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by slimmouse » Mon Jul 15, 2013 4:19 am
by JackRiddler » Mon Jul 15, 2013 3:03 pm
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/12/ ... gypt/print
Weekend Edition July 12-14, 2013
Mubarakism Without Mubarak
The Struggle for Egypt
by JOSEPH MASSAD
Ever since Muhammad Mursi was elected president of Egypt in democratic elections marred by his Mubarakist opponent Ahmad Shafiq’s electoral corruption and bribes, a coalition of Egyptian liberals, Nasserists, leftists — including socialists and communists of varying stripes –and even Salafist and repentant Muslim Brotherhood (MB) members began to form slowly but steadily, establishing an alliance with Mubarak’s ruling bourgeoisie and holdover politicians from his regime to oust him from power, fearing that he and his party were preparing a “Nazi-like” takeover of the country and destroying its fledgling democracy.
The scenario they fear is the one that brought the Nazis to establish a totalitarian state in 1933. In July 1932, in the German Reichstag (parliamentary) elections, the Nazi party received over 37 percent of the vote, becoming the largest party in parliament. On 30 January 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Reich Chancellor, wherein Hitler headed a cabinet with a minority of Nazi ministers. A month later, on 27 February 1933, arsonists burned down the Reichstag building in Berlin. Hitler blamed the communists and accused them of a plot to overthrow the democratically elected parliament and asked the President of the Weimar Republic to grant him emergency powers to suspend civil liberties so that he could chase the communists, imprison them, dissolve political parties and close down the press. This came to be known as the Reichstag Fire Decree. On March 23, the Reichstag conferred on Hitler dictatorial powers, establishing the Nazi totalitarian regime and state.
The anti-Mursi alliance, which began to form in earnest in August 2012, started out bashfully but would become proud and assertive by November 2012, after Mursi’s infamous Constitutional Decree, which centralized political power in the hands of the President. With the aid of Mubarak’s judges, the Mubarakist bourgeoisie and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which had ruled Egypt for a year and four months after Mubarak’s ouster, had already dissolved the post-uprising democratically-elected parliament, which was composed of a majority of Islamists, on technical grounds, before Mursi’s election. They did so to the cheers of liberals and leftists who claimed that they were the real leaders of the 25 January uprising that overthrew Mubarak and who feared the elected Islamists whom they depicted not as part of the uprising but as encroachers on their “revolution.” A few days before the elections, the military also issued a constitutional decree constricting the powers of the elected president and concentrating it in the hands of the military.
The liberals’ and the leftists’ fear was that the MB was Egypt’s Nazi party –they pretend to be democrats until they get elected and then they will refuse to leave power and will eliminate the democratic process and establish an Islamist dictatorship. That the Mubarak-appointed judges were the ones who dissolved the democratically elected parliament seemed not to bother the liberals and the leftists much, but they were horrified when Mursi issued his Constitutional Decree, which aimed to take away the power of Mubarak’s judges whom he had tried to depose unsuccessfully. Indeed the Constitutional Decree was seen as a sort of Reichstag Fire Decree, which it could very well have been. Mursi would soon reverse himself and would cancel the Decree in response to popular uproar. He would more recently express regret for having issued it.
Mursi’s Record
The Mursi government seemed surprisingly pliant and friendly to Western interests, including towards Israel, whose president Shimon Peres was addressed by Mursi as “my dear friend” in an official presidential letter. Contrary to expectations of a burgeoning friendship with Hamas, under Mursi’s government, the Gaza border in Rafah was closed more times than under Mubarak, security coordination with Israel became more intimate than under Mubarak, and to make matters worse, Mursi, with the Egyptian army and the help of the Americans, destroyed the majority of the underground tunnels between Gaza and Sinai which the Palestinians had dug out to smuggle in food and goods during their interminable siege since 2005 and which Mubarak had not dared demolish. Mursi even went further by mediating between Israel and Hamas during the latest Israeli attack on Gaza, vouching that he would guarantee that Hamas would not launch rockets against Israel but not the other way around. It is true that Mursi refused to meet with Israeli leaders but even Mubarak had refused to visit Israel for years before his ouster and had recalled his ambassador in protest against Israeli policies. One of Mursi’s more major acts before his recent ouster was not the closure of the Israeli embassy, as friends and enemies of the Islamists threatened he would do, but closed down instead the Syrian embassy in support of the ongoing rightwing Islamist insurrection in that country.
While in power, Mursi and his government continued Mubarak’s policies of contracting the public sector and social spending in a continuing war against the poor and downtrodden of Egypt, who are the majority of the population, and pushed forth neoliberal economic policies that favored the rich and powerful, including an IMF deal (which was never finalized for no fault of Mursi’s), which would increase the already existing austerity measures against the poor. Indeed, he did nothing to change the existing labor and tax laws that favor the rich and oppress workers, middle class employees, and the poor. Mursi neither prosecuted army generals for crimes of which they stood accused (he rather bestowed on them major state honors and awards and made those whom he retired into advisors to the President), nor tried the Mubarakist thieving bourgeoisie in the courts for its pillage of the country for three and a half decades, let alone the security apparatus that continued to repress Egyptians under his rule.
On the contrary, as a president who came out of the rightist and neoliberal wing of the MB (compared to the more centrist ‘Abd al-Mun’im Abu al-Futuh who also ran for the presidency and lost), he was interested in an alliance between the Islamist neoliberal bourgeoisie, whose most visible member is Khayrat al-Shatir (who was barred from running for the presidency by the Mubarakist courts), and the Mubarakist bourgeoisie. Unlike al-Shatir who is the son of a rich merchant and who made his own fortune in Egypt, many among the Islamist rich, though not all, made their money in the Gulf. They were mostly kept out of a share in the pillaging of Egypt, restricted to the close businessmen friends of Mubarak, now wanted a place at the table to partake of the ongoing pillage of the country. While Mursi won the favor of the military with the US vouching for his good behavior, at least until last week, hard as he tried to convince the Mubarakist bourgeoisie to allow the Islamists to partake of pillaging Egypt, the Mubarakist bourgeoisie would not budge.
The Response of the Mubarakists
The Mubarakist bourgeoisie’s response was that Egypt was theirs to pillage alone (though they have always been happy to include the Americans, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and of course the Israelis) and that they would not allow some Islamist upstarts to move in on their territory. Having shunned Egypt’s poor, its peasants and workers, its low income middle classes, while courting the rank and file of the MB, the Islamist and Mubarakist bourgeoisies, and the military, Mursi had no one but the MB to fall back on when the army abandoned him and the Mubarakists and the coalition plotting with them intensified their attacks on him.
Mubarak’s bourgeoisie set their media empires loose on Mursi and the MB. Week after week, hour after hour, on television, in the press, on social media, especially Facebook but also twitter, a campaign of vilification, exaggerations, and outright lies would ensue. Television anchors would go as far as calling for the violent overthrow of Mursi. Members of the opposition, like millionaire engineer Mamdouh Hamzah, openly called on the army to stage a coup.
Campaigns, which were also supported by the Saudis and the Emiratis, would target Qatar, the sponsor of the MB around the Arab world, as a financial monster trying to buy out everything in Egypt, including allegedly the Suez Canal and the pyramids! The comedian Bassem Youssef (very popular among the Cairo and Alexandria bourgeoisie and middle classes but virtually unknown to the majority of poor and lower class Egyptians in the cities and the countryside who cannot understand the majority of his Western and upper middle class references) went after Qatar with a clever parody of a late 1950s Arab nationalist song which designated Qatar rather than “the Arab homeland” as its object of adulation, on account of the latter’s increasing financial investments in Egypt (both real and imagined). That the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Americans are larger financial monsters and have investments and property in the country that far exceed what the voracious Qataris had been rumored to acquire did not merit any of them a parody song like the Qataris. The irony is that while the Qataris have been the sponsors and engineers of MB takeovers across Arab countries which experienced uprisings, including Egypt, or were sometimes made to experience them by the Qataris, as in Libya and even in Syria, the Saudis and the Emiratis have been the active sponsors of the counterrevolutions and of the anciens regimes.
In the meantime, the media and the pundits kept speaking about Mursi as the new “Hitler” and the MB as the “Nazi Party.” The highly westernized Bassem Youssef even unfurled the Nazi flag to his audience in one episode as a reference to the MB flag, thinking that the Nazi flag would be so familiar to most Egyptians that it would produce gasps of horror. Judging from the reaction of his choreographed studio audience, which reacted nonchalantly to the flag, which is not recognizable to most Egyptians (who are, unlike their western counterparts, not avid consumers of Hollywood films about WWII) outside political and intellectual circles, the impact seemed limited. But the Nazi and Hitler analogies would be made also by academics in their op-ed columns, time and again. Indeed, the recently appointed minister of culture was even likened to Goebbels by one columnist, which is not a problem unto itself, but what about the endless and repetitious barrage of propaganda and lies by the anti-Mursi media conglomerates? Does it deserve a comparison with Goebbels?
We should bear in mind that the Nazi accusations have been often used in world politics to justify all kinds of actions. In fact, Mursi is not the first Egyptian president accused of being a Hitler. In 1954, and in light of the Lavon Affair, Israel dubbed Nasser “Hitler on the Nile” for prosecuting Israel’s terrorist spies. The French and the British followed suit during their preparation for the 1956 invasion of Egypt
massadcoverclaiming that they were fighting a fascist Nasser and that their anti-fascism trumps his anti-imperialism. Western liberals who supported the US invasion of the Arabian Peninsula in 1991 and Iraq in 2003 to remove Saddam also argued that their anti-fascism trumps the anti-imperialism of opponents of the invasion. Husni Mubarak, in contrast, who served as tyrant for three decades was never called Hitler by the opposition press. Ironically, the only Egyptian president who ever flirted with Nazism was none other than Anwar Sadat who had been a pro-Nazi enthusiast in his youth.
In the case of Mursi, the media campaign against him and the MB, most prominently on CBC and ONTV satellite channels (both owned by members of the Mubarakist bourgeoisie), far outstripped anything that the CIA-financed El Mercurio could do in its anti-Salvador Allende campaign before the CIA-sponsored coup toppled him in 1973 Chile– which is not to say that Mursi is an Allende but rather that many of his powerful enemies are not unlike Allende’s (after all, middle class women carrying pots and pans, members of the truckers’ union, among other sectors, would march and strike against Allende’s rule).
Rumors had it also that the anti-Palestinian and increasingly anti-Hamas Mursi government was giving the poor and besieged Gaza Palestinians electricity (which it was not) that it was allegedly stealing from the Egyptian people and causing massive shortages in Cairo and around the country. Other rumors had it that Mursi was ceding the Sinai to Hamas and the Palestinians. More rumors would have it that Hamas elements were being brought in to harass Egyptian liberals and leftists who opposed Mursi’ policies. Just a week before his ouster, we were told without a shred of evidence that Mursi had imported 1500 Hamas elements to attack the anti-Mursi demonstrators set to stage their massive rallies on 30 June demanding that Mursi step down. The media-whipped hysteria gripping the country was of such magnitude that even usually levelheaded liberal and leftist academics abandoned their critical faculties altogether and immersed themselves exclusively in the world of Facebook rumors and yellow journalism, which became their primary source of information and education.
The Confrontation
The Mursi government was clearly adamant in its plans to push ahead, with blunders and all (and its stupid blunders let alone its neoliberal policies and its utter incompetence in running the country are sufficient on their own to discredit it), including its courting members of the MB and other Islamists for key positions in the government, in constitutional committees, and in the bureaucracy. It is true that Mursi invited many in the opposition throughout his year in power to join committees, the cabinet, the bureaucracy, and even his team of advisors (and some accepted for a while), but most of them rejected these offers, fearing, legitimately in many cases, that they would be used as fronts for what they expected would be a program of “Ikhwanization” (the MB in Arabic are truncated to “Ikhwan”) of the state, which has been astronomically exaggerated by the Mubarakist media. Others resigned advisory positions they had accepted because Mursi refused to heed their advice, something, according to reported MB sources, he also did with MB advisors.
But the incompetence of the MB presidency was not the only reason the country deteriorated in the last year. Everywhere Mursi turned, the Mubarakists put obstacles in his way. The government bureaucracy refused to cooperate with him, the judges fought him every step of the way, and the police refused to redeploy in the streets. The Mubarakist bourgeoisie, as is increasingly being revealed in the international press, fabricated an energy crisis causing massive shortages in fuel and electricity, which miraculously disappeared upon Mursi’s removal from power.
This set the scene for the massive mobilization that a new “movement” calling itself “Tamarrud” (which actually means “Mutiny” and in some contexts “Rebellion,” but not “Rebel” as its founders, supporters, and the western media erroneously translate it), which called for the demonstrations on June 30, the first year anniversary of Mursi’s assuming the presidency. The entire spectrum of the coalition, which had formed and consolidated itself since Mursi’s election, including the National Salvation Front, which was hastily put together following the issuance of Mursi’s Constitutional Decree, joined in demanding that Mursi leave office. They would be successful in mobilizing millions in the streets culminating in the 30 June demonstrations.
A deal was brokered with the army (and the Americans), by which the army declared a coup, ousted Mursi, and began a witch hunt, in which it is joined by enthusiastic members of the public eager for the chase, against the MB. MB office buildings were burned down around the country by the “peaceful” demonstrators, including its headquarters in Cairo. The coup was not called a coup, and members of the popular coalition that support it consider anyone who calls it a coup “an enemy of the Egyptian people,” as many have been posting on twitter and Facebook. While Islamist and MB television stations were closed down minutes after the coup was announced, Mursi was abducted by the military and placed under arrest in an undeclared military location, and top members of the MB were arrested or have become fugitives. Top member of the National Salvation Front and charisma-less Mohammed El-Baradei has defended the military repression unhesitatingly to Western leaders and politicians and is awaiting his appointment in the post-coup government in recognition of his efforts to sell the coup as a democratic revolution or even as a “recall election.”
One of the first acts of the coup leaders was to shut down indefinitely the Gaza border crossing, effectively strangling the Strip and its Palestinian population. They have also immediately resumed demolishing whatever underground tunnels have escaped destruction since the last campaign. Xenophobia in the country against Palestinians, and increasingly Syrians and Iraqis is taking on Fascist proportions. The coup leaders issued an announcement threatening members of these nationalities resident in the country with legal prosecution if they joined any of the demonstrations.
The current popular festive scene in Cairo is ironically reminiscent of triumphalist fascist festivities in the Europe of the 1930s rather than of democratic ones. But it is not the MB who declared the coup, as we have been prepared to expect for a whole year, nor was it they who put the opposition in jail and closed down their TV stations, burned down their headquarters, and are chasing them in the streets and calling on people to hand them over to the police and report on them.
Indeed, during the one-year rule of Mursi not one television station or newspaper was closed, even and especially as many of them would call for open rebellion and for the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government. True, some journalists were prosecuted for insulting the president (and no sitting president in Egypt or arguably in any other country has ever had to endure a small fraction of the daily if not hourly insults and ridicule Mursi endured during his tenure, let alone the type of media language used to humiliate him) by paying fines. Though he could not successfully interfere with the privately owned media, Mursi did take over all state-owned newspapers and replaced their editors, many of whom were Mubarakists, but a number of whom were elected editors, with his own appointments.
One feels the terror of the witch-hunt on the streets of Cairo, and the targets are not just card-carrying members of the MB. Pro-coup doormen of posh buildings in the upscale neighborhood of Zamalek, to take a small example, taunt and threaten other doormen who are accused of supporting the MB. The latter are staying indoors for fear of their lives after the coup was announced. What is happening in more divided middleclass and poor neighborhoods and in smaller cities and the countryside is far worse with fire exchanges, shootings and outright killings in which all sides are involved. The army itself shot and killed tens of pro-Mursi demonstrators who oppose the coup. As the fascist adulation for the army and police have been adopted popularly in full force, this could very well spell the beginning of a much-feared civil war and massive pogroms against those identified as “enemies” of Egypt and the Egyptian people.
The Liberals and The Leftists
How can one explain that liberals and leftists would support a coup against a democratic order for which they fought, would stage a “revolution” against “democracy,” in alliance with the Mubarakist bourgeoisie and with the very military they condemned so hard just a year earlier until it ceded power to an elected government? The military and the bourgeoisie and Mubarak’s judges have evidently not changed, but the liberals and the leftists have. Their rationale is one reminiscent of the futurist and dystopic Hollywood movie Minority Report wherein the authorities prosecute people for “pre-crimes” – i.e. crimes they would commit in the future if they were not caught before they committed them. They allege that the MB was going to stage an anti-democratic coup of sorts and begin to repress them, and for this future crime, which the MB and Mursi were expected to commit, the anti-Mursi coalition had to intervene and punish them now to prevent them from canceling democracy in the future!
But it is the liberals and the leftists who helped stage the coup, and who ended extant electoral democracy, and who are persecuting and prosecuting the MB for real and imagined crimes, not the other way around. That their coup was popular, they insist, means it is what the people want. But the people also wanted Fascism and they also wanted Nazism? How is this an argument for democracy, which they claim it is? They assert in response that workers and the poor joined in their marches. But workers and the poor also joined the Fascist and Nazi rallies. They are also part of MB rallies.
The leftists are claiming that their support for the coup and their alliance with the Mubarakist comprador bourgeoisie are actually anti-imperialist in nature and are railing against the Western media for its current “orientalist” coverage of their coup (as if the western media has ever been anything but orientalist in its coverage of our part of the world at all times), which they deem hostile, and for Obama’s possibly having to cut off military aid in keeping with US laws that prevent him from extending aid to coup leaders in the Third World (Carter and Reagan found a way around this in the 1970s and 1980s when they subcontracted Israel to aid America’s anti-democracy allies in Central and South America and in Apartheid South Africa, and Obama will find a way too). At any rate, US military aid to Egypt for 2013 was already disbursed and the 2014 aid is not scheduled for a Congressional vote until the fall. Not to worry though, top Israeli diplomats are lobbying the White House and the US Defense Department to continue military aid to Egypt.
Another legitimate argument that the liberals and leftists offer is that when they and others staged an uprising in January and February 2011 that led to the removal of Mubarak and the take-over by the army who ruled the country directly afterwards, few referred to what happened as a “coup” but called it a “revolution,” whereas now that there was another massive uprising and the army also intervened but without designating themselves as rulers, many are claiming this as a “coup.” This of course is correct though not accurate, as it sidesteps the central issue. In February 2011, the army refused to obey the orders of an unelected dictator by not shooting at civilians, thus helping to topple him, while in July 2013, they overthrew a president that more than half the Egyptian electorate voted for in democratic elections.
The coup-supporting liberals and leftists are mad at the Americans and crying imperialism for the alleged failure of the Americans to support their revolt against democracy unequivocally, oblivious, it seems, to how much the Americans had actually helped in brokering the coup behind the scenes. Publicly, Obama has been attempting all kinds of verbal acrobatics to accommodate the liberals and leftists by not calling the coup a coup. Their misplaced anger at the Americans, however, is not necessarily anti-imperialist, but is rather elicited by a narcissistic injury that the United States (like the Egyptian Army) had allied itself, if temporarily, with the MB and not with them, even though the US (like the Egyptian Army) had clearly abandoned the MB and given the green light to the coup. Their fulminations are their way of courting the Americans back to their camp where the Americans already are. The Wall Street Journal has already expressed its hope and expectation that General Sisi will be Egypt’s Pinochet. Some amongst the liberals are complaining that had the Republicans been in power, they would not have given this “soft” response to their coup that the Democrats have allegedly shown. But the Americans have not tarried at all in this regard!
The Americans are allies of all parties in Egypt and they are willing to let Egyptians choose who will rule them so that the US can then give them their marching orders as they did with Mubarak and the MB. All the Americans care about is that their interests are protected, and no member of the current anti- or pro-Mursi coalitions has dared threaten those interests. They are all vying to serve American interests if the Americans would only support them. In the last two and a half years, the Americans have been floundering trying to determine who among those competing to serve them in Egypt will be most successful in stabilizing the country so that the US can continue its dominance as before.
Nazis, Islamists, Liberals, and Leftists
For a year, we have been told that Mursi is Hitler, the MB are Nazis, and that they are consolidating their power so that they could later crack down on everyone else. Perhaps they were planning to do so, but no shred of real evidence has been produced to prove this. What happened, however, was the exact opposite; it was the coalition of liberals, Nasserists, leftists, Salafists and the Mubarak bourgeoisie who called for, and cheered and supported the coup by Mubarak’s army. Unlike the MB who never controlled the army or the police, the latter two continue to be fully answerable to the Mubarakist bourgeoisie with which the liberals and leftists are allied.
Egyptians have been flooded with images that the “Islamofascists” were going to destroy the culture of Egypt and its identity with their intolerance, narrow-mindedness, lack of inclusivity, and anti-democratic policies. But it has been the liberals and the leftists, perhaps some would call them the “secularofacsists,” who proved to be less open, less tolerant, and certainly less democratic than the “Islamofacsists.” In the United States, the saying goes that “a conservative is a liberal who got mugged,” indicating in a proper American classist manner that the mugging of a well-to-do liberal by the poor turns the liberal against them, thus becoming a conservative. In the case of Egypt, one could easily say that “a secularofascist is a liberal democrat who lost to the Islamists in democratic elections.”
The army coup, which the leftists, among others, support, was not a coup by middle rank socially conscious anti-imperialist army officers who were supported by progressive anti-capitalist forces to overthrow imperial and local capitalist control of the country and the dictator that runs it (when the Free Officers staged their coup in 1952, within a few weeks they enacted laws that undercut the feudal lords of Egypt and redistributed the land to the poor peasants), but rather by top army generals who receive a hefty sum of US imperial assistance annually, and who have always been the protectors of Mubarak and his bourgeoisie. It is this army leadership that overthrew a democratically elected president, his incompetence and services to local and international capital notwithstanding.
Some of the leftists who are cheering on the coup seem to feel that their mobilization was successful because people are now educated and aware of their rights which the MB was undercutting. But the education that the members of the anti-Mursi coalition have been subjected to, including the workers and the poor who joined its rallies, is an education imparted to them by the Mubarakist bourgeoisie through their media empires. It has not been an education emphasizing the MB’s neoliberal anti-poor policies, stressing workers rights, peasant rights, the right to a minimum wage, etc. The Mubarakist media empire’s imparted education is an education that is not for the liberation of the poor, the workers, the peasants, and the lower middle classes of Egypt from capitalist and imperial pillage of their country and livelihoods but rather one for the liberation of the “secular” Mubarakist bourgeoisie and its partners from the competition of the neoliberal MB bourgeoisie and its Qatari sponsors.
That the King of Saudi Arabia and the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, the sponsors with the Americans of the Mubarakist bourgeoisie, were the first to send their congratulations to the coup leaders, minutes after the coup took place, clarifies who, they believe, was liberated from whom. Within hours of the coup, the Mubarakist bourgeoisie also celebrated. On Thursday, the 4th of July, Egyptian singer Muhammad Fu’ad, who had cried on TV two and a half years ago to express his sadness and despair over the toppling of his beloved Mubarak, was invited to open the Cairo stock market, which has been gaining billions of pounds since the coup. If the Qataris and the MB bourgeoisie won the first battle against the Saudis with the fall of Mubarak and then the second battle when the MB was elected, the Saudis and the Mubarakist bourgeoisie intend their latest battle, which they won by the removal of the MB, to be the final victory in the war for Egypt.
The goals of the Egyptian uprising from the outset included social justice as primary. Both the Mubarakists and the MB have a unified policy against the social justice agenda of the uprising. But the anti-MB coup, which has driven and will drive many of their supporters to openly violent means now that peaceful ones have been thwarted, has transformed the uprising from one targeting the Mubarakist regime and its security and business apparatus to one that has joined Mubarak’s erstwhile war against the MB. If the goals of the liberals and the leftists are to bring about a real democracy with social security and decent standards of living for the majority of Egyptians who are poor, then the removal of the MB from power by military force will not only prevent this from happening but is likely to bring about more economic injustice and more repression.
Whether the leftists’ and the liberals’ calculations, that their alliance with the Mubarakist bourgeoisie and the army is tactical and temporary and that they will be able to overcome them and take power away from them as they did with the MB, are a case of naïve triumphalism or of studied optimism will become clear in the near future. What is clear for now, however, with the massive increase of police and army repression with the participation of the public, is that what this coalition has done is strengthen the Mubarakists and the army and weakened calls for a future Egyptian democracy, real or just procedural.
Gripped by popular fascist love fests for the army, Egypt is now ruled by an army whose top leadership was appointed and served under Mubarak, and is presided over by a judge appointed by Mubarak, and is policed by the same police used by Mubarak. People are free to call it a coup or not, but what Egypt has now is Mubarakism without Mubarak.
Joseph Massad teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians.
by JackRiddler » Mon Jul 15, 2013 3:13 pm
by cptmarginal » Tue Jul 23, 2013 12:31 am
JackRiddler wrote:Most persuasive argument against the latest turn in Egypt I've seen. (Makes Al-Amin look amateur.) The question is how powerful are the people?
by JackRiddler » Tue Jul 23, 2013 6:34 pm
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/com ... 28840.html
Robert Fisk
23 July 2013
Was it four killed? Or nine? In Egypt, the deaths keep racking up - and few pay any attention
When Mubarak fell the country was bright with optimism. Now life is cheap and the future brings only fear
Isra Lutfi was only 15 years old and the men beside the bright blue tent where she died pointed to the bloodstains on the mat with something approaching indifference. “She was running from the gunfire and that’s where the bullet entered,” one of them said, pointing to the neat little hole in the cheap plastic wall of the tent. Whoever was shooting at the Muslim Brotherhood encampment in Giza at dawn yesterday morning got away, as usual. He – or they – were probably firing from the grounds of Cairo University. Indeed, just opposite the place of Isra’s martyrdom stands the great domed hall where, four years ago, Barack Obama asked the Muslim world to forgive the sins of George W Bush.
Four members of the Brotherhood also found death amid the tents and garbage opposite the university gates yesterday. “But we carried on praying,” the man at Isra’s tent said, as if martyrdom were a way of life. Since violence has become so normalised in Egypt now – since the local papers often fail even to mention the names of the dead – let those who died at Giza here be recorded. Apart from Isra, all were men. One was an engineer, Hossamedin Mohamed. Another was a lawyer, Mohamed Abdul Hamid Abdul Ghani. The Brotherhood did not know the job of Abdul Rahman Mohamed and they knew only the first name of the fifth victim of the morning. Osama. All were shot by high-velocity rounds. Who fired those bullets? Who knows?
In a land where killers go free, they were variously said to be plainclothes policemen, army agents, “Baltagi” – slang for thugs, ex-cops and drug addicts – or local residents sickened by the camp and its graffiti and posters of bloodied martyrs. No one came to investigate the shooting. Egyptian radio claimed nine had died although there wasn’t a bearded man – and the Brotherhood men were all bearded – who could account for the extra four dead. Local flat-dwellers may not like the Brotherhood but they would surely not try to shoot them down. Yet there is a kind of torpor around the camps, both in Giza and in Nasr City, where the wind rips away the posters of the corpses from the massacre on 8 July that left more than 50 dead, where “Morsi President” is lamely spray-painted on the walls while pictures of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Defence Minister and leader of the coup-that-wasn’t-a-coup, has a Star of David painted on his military cap.
In a city which now boasts more conspiracy theories than Beirut, the Israeli “plot” – getting rid of the only Islamist-led state on its border – is now doing the rounds, along with the Morsi “plot”: that the man was dismantling the state of Egypt when the army arrived in the nick of time to save democracy. A subsidiary plot now involves the one soldier the military claim was killed by the Brotherhood during the 8 July massacre. Weirdly, he did not receive a military funeral – as all Egyptian soldiers do, for example, when they are killed in Sinai. The “plot”? He must have been killed by his own officer for refusing to shoot at Brotherhood supporters – and thus forfeited last rites from his army.
The lawlessness now cloaking Egypt is real enough. It’s not just a matter of village lynchings and the shooting of Christian Copts and Brotherhood supporters and widespread theft. A young woman told me of her father’s predicament, a landowner with property 150 miles from Cairo who was visited by an “armed group”. Baltagi, I asked? She didn’t know, but what she did know was that they asked her father to hand over his property. He refused and found that other landlords in the same city were now all paying protection money to the “group” – and when they complained to the police, they found that the cops were themselves also paying protection money to the same “group”.
Some believe they include men freed from state prisons during the 2011 revolution, several of whom are known to live as outlaws in the Sinai desert outside el-Arish. Lawlessness on the Egyptian side of the Israeli frontier existed in Mubarak’s time and now includes al-Qa’ida-inspired gangs who supposedly owe their freedom to Morsi. On average a soldier is killed every day in Sinai but when Lina Attalah – one of the most assiduous of Cairo’s reporters, who goes to Sinai every month – visited el-Arish last week, she found it strangely calm. “It doesn’t feel like a war zone,” she says. “There are ‘jihadi’ groups and a level of militancy exists with some form of organisation. The risk is that they will start operating together but they don’t seem able to grow or recruit. The tribes there like the soldiers. They prefer the army to the police who treat them badly.”
The one thing that the events of the past three weeks has proved, however, is that the Brotherhood does not have a militia. A few guns fired off by angry supporters, perhaps, but no secret army, no armed commandos, no “fedayeen”. Not that you’d believe this from the Cairo press which is now showing a subservience to the army that it once displayed towards Hosni Mubarak before the 2011 revolution, if it was such a thing. Leftist liberals – the Egyptians beloved by all journalists – say that the coup-that-wasn’t-a-coup was in fact a continuation of the revolution, while the Brotherhood believes that the 2011 revolution can only be restored if Mohamed Morsi is put back in power, an event as unlikely as the return of the Pharoahs.
By chance, yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the Egyptian military revolution by General Mohamed Naguib, who toppled King Farouk in 1952 and who was in turn toppled in a coup-that-wasn’t-a-coup by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser a year later. Without any sense of irony, General Sisi – in his new role of first Deputy Prime Minister as well as Defence Minister, head of the army and leader of the coup-that-wasn’t-a-coup – went ahead with a vast military parade in Cairo on Monday to mark the Naguib coup.
The extraordinary thing about the coup-that-isn’t-a-coup is the vast number of the aforesaid intellectuals who support it. Folk who would normally frown at the mere sight of khaki are now even making excuses for the 8 July killings. One old friend of mine – a genuine “analyst” of Egyptian politics – said that the army must have been “badly provoked” on the day of the killings. He spoke of how an army could only “act like an elephant” in such situations – not an idea to commend itself to Gen Sisi, I should imagine – and how the army would never wish to undermine democracy. “You have to understand that Morsi was hijacking our country, he was dismantling the state – in one more year, he would have completely dismantled it. He was following the definition of democracy that [the Turkish Prime Minister] Erdogan gave to a journalist when he was governor of Istanbul. Erdogan said that democracy was “like taking a tram – you ride it to your destination and then you get off”. That’s what Morsi thought. He pushed through his wretched constitution. He didn’t plan to have any more “democracy” or any more elections.”
All this can be unsettling when it is repeated, over and over, by otherwise perfectly sensible, reasonable free-thinking Egyptians. How, for example, can an army be in favour of democracy when it has accepted dozens of fake elections for Egyptian dictators – Nasser and then Sadat and then Mubarak – and yet steps in to prevent the winner of the only real presidential election in modern Egyptian history enjoying more than a year of democratically won power? True, Morsi only received 51 per cent of the vote. But that is surely more realistic than the 96 per cent vote of the dictators whom the army always protected. In a perverse logic, the very continuation of the Brotherhood demonstrations now “prove” that its supporters are not democrats; for if they were, they would acknowledge that Morsi cannot return to power now that the people “support” a new interim government chosen by the army.
So how will the Brotherhood demonstrations end? An appeal to do so by Morsi, perhaps? Unlikely, since Morsi – wherever the army has closeted him – has so far clearly refused to make such an appeal. If he was ready to, the army would assuredly have freed him to do just that.
When the Algerian army forbade the last round of elections in 1972 for fear that their Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), would win, it opened vast prison camps in the Algerian deserts to jail thousands of FIS supporters without trial.
Have the Egyptian generals been chatting to their opposite numbers in Algeria? If they have, be sure they won’t be chatting about the civil war that followed the cancelled elections in 1992 – and killed a quarter of a million people.
by beeline » Wed Jul 24, 2013 11:25 am
by ShinShinKid » Wed Jul 24, 2013 11:29 am
by JackRiddler » Fri Jul 26, 2013 6:51 pm
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/26/e ... i_detained
Friday, July 26, 2013
Egypt Tensions Escalate as Morsi Detained and Supporters of Army, Brotherhood Hold Rival Protests
In the first update on ousted Egyptian President Mohamad Morsi’s status since he was forced from office and held incommunicado, Egyptian state media reports authorities have issued an arrest warrant calling for him to be detained for 15 days. A court is investigating Morsi’s alleged collaboration with the Palestinian group Hamas to escape from prison during the 2011 uprising against the Mubarak regime. The news comes as both sides of Egypt’s political divide are holding major protests after Army Chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi called for public backing of a military crackdown on what he called "violence and potential terrorism" by supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. "The [Morsi] charges are a way to whitewash the former regime’s crimes and whitewash police crimes during the Mubarak era and the revolution," says Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous, joining us from Cairo.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Egypt, where state media is reporting authorities have issued an official order to detain ousted President Mohamed Morsi. This is the first update on Morsi’s status, who has been held incommunicado since he was forced from office July 3rd. The arrest warrant calls for Morsi to be detained for 15 days pending investigations into his suspected collaboration with the Palestinian group Hamas to escape from prison during the 2011 uprising. He is also accused of working with Hamas to attack police stations, killing and abducting police officers and prisoners during the uprising, and espionage. Senior Brotherhood leader Essam el-Erian responded by condemning the arrest warrant.
ESSAM EL-ERIAN: [translated] The announcement that Morsi has been detained for 15 days today, the morning of this merciful day, the Friday of the sermon, on which millions of Egyptians are gathering to demand the return of the legal president, the return of legitimacy, the constitution and the elected Parliament, is proof of the confusion that prevails amongst those who carried out the coup. And it is also proof of the collapse of agreement that we live in a state of laws.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri responded to the allegations against Morsi in a statement to the outlet Middle East Online, saying, quote, "This is a dangerous development, which confirms that the current powers in Egypt are giving up on national causes and even using these issues to deal with other parties—first among them the Palestinian cause," he said.
The news comes as Egypt braces for major protests today in support of army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The army’s top general has called for people to demonstrate in support of a military crackdown on what he called violence and potential terrorism.
We go now directly to Cairo, where we’re joined by Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous.
Sharif, can you respond to these latest developments—first, Morsi being detained? I mean, he has been in detention, is that right?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Right, he’s been held incommunicado by the military since July 3rd, when Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the head of the armed forces, deposed him and overthrew him, following that massive uprising on June 30th. There haven’t been any charges leveled against him. And then this morning, which is—you know, it’s a Friday morning, it’s a vacation, it’s a weekend, and the judiciary typically does not work on the weekends—we have this order coming down from a judge leveling the first kind of any formal legal measure against him, and those were detention pending investigations into these accusations.
Now, these accusations are very telling, that they include, you know, a suspected collaboration with the Palestinian group Hamas to break out of prison. We have to remember that Morsi himself and other top Muslim Brotherhood leaders, as well as a number of activists, were rounded up in the first days of the January 25th uprising in 2011 and were held as political prisoners. And so, the fact that, you know, breaking out of prison during what was essentially a political detention is the charge, I think is very telling.
And it also accuses him of conspiring with Hamas to attack police stations, to attack soldiers. We have to remember that, you know, in the opening days of the January 2011 uprising, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians were in the streets, and many groups—and they included the Muslim Brotherhood on January 28th; they were a minority—but many police stations were attacked. Ninety-nine or a hundred were burned down across the country. And this was by many Egyptians, who saw the police force as a lawless militia that was engaged in torture and so forth. I mean, the revolution itself began on January 25th, which was National Police Day, and they did that for a reason: to oppose the police.
So, these charges that, you know, accuse Morsi of collaborating with Hamas to attack police, I think, is also a way of trying to whitewash the former regime’s crimes and whitewash police crimes during the Mubarak era, but also during the revolution.
AMY GOODMAN: And the response of the progressive forces that were in the streets to oust Morsi just a few weeks ago to what is happening now, and then to this bringing in the issue of Israel and Palestine here?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, as you mentioned, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the head of the armed forces and who’s, you know, de facto running the country right now, went on television a few days ago and, you know, dressed in full military regalia and wearing dark sunglasses, really looking like kind of an army general of a banana republic from Latin America in the 1980s, and then saying—you know, calling on Egyptians to go and fill the streets of Egypt today to give him what he called a mandate to confront what he said was potential violence and terrorism—and, you know, a clear indication against Morsi supporters who have continued a month-long sit-in in—or nearly a month, in different parts of Cairo, and who have taken to marching across the city in—across Cairo and different cities across the country, at times provoking clashes. Both sides have been armed. Nearly 200 people have died over the past month. The worst case was the army shooting at Morsi supporters outside the Republican Guard headquarters, that killed over 50 people. But so, we have these two kind of very polarized sides coming to the streets now in a very tense and violent time.
So we have members of—who support the military, support the military’s overthrow of Morsi, and that includes the National Salvation Front, that loose coalition of opposition groups. Mohamed ElBaradei himself, who’s in the interim government, has not really spoken out against this. Tamarod, the youth group that gathered petitions to—that really were the first to call for the June 30th protests, have also backed this. But there also have been Morsi critics who have opposed the defense minister’s call today, groups like the April 6 Youth Movement and other leading activists who are staying home and reject what they see as a very dangerous pretext for the military to come in and perhaps use widespread—you know, a very harsh crackdown on the Brotherhood. Many see this as possibly a pretext, especially given that Morsi was charged, to clear these large sit-ins that Morsi supporters have had in different parts of the country.
We see military APCs now that are deployed around Tahrir Square, and a lot of police trucks, as well. They’re handing—some of them are handing out posters of the head of the armed forces, al-Sisi. And we’ve also seen the media, the private media, which has been really toeing the army line and really bolstering the army narrative, has decided—many of the channels—to cancel their entertainment series tonight. You know, it’s Ramadan, and after people break their fast, there’s usually these very highly produced and highly watched drama TV series and different TV shows, and they’ve canceled all of those today to entice people to go out, to—also to cover the rallies. So, you know, it’s this kind of atmosphere that we’re in, and there’s, I think, a widespread fear of more violence with this many people on the streets and the minister making these kind of provocative calls.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, the Obama administration has delayed the planned delivery of four F-16 fighter jets to the Egyptian government. This marks the administration’s first direct action in response to Mohamed Morsi’s ouster earlier this month. It comes as the U.S. continues to refuse to brand Morsi’s removal a coup, which would trigger an automatic suspension of military aid. This is State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki.
JEN PSAKI: We do not believe that it would be in the best interest of the United States to immediately change all of our assistance to Egypt. We are reviewing our obligations under the law and are consulting with Congress about the way forward. Given the current situation in Egypt, we do not believe it is appropriate to move forward with the delivery of F-16s at this time.
AMY GOODMAN: I also want to play a clip from Thursday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the crisis in Egypt. Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul said U.S. law necessitates the suspension of aid. He has written legislation that would cut off aid to Egypt in the wake of Morsi’s ouster.
SEN. RAND PAUL: Our law says that when a coup occurs, you know, the aid ends. So, we can debate whether it’s a good idea to end, and you’re welcome to have opinions on whether it’s a good idea to have aid or not to have aid, but the law is the law. And if we decide that we’re above the law, it’s very hard for us to be preaching to the rest of the world about having the rule of law. So I think this seriously undermines our standing in the world, and it seriously goes against anyone who claims that they’re for the rule of law.
But I would go one step further. Even if you say this is not a coup because a military is not—there’s not a general currently running it, I think that’s, you know, semantics and really not going to the point of this, because our law says, basically, if the military had a substantial involvement in replacing a democratically elected government, so it doesn’t matter, according to our law, whether there’s a general in charge or not. But putting a president who’s been elected under house arrest, putting—we don’t know where some of these people are—I mean, this is the definition of the kind of thing that we’re supposedly opposed to. And I was no great fan of the Muslim Brotherhood. I wasn’t for aiding the Muslim Brotherhood, either. But the thing is, is if we’re not going to obey the law, if we’re simply going to say that we bring a panel before us that says aid is a good idea, realize that if you’re telling us that the aid should continue, you’re telling us to flout the law.
AMY GOODMAN: That is Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul. Sharif, if you could respond to both what he said and the holding up of the F-16 fighter jets?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Right. Well, apparently, the Obama administration has determined now that it doesn’t—it’s not legally required to even determine whether a coup took place. You know, and there’s an official quoted in The New York Times today saying that the law does not require us to make a formal determination. So they are, you know, skipping past the issue, because, as you heard Congressman Rand Paul say, which is correct, that if the U.S. determines this to be a coup, then it automatically, by law, forces them to stop providing the more than $1.3 billion in annual aid that it’s given. The Obama administration, in its first move, in its first sign of any kind of displeasure with what is happening, has ordered the halt of these four F-16s. You know, in the broader scheme of things, this is—seems like a very calibrated position that keeps the aid going but shows a sign of discomfort.
But I think we have to make an important note here, is that Egypt—the military does get this $1.3 billion of aid, but it has to be spent purchasing U.S. weapons. And so, all of this money really gets funneled to U.S. defense contractors that are the real big beneficiary of these funds, that have very large lobbying firms in Washington and that lobby very strongly for this aid to keep going. And Egypt has more tanks than Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa combined. We just keep buying this equipment, and it’s sitting in warehouses. And we also have to understand that there’s—_The Washington Post_ had a very interesting article today showing that since the 1980s the United States has granted Egypt an extraordinary ability to make these orders with these American defense contractors that are worth far more than the funds Congress has already appropriated. So it’s essentially like this massive credit card that Egypt has, with a limit of billions of dollars. And it’s something called "cash flow financing." So Egypt can submit these large orders for equipment that will take years to produce and deliver, and it’s under the assumption that U.S. lawmakers will just continue funneling the aid. And so, when you had lawmakers like Patrick Leahy, the senator from Vermont, trying to reassess U.S. aid to Egypt, they were stunned to learn how difficult it is to actually shut off this pipeline. So, I think, you know, there’s a deep level of intricacy with these U.S. defense contractors and the way the aid is structured that keeps this aid flowing to Egypt regardless of what’s happening on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, I want to thank you for being with us, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Democracy Now! correspondent in Cairo. We’ll link to your article of The Nation magazine at democracynow.org.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll be talking about the George Zimmerman acquittal, because a second juror has come forward, the only woman of color on the six-woman jury. She first wanted second-degree murder; in the end, she voted to acquit. We’ll analyze what she says. Stay with us.
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by JackRiddler » Fri Jul 26, 2013 7:13 pm
http://socialistworker.co.uk/art/33983/ ... 0.facebook
Statement from Egypt’s Revolutionary Socialists: Not in our name!
The Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown to deepen the revolution, not to support the regime.
Whatever crimes the Brotherhood has committed against the people and against the Copts in defence of its power in the name of religion, we do not give army chief Al-Sisi our authority. We will not go into the streets on Friday offering a blank cheque to commit massacres.
If Al-Sisi has the legal means to do what he wants, why is he calling people into the streets? What he wants is a popular referendum on assuming the role of Caesar and the law will not deter him.
Yes, the Brotherhood caused the masses to suffer during the period of their rule, and today we see the return of terrorist acts in Sinai, Al-Arish, and attacks against the people living in Maniyal and al-Nahda.
Yet the army does not need “permission” to deal with terrorist acts, it has the legal means to do that and more. But it does want more, it wants a popular mobilisation behind it in order to increase the cohesion of the state and the ruling class behind its leadership.
It wants to wipe out one of the most important features of the revolution so far, which is the masses’ consciousness of the repressive role of the state apparatus and its intense hostility to towards them. It wants to make true the lie that “the army, the police and the people are one hand.” The army wants the people to follow it into the streets, just a year after the masses were screaming “down, down with military rule”.
They want finally to restore “stability” – that is to say the return of order, the return of the regime. They want to finish off the revolution, and they will use the Brotherhood to do it. The Brotherhood in only one year of office alienated everyone: the old state, its army and police; the ruling class; the working class and the poor; the Copts; the revolutionary and political parties. The fall of the Brotherhood was inevitable, and people were celebrating the downfall of Morsi even before they went into the streets on 30 June.
The military establishment, which had allied itself with the Islamists over the previous two years, decided to break this alliance after the Islamists failed to contain the social mobilisation and rising anger in the streets. So it seized the opportunity to get rid of Morsi and cut off the development of a revolutionary movement and prevent it deepening.
They want tolead this movement in a “safer” direction by getting rid of the Brotherhood to restore the old order. This strategy has seen the old regime’s cronies, police and army being cleared in the courts, while their crimes are added to the charge sheet against the Brotherhood.
On top of this, they claim that they were responsible for the 25 January Revolution as well. We do not want to find Morsi on trial for the murder of the martyrs of Port Said, and others. It was Mubarak/Morsi’s police which was responsible. The most important thing is to open the door which was closed with Morsi’s agreement: justice for the martyrs.
The crimes that Morsi committed, he committed with the military, the police and Mubarak’s state. They should all be tried together. Giving the old state a mandate for its repressive institutions to do what they want to their partners-in-crime of yesterday will only give them a free hand to repress all opposition thereafter.
They will repress all protest movements, workers’ strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations. We cannot forget that the crimes which the Brotherhood committed around the country, took place under the noses of the police and army without them intervening at all to protect protesters or the people.
The masses going into the street on Friday is damaging to the revolution, whatever the participants in the protests might think.
Giving the army a popular mandate to finish off the Muslim Brotherhood will inevitably lead to the consolidation of the regime which the revolution arose to overthrow. We must use the downfall of the Brotherhood to deepen the revolution, not to support the regime.
We have to deal with the Brotherhood at a popular and political level, responding to their acts of violence with the utmost firmness.
We must build popular committees to defend ourselves against attacks by the Brotherhood and to protect our revolution which will not subside before it overthrows the regime, and before it wins bread, freedom and social justice, and retribution for all the killers of the martyrs.
This is a translation from a statement from the Revolutionary Socialists, http://revsoc.me/statement/sqt-lkhwn-lt ... m-ln-nfwwd
http://www.cihrs.org/?p=7008&lang=en
“Combating Terrorism” Does Not Justify an Extralegal Mandate
The undersigned rights organizations express their grave concern over the statement made by the Minister of Defense, on behalf of both the armed forces and the police, calling on the Egyptian people to grant him a mandate to “combat terrorism”. The most prominent causes for concern over this statement are as follows:
-Current Egyptian legislation includes provisions which clearly criminalize all acts of terrorism. Not only is Egyptian law sufficient in this area, but some of these laws exceed the legitimate grounds for combating terrorism by criminalizing acts which should be protected as forms of freedom of expression.
-Even if loopholes were to be found in the laws currently in place, addressing the matter would not require a “popular” mandate allowing the army and the police to act outside the law. Rather, the matter should be dealt with by reinforcing the rule of law. This could be achieved by the interim president – who holds broad exceptional powers – issuing the appropriate legal amendments after consulting with the vice president, the prime minister, and legal and rights experts.
In light of the religious and political exacerbation of the violence which has taken place over the last two years against the religious and political “other” (be it against Coptic Christians, Shiite Muslims, or others), it is necessary to evaluate the extent to which the law on political parties has contributed to this increase in violence and to the emergence of incitement to religious and sectarian hatred committed by some political parties and media outlets.
-The real problem is that the police are not positioned in locations where violence violence attributable to hired thugs or to members of the Muslim Brotherhood occurs. This raises questions regarding whether the authorities are continuing to adopt a policy of selective policing and are purposefully absent from places where violence is expected to break out. The practice of selective policing has been implemented frequently by the police since the January 25 “Revolution”. Selective policing also does not require an extralegal mandate to be resolved; rather, the police should be obligated to perform their duties according to the law in order to prevent all acts of violence and terrorism by any party against citizens.
-Nor does combating the emergence of terrorist acts in Sinai require an extralegal mandate. One of the most important – and painful – lessons learned by Egyptians during the Mubarak era is that main causes of increased violence were the repressive use of the law in confronting terrorist crimes when they first appeared in Sinai and the reinforcement of discriminatory practices against Egyptian citizens in the peninsula. These measures helped to the creation of an environment in which terrorism was able to take root. Unfortunately, these policies have continue even after the removal of Mubarak. Instead, the understandings between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies contributed to the “suspension” of the law and of the role of law enforcement forces in combating illegal groups which embrace the use of violence. Ironically, human rights organizations were at the same time harassed and their offices broken into by the armed forces.
What is required to address this situation is not a popular mandate which would fundamentally violate the principles of a state governed by rule of law. Instead the government should strengthen of the rule of law by supporting the state institutions mandated to enforce the law in Sinai, developing the competence of the security bodies to collect information and conduct investigations in Sinai, and establishing an urgent plan to eliminate all discriminatory policies and practices against Egyptian citizens in Sinai with the participation of these citizens. The state, as represented by the interim president, should present a genuine apology to these citizens – and thereby to all Egyptians – for the discriminatory policies and the marginalization that they have experienced and for all of the crimes which have been committed by the security apparatus against them.
Signatories
Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS)
The Human Right Association for the Assistance of the Prisoners
Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI)
The Land Center for Human Rights
Egyptian Association for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR)
Misryon Against Religious Discrimination (MARD)
Arab Penal Reform Organization
This post is also available in: Arabic
July 25, 2013
http://menasolidaritynetwork.com/2013/0 ... tionaries/
Egypt: Army’s call to crush terrorism divides revolutionaries
Posted on July 25, 2013
0
sisi_tv_speech
Egyptian Army chief Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s call for massive protests against terrorism on 26 July has won wide support with many independent unions endorsing the demonstrations. The April 6 Youth Movement and the Revolutionary Socialists, along with activists in the Constitution Party’s student groups have rejected al-Sisi’s appeal.
The demonstrations come after two weeks of tension following the removal of president Mohamed Morsi in the face of huge protests on 30 June calling for his resignation. Clashes between supporters and opponents of the former president have left dozens dead in cities across Egypt, including over fifty pro-Morsi activists who were shot by the Army during a protest outside the Republican Guards headquarters.
Despite this, many leading activists in the independent unions are arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood is attempting to return to power with the help of foreign governments, such as the USA. The Independent School Teachers Union said in a statement on 24 July “we will all answer the call from our great army to go down into the streets to complete our revolution … standing in the face of terrorism which only knows the language of blood”.
The ‘Rebel’ campaign which launched the signature drive against Mohamed Morsi has also backed the demonstrations.
A small number of revolutionary groups, including the 6th of April Youth Movement and the Revolutionary Socialists have issued statements opposing the protests. In a statement on 25 July, the Revolutionary Socialists said: “We will not go into the streets on Friday offering a blank cheque to commit massacres. If Al-Sisi has the legal means to do what he wants, why is he calling people into the streets? What he wants is a popular referendum on assuming the role of Caesar and the law will not deter him.” Popular support for the army would be used as an excuse to repress the workers’ movement, the statement continued.
Some trade unionists also raised similar concerns. Mohamed Hardan, deputy president of the Independent Union of Workers at Cairo Water Company commented on Facebook “I hope that history does not repeat itself and we find ourselves prisoners of laws which limit our freedoms, repress and silence us, in the name of [fighting] terrorism”.
The army’s mobilisation comes a week after the appointment of Kamal Abu Aita, president of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Unions to the post of Minister of Labour in the new government. Abu Aita has pledged to implement workers’ demands, including the minimum and maximum wage and a new law on trade union freedoms. Abu Aita’s call for workers to shun strikes during the “transitional period” after Morsi – made while he was still EFITU president – sparked controversy, however. Fatma Ramadan, one of the leaders of EFITU who publicly opposed Abu Aita’s stance, warned: “the strike is workers’ right and their weapon, do not disarm yourselves in the face of any government”.
Meanwhile, several strikes over pay and conditions have erupted in the last week alone, including walkouts at the Iron and Steel Company in Suez and Toshiba.
by JackRiddler » Sat Jul 27, 2013 10:17 am
http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/ ... gypt-cairo
Saturday 27 July 2013 10.29 BST
More than 130 Morsi supporters killed in Egypt clashes
Death toll reaches at least 136 in Cairo as Muslim Brotherhood accuses security forces of shooting to kill
Patrick Kingsley and agencies in Cairo
At least 136 supporters of Egypt's ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, have been shot dead by security officials in what is the worst state-led massacre in the country since the fall of Hosni Mubarak, according to figures released by Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.
The Egyptian health ministry said that it had counted only 20 dead so far – though their figures are only based on bodies delivered to state institutions. Reporters at the scene counted at least 36 corpses in a single room.
The massacre took place in the small hours of Saturday morning, at a sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya, east Cairo, where tens of thousands of pro-Morsi supporters have camped since Morsi was deposed on 3 July.
Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Haddad said the shooting started shortly before pre-dawn morning prayers on the fringes of a round-the-clock vigil being staged by backers of Morsi, who was toppled by the army more than three weeks ago.
"They are not shooting to wound, they are shooting to kill," Haddad said, adding that the death toll might be much higher.
Al Jazeera's Egypt television station reported that 120 had been killed and some 4,500 injured in the early morning violence near Cairo's Rabaa al-Adawia mosque.
Reporters at the scene said firing could still be heard hours after the troubles started.
"I have been trying to make the youth withdraw for five hours. I can't. They are saying they have paid with their blood and they do not want to retreat," said Saad el-Hosseini, a senior Brotherhood politician.
"It is a first attempt to clear Rabaa al-Adawia," he said.
An injured supporter of Mohamed Morsi is treated at a field hospital. An injured man is treated at a field hospital. Photograph: Ahmed Khaled/EPA
There was no immediate comment from state authorities on what had happened.
The clashes started after police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Morsi supporters who tried to extend the sit-in in eastern Cairo.
Al Jazeera showed medics desperately trying to revive casualties arriving at a field hospital set up near the mosque.
El-Haddad said police started firing repeated rounds of tear-gas at protesters on a road close to the mosque sometime after 3am local time (2am BST). Shortly afterwards, live rounds started flying, hitting people at close range.
The deaths come just two weeks after military and police officers massacred 51 Morsi supporters at a nearby protest in east Cairo.
They also happened less than 24 hours after hundreds of thousands of anti-Morsi protesters gathered in Egyptian streets to give General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the army chief who ousted Morsi, their assent to crackdown on what he had on Wednesday called "terrorism".
Sceptics say this is a euphemism for a violent campaign on largely peaceful Morsi supporters, who have held sit-ins and marches across several Egyptian cities since Morsi was overthrown – including at Rabaa al-Adawiya. For weeks, most Egyptian media have depicted pro-Morsi supporters as terrorists.
"It doesn't make sense for a defence minister to ask people to give him authority to fight terrorism," said Abdallah Hatem, a 19-year-old student from Cairo, on Friday.
"So his speech was a pretext for something else – a pretext to fight peaceful protesters who want Morsi to come back."
http://lavozlit.com/response-to-the-dec ... urce=pubv1
Response to the Declaration Issue by the Egyptian Independent Trade Union Federation
Posted in Internacional/International, Noticias/News By FireBall On July 26, 2013
Written by *Fatma Ramadan
Friday, 26 July 2013 21:54
My comrades, Egyptian workers, have been struggling for their rights and for a better Egypt. Egypt’s workers have dreams, of freedom and social justice, dreams to work in a time when thieves who are called businessmen call for closing factories to pocket billions. Egypt’s workers dream of fair wages, dreams of a government that is not only interested in promoting investment at the expense of workers and their rights, and even their lives. Egypt’s workers who dream of a better life for their children, and dream of medicine when they are sick, and do not find it. Egypt’s workers who dream of four walls in which they can take shelter.
Since before the 25th of January and you have been demanding your rights, and your strikes and demonstrations have continued after Mubarak’s toppling, for your demands have not been answered.
Both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Military have negotiated left right and center, not once having in mind the demands and rights you have been calling for. All they have in mind is how to turn off the candle you have lit with your struggle in times of darkness, even if each time in isolation of the other.
Did not the military forcibly end your strikes and protests in Suez, Cairo, Fayyoum, and all over Egypt?! Did not the military arrest you and subject you to military trials, accused you of practicing your rights of organization, strike, and peaceful protest?! Have they not adamantly worked to criminalize this right through legislation barring the right of all the Egyptian people to peaceful protests, strikes, and sit ins?
Then came Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood to continue their path of division, arrests, and cracks downs on strikes by force to the extent of using police dogs against Titan Workers in Alexandria- done by Mursi- through the ministry of interior and its men. The very police and army officers who are right now carried on the shoulders are killers, the very killers of young honest Egyptians, they are power’s weapon against us all- and will remain so, in every time and place, unless these institutions are cleansed.
Today, because of the crimes planned by the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood against the Egyptian people on a daily basis, which the Army and the Police are facing with brutal violence and the killing of innocent people, let each of us remember, when is the army and police intervening? They intervene long after clashes have begun and almost coming to an end, after blood have been spilled. Ask yourselves, why are they not permitting these crimes committed by the Muslim Brotherhood against the Egyptian people before they start? Ask yourselves, in whose interest is this continuation of fighting and blood spilling? It is in the interest of both the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Military together. And as wars between states feed on the fuel of the poor, so does war and infighting fueled from Egypts poor workers and peasants. Was not the doormans’ innocent son been killed in Mokattam, and in Giza as well?
Today, we have been asked to go out and authorize Sisi’s killing spree, and we find all three associations, the Governmental Federation of Unions, the Democratic Egyptian Workers Federation, and the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (of which I am a member of the Executive Committee- and I engaged in discussion with members of the executive committee in order to convince them not to issue a statement calling on its members and the Egyptian people to go down on Friday (the 26th), confirming that the army, the police, and the people are one hand as stated in the statement, but my position was a minoritarian one, four other votes in my support versus 9 votes in support of the published statement) calling for workers to go down and authorize on the pretext of fighting terrorism. We are thus faced with a position from jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. The Muslim Brotherhood committed crimes and it must be held accountable and prosecuted for them, just like police and army officers and men of the Mubarak regime must be held accountable and prosecuted for their crimes.
Do not be fooled , replacing a religious dictatorship with a military dictatorship.
Workers of Egypt Be aware, for your demands are crystal clear, you want work for you and your children, you want fair pay, laws that protect your rights against the laws that the businessmen of Mubarak have designed to protect their interests against your rights, you want a state based development opening new factories in order to accommodate the nascent labor force. You want Freedom, freedom of all kinds, freedom to organize, freedom to strike. You want a country where you can live as free citizens without torture or murder. You have to specify what stands between you and these demands. Do not be fooled, let them drag you to battles that are not your own. Do not listen to those who ask of you today and tomorrow to stop pressing for these demands and rights under the pretext of fighting terrorism.”
* Member of the Executive Bureau of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions
Friday, July 26, 2013
by JackRiddler » Sat Jul 27, 2013 10:59 am
July 26, 2013, 6:05 pm Comment
Tahrir Taken, Some Egyptians Look for ‘Third Square’ to Resist Islamists and Army
By ROBERT MACKEY
As hundreds of thousands of Egyptians crammed into dueling rallies in different parts of Cairo on Friday, responding to calls for support from rival political factions around the army and the Muslim Brotherhood, activists who mistrust both the military and the Islamists were left wondering how best to register their disgust.
With Tahrir Square packed with flag-waving supporters of the defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, and a rally outside the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque across town calling for the reinstatement of the deposed Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, many dissenters avoided the streets and mocked both sides from afar online.
The activist filmmaker Aalam Wassef, who made subversive Web videos during the Mubarak era under the pseudonym Ahmad Sherif, released a bleakly comic music video that showed him sitting out Friday’s demonstrations at home, doing his laundry in front of a banner with a single word on it: “Resist.”
SNIP
by JackRiddler » Sat Jul 27, 2013 3:37 pm
http://www.tahrirsquared.com/node/5517
Tahrir Squared
Dispatches from Cairo by Sarah el-Tantawi
27th July, 2013
This pretty much sums it all up. And these people are wide-eyed, not stupid at all, and dead serious (when not dancing, making jokes, lighting fireworks, and sharing food.)
I have spent the day observing and photographing pro-Sisi protests, doing media, and now I have taken respite in a quieter part of town at my aunt and uncle's house, where I have just eaten my body weight in fish. Must write before collapsing.
Let me say at the outset that I didn't go to Rabaa or any pro-Morsi protests, for the simple reason that I had several appointments in the Tahrir area and it wasn't going to happen.
The pro-Sisi protests, and what I glean as next steps for Egypt, are more complex than meets the eye. I can't claim to have it all figured out, put in a box and tied with a bow (unlike those who scream "textbook coup!" -- often from afar), but I can share some thoughts that have been brewing.
The pro-Sisi protesters were out today in enormous numbers (it looks to me that pro-Sisi numbers dwarfed pro-Morsi's, but I can not say that with absolute certainty.) I saw a great, wide variety of people today, from the very poor to the very rich, Muslims of all stripes including several niqaabis, Christians (I assume) -- really just everyone -- a genuine slice of the country.
Here are some major themes that I heard repeatedly when talking to people:
1. I heard a version of this about 1000 times: "Look around you. Does this look like a coup? Do you see these crowds? We authorize General Sisi to protect us from terrorism and secure Egypt's borders." My sense is that when people say "terrorism", they certainly mean jihaadis, some mean the Muslim Brotherhood en mass, but my reading is that "terrorism" here means the direction the MB seemed to be going in, including letting convicted criminals out of jail, and the persistent rumor that the Brotherhood was going to give parts of Sinai to militants from Hamas. People are convinced that these groups are not only allied (that is an actual fact), but that the Brotherhood has a different vision for Egypt altogether, including what to do with its land, who its allies should be and not be, and what the Egyptian subject/citizen should act like, look like, and expect from government. Most disastrously, according to this narrative, this vision has been pre-decided with Muslim Brotherhood murshids -- they are not interested in the Egyptian people's opinions on any of these matters.
The anti-Obama sentiment was extremely intense. I actually found this one of the more confusing sentiments, considering that the U.S. announced today that they were not legally obligated to take a position on whether this was a revolution or a coup, and thus wouldn't, and ergo military aid to Egypt would continue and no more would be said about this. After a while though, I think I figured it out: people are actually *insulted* that the international community does not understand this was a popular revolution and what the Egyptian people want, and they want this cleared up in no uncertain terms.
2. The people at the pro-Sisi rallies truly believe Egypt has been rescued from the brink of disaster. I detected palpable relief, as if people were exhaling at long last. "We stayed quiet!", they said, "until we could not take it anymore and were going to explode! We love our country!" As someone put it to me: imagine if you came to rule Egypt, but you only spoke English, and only spoke to your American friends. That is what Morsi did to Egyptians -- he didn't talk to us! He ignored us and talked only to his group. They would cringe, they told me, when Morsi would address (his) audiences as, "Ahli wa Ashiiraati" (my family and my 'tribe'. This is an ancient word for tribe -- the classical Arabic use is often in connection with Arabian tribes of the pre-Islamic/early Islamic period) when addressing people as opposed, to say Gamal Abdul Nasser, who would say, "Aayuha al-ikhwaa il-muwaatinuun!!, (oh my brothers and fellow citizens!!), or Sadat, who modified it to say, "Aayuha al-ikhwaa w'al ikhawaat!" (oh my brothers and sisters!)
3. People are really and truly insulted that their religiosity and Islamic theology and practice has been questioned by people who seem to think they are better Muslims and thus better people than them. This is hardly a way to win people over. I was on the Qasr al-'Ayni bridge when fitar time came; it was eerily silent with people breaking their fast despite the fact that thousands of people were there. Church bells rang at the same time as the ithaan.
4. The Muslim Brotherhood disrupted and disturbed what many people called "the Egyptian identity". "Our heritage, our gentleness, our openness, our tolerance," people told me, "it's like they do not like the Egyptian nature!" In a context where people are suffering economically, this is the one thing you can not touch. One person said to me, "it's all we have."
I am not in a mood to condemn these people for their feelings, which strike me as valid. The embodiment of all of these desires in the person of Sisi is rather more problematic. Again, I see the point -- they feel rescued. My discomfort -- which is there, especially when seeing things like this:
Is tempered by my attempts to soothe myself with the reminder that this is 1) a country with large swaths of the population in a moment of jubulation and relief, that this will pass, and that there is a number of things MB supporters can do to improve their image and fortunes, and 2) this is a population that two years ago rose up in a revolution against military rule, suggesting -- optimistically, I admit -- that if there is true over reach, there will be a reaction against that.
For what it's worth, I did ask many people to elaborate on what they meant in carrying such signs -- I said to several people, "aren't the MB human beings too?" The vast majority said, "of course, what we mean is that those who commit violence have to be arrested. If you commit terrorism, you must be stopped. Anyone who is peaceful is peaceful and should be left alone."
Here are a few of my thought/predictions at this point:
1. Sisi called for this carnival first and foremost for international consumption, particularly American. A great many of the signs sent the message, "we the people want this, this is a popular revolution not a coup." The signs of Putin's face that cropped up occasionally (particularly in Alexandria, it seems?) was to send the message: we will break out of this current geo-political order and are more than happy to seek other patrons for our army. We're serious about this, America, stop insulting us by calling this a coup, you don't understand the Muslim Brotherhood, and, finally, butt out.
2. I say this with the requisite tentativeness, of course, but I do not believe there will be massive bloodshed against pro-Morsi supporters. However it is now the middle of the night in Cairo and there are reports of distributing the protests using tear gas. I'm following this now.
3. The Muslim Brotherhood do not share the same conception of Egyptian or nationalist identity as many if not most other Egyptians, and this is an identity people hold very dear. I think this wave can be read as a return to some conception of Egyptianness first, and in fact in some cases a return to Arabism over a pan-Islamic identity. I had a couple of very interesting discussions along the lines of, "I am an Egyptian, and an ARAB." Note in the above sign, the use of the phrase "Arab Republic of Egypt."
I also question whether the Muslim Brotherhood respect Egypt's borders in ways that reflect the thinking of most Egyptians. All one has to do is actually read the literature to know that they do not respect borders, and call for a pan-Islamic region. I have of course read their literature in the past and understood that this was their philosophy, and basically ignored it, thinking it lofty ideology that would be tempered by the realities of ruling. Perhaps it was wrong to ignore this, in view of the fact that over the past year, we saw that the group handled many of the challenges of state power by turning inward.
4. Here is how most people understand the legitimacy question, explained thusly by an intellectual and professional I know:
"Have you ever bought a can of corned beef that says it will expire in four years? You buy it and put it on the shelf, and open it after a year, and see that it's gone bad. Do you eat it or throw it away? You throw it away. Bas. You've now understood."
Sarah Eltantawi is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion. She is currently a fellow in Arab Studies at UC Berkeley, and in Cairo documenting events. Follow her on twitter @SEltantawi
info@tahrirsquared.com
by JackRiddler » Mon Jul 29, 2013 11:49 am
In Egypt, love for Sisi overshadows protester deaths (+video)
Adoration of Egypt's military chief and deep hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood leaves many ambivalent about news of at least 74 killed in weekend clashes.
By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / July 28, 2013
Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has become a wildly popular figure in Egypt, even as some democracy advocates worry about a return to dictatorship. Asmaa Waguih
Cairo
The day after at least 74 Islamist protesters were killed in clashes with Egyptian security forces, none of Egypt’s main newspapers on Sunday showed the injured, the dead, or even the vast crowds staging a sit-in against the coup that deposed former President Mohamed Morsi.
One newspaper went so far as to blanket the front page with regal photos of Egypt's military chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and revered nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser with a headline roughly equivalent to, “Spot on, chief!”
The elevation of General Sisi to almost legendary status when well over 200 people, mostly Islamists, have been killed in clashes since he led a July 3 coup has raised cries of anguish from a small but vocal segment of Egyptians. They openly wonder how their fellow citizens – including so many who fought for democratic government in the 2011 protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak – have become so deliriously in love with the army, and worry they are blind to the potential for a return to dictatorship.
“People of Egypt, political parties, where are you?” asked Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader who quit to run for president in 2011, on Al Jazeera today. “How can it be that there is no reaction condemning this massacre and mourning the people who died? I don’t know what is wrong with Egyptians.”
Hossam al-Hamalawy, a member of the far-left Revolutionary Socialists and a long-time activist, describes the atmosphere as similar to America’s “post-9/11 frenzy.” While the Muslim Brotherhood are not “angels,” he says, the media and army are whipping up hysteria against them.
“The media is lying, exaggerating, and picturing this like Islamist demons with horns creating havoc everywhere,” he says, describing the country as infected with a “zombie” virus. “You’re getting responses on the social networks when you tweet or post pictures [of those wounded or killed] like, ‘Oh yeah, they deserve that. I wish Sisi would kill more.’ ”
Protests, mandates, and crackdowns
After three weeks of unrest, Sisi called last week for the public to give him a mandate to crack down on violence and "terrorism," prompting dueling protests in Cairo and elsewhere Friday. Just before 1 a.m. Saturday morning Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim announced the Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Rabaa and Nahda would be cleared “soon.”
Clashes broke out at the edge of Rabaa as protesters moved to expand the sit-in toward the 6th of October Bridge, a major thoroughfare, and security forces fought back. By 1:45 a.m., bodies began arriving in the field hospital at Rabaa and within two hours many of those arriving bore gunshot wounds to the head and chest, according to a Human Rights Watch.
Doctors at the field hospital told Human Rights Watch that the killings appeared more targeted than in a previous massacre at a Republican Guard office in Cairo, where Morsi was believed to be held, on July 8.
“This time it was like 80 percent were shot by snipers targeted from above,” versus 10 percent on July 8, a doctor named Fouad told HRW.
The Ministry of Interior held a press conference hours later and blamed the Rabaa protesters for instigating a “crisis” and throwing tear gas canisters and Molotov cocktails at the security forces. The ministry insisted that no live fire was used by the police.
Apart from a small circle of human rights activists and leftists, much of the country beyond Muslim Brotherhood supporters seemed ambivalent about or even supportive of the security forces’ action – and rebuffed criticism that it represented a violation of basic freedoms.
“After we’ve seen the real side of those Islamists and how much they hate the country and the citizens of the country, they don’t have a right to protest or a right to protection,” Lt. Hamdy Bokheet, a military spokesman, was quoted as saying in Al-Akhbar newspaper. On the same page, prominent lawyers were featured asserting that the army had a legal right to clear the protests by force. Bokheet said he expected the protesters would be removed within 72 hours.
In addition to such press reports, flyers are being distributed in the Nile Delta calling for evacuating the Brotherhood from their homes and shutting down their businesses, says Wael Abbas, a blogger and human rights activist. “It’s like the Kristallnacht of Egypt.”
A wider campaign against dissent?
While the Brotherhood is taking the brunt of such hatred, some see them as just the first target in a wider campaign to crush opposition that might be abetted by a restoration of the Mubarak-era Emergency Law, which was used to stifle political dissent for decades.
“Now they are using the war on terrorism card in order to more or less cement the counterrevolution,” says Mr. Hamalawy. “This emergency law is not going to be just against Islamists – also trade unions, leftists, human rights activists, against anyone later who will raise the banner of dissent against the government.”
Even the Tamarod (“rebel”) movement that gathered 22 million signatures calling for early presidential elections, which led to the massive protests that ended in the coup, called Interior Minister Ibrahim’s comments Saturday “unacceptable” and a contradiction of the 2011 revolution. Among other things, Mr. Ibrahim announced that state-security departments in charge of monitoring political and religious activity, which had been closed after the 2011 revolution, had been reinstated, reported the English language version of the government-owned Al Ahram newspaper.
For at least some young revolutionaries who swelled Tahrir Square to oust Mubarak in 2011, only to see the interim military government (SCAF) detain and kill protesters in the tense months that followed, the public embrace of the army is at best strange.
“They killed us before; how can we trust them again?” asks Eve Radwan, an artist and video editor. On the other hand she understands why many people blame the Muslim Brotherhood for heavy-handed rule and responsibility for more recent violent protests, including in Port Said this winter. “Muslim Brotherhood actions made people cold-blooded. They don’t care about the Muslim Brotherhood anymore.”
Terrorists?
Public anger toward the Brotherhood goes well beyond disapproval of their politics, and is driven in no small measure by fear that they are behind jihadi violence in Sinai and are plotting a wave of violence in Egypt proper. Many freely characterize it as a terrorist group, and denounce its members as outsiders.
“The Muslim Brotherhood are not Egyptian, they are not even human at all,” says Abbas Abbas Mahmoud, an engineer kicking back at Café Riche, where Gamal Abdel Nasser reportedly planned the 1952 Free Officer’s Coup that deposed the monarchy, paving the way for him to become a wildly popular president.
Sisi is “exactly like Abdel Nasser,” says the café’s owner, Gen. (Ret.) Magdy Yacoub, who has a poster of a radiant Sisi surfing atop his cluttered desk.
Indeed, the comparison is sweeping through the media, with Sisi emerging as a symbol of the yearning for dignity and security that many feel has been lost since Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism made Egypt a powerful regional leader.
“He’s something beautiful,” says Mahmoud, a 20-something running a kiosk at the edge of Tahrir featuring Sisi and Nasser memorabilia. He says he’s sold 25,000 posters in the past month. “He made all our dreams come true.”
In one of the more prominent odes to Sisi, Al Masry Al Youm columnist Ghada El Sharif wrote in a column last week titled “Sisi, you just need to wink” that if the general wanted to take on the Islamic quota of four wives, she was available. “This is the way we want to implement sharia,” she said, deriding the Brotherhood as men with six-foot beards and donkeys and comparing Sisi to Nasser, who cracked down on the Brotherhood after surviving an assassination attempt.
Indeed, one of the reasons for Sisi’s enormous popularity is that he’s seen as a man who has the will and the ability to protect the country from the Brotherhood.
“He came in and rescued people from the Muslim Brotherhood who in many people’s eyes destroyed the economy and society,” says army supporter Mohammed Ahmed Ismail, noting that when Sisi threatened Morsi with a 48-hour ultimatum, he kept it. “So he was like a knight on a white horse.”
http://www.ctuws.com/Default.aspx?item=1293
Mon, 29-Jul-2013
The Condition of Egyptian Workers: One Year After the Brotherhood’s Rule... One Year Of Trade Union Freedom Violations... During Morsi’s Regime
Click here to download the report as pdf
One year has passed since Mohamed Morsi accede the presidency of the republic while Egyptian workers are still awaiting the fulfillment of his promises to realize social justice. All what the workers get from the president and his group is their concern with a file to empower the brotherhood and strengthen its involvement in the state institutions without the slightest attention to the workers and their living conditions. One year has passed and we did not hear about a plan to confront unemployment. We did not find a response from the president to the demands of the pensioners or to the complaints of the workers who were forced to accept early retirement. We did not hear from him when will the privatized companies be returned to state according to court sentences. We did not hear from the president and his group that budget allocations for health and education will be increased. Moreover, when the workers protested and exercised their right to strike calling for their fair rights, the media of the president and his group attacked the workers’ strikes and accused their noble trade union leaders through the state-owned press and TV channels. Worse then ever, they used the mosques to provoke T.U. leaders and confronted the strikes with unprecedented violence. Dr. Morsi and his government were not biased to trade union freedoms. On the contrary, they brought a minister whose main concern was to implement the Brotherhood’s plot to destroy the independent unions and dominate the official trade union Federation by removing Mubarak’s people and appoint the Murshid’s people instead of them.
One year has passed and the exercise of trade union freedoms, whose principles were announced, was met on the ground by severe difficulties and serious violations by the devilish alliance between the Egyptian Trade Union Federation “ETUF” and the government administrations whose officials remained unchanged with a number of businessmen and private companies. By the end of the year, Egypt was put on ILO’ black list of the worst nations which do not observe the workers rights.
During the fist year of the president from the Brotherhood the Egyptian working class was subject to a number of quantitative and qualitative violations unprecedented in the history of Egyptian workers. Quantitatively, the workers protests calling for their minimum legal rights (the right to work, the right to fair wages, etc.) were met by security confrontations at almost a daily level. Judicial prosecutions of labour leaders on the basis of the “law to protect the revolution” issued by president Morsi on 22nd November 2012. This law equates the striking workers with the killers of the revolutionaries and criminalizes the right to strike.
Qualitatively, the government the government did not deal with the workers’ protest movements in a manner that suits a post-revolution government. It confronted such protests with defamation of the strikes and the T.U. leaders through state-owned press and condemnation of strikes and sit-ins as acts in contradiction with religion. In addition, the regime sanctioned hiring thugs by businessmen to attack the striking workers with live bullets.
In this report, the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services “CTUWS” observed the state of trade union freedoms in Egypt during the first year of Morsi’s regime. The report exhibits the state of trade union freedoms at two levels:
The First level: the legal structure which restricts trade union freedoms, and
The Second Level: violations and assaults against trade union and labour leaderships.
A Tyrannical Legal System:
At the level of the legal structure, the year passed leaving the laws which restricted trade union freedoms without change. Moreover, these laws were utilized to suppress trade union freedoms and to implement the most important project for the Brotherhood, namely the empowerment project.
The year has passed while the law on trade union freedoms is still shelved. Although the Brotherhood participated during the first months after the revolution (during 2011) in discussing the draft law, and their repeated announcement that they support the workers’ right to establish their independent unions in complete freedom, they started gradually to withdraw from their promises as soon as they put things under their control. The Brotherhood gained the majority of votes in the 2012 parliamentary elections, nevertheless the draft law which remained for months in the drawers of the Military Council was lost in the corridors of the People’s Assembly with its Brotherhood majority. This indicates that the Muslim Brotherhood stood against trade union freedoms and the workers’ right to establish independent unions. The same stand continued after the election of Mohamed Morsi a president of the republic. The president could have issued the law, but there were several equivocations which continued for one more year until the Standards Committee of the ILO announced on 6 June 2013 putting Egypt again on the Individual Cases List (known in the media as the black list) in the framework of the102 Session of the ILO Conference. The Egyptian case was the worst amongst the listed five states which do not observe the international agreements they had ratified particularly the ILO conventions No. 87 and No. 98 on trade union freedoms, the right of association and to organize freely in independent and democratic trade unions.
In August 2012 before the president completes his second month, the government started to talk about a new emergency law to confront the thugs and gangsters. Article No. 16 of the law cited the cases which fall under it. They include “aggression on the right to work”. It is almost the same provision cited in Law No. 34.2011 issued by the Military Council in April 2011 called: Law on Criminalization of Aggression Against the Right to Work and Sabotage of Establishments” according to which tens of workers were referred to military courts. Eleven workers from Western Alexandria District were imprisoned for 6 months because they demonstrated against the president of the District and called to reform the local councils and to prevent the military from taking leading positions in the local councils. In addition, the law, which was expected to confront violence and crime, restricted public and private freedoms and returned the extraordinary trials to the country without any need for them. It restricted the rights of assembly, movement, demonstration and sit-in. The law allowed the return of military trials for civilians.
On 6th September 2012 the Minister of Industry and Foreign Trade issued a decision that banned any sit-ins and strikes in all the institutions that fall under the ministry. According to this decision: “it is prohibited for workers in the Ministry or in any of the institutions which belong to it to sit-in, organize protests or demonstrate during official work hours, go in strike or make any action which may delay work. The violators will be subject to legal liability. The decision stipulated that anyone who claims the right to strike should call for it through the legal methods and to support his call with the necessary documents. Heads of the different sectors and bodies should refer to the legal departments anyone who violates the provisions of the first article of the decision and should submit a memorandum on the violators in order to suspend their employment – according to the law provisions - for the benefit of the investigation whenever necessary!!
On 22nd November 2013 President Mohamed Morsi issued a new constitutional declaration in which he appointed himself a semi-god under the pretext or protecting the revolution. According to this declaration, the president immunized the decrees and laws he has issued since his access to the president from appeals before the courts. The president, who took the oath to observe the law and the constitution, announced himself above the law to exercise tyranny in a manner unprecedented in Egypt in the modern age. He was not satisfied with dominating the administrative and legislative authorities, but tried by his constitutional declaration to dominate the judicial authority and immunize the Shura Council and the Constitutive Committee both of which are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood against any judicial sentences. Then he removed the Public Prosecutor and appointed another one. This was a striking blow to the judiciary authority which was the only remaining defense for the Egyptian people against the ruler’s tyranny.
On the previous day and under the pretext or protecting the revolution and its objectives, the president, based upon his constitutional declaration, issued the Law on the Revolution Protection which comprises 6 articles. The law stipulated the establishment of a special prosecution office to protect the revolution. The second article of the said law gave this prosecution office the right to imprison perpetrators of the crimes listed in the fifth article of that law for a period of six months. As it was expected, the fourth article of the said law gave the workers the lion’s share of these threats and made them equal to the killers of the revolutionaries and the enemies of the revolution. The fourth article of that law mandated the prosecution of the revolution protection or whoever is delegated by the public prosecutor or members of the public prosecution to investigate the crimes mentioned in Article One of that law and the crimes listed in Chapters 7, 12, 13 and 14 of Book 2 and Chapters 15 and 16 of Book 3 of the Penal Code. It is worthy noting that the crimes listed in Chapters 15 and 16 of Book 3 of the Penal Code are related to the prohibition of or strikes (or the so called aggression against the right to work). A person who goes on strike or calls for strikes shall be subject to 2 years of imprisonment and a fine of 100 Egyptian Pounds. The president found that the presence of such articles in the penal code (which the workers were calling for years to wipe them out) is insufficient, but he added salt to injury by giving the special prosecutor to put a worker in jail for 6 months before he stands before the court !! and made a worker who exercises the right to go in strike equal to the martyrs’ killers, the corrupted and the remains of the former regime.
Without the attention of anyone, the present issued, on the same day of his issuance of the constitutional declaration on 22nd November 2012, his decree No. 97/2012 amending the Law on Trade Unions No. 35/1976. This decree was not announced. Were surprised to find it published in the issue No. 47 (bis) of the Official Gazette of 24th November 2012. It had been approved by the cabinet at its session held on Wednesday 17th October 2012. The amendments were tailored to force board members of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation “ETUF” and its General Trade Unions who reached the retirement age to retire. They were to be replaced (according to a decision from the concerned Minister) by candidates of the previous elections who have got the highest votes. As the majority of the board members of “ETUF”, its General Trade Unions and many plant unions were elected by acclamation (i.e. there was no voting), the new board members were selected by ETUF’s board - which was controlled by the Brotherhood through its domination policies – in collaboration with the Minister of Manpower and Immigration who is a member of the Brotherhood and the ruling party. Thus, the Muslim Brotherhood secured its control on ETUF.
On 25th December 2012 the Muslim Brotherhood issued their constitution which was rejected by millions of Egyptians with the workers in the core. Prior to the promulgation of the Constitution, the workers were not allowed to participate in the Constituent Assembly which drafted the constitution. The Muslim Brotherhood monopolized the representation of workers in this Assembly. The constitution reflects the hostility of the Brotherhood, its president and allies not only for trade union freedoms but also for the economic and social rights. It disregarded the workers right of association and the freedom of expression, attacked the Supreme Constitutional Court and destroyed the state of law. Instead, it establishes by its Article No. 219 the state of the Faqeeh and evaded by its Article No. 33 the principle of equality between the citizens. It deleted the provision which was established since the 1923 constitution to abolish discrimination on the basis of sex, religion language or creed. Instead, the prelude contained eloquent sentences on economic and social rights whereas Article 14 disregarded the most important pillars of social justice by linking wages with production. Such an article opens the door for businessmen and company board directors to evade the worker’s right to fair wages pro rata the rise in prices and living costs. Article 52 destroyed trade union rights by giving the state the right to dissolve trade unions. It is an irregular provision which is unseen in any constitution in democratic countries. It violates ILO Conventions 87 and 98 which the government of Egypt had ratified and which protect the workers right to establish their trade unions. Articles 64 and 70 take us back to the age of forced labor. Article 64 stipulates the possibility of imposing forced labor by the power of law. Article 70 allows child labour before completing the age of compulsory education in jobs suitable to the child age. We do not know what are the jobs that suit children!! The two articles are against all the international conventions which prohibit forced labor and child work.
On 6th December the law No. 105/2012 was issued amongst the package of laws to protect the revolution. It stipulated heavy penalties on street mongers who represent the biggest percentage of informal employment. They became subject to fine, imprisonment and confiscation of goods. The law was issued without any dialogue with the stakeholders and without any regard to their living conditions, the nature of their work or the difficulties which they face without any humanitarian rights. The law stipulated imprisonment for1 – 3 months because they disregard public order, delay traffic and occupy the road. The fine was EGP 5 in the old law, but it was increased to EGP 1000 to EGP 5000 if the crime of occupying the road is repeated !!
On 7th June 2013 and due to all the reasons mentioned in this report, and within the framework of the 102nd session of the ILO Conference, the ILO’s Standards Committee put the name of Egypt on the individual cases list(known in the media by the ‘black list’) which do not observe workers rights. Egypt became amongst the worst 25 countries contained in the list which do not observe the international conventions which they had ratified especially Conventions Nos.87 and 98 on trade union freedoms and the workers tight to establish independent and democratic unions freely. Egypt was on the list of individual cases from 2008 to 2010 due to its repetitive violations of workers rights and closing the premises of the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services “CTUWS”. The post-revolution government undertook to the international community to observe the workers rights. Dr. Ahmed Hassan el Boare’i firmer Minister of Manpower announced the Trade Union Freedoms Declaration on 12th March 2011 in the presence of the director of ILO at that time. The Government of Egypt undertook to issue a new law on trade union freedoms. The name of Egypt was removed from the black list anticipating that the government will fulfill its promise. This was not done until now. The ILO had agreed with the government that the new law would be issued before the last ILO conference. But the government used the same method of the manipulations used by the previous regime. The law was presented to the Shura Council a few days before the beginning of the conference in an attempt to deceive the ILO. But the ILO was not convinced. The Standards Committee discussed the Egyptian case and concluded that the Government of Egypt should issue the law within 6 months and send a report on the trade union freedoms in Egypt next October. Until the new law is issued, the government should provide suitable climate for the workers to enjoy their trade union rights. A copy of the draft law should be sent to the ILO to consider to which extent it is compatible with the international conventions which Egypt had signed.
On 25th May 2013 the Shura Council with its majority from the Brotherhood approved the draft law presented by the government to amend the law on trade unions No. 35/1976 to extend the current trade union term for another year. The first article of the draft law stipulated that the current boards of directors which were formed by virtue of Law No. 35/1976 and its amendments shall be extended for one year starting from the end of the current term or until the issuance of a law for trade union, whichever comes first. The call for electing new boards shall take place during the stipulated period or 60 days before the end of this period. This added salt to injury. It shows that the government evades issuing the law on trade union freedoms and gives a longer grace period to allow the Brotherhood to strengthen its hold of ETUF.
Field Violations:
On 6 June 2012 the Public Prosecution of Mehalla el Kobra decided to keep three leaders from the Independent Union of Post for 4 days under investigation in misdemeanor No. 3240. Each of them was bailed by EGP 500 to avoid attachment due to their participation in a strike in March 2012. The workers emphasized that it was an attempt to force them to waiver a lawsuit they have filed against the Chairman of the Postal Authority No. 1317 Misdemeanor Al Mosky. The chairman was accused of assaulting them.
On 19th June 2012 a worker in Toshiba Company in Banha died by electric shock when he was testing one of the company’s products. He was transferred to the Kuwaiti Hospital in Banha. The workers held the management responsible for his death due to lack of occupational health and safety procedures. They emphasized that the company refused to write a report on the real cause of his death.
On 3rd July 2012 Al Youm Al Sabe’ Newspaper published press releases for the Brotherhood and their Freedom and Justice Party against the waves of labour protests and strikes. Sr. Mohamed el Beltagy the Secretary of the Party in Cairo and Hassan el Brens Deputy Governor of Alexandria described the workers’ demonstrations in front of the Presidential Palace as a ‘plot to topple President Morsi and show him as incapable to meet their demands’. They said that the demonstrations are plotted by the State Security detectives and that the demonstrators receive money to make trouble in front of the Presidential Palace !!
On 4th July 2012 the 850 workers of the Nile Spinning and Weaving Company of Sadat City went on strike and announced their sit-in in the company premises. This was after the company’s director had informed them that the company owner Mr. Mohamed Marzouk will not disburse the salary increase which was agreed to be disbursed in July. He also confirmed to them that the company will not disburse the 15% social allowance as decided by the government. He said that only 7% will be disbursed and that the company will cut off the 8% which was given to the workers in January as annual increment. As a result, the company owner dismissed 34 workers including the independent union’s board members. Instead of facing such tyranny, the government of the Brotherhood together with officials from the Freedom and Justice Party in Sadat City succeeded to convince the workers to surrender their dismissed colleagues after a negotiation session that included the president of the City Council, the factory owner Mr. Mohamed Marzouk, the president of the General Trade Union of Textile Industries (ETUF member), Mr. Ayad and Mr. Mohamed Farrag members of the People’s Assembly for the Freedom and Justice Party.
On 16th June 2012 the board of the Independent Union for the Workers of the Adult Education Authority organized an open sit-in against the oppressive procedures exercised by the Authority’s chairman against the Union and his repeated attempts to prevent it from performing its main duties for its members. He formed an administrative committee to illegally represent the workers and imposed it on the workers using the stick and carrot methods. He gave the administrative committee the right to attend the meetings of the employees committee without any legal justifications. Because the Independent Union performed its role in fighting corruption, the Chairman oppressed the Union’s President Ahmed Abdel Mordy and transferred him to another location in contradiction with the legal rules which ban the oppression on trade unionists because they perform their trade union and national duties.
On 20th July 2012 Abdeen Court sentenced 9 workers from the Arab Contractors with one month imprisonment and EGP 1000 penalty for each of them in the lawsuit No. 833/2012 / Abdeen / Misdemeanors because they participated in a strike in March 2012. The police forces dissipated the workers' sit-in by force and arrested 8 workers and the last one was released on 23rd March 2012. After they were released, they were surprised by this sentence in absentia. It is worthy mention that after the dissipation of the strikers Engineer Adel el Sayed was transferred from Alexandria to Wady el Natroon, Engineer Mohamed Adel was transferred from Ismailia to Assiut and Engineer Mohamed Zain Eddeen was transferred from the Central Bank Site in Mohandiseen in Cairo to the stadium of Port Said !!
On 24th July 2012 the National Company for Metal Industries at the 6th of October City (an affiliate of Orascom Co.) dismissed the following members of the independent union: Khaled Mohamed Yusuf Ameen (Treasurer), Amr Anwar, Zaky Ramadan Ragab, Ashraf Subhy, Abdel Hakeem Mohamed Abdel Hakeem, Sayed Mahmoud, Ihab Sameer and Ameer Yunaan; and transferred the following thee members for investigation: Sharif Saeed, Mohamed Anwar and Abdel Rahman Ibrahim. All of them were accused of calling for strike. Earlier, the workers went into strike and cut off electricity in the company because the management refused to respond to respond to their demands of 10% share in the profits and equal health insurance treatment with high rank employees. The workers organized a protest stand calling to open the gates of the factory which were closed by the management. They filed reports at the police station of 6th October City when the police station at the factories' area refused to do so. They also filed complaints with the Manpower Office.
On 24th July 2012 in response to the Al Sukkary Mine workers' strike the management dismissed 29 workers including board members of the independent union. The mine's 1200 workers started a strike calling for higher wages, accommodation allowance and the enforcement of the Law on Mines which is applicable on mines and quarries workers. They gave the management a period of 24 hours to respond before they escalate the strike. When they did not get a positive reply they decided to go in strike. After negotiations at the Ministry of Manpower on 26th July 2012 the decision to dismiss the workers was withdrawn but they were stopped from work until the administrative investigations are completed. This was done on 21st September 2012 when 12 of them were dismissed including 7 board members of the independent union. Another 7 workers suffered cut-off salary of 20 days. The decision was implemented even though the chairman did not approve it. After long months of litigation, 7 of the dismissed workers obtained on 27th May 2013 a court sentence to return to their work and take all their dues for the period of dismissal which amounted to EGP 50 thousand for each worker. Those seven workers are: Maher Saad el Deen president of the Union, Yaser Mahmoud vice president, Ahmed Fathy treasurer, Aly el Rasheedy Ahmed general secretary, Abdel Baqy Ahmed, Bahaa el Deen Aaref and Mohamed Mohamed Abdalla.
On 26th July 2012 the management of the Egyptian Company for Medical Industries dismissed the board members of the independent union as soon as it learnt that the union had deposited its documents. The management threatened the other workers to have the same destiny if they do not resign from the union membership. This provoked the workers who announced a protest stand. As a result, the management withdrew its decision to dismiss all the board members of the independent union with the exception of its President Mohamed Gamal and its general secretary Ahmed Fathy.
On 8th September 2012 also, the management of Armant Sugar Company issued a decision to transfer four executive members of the independent union. Al Wakeel Gamal Mahmoud was transferred to Quos Factory, Saber Afifi was transferred to Kum Umbo Factory, Sayed Abdel Mo'ty was transferred to Kum Umbo Factory and Mohamed Abdel Rahman president of the independent union was transferred to Girga Factory.
On 15th September - and after the teachers independent unions, associations and movements went into strike calling for deciding teachers' minimum wages by no less than EGP 3000, providing permanent jobs for temporary teachers, appointing graduates of the colleges education and reforming the education policy which is biased to the rich at the cost of the poor – tens of teachers who went in strike were referred to administrative investigation. This was confirmed by information from the Independent Teachers' Federation and the Independent Unions. The same happened with Samah Khalil vice president of the Independent Teachers Union of Sharkiya Governorate. She was transferred to administrative investigation and was threatened to be downgraded to a "worker" if she did not convince the works to stop the strike. Hisham Abu Kamel general secretary of the Independent Teachers Union of Sharkiya Governorate was transferred to administrative investigation because he and other 6 teachers asked to improve living conditions.
On 20th September 2012 Upper Egypt Transport Co. stopped from work Hassan Abdel Raheem Mohamed vice president of the independent trade union in Qena, Ramadan Amin its general secretary and Hassan el Demeery its treasurer under the claim that they had visited their colleagues in the Company's branch in Aswan Governorate and called them to go on strike. It was confirmed that the purpose of the visit was establish an independent union for the branch of Aswan; a legal act which is safeguarded by law and the constitution.
On 16th August 2012 Cadbury Chocolate Company of Alexandria stopped 5 leaders of the independent union and referred them to a labour court to consider dismissing them. They were: Mohamed Hassan Ahmed Sayed (president of the independent union), Nasr Awad Abdel Rahim (Vice President), Mohamed Abul Ela Mohamed (Treasurer), Hussein Ahmed (General Secretary) and Mohamed Hussein Mustafa (Assistant Treasurer). The company management refused to approve the 15% social allowance which was decided by the president of the republic to face the soaring process. As a direct response, the workers decided a sit-in on Thursday 26/7/2012. The site-in lasted for 2 days until it was finished in the presence of the company's engineers Alaa Darweesh, Ameer Shehata and Mahmoud Shabaan. The management decided to give the company workers 3-days off, but they refused because of the management's procrastination to give them the due social allowance. The management accused the 5 trade unionists of encouraging the workers to go in strike. It also accused them of causing losses for the company. As a matter of fact the losses realized by the company were the outcome of the management's failures and its abnormal administrative practices.
On 25th August 2012 the chairperson of the Public Transport Authority Eng. Muna Mustafa issued a decision to transfer the trade unionist Mahmoud Ragab from Badr Garage to Athar el Naby garage under the pretext that his service is needed there. Members of the independent union confirmed that the decision was a penalty for their colleague who defended the workers' rights at Badr Garage.
On 3rd September 2012 Kalyub public prosecution called 12 workers from the Wholesale Trade Company including 3 of the board members of the independent union for investigation in report No. 3018 in which they are accused of delaying the work and encouraging workers to go in strike. This happened after a strike was made and the workers called for 200% of the incentive salary instead of the suggested incentives which were to be calculated on the basic salary. They also called for cancellation of the contracts of those who reached the age of retirement, allowing promotion, cancellation of delegation to governorates and holding the board of directors responsible for wasting public funds. The workers were presented to the public prosecutor from 3rd to 17th September and were released by EGP 200 as bail. They were Emad Eddin Abdel Raouf vice president of the independent union, Farag el Sayed Aly and Ashraf Mohamed Ragab board members of the independent union, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Sadek Mahmoud Sadek, Amro Gamal Abdel Hameed, Khaled el Sayed Rady, Rizk Mohamed Risk, Aly Ahmed Emam, Khalaf Mohamed Awaad, Husam Mohamed Rizk and Ashraf Abdel Samee. The case is still under the consideration of the court.
On 5th September 2012 Mr. Atef Mahmoud Mohamed Ismail president of the Regional Independent Federation for Southern Egypt was not included in the promotion lists without any clear justification. His batch were promoted from grade 3 to grade 2. He passed all the qualifying tests for the promotion. But he as well as the Education Administration of Qena were surprised that the lists which came from the Ministry did not include his name.
On 8th September 2012 the management of Naj' Hamadi Sugar Company issued a decision to transfer the five labour leaders who led the last strike of August. Mamdouh Hassan Mohamed el Berdeesy and Naser Thabet Amin were transferred to Qous Sugar Factory, Ahmed Salah Abdel Hameed was transferred to Deshna Sugar Factory, Mustafa el Mursy was transferred to Gerga Sugar Company and Mohamed Kamal Abdel Lateef was transferred to el Hawamdiya Sugar Factory. The decision provoked the workers particularly that the five transferred workers had started to collect signature in order to establish an independent union to replace the union affiliated to ETUF which stood against the workers in the last strike.
On 9th September 2012 the management of Arco Steel Co. dismissed four board members of the independent union: Sameer Rihaan president of the plant union, Abdel Baset Tarkhan general secretary, Abdel Rahman Hassan treasurer and Magdy Darwish member of the plant union. This was because those trade unionists filed a report with the public prosecutor affirmed by documents on the waste of millions of Egyptian Pounds in that company which is publicly owned by 80% of the share capital.
On 11th September Al Nuzha Prosecution summoned leaders of the independent union of the workers in aviation hospitality under the pretext of a claim that fifty passengers filed reports against Mahmoud Mohamed Khairy president of the independent union, Ahmed Abdel Fattah el Sayed president of the Aviation Hospitality Association and members of the Union's executive council Abdel Wahab Mohamed Waheed Eddin, tamer Saad Abdu, Maged Albert Girgis, Yusry Anas Khalil, Hany Fathy Amin, Ashraf Rashwan Abdel Lateef, Hisham Mohamed Aly, Mustafa Mukhtar Mohamed and Ahmed Helmy Aly Shehata. They were accused of intentionally wasting public money and causing losses exceeding 50 million Egyptian Pounds for Egypt Air and refusal to perform their duties. In addition, they were accused of causing several material and moral losses for passengers who were affected by the strike. This was after a strike of the air hosts of Egypt Air who called for establishing a separate sector for air hospitality to look after their interests, and solve their problems which are accumulated for many years and improve their living standards. The report No. 8905/2012 which was filed against them at Al Nuzha Prosecution accused them of refusal to work according to the State Employees Law. Such a refusal is a misdemeanor according to Article No. 124 of the Penal Code. The penalty thereon is imprisonment for a period between 3 months and 2 years in addition to the felony of intentional endangering of public money which is penalized by Articles Nos. 116, 117, 118 and 119 of the same law by imprisonment from 3 to 15 years.
On 12th September Toshiba el Araby Group dismissed Wael Abul Fetouh delegate of the independent union of Quesna Factory within the framework of the company's organized campaign against the independent union. The workers of Quesna and Banha factories developed confidence in the independent union. In addition to dismissing the union's delegate to Quesna Factory, the company dismissed Mohamed Shaaban a worker who refused to play the role of a detective on the union members. Further, the management forced a number of workers to sign resignation after obliging them to choose either to resign from the union or to resign from the factory. The management exercised the carrot and stick policy with some union members.
On 12th September the management of Arco Steel Co. in al Sadat City dismissed four board members of the independent union: Sameer Rihaan president of the plant union, Abdel Baset Tarkhan general secretary, Abdel Rahman Hassan treasurer and Magdy Darwish member of the plant union because they filed a report with the public prosecutor affirmed by documents on the waste of millions of Egyptian Pounds in that company which is publicly owned by 80% of the share capital. The workers announced an open sit-in before the Culture Palace of Sadat City but none of the officials responded to them.
On 16th September two workers from Al Ameriya Spinning and Weaving Company (Rashad Shabaan and Aly Hassan Kenawy) sat-in because the company did not issue their frozen wages in violation of a court of appeal sentence. They were dismissed a few months earlier because they called for a strike. The court judged that the dismissal decision was illegal.
On 16th September the Public Transport Authority workers announced a strike and called to be adjoined to the Ministry of Transport. Hundreds of security forces personnel surrounded the Garages which started the strike (namely Embaba, Mazallaat and Athar el Naby). In the evening of the same day 6 lorries for the central security forces entered the Embaba garage to arrest a trade unionist (namely Tarek el Beheery) who is at the same time the spokesman of the independent union. He was kept in jail until intelligent investigation is made. The public transport authority filed several claims against him. The situation became more complicated when three other trade unionists were arrested: Mahmud Zaher, Ahmed Yukas and Mohamed Muneer. Tarek el Beheery was released the second day after he was arrested.
On 16th September the security troops dissipated by force the forestation workers' sit-in before the Ministry of Agriculture and assaulted them. Seven workers were arrested and accused of trying to enter the office of the Minister Dr. Salah Abdel Mo'men. The arrested workers who called for better wages and permanent jobs were: Ahmed Ibrahim from Kafr el Sheikh Governorate, Ahmed Hamed Mohamed from Beni Suef Governorate, Rushdy Abdel Hameed from Beheera Governorate, Mohamed Kael el Sherbeeny from Beheera Governorate, Adel Ramadan Ahmed Bassyuny from Gharbiya Governorate, Ahmed Ragab Abdel Rahman and Wael Nabeel Hamed from Assiut Governorate. All of them were released on 19th September but the lawsuit filed against them is still under consideration.
On 22nd September 2012 Qena Prosecution issued a decision to arrest Sayed Mahmoud Abdel Hafez president of the Independent Union of Qena Railway Workers for investigation in a report filed against him by the Railway Authority. He was accused of calling the workers to go in strike and sit-in. Although he denied the accusation and proved that he was involved in a traffic accident and that he had suffered bone fractures and other physical injuries during the sit-in period and that for this reason he could not take part in the sit-in, the prosecution released him on bail of EGP 2000 otherwise he would have remained in jail for 4 days under investigation. It is worthy to mention that Sayed Mahmoud and his colleagues deposited documents to establish their independent union at the beginning of September and established another independent union in Luxor Governorate. The authority assigned one room to be the premises of the independent union in Qena. It is also worth mentioning that Sayed Mahmoud made a study on developing the authority and magnifying its resources. He emphasized the need to reduce the number of transport police because it does not perform its mandate. A lot had been stolen from the railway service but the police is unable in most cases to protect the Authority's property. The study called upon the Authority to collect the amounts of subsidy which it gives for several ministries and bodies such as the armed forces, the police, the judiciary, etc. The study was sent to all the concerned officials and to the president of the republic in particular. The study showed by documents the size of corruption and doubtful interests between the Authority and some private sector companies.
On 22nd September Alexandria Misdemeanor Court issued a sentence of 3 year imprisonment against five of the workers of Alexandria Containers Company on the background of their strike which called for the resignation of the company's chairman who was accused of corruption. The workers called as well for returning the platforms which the Company had rented to Chinese companies and other unknown companies. The five workers are: Ahmed Hassan Sadek president of the independent union of the company, Yusry Marouf general secretary and Ashraf Ibrahim, Mohamed Abdel Monim and Esam Eddin Mohamed Mabrouk who are the workers' representatives in negotiations with the leaders of the Northern Military Area. They presented the workers' demands to the military during their last strike in March. This is the background of the whole case. The chairman of that company filed a report against the striking workers and the union board and accused them of encouraging strikes, causing damage to public money and preventing the workers from doing their loading and unloading works. The public prosecution retained the report. The company submitted a complaint against the public prosecutor's office of the Port of Alexandria which reopened the matter for investigation which continued from March onwards. The workers were summoned three times for investigation. The workers' lawyer requested to delegate a committee from the Faculty of Engineering of Alexandria University to estimate the damage which the workers are accused of without relying solely on the Company's report which contained faked accusations. Finally the prosecution referred the case to the court which issued its sentence in absentia. Lawyers of the Egyptian Democratic Labour Congress and the Center for Trade Union and workers Services appealed the court sentence. The appeal was deliberated until they were released on 16th June.
On the dawn of 24th September 2012 security troops arrested 7 of the nursing staff of Zagazig University's Hospitals. They were taken from their homes. Earlier, they had a meeting with Dr. Salem El Deeb director of the University Hospitals to negotiate on their demands for which they went in strike, namely to increase the incentives to 300%, increasing the allowance by 200%, increasing the examinations allowance from 410 to 600, health insurance and removing Ahmed Adel the financial and administrative director whom they accused of corruption. Four nurses were released and the other three remained in jail for 4 days under investigation: Ashraf Abdel Monem, Mohamed el Sayed and Ayman Almaz. They were accused of making riots and calling for strike. Their colleagues were very angry. They demonstrated and marched until they reached the Surgery Hospital. They cheered against the president of their trade union because it did not support their legal demands. Then the prosecution released the three nurses who were still kept in jail.
On 30th September security officers from Dakahliya attacked the teachers who had a sit-in before the Governorate's premises protesting against corruption related with contracting methods. Brigadier Ehab Shabana, Brigadier General Mohamed Wasfy and another officer called Gamal Ibrahim abused the teachers using very rude language and order soldiers to attack them. They also arrested Mohamed Mokhtar, Aamer Tharwat and Mohamed Mahmoud, took them to Al Mansoura Police Station No.2 and released them the following day.
On 2nd October 2012 the National Steel Factory NSF an affiliate of Orascom at the Gulf of Suez stopped 12 workers and investigated with them. They were accused of calling workers to go on strike and that they carried white weapons during their protests at the factory which lasted for 15 days. The workers were calling for wage increase and getting their incentives in arrears. They also said that the management stopped to investigate them and refused to publish the results of the investigations.
On 3rd October 2012 security forces attacked taxi drivers who demonstrated in front of the General Administration of Traffic at Salah Salim Street and arrested 14 of them. Ten of them were released on the same day and the other four were released the next day after they were bailed by EGP 500 each. Taxi drivers in Greater Cairo had announced a strike on 2nd October calling for lower taxes, providing fuel at all gasoline stations, monitoring car spare parts shops and reducing the fines imposed haphazardly on taxis.
On 4th October the Health Administration of Qous, Qena Governorate decided to refer Abu Bakr Abdel Rahman El Rawy president of the independent union of health workers to investigation. He was accused of exercising illegal trade union activities. This union was amongst the first unions which deposited their credentials at the Ministry of Manpower on 22/6/2011 according to the Declaration of Trade Union Rights which was issued by the former Minister of Manpower Dr. Ahmed Hassan el Borae'i on 12th March 2011. The membership of the independent union was 350 workers (from the total number of 550 workers). This means that the union was exercising trade union activities for more than one year, organized a number of protests and realized several gains for the health workers in Qous. Abu Bakr Abdel Rahman El Rawy president of the independent union stated that his supervisors told him that the investigation made with him is a step towards dismissing him completely from the Health Administration and dissolve the union.
On 6th October 2012 the National Metallic Industries Co. in 6th October City dismissed 9 trade union leaders of the independent union. They were: Sayed Mohamed Mahmoud, Amro Anwar, Mohamed Anwar, Zaky Ramadan, Ehab Sameer, Abdel Hakim Mohamed Abdel Hakim, Abdel Rahman Fathy, Ashraf Sobhy and Ameer Yunan Thabet. They were stopped from work since July 2012 after being accused of encouraging the workers to go in strike. The more than 1000 workers of the company went in strike in an attempt to confront the company's attempt to liquidate the factory.
On 3rd November Banha Prosecution summoned 6 of the workers of Toshiba el Araby Company including the president of the company's independent union for investigation in Report No. 2723 / 2012. They were accused of cutting off the Cairo / Alexandria Road. They were: Ibrahim Ibrahim, Wageeh Eid Mohamed, Ahmed el Sayed el Touny, Sabry Ghannam (president of the union), Mahmoud Ibrahim Moseelhy and Hekmat Mohamed el Araby. Ahmed el Sayed stood before the prosecutor who refused to tell him the names of those who filed the report but told him that they were secondary school students. The workers were accused of cutting off the road and disturbing public security !!
The more than 1000 workers of the company announced a sit-in n 20th June when a worker was killed by electric shock when he was testing a piece of equipment but the management did not consider that his death was the result of a job accident. This would deprive the deceased family from the pension and other financial benefits. The workers demonstrated at the hospital. When the management wrote another report stating the real cause of death, they rushed in hundreds to the factory which is adjacent to the Agricultural Road. Their rush in big numbers delayed the traffic until all of them entered the factory.
On 7th November 2012 the Central Security Forces arrested 18 workers from Al Nasr Co. for Civil Works because they organized a protest stand in front of the company premises downtown. They called for their rights including the right to have permanent contracts, the return of their means of transportation and to have an ambulance. The chairman informed the poice who brought 8 trucks from the Central Security forces and arrested 18 worker. They were kept for one night at Al Khalifa Police Station although the premises falls under the jurisdiction of Abdeen Police Station. On the following day they were transferred to Abdeen and a report was filed under No. 1670/Administrative. Abdeen Misdemeanor Court decided to release them after being bailed by EGP 200 each. They were also accused of retaining the company chairman inside the company premises.
On 11th November Qena Administration of Education transferred Aatef Mohamed Mahmoud, a teacher at el Gebeelaat School at Abu Tisht to Al Awamer School which is more than 60 kilometers away from his house.Aatef Mahmoud president of the Independent Regional Federation of the Independent Unions in South Egypt and responsible for CTUWS Office in Naji' Hamady was surprised that he was transferred without any justification. At the beginning of the same month he was surprised again when he found that his salary was returned to the Administration in the Governorate of Sohag under the pretext that there was a mistake in the pay rolls.
On 14th November 2012 and after the Metro workers finished their strike, Refaat Arafat president of the Independent Union of Shubra el Kheima Workshops received a telephone call summoning him and Bahaa Mutawa and Ibrahim el Sayed members of the Union's executive committee for investigation in the accusation that they delay work. When this call was received a delegation of the workers was sitting with Yehya Hamid consultant of the President of the Republic who took the phone call and asked the caller to postpone the summoning date. They were not summoned for investigation to date.
On 23rd December 2012 security troops arrested three workers from the Nuclear Energy Authority during a sit-in before the Ministry of Electricity calling for appointment after they passed the necessary tests required for their employment. The three workers (Ahmed Mahmoud, Kadry Nabeel and Ahmed Serag) were taken to Al Amiriya police station and were released the next day.
On 23rd December 2012 a worker from Butchino Co. called Ayman Mohamed Abdel Aal died during a sit-in inside the company's premised at el Sadat City. The company refused to transfer him to the hospital or to let him see a doctor after catching a serious fever. It is worth mentioning that Ayman and other 16 workers were dismissed from the company on the background of encouraging workers to go in strikes and sit-ins.
On 24th December 2012 Ahmed Abdalla the chief detective of Qena entered by force the Independent Union of the Railway Workers and threatened to dismiss members of its executive board because they encourage workers to strike and because they delay work. He told the president of the union that he has order from high circles to collect information about all of them particularly the president of the union. It is worth noting that the prosecution of the Governorate had issued a decision to arrest and bring for investigation Sayed Mahmoud Abdel Hafez president of the same union for the same charge.
On 1st January 2013 Care Service and Maintenance Co. which works at the Emergency Forces Camp in Sharm el Sheikh transferred 5 workers to remote areas. On 2nd January 2013 tens of workers announced a sit-in. they called for the return of their colleagues and accused the company that it was taking revenge by transferring and dismissing their colleagues because they demonstrated and called for their rights. KareemAshour Mohamed, an electrician working in the UN Emergency Forces’ Camp in Sharm el Sheikh said that they were surprised that their colleagues were arbitrarily transferred to remote governorates. It was a step towards dismissing the because they demonstrated calling for a package of rights including salary increase and organizing monthly leave (by working 15 days and taking 15 days alternatively). The workers presented to Sharm el Sheikh Manpower Office a memorandum containing the company’s violations. The sit-in came to an end when the company management promised them to return their colleagues and to abstain from dismissing or transferring workers arbitrarily. This happened after the Emergency Forces threatened to terminate the contract with the company if the problem is not solved. And indeed, the problem is not solved to date.
On 15th January 2013 the management of ABB Arab Contractors Electrical Industries (affiliate of ABB International) at 10th of Ramadan City forced Hosny Abdel Hameed to sign his signature. However, he withdrew his resignation before the elapse of one week from the date of his signature and files a complaint with the Manpower Office of the 10th of Ramadan City. Hosny was the workers' spokesman in the negotiations between them and the company on their rights during previous protests because there is no union to represent the workers of this company.
On 29th January 2013 workers in Assiut Postal Service were surprised with a court sentence issued in absentia for 3 month imprisonment for 5 workers namely Abdel Rahman Ahmed, Hamdy Mahmoud, Romany Maher, Sayed Galal and Mohamed Ahmed Sayed. The sentence issued inabsentia was from Abnoub Court in Assiut Governorate. The workers insisted that the sentence was issued without any investigation by either the prosecution or the court. They were accused of calling for the rights of 55 thousand workers in the postal service in July 2012 and that a lawsuit was filed against them under No. 6067/2012. The workers added that the management filed the lawsuit intentionally in Abnoub so that they will not know about it. Accordingly, the court judgment was issued in absentia and without any investigation by the prosecution.
On 28th January 2013 the Water and Sanitary Sewage Co. of Luxor Governorate transferred five engineers from the Projects Department arbitrarily to different departments throughout the governorate. Their colleagues announced a sit-in in front of the office of the Projects Department director protesting against the company chairman’s decision to transfer their colleagues. One of the engineers said that the decision was issued after their call for a distinguished incentive and “scarcity allowance” which represent 300% of the basic salary for 2 years or 40% of the total wages of the engineer in the company. Such benefits are similar to what their colleagues get inother governorates.
In the morning of Wednesday 13th February 2013 a force from the Qaft police station in Qena Governorate arrested 7 workers from HU factory for filling gas cylinders on the background of a strike calling for wage increase. The factory management had promised to increase their wages starting from January 2013 and to disburse their annual increment. Instead, the factory owner filed a complaint at the Public Prosecutor Office accusing the workers of calling for strike and delaying work. The Prosecutor ordered to arrest them. They are: Ashraf Abdel Aziz Mubarak, Zayn el Abedeen Ragab, Mahmoud Abdalla Mubarak, Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed, Yahya Mahmoud Desouky, Abdel Rahman Shahat and Ahmed Saad. More then 50 workers gathered in front of Qaft police station together with lawyers fron CTUWS awaiting for the investigation to be made. At the same time, the other workers announced a sit-in inside the factory lest the management should make sabotage and accuse the workers of doing it. The prosecution decided to release the 7 workers after paying a bail of EGP 1000 each.
On 23rd February 2013 when some of Faragello Factories’ workers resumed work after their strike according to an agreement between the company and their representatives, thet were surprised to find that 27 workers were suspended and referred for investigation because they raise riots. They included the president of the independent union Magdy Abdel Salaam and two board members. The company’s security prevented the president of the union from entering the company. Investigations started with the workers. The president of the union said that the company had filed reports at Burg el Arab police station accusing the workers of assaulting some administrators after the administrative investigation that was made. At the same time, 16 other workers were arrested and accused of calling for strike, delaying work and assaulting other workers at the job site. The company contacted the police station which sent some policemen with a warranty order from the public prosecutor’s office.
In the evening of Tuesday 6th March 2013 the Public Prosecution of Luxor chaired by Chancellor Omar el Naqer decided to imprison 8 workers from the Integrated Services Company, Insurance Services and Cleaning for 4 days for investigation. They were accused of cutting off the railway line and delaying the movement of trains. The prosecution raised several accusations including causing damage to the railway estimated at EGP 800 thousand, refusing to work, attacking the state institutions, cutting off roads, paralyzing trains movement and delaying the citizens’ work. Relatives of the retained workers and some of their colleagues made a protest movement in front of Luxor train station. Calling for their release and return to work. They said that the workers have exhausted all the peaceful protests to get their rights but the officials did not respond to them. That was why they cut-off the railway line and stopped the train movement, they also called for permanent contracts because they were working for more than 4 years and were promised to be appointed. In the following day, the appeals judge ordered to release them.
On 3rd March 2013 the management of Ideal Standard Co. at 10th of Ramadan City dismissed 29 workers including board members of the plant committee. The Company’s 1000 workers made a sit-in calling for fair distribution of profits, to disburse risk allowance at EGP 300, disburse the nature of work allowance, get the balance of leave days according to the recommendations of the Ministry of Manpower and insuring the workers with the actual salaries which they receive. The workers announced a strike until their colleagues’ return. On the following day, the management decided to stop production completely, cut off gas and electricity and separate the mills from the factory for the morning shift.
Ahmed Yusuf member of the plant union said that they filed a report at the Manpower Office of the 10th of Ramadan City confirming that it was the company – not the workers – which stopped work at the company. Later, the company filed a complaint to the Labour Court calling to dismiss all the members of the Plant union. It also stopped the buses used to transport the workers. He added that the plant union members filed a counter report at the 10th of Ramadan police station concerning their stance, their right to return to their work and resume company operation. They also raised a complaint to the Minister of Manpower asking him to protect the 1000 workers and their families. But they did not find any response to their demands.
On 10th March 2013 Aqua Delta Bottled Water Co. dismissed 7 of the independent union’s board members. The company workers called for a strike until the return of their colleagues. The workers referred the dismissal to the management’s intention to reduce labour especially that the Ministry of Health and the Ministry for Environment closed the company for 5 months after discovering that the company’s well lacks the necessary specifications. The workers confirmed that the owner of the factory used to force them to work an additional evening shift far from any supervision. Now, the sample taken from the well proved that the water is potable, instead of operating the factory legally and in full capacity the workers were surprised that their colleagues were dismissed !!
On 13th March 2013 the management of Globe Co. in el Sadat City dismissed 11 workers who are members of the executive council of the independent union. The evening shift workers were surprised after the end of the shift with the decision to dismiss their colleagues simply because they called for implementing the collective agreement which was signed after the last strike. The agreement stipulated the disbursement of a percentage of profits to the workers, writing labour contracts for 3 years, disbursement of an allowance for working the 1 hour break and no threat for any worker. But after that, the management suspended 11 workers and referred them to administrative investigation. Only 13 workers were returned, 7 workers are still suspended and the remaining 11 workers were dismissed. Consequently, the workers announced a strike and sit-in inside the company premises.
On 18th March 1203 the police arrested more than 15 workers from Alexandria Fertilizers’ Company. The workers had a sit-in inside the premises calling for permanent jobs and higher salaries. It is worthy noting that the company’s 90 workers are employed through a sub contractor. They called more than once to have permanent jobs because they are working in the same company for five years now.
On 4th April 2013 Cairo Airport Company decided to transfer 4 trade union leaders to remote places. They are: Mahmoud Rehan president of the Independent Union who was transferred to East Owenaat Airport. Ahmed Ameen who was transferred to St. Catherine Airport, Usama Aly who was transferred to Hurghada Airport and Reem el Shazly who was transferred to 6th October airport. They called for the resignation of the Minister of Civil Aviation because he closed his eyed to corruption cases and forced the chairman of Cairo Airport Company to resign simply because he asked to refer one of the corruption files to the Public Prosecutor. The file was about the establishment of a fire fighting station without having a source for water. More than 50 air supervision officers demonstrated in protest to transferring their colleagues. In their statement they emphasized that the Minister disregards the workers demand to hold officials responsible for wasting public money and insists to keep those who are involved in corruption in their positions although the administrative investigations proved that they were involved in financial corruption, one of those corrupted people is the chairman of the holding company. It is worth mentioning that the transfer decision included as well 4 drivers but their transfer was cancelled when all the drivers threatened to go on strike !!
On 5th April 2013 the owner of Aswan Cement Factory tried to end the workers’ strike by force using live bullets. The workers filed a report No. 2033/2013 Administrative at Aswan Police Station. The bullets were kept as an evidence of the crime. Earlier, the 350 workers had announced a strike. They called for a leave system in the company, permanent jobs for the temporary workers and higher wages. The owner kept promising them since 2003 to provide permanent contracts for 250 workers and raise wages. The leaves system in the company does not fall under any law. They work for 26 days every month for 12 hours every day without any overtime payment. Then the worker takes 8 days as unpaid leave. A worker gets EGP 35 for a work day. The workers reported that there is no potable water in the factory which is situated at Kilometer 110 Aswan / Abu Simbul desert road. They get water from the wells in the area.
On 13th May 2013 when the staff of CTUWS Naj’ Hamady Office (the temporary premises of the Regional Federation of Southern Egypt Independent Unions) arrived in the morning they were surprised to find that contents of the premises were stolen including documents of the independent unions members of the Egyptian Democratic Labour Federation, a laptop and a data show projector. All the other papers and documents were scattered. The doors, the balcony and the windows did not show any sign of violence. Mr. Atef Mahmoud president of the Regional Federation of Southern Egypt Independent Unions said, “It is clear that robbery is not the motive of this forced entry of the premises. There is a TV set, a receiver and other electrical equipments which were not stolen. The perpetrators wanted the computer sets, searched all the papers and documents in the premises and took the documents of the independent unions only.
On the evening of 14th May 2013 police ended by force a sit-in for the workers in electricity companies. Tens of workers (including some females) were seriously injured. The police arrested 16 from the workers who organized protests in front of the premises of Northern Cairo Electricity Distribution Company in Nasr City. They called to cancel decisions which minimize the workers benefits and to keep incentives, unify the benefits for all the workers in the holding company and the affiliate companies, give Saturday as an official leave similar to workers in the Egyptian Holding Company for Electricity and the Egyptian Company for Electricity Transfer, `mend the medical regulations to include all the workers and their families and to disburse 2 months salary as school allowance without deducting the same from the profits.
On 15th May a court sentence of one month imprisonment was issued in absentia for 23 employees from Fayoum University. They were accused of attacking the teaching staff in lawsuit No. 10825. The appeal session was decided on 2nd October 2013. The issue goes back to a complaint filed by Mohamed Ramadan el Dayan the security director of the university who is appointed by a contract which is about to expire. He filed the complaint against someof the workers in the university namely: Mohamed Mohamed Ismail, Ezzat Mohamed Mahmoud, Ahmed Saad Abdel Aziz, Seef Sayed, Abdel Naser Bakry Ahmed, Shaban el Sayed Abbas, Mohamed Hussein Abdel Rady, ahmed Aly Abdel Aleem, Omar Mohamed Farghaly, Magdy Nagy Ahmed, Salah Mohamed Hamed, Hassan Abdel Wahed, AlyShabaan Ahmed, Adel Au Taleb Abdel Muttaleb, Mohamed Abdel Kader Asssd, Mohamed Mohamed el Sayed, Magdy Qurany Hamed, Thabet Ahmed Shabaan, Mohamed Aly Abdel Fattah, Khaled Hamed Qurany and Islam Hassan Abdel Fattah.
On May 15th 2013 the Water Company of Suez Governorate referred 5 workers to the Administrative Prosecution for investigation. They were accused of preventing engineers from entering the work site and delaying work after their protest stand which they organized because the Water Department was adjoined to the Egyptian Shareholding Company an affiliate of the Water Holding Company as a step towards its privatization. The management filed a report to the police station accusing the following five workers of delaying work and preventing engineers from doing their work: Waleed Mohamed Abdel Baset, Alaa Hussein Ata, Mahmoud Mohamed Mahmoud, Ahmed Mohamed Mursy and Naser Maghraby Abbady.
On 15th May 2013 the management of Al Ragaa Co. for Clay Products in 10th of Ramadan City dismissed 3 board members of the independent union namely Ahmed Sobhy, Ragab Gad and Asaad el Sayed el Nady. They called for the 10% salary increase which the employer promised to disburse then he refused to do so. Instead, he offered to pay 37 days only. Although the union’s board members accepted the offer, they were surprised to find the employer cancel their being full time trade unionists and gave them one hour every day to manage their union. Then, without any previous warning he issued a decision to dismiss them. It is worthy mentioning that he had dismissed the union president Mr. Tarek Nadawy in April 2013 and forced him to make a settlement and get compensated by 2 months salary for every year of service according to law provisions.
On 25th May 2013 the chairman of Alexandria Port Authority Major General Adel Yaseen Hammad decided to punish 28 of the employees of the Electronic Department who control the Port gates. They were referred to investigation and suspended for15 days because they went into strike calling for their financial rights. The Legal Affairs of the Alexandria Port Authority recommended to transfer them to public prosecution and to suspend then for a period of three months. But the Chairman decided to suspend them for 15 days and to refer them to the Legal Affairs for investigation !!
On 28th May 2013 the police of el Sadat City arrested the president and general secretary of the independent union of Alexandria Spinning and Weaving Company after the company workers had announced a sit-in because the management deducted the percentage of social insurances from the comprehensive salary without amending the ‘insurance salary’ registered at the General Authority of Social Insurances. The Company’s 400 workers emphasized that the management decided to make the deduction with a retroactive effect starting from January 2013. This means that the worker will pay more than EGP 1000 for the previous period in addition to the reduction of the salary by an average of EGP 150. Then the management filed a report at el Sadat City Police Station against Abdel Aleem el Bekeemy president of the independent union and Nasef el Shahat its general secretary. They were accused of calling the workers to go in strike and preventing the exit of products outside the factory. The workers refused the accusation and emphasized that the factory is running in full capacity. Thee two union leaders were summoned to the public prosecutor office who released them until the police investigation is completed.
On 6th June 2013 the management of Cairo Airport Company dismissed 15 employees, suspended another 36 and referred them to the public prosecution office. They were accused of delaying work and hindering air navigation movement. This was on the background of the workers’ strike because the company changed the ‘incentives’ item to ‘compensation’ item. This was understood as a step to cancel the incentives in order to provide resources to meet the demands of the Customs workers (who belong to the Ministry of Finance) who went in strike for 4 successive days. They started their strike on Monday calling to clean the Customs Authority from corrupted leaders, bridging the gaps, stipulating more stringent penalties in the Customs Law, rationalizing customs’ exemptions, amending some customs regulations tailored for some Egyptian businessmen, improving the employees’ salaries to secure dignified life for themselves and their families and providing reasonable rest houses and means of transportation for workers in remote areas. After the Customs workers’ meeting with the Minister of Civil Aviation, he responded to some of their demands. Consequently, the Minister decided to change some of the ‘incentives’ of the Cairo Airport Company into ‘compensations’. This provoked the Company’s workers who announced a strike on Tuesday and protested cheering against the leaderships of their company and the Holding Company for Airports. They called for incentives similar to those of the customs workers. In response, Engineer Wael el Meaddawy Minister of Civil Aviation issued his decision to dismiss the following 15 workers: Ahmed elSaeed el Shahaat, Hany Anwar Fouad, Haytham Raafat Abdel Rahman, Ahmed Abdel Salam Mehanna, Hamdy Abdel Rahim el Sheikh, Ahmed el Saeed el Nabarawy, Mohamed Hosny Kamel, Tharwat Mohamed Oraby, Mohamed Abdalla Solaiman, Ahmed Ahmed Awaad, Mahmoud Galal Hassan, Hamdy Abdel Gawad Abdel Rahman, Sameh Mohamed Eshmawy and Mohamed Saeed Mohamed. He also decided to suspend another 36 workers and referred them for investigation.
On 13 June 2013 Dubai Ports Authority issued a decision to dismiss two board members of the independent union namely: Ashraf Eassa and Aly Saleem under the pretext that they were absent. But they had an approval to be full time trade unionists and the approval was signed by the company’s management over 5 months ago. One of the 2 dismissed trade unionists confirmed that since they have got the approval to become full time trade unionists their names were removed from the attendance registry. On the other hand, the management stated in its decision that they were absent from 1st to 31st May. The workers defied this statement and said that they have got the salary of May completely. It is an evidence that they used to attend and perform their trade union activities regularly and that the decision to dismiss them is groundless.
by JackRiddler » Mon Jul 29, 2013 11:56 am
[From the pro-military protest in Tahrir Square.]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/com ... 35098.html
Robert Fisk
Sunday 28 July 2013
Eyewitness in Egypt: 'Most were shot in the face – only one in the back'
The hospital next to the Rabaa mosque was filled with the blood of 37 corpses, the doctors using two weeks' worth of medical supplies in two hours
Aiman Husseini was lying by the wall. Khaled Abdul Nasser had his name written in black ink on his white shroud just to the left of the door. There were 37 corpses in the room. It was swamped in blood. The doctors had blood on their shirts. It wasn't long before we had blood on our shoes. There were ribbons of it, dark brown, where they brought the stretchers in, even on the walls. The hospital next to the Rabaa mosque was packed with men and women in tears. Many of them talked about God. "These people are in the sun," a doctor said to me. "They are with God. We are just in the shade."
Believers all, I suppose. And the dead? Perhaps it requires a medical report to understand this many dead. Shot in the face, most of them, several in the eyes, many in the chest. I saw only one body which they claimed was shot in the back. Most of the faces they showed me were bearded. A massacre? Most certainly. And these were only a few of the dead. What on earth did General Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi intend to do when he called on Egyptians to give their support to him on the streets on Friday?
These killings took place in the hours before dawn. The police, everyone said, opened fire, first with birdshot, then with live rounds as members of the Muslim Brotherhood led by Mohamed Morsi paraded close to the tomb of President Anwar Sadat – himself assassinated 23 years ago by an Islamist called Khalid al-Islambouli, a lieutenant in the Egyptian army no less – not far from the mosque. Who fired first? Well, all the dead were Muslim Brothers or their friends or family. There were no dead policemen.
The Brotherhood said its people were unarmed, which may well be true, although I have to say that a man guarding a car park near the mosque who directed me to the hospital was holding a Kalashnikov rifle. Living in Beirut, I have grown used to seeing guns in the hands of young men, but I was a little shocked to see this man in a blue T-shirt holding an automatic weapon. But he was the only armed man I saw.
But why did this have to happen? Ahmed Habib, a doctor, told me that in all his life he had never experienced dead on this scale – and you have to remember that I was seeing only some of the Egyptians who died – and that he had used up two weeks' worth of medical equipment in just a few hours. "Look at the blood on my clothes," he shouted at me. Many of the doctors lay outside the room of the dead, sleeping on the dirty floor, exhausted after trying to save lives all through the morning.
No one blamed the army – which lets al-Sisi off the hook as a general but not as the coup leader who demanded that the people of Egypt support his battle against "terrorism". Nor does it let him off the hook as a father. The general has three sons and a daughter, but the 37 dead men I saw were also children of Egypt who deserve, surely, some compassion. That they belonged to the Brotherhood – if they all did – does not make them "terrorists". On Friday night, I told several friends that I feared there would be dead on the streets of Cairo. Does this mean that I, a mere foreigner, feared the mortuary room I saw and that al-Sisi – a lofty general – could not have predicted this?
"We are told we are a minority now, so we don't deserve to live," another doctor told me. I didn't like the propaganda line but these were dramatic minutes in a room packed with dead bodies, so many that medical staff were literally tripping on the corpses and their shrouds. They were taken from the room on stretchers under the flash of cameras – no one missed the opportunity of Brotherhood martyrdom and many times was God's name invoked outside – and inserted into ambulances that queued beside the mosque in the midday heat.
Many people said the things people always say when confronted by tragedy. That they would never give way, that they would die rather than submit to military rule – this in a country, remember, where we must believe that the coup that happened didn't happen – and that God was greater than life itself, certainly greater than al-Sisi, a statement which the general would, of course, agree with. Dr Habib insisted that there was an afterlife which – being in a place of death – I admit I did ask him to prove. "Because we are not animals, to eat food and drink water all our lives. Do you think that is the only reason for our being?"
Behind the hospital were many men who had been wounded in the feet, some of them groaning with pain. But it was the dead who caught our attention, so newly killed that their faces had not yet taken on the mark of death. One paramedic had difficulty closing the eyes of a corpse and had to ask a doctor for help. In death, it seems, you must always appear to be asleep. And, cliché as it might be, I wonder if that is now the state of Egypt.
by JackRiddler » Mon Jul 29, 2013 11:59 am
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent ... again.aspx
Hundreds of Egypt bank employees demonstrate against board decisions
Ahram Online, Sunday 28 Jul 2013
Protesting employees of public-owned Misr Bank call for strike, demonstration on Monday against restructuring plan
A few hundred employees of the oldest national Egyptian bank, Misr Bank, gathered on Sunday at the main branch in downtown Cairo to call for the chairman to reverse his decisions to restructure the organisation and for his dismissal along with the board.
The employees started an online campaign titled Rebel (Tamarod) built on the spirit of the Rebel movement that called for nationwide protests and led to president Mohamed Morsi's ouster. It gathered momentum after board chairman Mohamed Kamal El-Din Barakat decided last Thursday to restrict job categories "in a way that would slow down promotion eligibility and pay raises", claim the protesters.
"The decisions include employment restructuring, which affected the entire bank's hierarchy", an employee who asked to remain anonymous told Ahram Online.
After the bank closed Sunday afternoon, the employees, including some from other branches throughout Cairo, called for a spontaneous demonstration. Many chanted, holding banners that read "leave" and "invalid."
The protesting bank employees have also called for a strike and are planning to demonstrate on Monday at 9am in front of the bank building.
Mohamed Kamal El-Din Barakat, the current Chairman of the Board of Directors of Misr Bank was appointed to his current position in September 2011 during Essam Sharaf cabinet and Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) rule. He was also elected as head of the Union of Arab Banks in April 2013.
http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/77638.aspx
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