KUALA LUMPUR, Aug. 29 (Xinhua) -- The violence that has gripped China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) is a "criminal activity" and will not be tolerated in any place, said a Malaysian expert.
The recent protests in Hong Kong "are not just protests" but involved "a lot of hooliganism and vandalism," said Bunn Nagara, Senior Fellow of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia.
"It is criminal activity because laws have been broken; people including the police have been attacked and both public and private property has been damaged, including cars on the road," Nagara told Xinhua in a recent interview.
If people want to express their opinions, they should do it peacefully and through proper channels. "But going by not just demonstrations but criminal activity like vandalism," it's not the way that can be accepted anywhere in the world, he said.
Nagara also noted that the allegations of Hong Kong police being violent against protestors are unjustified.
"It is totally unjustified because the police in Hong Kong should match at least the level of threat posed by the violent demonstrators," he said.
He expressed the hope that Hong Kong people will make efforts to bring the situation back to normal. "If the protests are not stopped early, they will grow more and more widespread and more and more violent and that becomes much more difficult to control," he said.
"One country, two systems" has been working very well since Hong Kong's return to its motherland in 1997, Nagara said, adding, "It has worked so far. Why disrupt it, why want to change it at all?"
He also pointed out that the practice of using Hong Kong to distract China as well as to weaken its position by certain elements is "unfair and very unethical," which lead to the people in Hong Kong suffer as a result.
