Yemeni police with clubs yesterday beat anti-government protesters who were calling for the ouster of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, while thousands of Algerians defied an official ban on demonstrations in the capital and gathered in the city center for a pro-reform protest, the day after weeks of mass protests in Egypt succeeded in toppling the president.
The crackdown in Yemen reflected an effort to undercut a protest movement seeking fresh momentum from the developments in Egypt, where an 18-day uprising toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
The US is in a delicate position because it advocates democratic reform, but wants stability in Yemen because it is seen as a key ally in its fight against Islamic militants.
Hundreds of protesters had tried to reach the Egyptian embassy in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital yesterday, but security forces pushed them back. Buses ferried ruling party members, equipped with tents, food and water, to the city’s main square to help prevent attempts by protesters to gather there.
There were about 5,000 security agents and government supporters in the Sana’a square named Tahrir, or Liberation. Egypt’s protesters built an encampment at a square of the same name in Cairo, and it became a rallying point for their movement.
Witnesses said police, including plainclothes agents, drove several thousand protesters away from Sanaa’s main square on Friday night. The demonstrators tore up pictures of Saleh and shouted slogans demanding his immediate resignation.
Saleh has been in power for three decades and tried to blunt unrest by promising not to run again. His term ends in 2013.
In Algeria, protest organizers estimated that about 10,000 had flooded downtown Algiers, where they skirmished with riot police attempting to block off streets and disperse the crowd. Some arrests were reported.
Protesters chanted slogans including “No to the police state” and “Bouteflika out,” a reference to Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who has been in power since 1999.
“It is a state of siege,” said Abdeslam Ali Rachedi, a university lecturer and government opponent.
Under Algeria’s long-standing state of emergency, protests are banned in Algiers, but the government’s repeated warnings for people to stay out of the streets apparently fell on deaf ears.
The success on the “people’s revolution” in Egypt and Tunisia, which pushed Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile on Jan. 14, looked bound to fuel the hopes of those seeking change in Algeria, though many in this conflict-scarred country fear any prospect of violence following the brutal insurgency by Islamist extremists in the 1990s that has left an estimated 200,000 dead.
Organized by the Coordination for Democratic Change in Algeria, an umbrella group of human rights activists, unionists, lawyers and others, yesterday’s march was aimed at pressing for reforms to push Algeria toward democracy and didn’t include any specific call by organizers to oust Bouteflika.
A spokesman for the opposition RCD party said police had arrested 1,000 demonstrators. An interior ministry statement said 14 people were detained and immediately released.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
RSS