OCT. 3, 2014
HONG KONG — Pro-democracy demonstrations in two of Hong Kong’s most crowded shopping districts came under attack on Friday from unidentified men who assaulted protesters and tore down their encampments, as the Beijing-backed government sent sharply conflicting messages about how to grapple with the unrest.
The protesters said the attackers were pro-government gangs, and several protest groups called off planned negotiations with the government in response. Whoever the culprits were, and by Saturday morning it was still unclear, they drew crowds of angry supporters, neighbors fed up with the inconvenience of the protests and happy to see gangs step in where the police refused to go.
A week after the protests began with a student rally, both the pro-democracy movement and the government were showing increasing signs of wear and desperation, each improvising its next moves like chess players in the face of dwindling options.
The protest movement, fighting to remain relevant, was suffering from internal discord and exhaustion even before the attacks began. The sit-ins on major roads across this financial capital still drew thousands on Friday night, but the crowds were diminished as the city returned to work after a two-day holiday.
The Beijing-backed government, meanwhile, continued to deploy one contradictory strategy after the next, sending in riot police officers with tear gas one day, pulling them back the next, refusing in principle to talk to protesters then calling for talks, announcing a plan to wait out the protests then appearing to sit on its hands as the protesters were attacked.
The new elements injected on Friday were the gangs of attackers, who entered the fray a day after the Communist Party warned that there would be “chaos” in Hong Kong if the protests did not end.
The skirmishing opened in the Mong Kok neighborhood, a hive of shops, apartment blocks and hotels that is one of the world’s mostly densely populated places, and quickly turned ugly. As skies darkened and rain fell, a couple of dozen men stormed a protest encampment in the middle of a major thoroughfare usually packed with traffic and shoppers.
They shoved and punched protesters, sometimes kicking them after they fell to the ground. Others grabbed the scaffolding of canopies and pulled them down until the tents collapsed in heaps. Residents said the police were outnumbered and slow to react, and hours passed before reinforcements arrived to protect the protesters from a jeering, hostile crowd.
Some threw cans and plastic bottles at the protesters; others spit at them. One protester was led away bleeding from his head as angry residents pressed forward, hurling insults and threats. Another was rushed out on a stretcher, an oxygen mask on his face. Several protesters said the attackers groped and sexually harassed female protesters, and Amnesty International alleged that police officers watched and did nothing.
As fistfights broke out, onlookers snapped photos and the crowds cheered. “I will use a knife!” one protester shouted at one of the men who attacked the encampment. “Get out of here!”
