Violent street protesters yesterday defied President Laurent Gbagbo's calls to return home after days of unrest in southern Ivory Coast and demanded the UN be punished after a deadly firefight involving UN peacekeepers.
As the UN Security Council called for an end to violence, the Gbagbo-allied youth leader whose acolytes have been manning illegal checkpoints and attacking UN and diplomatic offices, echoed Gbagbo's call late on Thursday, telling a crowd in front of the French Embassy to go home.
"Everybody, get off the streets, tear down the roadblocks," Ble Goude, the head of the loyalist Young Patriots, shouted to hundreds of angry young men.
Earlier, peacekeepers fired tear gas grenades to keep back hundreds of angry young men who threw flaming torches at UN headquarters in Abidjan, the country's main city.
Shops, schools and banks remained closed in the city center although life began returning to normal in some outlying areas after Gbagbo called on protesters late on Wednesday to leave the streets and said workers should return to their jobs. There were fewer impromptu roadblocks manned by bribe-seeking youths than in previous days.
Gbagbo asked his supporters to end their protests after meeting with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, UN Ivory Coast chief of mission Pierre Schori and others.
But pro-Gbagbo youth leaders said the UN should have been punished for a Wednesday battle with gunmen in a western town that left four Ivorians dead.
"We're going to continue to protest because the communique wasn't satisfactory. Pierre Schori killed Ivorians, but he wasn't sanctioned,'' said Eugene Djue, a prominent member of the youth group Young Patriots.
At UN headquarters in New York, the Security Council on Thursday demanded an immediate end to the violence in Ivory Coast and warned that sanctions would be imposed against people who block the roadmap to peace, including by attacking UN or French forces.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan echoed the demand, calling the situation in the west African nation "critical" and appealing to all parties to work together to calm the situation, restore peace and promote national reconciliation.
Ivory Coast is still split between government- and rebel-held zones despite peace deals to end a 2002-2003 civil war.
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
FLYBY: The object, appears to be traveling more than 60 kilometers per second, meaning it is not bound by the sun’s orbit, astronomers studying 3I/Atlas said Astronomers on Wednesday confirmed the discovery of an interstellar object racing through the solar system — only the third-ever spotted, although scientists suspect many more might slip past unnoticed. The visitor from the stars, designated 3I/Atlas, is likely the largest yet detected, and has been classified as a comet, or cosmic snowball. “It looks kind of fuzzy,” said Peter Veres, an astronomer with the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which was responsible for the official confirmation. “It seems that there is some gas around it, and I think one or two telescopes reported a very short tail.” Originally known as A11pl3Z before
RSS