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As Hong Kong Occupy Protests Wind Down, Many Make One Last Visit | As Hong Kong Occupy Protests Wind Down, Many Make One Last Visit |
(about 2 hours later) | |
HONG KONG — Thousands of protesters thronged the political heart of Hong Kong on Wednesday night, giving a defiant and tearful farewell to a pro-democracy camp that the police have warned they will start demolishing Thursday morning, effectively ending 10 weeks of street occupations that have laid bare divisions over the city’s political future. | |
Attendance has shrunk at the protest camp in the Admiralty neighborhood, next to the city government’s offices, reduced by exhaustion, cold and disappointment. But thousands returned on a cool night to see the camp, which sprang up in late September as part of a demand for democratic elections for the city’s leader. | |
“The police can clear our protest site, but they can never extinguish our desire for democracy in our hearts,” said a woman in her 20s who climbed onto a makeshift podium in the middle of the camp, where many huddled to listen to valedictory speeches and roared approval at her words. | |
The turnout in Admiralty was one of the largest since the early days of the protests. Families queued up to collect bracelets and other mementos made by volunteers; other people took pictures of themselves and the posters and art that have covered the camp. Many signed banners demanding democracy and left sticky notes on what has been called the Lennon Wall, a side of a government building facing the protest camp that is covered in the notes. | |
Many protesters, resigned to the police clearance, were busy packing away tents and other supplies. Some vowed to peacefully resist, and others may forcefully oppose any move to demolish the camp. | |
“We know it’s nearly time to leave, but that doesn’t mean the struggle is over,” said Ng Kai-man, 17, who quit her job as a waitress to plunge full time into the protests. She sat on a chair with a sign that declared, “We’ll be back.” | |
“That means, ‘If you clear us, we’ll come back sooner or later somewhere,'” said Ms. Ng, looking at the sign. “I think we have developed a spirit of solidarity. It’s a big gang of people who have learned disobedience.” | |
Whatever happens, the protests have exposed and widened political fissures, Hong Kong residents say. The government and its supporters have accused the protesters of reckless naïveté and of serving as tools of Western-sponsored subversion. Many protesters have said the Chinese government’s plans for election changes in the city would leave Beijing with the power to choose winners. | |
At supply stations for the protesters, volunteers packed away safety masks, goggles and helmets stockpiled for possible confrontations with the police. Student leaders have said they do not want a repeat of the violence that erupted after the police demolished the other main protest camp, in the Mong Kok neighborhood, on Nov. 25. | |
Alex Chow, a leader of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, a university group at the forefront of the protests, said the protesters should neither “resist nor retaliate” during the police clearance. | |
“We will stay here until the end, even risking arrests, to tell the government we are not the rioters they say and we bear the responsibility of our actions,” Mr. Chow told the crowd. “The movement will go on in other forms of disobedience.” | |
But in recent weeks, the protesters have become increasingly divided between those who favor peaceful resistance and a minority who argue that only escalating the protests, and risking confrontation, can win concessions. A few protesters have vowed to vigorously resist the police in Admiralty, said Fernando Cheung Chiu-hung, a democratic member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, who has sought to defuse confrontations during the protests. | |
“If you have one incident, or one person triggering the offensive from our side, the police could respond with tens or hundreds of times more forcefully,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. | |
The Admiralty protest camp sprang up on Sept. 28, when thousands of protesters seized the streets after a bungled police effort to disperse students with tear gas and pepper spray. The police hope that a tightly choreographed operation to clear it will avoid such misfires. | |
The operation will proceed in steps, beginning with the clearance of an area covered by a court injunction, said a police official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. | |
After that, the police will move on to the main camp, first warning people to leave, then sealing off the area so residents cannot enter, and then removing protesters and their tents. The effort could take much of the day, if not longer, and the police are prepared to make many arrests, the official said. Already, 655 people have been arrested since the protests began, he said. | |
Carrie Lam, the chief secretary of the Hong Kong government and its second-ranking official, said 3,000 employees at the government offices near Admiralty would not go to work on Thursday, and urged people to stay away from the area. | |
“Once the police operation is underway, and knowing very well that there are some radical elements amongst the protesters, confrontation might become inevitable,” she said in an email. | |
But Steve Vickers, a senior Hong Kong police official before the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, predicted that resistance would be limited to a few protesters. “There will be a small, very hard core who will resist,” Mr. Vickers said in an interview. “The bulk of them will probably melt away after some screaming and shouting.” |