On 4 June 1989 the Chinese Communist Party cracked down heavily on the peaceful student demonstrations that were taking place in Tiananmen square to demand democracy and human rights.
Every year since then, whether from house arrest, jail or labour camp, Peace Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo has written a poem in honour of the victims of the deadly clampdown. Here's an example of his poetry:
Even if I know
death's a mysterious unknown
being alive, there's no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I'm still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning . . .
The founder of Charter 08, who is serving a 11-year jail term for his pro-democratic activism, published a book with these poems, Elegies of Fourth June. In it he expresses his human and political ideas, his sense of guilt for being unable to rescue the people killed or maimed in the repression, and his awareness of struggling against an "inhumane power".
In China this topic is taboo. Even people who still report serious injuries inflicted by the Chinese police are compelled to find excuses with their younger relatives if they ask them to explain the reasons why they are crippled. Even poets have to find a way out censorship.
Fourth June Elegies
anniversary of Tiananmen square
6 June 2013
Further insights in Gariwo
- Empty chair at Sakharov Prize ceremony [article]
- Cuba denies visa to dissident Farina
- Nobel Prize, empty chair for Liu Xiaobo [article]
- and the winners who did not receive the award
- Peace Nobel Prize, 20 Countries to boycott it [article]
- Beijing's closest allies to defect the ceremony
- Liu Xiaobo refuses China's offer [article]
- release in turn of "confession"
- Nobel Prize, empty chair for Liu Xiaobo [article]
- no one will represent the laureate
- Nobel Prize Laureates gather in Hiroshima [article]
- they call for the release of Liu and Suu Kyi
- New call from Vaclav Havel [article]
- for the release of Liu Xiaobo
- Tien An Men's Mother Courage arrested [article]
- the denounciation of Liu Xiaobo's wife
GULag
the Soviet labour camps
GULag is the acronym, introduced in 1930, of Gosudarstvennyj Upravlenje Lagerej (General Direction of the lagers).
In 1918, with the beginning of civil war, the Soviet system created a broad network of concentration camps for the political opponents of the newly created Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR). In 1919 the Soviets created the forced labour division. Forced labour was designed to socially redeem the detainees according to the very Soviet constitution. Besides the economic and punishment function, some lagers also worked in order to murder the deportees.
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Nadezhda Mandel'shtam
wife of poet Osip Mandel'shtam who devoted herself to preserving his works