CAMEROON: University paralysed after students clash with police

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

YAOUNDE, 22 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - Classes at Cameroon's largest university were suspended on Friday following a clash between student protestors and paramilitary gendarmes on the campus.

The trouble began on Thursday when armed riot police fired tear gas at 300 student demonstrators who interrupted lectures at Yaounde One University urging other students to join them in the protest march.

Eyewitnesses said the police also fired warning shots into the air, beat up several students and arrested five of them.

The protestors were demanding the scrapping of university fees, the restoration of student grants, an improvement in living conditions at student residences and an end to the practice of lecturers giving higher marks in return for bribes.

Four of the 17,000 students at Yaounde One started a hunger strike last week to press these demands. Their protest entered its ninth day on Friday.

The hunger strikers, who belong to the Association for the Defence of the Rights of Cameroon University Students (ADDEC), began their fast outside the offices of the National Episcopal Conference of Cameroon.

After being chased away from there, they stationed themselves outside the offices of the Cameroonian Red Cross.

They were moved on again from there on Tuesday and established a new base on the university campus, where their presence helped to spark the latest unrest.

"Our hunger strike is a signal to both the government and school administration to show the unbearable situation of abject poverty and misery in which we live in the universities," Eric Koidzeka, one of the four fasting students told IRIN on Thursday.

Koidzeka, a fourth-year history student, was lying on a mattress in front of a university building together with the three other hunger strikers.

On Thursday, some ADDEC students interrupted classes and urged others to join them in a protest march to the prime minister’s office, situated three km from the university.

Professor Samy Beban Chumbo, the Rector of Yaounde One University, told IRIN that, "The students' strike is illegitimate because we've been examining the problems put forward by the student body".

He accused those on hunger strike of being "politically manipulated," but declined to say who was manipulating them.

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