Police violently disperse students

[Kefentse_Bandele]

Police violently disperse students

September 03 2007 at 10:13PM

Abidjan - Ivory Coast police on Monday used teargas to break up an Abidjan demonstration by students demanding compensation from the government after a bloody police crackdown on protest last year.

At least 20 people were injured, though apparently none seriously, when police moved in against about 100 students in the Ivorian economic capital's downtown Cocody business district, witnesses at the scene told AFP.

A number of vehicles were damaged by demonstrators and the students put up barricades for a while on streets in the wealthy area where their campus and residences are housed.

The students were called out by their FESCI union to urge the government to pay damages after one student was shot dead and more than a dozen wounded in a clash on the Cocody campus at the end of August 2006.


FESCI argues that the government should pay almost 300 million CFA francs (about R4,46-million) in damages and compensation to victims of that clash, which was a brawl on the Cocody campus itself.

A FESCI leader, Durand Zagol, said the aim had been to hold a sit-in demo at the interior ministry premises, but when police showed up they fell back to the Cocody neighborhood nearby.

He said FESCI had then tried to prevent the protest getting out of hand.

In the clash last year, police cadets wielding mainly iron bars and baseball bats stormed the campus premises next to their academy, burst into lectures, attacked students and wrecked some of their residences.

They were taking revenge for two of their number beaten up two days earlier in a row at a bus station.

Similar clashes have been commonplace between police and students for more than a decade in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast.

Source: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_i...2639816C406988