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We come to the events of last weekend and I want to say one thing which is pretty obvious straightaway. I think the euphemism is the 'united front press' have claimed that the Governor of Hong Kong, that I was responsible for the demonstrations and the arguments and those sad pictures that flashed around the world of people burning tyres and people marching. It's just another of the fabrications that we get from Wen Wei Po and others. I suspect that if they ever started being nice about me I'd have reason to think I was doing my job badly. It's only a matter of time, I can assure the honourable member, that the NCNA or those 'united front newspapers' will accuse me of being responsible for the demonstrations in 1989. It's, of course, complete and utter nonsense. I don't want in any way to ever excuse breaches of the law or rowdy behaviour because in my view arguments should always be carried on within the law and should always be carried on in as civilised a way as possible. But I don't think that those who refuse to listen should be very surprised if other people raise their voices and that's what I'm afraid we've seen in the last few days. I repeat, this is a very tranquil community. It's a community whose politics are extraordinarily moderate and it takes quite a lot to push people in Hong Kong into behaving in an immoderate way. It takes quite a lot to push them into raising their
voices.
Let me offer one piece of advice and I take it from Ta Kung Pao, the edition of the 12 March, which reported extensively a speech by a Member of the Politburo, Mr Li Ruihuan who noted how important it was to allow people to have their say in relation to Hong Kong. That's what he was talking about quite explicitly and he quoted Chairman Mao. Now I don't want to comment on the context in which the Chairman's remarks were made. It's not my part to play the role of historian now but what he said was this; "the heaven's will not fall even if we allow people to speak their minds otherwise the heaven's will surely fall sooner or later." In other words if you don't allow people to speak their minds. An open and plural society should respect people's rights to speak their own mind but of course it must insist that they do that within the law. That is what our police ensure happens. They have all my sympathy for the pressure that they've been placed under in recent days.
Mr Albert Chan (in Chinese): Mr President, of course we fully appreciate that most police officers are just trying to fulfil their duty and most of our civil servants are doing very well but as we approach 1997, you cannot rule out this possibility that because of the change of sovereignty and change of masters some of these police officers are afraid that they will lose their job so that's why they are over zealous in protecting Chinese officials during the interim. That's why you see something like this happening in this picture. We are talking about a six foot tall police officer, security officer, using force against a much smaller person and that's clearly unnecessary.
So, Mr Governor, how would you instruct your staff that when they deal with such demonstrations, as you said, they must treat them well? How can you ensure there would not be abuse of force?