CAIRO, 21 March 2003 — Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the Middle East yesterday, demonstrating against military strikes on Iraq and calling on Muslims to wage a holy war against the United States and its allies. Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority issued fierce denunciations of the US-led attacks, while the Egyptian government daily Al-Ahram warned it marked “the beginning of an era of US colonization that will benefit only Israel”.
Protests against the action aimed at toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein were held in cities across Libya, Egypt and Lebanon, as well as in Amman, Damascus and the Gaza Strip. However, there were no reports of protests against the war from the Gulf states, many of whom are host to US military personnel.
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, meanwhile, strongly denounced Washington’s “aggression” and warned it could have repercussions beyond the borders of the pariah state. “We have warned against the marginalization of the United Nations ... and we see this aggression today plunging the world into a tunnel where one cannot see the end,” he said in a statement.
“For these reasons, we judge that it is necessary that the forces of peace and those who believe in right and justice take the necessary and rapid steps to halt this dangerous slide into war against Iraq which will result in heavy human and material losses.”
In the Egyptian capital, 10 demonstrators and at least four policeman were injured in clashes after several thousand demonstrators took to the streets near the US and British embassies. Riot police intervened after the protesters, who included hundreds of students from the American University in Cairo, rallied on the city’s central Tahrir Square, close to both the university campus and the US Embassy. More than 1,000 people also gathered at Cairo’s Al-Azhar Islamic University, where they burned an American flag and demanded the expulsion of the ambassadors of the US, Britain, Spain and Israel. Demonstrations also took place in the northern Egyptian cities of Alexandria, Tanta and Kafr El-Sheikh.
In Amman, three protesters were hospitalized after some 500 Jordanian lawyers staged a sit-in at the main court house after being forcibly blocked by riot police from marching toward the Iraqi Embassy to show their solidarity. In Lebanon, hundreds of students gathered on the campuses of the Arab University of Beirut and the American University of Beirut calling for the assassinations of US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. South of the capital in Sidon, some 1,500 schoolboys denounced “the Bush assassin” and the “silence of the Arab leaders”.
And in Khartoum, hundreds of university students took to the streets, carrying tree branches, a symbol of popular uprising in Sudan, and shouting slogans agains the US. Several hundred people in Mauritania, including parliamentarians, took to the streets of the capital yesterday in a march against the war in Iraq, witnesses said in Nouakchott. A journalist at the protest said Mauritanian parliamentary speaker Rachid Ould Saleh led the marchers as they set off from Nouakchott’s main marketplace.
