2014-12-12
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A worker cleans up the Occupy Central camp outside the Legislative Council in Hong Kong, Dec. 12, 2014.
RFA
Smaller protests continued on Friday outside Hong Kong’s legislature and in a busy shopping district after some 7,000 police moved in to clear the last protesters from the main Occupy Central on Thursday, arresting 247 people.
A handful of protesters remained encamped outside the semiautonomous Chinese city’s Legislative Council (LegCo) in a bid to keep up the pressure on the government for fully democratic elections in 2017 and beyond.
LegCo chairman and pro-Beijing politician Jasper Tsang said he hadn’t ruled out asking for police assistance to remove the protesters.
“The area in question…isn’t a public space, and if people begin any sort of movement there, the secretariat will try to use their own efforts…to get them to see sense and move on of their own accord,” Tsang told reporters.
“That way, we won’t have to ask the police to help us.”
Protesters vowed to stay until moved on, however.
“We are gathered here…[because] the Basic Law gives citizens the right of assembly and protest,” one protester outside LegCo told RFA, in a reference to the former British colony’s mini-constitution.
But he said he had no plans to resist if police tried to remove the group.
‘We won’t leave’
A second protester surnamed Tsik said protesters planned to stay until LegCo begins its session next week.
“We won’t leave, unless the police come and force us to leave,” he said. “But we will want to know what law we are supposed to have broken.”
“Don’t we have the right to make our views heard, to demonstrate?”
He said the Occupy movement will continue in spite of the loss of its main encampment near government headquarters in Admiralty district after Thursday’s clearance operation.
“All we want are fully democratic elections,” Tsik said.
Student leaders of the civil disobedience movement, which blocked key highways and intersections in Hong Kong for more than two months, said they would likely switch tactics and avoid blocking roads in future protests in the densely populated and congested city.
“Now that the road occupation has ended, students will now go into the community to publicize their ideas,” Joshua Wong, who heads the academic activist group Scholarism, told government broadcaster RTHK.
“If there are occupy movements or other kinds of civil disobedience campaigns in the future, we won’t allow them to drag on, but instead employ flexible strategies,” said Wong, who has been criticized for his absence from the clearance when four other student leaders were arrested.
