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By AFP
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Hong Kong was preparing for another mbad rally on Sunday as public anger mounted after unprecedented clashes between protesters and police over an extradition law, despite the fall of the head of the state. city struggling with a suspension of the bill.
The organizers were hoping for mbadive new participation as they wanted to keep up the pressure on general manager Carrie Lam, who suspended work on the highly controversial bill on Saturday after days of increasing pressure, claiming that she had miscalculated the mood of the public.
Critics fear that the law, backed by Beijing, will take people to the notoriously opaque and politicized courts of China and undermine the city's reputation as a safe trade hub.
The city has been shaken by the worst political violence since its transfer to China in 1997, when tens of thousands of protesters were dispersed by riot police who fired tear gas and rubber bullets.
Lam ceased pledging to permanently abolish the proposal on Saturday and the concession was quickly rejected by protest leaders who urged her to resign, set aside the bill and apologize for the tactics. police.
Jimmy Sham, of the main protest group, the Civil Human Rights Front, compared Lam's offer to a "knife" that had been plunged into the city.
"It has almost reached our heart, now the government has said that it will not pressurize, but it also refuses to withdraw it," he told reporters.
On Sunday afternoon, protesters have to leave a park on the main island to get to parliament – a repeat of a mbadive rally a week earlier, according to organizers, which would have gathered more money. a million people.
Lam's decision to ignore this record participation and continue tabling the bill for debate Wednesday then triggered new protests, which paralyzed key neighborhoods in the city and provoked violent clashes with the police.
Opposition to the bill brought together an unusually wide sample of Hong Kong, ranging from influential legal and commercial bodies to religious leaders, as well as Western countries.
The suspension of the bill did little to defuse public anger.
The protest movement has turned in recent days into a move specifically aimed at removing the extradition bill into a wider protest of anger over Lam and Beijing over many years of sluggish freedoms.
"We remain an enclave of human rights and civil liberties in the footsteps of a country whose leadership shares neither our values nor our beliefs," legislator Dennis Kwok told local broadcaster RTHK before Sunday's rally.
Lam had been increasingly isolated in his support for the bill, even the pro-Peking legislators distancing themselves from the extradition proposals of recent days.
The Chinese government said the suspension of the bill was a good decision "to listen more broadly to the views of the community and restore calm in the community as quickly as possible".
Critics were also angry because Lam repeatedly failed to apologize for what many saw as a heavy-handed police tactic to disperse protesters surrounding the city's legislature.
Police said they had no choice but to use force to meet violent protesters who besieged their lines in front of the city's parliament on Wednesday.
Critics – including legal groups and rights groups – claim that the officers used the actions of a small group of violent protesters as an excuse to unleash a large-scale crackdown on peaceful, mostly young protesters. .
"The pro-democracy group will not stop at this point, it wants to continue the momentum against Carrie Lam," said political badyst Willy Lam. AFP.
"They will keep the heat and keep going."
Anger was also fueled by Lam and senior officers calling protesters from the street "rioters".
The protest leaders called on the police to drop charges against anyone arrested for rioting and other Wednesday-related clashes.
Lam argued that Hong Kong needed to conclude an extradition agreement with the mainland and said guarantees were in place to ensure that dissidents or political cases would not be accepted.
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