The thing to keep in mind is there were a massive amount of people occupying the square. The key point is, the army did not massacre those people. They left after negotiations with the army. There was no gunning down the occupiers or crushing them with tanks. One person picked up in CIA/SIS Operation Yellowbird said that the tanks ran over tents with people sleeping inside them in the square, but that’s frankly dumb, nobody would be sleeping. The others that were actually there noted that it was a largely peaceful dispersal if you compare it to what happened before with the protesters fighting the PLA on the streets of Beijing and the soldiers indiscriminately opening fire on entire apartment blocks because someone threw a rock.
Frankly the best evidence of it is Yellowbird itself, which smuggled more than 400 people out of China, many of them the leaders of the protest themselves. If they had kettled in and slaughtered the occupants, that wouldn’t have been possible.
The thing to keep in mind is there were a massive amount of people occupying the square. The key point is, the army did not massacre those people. They left after negotiations with the army. There was no gunning down the occupiers or crushing them with tanks. One person picked up in CIA/SIS Operation Yellowbird said that the tanks ran over tents with people sleeping inside them in the square, but that’s frankly dumb, nobody would be sleeping. The others that were actually there noted that it was a largely peaceful dispersal if you compare it to what happened before with the protesters fighting the PLA on the streets of Beijing and the soldiers indiscriminately opening fire on entire apartment blocks because someone threw a rock.
Frankly the best evidence of it is Yellowbird itself, which smuggled more than 400 people out of China, many of them the leaders of the protest themselves. If they had kettled in and slaughtered the occupants, that wouldn’t have been possible.