Sunday, February 20, 2011

Killed in Libya, Bahrain protests, incidents in Algeria

.- The protesters returned to take the place of the Pearl of Bahrain despite the brutal repression, in an eruption of protests against the authoritarian regimes of the Arab countries that left nearly 80 dead in Libya and a dozen in Yemen and Saturday hit Algeria. Thousands of protesters set up tents in the central square in Manama, Bahrain's capital, where they had been expelled Thursday in a police raid that left four dead.

On Friday, security forces opened fire on other protests, leaving scores injured. But Sunni authorities in this small oil-rich Gulf monarchy with a majority Shiite population on Saturday seemed resigned to seek another strategy to the demands of political reforms, to order the military and the police stay out of the now famous Place de la Perla .

"We ordered all security forces to withdraw immediately from the assembly areas (...) and concentrated ask people to leave the place to avoid any clash," said Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa . The opposition makes the beginning of a dialogue at the retreat of the army out of Manama.

Bahrain is a U.S. ally, which has its base there V Fleet. The crackdown also failed to intimidate other movements, such as the outbreak in Libya against the regime of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi in power for almost 42 years. At least 12 people were killed in clashes between demonstrators and soldiers in Benghazi, a major city in eastern Libya, the newspaper Quryna, close to the reformist Seif el Islam Kadhafi, a son of Libyan leader.

According to medical sources and witnesses cited by the advocacy organization Human Rights Human Rights Watch (HRW, based in New York), at least 84 people were killed in Libya since the beginning of the demonstrations on 15 February. A final count from different local sources totaled 77 killed on Saturday.

A source close to the power indicated that the security forces, "to avoid clashes with protesters," were ordered to leave the center of the city of Al Baida, a thousand 200 km east of Tripoli, a region where the protests appear to have become a general insurrection. In Algiers, about 200 protesters who chanted "free and democratic Algeria", "power murderer" or "the people want to topple the regime," gathered Saturday at the center of the city, despite an impressive array of forces security.

A deputy of the opposition Assembly for Culture and Democracy (RCD), Tahar Besbes, was seriously injured in a clash with police during the protest and appeared in a coma, according to a member of his party. However, the authorities claimed that the deputy has "absolutely nothing." The protests in the Arab world, inspired rebellions since the beginning of the year that ousted the president of Tunisia, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, spread like wildfire in this region with large population groups mired in poverty, eaten away by corruption and ruled by long-lived authoritarian regimes.

Other clashes erupted on Saturday in Yemen, where a student was shot dead in Sanaa, the capital, although the Interior Ministry denied this news. In Aden, southern Yemen, a 16-year-old died on Saturday hit by a stray bullet from the security forces during the dispersal of a demonstration, according to a hospital.

According to a report of the agency, this death brings to 10 the total number of deaths in protests that began on Sunday 13 in this impoverished country in the southern Arabian Peninsula. In Djibouti, another small country in the Horn of Africa separated from Yemen across the Red Sea, a policeman and a protester were killed Saturday in clashes after a major opposition demonstration in the capital, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The U.S. president, Barack Obama on Friday condemned the use of violence against peaceful demonstrations in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen, and broach called freedom of expression. In Tunisia, several hundred people demonstrated on Saturday "for a secular Tunisia, after several incidents with Islamists who attacked on Friday the streets of prostitutes and anti-Semitic slogans last week and a day after he was beheaded a Polish priest.

The main Tunisian Islamist movement, Ennahda asked the government "to discover the true circumstances" of the murder of Polish priest Rybinski Marek, 34, and "find those who committed it to clear things up before the public."

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