159. The fast (fast of moral pressure, hunger strike, satyagrahic fast)

Located inside the Arctic Circle in northern Norway, the Alta River runs through the reindeer herding grounds of the indigenous Saami people. In 1970, the Norwegian Water Resources and Electricity Board proposed a hydroelectric dam on the river. The proposed dam, which would have completely submerged the Saami village of Masi and interrupted reindeer migration routes, was only the latest affront in a long history of Norway’s marginalization of its indigenous peoples.

In 1997, student activists formed an organization called United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). Entirely student run, the organization strives to "win victories that set precedents in the struggle for self-determination of working people everywhere, particularly campus workers and garment workers who make collegiate licensed apparel." In an effort to pursue these goals, USAS created another organization in 2000: the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC).

In the winter of 2004, the Charest Government of Quebec cut $103 million in grants for low-income students at Quebec universities and CEGEP (junior colleges). The Quebec people disliked the Charest government to begin with, and in early December, students threatened to go on strike.

During the Cold War era, Albanians endured the totalitarian rule of Enver Hoxha. When Hoxha died in 1985, Ramiz Alia took over a Communist country with a history of repression and burdened by massive debt, poverty, and widespread underdevelopment. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and facing mounting pressure from the Albanian populace, Alia instituted modest political reforms in early 1991 and on March 31 held the Albania’s first free and open elections in 60 years.

For decades, Australia’s notoriously strict immigration policy has prevented asylum seekers from residing on the mainland of the continent. From 2001 to 2008, Nauru, the smallest sovereign island nation in the world, supported itself economically by hosting an Australian detention center in exchange for medical and financial support. During that time period, the detention center hosted between 200 and 1200 refugees, mainly ethnically Hazara Afghanis. Hazara are a Shi’a sect of Muslims often persecuted by the Sunni majority in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Under the leadership of President Alexandr Lukashenko, Belarusians who do not practice Russian Orthodox Catholicism have had to deal with varying degrees of religious repression.

In 2004 the Azerbaijan government issued a presidential decree stating that students planning to attend universities would have to take a test through the State Commission for Students’ Admission.  According to this decree, students could only be legally admitted to a university based on this test and not on any other.  However, that year Independent Azerbaijan University (IAU), a private university in the city of Baku, admitted 1,700 students who had not taken the state-sanctioned test.  Two years later, in the spring of 2006, the Azerbaijan Ministry of Education announced t

In 1991, the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority (TLLRWDA) began searching for a disposal site for dangerous toxic waste in the Hudspeth County area. According to the 1983 La Paz agreement, Hudspeth County falls in a no-contamination zone surrounding the Mexican border. Regardless, the TLLRWDA selected Sierra Blanca, a small low-income town in an environmentally fragile region. 

On January 25, 2010, the United States government ordered three detainees, Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar, Poolad Tsiradzho, and Rafiq al-Hami to be relocated from Guantánamo Bay Prison in Cuba to a facility in Slovakia. At the same time, the U.S. government moved other Guantánamo detainees to other European countries, as part of an attempt to relocate all of the detainees and shut down the facility. The United States sent 32 prisoners to various European countries, but both the U.S.

Tajikistan is a small country in Asia that borders Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and China with a population of approximately 8 million.  Once a republic under the Soviet Union, the country experienced a civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1997, which damaged the country’s already weakening economy.  Tajikistan currently has one of the lowest GDPs among the former Soviet republics, but has started to improve due to foreign aid.

On Thursday, October 9, Montenegro announced its official recognition of the independent country of Kosovo, a breakaway province of Serbia.  Four separate opposition political parties worked in conjunction and called for a protest in response to the recognition. They declared that the government's decision to recognize Kosovo was illegal. Reports say that on Monday, October 13, approximately 10,000 protestersappeared at the rally.

In 2001, the communist party came to power in Moldova. The communist party would go on to acquire a parliamentary majority. Early in 2004, this parliamentary majority made a request that suspended the licenses of two oppositional media entities: a radio station, Antena C, and a television station, Euro TV. Both media outlets had supported oppositional candidates in the previous election. The government's decision would be met with outrage and resistance from both stations.

In June of 2004, police arrested twenty-three businessmen in the Uzbek city of Andijan for their supposed connection to Akramia, an Islamic extremist group.  These businessmen enjoyed considerable support among the Andijan population, because they employed many locals at higher wages than other companies did.  The national government, however, saw these businessmen as a nuisance.  After the 1999 Tashkent bombings, the Uzbek government cracked down on Muslims, and made it much harder for Muslims to have their own businesses.  The twenty-three Muslim businessmen in Andijan

Western Sahara is one of the last remaining land disputes regarding decolonization issues.  It was previously a colony of Spain until 1975, when the native Sahrawi people were promised a vote of self-determination.  However, Morocco annexed the territory despite a ruling in the international court of justice that rejected this claim of sovereignty.  A sixteen-year-war between Morocco and the Sahrawi nationalist Polisario Front resulted, eventually ending in 1991 with a ceasefire and an agreement to hold a UN-sponsored referendum on independence.  But Morocco never allowe

The Republic of Djibouti is in the Horn of Africa, between Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Red Sea.  It is one of the least populous countries of Africa.

In February 1998, the Djiboutian government arrested some members of Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) for criticizing their government. The government sent the detainees to Gabode Prison where guards imprisoned and tortured them.

In the 1980’s the Bhutanese government saw the Lhotshampa people, natives of Southern Bhutan, as a political threat. The government began to discriminate against them, and in the early 1990’s, 100,000 people from Southern Bhutan fled their country, fearing for their safety. The Bhutan refugees resided in United Nations-sponsored refugee camps in Nepal.

Three men sentenced to death in Ohio staged a twelve-day hunger strike in January 2011 with the goal of gaining the same living conditions as the 100 other prisoners on Ohio's Death Row.  The men, Keith Lamar, Jason Robb, and Carlos Sanders were sentenced to death for their roles in the 1993 Lucasville Uprising, the deadly and longest-lasting prison revolt in United States history.  For the last seventeen years, the three men, along with James Were, who was also involved in the Uprising, had been held in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.  They had been barred from access to

In 1959, French, British, Italian, and German interests established a mining and steel-making consortium- Societe Anonyme des Mines de Fer de Mauritanie (MIFERMA)- with the purpose of extracting and exporting resources from Mauritania.  MIFERMA became a dominant force in Mauritania’s industrialization.   International press celebrated the new iron ore mines as Mauritania’s entry into the 20th century.  

In 2002, El Salvador was under intense pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to privatize its healthcare system, which had up until that point been controlled by the government and available to all legally employed Salvadorans.  The system, while admittedly seriously lacking in the services that it provided to the typical Salvadoran, had shown marked improvements over the past few years.  A widely popular 1999 strike by the ISSS, the healthcare workers union, had prevented the country from privatizing healthcare and since that point services had graduall

The Isle of Man (also known as Mann) is an island British Crown Dependency, located between Great Britain and Ireland.  On March 30, 2008, a ban on smoking in public places came into effect.  This ban also included smoking inside the Victoria Road Prison in the capital city of Douglas, in an effort to “provide clean air” for prison staff and inmates.  The Department of Home affairs also hoped to encourage the prisoners, most of whom smoked, to break their nicotine addiction.  

Several hundred Indian workers of the British construction firm, Carillion, started demonstrations in Anguilla on June 26 and 27, 2007. They demanded better wages and working conditions because they could not live on $180 a month and they were concerned about the quality of the food, water, and medical attention that the company gave them. Later that week, many Anguillans came out to demonstrations to express their support.

In 1988 Burmese students led mass demonstrations against the oppressive military junta of Burma (the country now referred to as Myanmar). The result was 3,000 civilians dead after a governmental crackdown and a prevailing junta. Shortly after, as the “rallying symbol for the population,” pro-democracy leader Aung Sun Suu Kyi was confined to her house by the junta, not to be seen by the public for 12 out of the next 18 years.

From late June to early September 1989, nearly 2,000 Turkish prisoners underwent a hunger strike. They protested against an August 1988 decree that instituted very harsh measures within the prison system. The Turkish government imposed the decree after 47 prisoners had escaped. Additionally, in June 1989, prison officials found two unfinished escape tunnels and, as a result, imposed even harsher measures.

When the United States proposed an expansion of its military base in the Pyeongtaek region of South Korea in 2001, it threatened to be the third time that the people of the region were to be displaced from their land. The people who lived in Pyeongtaek, primarily farmers, were first evicted when the Japanese occupied the region in World War II. Then they were forcibly displaced a second time in 1952, when the United States built its military base, Camp Humphreys.

The Republic of Equatorial Guinea is a small country in Middle Africa that was a colony of Spain (Spanish Guinea) until 1968.  Since a violent military coup in 1979, President Teodoro Obiang has ruled the country with the Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea.  In 2008, journalist Peter Maas called Obiang “Africa’s Worst Dictator” due to rampant corruption within the government and accusations from human rights groups of murder and torture.