Plain-clothed security agents beat on Tuesday leftist students gathered to protest against a government ban on demonstrations and "illegal interrogations," said reports.
The security agents punched and kicked a number of young men and women protestors to prevent about 100 demonstrators, mostly university students, from approaching the interior ministry, an AFP correspondent witnessed.
The agents pushed back the protestors, forcing them to disperse away from the interior ministry where Interior Security Forces had been heavily deployed, said the correspondent.
A spokesman of the leftist Khat Mubashar group, which called for the protest, said "we were trying to approach the interior ministry, when plain-clothed people asked us to leave."
"We asked them who they were, and they immediately started to beat us. They were security agents wearing civilian clothes," he told AFP.
Many of the protestors wore stickers and raised posters showing a cup of coffee with binoculars and cameras inside, reading: "this poster is against the services, all the services, both local and imported," in an apparent reference to Lebanese and Syrian intelligence services.
The Khat Mubashar spokesman explained that the posters referred to "repeated illegal interrogations subjected to students when security agents 'invite' them over for a cup of coffee at their offices."
He said the protest was planned "to protest a government ban on demonstrations, denounce 'cup of coffee' illegal interrogations and back all kinds of freedoms, while expressing support for Samir Kassir."
Authorities confiscated the passport of Kassir, a journalist and front-page editorialist in the leading An-Nahar newspaper, upon his March 28 return from a mission in Jordan.
On Monday, the General Security said it will temporarily return Kassir's passport, awaiting further "legal verification of the conditions of obtaining the passport."
But Kassir insists that "it was clear that it was a message for an editorial I had published on March 16," which criticized recently stepped up security and military showdowns in the country.
Lebanon's interior ministry decided Saturday not to grant authorization for street protests this week, in a bid to ban rival public rallies planned by pro- and anti-Syrian groups.
PRO-SYRIAN GROUPS INSIST ON STAGING DEMONSTRATION DESPITE BAN
The Daily Star newspaper reported that some pro-Syrian groups say that despite a ban on gatherings for Wednesday’s civil war commemoration, they will stick with plans to “counter-demonstrate” after other activists either suspended their protests or said they would restrict them to within university campuses.
A gathering of nationalist and pro-Syrian parties urged their partisans to take to the streets to counter any “hostile” activities by those it called “anti-Lebanon and anti-Syria.”
“Civil peace is a red line that no one is allowed to cross,” they said in a statement, but did not specify any locations.
For its part, the pro-Michel Aoun Free Patriotic Movement urged students to hold sit-ins within campuses in a bid to by-pass the need for rally permits. The sit-ins are scheduled for one hour starting at noon Wednesday.
The FPM said Tuesday that its gatherings would decry the beginning of the war and assert that conflict would not break out anew if the Syrian Army leaves Lebanon, said the paper.
Fadi Abu Jamra, the FPM’s student coordinator, said that by remaining within campuses, the group was merely “postponing” its original plan.
The original protest was planned by student supporters of the Progressive Socialist Party, the Aounists, the Communist Party, and various leftist groups.
The government banned it and other war-related protests, although two gatherings are scheduled for Wednesday one by the Baath Party and the other by a group calling itself the “6 February Forces,” a reference to the 1984 uprising that saw pro-Syrian militias eject the Lebanese Army from West Beirut, the paper added.
Flyers released Monday evening in Hamra and others in Tariq al-Jadideh urged “confronting Sharon’s allies, consisting of Aounists and members of the Lebanese Forces, and those who associate with them” at a demonstration in Barbir – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
