Sudan protesters defiant despite crackdown

fyeahafrica:

Khartoum - Sudanese students defied arrests and beatings on Tuesday, pressing ahead with anti-government protests inspired by demonstrations in neighbouring Egypt.

Opposition activists blame the government for rising food prices and have been protesting since Sunday around the country. They plan more demonstrations on February 3.

On Tuesday, some 200 students demonstrated outside al-Nilein university in Khartoum before hundreds of police beat them back and surrounded the university buildings with 20 vehicles.

Protests in Sudan have so far been small. Police have used force to quickly disperse any gatherings, illegal without prior permission. Rallies are rarely permitted in Sudan.

Late on Monday students in Gezira, Sudan’s farming heartland, and young people in the busy Khartoum suburb of al-Kalakla gathered chanting slogans against rising prices and repression.

One student has died from injuries after being beaten up by security forces, activists said on Monday. Authorities said they had no reports of a death.

The government has blamed the opposition for trying to create chaos in the country. The broad opposition alliance on Tuesday said their student leaders were arrested after a meeting in the capital and demanded the release of all prisoners.

Earlier this month Khartoum arrested opposition Islamist Hassan al-Turabi and a dozen members of his party but have not charged them. The government has also clamped down on the press.

“These ongoing rights violations are a pattern to silence dissident voices and limit access to information,” the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies said in a statement.

“The responses undertaken by police forces…exemplify the extent to which the (ruling party) are unwilling to tolerate any other voices on the road to democratic transformation.”

It said police had detained more than 100 people on the first day and arrests were continuing with people also being taken from their homes and offices. Activists are struggling to keep track of how many of their members have been detained.

Khartoum is in a vulnerable state after the oil-producing south voted overwhelmingly to secede in a referendum this month. It is also in deep economic crisis with a bloated import bill and foreign currency shortages.

An effective devaluation of the Sudanese pound has triggered inflation, and the government’s decision to subsidies on petroleum products and key commodity sugar provoking smaller protests in the north last month. - Reuters

Rights and Humanity: Five Ways to Help Egypt:

rightsandhumanity:

Just got this in an email from AccessNow.

Today, millions of Egyptians took to the streets in the biggest day of protests yet. Their dictator’s response? “I’m not going anywhere.” The people of Egypt are surging towards political freedom, but with the internet blocked and the mobile…

South Sudan's referendum vote reaches 60%, says SPLM

fyeahafrica:

South Sudan has reached the 60% turnout needed to pass the referendum on secession from the north, the south’s ruling party and ex-rebel group says.

“The 60% threshold has been achieved but we are asking for a 100% (turnout),” the SPLM’s Anne Itto said.

She did not give exact figures, but said it was based on polling centre reports for the first three days of the week-long vote which began on Sunday.

The poll was agreed as part of the 2005 deal to end the two-decade civil war.

The Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement have been running the region since that peace agreement.

Official turnout figures - which along with the preliminary result, are not expected until the beginning of February - are the responsibility of the South Sudan Referendum Commission.

Nearly all of those registered to vote - almost four million people - live in the south.

Ms Itto said people have stopped asking each other “how are you?” as a greeting and instead are asking “have you voted?”, AP news agency reported.

Sabit Alley, a member of the referendum commission, told the BBC they do not have exact statistics for the south because of communication problems.

But from information collected so far, 46% of people had cast their ballot in the south in the first two days.

“In the north 25% have voted - Khartoum state is quite high, over 50%,” he said.

The vote, in which only southerners are taking part, is widely expected to approve secession.

Meanwhile the US state department has indicated it could remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism if the north recognises the outcome of the poll.

“It is a process that takes some time, but by beginning the process in the wake of the referendum, the hope is if they meet all the conditions, it can be done by July,” US diplomat Princeton Lyman told AFP news agency.

Southern Sudan would become Africa’s 54th nation on 9 July 2011 if the referendum is passed.

North and south Sudan have suffered decades of conflicts driven by religious and ethnic divides, with an estimated 1.5 million people killed in the civil war.

Clooney, Google, UN team up to watch Sudan border

A group founded by American actor George Clooney said Tuesday it has teamed up with Google, a U.N. agency and anti-genocide organizations to launch satellite surveillance of the border between north and south Sudan to try to prevent a new civil war after the south votes in a secession referendum next month.

Clooney’s Not On Our Watch is funding the start-up phase Satellite Sentinel Project that will collect real-time satellite imagery and combine it with field analysis from the Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, organizers said.

The data will point out movements of troops, civilians and other signs of impending conflict. The U.N. Operational Satellite Applications Program and Google will then publish the findings online.

“We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we’re watching, the world is watching,” Clooney said in a statement. “War criminals thrive in the dark. It’s a lot harder to commit mass atrocities in the glare of the media spotlight.”

The groups hope that early warnings will reduce the risk of violence.

Southern Sudan’s looming Jan. 9 independence referendum has raised fears of renewed north-south civil war. The vote is the result of a 2005 peace deal that ended a 21-year conflict that claimed the lives of two million people and left twice as many displaced.

Organizers said the Satellite Sentinel Project will be available online Wednesday at http://www.satsentinel.org.

Liberia Expecting 100,000 Ivory Coast Refugees, Wants Help, Minister Says

Liberia is expecting about 100,000 refugees from Ivory Coast because of the political situation in the neighboring country, Liberia’s Internal Affairs Minister Harrison Kanwea said. More than 16,000 refugees crossed the border since November, Kanwea told reporters today in the capital, Monrovia. “The government of Liberia has decided that there will be refugee camps established in Liberia for Ivorian refugees,” he said. The refugees will only be integrated into local communities where international aid groups offer support, Kanwea said.

Kenya: Somalis Wait for Space in Overcrowded Camps

doctorswithoutborders:

Somalis fleeing the fighting in their own country continue to arrive as refugees in Dadaab, just across the Kenyan border. The three vast refugee camps there are already too overcrowded to house them, and new arrivals have no choice but to construct makeshift shelters in the desert beyond the camps. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is helping the new arrivals by providing them with shelter materials and much-needed medical care while they wait for somewhere more permanent to live.

Kenya MPs vote to leave ICC over poll violence claims

fyeahafrica:

Kenyan MPs have voted overwhelmingly for the country to pull out of the treaty which created the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The move comes a week after the ICC prosecutor named six Kenyans he accuses of being behind post-election violence.

The prosecutor’s list included senior politicians and civil servants.

The MPs do not have the power to effect any immediate change in relation to the ICC but they have sent a message to government to start withdrawing.

Some 1,200 people died and more than 500,000 fled their homes in the violence following the disputed election in December 2007.

It ended when President Mwai Kibaki and his rival Raila Odinga agreed to share power, with Mr Odinga becoming prime minister.

In the peace deal they signed it was agreed perpetrators would face justice in Kenya or at the ICC in The Hague.

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