisoned in the wake of the crackdown. Some are still in jail but they are no longer young. China still practises a massive censorship on information on the massacre. And it is impossible for Chinese people to obtain uncensored information about the event.

In China the encroachments continue. The famous artist Ai Weiwei has recently been jailed. Guggenheim has launched a petition to set him free. The imprisonment of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo is maintained and his wife has been put under house arrest.

Thousands of Chinese students are today studying at universities and other institutions of education in the West. Most of them do not even know their own history due to the censorship. You can help to remedy this.

• Therefore we invite all pro-democracy institutions, scholars and working colleagues to download and print out this documentation or burn it on a CD. Place it on the shelves of libraries and hand it out as a gift to Chinese students on 4^th June, the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.
• This way we can make a contribution to preserve the memory of the victims and maybe inspire a new generation of Chinese to see democracy as a possibility 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 in 1997 put up an 8 meter high Pillar of Shame in Hong Kong to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre. Hong Kong is the only place on Chinese soil where the victims can be honoured.

It seems that China’s curbing of free speech has got a solid grip, also in Hong Kong. Galschiot is just one of many critics who have been denied entry. So the city is deprived of a cultural exchange that is taken for granted in all open democratic societies. The expulsions are a strident violation of the principle of ‘One country – Two systems’ that was guarantied ahead of Hong Kong’s reunion with China in ‘97.

Galschiot’s activities related to China: http://www.aidoh.dk/China-Activities