CAIRO, 25 March 2003 — Egyptian students implored God to grant victory to Iraq, in a song taken up by thousands in a demonstration in Cairo yesterday on the fifth day of the US-led war. “Baghdad don’t suffer, Baghdad don’t surrender, God is Great and will grant you victory,” went the lyrics aired first on loudspeakers and quickly repeated by some 12,000 students gathered on the campus of the Al-Azhar Islamic university. “It’s the first time I hear this song,” said a physics professor at the university, which has 150,000 students.
The rally also featured mock funerals of US President George W. Bush, branded “Bush the pig,” and his “accomplices Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon,” the prime ministers of Britain and Israel. Some of the demonstrators, wearing Palestinian head scarves, waved shrouds in a sign of mourning for Iraqi killed as a result of the US-led invasion, while other carried mock missiles made of plastic tubes.
Balloons flew overhead tied to soda bottles, packs of washing powder and placards saying “save a Muslim, boycott US products.” Another 2,000 students demonstrated at Ain Shams University in northeastern Cairo, organizers said, reporting massive police deployment to prevent the students from going out to the streets.
Students and opposition activists have been staging daily demonstrations against the war, defying emergency laws that have been in force nearly constantly in Egypt since 1967. According to human rights organizations, 800 anti-war demonstrators have been arrested so far by police.
In Germany, several hundred anti-war activists clashed with police in the northern port of Hamburg yesterday in the first German peace protests to turn violent since the Iraq war started last Thursday. Police said they had detained 21 people after protesters marching on the US Consulate threw bottles and stones at them. About 20,000 students had attended a peaceful protest rally in the morning, but about 8,000 then left the official march route to approach the heavily-guarded consulate, police said.
Hundreds of protesters have staged protests at US bases in Germany. More than 7,000 people have signed up to engage in further activities of civil disobedience now the war had started, anti-war group Resist said.
Around 3,000 Thais staged a peaceful protest in front of the United Nations building in Bangkok yesterday, police said. Bearing placards emblazoned with anti-US and anti-war slogans, protesters rallied for under two hours, police told AFP. Anti-war protests in predominantly Buddhist Thailand have been low-key since the US-led offensive in Iraq began last Thursday.
Indonesians took to the streets of several cities yesterday to protest the invasion of Iraq, with some denouncing US President George Bush as a “terrorist” and a “vampire.” Some 1,000 members and supporters of the Muslim Hizb-ut Tahrir group demonstrated at Yogyakarta, the Detikcom online news service said.
Authorities in the eastern Afghan province of Laghman said yesterday they had clamped down on a second day of demonstrations against attacks on Iraq, fearing protests could get out of hand.
