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Letters | Hong Kong protests: This is the house that Carrie Lam built and it’s burning itself down
- By turning the police force into a guerilla army while ignoring the people’s demands, the government is only making the Hong Kong crisis steadily burn on
The Hong Kong government under Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor has lit the fire, the protesters are stoking it and the police are being used (and abused) to put it out, or at least make sure it remains a controlled fire (“Resign? Carrie Lam won’t get off that easy”, November 6).
Lam’s government has abused the role of the Hong Kong police and corrupted its mission, changing it from “serve and protect” to “attack and deny”.
We witness weekend after weekend of violent protests met with increasingly violent police responses, but just short of lethal force. In most countries, those attacking police with weapons or throwing petrol bombs would be met by live fire – but this does not happen as a matter of course in Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong government must be fully aware that they cannot withstand the backlash from creating a martyr out of a teenage protester. Only a government without a mandate derived from the people would be so frightened of its own citizens as to suspend the rule of law out of fear of stirring further dissent it cannot control.
The government, in a desperate move, has resorted to subverting the role of the police, turning them into its own guerilla army to intimidate those who object to its governance. The stakes are being raised by the government’s failure to address people’s desires – the protesters have become emboldened and the police more brutal.
Our government now rules by fiat and force, and has forever destroyed the legitimacy of the police force by co-opting law enforcers as gangsters.
The government’s deliberate show of a “restrained” response, to behaviours that elsewhere would command the use of lethal force, can only be a ploy to garner sympathy and support at home and abroad. Creating martyrs would run the risk of stirring up a level of opposition they cannot control and create a situation inviting the deployment of the Chinese army.
But now that we live in a tinderbox, we are all burning, as is life as we have known it in Hong Kong. A city that must protect itself from its own people is lost.
This is the house that Lam built, where the heads of the household do not see, hear or speak to its inhabitants and will instead let it burn to the ground.
Catherine LaJeunesse, Sai Kung
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: This is the house that Lam built, and right now she’s letting it burn to the ground
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