Hong Kong on edge after airport clashes
Pro-Beijing leader warns ongoing protests have taken city on ‘path of no return’
Flights resumed at Hong Kong’s airport yesterday but there were no signs the protests that have rocked the city for the past 10 weeks are about to stop.
The two days of disruptions at the airport were marked by outbursts of violence that highlight the hardening positions of pro-democracy protesters and the authorities in the semiautonomous Chinese city.
About three dozen protesters remained camped in the airport’s arrivals area yesterday, a day after a mass demonstration and frenzied mob violence forced more than 100 flight cancellations. Additional identification checks were in place, but check-in counters were open and flights appeared to be operating normally.
Protesters spread pamphlets and posters across the floor in a section of the terminal but were not impeding travellers.
A statement from the airport’s management said it had obtained “an interim injunction to restrain persons from unlawfully and willfully obstructing or interfering” with airport operations. It said an area of the airport had been set aside for demonstrations, but no protests would be allowed outside the designated area.
Protesters had gathered at the airport on Friday but it was on Monday and Tuesday, after claims of heavyhanded tactics by the police elsewhere in the city over the weekend, that they made their presence felt the most.
Protesters mobbed two men at the airport they suspected of being spies from mainland China on Tuesday night. They were said to be holding identity cards showing they were police officers from mainland China.
Hong Kong police have admitted deploying officers disguised as antigovernment protesters during the unrest in the city.
Calm eventually returned, with most of the protesters leaving the airport hours after officers armed with pepper spray and swinging batons tried to enter the terminal, fighting with demonstrators who barricaded
entrances with luggage carts. Riot police clashed briefly with the demonstrators, who said they planned to return to the airport yesterday.
More than 100 flights were cancelled on Tuesday, the fifth consecutive day that protesters occupied the airport. Airlines were still working through a backlog of more than 200 flights from Monday when the airport announced in the afternoon that check-in processes would once again be suspended.
“Democracy is a good thing,” said signs that appeared to be aimed at mainland Chinese and foreign travellers. Many signs also contained apologies for the disruption to travellers: “We stand here to obstruct, only for one single reason. We love and care for Hong Kong. We hope you will understand. Sorry.”
The burst of violence included protesters beating up the two men they suspected of being undercover agents and came the same day Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing leader warned that the demonstrators had pushed events onto a “path of no return”, highlighting the hardening positions on both sides.
Police have acknowledged using “decoy” officers, and the violence followed weekend sightings of men dressed like demonstrators — in black and wearing face masks — appearing to arrest protesters.
In both instances, angry demonstrators pushed past people trying to hold them back and attacked the men, binding their wrists together and beating them to the ground. The two were eventually taken away by paramedics.
In one case, protesters detained a man they claimed to be an undercover police officer from mainland China,
pulled his identity documents from his wallet and encouraged journalists to photograph them. None of them showed that he was a police officer, though protesters claimed to have found his name on an online list of police officers in southern Guangdong province. The Associated Press could not independently verify the man’s identity.
Hours later, the protesters apprehended another man from mainland China. But they could not agree on who
they believed he was: Some said he was a gangster, others said he was a fake reporter, and still others said he was masquerading as a protester. As with the first man, some protesters tied his wrists together and poured water over his head. Airport security appeared unable to control the crowd.
Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a nationalistic Chinese tabloid, said the man was one of his reporters, Fu Guohao.
One protester used a US flag to beat
Fu as he lay on the floor in a fetal position. Other protesters and first aid workers attempted to stop some who tried to trample the man, while prodemocracy lawmaker Kwok Ka-ki crouched beside him and tried to calm the attackers. After a heated argument, protesters eventually allowed ambulance workers to take the man away on a stretcher.
Hong Kong police said they arrested five people for unlawful assembly, assaulting police officers and possessing weapons.
The airport disruptions escalated a summer of demonstrations aimed at what many Hong Kong residents see as an increasing erosion of the freedoms they were promised in 1997 when Communist Party-ruled mainland China took over what had been a British colony.
The early protests were in neighbourhoods near government offices.
However, the airport protest has had a direct impact on business travel and tourism. Analysts said it could make foreign investors think twice about Hong Kong, which has long prided itself as being Asia’s leading business city with convenient regional air links.
The central Government in Beijing has ominously characterised the current protest movement as something approaching “terrorism” that poses an “existential threat” to citizens.
While Beijing tends to define terrorism broadly, extending it especially to movements opposing government policies in minority regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang, its use of the term in relation to Hong Kong raised the prospect of greater violence and the possible suspension of legal rights for those detained.
The black-clad demonstrators have shown no sign of letting up on their campaign to force Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam’s Administration to respond to their demands, including that she step down and scrap proposed legislation under which some suspects could be sent to mainland China, where critics say they could face torture and unfair or politically charged trials.
Lam has rejected calls for dialogue, saying on Tuesday that the protesters were threatening to push their home into an “abyss”.
“After the violence has been stopped, and the chaotic situation that we are seeing could subside, I as the chief executive will be responsible to rebuild Hong Kong’s economy . . . to help Hong Kong to move on,” Lam said, without elaborating on what conciliatory steps she will take.
Meanwhile, paramilitary police were assembling across the border in the city of Shenzhen for exercises that some saw as a threat to increase force against the mostly young protesters who have turned out by the thousands in the past 10 weeks.
While China has yet to threaten using the Army — as it did against prodemocracy protesters in Beijing in 1989 — the Shenzhen exercises were a sign of its ability to crush the demonstrations, even at the cost to Hong Kong’s reputation as a safe haven for business and international exchange. Images on the internet showed armoured personnel carriers belonging to the People’s Armed Police driving in a convoy on Monday toward the site of the exercises.