World roundup: May 12 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, India, Burkina Faso, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

May 12, 1364: Jagiellonian University is founded as the “University of Kraków” by Polish King Casimir III, making it the oldest university in Poland. The institution hit a rough patch after Casimir’s death in 1370, but had its funding restored and a permanent location obtained for it by King Władysław II Jagiełło (r. 1386-1434). After having been known as the Kraków Academy for much of its existence, the university’s name was changed several times around the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, eventually settling on its current moniker in 1817 in honor of Władysław II’s Jagiellonian dynasty.

May 12, 1551: The National University of San Marcos is founded in Lima, Peru, under a decree from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Initially called the “Royal and Pontifical University of the City of the Kings of Lima,” it is officially the oldest still-active university in the Americas and is sometimes called the “Dean of the Americas” for that reason. The Dominican Republic’s Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo is unofficially even older, having been founded in 1538, but it didn’t receive its official charter until 1558.

May 12, 1998: During a protest against Indonesian dictator Suharto on the campus of Jakarta’s Trisakti University, soldiers open fire on the protesters and kill four of them. The killings triggered riots in Jakarta that quickly spread to the city of Surakarta and involved demands for Suharto’s resignation as well as attacks on ethnic Chinese Indonesian communities. Upwards of 1200 people were killed in the violence, and Suharto resigned on May 21 after more than 30 years in power.

MIDDLE EAST

TURKEY

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) announced on Monday that it will end its conflict with the Turkish state and disarm, in keeping with the call to do so earlier this year from founder Abdullah Öcalan. The party apparently agreed on this course of action at the congress it held earlier this month in northern Iraq. In a statement, the party said that it had “fulfilled its historical mission” and argued that “the Kurdish issue” is now at “a point where it can be resolved through democratic politics.” I’m not sure how true that is, particularly in an increasingly undemocratic Turkish state, but I digress.