– Two opposition leaders beaten
– Tens of thousands gather in Minsk’s Independence Square
– Lukashenko claims 79 per cent of poll
– Index on Censorship told of 31 detentions prior to demonstrations
Belarus Free Theatre founders arrested
Up to 600 protestors detained
As the world’s attention turns to Europe’s last dictatorship, Index’s Mike Harris explains the bakground to today’s demonstrations
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Journalist Shiv Malik was injured by a police baton strike during last week’s student protests. He asks who should be blamed for the violence: protesters, police officers or politicians?
It wasn’t true. At 15:30pm, two hours after it began, the front of Thursday’s anti-fees march had not been kettled. It was hemmed in on four sides of the square, but a main exit was still open — up Whitehall, the actual route of the march. The thing was, no one wanted to leave. “ We saw what happened after a million people marched during the Iraq war. We don’t want to just go home. And they haven’t even voted yet,” one red haired female college student told me.
Asserting their right to free movement, the crowd surged up Victoria which was blocked by a line of riot and mounted police. Within a few minutes, I found myself at the front line.
“Get back, get back,” shouted a six-foot copper, his truncheon raised. Now with the crowd pressing up behind me, attempting to break the line, there was nowhere to go. The officer’s baton then glanced the side of my face, knocking off my glasses and catching my left eye. I caught my glasses before they dropped to the floor and then prepared for a second strike. This time, I held the officer’s baton for a few seconds as it came down on me.
It was a natural response — I was defending myself against assault. However, an officer trying to keep order is a licensed professional in a unique position: they are permitted to strike out — within reason — to keep the peace and hold their line. For the officer, protecting myself by placing a hand around his baton, even for a moment, riled him up no end; I was stopping him from doing his job. The third strike caught the top of my head. The blood began to pour.
The narrative of who started what and when, and the blame game of who is responsible for violence — protesters or the police — is most always chewed over by people who don’t actually go to demonstrations where there is a threat of public disorder. As someone who has attended dozens of violent protests over the last ten years, including all four major student demos since 10 November, I can say that most trouble starts when protesters try to move in a direction — up a street or down an alley — which police commanders have decided they must be barred from.
Thursday’s events left hundreds of students and police injured. It was pure chance that no one died.
It’s worth asking a counter factual question. What would have happened if the police hadn’t been there, stacked line-by-line near Parliament? The answer, I believe, is that the students would have entered the House of Commons and occupied it. And it is entirely possible that it would have been 99 per cent peaceful, rather like the countrywide protests of 30 November or the dozens of other student occupations around the country. Ultimately, the police were there to protect the Palace of Westminster from a very unpopular decision being taken against people who couldn’t vote at the last election or felt rightly betrayed by the party they did vote for. And the easiest way you can stop thousands of people from occupying a building is to beat them back or charge at them with horses. Protesters will obviously fight back and use violence in turn.
One protester here sums this up: “A feeling of desperation always leads to severe consequences. The problem is the government are not supposed to allow it to go that far. They have, they’ve pushed their luck and now they are happy to hide behind the police, who aren’t our enemy, yet they’re the ones who get the stick for it. They brutalise us, we fight back, but it deters from the fact that the enemy is in there,” he says pointing towards the Palace of Westminster.
The police know this too. Asked if repeated clashes with students could damage the police’s reputation, Association of Chief Police Officer president Sir Hugh Orde said, “Yes, if it is allowed to be played as the cops acting as an arm of the state, delivering the elected government’s will, rather than protecting the rights of the citizen.”
He added “the predictable consequence” of the anti-cuts demos were that “the police become the focus of people’s anger. Any time citizens in uniform comes up against the citizen, relationships suffer.”
Orde is absolutely right, we are all citizens. So ultimately it is those politicians who cower behind the uniforms and resources of some of those citizens, who are responsible for the violence. And they should only carry on if they have the stomach for more blood.
Shiv Malik is a journalist and co-author of Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth
Al Jazeera’s office in Kuwait City has been shut down after the news channel broadcast footage of police brutality against members of the Kuwaiti opposition. The footage showed police beating activists, and the channel aired interviews with members of the Kuwaiti opposition. Four Kuwaiti members of parliament and a dozen citizens were injured in the incident. The official reason for the closure given to Al Jazeera was “the latest developments and your interference in Kuwait’s internal affairs”. Al Jazeera’s Kuwait office was previously closed in November 2002 in the run-up to the US led invasion of Iraq.
This is a guest post by Cecilia Anesi and Giulio Rubino
A rally “for life” takes place today, starting in Terzigno, a small city of a complex of three, with Boscoreale and Boscotrecase, a few kilometres away from Naples. Protesters will come from the whole of Campania region, since many feel Terzigno’s fight against a new landfill is their fight for an alternative way of managing waste.
Citizens of the three towns, located at the bottom of Vesuvius National Park, have been in turmoil for days, as the Italian government attempts to open a new landfill in the park.
Vesuvius National Park already holds a major landfill, built by the government two years ago, breaching the law that institutes national parks. Moreover, this landfill contains a mix of unprocessed solid and toxic waste, and although this breaches EU regulations in matter
of waste, the landfill was built — as others — by issuing an “emergency decree”. Moreover, the same emergency decree (dlg 90/2008 issued by Berlusconi’s Government) turned landfills and incinerators into “military areas” protected by state secrecy laws (issued by the Prodi government) and thus inscrutable for the people, civil authorities and the press.
A week ago the “Movimento per la difesa del territorio/Area Vesuviana” (Movement for the defence of Vesuvius Area) noticed the increase in the number of waste trucks that were entering the landfill. Naples was once again covered in rubbish, and the government had to quickly find a solution before a media scandal would explode again.
The solution was found in sending as many trucks as possible to Terzigno’s landfill. Hundred of citizens of all ages started blocking the entrance, scared that as soon as that landfill was been full the government would inaugurate a new landfill in a quarry few hundred metres away.
On the second day, riot police were called in the scene. On mainstream Italian media the protesters were shown for a few seconds, and although the reasons of the protest weren’t explained in depth, it was possible to see some seriously injured people. The blocade was violently removed by riot police, and the rubbish trucks were escorted inside and outside the landfill as if they were carrying gold. People were prevented from peacefully demonstrating, and from physically blocking with their bodies the access to trucks into the landfill.
Locals claim to have the right to protest, as it is the state that is acting against the law — firstly by opening a landfill in a national park, secondly by making it wihout following EU regulations, thirdly by breaching the internationally recognised right to health and life, and last but not least, because the government is not acting transparently and democractically by preventing both citizens and the press from entering the landfills of Campania.
Moreover, people have the right to protest because it is a fundamental right included into the Italian Consitution, and Berlusconi’s government is simply ignoring it.
But, as the citizens of Terzigno and other places of Campania will say, when the State thinks as a business and acts as a dictatorship, democracy can be proclaimed dead.