media - Counting the dead
Tiananmen in 1989

The gruesome developments in Uzbekistan have put some of the reporting newswires into an overdrive, when looking for a comparison. The number of people shot by the army are between 500-700 according the the current estimates. What caught my attention was this sentence in a dispatch by AP.

If the reports of more than 700 deaths since Friday hold true and if Uzbek forces were behind the killing - as most reports indicate, it would be some of the worst state-inspired bloodshed since the massacre of protesters in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

My internal alarm went off. "Since the massacre". How many people were again killed during these dreadful days in Beijing? I know the the original accounts of thousands of killed went later down to hundreds, but how many again? Fortunately, Wikipedia has many of those answers:

Foreign reporters that witnessed the incident have claimed that at least 3000 people had died. Some lists of the casualties were created from underground sources with numbers as high as 5000. However, it is important to note that NSA documents declassified in 1999 show that their intelligence gives an estimate of 180-500 killed. Thus the various Chinese government estimates are in agreement with the official US government estimate. As the PLA is made up largely of draftees, the soldiers killed or injured are very much victims of this tragedy too.

So, the drama in Uzbekistan 'beats' Tiananmen. If the figures are right, of course. The figures by foreign reporters at the time have been too high, told also eye witness John Gittings of The Guardian, when I interviewed him for my book. (Here in German). "We mainly repeated the rumors we got from Hong Kong," he said. He changed his view on the whole issue, but newswires still have a hard time to get it straight.

Books on Tiananmen Square