HK set for fresh weekend protests

Hong Kong: Hong Kong police on Friday ended their two-week siege of a university campus that became a battleground with pro-democracy protesters, as activists vowed to hold fresh rallies and strikes in the coming days. Renewed calls to hit the streets came after Beijing and city leader Carrie Lam refused further political concessions despite a landslide victory for pro-democracy parties in local elections last weekend.
Sunday’s district council polls delivered a stinging rebuke to the financial hub’s pro-Beijing establishment and undermined their argument that a silent majority were tired of the nearly six months of increasingly violent protests.
They also ushered in a rare period of calm following weeks of spiralling unrest, with no clashes or tear gas battles between protesters and police for more than a week.
But the calm spell looks set to end as public anger grows once more over the lack of response to the election results by Beijing and Hong Kong’s leaders.
Online forums used to organise the mass movement have filled with calls for a major rally on Sunday and a strike on Monday targeting the morning commute. “If the communist Hong Kong government ignores public opinion, we will blossom everywhere for five or six days straight… We have to set a deadline,” read one post on the Reddit-like LIHKG forum, which got heavy approval from users.
The Sunday rally has received permission from authorities, but the fresh calls raise the spectre of a return to the kind of weekly political chaos that has battered Hong Kong for nearly six months and helped tip the city into recession. Hundreds of office workers held flashmob rallies during their Friday lunch break in multiple locations across the city. Riot police were deployed but the protesters dispersed peacefully.
Earlier in the day police said they were closing the book on one of the most violent chapters of the protest movement — the siege of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The sprawling red-brick campus became a battleground on November 17 between police and protesters armed with bows and arrows as well as Molotov cocktails.
The standoff settled into a tense stalemate during which hundreds fled the campus — some making daring escapes, others caught and beaten by officers during failed breakouts — leaving a dwindling core of holdouts surrounded by police cordons. After university leaders said almost all protesters had left, police teams moved in on Thursday to gather nearly 4,000 Molotov cocktails and other weapons left behind after the occupation.
On Friday, police removed the cordons surrounding the campus and departed, ending the 13-day siege. They said they had arrested a total of 1,377 people, including more than 800 who left the campus during the siege. (AFP)