Original title:“In the frontline of the umbrella revolution, we stopped delivering long umbrellas just so the police won't have the excuse to accuse peaceful students of attacking them. They did anyway.“
I have to tell the truth about what I witnessed on 9/28 (Sun), the dark day Hong Kong police fired tear gas into peaceful crowds of protestors.
We arrived at at Admiralty a little before 5 o'clock in the afternoon. As soon as we arrived, we heard people running and yelling up and down the street, asking for emergency support. They needed a lot of distilled water, umbrellas, goggles, face masks, plastic wrap, etc.. The protestors voluntarily and orderly formed two lines of "human chains", about 100 meters long each, and one after another we moved the requested supplies to the frontline.
We could hear people yelling at the front, over the Gloucester highway. When they screamed: Water! Goggles! Umbrellas! We took turn passing along the message all the way to the end of the line… And somehow these supplies flowed in like a stream - they were all collected from the increasing number of protesters coming to support the movement.
For over half an hour, the human chains transported an almost nonstop stream of supplies to the front. Suddenly the frontline yelled: Medic! We need Medic! Emergency! We screamed the message along with a worried sense of urgency. For a few minutes no one came, and all we could do was to man our posts dutifully, hoping for someone with medical knowhow to turn up. Then a few young faces ran passed us to the front. We all clapped in relief. Minutes later, the real medics arrived with their stretchers. We clapped even louder. We saw the first fallen protestor limped passed us, face bright red and in extreme pain. This young man, probably a college student, had been hit by the police's pepper stray. Again we clapped in support and gratitude.
But the struggle continued; the frontline kept on asking for more and more supplies, including medical supplies like saline solutions. I can verify that the frontline was merely holding ground - the front protestors did not try to push up the frontline, contrary to what the police claimed the following day (they just downright lied basically).
At one point the frontline asked us to stop delivering long umbrellas and only give them short, retractable umbrellas - they did so just to not give the police an excuse to falsely accuse the protestors of attacking them. Of course the police accused anyway - just a day after, the police would excuse their assaults on peaceful protestors by saying that the plastic wrapped around our heads indicated an intent of attack. This in turn strongly indicates how corrupted the Hong Kong police force has become: using lies to cover up the fact that the police, now an utter political tool of the government, accepted order to use violence to oppress unarmed citizens who peacefully express their civic concerns.
At this point, there were about 10,000 protesters on Gloucestor Road. They originally took over the road a few hours back because the police did not allow the crowd to get to the open space in front of the government headquarter across the road. In this serendipitous twist of events, the movement evolved from occupying the front of government headquarters to occupying Gloucester, a major highway that connects Central, Admirally and Wan Chai, and the leadership of the movement subsequently changed from the hands of occupy central leaders to that of all protestors. In the following night, the Gloucestor protestors would bravely hold their fort on Gloucester Road, retreating only temporarily to avoid the tear gas, but bravely and persistently moving back on the road to continue the occupy movement.
Around 6 o'clock, seeing that the frontline of the protestors was holding strong and not budging, and that the endless supply of short umbrellas and supporting materials would not stop, the police, *without any evocation*, escalated their attack on the Gloucester protestors by firing the first tear gas. That would be the first of 87 tear gases fired that night (89 protestors arrested). We in the support line were stunned. For a moment, we could not comprehend why our own police force would fire weapon typically reserved for violent mobs and looters on peaceful protestors. Our disbelief quickly turned into anger. And while retreating to get away from the gas, the support crowd started to yell at the policemen standing arrogantly on the bridge and over the road in full anti-gas gear. We cursed at them and chanted: Shame on you! They stood faceless and unmoved.
What happened for the rest of the night has now become the start of the "Umbrella Revolution". I just want to bear witness and keep an record of how it started. The Hong Kong police downright lied to blame the protestors for forcing them to use pepper stray and tear gas to control the crowd. That night, protestors would continue to hold their ground on Gloucester Road, never giving up but never advancing either, while the police contined to escalate their violent attack to scare and disperse us, including taking over MTR trains to transport anti-violence police to outflank and envelop the protestors from Wan Chai and Central, and threatening that they had fully loaded (plastic-bullet) guns ready to fire at our arms and legs.
I will try to report what we saw for the rest of the night in another article.
With this report, I want to whole-heartedly salute the brave students who held the frontline on Gloucester Road on 9/28. They were the heros who started the "Umbrella Revolution" that so many are a part of now.
P.S.: For a report on how peaceful and event "polite" the Hong Kong protestors are, please see BBC's: Things that would only happen in a Hong Kong protest.