Scotland Friends highlight arrests of Ugandan students
The plight of students in Uganda who were arrested for peacefully protesting is being highlighted by Quakers in Scotland
Quakers in Scotland have highlighted the plight of dozens of students in Uganda who have been violently arrested for peacefully marching against the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).
Members of Students Against EACOP Uganda, a student climate movement, were most recently arrested on 9 August while marching to deliver petitions to the Republic of Uganda’s parliament and the Chinese Embassy in Kampala. Forty-seven members were arrested, as well as two members who had reached parliament to ask the government to sign a treaty to end fossil fuels. According to the group, they are likely to be charged with inciting violence. ‘We continue to assert and commit to our principles of non-violence – the charges against our two members are trumped up political charges,’ the group has said, on its donations page.
‘I have been charged with “common nuisance” but as far as I know, I am not guilty and it is the regime together with TotalEnergies that deserve to be in the courts of law for their dangerous contribution to what will be mass extinction of humanity and wildlife once the construction of EACOP proceeds,’ said one student of Makerere University, who pledged to continue in acts of civil disobedience until the plans are dropped.
The arrests were highlighted by StopEacopScot, a group of Quakers in Scotland campaigning to challenge the pipeline. John Phillips, from Central Edinburgh Meeting, told the Friend: ‘[The pipeline] involves massive drilling for oil along the border between western Uganda and the Republic of Congo, pumping this through a huge heated pipeline first south and then east through the Lake Victoria basin to Tanga on the Tanzanian coast, from where the oil will be exported (probably to Asia).
‘Some of the oil wells are in the Murchison Falls National Park; the massive infrastructure construction associated with the world’s longest pipeline [that] has already displaced 100,000 local people from their subsistence farms, with essentially no compensation; and the oil itself is going to be exported and will never benefit Ugandans or Tanzanians.’
The group is also supporting a call for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty to end fossil fuels from the group Global Justice Now. Thirteen nation states have backed the call for governments to negotiate a treaty, as well as the World Health Organisation and the European Parliament.
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