Ethiopian poll protests spread as more students defy demo ban

ADDIS ABABA, June 7 (AFP) — Ethiopian police on Tuesday raided a technical college in Addis Ababa as student protests against last month’s disputed polls spread in defiance of a government ban, witnesses said.

A day after a teenager was killed and more than 500 students arrested amid sporadic clashes with security forces at campuses in the north and east of the capital, police broke up a demonstration at the Addis Ababa Tegbareed Industrial Technical College in the southern part of the city, they said.

Baton-wielding police fired several shots in the air and charged angry groups of people outside the school on trucks and on foot in a bid to disperse crowds after beating and subduing protesting students inside, witnesses said.

“Release our students,” yelled one group of women, apparently mothers of pupils among a group of 100 to 120 people at the college who have been protesting alleged ruling party fraud in the May 15 polls.

Police entered the facility after being pelted with rocks and beat several demonstrators with batons, according to an eyewitness, Japanese teacher Isao Okutsu, who said he had been “upset” by the severity of the blows.

“When the students saw the police coming they became violent and started throwing stones,” Okutsu told AFP. “Then the police came inside the school and started beating the students with sticks.”

“The beating was very hard, it upset me,” he said, adding that he had seen one female student taken to hospital after being hit.

Government officials have blamed the country’s main opposition group, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) for inciting the students to defy a one-month ban on all demonstrations in the capital and to commit violence.

The CUD has led opposition claims that the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) is trying to steal the election through massive vote rigging and fraud.

Late Monday, after announcing the death of a female high school student and the wounding of six people in clashes near a teachers’ college, the government appealed to parents to discourage their children from joining the protests.

“We call on all parents not to let their children to be instruments of anti-peace forces,” the information ministry said in a statement aired on national television warning the opposition to stop fomenting unrest.

Police on Monday said they had detained 520 students from the Kotebe Teacher’s College and Addis Ababa University, the center of deadly rioting in 2001 in which more than 30 people were killed.

Both of those campuses were calm on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi imposed a month-long post-election ban on all demonstrations in the capital and surrounding areas shortly after the polls closed on May 15.

The opposition are now awaiting a high court ruling on a suit they filed last week seeking to prevent election authorities from validating provisional results of the May 15 polls that give the EPRDF a majority in parliament.

The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) has delayed by one month — from June 8 to July 8 — the release of final results due to the large number of fraud allegations it has to investigate.

The board says it has received complaints about irregularities at some 15,000 out of more than 30,000 polling stations in 299 constituencies around the country and would investigate them.

Provisional results announced thus far give the EPRDF and allied parties 321 seats in the 547-member parliament.

Those returns, from 517 of the 524 contested constituencies, show opposition parties, which had only 12 seats in the previous parliament, and independents with 196 seats.