HK park empty for 1st time in 32 years on Tiananmen anniv
Cops enforce ban public commemorations but protests flicker at distance
Hong Kong, June 4: A Hong Kong park that traditionally hosts huge vigils on the anniversary of China’s deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown lay empty for the first time late Friday as police blocked access, but flashes of defiance still flickered across the city.
Huge crowds have routinely gathered in Hong Kong's Victoria Park to mark the anniversary of Chinese troops crushing peaceful democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
Hundreds were killed in the crackdown, by some estimates more than 1,000.
Public commemorations are forbidden on the mainland and, until recently, semi-autonomous Hong Kong was the one place in China where large scale remembrance was still tolerated.
This year’s vigil was banned at a time when authorities are carrying out a sweeping clampdown on dissent following huge and often violent democracy protests two years ago.
Police threw cordons around the Victoria Park, keeping crowds out and leaving the venue free of candle carrying mourners for the first time in 32 years.
Activists who approached the park were stopped and searched, while officers used loud hailers and signs to call for people to disperse from nearby streets.
Some officers displayed signs warning chanting crowds that they were in breach of a sweeping new national security law Beijing imposed on the city last year to stamp out dissent.
Unable to muster en masse, many Hong Kong residents still found other ways to mourn the dead.
As the clock struck 8pm in Hong Kong’s shopping district of Mong Kok, dozens of people simultaneously turned their mobile phone lights on, a small gesture of defiance in a city where mass remembrance of Beijing’s Tiananmen crackdown has been banned.
It was a scene repeated in multiple districts across the city.
For the last 32 years, crowds of Hong Kongers, often tens of thousands strong, have come together each June 4 in the city’s Victoria Park to hold a candlelight vigil for those killed in 1989 when tanks and troops crushed prodemocracy protesters in China’s capital.
Police arrested an organiser of Hong Kong's annual candlelight vigil remembering the deadly crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, warned people not to attend the banned event and cordoned off parts of the venue on Friday as authorities mute China’s last pro-democracy voices. In past years, tens of thousands of people gathered in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to honour those who died when China’s military put down student-led pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989.
Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed. China’s ruling Communist Party has never allowed public events on the mainland to mark the anniversary and security was increased at the Beijing square, with police checking pedestrians’ IDs as tour buses shuttled Chinese tourists in and out.
Chinese officials say the country’s rapid economic development in the years since what they call the “political turmoil” of 1989 proves that decisions made at the time were correct.
Efforts to suppress public memory of the Tiananmen events have lately turned to Hong Kong.