Around 55,000 mark Tiananmen anniversary in Hong Kong (2nd Roundup)

Jun 4, 2007, 14:35 GMT

Hong Kong - An estimated 55,000 people took part in a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong Monday to mark the 18th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.

Crowds poured into the city's Victoria Park on a hot, clear evening to join in the peaceful and evocative annual event, the only public memorial of the 1989 killings that is allowed on Chinese soil.

Organizers estimated that the turnout at the vigil at around 55,000 people, 15,000 more than last year.

Numbers were believed to have been boosted by a row over a pro-Beijing politician's claims last month that the 1989 killings could not be called a massacre because troops had acted to maintain social order.

Massive crowds filled six football pitches as they streamed into Victoria Park where speeches were delivered and banners held up calling on China to revise its official verdict on the Tiananmen Square protestors.

People in Hong Kong were horrified by the events of June 4, 1989, when Chinese troops and tanks brutally crushed a student uprising, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of protestors.

The massacre had a particular poignancy for people in the city of 6.9 million, then still a British colony but only eight years away from reverting to Chinese rule in 1997.

Although it is now part of China, the annual Tiananmen memorial and other anti-government protests are allowed because of Hong Kong's status as a special administrative region where citizens have freedom of speech.

Earlier Monday, members of the pro-democracy April 5th protest group led by legislator Leung Kwok-hung, marched to the Beijing Liaison Office in Hong Kong to lay a wreath commemorating the June 4 killings.

Leung said: 'It was a massacre. Those students were killed in cold blood. I don't think any government on earth has the authority to kill people in that way. It is not a matter of politics. It is a matter of human rights.

'In Hong Kong we still have freedom of expression. It is not like mainland China. When you go on the internet, it is forbidden for any website to mention say anything about June 4.'

Meanwhile a pro-Beijing politician in Hong Kong said Monday it was wrong to call the Tiananmen Square crackdown a massacre.

Speaking on a radio debate on the 18th anniversary of the crushing of the student movement, Peter Wong said the term massacre applied to incidents like ethnic cleansing in the Balkans conflict.

'We all saw what happened in Tiananmen Square,' said the outspoken Hong Kong delegate to China's law-making body, the National People's Congress.

'The (soldiers) didn't go there deliberately to kill people. The intention of the government was to maintain the order of the (capital) of the country.'

Wong's remarks follow controversial comments by another pro-Beijing politician, Democratic Alliance leader Ma Lik, that the 1989 incident was no massacre as it is popularly called.

China has resisted calls to apologize for the 1989 killings or to reverse the official verdict that the crackdown was necessary to maintain social order.