Inside hong kong’s besieged university, students tell of exhaustion and fear amid tear gas and rubber bullets | thearticle

As the siege of Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University neared its end, with student protesters fleeing the Kowloon campus amid hails of rubber bullets and tear gas, some who spent days inside

described their mounting fear as police closed in. With food and water running low after days of battles with police, and communications cut as phone batteries died, students worried that

riot police would storm the campus, arrest them and send them over the border into detention in China. Some described hunkering down as fear and exhaustion took its toll. Some students

collapsed, others escaped into the night aided by a secretive underground rescue mission that saw many being sped away on motorbikes after abseiling over walls. Tear gas fired by the

hundreds of riot police who surrounded the university from late Saturday choked students, adding to exhaustion and depression, according to eyewitnesses inside the university and some who

gathered outside to offer help and guide those who managed to escape to safety. Many remained defiant, fearing the consequences of surrendering to police. “Right now, I don’t want to leave.

We are trapped. If we leave we will be imprisoned for 10 years. I have to stay until the end,” one said, speaking on Monday night on condition of anonymity. Others who tried to negotiate a

surrender said police had reneged on assurances for their safety, instead firing rubber bullets “at point blank range,” according to one student. Another said that tear gas had been fired

directly on at least one group of protesters as they emerged from the campus. “I counted at least 15 tear gas canisters shot at one group of students who were surrendering,” said the

student, who also asked not to be identified. He and other eyewitnesses said that as students left the campus, they collapsed, unable to breathe in the clouds of tear gas, and were then

arrested.  He described students being “kicked multiple times in the head” by police. “This has happened four or five times over the night.” With an estimated 400 of the protesters inside

under the age of 18, frantic parents gathered outside, pleading with police to let their children go home. Late on Sunday, authorities agreed to allow the youngsters to leave, after taking

their identity details. According to media reports, a total of 1,100 protesters had been arrested by late Tuesday. The Polytechnic University has been the scene of violent battles between

hundreds of students who barricaded themselves inside the campus, which sits near the Lion Rock Tunnel that is a vital road link between Kowloon, on the mainland side of the city-state, and

Hong Kong island, its financial centre. The siege was the culmination of more than five months of protests that began in reaction to a proposed law that would have allowed authorities to

send anyone suspected of a crime over the border to be dealt with by China’s justice system. The bill has been shelved, not cancelled. Protesters saw the move as Beijing’s attempt to impose

direct Communist Party rule on freewheeling Hong Kong, which reverted to Chinese sovereignty from British colonial rule in 1997 with the promise of a mini-Constitution that would largely

preserve its institutional independence for 50 years. As the intensity of the protests escalated, students spent days preparing to defend the campus, stockpiling petrol bombs and other

missiles. By Tuesday morning, desperation had set in, according to one protester who said: “Everyone is running around, looking for exits.”