NICOSIA: Cyprus police arrested 21 people late Monday after violent clashes involving immigrants and residents of a community in the west of the island which has a large population of asylum-seekers.
Police said those arrested after a second night of disturbances in the village of Chlorakas, some 155 km west of the capital Nicosia, included migrants and locals.
Monday night’s incidents followed a peaceful sit-down protest by migrants against violence late on Sunday, where people wearing hoods damaged a property and vehicles belonging to non-Cypriots.
Tension boiled over after the protest broke up, with groups of migrants and Greek Cypriots kept apart by police using teargas and water cannon. One police officer was lightly hurt by a petrol bomb.
Cyprus had seen a spike in the arrival of irregular migrants and people seeking asylum in recent years, though the rate of increase has tapered off this year. About 20 percent of the migrant community in Chlorakas comes from Syria.
Tensions have been running high in Chlorakas for several years over what some locals believe is a disproportionately high number of asylum seekers or recognized refugees settled there.
The island’s interior ministry declared the community off-limits to new arrivals in 2021, and last week authorities said they would vacate a property complex where hundreds of migrants lived without electricity and running water.
Sunday’s disturbances were preceded by a demonstration of around 300 people who marched through a central street in Chlorakas, calling for an end to irregular migration. Several participants then broke off from the main body of demonstrators and damaged property, police said.
Cyprus police arrest 21 after anti-immigrant violence
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Cyprus police arrest 21 after anti-immigrant violence
- Monday night’s incidents followed a peaceful sit-down protest by migrants against violence late on Sunday, where people wearing hoods damaged a property and vehicles belonging to non-Cypriots
- Tension boiled over after the protest broke up, with groups of migrants and Greek Cypriots kept apart by police using teargas and water cannon
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
