Page 2746 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 21 November 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
sovereignty in the Torres Strait are now giving rise to prospects of a local militia - a self-policing role. I predict that these militia forces, given the strength of the secession movement in the Torres Strait, could really backfire on us and provide an armed secessionist government that may not necessarily have its formation determined at the ballot-box but rather by the magazine of a rifle.
Sitting in our public gallery tonight is someone who wrote the following graphic account of his involvement in Tiananmen Square on the days before and after the massacre on 4 June:
The true climax came during the day of the 3rd. Before dawn, four people were run down by a police car, three of them died. In addition, a number of military vehicles had been taken over. I saw one of them being taken over ... It was a small minibus with 6 or 7 soldiers. Beijing was very calm, there was no violence or looting ... These vehicles all had local numberplates rather than military plates. If they had had military plates, it would have been impossible for them to get through. The soldiers were all in civilian clothes, they all had white shirts on so, at first glance, you wouldn't notice them but when you looked carefully, they all had the same military haircut. In a vehicle at Liu Bukau, there were rifles, machine guns and assault rifles. The weapons and ammunition were all put on display on the roof of the vehicle ... after the people took over the vehicle, the soldiers just left their weapons and fled. They probably intended that the people should take the guns away. We all suspected that this was a trick perpetrated by the government. The Independent Students Union told everyone to look after the weapons and not to let anyone take them away so as to prevent the government from using this incident as a pretext ... Everyone's feelings were running very high ... We took the things we had written to be printed, three sets of them on different topics. We got some water and some clothes ready and we set out from "X" -
I will call these places X and Y, for obvious reasons -
We went past the "X", "Y" and "Z". All the way we were handing out our leaflets ... When we reached "X", we discovered that there were actually two people following us when we rode fast.
It goes on to say:
At sunrise on the 4th, the 28th army came into the city and promptly about 80 vehicles were set on fire. The crowd was very heroic that day. The troops watched the vehicles burn and then moved
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .