Serbian police detain 79 people in crackdown on protests
Police and protesters clashed in the capital Belgrade and the cities of Novi Sad, Nis and Novi Pazar, the interior ministry said in the statement on Thursday.
Months of protests across Serbia, including university shutdowns, have rattled Vucic, a former ultranationalist who converted to the cause of European Union membership in 2008.
His second term ends in 2027, when parliamentary elections are also scheduled.
The protesters launched blockades of major junctions and roads in Belgrade and other towns across Serbia on Sunday over the arrest of activists when police and demonstrators clashed at a big opposition rally on Saturday.
On Wednesday evening, police moved to remove students in front of the entrance of the Law Faculty in Belgrade, and briefly detained dozens, N1 TV reported.
Oliver Stojkovic, a professor at the medical faculty, told Fonet news agency that four students had been injured in the police action and taken to hospital.
"This (the police action) is an absolute violation of human rights and a violation of the freedom of the university," Bozo Prelevic, a former interior minister, told Reuters.
The U.N. human rights office said on X it was "closely monitoring situation after reports of violence, harassment & arbitrary detention of protesters" and urged authorities to exercise restraint.
Vucic's opponents accuse him and his allies of ties to organised crime, violence against rivals and curbing media freedoms. Vucic denies the accusations.
Protests by students, opposition, teachers, workers and farmers began last December after 16 people died on November 1 in a Novi Sad railway station roof collapse. Protesters blame corruption for the disaster.
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Reuters
5 hours ago
- Reuters
Bosnia's prosecutor lifts arrest warrant against separatist Serb leader
BELGRADE, July 5 (Reuters) - Bosnia's prosecutor's office said it had lifted an arrest warrant against separatist Serb leader Milorad Dodik after he surprisingly appeared at a hearing investigating allegations against him of violating the constitutional order. After months of ignoring summons to attend the prosecutor's office to answer questions, Dodik appeared at a hearing on Friday, authorities said in a statement issued late on Friday. Dodik is a long-time advocate of the secession of the autonomous Serb Republic, one of two regions in Bosnia linked by a weak central government, and the crisis precipitated by his separatist push represents one of the biggest threats to peace in the Balkans since the 1990s conflicts that followed Yugoslavia's collapse. In February, he was sentenced to one year in jail and banned from holding office for six years for defying the decisions of an international peace envoy, the ultimate interpreter of Bosnia's constitution under the Dayton peace accords that ended the 1992-95 war in which 100,000 people were killed. In March, Bosnian state prosecutors ordered Dodik's arrest for ignoring a court summons. Following Friday's hearing, Bosnia's prosecutor's office and the court issued a statement saying that the arrest warrant for him was withdrawn, though he will still have to report periodically to state authorities.
Daily Mail
9 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Inside China's horrifying torture jails from gang-rape, human experiments and organ harvesting to inmates having nails ripped out and limbs bent back on notorious 'tiger chairs'
Mass sterilisation, mysterious injections, organ extractions and gang rape - these are just some of the sadistic conditions prisoners face in China, according to activists. Horrifying accounts of sexual abuse, torture, forced confessions and human experimentation have led rights groups to accuse the country of crimes against humanity. A shocking 2015 Amnesty International report revealed the inhumane conditions prisoners endured, and detailed how they were routinely slapped, kicked and hit with shoes or water-filled bottles. Prisoners described being strapped in so-called 'tiger chairs', with their legs tied to a bench as bricks attached to the bottom of their feet forced their legs backwards, causing them unimaginable pain. Amnesty also found that dozens of Chinese firms were producing 'tools of torture', ranging from electric chairs to deadly metal spiked rods. A separate report from Human Rights Watch in 2015 claimed Chinese detainees were being beaten and hanged by their wrists. 'Police are torturing criminal suspects to get them to confess to crimes and courts are convicting people who confessed under torture', the report said. The rights group cited former detainees as saying they were physically and psychologically tortured during police interrogations, including being whacked with electric batons, sprayed with chilli oil and deprived of sleep. Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council has been warned that China is actively selling human organs on an industrial scale, with body parts of prisoners - such as kidneys, livers and lungs - removed from them while they are still alive. While Beijing has repeatedly denied accusations that it forcibly takes organs from inmates, one survivor of organ harvesting in China revealed the horrific ordeal he endured at the hands of state-sanctioned surgeons. Between 1999 and 2006, Cheng Pei Ming faced relentless persecution for his religious and spiritual beliefs by the Chinese Communist Party, during which he is believed to have been repeatedly tortured. Cheng says he was taken to a hospital where doctors pressured him into signing consent forms for surgery In one of the most chilling episodes of his captivity, Cheng was taken to a hospital where doctors pressured him into signing consent forms for surgery. When he refused, he was immediately injected with an unknown substance which knocked him out. He awoke with a massive incision down the left side of his chest, and scans later confirmed that segments of Cheng's liver and lung had been removed. Images that surfaced on a website that shares information about the practice of organ harvesting clearly show an unconscious Cheng, which he suspects were taken by a shocked nurse or hospital worker. Beijing has denied any wrongdoing, but it admitted that organs were taken out of executed prisoners up until 2015. But many human rights organisations insist that China continues to harvest the organs of the country's oppressed ethnic minorities held in prisons. Internationals detained in China have also exposed the country's vicious treatment of prisoners and its brutal psychological torture methods. One Canadian man, who was detained by Chinese authorities for more than 1,000 days, claimed he was put into solitary confinement for months and interrogated for up to nine hours every day. ormer diplomat Michael Kovrig, his wife Vina Nadjibulla and sister Ariana Botha walk following his arrival on a Canadian air force jet after his release from detention in China, at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, Ontario, Canada September 25, 2021. He described the mental torture he suffered while detained Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, was taken into custody in December 2018 in China and was accused of spying. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp last year, he described how there was no daylight in his solitary cell, where the fluorescent lights were kept on 24 hours a day. At one point, his food ration was cut to three bowls of rice a day. 'It was psychologically absolutely, the most gruelling, painful thing I've ever been through,' he said. 'It's a combination of solitary confinement, total isolation, and relentless interrogation for six to nine hours every day,' he said. 'They are trying to bully and torment and terrorize and coerce you ... into accepting their false version of reality.' Another example that has sparked international condemnation are the harrowing prison camps hidden deep within the remote Xingjiang province in western China. Branded by the government as re-education facilities, the camps are believed to hold approximately one million inmates - most of whom are Uighur Muslim - for 'vocational training', which the government argues is necessary in the region to alleviate poverty and fight extremism. Horrifying accounts of the inhumane conditions inmates endure in these facilities have led human rights groups to accuse China of crimes against humanity and possible genocide. Picture shows watchtowers on a high-security facility near what is believed to a re-educatiion camp on the outskirts of Hotan in Xiangjing The barbarity of Beijing's clandestine prisons has been detailed by those who have been lucky enough to escape. Sayragul Sauytbay, a Uighur Muslim, was forced into a camp in 2017, where she was made to teach other prisoners Chinese in a bid to strip them of their identity and indoctrinate them into the Communist regime. After being released from the camp a year later, she fled China and bravely told of the savagery she witnessed in a 2019 interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz. She described a world where prisoners were shackled, sleep deprived and subjected to humiliating punishments inside Beijing's brutal gulags. In her testimony, Sauytbay also went as far as comparing the Chinese bid to crush traditional cultures in the Xinjiang region to Nazi efforts to eradicate the Jews. During her time at the camp, she claims to have witnessed the use of mass surveillance by authorities, forced marriage, secret medical procedures, sterilisation and torture. Sauytbay described how inmates were stripped of all of their possessions upon arrival and were handed military-style uniforms. She also claimed that punishments were carried out in a so-called 'black room', a nickname given to it by prisoners because they were banned from talking about it. Tortures included being forced to sit on a chair covered with nails, beatings with electrified truncheons and having fingernails torn out. In one chillingly cruel instance, she saw an elderly woman get her skin flayed off and her fingernails ripped out for a minor act of defiance. Describing the sleeping arrangements at the camp, Sauytbay said around 20 inmates were crammed into a room measuring 50ft by 50ft, with a single bucket for a toilet. She also highlighted how people were constantly watched, with cameras installed in dormitories and corridors. Women were systematically raped, she claimed, and said that she was forced to watch a woman be repeatedly assaulted. In one instance, she saw how a woman was raped by guards as part of a forced confession. 'While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again,' she said. 'It was awful. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her.' Sauytbay also claimed that inmates were routinely starved, but on Fridays, Muslim inmates were force-fed pork and spent hours learning political slogans such as 'I love Xi Jinping.' Mysterious medical experiments were also commonplace, with Sauytbay witnessing how prisoners were given pills or injections. 'Some prisoners were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and men became sterile.' Another Uighur woman who escaped a detention camp detailed the torture and abuse she experienced at the hands of Chinese authorities. Mihrigul Tursun told reporters in a 2018 press conference in Washington that she was interrogated for four days in a row without sleep, had her head shaved and was subjected to intrusive medical examination following her arrest the year prior. 'I thought that I would rather die than go through this torture and begged them to kill me,' she tearfully told reporters at a meeting at the National Press Club. She also spoke of how her and other inmates were forced to take medication, including pills that made them faint. One day, Tursun recalled, she was led into a room and placed in a high chair, and her legs and arms were locked in place. 'The authorities put a helmet-like thing on my head, and each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I would feel the pain in my veins,' Tursun said. 'I don't remember the rest. White foam came out of my mouth, and I began to lose consciousness,' Tursun said. 'The last word I heard them saying is that you being an Uighur is a crime.' But their account are not the only evidence of of China's atrocious treatment of Uighur prisoners. Drone footage released in 2019 showed apparently Uighur prisoners being unloaded from a train. The detainees appeared to be blindfolded and shackled, their heads shaved. In 2022, a series of police files obtained by the BBC revealed details of China's use of these camps, and described the use of armed officers and a shoot-to-kill policy for those who dared escape. Other reports have claimed that Uighur women have been forced to marry Han Chinese men, many of them government officials. According to a report from the Uighur Human Rights Project, the Chinese government has imposed forced inter-ethnic marriages on young Uighur women under the guise of 'promoting unity and social stability'. But defectors claim that women who have fallen victim into coerced marriages often endure unimaginable abuse, including rape. Another brave Chinese whistle-blower exposed the brutal tactics used by police and guards at re-education centres in Xinjiang. The unnamed Chinese defector spoke to Sky News in 2021, in which he revealed the conditions he witnessed as a police officer in one of the prison camps. He spoke of how prisoners were brought to the re-education facilities on crowded trains and detailed how they would be handcuffed to each other and have hoods placed over their heads to prevent them from escaping. He also revealed how detainees would not be given food onboard the trains and would only be given minimal amounts of water. They were also forbidden from going to the toilet 'to keep order'. It is believed that China implemented the use of re-education camps following an eruption of anti-government protests and deadly terror attacks. In response, President Xi Jinping demanded an all-out 'struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism' with 'absolutely no mercy', according to leaked documents. China denied the existence of camps for Uighur people for years, but when images of the centres began to emerge, Beijing changed its story. The government now acknowledges the existence of the camps but has stood by the fact that they are 'vocational education and training centres' aimed at 'stamping out extremism.' The demonstrators protest against the International Olympics Committee's (IOC) decision to award 2022's Winter Olympics to China amid the country's record of human rights violations in Hongkong and Tibet as well as crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. February 03, 2022 President Xi Jinping recently vowed to reduce corruption and improve transparency in the legal system. The crackdown is predominantly focused on the Uighurs, an ethnic minority group of about 12 million people related to the Turks. But efforts from the Chinese government have also targeted other Muslim groups such as Kazakhs, Tajiks and Uzbeks. And just this week, rights groups have claimed that China is preparing to dramatically scale up forced organ donations from Uighur Muslims and other persecuted minorities held in detention camps. The claim comes after China's National Health Commission announced plans last year to triple the number of medical facilities capable of performing organ transplants in the Xinjiang region, home to the vast majority of Uyghurs in the country. The expanded facilities will reportedly be authorised to perform transplants of all major organs, including hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys and pancreas. The move has prompted warnings from rights campaigners and international human rights experts who say the planned expansion aims to fuel industrial-scale organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience. Despite China's attempts to downplay the severity of its prisons , it recently issued a rare admission that torture and unlawful detention take place in the country's justice system and has vowed to crack down on illegal practices by law enforcement. The country's opaque justice system has long been criticised over the disappearance of defendants, the targeting of dissidents and regularly forcing confessions through torture. The country's top prosecutorial body the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) has occasionally called out abuses while President Xi Jinping has vowed to reduce corruption and improve transparency in the legal system. The SPP announced last week the creation of a new investigation department to target judicial officers who 'infringe on citizens' rights' through unlawful detention, illegal searches and torture to extract confessions. Its establishment 'reflects the high importance... attached to safeguarding judicial fairness, and a clear stance on severely punishing judicial corruption', the SPP said in a statement. China has frequently denied allegations of torture levelled at it by the United Nations and rights bodies, particularly accusations of ill-treatment of political dissidents and minorities. Drone footage emerged showing police leading hundreds of blindfolded and shackled men from a train in what was believed to be a transfer of inmates in Xinjiang The Chinese government has acknowledged the existence of the camps but has stood by the fact that they are 'vocational education and training centres' But several recent cases involving the mistreatment of suspects have drawn public ire despite China's strictly controlled media. A senior executive at a mobile gaming company in Beijing died in custody in April last year, allegedly taking his own life, after public security officials detained him for more than four months in the northern region of Inner Mongolia. The man had been held under the residential surveillance at a designated location system, where suspects are detained incognito for long stretches without charge, access to lawyers and sometimes any contact with the outside world. Several public security officials were accused in court this month of torturing a suspect to death in 2022, including by using electric shocks and plastic pipes, while he was held. The SPP also released details last year of a 2019 case in which several police officers were jailed for using starvation and sleep deprivation on a suspect and restricting his access to medical treatment. The suspect was eventually left in a 'vegetative state', the SPP said.
Times
11 hours ago
- Times
Yes we can! A master of political slogans reveals his secrets
There can't be many people working in politics with a CV like Chris Bruni-Lowe's. One morning in late 2018 the pollster and strategist took an unexpected phone call from his old friend Nigel Farage. Together the two men had taken Ukip from nutty obscurity to nearly four million votes in a general election and the EU referendum victory it had always dreamt of. Now, with parliament deadlocked and Ukip back beyond the fringe, a restless Farage was planning his most audacious heist on British democracy yet: the Brexit Party. Now he needed a slogan. To Bruni-Lowe, a shaven-headed thirtysomething from south London, Farage was insistent: he wanted to promise a 'political revolution'. Saying no to Farage is never easy. But Bruni-Lowe did just that. 'I pointed out to him that the politically explosive connotations of the term made it a risky choice,' he writes in Eight Words That Changed the World, a fascinating and timely history of election slogans – some of them his. Instead he settled on a gentler line with a deliberate double meaning: 'Change politics for good.' Farage won the European elections of 2019, Theresa May was ousted as prime minister, then Boris Johnson got Brexit done. 'We had succeeded,' Bruni-Lowe reflects, 'in choosing the right word for the right candidate at the right time.' A couple of pages after this story Bruni-Lowe recounts another of his professional triumphs. 'I was advising Milojko Spajic, a former finance minister in Montenegro … He had resigned from the government six months earlier to found a new political party called Europe Now! and he wanted my help to win the presidential election in March 2023.' Pardon me? What now? Europe when? We thought you were the Farage guy. But no: here is Bruni-Lowe, settling on the slogan 'It's time' to help another upstart party 'overturn some deeply entrenched attitudes' and win an election on a pro-EU platform. It worked. Just how does he do it? In an age of volatile electorates and unpredictable polls, this stuff is more important than it has ever been. At their best, slogans capture the zeitgeist and express in not even a sentence the essence of a politician's mandate. Just ask Keir Starmer. 'Change', one of Bruni-Lowe's eight words, spoke to the anti-Tory mood of 2024, but is proving rather difficult to substantiate in office. Few people know all of this better than the author, a gun for hire whose work has taken him to almost every democracy in the world. There is a little bit of memoir in this pacey, breezily written history of a much misunderstood political art — I almost wanted more — but it is short on baccy-stained anecdotes about Farage. Instead, this short book's great strength is in its breadth and depth. Those eight words are people, change, democracy, strong, together, new, time and better, with a chapter for each — and two bonus choices, great and future, as our introduction and epilogue. Some are invariably more effective, ambiguous and elastic than others, but it of course depends where you are. As the Liberal Democrats have learnt from a century of banging on about proportional representation, lecturing UK voters about 'democracy' is likely to put them to sleep. In embattled states like Taiwan and Ukraine, however, it means something real. Parties that look knackered, meanwhile, can be reinvigorated by the judicious use of a single word. Old rogues like Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orban in Hungary have both used the word 'time' to present themselves afresh to exhausted electorates. Political journalists like me are constantly discovering that there's really nothing new in our line of work — and that is also the lesson here. Not least the word 'new', which turns out to belong to rather more people than Tony Blair. Vladimir Putin, Erdogan and the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko all used it to win the elections that would, in time, turn them into very old-school strongmen. The best slogans are a repository for millions of diffuse — and very different — hopes and dreams. • The 9 best politics books of the past year to read next Take Barack Obama. 'Yes we can' was his clarion call to a restive America in 2008. Even I, the sort of tragic political nerd who watches old Michael Cockerell documentaries on holiday, didn't know that Alex Salmond had used the same slogan for the SNP in the general election of 1997. As Bruni-Lowe notes, drily and wryly: 'It is plain to see that Alex Salmond and Barack Obama had different qualities.' It wasn't so much the slogan that mattered, but the time and place in which voters were reading it. 'The words can work,' he writes, 'but only if they're used by the right person at the right time.' See also: Winston Churchill. Almost absurdly, given how intimately he was then known by the British public, Churchill told voters that it was 'time for a change' in 1951. Despite knowing him only too well — just as they knew Farage by 2019 — they happened to agree. But when the Republicans ran Thomas Dewey against Franklin D Roosevelt with the same slogan in 1944, Americans laughed him out of the room. Yes, Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented and controversial fourth term — but the business end of the Second World War was not, it turned out, the ideal time for a change. Perhaps my favourite one of all is the frankly deranged slogan employed by the Japanese Social Democrats in 2021: 'Change is fun!' That may be the implicit logic of every 'change' line, but in this case the voters did not agree. They won one seat. As South Africa prepared for its first multiracial elections in 1994, Nelson Mandela — not a man we imagine as a ruthless electioneer — learnt a similar lesson. He told his American strategists, Stan Greenberg and Frank Greer, that he had come up with the ideal slogan for the African National Congress: 'Now is the time.' They duly polled it and found it resonated only with hardcore activists from the ANC. Mandela, 75 but ever conscientious, did not much like that. 'He really wanted to unite the country,' Greer, one of many gnarled veterans to speak on the record, tells Bruni-Lowe. 'I've never been a candidate,' Mandela would say. 'I want to learn how to be a candidate.' That resulted in a slogan befitting of a father of the rainbow nation: 'A better life for all.' • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List As Bruni-Lowe rightly concludes, the election slogan has never been more important. With everything up for grabs in British politics, his comrades in the polling fraternity should study his book. I bet Farage will. And if that scares you, read to the very end. The author's parting shot should terrify well-meaning liberals even more than the prospect of a Reform government. The reader we should worry about isn't an unscrupulous politician but ChatGPT. The future, Bruni-Lowe warns, is a world of 'hyper-targeted slogans', written by AI, mashing his eight words together in different orders for each individual voter and smashing our national conversation into tens of millions of pieces. That's certainly new. It will be a change too. And it's about time politics caught up with technology. But is it democracy? Eight Words That Changed the World: A Modern History of the Election Slogan by Chris Bruni-Lowe (Biteback £20 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
