Opinion

National security law won’t heal Hong Kong. People need a second chance through victim-offender reconciliation

The rift between the yellow and blue camps won’t be healed under our judicial process that hands out sentences as payback or a deterrent. Civility in conflicts used to be a Hong Kong hallmark, so let’s all aim for reconciliation

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Hong Kong riot police detain a protester in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, on June 12. Photo: AP

C. K. Yeung is a former associate vice-president of Hong Kong Baptist University and professor of practice at Chinese University of Hong Kong

Published: 9:15am, 24 Sep 2020Updated: 9:23am, 24 Sep 2020

Hong Kong people need a second chance. Although the fire and fury on the street has subsided, the seething political hatred is lurking just below the surface, ready to erupt when conditions are right. The national security law and heightened police enforcement can only suppress the pent-up political anger, not defuse it. To restore long-term peace and harmony to the place we call home, we need a heart-and-mind solution, not just the long arm of the law.

Such a solution does exist, and has proven effective elsewhere, from Europe to America to China. This should be high on the agenda when Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor delivers her policy address: introduce a victim-offender reconciliation scheme for those arrested in street protests. Give them a second chance.

Until about 10 years ago, when tolerance degenerated into intolerance, civility in political conflicts had been a Hong Kong hallmark. But, actually, we have no age-old feuds, just spur-of-the-moment flare-ups of political passions. What if the masked man who doused an elderly man with kerosene and set him ablaze could sit down with his victim, and come face to face with the victim’s daughter and wife?