Around 48,000 people attended a candlelight
vigil in Hong Kong Wednesday to mark the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen
Square massacre in Beijing, organizers claimed.
However, in a numbers game as traditional as the vigil itself, police claimed
only around 16,000 people went to Victoria Park for the only public memorial on
Chinese soil of the 1989 killings.
Organizers said their estimate of around 48,000 people joined the annual vigil,
basing their estimate on the number of candles handed out as people arrived.
Independent observers put the figure at between 20,000 and 30,000, lower than
last year's turnout but higher than many people expected in the year China hosts the Olympics.
The event included a one-minute silence for victims of last month's Sichuan earthquake, another event that commentators expected might dull people's appetite
for anti-China protests.
The theme for Wednesday's event mimicked the slogan for the forthcoming Beijing
Olympics "One World, One Dream" with the message: "One world -
universal human rights. One dream - rectify the June 4 verdict."
Under drizzly skies, the huge crowd including many families and children
thousands held aloft candles in a peaceful and poignant memorial that annually
confounds predictions of low turnouts.
Up to 70,000 people have attended the vigil in previous years and turnouts have
always been in the tens of thousands by organizers estimates.
People in Hong Kong were horrified by the events of June 4, 1989, when troops
killed hundreds and possibly thousands of student protestors in the heart of
the Chinese capital.
The massacre had 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 Hong Kong is now part of China, the annual Tiananmen memorial is
allowed because of Hong Kong's status as a special administrative region where
citizens have freedom of speech, dpa
reported.
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