Officials Try to Cover up Deaths in China

By Peter Enav

Beijing - Officials were reportedly trying to cover up police shootings of protesters in a Chinese village by offering money for victims' bodies, and villagers said they were blocked from leaving the area on Saturday, four days after the incident.

Police were refusing to return other bodies to relatives, a villager said.

Residents say police killed up to 20 people Tuesday when they fired on demonstrators in Guangdong province's Dongzhou village, north-east of Hong Kong.

Another villager said dozens of others were still missing.

The villagers had been protesting allegedly inadequate payments for land taken for a power plant.

After Tuesday's incident, villagers said a tense standoff prevailed as thousands of troops patrolled the perimeter, and frightened villagers either hunkered in their homes or argued with police over relatives' bodies.

If 20 are confirmed dead, it would be Chinese security forces' deadliest known use of force against civilians since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989, and underscore rising tension in rural China over land seizures for projects like factories, power plants and shopping malls.

Farmers often say they're paid too little. Some accuse officials of stealing compensation money.

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper reported that Dongzhou villagers said authorities were trying to cover up the killings by offering families money for the bodies.

"They offered us a sum but said we would have to give up the body," an unidentified relative of one slain villager, 31-year-old Wei Jin, was quoted as saying. "We are not going to agree."

Police with villagers' photos were trying to find people linked to the protest, the Post said, citing residents.

A village woman said by telephone that police were holding some bodies, refusing relatives' pleas to return them.

The woman, who refused to give her name for fear of retribution, said between 10 and 20 people were dead.

A village man, who gave only his surname, Chong, put the number at between 15 and 20. He said many of the victims' families had gone to a local police station seeking compensation, but officers had turned them back.

Chong said dozens of people were still missing, but didn't elaborate.

Telephone calls to the local police station went unanswered.

Also Saturday, villagers claimed authorities were refusing to let them leave.

"Many police are surrounding the village today," said one woman, who refused to give her name for fear of official retaliation. "We are not permitted to leave the village."

Such conflicts have alarmed communist leaders, who are promising to spend more to raise living standards in the poor countryside, home to about 800 million people.

By the government's count, China had more than 70 000 such conflicts last year. Protests are growing more violent, with injuries on both sides.

A 14-year-old Dongzhou girl said a local official on Friday called the shootings "a misunderstanding."

"He said (he) hoped it wouldn't become a big issue," the girl said by phone. "This is not a misunderstanding. I am afraid. I haven't been to school in days."

"Come save us," she said.

Like most of the villagers she didn't wanted to be identified, fearing official retaliation.

Other villagers said by phone there were at least two deaths and as many as 10, with at least 20 others wounded. Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper, citing villagers, said on Saturday that 20 were killed.

Hong Kong, a former British colony, reverted to Chinese control in 1997 but retains much press freedom. Its proximity to Dongzhou gives its reporters access to events there.

President Hu Jintao's government has made a priority of easing rural poverty and trying to spread prosperity to areas left behind by China's 25-year economic boom. But in many areas, families still live on the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a year.

Protests by farmers - the ruling party's traditional base - are a sensitive issue. The government bars mentioning them in the mainland's entirely state-controlled media, where newspapers and TV have not reported on the Dongzhou incident.

On Friday,villagers described chaos during the protest.

They said police fired into a crowd of several thousand, killing several, mostly men.

On Saturday, another Hong Kong newspaper, the Ming Pao Daily News, said the Communist Party secretary for Guangdong, Zhang Dejiang, had visited Dongzhou. Zhang is a member of the party's policymaking Politburo.

CFPA: And still the oppression, murders and persecutions continue in Red China. And there will be no stop to these atrocities until the Communists fall and one day they will indeed fall just as they fell in Russia and one day in Cuba. It is in a man's nature that will to be free.

Posted: 10 Dec 2005