News Roundup: 7/28/08
New Zealand students offer new bounty for arrest of Condoleezza Rice for war crimes
IHT:
A group of New Zealand students offered a higher reward Saturday for the citizen's arrest of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for war crimes after another group withdrew their own bounty, accusing police of threatening them.
Canadian student faces deportation from Israel following protest
CBC:
A Canadian student who took part in a protest against the security wall Israel's building in the West Bank has been arrested and faces deportation from the Jewish state.
Victor McDiarmid, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement, had been living in the West Bank for nearly a month when he was arrested Wednesday at a demonstration by women from the village of Nilin, where Israel plans to build the next section of its security barrier.
McDiarmid, 23, was arrested after taking photographs of Israeli soldiers who were breaking up the protest by villagers, who say the barrier will separate them from their farmland.
Successful protest gives Kashmiris in India a sense of freedom
The students at the University of Kashmir have freedom on their minds.
Not from the tyranny of exams and professors, or of too-strict parents. What many young people here are dreaming of is freedom for their divided land, instead of being caught in the middle of a decades-old tug of war between India and Pakistan.
[...]
They got a taste of self-rule recently when thousands of residents rose up against a government decision to set aside forest land for use by Hindu pilgrims visiting a shrine here in India's only predominantly Muslim state, Jammu and Kashmir. The protests, in which at least six people were killed, were the biggest in years and forced not only an official reversal but the collapse of the state government this month.But beyond that, experts detect a rising sense of political and economic discontent among Kashmiri youths. About 400,000 young people are unemployed, half of them with bachelor's degrees. Many complain of discrimination when they apply for jobs in other parts of India, where human rights groups say police routinely detain and harass young Kashmiri men.
The pent-up resentment and anger helped drive young people out to protest and to support the demonstrations from behind the scenes. On the university campus, students organized blood drives as the number of people injured in clashes with security forces grew.
After the government reversed itself, they celebrated along with millions of other Kashmiris, and hoped it would be a sign of things to come.
The particular politics of the situation aside, this is a fantastic example of how student movements are so often at the fore of much larger and monumental social change. I was tempted to just quote the entire article -- it's very much worth reading, and I hope more is written about this.