Scuffling broke out again Saturday in the Mong Kok district of Hong Kong between pro-democracy protesters, at right, and men assailing their encampment in Nathan Road, a major thoroughfare. Nineteen men were arrested in connection with an attack Friday night on protesters in the same neighborhood.
CARLOS BARRIA / REUTERS
By AUSTIN RAMZY and CHRIS BUCKLEY
OCTOBER 4, 2014
HONG KONG — Volatile political rifts exposed by pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong resurfaced on Saturday in one of the city’s most crowded neighborhoods, a day after protest camps came under attack by men who the police believe had underworld ties.
The police, the government and pro-democracy leaders had all urged crowds to leave two protest sites in the city after scuffles and fighting broke out on Friday between supporters and opponents of the democracy protests, which have become known as the Occupy movement. But confrontation returned to the Mong Kok area on Saturday, evidence that a week after the protests began, the conflict has slipped beyond the grip of leaders on either side.
“It’s very difficult to control, because it’s not really organized,” Jean-Philippe Béja, a senior researcher at the French Center for Studies on Modern and Contemporary China in Hong Kong, said in an interview in Mong Kok as he observed the confrontation. “It’s very spontaneous.”
Instead of leaving Mong Kok overnight, protesters, mostly students, repaired and expanded their encampment Saturday on Nathan Road, a major avenue usually crammed during the weekend with tourists and shoppers, many from mainland China. The protesters suspended tarpaulins and signs over the road and built large barriers to the south of their main tent.
Walter Tsang, a 19-year-old student at City University of Hong Kong, spoke with the mixture of fear and determination voiced by many of the remaining demonstrators, who are a dwindling but still determined force in the city.
“I can’t say I’m not worried at all. But some things are more important,” Mr. Tsang said as he stood arm and arm with fellow protesters in front of one of the Mong Kok street barricades, wearing a yellow helmet. “We are causing some problems. But it’s a short-term sacrifice for a more democratic society.”
But by midday, the barricade was again besieged by a group of middle-aged men, who screamed at the protesters to leave and ripped away their signs and makeshift traffic barriers. The police were at first nowhere to be seen while the two sides clashed. Then about a dozen officers arrived and took away one man, who was wearing a blue shirt, the color adopted by some opponents of the yellow-sporting democracy demonstrators.
Peter Mok, 65, who was among a crowd denouncing the demonstrators, said the sit-ins were causing chaos. “They are going too far,” he said. “It’s been seven days now. How much have the Hong Kong people lost?”
The protests demanding a fully democratic vote for the city’s leader erupted last weekend, then expanded after the police’s use of tear gas and pepper spray spurred public sympathy for the demonstrators. The protesters, mostly young, occupied major roads with sit-in camps that remained mostly peaceful until Friday, when gangs of men assaulted two of them, in Mong Kok and another crowded district, Causeway Bay. Some local residents, weary of the disruption from the week-old occupation, cheered on the attacks.
The protests have demanded that the city’s leader, or chief executive, be chosen through a freely democratic vote. But the Chinese government has insisted that Hong Kong accept far more restricted electoral changes, which would allow the city’s voters to choose only among two or three candidates who have the blessing of Beijing and its loyalists.
Now, however, the political divisions besetting Hong Kong have been intensified by disagreement over whether the protesters or the government bears responsibility for the street mayhem on Friday.
On Saturday morning, the Hong Kong police said 19 men, including eight linked to organized crime gangs, or triads, had been arrested over the violence in Mong Kok. The police also said at least 18 people had been injured in the violence, including six police officers.
The attacks on Friday incensed pro-democracy politicians and protest leaders, who claimed that the assaults, and what appeared to be a delayed police reaction, bore the hallmarks of acts by triads that were condoned by the authorities, or at least made worse by a lax official response.
“They vandalized and attacked peaceful occupiers,” Alan Leong, the leader of the Civic Party, one of the city’s pro-democracy parties, said of the attackers at a news conference Saturday. The democrats, he said, were asking to meet with local officials to “manifest our strongest condemnation, and want them to make sure that what happened would not repeat today or in the future.”
Hong Kong’s secretary for security, Lai Tung-kwok, adamantly denied that the attacks had been condoned by the police.
“I am aware of people’s allegation that the government tolerated triad societies, or even work with them,” Mr. Lai said at a news conference. “These accusations are completely fabricated and unjustified. They are also very unreasonable and unfair to the dutiful, diligent police officers.”
At the biggest protest site, in Admiralty, an area dominated by corporate offices and government buildings, the protesters were not attacked on Friday. Crowds there that had numbered in the tens of thousands earlier in the week appeared smaller and subdued on Saturday, although a rally was scheduled for the evening that could swell their numbers.
Michael DeGolyer, a longtime expert on local politics at Hong Kong Baptist University, warned Saturday that worse violence could yet come at the hands of triads paid protection money by small businesses in areas like Mong Kok.
“I am sure in that area the shopkeepers are paying protection, and the shopkeepers are saying, ‘Why are we paying you if you’re not giving us protection’ ” from the disruption to business caused by the protests, Mr. DeGolyer said Saturday.
“I expect in a couple days it’ll move to flying squads with bats and choppers,” he said, referring to small groups of gangsters who come and go quickly in stolen cars or on motorcycles, armed with baseball bats and meat cleavers. “Then you can start literally getting blood on the streets.”
The Chinese Communist Party sees the protesters as a subversive threat to their control over the city, a former British colony that since its return to Beijing’s sovereignty in 1997 has preserved freedoms and legal protections not enjoyed by mainland Chinese citizens.
On Saturday, People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper, suggested that the Occupy movement was part of an effort to subvert its power across all of China, and likened the movement to a “color revolution,” the party’s phrase for anti-Communist insurrections across the former Soviet bloc and beyond.
“As for the ideas of a very small minority of people to use Hong Kong to create a ‘color revolution’ in mainland China, that is even more of a daydream,” the paper said in a commentary on its front page.
Keith Bradsher, Alan Wong and Edward Wong contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Didi Kirsten Tatlow from Beijing.
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