Stamping out dissent in Hong Kong
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In Hong Kong,the authorities are showing that they mean business with the new security law to stamp out demonstrations and dissent. The pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai has been detained, and young campaigners including protest leader Joshua Wong were sentenced to prison this week. Before that, the pro-democracy opposition resigned en masse, as Danny Vincent reports. Seventeen weeks after the presidential election that is widely thought to have been rigged and that led to Belarus's largest-ever anti-government protests, President Alexander Lukashenko still refuses to step down. But he has lost the support of some of his police officers, a few of whom have fled to Poland. Lucy Ash meets one of them. Araucania in southern Chile is a land of ancient volcanoes, virgin forests and agriculture. But recently it has been making headlines for arson attacks on timber lorries and prisoners on hunger strike. This is the homeland of one of Chile’s main indigenous peoples – the Mapuche. They want their land back that was taken from them not by early colonisers but by General Pinochet, as Jane Chambers found out. In Australia there has been a new impetus to look at past injustices this year, as elsewhere. And these include a little-known practice akin to the slave trade. In what is known as “black-birding”, islanders from the South Pacific were brought to work in Australia against their will, as Will Higginbotham reports. Across Europe, coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions have shut opera houses, theatres and concert halls. Despite receiving large government grants and loans, the performing arts are now facing a critical period in countries like Italy, France, Germany and Austria, says Joanna Robertson.
Presenter: Kate Adie Producer: Arlene Gregorius
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Good morning. |
| 0:07.0 | Today brutal tactics by the Bialo Russian security forces against protesters have been on public display for months, but we hear from one policeman who's had enough and fled to Poland. |
| 0:19.0 | In southern Chile there's a fight to get land back by the Mapuche indigenous people, not territories |
| 0:25.6 | taken years ago by colonial invaders, but land confiscated much more recently by General |
| 0:31.6 | Pinochet. In Australia a new look at the system of Blackbirding |
| 0:37.2 | which took islanders from the South Pacific to work on Australian plantations. And lockdown has not been kind to the arts, |
| 0:46.5 | shutting the concert halls and theatres, we ask how they've been fairing in the rest of Europe. |
| 0:52.3 | First, Hong Kong, where freedoms are dwindling as the authorities |
| 0:57.1 | enforce the new security law intended to stamp out dissent and demonstrations. This week the pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lye was arrested |
| 1:07.7 | and told he'll be detained until April and young campaigners including the student protest leader Joshua Wong, were sentenced |
| 1:15.8 | to prison terms. |
| 1:17.4 | Danny Vincent looks at a darkening scene with the pro-democracy opposition having resigned en masse. |
| 1:25.0 | The exterior of Hong Kong's legislative council building is still scarred with memories of last year's protest movement. |
| 1:32.0 | Political graffiti is rubbed out and blotted over with grey paint on the pavement outside. |
| 1:37.0 | Red tape is hung and stretched between police cones, but if you look closely you can still make out the slogans in Chinese characters, graffitied |
| 1:46.3 | onto concrete bollards, now hidden under fresh layers of paint. The slogans that were |
| 1:51.9 | chanted by thousands of young protesters during last year's |
| 1:55.3 | demonstration could today be interpreted as being in violation of the new national security |
| 2:00.2 | law. |
| 2:01.2 | On the 1st of July 2019, thousands of protesters surrounded the |
| 2:05.6 | Hong Kong Legislative Council. They smashed their way into the building and |
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