Class boycott of university and secondary school students initiated by the Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism since 22nd September for genuine universal suffrage escalated to the full-blown Occupy Movement on 26th September evening. Attempts of the government and police to evict protestors with violence on 28th September just triggered another wave of ever-expanding autonomous occupation across the territory.
On 2nd October evening, the SAR government eventually responded to the Occupy Movement and the open letter of HKFS by sending the Chief Secretary of Administration Carrie Lam to meet with HKFS. It is the first concession of the SAR government since the Occupy Movement started, and it is largely because of the anger of Hong Kong citizens against the earlier violent eviction by the police. In the meantime, Hong Kong citizens began occupying areas in the vicinity of Chief Executive Office, which is the political centre of the SAR government. Authorities who wished to suppress the movement with violence are obvious dragged into a prolonged battle by the people. Although we do not have high expectation on the negotiation with the government, such progress shows that our effort in the past 11 days is definitely not in vain.
Nevertheless, the SAR government is far from sincere to negotiate with the people. Today the peaceful Occupy Movement has been severely threatened by hooligans with destruction to the occupied areas and physical violence against participants, while the SAR government and the police turned a blind eye to the chaos. This is unacceptable and has to be strongly condemned. After the violent clashes in the occupied areas, HKFS has announced the suspension of talks with the government. Authorities manage to suppress the people with legitimate power of the police and huge amount of money, but what we possess are merely flesh and solidarity. We need more people coming out to support the Occupy Movement, urge the government to bring the suppression to an end and enforce universal suffrage.
We hereby urge the SAR and central government to:
1. Stop any kind of suppression to the Occupy Movement, which includes illegitimate force by the police and driving other social groups to disturb the occupying crowd with violence.
2. Make the Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying be held responsible for the violent eviction and resign.
3. Withdraw the NPC resolution on political reform.
4. Implement genuine universal suffrage with civil nomination and abolish functional constituencies of the Legislative Council.
5. Repeal all political prosecutions.
We also call upon our fellow Hong Kong citizens to:
1. Continue participating in the Occupy Movement and pressurise the government with civil disobedience in order to fight for genuine universal suffrage.
2. Convince as many people in your community as possible to join the democratic movement, so as to strength public pressure for universal suffrage and the resignation of Leung Chun-ying.
Left 21
4th October, 2014