Israeli forces on March 20 surrounded a new tent village erected by Palestinian activists in Eizariya east of Jerusalem. An Israeli military spokeswoman said hundreds of Palestinians established "an illegal settlement" and that security forces were in the area "to maintain order." She said soldiers arrested the driver of a truck loaded with equipment including tents. Mohammad Khatib, a spokesman for the activists, said soldiers handed protesters a document declaring the area a closed military zone. "We are staying. We are Palestinians, and we will stay here. They will have to evacuate us. They will have to use their power to do it, but we will not do it by ourselves," Khatib told Ma'an News Agency. "We are staying here because this is Palestinian land. This is our land, and no one has a right to evacuate us." 

Congolese war crimes suspect Gen. Bosco Ntaganda surrendered himself to a US embassy in Rwanda on March 18 and requested extradition to the  International Criminal Court  (ICC). Ntaganda has been wanted by the ICC since 2006 on charges enlisting and conscripting children under the age of 15 and of using them to participate actively in hostilities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from July 2002 to December 2003. Ntaganda remained at large, however, and in 2012 ICC Pre-Trial Chamber II issued a second warrant for Ntaganda's arrest for additional war crimes and crimes against humanity in contravention of the Rome Statute:

Ahmed Qaddaf al-Dam, cousin of Moammar Qaddafi, was arrested at his home March 19 in central Cairo by Libyan forces. The arrest of Qaddaf al-Dam coincides with the second anniversary start of the air campaign in Libya by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that assisted rebels in toppling Qaddafi's regime. Qaddaf al-Dam, who is said to have beeb a trusted accomplice of the former leader, has said he plans on filing a complaint with the Egyptian public prosecutor and Libyan authorities. The Egyptian-controlled Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported that Libyan authorities will gain control of al-Dam and plan on prosecuting him. The specific charges faced by Qaddaf al-Dam are still unknown.

A group of 40 Argentine environmentalists invaded the Embalse Nuclear Center in the central province of Córdoba on March 11 to mark the second anniversary of the earthquake that caused meltdowns at three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan's Fukushima prefecture, the second-worst nuclear accident in history. The protesters, members of Greenpeace Argentina, "entered [the complex] peacefully, waving flags and wearing orange overalls," according to Greenpeace Energy Campaign coordinator Mauro Fernández. They proceeded to climb to the top of the reactor, where they unfurled a giant banner reading: "Enough with nuclear danger!" The activists were then "beaten and arrested," Greenpeace said, and taken to Río Cuarto federal court, with jurisdiction over the facility.

Some 80 indigenous Ngöbe-Buglé activists blocked access to the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam construction site in Panama's western province of Chiriquí for about three hours on March 8. Riot police dispersed the protesters with tear gas, and the next day police agents arrested four Ngöbe-Buglé. Ricardo Miranda, a spokesperson for the April 10 Movement, which opposes construction of the dam, told a March 11 press conference that the police threatened the detainees and beat them with nightsticks. Miranda, who offered photographs of injured detainees as evidence of the beatings, also charged that the police violated the autonomy of the Ngöbe-Buglé territory by making the arrests. Chiriquí police commissioner Luis Navarro denied that the detainees were mistreated.

Joined by activists from other social movements, hundreds of students from Guatemalan teachers' colleges marched nearly 50 kilometers to Guatemala City from El Tejar in the central department of Chimaltenango starting on March 10 to protest what they called the "arbitrary and anti-democratic form" of an educational "reform" passed last year. Students from local private schools began joining the marchers as they arrived in the capital around 6 AM on March 12. The protesters headed to the National Congress and surrounded it, demanding a dialogue with Education Minister Cynthia del Aguila. The minister initially refused to meet with the students, but at the end of the day Del Aguila held a press conference with Dialogue Commissioner Miguel Barcárcel and student representatives to announce plans for a discussion—although Del Aguila said this didn't necessarily mean the government was backing down from the reform.

On March 13 a federal magistrate judge in Columbus, Georgia, sentenced Robert Norman "Nashua" Chantal to a six-month prison term for trespassing on the US Army's Fort Benning base during a protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), on Nov. 18. SOA Watch, an organization that has sponsored protests at the base each November since 1990, opposes the US Army's training of Latin American soldiers, charging that SOA graduates have been among the region's most notorious human rights violators.

Burma's persecuted Muslim Rohingya people were in the news again over the weekend with the Thai navy's denial that its forces opened fire on a group of refugees off the country's southwestern coast last month, killing at least two. Survivors said that Thai naval troops fired a boat of around 20 refugees off Thailand's Phang Nga province on Feb. 22, as they jumped into the water to escape custody. "Navy personnel fired into the air three times and told us not to move," a refugee told Human Rights Watch (HRW). "But we were panicking and jumped off the boat, and then they opened fire at us in the water." More than 100,000 Rohingyas have been displaced since ethnic violence broke out in western Burma last year. Burma refuses to recognize the Rohingya as citizens and labels the minority of about 800,000 as "illegal" immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh—which in turn disavows them as nationals.  (BBC News, March 15; Press TV, March 13)