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Demonstrators say they will persist until white police officer is charged over killing of unarmed black teenager — AFP

FERGUSON, MISSOURI — Protesters in the US suburb of Ferguson have taken to the streets again after more than a week of racially-charged rioting since the killing of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman.
The police have struggled to cope with a combination of peaceful protestors and looters who have smashed windows and torched buildings in a spate of violence that has raised fresh questions about US race relations almost six years after Americans elected their first black president. Right now, to get us off the streets, they just need to charge him. Charge the officer.

“It’s a game of chess between us and the government. We make our move, now it’s their move,” protester Charnicholas Walker, 38, said.
“There will be 5,000 of us out tonight. The only reason it won’t be 50,000 is because people are scared from seeing the tear gas on social media.”

Police said they came under heavy gunfire overnight on Monday and arrested 31 people despite the deployment of Missouri National Guard troops and the lifting of a curfew to allow demonstrators more freedom to protest peacefully.

The violence erupted just hours after US President Barack Obama had called for calm.
Meanwhile, clashes between police and protesters in the US town of Ferguson are reminiscent of the racial violence spawned by apartheid in her native South Africa, the top UN human rights official said.

Navi Pillay, who is due to step down at the end of the month after six years in the UN hotseat, urged US authorities to investigate allegations of brutality and examine the “root causes” of racial discrimination in America.

US lawmakers on Tuesday called for calm and a change in police tactics in Ferguson, Missouri, which has been rocked by racially charged clashes and riots after a white officer killed an unarmed black teenager 10 days ago.

“I condemn the excessive use of force by the police and call for the right of protest to be respected. The United States is a freedom-loving country and one thing they should cherish is people’s right to protest,” Pillay said in a wide-ranging interview in her office along Lake Geneva.

“Apart from that, let me say that coming from apartheid South Africa I have long experience of how racism and racial discrimination breeds conflict and violence,” she said.

“These scenes are familiar to me and privately I was thinking that there are many parts of the United States where apartheid is flourishing.”

Noting that African-Americans are often among the poorest and most vulnerable US citizens, and accounted for many of the inmates in the country’s teeming prisons, she added: “Apartheid is also where law turns a blind eye to racism.”

Scenes of heavily armed American police and now National Guard troops confronting demonstrators have become daily fixtures on television around the world, not least in countries branded abusers of human rights by the United States.

From Egypt urging “restraint” on US police to Iran calling Washington the “biggest violator of human rights” and Chinese state media suggesting it clean up its own act before “pointing fingers at others”, Ferguson has been seized on by governments weary of criticism from the United States and the UN watchdog.

“There isn’t a country in the world which has a perfect human rights record and doesn’t have these kind of issues that emerge,” Pillay said. “In other countries, this is what I urge, that it should be properly addressed, whether in Egypt, China or any other country, you have to have fair trials and afford proper defence and they should not be spurious charges.”