“And this too shall pass.” This wise quotation, perhaps the wisest of all, is the thought Hong Kong should cling to as nervous residents cram into supermarkets to stock up for a feared siege and stay home, avoiding the most troubled areas and dooming some tourism and retail businesses to failure.
The Chief Executive in Council was right to use the Emergency Regulations Ordinance to ban face masks during protests in the hope it will help quell a political crisis gone so far Hong Kong has been changed forever. Face mask banning is justified because criminal demonstrators have hidden behind them to:
- Throw petrol bombs, acid and bricks at police officers, their fellow citizens, and attack them with metal bars, in the worst cases trying to seriously injure, even kill, the officers.
- Attack mainlanders for no other reason that they are mainlanders, which is reprehensible and unacceptable and close to incomprehensible.
- Deface and disrupt public transport systems — for the first time the entire MTR system was shut down last night at 10.30pm — which the bulk of our people depend upon.
The mask banning means that if you wear a face covering during an illegal assembly or on the scene of a riot you are liable to jail for one year and a fine of $25,000. If a police officer asks you to remove a mask and you refuse on conviction you may be imprisoned for six months and fined $10,000. In a press release yesterday the Government said the ban on facial covering “is urgently needed for police investigation and collection of evidence and for deterring violent or illegal behaviour”. Former Secretary for Security Regina Ip said a protester whose face is uncovered is an entirely different person.
The mask ban empowers the police, but may inflame the protests. It is to be hoped this escalation will be temporary and the troubles will gradually decline as they have in similar situations in other cities.
Meanwhile, police behaviour needs to improve too. It is wrong for the police to fail to display their identification numbers. Secretary for Security John Lee said at yesterday’s press conference, officers can be identified by a code on their helmets. But this is not enough. Their shoulder ID numbers should be showing too. Police hiding their identities arouses suspicion and feeds conspiracy theories.
The officer who shot the Indonesian reporter should, if investigation shows he fired a rubber bullet at an innocent girl doing her job from a few feet away as alleged, should be charged and sacked from the force. On the other hand, the policeman who shot the 18-year-old boy in the chest was justified in our view, based on the video evidence of the teenager and other violent offenders trying to corner the outnumbered officer and a colleague and beat them with bars.
The police also need to improve their tactics. A retired Senior Superintendent, writing in these columns, said the same groups of criminal protestors have been acting violently in district after district. He wrote by now they all should have been arrested. The bulk of the more than 2000 people detained have simply been released. The police need more effective tactics surrounding the worst offenders, arresting them and seeing they are charged. The justice system should be tougher, on conviction jailing the worst offenders for years.
Hong Kong has been brought to its knees. One of the greatest economies in the world and one of the finest places to live damn near wrecked by political fires that got out of control, fanned by young people who are right to be angry about the vast inequalities of Hong Kong, the way it is run for the benefit of a handful of super-rich families, the impossibility for even the middle classes to buy their own home, unsubtle pressure on the city’s freedoms from the Communist Party and the ineptitude of our Government. Meanwhile, some rabid Democrats* egg them on.
“And this too shall pass.” You read it here. But when? A despairing public wants to know.
* HONG KONG BUZZ supports universal suffrage for election of the Chief Executive and Legislative Councillors under ‘one country two systems’ within a federated China.
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