Politics

Tunisian police fired teargas on Monday at a rally by hundreds of people protesting at the lack of political reforms since the overthrow of President Ben Ali in January. Columns of smoke could be seen rising above an area in front of Tunis cathedral where protesters gathered for a demonstration at the same time as an authorised one called by the General Workers’ Union.

When Mahatma Gandhi resorted to the use of hunger strikes as a tool of non-violent struggle, denying himself any form of food in order to demand freedom for his people in front of the British Empire which was colonising India, he was massively supported by the clamour of his people who knew – in the India of that day – what it was to suffer hunger.

Myanmar’s democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi is on Sunday set to make her first political trip outside her home city since she was freed from house arrest, despite a government security warning. Suu Kyi, who was released from seven straight years of detention days after a controversial election last November, will visit the Bago region, about 80 kilometres north of Yangon.

To speak of nonviolence obliges us to review what we understand by violence. The great backing received by the 15-M movement in Spain is due, apart from their demands, to the fact that their actions and protests are peaceful and non-violent. Nevertheless, we still don’t know very well what nonviolence as a methodology of social struggle is.

Since May protests have been ongoing in Chile against the profit-making Education system. Chilean students mobilized to demand a profound reform in education, rejected on Sunday the possibility of negotiating with Congress and reaffirmed they would hold further marches throughout August.

The area where the first spark of rioting started, following the fatal shooting by police of a local resident, today saw a large and peaceful demonstration calling for an end to the violence on all sides but also for changes in the recent austerity measures that most of those marching see as the root cause of the recent disturbances.

London and other UK cities are descending into an uneasy, massive police deployment induced calm. The post-mortem has began, even if the beast is not quiet dead yet. Everybody has an opinion as to who’s to blame. Nobody is asking the kids (“thugs”? or “victims of social exclusion”?), now going through the courts, some as young as 10.

If we want to understand why there have been widespread incidents of street violence across London for the past few days, we need look no further than the comments of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, when he announced this Wednesday, “a fight-back is under way!” As if it were another country that had invaded the city!

Disappointed and frustrated, New York advocates condemn Friday’s announcement from the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ), which brazenly announced its decision to bypass state governments and implement Secure Communities ( S-Comm ) and unilaterally terminate its Memorandum of Agreements ( MOAs ) with states.

Here we publish in full the open letter by the Chilean Community in Support of the Humanitarian Crisis taking place in Syria and which gave rise to a public demonstration at the Sirian embassy in Santiago, denouncing the extreme violation of human rights that this government has been carrying out for months.