Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and former Beijing correspondent for the paper. 

 

 

Yesterday The New York Times published what purported to be an account by a witness of troops attacking students on Tiananmen Square in Beijing before dawn on June 4. The article was published by the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po(文匯報), which said it was the account of an unidentified 20-year-old Chinese student, and was republished in The San Francisco Examiner. Nicholas D. Kristof, the Beijing correspondent of The Times, reports that the article does not correspond with accounts of other witnesses on important points.

This reporter and many other witnesses saw troops shoot and kill people before dawn on June 4. But these shootings occurred in a different place from that described in the Wen Wei Po article and in somewhat different circumstances.

The question of where the shootings occurred has significance because of the Government's claim that no one was shot on Tiananmen Square. State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the square shortly after dawn as proof that they were not slaughtered. The disagreement is partly one about definition of the square.

The central scene in the article is of troops beating and machine-gunning unarmed students clustered around the Monument to the People's Heroes in the middle of Tiananmen Square. Several other witnesses, both Chinese and foreign, say this did not happen.

Troops fired on civilians in many parts of the city, but the shooting was concentrated along the Avenue of Eternal Peace, or Changan Avenue(長安街), which runs on the north side of the square. There was heavy shooting in the Muxidi (木樨地)district to the west of Tiananmen Square, and there were also many casualties along the Avenue of Eternal Peace to the immediate east of the square, as well as on streets to the south of the square.

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