HONG KONG — Thousands of protesters rallied in Hong Kong on Sunday against what they say is police brutality, a day after officers used tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets against demonstrators and briefly clashed with them in a train station.
The police placed restrictions on organizers’ plans for Sunday, approving a meeting in a square in the Central district, but rejecting a request to march to the western part of Hong Kong Island, citing fears of violence.
A police ban did not stop a similar march on Saturday, and protesters are likely to leave the approved area on Sunday again, creating the potential for further confrontations with the police.
The police said there were 13 arrests stemming from the Saturday protest on charges of unlawful assembly, possession of offensive weapons, assaulting a police officer and assault. Organizers also said the lead applicant for the march, Max Chung, had been arrested on charges of inciting others to take part in an unlawful assembly.
The last stop of the banned march on Sunday is close to the Chinese government’s office in Hong Kong, known as the liaison office, which was defaced a week ago by protesters who painted slogans and threw eggs and ink at a crest of the Chinese state.
That vandalism set off days of vociferous denunciations from Chinese officials. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the State Council, China’s cabinet, said it “openly challenged the authority of the central government.”
On Wednesday, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of National Defense cited the damage to the liaison office when he warned that the military could be called upon to quell unrest in Hong Kong. The local government has repeatedly denied requesting assistance from the armed forces.
The liaison office has also been a target of growing anger after reports that one of its district officers gave a speech in the satellite town of Yuen Long urging residents to drive out protesters. Just over a week later, a group of men, including some accused of having connections with the gangs known as triads, assaulted protesters and others in a Yuen Long train station. At least 45 people were injured.
The liaison office has dismissed alleged links to the Yuen Long violence as “malicious rumors.” But it is facing increasing scrutiny over its role in Hong Kong, which is a semiautonomous part of China that has operated under a model of “one country, two systems” since its 1997 return from British control.
Before the protest on Sunday, workers erected barriers around the liaison office and glued down nearby pavement stones to prevent them from being dug up and hurled by protesters.
Prohibitions on protests are generally rare in Hong Kong, but they have been used with increasing frequency in recent days as the authorities try to contain a turbulent protest movement.
A handful of demonstrations this spring against a government plan, since shelved, that would allow extraditions to mainland China has grown into almost daily public displays of vitriol against the police and Hong Kong’s leaders. The demands include an expansion of direct elections and an independent investigation into police use of force.
Weeks of protests have also exacerbated divisions between government leaders and some of the rank-and-file police officers assigned to confrontational protests. Police associations denounced the No. 2 official in Hong Kong, Matthew Cheung, after he apologized on Friday for the authorities’ failure to stop the Yuen Long attack.
Source : Nytimes
