U.S. diplomats recount Tiananmen Square horror

Fifteen years after China’s brutal crackdown of the biggest democracy protest movement against communist government rule, the U.S. State Department official is still haunted by the blood-soaked bodies of hundreds of unarmed students littered in the streets around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

A fresh consular officer at the U.S. embassy in Beijing then, Huskey was frantically trying to get American citizens — mostly students and tourists — out of the square.

But he became the U.S. government’s key witness to the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre after six weeks of demonstrations by largely university students condemning corruption and crying out for democratic reforms.

“It’s a horrific memory, something that will live with you for a long time,” Huskey, now a senior political officer at the State Department, told AFP.

Huskey’s secret telegram to Washington capturing graphic details of the massacre was declassified and distributed this week at a public forum, where he and other diplomats based in the U.S. embassy in Beijing at that time related their harrowing experience.

“I was visibly angry then and had very undiplomatic thoughts,” Huskey told the forum. “I watched people from all sides getting shot down.”

The actual number of people who were plowed by tanks or mowed down by gunfire during the incident is still unclear but Huskey said he saw “about 200 to 300 bodies” on just one spot near Tiananmen Square.

“It was along Jiango East Road, directly in front of the Beijing Hotel,” Huskey said. “There were many, many, many other locations all over the city, where people were killed.

“We know from going to hospitals that hundreds and hundreds more had died elsewhere,” he said. “But I’ll never forget the site of that violence and it’s hard to believe that it actually happened.”

Larry Wortzel, an assistant military attache at the embassy, said his office had been in contact with someone in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army who “was telling U.S. 2,500 people” had been killed “and then the phone call stopped and we never heard from him again.”

Mark Mohr, a political officer at the embassy, said he saw hundreds of frustrated protesters on bicycles racing towards a line of moving tanks.

“What are you people doing, going for the tanks?” Mohr asked himself, from a vantage point at the 15th floor of the Beijing Hotel.

The unarmed demonstrators were so raged by the military might used against them that they were literally “committing suicide” he said.

Huskey said in his telegram that the PLA shooting “was intense” and that armored personnel carriers were seen “plowing through the demonstrators and running over some,” spewing gunfire “with bullets whizzing by and people falling to the ground in pools of blood.

“How can Chinese shoot Chinese?” an elderly woman cried in rage as the gunshots became louder, according to his dispatch which cited “screams of pain as people were hit at random and fell to the ground.”

A Chinese man shouted to Huskey “do something, you foreigners must help us,” before he fell with a bullet in the center of his forehead.

Huskey said he also saw demonstrators set ablaze an armored personnel carrier and beat apparently to death a soldier who emerged from the vehicle.

Then Beijing mayor Chen Xitong had said “many dozens” of soldiers were killed during the turmoil and 6,000 soldiers wounded, while some 200 civilians, including 36 students, were killed and 3,000 injured.

But independent sources estimate between 1,000 and 3,000 people were killed.

James Lilley, the U.S. ambassador during the crackdown, told AFP he regretted not speaking directly to George Bush, the president at that time, when he got wind of the impending crackdown.

When Bush learned of it, he wanted to speak to his good friend, China’s paramount leader Deng Xioping, by telephone but the Chinese strongman refused to accept the call.

“When we felt that the crackdown was coming, I should have picked up the phone and called the president and told him. I should not have relied on the chain of command to get the message to him,” Lilley said, when asked whether he would have done things differently in retrospect.

“I don’t know whether it would have made any difference because he (Bush) tried to get through to Deng on the phone and they wouldn’t respond to him.

The United States was under pressure to cut off diplomatic relations with Beijing following the massacre, which was condemned worldwide.

“In retrospect, I am extremely grateful to George H. W. Bush and my own boss (Lilley) for holding the course and keeping the door open when it was hard to do so,” Huskey said.

The Tiananmen incident, he said, opened the eyes of the Deng-led Chinese government, which later launched a globally-acclaimed reform program.

“It may be two steps forward, one step backward but reform has never stopped, never slowed down since."

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