Tag: State Violence

Sudanese Barricade Streets As Strike Over Protest Deaths Begins

Protesters have erected barricades across roads in Sudan’s capital Khartoum and some shops and offices were shut as a two-day general strike and civil disobedience campaign began in response to demonstrators’ deaths.

Neighborhood resistance committees and political parties called the strike starting on Tuesday after seven people were killed in Khartoum on Monday in one of the deadliest days to date in a series of demonstrations against a military takeover on October 25.

Protesters are demanding the military, which had been sharing power with civilian groups before the coup, quit politics completely.

“It is our duty to resist them until we are victorious or they rule an empty country after they have killed us all,” the Khartoum State resistance committees said in a statement.

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Military coup State Violence Sudan

Ugandans Escalate Movement Of ‘Radical Rudeness’ Following Violent Arrest Over Mean Tweet

“Men with guns are breaking my door. They say they’re policemen but are not in uniform. I’ve locked myself inside.”

This was the final Facebook post by Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, 2021 winner of the PEN Pinter International Writer of Courage Award, on Dec. 28. Within minutes of his post, Rukirabashaija was abducted by Uganda’s Special Forces Command, a military outfit notorious for torturing nonviolent activists.

Rukirabashaija — author of a political allegory novel and an autobiographical book detailing his previous torture — has only surfaced once since his brutal kidnapping. When his lawyer Eron Kiiza summoned Rukirabashaija’s captors to present him in court, they violated the summons and brought their victim to his rural home in Iganga to search his home, much to the terror of his wife and children.

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Criminal Justice and Prisons Human Rights State Violence Uganda

Sudan’s Doctors March To Protest Violence Against Hospitals

Khartoum – Hundreds of Sudanese doctors and medics marched in Khartoum and other parts of Sudan on Sunday to protest against violence by security forces against the medical staff, healthcare facilities, and patients.

Slogans against the military and its October coup were raised and a petition was handed to the United Nations representative in Sudan, calling on the international community to document the violations against the Sudanese people.

The doctors’ march comes as neighborhood-based resistance committees, political parties, and other pro-democracy groups carry out an ongoing campaign of protests under a “no negotiation” slogan.

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Doctors Health Care State Violence Sudan

After Largest Anti-Racist Uprising, Historic Trials Provide Important Lessons

In the summer of 2020, the people of the United States witnessed the largest anti-racist struggle in the country’s history after a video of the brutal murder of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin went viral. While Floyd’s murder was the catalyst, the first year of the pandemic was marked by increased police and vigilante violence. Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot in a botched “citizen’s arrest” by vigilantes and Breonna Taylor, who was shot dead while asleep by police, were among the most egregious cases.

In the year 2021, it was the turn of the US government, particularly its judicial system, to respond to the protests of 2020. Historic trials of the killers of unarmed Black people and protestors were set to answer an important question: how would the system respond to the outcry of millions against racist violence?

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Anti-Racism Legal System Rebellion2020 State Violence

Sudan Security Forces Fire Tear Gas At Khartoum Protesters

Sudanese security forces fired tear gas to disperse pro-democracy protesters near the presidential palace in the capital, Khartoum, as tens of thousands marched against military rule following last month’s coup.

The rally on Tuesday was the latest show of opposition to military rule since last month’s coup that ended a partnership between civilian political groups and the military.

Heavily armed police forces took to central Khartoum, fired tear gas, and began chasing protesters as they gathered about a kilometre from the palace, blocking a main road and chanting “Soldiers, go back to the barracks”.

Other protests took place in cities including Port Sudan, Kassala, Nyala and Atbara.

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Coups State Violence Sudan Wars and Militarism

Sudan Coup: The Names And Faces Of The Protesters Killed

On 25 October, Sudan’s top general, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, declared a state of emergency in the country, ousting the government and detaining the country’s civilian leadership, including Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.

The military takeover, which upended a two-year transition to civilian rule, was widely denounced by critics as a coup, and sparked a nationwide protest movement that has been violently repressed by armed forces.

One month later, the independent Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors (CCSD) has tallied the names of 42 protesters who have been killed between 21 October – one of the first protests against the army’s already clear ambitions to claim power – and Thursday 25 November.

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coup State Violence Sudan Wars and Militarism

A World Without Police Is More Possible (And Necessary) Than You Think

Calls to “defund the police” reverberated throughout communities across the US in the summer of 2020, when millions took to the streets to protest a brutal, unchecked, and racist system of police violence and control. Then came the backlash. Since the initial push by activists and protestors to get the public to consider alternatives to endlessly increasing police spending, a forceful chorus has pushed in the opposite direction, demanding more funding for more police who should be given more power over our lives. “Defund the police” has been criticized for being not only a “bad slogan” but a political pipe dream that fails to reckon with the messy realities of maintaining “public safety.”

However, as Geo Maher argues in his latest book, A World without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete, America’s policing system is a demonstrably terrible way to keep people and communities safe.

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Police Police Abolition Public safety State Violence

CIA Conspiring To Murder Julian Assange Jeopardise US Prosecution Case

The US prosecution of Julian Assange has been dealt another blow following revelations that the CIA plotted the kidnap and rendition or murder of the WikiLeaks founder. The revelations also directly implicate Mike Pompeo, former CIA director and secretary of state, and US president Donald Trump.

Separately, there’s evidence of how cyber activists foiled a 2012 attempt by British police to break into and enter the Ecuadorian embassy where Assange had sought asylum.

In April 2017, Pompeo publicly declared that “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service”. Arguably, that could be interpreted as an invitation to the CIA and other US agencies to take action against Assange and other WikiLeaks staffers.

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CIA Extradition Julian Assange State Violence

New Evidence In Ayotzinapa Disappearance Case

On September 21, five days before the seventh anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students of the Rural Teachers’ College in the town of Ayotzinapa, Mexico, the federal authorities revealed new evidence in the case, which contradicted the official version of the truth presented by the previous government.

At a press conference, the special prosecutor for the case, Omar Gómez Trejo, and the Undersecretary for Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez, reported that the search for evidence in the La Carnicería ravine located in Cocula town, in the state of Guerrero, had concluded. They reported that in the past two years of investigation in the ravine, located 800 meters from the Cocula garbage dump, around 200 human skeletal remains were discovered in an area of 8,000 square meters.

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Ayotzinapa 43 Mexico State Violence

Denver Refuses To Negotiate, Sweeps Indigenous Encampment

Denver, CO – Under the hardline stance of Mayor Michael Hancock, Denver continues to sweep unhoused encampments—more than 80 this year alone—ignoring countless requests from unhoused residents and their advocates to stop, and refusing to negotiate any alternatives. Outside the Four Winds American Indian Council building in the Baker neighborhood, that cycle continued when, despite multiple attempts by Four Winds and other advocates to find some common ground and a different solution, the city swept a predominantly Indigenous encampment on August 31.

“It’s kind of unfortunate that the Mayor decided that he’s going to say that [the encampment] is unsafe and unclean without even being here, without even visiting and seeing it first-hand and being willing to sit down with our relatives and hear their stories and even break bread with them or anything like that.”

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Denver Homelessness Indigenous Activism State Violence

2020 Sets ‘Stark’ Record For Murders Of Environmental Activists

A record 227 activists working to protect environmental and land rights were murdered in 2020, says the latest in a series of annual reports from Global Witness.

“Almost a third of the murders were reportedly linked to resource exploitation—logging, mining, large-scale agribusiness, hydroelectric dams, and other infrastructure,” writes BBC News in its coverage of the research.

Global Witness calculated that, since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in December 2015, an average of four activists have been murdered every week. And “shocking” as that number is, Global Witness says an accelerating crackdown on journalists means the reporting likely falls short of the reality on the ground.

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Activism Environment Murder State Violence

The Movement To De-Cop The Campus

Police abolition has become a national conversation since the George Floyd uprisings. Many university police chiefs are encouraging the misconception, however, that campus police are somehow different from other police forces — despite their long history of racist violence.

To take just one example, a campus police officer at the University of California, Los Angeles shot and wounded a Black man he assumed was unhoused in 2003; in 2009, that same officer repeatedly used a Taser on an Iranian American student studying in the library.

But police violence is not confined to these dramatic incidents. It appears in the routine, everyday functions of policing. UCLA police logs reveal, for example, that campus police stop and arrest Black and Latino people at higher rates than their white counterparts.

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Education Police Police Abolition State Violence

Popular Resistance In The Age Of Neoliberal War

Since April 28 hundreds of thousands of Colombians have taken to the streets to demand the end to neoliberal reforms, chanting “el pueblo unido jamás será vencido”. Now, a month later their joint call has grown into a generalized rejection of the neoliberal and far-right government of Ivan Duque. His government is polled as the least popular in recent Colombian history, already a low bar for a State that has waged an ongoing war against its people.

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Colombia National Strike Neoliberalism State Violence

On Contact: A Different Kind Of War

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the plight of everyday people victimized by the hardships of life in Mexico and Central America with author and journalist J. Malcolm Garcia. His new book is ‘A Different Kind of War: Uneasy Encounters in Mexico and Central America’. A collection of essays informed by grief and anger, the book reveals the varied and distinctive voices of those families fleeing the violence of Honduras, Mexican reporters covering gang conflict in Juarez, and children living off the refuse of a landfill.

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Mexico Migration Neoliberalism State Violence