Zhao Ziang

Zhao Ziyang (d. 2005) was a top Chinese leader who was deposed over his sympathy with 1989 protests by students  (in Pashto, taliban, albeit with a small ‘t‘) who were massacred in the bloody 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, that he tried to prevent.

Reflecting on his recently published memoir, as reported in the Bangkok Post of 14 May 2009, Philip J. Cunnigham, who was a witness to those events, has written a sensitive and thoughtful piece, in Informed Comment, on “the degree of culpability, if any, that 1989 Beijing student activists bear for the tragic outcome of an otherwise uplifting and peaceful movement.” (See also the review in the Independent of 15 May 2009.)

Philip Cunnigham’s Account

As Cunningham, a free-lance writer and political commentator, tells it (emphasis added):

[BEGIN QUOTE]  … The most effective obfuscations [by the Chinese authorities] serve to divert attention elsewhere, but the one that is most distressing to me as a witness and participant is “blame it on the students“.

… The students were indeed imperfect, and in unwitting ways mimicked the best and worst tendencies of their communist elders. But they did not carry out the bloody crackdown, rather certain units of the PLA [China's army, the People's Liberation Army] did…

…  Yet despite crowds a million strong and an abundance of over-the-top rhetoric, the hunger strike ended quietly without a single casualty.

For 20 years the official voice of China, and to a surprising extent, many of its foreign interlocutors, has found it expedient to sweep the basic facts of the crackdown under the carpet, by quibbling about details, cooking up various arguments about the overarching need for stability, or by giving it the silent treatment, in counterpoint to readily available lurid descriptions of what rascals and opportunists the student activists were.

To blame it on the students, as many young people in China do today, is to fall for a propaganda line, to take one’s eye off the ball.

The so-called student leaders of 1989, crowd facilitators at best, not unlike the enthusiastic student volunteers who helped manage crowds at the Olympics last year, were at once hailed as abstract heroes in a way they were decidedly undeserving of, and then later cast as villains, in a way they were also decidedly undeserving of.

As best I could judge, from studying the crowd every day for a month on the square, is that the ever-shifting crowd largely organised and ordered itself, at once subject to the vagaries of mass psychology and the kinetics of crowd dynamics, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Countless individuals poured into Beijing’s most central plaza to create a vivid living tableau with their passion and dedication to peaceful change; they became part of a whole beyond individual control yet coherent and compelling.

While the possibility that there were indeed “black hands” cannot be dismissed, whether it be communist party factions trying to play the student movement to their own political advantage, or the question of clandestine support lent to protesters by foreign embassies, or even the tango between Western media and the protesters, the revelation of influences and interactions is not the same as culpability.

The only real crime was demanding a military solution and then turning the guns on unarmed civilians. (Emphases added.)

Comments

These observations merit greater attention in evaluating the consensus that seems to have been reached in going after students of vernacular Arabic language schools (madrasas), whose moral disquiet at the venality and corruption of government and society, is somehow seen as being linked to terrorism, extremism, etc.

Kent State Massacre in USA, 4 May 1970

Students (taliban, in Pashto, tulaba in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu), everywhere, are one of the last repositories of a society’s idealism. In October 1956, growing student protests culminated in the démarche of 23 October that sparked the Hungarian Revolution. In August 1967, the students in Chile led a national revolution. In May 1968, the students in France nearly brought down the De Gaulle government — and, incidentally, raised the hopes of many on the left who were inclined to see it as the prophecied revolution of the proletariat. In the 1960s and the 1970s, student protests in America defined a cultural epoch — against which the present can be seen as a reaction.

Wikipedia’s account of the historical background to the Kent State Massacre of May 1970 makes chilling reading (as you read, just substitute 2008 for 1968, Obama for Nixon, the torture memoranda for My Lai, Defence Secretary Gates’ proposals on troop strengths for the draft lottery, and Pakistan for Cambodia):

My Lai Massacre

[BEGIN QUOTE]  Richard Nixon had been elected President in 1968, promising to end the Vietnam War. In November 1969, the My Lai Massacre was exposed, prompting widespread outrage around the world and leading to increased public opposition to the war. In addition, the following month saw the first draft lottery instituted since World War II. The war had appeared to be winding down throughout 1969, so the new invasion of Cambodia angered those who believed it only exacerbated the conflict. Many young people, including college students and teachers, were concerned about being drafted to fight in a war that they strongly opposed. The expansion of that war into another country appeared to them to have increased that risk, though the number of troops serving in Vietnam peaked in 1967, well before that time. Across the country, campuses erupted in protests in what Time called “a nation-wide student strike”, setting the stage for the events of early May 1970. [END QUOTE]

Although the early Afghan Taliban movement has been hijacked by numerous others, who are not even students, it is useful to remember that they too moved in to restore order after the US/Pakistan backed mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves after the departure of the Soviets.

While it is now forgotten, these early taliban, led by their teacher, a man with no military training whatsoever, Mulla Omar, were not “created by” the CIA or the ISI. Armed only with Islamic law, not as ideology, but as the only available commonly accepted reference point that they could use as an instrument to settle disputes, they started out by trying to bring peace among warring factions. It was only after their initial success that the two agencies jumped in to support them with weapons, training, and funds, which they did not decline.

This is fully consistent with the statement by Zabiullah Mujahid, said to be a spokesmen for Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who informed Nic Robertson in a recent interview (see earlier post) that:

[BEGIN QUOTE]  I want to tell you clearly when we rose up in Afghanistan in 1994 we did not rise up to be the government … you know the mujahadeen government … and when the Russians flee Afghanistan. But the mujahadeen were fighting each other, the people were being killed. So we rose up not for power and government we rose up just … to force Islamic law and to help our widows in Afghanistan. We did jihad for the Islamic government. And No. 2 I want to tell you clearly our Afghan nation is held hostage by foreign troops. We don’t fight the government. We fight for the sake of our country, for the sake of our nation, for Islamic law and also to rescue our country from the crusader. [END QUOTE] (Emphasis added.)

Mulla Omar

This is also what the then Director-General, ISI, General Mahmood Ahmad, tried to tell George Tenet and his deputies at the CIA (Bob Woodward, Bush at War, 2002, p. 47): “that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was religious, a man of humanitarian instincts, not a man of violence, but one who had suffered greatly under the Afghan warlords,” when Deputy Director of Operations, CIA, Jim Pavitt rudely cut him off and refused to listen.

As for the Soviets, in a remarkably balanced account (Letter from Afghanistan: Across the Divide, New Yorker, 15 May 2000), Walter T. Vollman had written:

[BEGIN QUOTE]  The deeds of the Soviets were unspeakable… They raped women in the name of emancipating them. In defense of national security, they machine gunned illiterate peasants who couldn’t have found Moscow on a map. They burned people alive and drowned them in excrement. They razed villages, slaughtered live-stock, and destroyed harvests. They even scattered mines disguised as toys to lure people to their maiming.” [END QUOTE]