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 | Friday, April 28, 2000, updated at 20:58(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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Former Japanese Soldier to Disclose Outrages to ChinaA former Japanese soldier said April 28 that he will go to UN Commission On Human Rights to disclose outrages made by Japanese troops in China 63 years ago.Azuma Shiro, 88, was a soldier in the Japanese army that occupied Nanjing, then China's capital, in December of 1937. In the following weeks they killed more than 300,000 unarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians. He recorded the atrocities in a secret diary published in 1996. He was then sued by a former soldier named in it who was described as a war criminal. Earlier this year, Shiro was convicted by the Japanese Supreme Court. "I will not give up my struggle, I will continue to appeal for worldwide support for justice and truth through the UN," Shiro said today at a gathering sponsored by the China Human Right Development Foundation. "In the battlefield we took life lightly. Militarism taught us that being loyal was more important than our lives," he told some one hundred Chinese scholars, officials and journalists attending today's gathering. "Militarism turned us into devils," he said. In his diary, Shiro claimed that the man who sued him took part in war crimes, including one particularly horrific incident in which he forced a Chinese civilian into a sack soaked in petrol fastened with hand grenades. He then ignited the sack and kicked it into a pond in front of what was then Nanjing court. Historical documents has showed that the invasion of Japanese troops in 1937 injured and killed 35 million Chinese people. The Nanjing Massacre is believed to be one of the biggest tragedies and one of the most brute violations against human rights in history. "China demanded no compensations from Japan after winning the eight-year anti-invasion war, but Japan's right-wing forces tried again and again to deny historical facts," Shiro said. "Japan lost not only the war, but also its morality and justice." Huang Hua, former Vice Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs addressed today's gathering, saying that the support to Shiro's just action represents the will of not only the Chinese people, but also the Japanese people in Japan and the rest of the world. Huang also asked the UN Commission On Human Rights to open its door to Shiro.
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