Proposed lifting of EU embargo on arms sales to China an affront to the victims' memory

On Thursday, the 15th anniversary of the 4 June 1989 massacre in Beijing's Square of Heavenly Peace, Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (GfbV) / Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) and members of the Chinese Democracy Movement honoured the memory of the victims in a human rights protest action in Berlin and called for a full explanation of the killings in the Square. The German-based human rights organisation was also protesting against the proposed lifting of the EU's arms embargo on China, staging a symbolic arms deal in front of the Chinese embassy. A human rights activist disguised as Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder handed over crates of munitions to his Chinese trading partner.

"For the German Federal Chancellor, French President Jacques Chirac and now British Prime Minister Tony Blair as well to be talking about lifting the EU arms embargo is an insult to the memory of those who died in the massacre", argued GfbV's Asia Desk representative Ulrich Delius. "Given the renewed arrests of Chinese dissidents and planned Chinese military manoeuvres off the coast of Taiwan it is nothing short of scandalous". China is reportedly eager to purchase new European weapons systems for a possible war of aggression against Taiwan. The EU's Code of Conduct on arms exports "has as many holes in it as a Swiss cheese" and offers no guarantee that weapons systems posing a threat to Taiwanese security will not be sold to China.

China's rulers have not changed since the embargo was imposed in the aftermath of the June 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. Any challenge to the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly of power is repressed and eliminated, as the brutal treatment handed out to the Falun Gong meditation movement since 1999 and to the Democracy Movement in 1997/98 has demonstrated. In Tibet and the Muslim Uigur province of Xinjiang in north-western China serious human rights violations are a routine occurrence.

The Chinese authorities, anxious to clamp down on any form of public protest, are reportedly targeting supporters of the Democracy Movement who have been imprisoned or put under house arrest. Relatives of massacre victims and dissidents seeking to find out what actually happened continue to be threatened and imprisoned. In the face of efforts to suppress the truth about the killings GfbV / STP has produced a new report on the massacre 15 years ago. Among other demands the organisation is calling for the release of the student leaders still in prison and the punishment of those responsible for the killings.