Demand heard ‘round the world: New trial for
Mumia
By Greg Butterfield
While confrontations between the police and supporters of
Mumia Abu-Jamal in the United States escalate, the movement
demanding his freedom continues to grow worldwide.
On April 26 and 27 the people of South Africa
celebrate Freedom Day, marking the political revolution that
overthrew apart heid. This year, a special interfaith service
called by Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndugane and Poet
Laureate Prof. Dennis Brutus on April 26 will focus on
demanding a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The service will be held on Robben Island, once the
infamous prison of the apartheid regime, now a memorial to
the struggle to end it. Both Ndugane and Brutus spent time
there as political prisoners along with Nelson Mandela.
"We in South Africa look in horror and great sadness at
the United States," said Ndugane, "where 37 states now apply
the death penalty. Apartheid South Africa applied the death
penalty."
The April 13 edition of An Phoblacht/Republican News--the
newspaper of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the liberation
movement in Ireland--reported that a meeting of the
International Section of the Ard Fheis April 9 expressed
solidarity with "Black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal,
who has been in the death row in a U.S. prison since the
early 1980s."
On April 13 hundreds of students from Cheikh Anta Diop
University in Dakar, Senegal, attempted to march on
the U.S. Embassy to demand freedom for Abu-Jamal. According
to the Senegalese Press Agency, police attacked the
demonstration with teargas grenades. During the standoff, the
students chanted, "Free Mumia!"
Inspired by the recent occupation of the U.S. Embassy roof
in Oslo, Norway, about 20 activists from Soligroep, part of
the European Network to Free Mumia, marched on the U.S.
Embassy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, one night in
mid-April.
According to an email bulletin from the activists, two of
the protesters managed to scale the embassy's fence. On the
flagpole they ran up a U.S. flag with the chalk outline of a
corpse drawn on it. Then the duo painted outlines and slogans
for Abu-Jamal and against police brutality on the sidewalks.
It took embassy security 15 minutes to respond. One of the
protesters was arrested, and the entire action was filmed by
a TV crew.
This article is copyright under a Creative
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