Tiananmen Mothers tell Beijing to remove Ma Lik who "has utterly gone under the baseline"
Hong Kong (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Pressure continues to mount against pro-Beijing National People’s Congress member Ma Lik, who denied that the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown was a massacre and said that the Territory’s voters should wait till 2022 for full universal suffrage. His doubts about the feasibility of some of the ways people were killed and how their bodies were disposed outraged many. Mr Ma, for instance, questioned the estimated death toll because of the time it would have taken to cremate them. He also suggested a pig could be thrown in front of a tank to see whether bodies could really be crushed into “minced meat.”
Yesterday, in a strongly worded statement, 127 family members of students and workers killed during the crackdown, said: “Mr Ma's remarks [. . .] twist and cover up the massacre [and are] a malicious humiliation of the dead and an unrestrained attack on their families. These remarks only show the person who made them has absolutely no humanity left in him and has utterly gone under the baseline of being a human being.”
The group demanded that the National People's Congress Standing Committee remove him as chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, a pro-Beijing party in Hong Kong.
The letter by the ‘Tiananmen Mothers’ is but one of several reactions the lawmaker sparked.
An online petition calling on Mr Ma to apologise was organised by social work students at the University of Hong Kong. So far it has gathered nearly 800 signatures.
Members of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China delivered a letter to Mr Ma's party headquarters, asking him to attend a public forum on May 27 to discuss “The Repression of the Anti-Corruption and Pro-Democracy Student Movement of 1989.”
In a statement, the Union of Hong Kong Catholic Organisations in Support of the Patriotic and Democratic Movement in China also called on Ma to resign, withdraw his remarks and make a public apology. It asked the central government to launch an inquiry.
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05/06/2017 09:20
