Saturday saw more protests at King Khalid University in Abha, this time the male students coming out in support of the females, who demonstrated last Wednesday. This short video shows the students marching onto campus and calling for the resignation of the university president.
Some more images of the protests at KKU were emailed to me, but unfortunately, I don’t know the original source of them. This one shows the authorities’ response to the male students’ protest earlier this week. Note the machine gun truck in the photo on the top right and the tank-like vehicle in the middle. Yikes! (The caption on this photo collage says “King Khalid Military University”.)
I also got more images from the women’s protest. Here’s one showing just a sea of black from the number of women gathered during the demonstration.
The signs being held up by these 3 women say “The People want to bring down the regime of King Khalid University” – a phrase borrowed from the Arab Spring protests.
There’s also several videos on Youtube that were posted about a month ago showing examples of what the students were demonstrating about. I grabbed a couple of screen shots from one of them. The state of the facilities is pretty shocking, even more so considering that the university is relatively new (established 1999) and that the country has forecast a $3.2 billion budget surplus and has budgeted more than $100 billion for education spending for 2012. And the focus on education already goes back several years – for example, in 2008, the budget for education was $28 billion.
Where is the all that money allocated towards education going? These students deserve much more from their university and the learning environment the government purports to provide!
reflections in the sand 