Somebody’s son, somebody’s brother

A group of students held a pro-democracy sit-in in the square and over a few weeks were joined by other concerned citizens. They insisted all through that theirs was a non-violent demonstration and their discipline was exemplary. Faced with heavily armed soldiers, the demonstrators tried to appeal to the soldiers’ humanity.

We have all seen the film clip of a lone unarmed man stopping a column of tanks in a street near the square by standing in front of it. That shows the strength of the demonstrators’ non-violent discipline. It also proves the humanity of the tank drivers, who would not run down an unarmed man.

Then one unfortunate incident occurred, although the majority of the demonstrators did all they could to minimise its effects. Some of the demonstrators assaulted a soldier who had got separated from his comrades. Almost immediately, other demonstrators called a bus driver to bring his bus to the site of the attack. They bundled the soldier into the bus and took him away to safety.

So all went well, you might say. Unfortunately, government agents had copies of the same TV footage we all saw around the world as it happened. They were looking for anything they could use to justify a clamp-down on the demonstrators. They had brought a regiment of soldiers two or three weeks earlier from the Mongolian border to an isolated army camp just outside Beijing. Those soldiers had only heard what their commanders told them on the situation in the square. We can only guess at what led up to a tragedy, but the timing of the events make my guess plausible.

The day after the rescue of that soldier, this regiment were sent into Tienanmen Square and they immediately advanced on the demonstrators and started shooting. We don’t know how many were killed, but most estimates put the number in the hundreds.

I asked myself how anyone can persuade any human being to kill innocent people like that. The likeliest answer is that some top people showed those soldiers, in their isolated camp, a video clip of the attack on that lone soldier, probably cut short so that the soldiers did not know that the “victim” was safe, and had been rescued, not by his military comrades, but by demonstrators.

Using this short film clip, some senior army officer presumably told them “You can see all hell has broken out in that square; go in and sort it out”. If you want soldiers to massacre peaceful civilians, it’s much easier if you can persuade them that those civilians aren’t peaceful at all, but just waiting for a chance to grab more soldiers and tear them apart, limb from limb. The rest is history.

In the difficult months ahead, we will need to encourage our soldiers to behave like that tank driver, not like the regiment who shot hundreds of peaceful people in Tienanmen Square. That means we may need to keep cool in the face of brutal threats. We will need to look for every opportunity to inform every soldier in the army on what is really going on.

If we can remember that, however brutal a soldier may look, he is somebody’s son, somebody’s brother and quite likely somebody’s husband it will be easier to persuade him that his parents, his sister, his wife could easily be in any crowd he is sent to control. Or to remind him that they are all somebody’s parents, sister or wife.