20th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square Massacre

I wrote the piece at the end of this post in the Calgary Herald on June 4th, 2004 -- the 15th anniversary of the tragedy. I have also written a piece to mark the 20th anniversary in the June 4, 2009 Herald (link to come on June 4), but I thought folks might be interested in the more raw emotion in the 2004 column.

I also wrote this and this around the Beijing Olympics.

Here's the 2004 piece, in full, as published in the Herald, June 4, 2004.

Today, a Calgarian remembers those of his generation massacred 15 years ago in Tiananmen Square

It's early June 1989. The Flames have just won the Stanley Cup. I'm a few weeks from graduating high school. I'm off to university in the fall, and I'm excited. I'm thrilled that I'll be getting out from under my parents, into a bigger world, but I'm mostly fascinated with the life of a university student. Endless debates and discussions about things that really matter, fuelled by Kraft Dinner and way too much coffee. Working together to create new ways of thinking about the world and about how we all fit in it. Spirited arguments about whether theory really applies to people's lives.

Across the world, in the place my mother always told me I would end up if I dug a hole deep enough, some other students were having similar feelings. Some were my age, some older, but they all felt they were on the verge of something really exciting, something that would change the world. They were so sure of themselves that they organized a grand rally in the central square of their city -- two million people tasting freedom. They even raised a huge, garish version of the Statue of Liberty, all done up in white Styrofoam, as their symbol, and called her the "Goddess of Democracy."

1989 had been an exciting year, and not just for hockey. Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika were transforming the Soviet Union. Poland held its first free democratic elections. Other Iron Curtain countries were opening their borders. Even Iran and Iraq stopped fighting with one another. The Cold War was thawing, and peace was breaking out all over. China, with its history as the most pragmatic of the communist nations, was poised to follow suit, bringing a billion people into democracy for the first time.

Of course, that's not how the story ends. On the morning of June 4, 1989, the People's Liberation Army moves into Tiananmen Square. It is rumoured that the PLA could not get its Beijing units to move against their neighbours and colleagues, so peasant armies have to be moved into the city. Thousands of people die that day, though their government has never acknowledged that fact. Even after a day of rain, bloodstains are visible on the stones and pavement of the square and on the streets surrounding it.

A world away, I see the image of an impossibly small person, holding what looks like a school bag, standing in front of a row of tanks towering over him. I can't stop thinking about that person, and how he gave his life in the pursuit of such a simple, basic ideal, one that I get every day. For me, the image of what a student is, and what a student does, is changed forever. How can I take for granted those heated discussions over coffee when one-fifth of the world's population can't even start that conversation?

Fast-forward 15 years. The Flames are about to win another Cup, but everything else has changed. The Goddess of Democracy is long gone from that square, though replicas of her stand improbably, even comically, near the Dairy Queen at the U of C and in university student centres around the world. I'm not a student anymore, and my heated discussions these days are more likely to be about marketing strategy than about human rights. Life in that other place across the world is different, too. For me, though, "China" still means, and will always mean, Tiananmen.

In the past decade, I have seen the West's policy of "constructive engagement" in action, and I have tried in my heart to support it. I know it makes sense. I have a master's degree in public policy. I know that this policy helps spur debate on China and on its human rights record. I know that the economic growth of China in the last decade has been without precedent in history, and that more than 200 million people have been lifted out of the direst poverty. I know that human rights matter less to people without food, shelter or the luxury to enjoy them. I even know that the Chinese people I see in the western media are happy with their material progress.

But I also know that people died in a square all those years ago, and that the same regime that killed them is the same regime behind this economic growth. I also know that, despite our leaders' rhetoric, human rights violations in China are as bad as ever. I know that my classmate, Yang Jianli, with his doctorates from Berkeley and Harvard, rots in a Chinese jail. Today is his 771st day behind bars, after more than two years in solitary confinement without a trial.

And Jianli's not the only one. Stories of atrocities abound. I heard a Boston doctor, as one example, speak of her time in Dharamsala, India, treating Tibetan escapees. Most of the women she saw were sterile because of the forced insertion of IUDs many years earlier -- birth control devices which were in so deep that this doctor, and all of her American medicine, could not remove them. While these women cry out, and while democracy activists rot in jail, Jiang Zemin comes to Calgary and is given a white hat.

Today, there will be no memorial ceremony in Beijing. Young Chinese are forgetting what happened in Tiananmen Square. We cannot become their memory, but neither can we allow ourselves to forget. To do so would be to lose faith with those students on that June night so long ago, and to allow their deaths to be in vain.

Naheed Nenshi is a consultant and educator in Calgary.