As for the missing persons during the June 4th 1989 massacre, they simply disappeared without a trace since June 3rd l989, or a couple of days later. Their beloved ones have been trying their best to look for them during the past years, but to no avail.
As we turned the pages of the long list of the deceased, we found that among the 182 deceased, 13 of them were missing. It can be assumed that even these 13 known missing ones are only a minority of all the missing persons.
What worries us is that up to this day, not a single one of those missing has been found still alive. This confirms rumors that many corpses were destroyed by the curfew troops so as to destroy the evidence. According to several persons, from June 3rd to June 4th, a batch of corpses of the victims were buried by the curfew troops in the lawn in front of the Twenty-eight Middle School. A few days later, the corpses emanated a bad smell. After complaints from the school authorities, the corpses were dug up and moved away. The corpse of Wang Nan, the youngest son of Zhang Xianling, fortunately was not destroyed. At the time of the tragedy, he was wearing a military training uniform, and was mistaken for a soldier of the curfew troops. As to the whereabouts of the other corpses, no one knows. This has revealed an undoubted fact: At that time, many corpses were put into black plastic bags by the curfew troops and secretly transported away. It is also said that the curfew troops took over control of the crematorium in the east suburb of Beijing for several days to cremate the corpses. To these rumors, the authorities try hard not to respond, and citizens are unable to confirm them. However, we believe the truth is bound to come to light one day.
During the student movement in 1989, a student of the electrical engineering faculty of a university in Sunan, together with several other students, acting on behalf of their fellow-students, traveled a long way to the Tiananmen Square to hand over their donated money to the students who were on hunger strike. However one of them did not return. He disappeared in Beijing. This is a well-known case.
On June 4th, a man wearing a floral-patterned shirt was knocked down by an army vehicle near a suburban hospital, and was rolled over by another army vehicle coming from behind. His body badly crushed. Only one of his hands and the debris of his shirt remained. The badly ruined corpse was left on the road till June 5th when it was shoveled into a plastic bag and taken away. This is a deceased and missing person, because the whereabouts of his corpse are still unknown. I believe his loved ones cannot imagine that the debris in the plastic bag could be their loved one whom they have been painstakingly looking for in vain. How can the body of a human being be shoveled away and disposed of like rubbish!
The missing ones left endless dreams and expectations with their loved ones who would rather believe they are still living rather than dead. They cannot stand neither such a sudden loss nor the sudden change to solitude in their families. To those who have not experienced the tragedy, the suffering and trauma of the family members of the missing ones are unimaginable.
In an extreme autocracy, the hidden danger from people around is horrible. It can bring about unexpected misfortune. A naive 14 year-old school-boy, suffering from the trauma of his father's disappearance, one day in his classroom, vented his anger by writing on the blackboard that he would revenge his father's death with the butcher, Li Peng. He was reported by his class-teacher to the authorities, and was put on 3 years' probation.
People often condemn an autocracy for being dictatorial, stifling democracy, trampling on human rights and what not. However, what deserves denouncing most is its inhumanity, as shown in the punishment of the school-boy. The above-mentioned teacher is detestable. However he/she is only a lamentable accessory of the apparatus of dictatorship.
The above is only a small part of what we can document. At first , we did not want to display to the world such sufferings and inhumanity. However, these are the facts, and I think it needs to be made known to our compatriots whose hearts are so insensitive.
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