Saturday April 10 2:15 AM ET
China Activists Launch Global Internet Campaign
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Activist groups, led by exiled Chinese dissident Wang Dan, Saturday moved their global campaign into cyberspace urging China to reassess its verdict slamming the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations.
The student-led protests are officially labeled a counter-revolutionary rebellion aimed at toppling the government.
The protests centered on Beijing's Tiananmen Square were crushed by army tanks backed by troops with machineguns on June 4, 1989. Hundreds died and many were jailed.
''This important Internet campaign will be (headquartered) on Chinese territory,'' Lau San-ching, director of the cyber-petition campaign said at a news conference in Hong Kong. ''Because we are using the Internet we can bring the campaign inside China.''
Wang, a veteran of the June 4 movement announced last November that a preparatory committee of overseas pro-democracy activists would initiate a massive signature campaign to reassess the Chinese government verdict.
''By using the internet, the petition drive will be able to bypass the censorship of the Chinese communist party,'' Wang, who enrolled at Harvard University after Beijing granted him an early medical parole from an 11-year prison term last year, said in a taped message at the conference.
The announcement in Hong Kong was one of eleven being made worldwide including New York, Boston, London, Geneva and Taipei in the runup to the 10th anniversary of Beijing's crackdown on the pro-democracy movement.
The petition website at june4.org was specially created for the campaign and is endorsed by Amnesty International, International PEN, Human Rights Watch and the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China.
The website carries a letter calling for a re-evaluation of the official verdict of the 1989 movement and bringing to justice those responsible for the bloody crackdown. It also urges Beijing to release all prisoners of conscience and to ratify and implement the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The site has received no official pressure from the governments of Hong Kong or China, but Beijing wants to block access to the site, Lau said.
Before Saturday's official site launch, 3,000 signatures had been gathered for the petition, mostly from the United States. The site logged 159,865 hits in March, up from 2,097 in January when it was first installed.
Frank Lu, founder of the Information Center for Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said the banned opposition China Democratic Party would help in the campaign and targeted 5,000 signatures before June 4 this year. |
