BBC news 2009-06-16 加文本

BBC 2009-06-16


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Hello, and welcome to the latest global news recorded at 02:00 GMT on Tuesday, June 16th. This is Marks Pearson with a selection of highlights from across BBC World Service News today, coming up.

Will people power win the day in Iran?

Hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets of Tehran, security forces respond with gunfire and intimidation.

“They swooped into the dormitory. They just keep the hell out of everybody. I’ve sustained some severe injuries, but I don’t feel any pain anywhere, but my heart.”

Also in this podcast: Mother’s driven by poverty, abandon their babies in South Africa. How do you get to be a Somali pirate? "I got an AK 47 rifle and a ladder, but the problem was that we couldn’t catch up with the ships." Find out if he caught the boat or the law caught him.

And a provocative exhibition in Paris which tries to unpick the myth about the world’s most famous ape-man. Post-election Iran is still a turbulent place. The legal appeal by the opposition standard bearer Mir Hussein Mousavi has yet to run its course. And in the meantime, he’s drawn hundreds of thousands of people out onto the streets for a massive demonstration. There were some incidents of violence. One person was killed in gunfire coming from a pro-government militia building in Tehran. Our correspondent John Lion was out on the streets during the protests.

I was down at the rally and the atmosphere there was just quite unbelievable. People had suddenly thrown off the mantle of fear that has ruled this country for I don’t know how long, and we are going out in complete defiance of pretty unveiled threats from the authorities, who are enjoying themselves, who are encouraging us to film them, and were speaking out openly against the system about, against the Supreme Leader, against everything this country stands for, really, so that was a moment of kind of, a moment of freedom really. As soon as we got into the traffic jam going into the rally, you could, we kind of felt safe, just safe in numbers. Suddenly, all around us were people in cars, were waving V signs and green, the color of the opposition, honking their horns and you could see that nobody could come and nobody can attack you, once you are into the crowd, you realize you are amongst a million people. And I think the security forces realized that, we saw a small group of riot police sort of miles away from the demonstration. They just, just standing by the side of the road. And even in the demonstration itself, I’m sure there were secret police officers in the crowd as they always are here, but they didn’t dare come up to us and try and stop us filming as they usually do. And since then, of course, we’ve had what’s the gunfire in the rally, the circumstances surrounding are a little bit murky, but somebody has been killed. So I wasn’t there when that happen, but I can see obviously the fear will creep back in and the fear here is always in the background. What is the government going to do? How is it going to respond to these protests?

John Lion in Tehran.

Well, in the main, the authorities appear to have let Monday’s mass demonstration pass off without challenge. There have been incidents in which opposition activists have been confronted by the forces of the state. We have been speaking to a student in Tehran who asked not to be identified. He’d been involved in a sit-in at Tehran University and told us what happened when the police turned up.

They detained at least about 200 students because there were three buses out there, and all were filled after they arrived. And they injured me and some of my friends had witnessed some scenes that was like a bloodshed. They had some knives with them and swords. I’ve sustained some severe injuries, but I don’t feel any pain anywhere, but my heart.

The experiences of one student at Tehran University.

The Obama administration has been watching events in Iran closely. It was only this month that the American president reached out to Iran and the wider Islamic world in a major speech in Cairo. The upheaval surrounding the election has left Washington with a problem. In his first comments on the contested election, President Obama was at pains to stress that it is for Iranians themselves to resolve their differences, but he added that he was deeply troubled by reports of violence. Ambassador William Louis is with the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington...