Hong Kong activists regroup to force police retreat in protest
hotspot
18 Oct Yahoo News
Hong Kong pro-democracy activists recaptured parts of a core protest
zone early on Saturday, defying riot police who had tried to disperse
them with pepper spray and baton charges.
About a thousand protesters, some wearing protective goggles and
helmets, helped to build fresh barricades from wooden fencing and other
materials in the gritty, densely populated Mong Kok district. Some
chanted “black police” after the police struck demonstrators’ umbrellas
with their small metal batons.
The area has become a flashpoint for ugly street brawls between
students and mobs, including triads, or local gangsters, intent on
breaking up the prolonged protests that pose one of the biggest
political challenges for China since the crushing of pro-democracy
demonstrations in Beijing in 1989.
Demonstrators chanting “open the road” tried late on Friday to break
through multiple police lines, using umbrellas as a shield from pepper
spray at a major traffic intersection.In the melee, police used batons
and scuffled violently with activists, but were eventually forced into a
partial retreat, less than 24 hours after re-opening most of the area to
traffic.”
Occupy Mong Kok!” a jubilant sea of several thousand people chanted
afterwards. “We want real universal suffrage!” Twenty-six people were
arrested and 15 officers were injured, the government said in a
statement.
“The police have no right to throw us out,” said Fish Tong, a
20-year-old student in the crowd. “We are just here to take back what is
supposed to belong to us.”
The renewed clashes came just hours after Hong Kong's pro-Beijing
leader Leung Chun-ying offered talks to student leaders next week in an
attempt to defuse weeks of protests that have paralyzed parts of the
city and grabbed global headlines amid scenes of violent clashes and
tear gas rising between some of the world's most valuable office
buildings.
The protesters are demanding free elections for their leader in 2017,
but China insists on screening candidates first and Leung reiterated
that the government would not compromise.” We will stay and fight till
the end,” Joshua Wong, a bookish 18-year-old whose fiery speeches have
helped drive the protests, told the seething crowds late on Friday while
standing atop a subway station exit.
Before dawn on Friday, hundreds of police had staged their biggest
raid yet on a pro-democracy protest camp, forcing out student-led
activists who had held the traffic intersection in one of their main
protest zones for more than three weeks.The raid was a gamble for the
28,000-strong police force who have come under criticism for aggressive
clearance operations with their tear gas and baton charges and for the
beating of a handcuffed protester on Wednesday.
What initially seemed to be a smooth clearance operation has now
sparked a bigger backlash.The escalation in the confrontation
illustrates the dilemma faced by police in striking a balance between
law enforcement and not inciting the protesters who have been out for
three weeks in three core shopping and government districts.
The protesters, led by a restive generation of students, have been
demanding China's Communist Party rulers live up to constitutional
promises to grant full democracy to the former British colony which
returned to Chinese rule in 1997. |