World

Hundreds of people took to the streets in China’s major cities on Sunday to protest against the country’s zero-Covid policy, in a rare outpouring of public anger against the state.

China’s hardline virus strategy is stoking public frustration, with many growing weary of snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and mass testing campaigns.

A deadly fire on Thursday in Urumqi, the capital of northwest China’s Xinjiang region, has become a fresh catalyst for public anger, with many blaming Covid lockdowns for hampering rescue efforts. Authorities deny the claims. 

On Sunday night, at least 400 people gathered on the banks of a river in the capital Beijing for several hours, with some shouting: “We are all Xinjiang people! Go Chinese people!”

AFP reporters at the scene described the crowd singing the national anthem and listening to speeches, while on the other side of the canal bank, a line of police cars waited. 

Cars honked in support as people remained in the area until the early hours, chanting and waving blank sheets of paper symbolising censorship. 

Authorities blocked the road to stop cars passing, and around 100 plainclothes and police officers arrived on the scene. 

At around 2:00 am (1800 GMT) they were joined by coaches of paramilitary police. 

Eventually protesters agreed to leave after making officers promise their demands had been heard. 

– Shanghai clashes –

In downtown Shanghai — China’s biggest metropolis — AFP saw police clashing with groups of protesters, as officers tried to move people away from the site of an earlier demonstration on Wulumuqi street, named after the Mandarin for Urumqi. 

Crowds that had gathered overnight — some of whom chanted “Xi Jinping, step down! CCP, step down!” — were dispersed by Sunday morning.

But in the afternoon, hundreds rallied in the same area with blank sheets of paper and flowers to hold what appeared to be a silent protest, an eyewitness told AFP.

Social media videos from the area that appeared to be taken in the late afternoon showed the crowd chanting.  

By evening, dozens of policemen in yellow high-vis jackets formed a thick line, cordoning off the streets where the protests had taken place. 

AFP saw multiple people arrested as officers told demonstrators to leave the area. 

A foreigner who wished to remain anonymous told AFP he had seen a standoff as police directed a crowd away from Wulumuqi street. 

“The police appeared to be looking for individuals suspected of leading the protests,” he said.

“Protesters directed their anger at the police and the party, using the ‘step down!’ refrain of the last few days.”

By midnight the area was calm, though swamped by hundreds of police officers and dozens of cars lining both sides of the road in some places. 

Men in hard hats and overalls were erecting tall blue metal barriers on the sides of the street, cutting off the pavement. When asked why, they said they did not know.

In the central megacity of Wuhan, where the coronavirus first emerged, multiple livestreams that were quickly censored showed crowds walking through the streets cheering and filming on their phones.  

Footage of protests allegedly taken in major cities Guangzhou and Chengdu was also spreading online Sunday night, but AFP was unable to independently verify the videos. 

– University protests –

Earlier in the day, around 200 to 300 students rallied at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University to protest against lockdowns, one witness who wished to remain anonymous told AFP.

A video that appeared to be taken in the same location showed students shouting, “Democracy and the rule of law, freedom of expression”, and was quickly taken down. 

Other vigils took place overnight at universities across China, including one at Tsinghua’s neighbour Peking University, an undergraduate participant told AFP. 

He said some anti-Covid slogans had been daubed on a wall in the university. 

Some of the words echoed a banner that was hung over a Beijing bridge just before the Communist Party Congress in October. 

“I heard people yelling: ‘No to Covid tests, yes to freedom!’,” he said, adding there were between 100 and 200 people there. 

Videos on social media also showed a mass vigil at Nanjing Institute of Communications, with people holding lights and white sheets of paper. 

Hashtags relating to the institute were censored on Weibo, and video platforms Duoyin and Kuaishou were scrubbed of footage. 

Videos from campuses in Xi’an, Guangzhou and Wuhan showing similar protests also spread on social media. AFP was unable to verify the footage independently. 

– ‘Lift lockdowns!’ –

China reported 39,506 domestic Covid-19 cases Sunday, a record high but tiny compared to caseloads in the West at the height of the pandemic.

The protests come against a backdrop of mounting public frustration over China’s zero-tolerance approach to the virus and follow sporadic rallies in other cities.

Hundreds of people massed outside Urumqi’s government offices after the deadly fire, chanting: “Lift lockdowns!”, footage partially verified by AFP shows. 

AFP verified the video by geolocating local landmarks but was unable to specify exactly when the protests occurred.

It is the latest in several high-profile cases where emergency services have been allegedly slowed down by Covid lockdowns.

The Qatar World Cup has also proved a flashpoint, as scenes of maskless fans provoked outrage on social media. 

China’s state broadcaster has started cutting close-ups of supporters and replacing them with shots of officials or players. 

Somali police launched an investigation Sunday after 20 foreigners were discovered near territory controlled by the Al-Shabaab militant group claiming to be fishermen who had been held hostage for years.

Police spokesman Sadik Dudishe said the men — 14 Iranians and six Pakistanis — were apprehended for questioning after they wandered unexpectedly from a part of Galmudug state under militant control.

“Some of these people were kidnapped by Al-Shabaab in 2014, while others were abducted on the Harardhere coast, near Qosol-tire, in southern Somalia in mid-2019,” Dudishe said in a statement.

“Four of them have physical injuries,” he said.

It is not clear how the men came to be released, and police provided no further detail, citing an ongoing inquiry. 

Local authorities in Hobyo, the coastal town where the men appeared, said the foreigners were being held for questioning.

“We are still investigating these 20 men who were detained today after coming from an Al-Shabaab controlled area,” Hobyo’s commissioner Abdullahi Ahmed Ali told reporters.

“They have claimed to be fishermen,” he added.

Al-Shabaab, which controls swathes of rural Somalia, has been trying to overthrow the central government for 15 years, funding its insurgency through criminal activities including kidnapping and ransom.

Somalia has also been plagued by piracy for years, though attacks on maritime vessels off the coast have fallen off sharply in recent years since peaking at 176 in 2011.

Unconfirmed reports suggest the men could have been abducted by pirates and passed on to Al-Shabaab, an affiliate of Al-Qaeda, which includes foreign fighters among its ranks.

In 2020, three Iranian fishermen believed to be the last hostages held by Somali pirates were freed after five years of captivity.

Cubans are voting Sunday in municipal elections amid a grave economic crisis that could weaken turnout and with the opposition charging some of its candidates have faced unfair pressure.

More than eight million Cubans aged 16 and older (of a population of 11.2 million) are eligible to cast secret ballots to select more than 12,400 municipal delegates, or councillors, from the 27,000 candidates nominated by show of hands in neighborhood assemblies.

In Havana, polling stations opened without incident at 7:00 am (1200 GMT), AFP journalists reported.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who had arrived back in Cuba earlier Sunday after a trip that took him to Algeria, Russia, Turkey and China, went with his wife Lis Cuesta to vote at a polling station in Playa, west of Havana. 

He later told reporters that the electoral process confirmed the political and social stability of the island, despite the “economic suffocation” he said the US was imposing on Cuba. 

The government had mounted an intense get-out-the-vote campaign on social media, as well as in the press and on television — both controlled by the ruling Communist Party, which oversees the election process but does not nominate candidates. 

But the opposition platform known as the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba (CDTC), which promotes change and pluralism in the country through legal means, called on people to abstain, citing unfair pressure by the government.

Its vice president, Manuel Cuesta, told AFP that three of the group’s candidates had been prevented “by the political police” from participating in neighborhood assemblies because they appeared to have a good chance of winning.

He said a fourth candidate, Jose Cabrera, was nominated in the southeastern city of Palma Soriano but never made it to the ballot over “threats of losing his job” and other difficulties.

The Cuban government has branded opposition members as US “mercenaries.”

These elections are the first step in a unique electoral system.

Councillors elected Sunday will form municipal governments that will propose 50 percent of the candidates for provincial assemblies and the National Assembly, which in turn elects the Council of State and the Cuban president from among its members. 

The other 50 percent are put forward by social organizations close to the government.

In theory, the system allows any Cuban to reach parliament, but the opposition maintains that Communist Party militants have the ability to prevent any opposition member from being elected. 

Adding uncertainty to the election — the first since Diaz-Canel came to power in 2018 —  is the economic crisis that has brought shortages of food and medicine and daily blackouts to the island, fueling an outflow of migrants and potentially increasing abstentionism.

Candidates who fail to win with an outright majority this Sunday will face a runoff on December 4.

Forty Burundian rebels have been killed in a joint offensive by the militaries of Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi in eastern DRC, a Congolese army spokesman said on Sunday. 

The two armies “carried out a high-intensity offensive operation” against Burundian rebels of the National Liberation Forces (FNL), Lieutenant Marc Elongo-Kyondwa said in a statement. 

The enemy “suffered a heavy loss of men and equipment: 40 attackers neutralised (killed),” he said. 

The two armies “dislodged” the FNL “from all the four hills overlooking the town of Nabombi,” considered a command post of the FNL’s self-proclaimed general Aloys Nzabampema, he added. 

The Congolese army called on local people to cooperate with the regular forces and “young people to dissociate themselves from armed groups”, the statement quoted Congolese General Major Ramazani Fundi, commander of operations in the southern part of the province, as saying. 

The FNL is a branch of Agathon Rwasa’s former rebel group, now the main political opposition in Burundi. 

Since August, Burundian soldiers charged with fighting armed groups have been officially present in DRC’s South Kivu region, as part of the Community of East African States (EAC) force. 

In June, the EAC decided to set up a regional force, comprising the Kenyan and Ugandan armies alongside Congolese soldiers in North Kivu and Ituri, the South Sudanese army in Haut-Uele and Burundians in South Kivu.  

Kinshasa, which accuses Rwanda of actively supporting M23 rebels in North Kivu, has refused to allow Kigali to take part in the force. 

For nearly 30 years, the east of the DRC has been plagued by violent armed groups, some local, others made up of militiamen from neighbouring countries. 

Thousands of Kurds protested on Sunday in the Syrian city of Qamishli against days of deadly Turkish cross-border strikes targeting Kurdish groups in the country’s northeast.

Turkey announced last Sunday it had carried out air strikes against semi-autonomous Kurdish zones in north and northeastern Syria, and across the border in Iraq. It has also threatened a ground offensive in those areas of Syria.

Demonstrators in Kurdish-controlled Qamishli, in Hasakeh province, brandished photos of people killed during recent strikes in the semi-autonomous region, an AFP correspondent said.

“Only the will of the Kurdish people remains,” said protester Siham Sleiman, 49. “It will not be broken and we remain ready. We will not leave our historic land.”

After a three-day lull, Turkish fighter jets heavily bombed Kurdish-controlled areas north of Aleppo early on Sunday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor.

A separate Turkish drone strike killed five Syrian government soldiers near Tal Rifaat, also north of Aleppo, the Observatory added, reporting an exchange of shelling between Kurdish combatants and Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies.

Protesters in Qamishli also chanted in favour of the resistance in “Rojava” — the name Kurds in Syria give to the area they administer.

“The message that we want to convey to the world is that we are victims of eradication,” said Salah el-Dine Hamou, 55.

“How long will we continue to die while other countries watch?”

The Turkish strikes come after a November 13 bombing in Istanbul that killed six people and wounded 81. Ankara blamed the attack on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which it and its Western allies consider a terrorist group.

The PKK has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984. Turkey alleges that Syrian Kurdish fighters are the PKK’s allies.

Kurdish groups denied any involvement in the Ankara blast.

Some protesters on Sunday carried Kurdish flags alongside photos of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan — jailed in Turkey since 1999 — and shouted slogans against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Turkish raids have killed at least 63 Kurdish and allied fighters and Syrian regime soldiers, as well as a Kurdish journalist, according to the Observatory, which relies on an extensive network of sources in Syria.

Eight people have been killed in retaliatory artillery fire, three of them across the Turkish border.

Since 2016, Turkey’s military has conducted three offensives mostly targeting Kurdish fighters, and captured territory in northern Syria, which is now held by Ankara-backed proxies.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurds’ de facto army in the area, led the battle that dislodged Islamic State group jihadist fighters from the last scraps of their Syrian territory in 2019.

Hundreds of people took to the streets in China’s major cities on Sunday to protest against the country’s zero-Covid policy in a rare outpouring of public anger against the state.

China’s hardline virus strategy is stoking public frustration, with many growing weary of snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and mass testing campaigns.

A deadly fire on Thursday in Urumqi, the capital of northwest China’s Xinjiang region, has become a fresh catalyst for public anger, with many blaming lengthy Covid lockdowns for hampering rescue efforts. Authorities deny the claims. 

On Sunday night, between 300 to 400 people gathered on the banks of a river in the capital Beijing for several hours, with some shouting: “We are all Xinjiang people! Go Chinese people!”

AFP reporters at the scene described the crowd singing the national anthem and listening to speeches, while on the other side of the canal bank, a line of police cars waited. 

In the central megacity of Wuhan, where the coronavirus first emerged, multiple livestreams that were quickly censored showed crowds walking through the streets cheering and filming on their phones.  

And in downtown Shanghai, AFP saw police clashing with groups of protestors, as officers tried to move people away from the site of an earlier demonstration on Wulumuqi street — named after the Mandarin for Urumqi. 

Crowds that had gathered overnight — some of whom chanted “Xi Jinping, step down! CCP, step down!” — were dispersed by morning.

But in the afternoon, hundreds gathered in the same area to hold what appeared to be a silent protest, an eyewitness told AFP.

Social media videos from the area that appeared to be taken in the late afternoon showed the crowd chanting.  

Footage from several different angles showed a man holding a bouquet of yellow flowers being dragged into a police car at one intersection as onlookers shouted.

By evening, dozens of policemen in yellow high-vis jackets formed a thick line, cordoning off the streets where the protests had taken place. 

AFP saw multiple people arrested as officers told people to leave the area. 

A foreigner who wished to remain anonymous told AFP he had seen a standoff as police directed a crowd away from Wulumuqi street. 

“The police appeared to be looking for individuals suspected of leading the protests,” he said.  

“The atmosphere was very tense, but there was also excitement and energy… Protestors directed their anger at the police and the party, using the ‘step down!’ refrain of the last few days.”

Footage of protests allegedly taken in major cities Guangzhou and Chengdu were also spreading online Sunday night, but AFP was unable to independently verify them. 

– University protests –

Earlier in the day, hundreds also rallied at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University to protest against lockdowns, one witness who wished to remain anonymous told AFP.

“At 11:30 am students started holding up signs at the entrance of the canteen, then more and more people joined,” they said, estimating there were 200-300 people present, some holding blank bits of paper. 

Participants sang the national anthem and “the Internationale” — a standard of the international communist movement — and chanted “freedom will prevail” and “no to lockdowns, we want freedom”, they said.

A video that appeared to be taken in the same location showed students shouting, “Democracy and the rule of law, freedom of expression”, and was quickly taken down. 

Other vigils took place overnight at universities across China, including one at Tsinghua’s neighbour Peking University, an undergraduate participant told AFP. 

Speaking anonymously as well for fear of repercussions, he said some anti-Covid slogans had been daubed on a wall in the university. 

Some of the words echoed a banner that was hung over a Beijing bridge just before the Communist Party Congress in October. 

“I heard people yelling: ‘No to Covid tests, yes to freedom!’,” he said, adding there were between 100 and 200 people there. 

Videos on social media also showed a mass vigil at Nanjing Institute of Communications, with people holding lights and white sheets of paper. 

Hashtags relating to the protest were censored on Weibo, and video platforms Duoyin and Kuaishou were scrubbed of footage. 

Videos from campuses in Xi’an, Guangzhou and Wuhan showing similar protests also spread on social media. AFP was unable to verify the footage independently. 

– ‘Lift lockdowns!’ –

China reported 39,506 domestic Covid-19 cases Sunday, a record high but small compared to caseloads in the West at the height of the pandemic.

The protests come against a backdrop of mounting public frustration over China’s zero-tolerance approach to the virus and follow sporadic rallies in other cities.

Hundreds of people massed outside Urumqi’s government offices after the deadly fire, chanting: “Lift lockdowns!”, footage partially verified by AFP shows. 

AFP verified the video by geolocating local landmarks but was unable to specify exactly when the protests occurred.

It is the latest in several high-profile cases where emergency services have been allegedly slowed down by Covid lockdowns, which have catalysed public opposition.

The Qatar World Cup has also proved a flashpoint, as scenes of maskless fans provoked outrage on social media. 

China’s state broadcaster has started cutting close-ups of supporters and replacing them with shots of officials or players.