Soldiers on streets – with brooms
Chinese troops have emerged from a Hong Kong barracks to remove protester barricades in a rare appearance on the city’s streets that has spooked democracy activists and was slammed as potentially violating the law.
Student protesters holed up in the Polytechnic University, metres from another People’s Liberation Army barracks, said they feared the appearance of the military was ‘‘the first step’’.
Hours later riot police moved against the Polytechnic University campus, where students had been stockpiling petrol bombs and blockading the Hung Hom cross harbour tunnel for days.
Students threw petrol bombs metres from the PLA gates as riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets. People’s Liberation Army troops are rarely seen outside barracks in Hong Kong, and the threat of a Chinese military crackdown weighs heavily over the long-running protests, particularly after Chinese president Xi Jinping declared on Thursday it was Hong Kong’s ‘‘most pressing task’’ to restore order.
So the sight of dozens of Chinese military in khaki T-shirts running out of the barracks in Kowloon Tong near Baptist University and working to lift road blocks at 4pm on Saturday, local tme, prompted a news alert from the public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong.
Opposition party politicians demanded to know if Lam’s government had invoked Article 14 of the Garrison Law ‘‘which stipulates that the PLA must not interfere in local affairs unless it is asked by the Hong Kong government to help with disaster relief or maintaining public order’’.
The article has never been invoked since the handover to China in 1997. A Hong Kong government spokesman said it had not requested the PLA’s help and they had come out voluntarily.
Lawyer and author Antony Dapiran said the government’s comment that the PLA was on the street as volunteers was ‘‘nonsense’’. He said unless there was an exemption in the Garrison Law for volunteers, the move was illegal.
‘‘Removing protester barricades is not ’cleaning’, it is ’policing’,’’ he wrote on social media.
Saturday’s appearance seemed highly staged, with Chinese propaganda outlets including the People’s Daily, circulating video of the soldiers ‘‘removing bricks and other objects deliberately put on streets by rioters’’.
The Hong Kong government information office later distributed a press release from the PLA to media, which said officers and soldiers from the garrison had joined a clean up near the gate of the military camp. – Nine