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Sudanese police have beaten and arrested students as protests broke out throughout Khartoum demanding the government resign, inspired by a popular uprising in neighbouring Egypt.Hundreds of armed riot police on Sunday broke up groups of young Sudanese demonstrating in central Khartoum and surrounded the entrances of four universities in the capital, firing teargas and beating students at three of them. Police beat students with batons as they chanted anti-government slogans such as "we are ready to die for Sudan" and "revolution, revolution until victory". There were further protests in North Kordofan capital el-Obeid in Sudan's west, where around 500 protesters engulfed the market before police used tear gas to disperse them, three witnesses said."They were shouting against the government and demanding change," said witness Ahmed who declined to give his full name.
Protests by Tibetan students in China over the right to study in their language have spread, according to a rights group and state media. Thousands marched in Qinghai province on Wednesday, following a peaceful demonstration in Tongren a day earlier.It follows unconfirmed reports of plans to curb the use of the Tibetan language in classrooms in favour of Chinese.Qinghai province is home to many ethnic Tibetans and was the scene of anti-Chinese riots in 2008.Thousands of students, many of them in their early teens, are expressing their desire to continue to study and learn in their native Tibetan, said the London-based Free Tibet.
In the United States, the first week of October passed by without much fanfare. However, for about 10 million Serbian citizens, it was a time to celebrate. This past week was the tenth anniversary of the Serbian people’s victory over communist tyrant Slobodan Milosevic and of the moment the country joined the ranks of the world’s newest democracies.Milosevic was brought down not by bombs, bullets, or a military coup, nor was he even brought down the ballot, although the presidential election of Kostunica was the lynchpin. Milsoevic was forced out of power in a massive display of nonviolent civil resistance that represented the first truly democratic transition of the 21st century.
Ahead of a planned opposition rally on Monday, Iran tightened security and arrested over 20 mothers who were mourning children killed in the unrest that has broken out since the disputed June 12 elections.The mothers took part in an antigovernment protest in Leleh Park in central Tehran every Saturday since the death in June of Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, whose shooting became a symbol of the government’s violent repression. The rally had been attacked by the police before, but Saturday was the first time the mothers were arrested. An opposition Web site reported that the protest was broken up by the police and many demonstrators were taken away. The BBC Persian service quoted a witness who said 29 women were arrested, some of whom were later released. But at least 21 remained in jail, the BBC said.
TEHRAN -- Iranian security forces and paramilitary groups broke up anti-government demonstrations in central Tehran on Monday, using clubs, tear gas and electric batons to disperse crowds outside the University of Tehran, witnesses said. Authorities blocked main roads into the city center and arrested dozens of demonstrators who sought to turn Iran's annual "Student Day" rallies into the latest in a series of protests against the government that began about six months ago. Officials had declared such demonstrations illegal and threatened to meet them with force. Despite the warnings, thousands of demonstrators tried to join students at sealed-off campuses of Tehran's main universities. Deployed to head them off were hundreds of riot police, Revolutionary Guard Corps troops and members of the Basij, a pro-government militia.
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian security forces fired warning shots in Tehran on Monday and beat opposition protesters among thousands seeking to renew their challenge to the government six months after a disputed election, witnesses said.The security forces fired shots into the air as they clashed with supporters of opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi at a state rally marking the killing of three students under the former Shah, the reformist website Mowjcamp said."Security forces are beating demonstrators, men and women. Some of them are injured and bleeding," said one witness in Tehran's central Haft-e Tir square.The June 12 presidential election, which secured President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election, sparked Iran's worst unrest since the Islamic revolution three decades ago and exposed deep divisions in the establishment. Authorities deny allegations of vote-rigging.
Iranians are marking University Student Day, traditionally an anti-US event that commemorates the killing of three students in 1953. Opposition supporters are expected to try to hijack official protests by chanting their own anti-government slogans.Olivia Cornes navigates some of the opposition chants heard in Iran since June's disputed presidential elections, with the help of BBCPersian.com and protesters themselves.The waves of street chanting among anti-regime protesters are spontaneous but many are not new. Slogans that Iranians used 30 years ago to call for an end to the Shah's regime are now thrown back at the Islamic regime which replaced it.
Tens of thousands of people, government protesters and supporters alike, demonstrated Saturday in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua."The only way for the government to change, as it has been shown in all these years, is for the people to go to the streets," said Dora Maria Tellez, who was a main figure in President Daniel Ortega's government during the 1980s but who now leads an opposition party."There is no other way," she said at the protests, which appeared to be peaceful. It was not immediately clear how many of the masses were demonstrating against the government and how many had gathered to support it.
Tens of thousands of opposition supporters held a major rally on Friday evening in Tirana, seeking a partial recount of the ballots cast during the 28 June parliamentary elections.The rally, which was organised by the Socialists headed by Tirana's mayor Edi Rama was also supported by smaller opposition parties from the left and right, which accuse the government of Prime Minister Sali Berisha of electoral fraud.The rally. which was extended into a three day marathon by a few hundred opposition supporters and deputies who camped out in front of Berisha's office, closed on Sunday afternoon.Speaking at the closing rally opposition leader Edi Rama described the protest as the birth of a new political movement, while giving the government an ultimatum to accept his party's request for a partial recount.
The history of Bertha Oliva de Nativi is the history of Honduras. If the storyline of the past one hundred years of this continent has been ‘so few with so much, and so many with so little’, then Bertha has been the fearless protagonist racing to rewrite the chapters that will hence come. In 1982 Berta’s husband, Professor Tomas Nativi disappeared. One of hundreds of Hondurans and tens of thousands of Central Americans to lose their lives to state sanctioned violence, Tomas and all of those who have disappeared remain the most terrifying and silencing bootprint of the military regimes of the 1980’s. The stories are all too common: "they came to our door in the middle of the night" or "he just never came home ever again." Their families must find ways to grieve, to cope, and to say goodbye to their loved ones without the benefit of closure or resolution. Some, however, began to demand answers.
Security offices and disciplinary committees have become a hub of activity at Iranian universities these days. The lines of accused students waiting to be processed for taking part in protesting the election outcome are creating a veritable traffic jam outside the doors of these offices. This traffic jam is indicative of one clear truth: those who ordered the crackdown on the students' movement, unaware that the sword they have been wielding has never been able to make a single cut, are still trying to take coercive measures instead of entering into dialogue with students. The student movement in Iran has a sixty-year history. For Iranians who experienced the fruits of the inauguration of the country’s first university, it was no less grand a political and nationalist movement as that of the nationalization of the oil industry.
TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Shouts of "Allahu Akbar," or "God is great," a sign of continuing protest in Iran, could be heard Tuesday night in north and west Tehran, along with shouts of "death to dictator."In addition, pictures and videos were posted online of a reported protest at the University of Kashan, south of the capital city.The shouts were heard and reports came a day after the Islamic republic warned reformists against taking to the streets in protest, as the 30th anniversary of the Iranian hostage crisis approaches.
A former MDC security officer who was tortured by state security agents in March 2007 died two weeks ago, from the injuries he sustained. Reports of his death have only just been received.Gift Nhidza was one of several activists arrested when police brutally crushed an opposition protest in Harare’s Highfields suburb. Gift Tandare, a National Constitutional Assembly activist, was shot dead while MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai was brutally assaulted by police. Nhidza was initially tortured using electrical shocks and beaten underneath his feet.The Chairman of the MDC Veteran Activists Association based in South Africa, Solomon Chikohwero, told Newsreel that although Nhidza fled to South Africa, the regime pursued him there. Four months after fleeing Nhidza sought employment in the farms around the Musina area close to the border. It was there that members of the Central Intelligence Organization abducted him and took him back to Zimbabwe.
Four more students were arrested on Monday at the Bindura University, in what appears to be an intensifying clampdown on student activists in the country.The four student leaders were arrested during a campaign meeting at the Bindura University of Science Education, where SRC elections have been underway. The group, including outgoing SRC President Respect Ndanga, had just finished addressing students at a campaign rally for one of the new presidential candidates, Paul Dakarai. The students were arrested on as yet unclear grounds, and were being detained at Mashonaland Central police station.At the same time, President of the Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU) Clever Bere, who was also in Bindura for the SRC polls, had to flee the area because of a police-led hunt to have him detained. According to a ZINASU statement, police and state intelligence details were ‘frantically’ searching for Bere, even going as far as to set up road blocks out of the area to try and find him.
Honduran women continue their resistance to the de facto regime that kidnapped and ousted the democratically elected president in a coup d'état on June 28, 2009. In August an international delegation organized by JASS (www.justassociates.org), Petateras, Radio Feminista and allied organizations traveled to Honduras and accompanied Honduran Feminists in Resistance, an alliance of feminists and women's organizations. The delegation, together with the Feminists in Resistance, documented the impact of the current political crisis on women - in particular, the human rights abuses, sexual harrassment and rape committed against women who are resisting the coup and calling for a return to democracy.
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TEHRAN, Iran — A hard-line cleric sought Friday to head off an attempt to reinvigorate Iran's anti-government movement, warning against a planned opposition rally next month that would coincide with annual state-sponsored demonstrations against the United States.Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, delivering the weekly Muslim prayer sermon in Tehran, also had an unusual warning for the security forces, telling them any soft treatment of those activists already in detention would be considered treason. "Nobody gives a flower to his murderer," he said.Iranian authorities executed a fierce crackdown on the hundreds of thousands of protesters who poured into the streets in response to allegations that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won re-election in June through vote fraud.
On the third week of the new academic year in Iran, thousands of students from the main campus of Azad University in Tehran held several peaceful demonstrations protesting the coup government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the demonstrations that were attacked by Basiji and plain-clothes agents, students changed anti-government slogans protesting the conditions prevalent in the country and in the universities, while also insisting on their support of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi. Since the demonstrations, the streets leading up to the main campus were taken over by security agents and many students were denied entry into the main campus and its buildings.
The international community should strongly back the efforts of prosecutors in the human rights unit of the Honduras Attorney General's office to investigate army and police abuses in Honduras and to overturn a decree by the de facto government that severely restricts freedoms of speech and assembly, Human Rights Watch said.The organization also called on the international community to oppose any amnesty for human rights violations as part of the transition back to democratic rule. Deposed President Manuel Zelaya and the de facto government of Honduras are now engaged in negotiations about such a transition, and have announced that an agreement may be imminent.
Five senior members of the Zimbabwe National Student Union were arrested Saturday - on charges of misconduct and undermining the office of the President and Cabinet - for saying “Robert Mugabe is the major outstanding issue that is stalling progress for the inclusive government.” ZINASU National President Clever Bere, National Spokesperson Blessing Vava, Secretary for Education and Research Obert Masaraure, National University of Science and Technology SRC President Kurayi Hoyi and Great Zimbabwe University student activist Tafadzwa Kutya were discussing national issues while travelling in a commuter mini-bus, en-route to Glen View suburb in Harare on Saturday evening.
JOHANNESBURG – Zimbabwean students studying at a South African university claim that Zimbabwe secret service agents are harassing and victimising students aligned to Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party.The students, who came to Fort Hare University (FHU) on a scholarship fund started by President Robert Mugabe a few years ago, claim that a number of them have been stripped of the scholarships because of their affiliation to the MDC, the former main opposition that formed a coalition government with Mugabe’s ZANU PF party last February.They allege that some students have received death threats and the intimidation intensified after MDC branches were launched at the FHU’s East London and Alice campuses last month.
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