Live: Al Jazeera coverage of Egypt’s growing revolution

[23]

Thank you, Miss Alica. Your post, three posts up, is an excellent commentary on what transpired and is transpiring in Egypt.

But more importantly, thank you for providing my daughter and her peers with a living example of what power to the people looks, sounds, smells, and feels like.

Power truly does belong to the people... but only if you have the will and courage to claim it. Your country(wo)men are a living testimony to that.

[Luther Blissett]

I've got some idiot on my facebook hand-wringing about WMD research in Egypt, trying to kill my good vibes post.

[vanlose kid]

A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: February 13, 2011


CAIRO — As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: “Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.”

The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.

They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley.

As their swelling protests shook the Egyptian state, they were locked in a virtual tug of war with a leader with a very different vision — Gamal Mubarak, the son of President Hosni Mubarak, a wealthy investment banker and ruling-party power broker. Considered the heir apparent to his father until the youth revolt eliminated any thought of dynastic succession, the younger Mubarak pushed his father to hold on to power even after his top generals and the prime minister were urging an exit, according to American officials who tracked Hosni Mubarak’s final days.

The defiant tone of the president’s speech on Thursday, the officials said, was largely his son’s work.

“He was probably more strident than his father was,” said one American official, who characterized Gamal’s role as “sugarcoating what was for Mubarak a disastrous situation.” But the speech backfired, prompting Egypt’s military to force the president out and assert control of what they promise will be a transition to civilian government.

Now the young leaders are looking beyond Egypt. “Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world,” said Walid Rachid, one of the members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which helped organize the Jan. 25 protests that set off the uprising. He spoke at a meeting on Sunday night where the members discussed sharing their experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran.

“If a small group of people in every Arab country went out and persevered as we did, then that would be the end of all the regimes,” he said, joking that the next Arab summit might be “a coming-out party” for all the ascendant youth leaders.

Bloggers Lead the Way

The Egyptian revolt was years in the making. Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement, first became engaged in a political movement known as Kefaya, or Enough, in about 2005. Mr. Maher and others organized their own brigade, Youth for Change. But they could not muster enough followers; arrests decimated their leadership ranks, and many of those left became mired in the timid, legally recognized opposition parties. “What destroyed the movement was the old parties,” said Mr. Maher, who has since been arrested four times.

By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.

After a strike that March in the city of Malhalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups. Bad weather turned the strike into a nonevent in most places, but in Malhalla a demonstration by the workers’ families led to a violent police crackdown — the first major labor confrontation in years.

Just a few months later, after a strike in the Tunisian city of Hawd el-Mongamy, a group of young online organizers followed the same model, setting up what became the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. The organizers in both countries began exchanging their experiences over Facebook. The Tunisians faced a more pervasive police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. “We shared our experience with strikes and blogging,” Mr. Maher recalled.

For their part, Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.

The April 6 Youth Movement modeled its logo — a vaguely Soviet looking red and white clenched fist—after Otpor’s, and some of its members traveled to Serbia to meet with Otpor activists.

Another influence, several said, was a group of Egyptian expatriates in their 30s who set up an organization in Qatar called the Academy of Change, which promotes ideas drawn in part on Mr. Sharp’s work. One of the group’s organizers, Hisham Morsy, was arrested during the Cairo protests and remained in detention.

“The Academy of Change is sort of like Karl Marx, and we are like Lenin,” said Basem Fathy, another organizer who sometimes works with the April 6 Youth Movement and is also the project director at the Egyptian Democratic Academy, which receives grants from the United States and focuses on human rights and election-monitoring. During the protesters’ occupation of Tahrir Square, he said, he used his connections to raise about $5,100 from Egyptian businessmen to buy blankets and tents.

‘This Is Your Country’

Then, about a year ago, the growing Egyptian youth movement acquired a strategic ally, Wael Ghonim, a 31-year-old Google marketing executive. Like many others, he was introduced into the informal network of young organizers by the movement that came together around Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat who returned to Egypt a year ago to try to jump-start its moribund political opposition.

Mr. Ghonim had little experience in politics but an intense dislike for the abusive Egyptian police, the mainstay of the government’s power. He offered his business savvy to the cause. “I worked in marketing, and I knew that if you build a brand you can get people to trust the brand,” he said.

The result was a Facebook group Mr. Ghonim set up: We Are All Khalid Said, after a young Egyptian who was beaten to death by police. Mr. Ghonim — unknown to the public, but working closely with Mr. Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement and a contact from Mr. ElBaradei’s group — said that he used Mr. Said’s killing to educate Egyptians about democracy movements.

He filled the site with video clips and newspaper articles about police violence. He repeatedly hammered home a simple message: “This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights.” He took special aim at the distortions of the official media, because when the people “distrust the media then you know you are not going to lose them,” he said.

He eventually attracted hundreds of thousands of users, building their allegiance through exercises in online democratic participation. When organizers planned a “day of silence” in the Cairo streets, for example, he polled users on what color shirts they should all wear — black or white. (When the revolt exploded, the Mubarak government detained him for 12 days in blindfolded isolation in a belated attempt to stop his work.)

After the Tunisian revolution on Jan. 14, the April 6 Youth Movement saw an opportunity to turn its little-noticed annual protest on Police Day — the Jan. 25 holiday that celebrates a police revolt that was suppressed by the British — into a much bigger event. Mr. Ghonim used the Facebook site to mobilize support. If at least 50,000 people committed to turn out that day, the site suggested, the protest could be held. More than 100,000 signed up.

“I have never seen a revolution that was preannounced before,” Mr. Ghonim said.

By then, the April 6 movement had teamed up with Mr. ElBaradei’s supporters, some liberal and leftist parties, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood to plaster Cairo with eye-catching modernist posters advertising their Tunisia-inspired Police Day protest. But their elders — even members of the Brotherhood who had long been portrayed as extremists by Mr. Mubarak and the West — shied away from taking to the streets.

Explaining that Police Day was supposed to honor the fight against British colonialism, Essem Erian, a Brotherhood leader, said, “On that day we should all be celebrating together.

“All these people are on Facebook, but do we know who they are?” he asked. “We cannot tie our parties and entities to a virtual world.”

‘This Was It’

When the 25th came, the coalition of young activists, almost all of them affluent, wanted to tap into the widespread frustration with the country’s autocracy, and also with the grinding poverty of Egyptian life. They started their day trying to rally poor people with complaints about pocketbook issues: “They are eating pigeon and chicken, but we eat beans every day.”

By the end of the day, when tens of thousands had marched to Tahrir Square, their chants had become more sweeping. “The people want to bring down the regime,” they shouted, a slogan that the organizers said they had read in signs and on Facebook pages from Tunisia. Mr. Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement said the organizers even debated storming Parliament and the state television building — classic revolutionary moves.

“When I looked around me and I saw all these unfamiliar faces in the protests, and they were more brave than us — I knew that this was it for the regime,” Mr. Maher said.

It was then that they began to rely on advice from Tunisia, Serbia and the Academy of Change, which had sent staff members to Cairo a week before to train the protest organizers. After the police used tear gas to break up the protest that Tuesday, the organizers came back better prepared for their next march on Friday, the 28th, the “Day of Rage.”

This time, they brought lemons, onions and vinegar to sniff for relief from the tear gas, and soda or milk to pour into their eyes. Some had fashioned cardboard or plastic bottles into makeshift armor worn under their clothes to protect against riot police bullets. They brought spray paint to cover the windshields of police cars, and they were ready to stuff the exhaust pipes and jam the wheels to render them useless. By the early afternoon, a few thousand protesters faced off against well over a thousand heavily armed riot police officers on the four-lane Kasr al-Nile Bridge in perhaps the most pivotal battle of the revolution.

“We pulled out all the tricks of the game — the Pepsi, the onion, the vinegar,” said Mr. Maher, who wore cardboard and plastic bottles under his sweater, a bike helmet on his head and a barrel-top shield on his arm. “The strategy was the people who were injured would go to the back and other people would replace them,” he said. “We just kept rotating.” After more than five hours of battle, they had finally won — and burned down the empty headquarters of the ruling party on their way to occupy Tahrir Square.

Pressuring Mubarak

In Washington that day, President Obama turned up, unexpectedly, at a 3:30 p.m. Situation Room meeting of his “principals,” the key members of the national security team, where he displaced Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, from his seat at the head of the table.

The White House had been debating the likelihood of a domino effect since youth-driven revolts had toppled President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, even though the American intelligence community and Israel’s intelligence services had estimated that the risk to President Mubarak was low — less than 20 percent, some officials said.

According to senior officials who participated in Mr. Obama’s policy debates, the president took a different view. He made the point early on, a senior official said, that “this was a trend” that could spread to other authoritarian governments in the region, including in Iran. By the end of the 18-day uprising, by a White House count, there were 38 meetings with the president about Egypt. Mr. Obama said that this was a chance to create an alternative to “the Al Qaeda narrative” of Western interference.

American officials had seen no evidence of overtly anti-American or anti-Western sentiment. “When we saw people bringing their children to Tahrir Square, wanting to see history being made, we knew this was something different,” one official said.

On Jan. 28, the debate quickly turned to how to pressure Mr. Mubarak in private and in public — and whether Mr. Obama should appear on television urging change. Mr. Obama decided to call Mr. Mubarak, and several aides listened in on the line. Mr. Obama did not suggest that the 82-year-old leader step aside or transfer power. At this point, “the argument was that he really needed to do the reforms, and do them fast,” a senior official said. Mr. Mubarak resisted, saying the protests were about outside interference.

According to the official, Mr. Obama told him, “You have a large portion of your people who are not satisfied, and they won’t be until you make concrete political, social and economic reforms.”

The next day, the decision was made to send former Ambassador Frank G. Wisner to Cairo as an envoy. Mr. Obama began placing calls to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and other regional leaders.

The most difficult calls, officials said, were with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Mr. Netanyahu, who feared regional instability and urged the United States to stick with Mr. Mubarak. According to American officials, senior members of the government in Saudi Arabia argued that the United States should back Mr. Mubarak even if he used force against the demonstrators. By Feb. 1, when Mr. Mubarak broadcast a speech pledging that he would not run again and that elections would be held in September, Mr. Obama concluded that the Egyptian president still had not gotten the message.

Within an hour, Mr. Obama called Mr. Mubarak again in the toughest, and last, of their conversations. “He said if this transition process drags out for months, the protests will, too,” one of Mr. Obama’s aides said.

Mr. Mubarak told Mr. Obama that the protests would be over in a few days.

Mr. Obama ended the call, the official said, with these words: “I respect my elders. And you have been in politics for a very long time, Mr. President. But there are moments in history when just because things were the same way in the past doesn’t mean they will be that way in the future.”

The next day, heedless of Mr. Obama’s admonitions, Mr. Mubarak launched another attack against the protesters, many of whom had by then spent five nights camped out in Tahrir Square. By about 2:30 p.m., thousands of burly men loyal to Mr. Mubarak and armed with rocks, clubs and, eventually, improvised explosives had come crashing into the square.

The protesters — trying to stay true to the lessons they had learned from Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gene Sharp — tried for a time to avoid retaliating. A row of men stood silent as rocks rained down on them. An older man told a younger one to put down his stick.

But by 3:30 p.m., the battle was joined. A rhythmic din of stones on metal rang out as the protesters beat street lamps and fences to rally their troops.

The Muslim Brotherhood, after sitting out the first day, had reversed itself, issuing an order for all able-bodied men to join the occupation of Tahrir Square. They now took the lead. As a secret, illegal organization, the Brotherhood was accustomed to operating in a disciplined hierarchy. The group’s members helped the protesters divide into teams to organize their defense, several organizers said. One team broke the pavement into rocks, while another ferried the rocks to makeshift barricades along their perimeter and the third defended the front.

“The youth of the Muslim Brotherhood played a really big role,” Mr. Maher said. “But actually so did the soccer fans” of Egypt’s two leading teams. “These are always used to having confrontations with police at the stadiums,” he said.

Soldiers of the Egyptian military, evidently under orders to stay neutral, stood watching from behind the iron gates of the Egyptian Museum as the war of stone missiles and improvised bombs continued for 14 hours until about four in the morning.

Then, unable to break the protesters’ discipline or determination, the Mubarak forces resorted to guns, shooting 45 and killing 2, according to witnesses and doctors interviewed early that morning. The soldiers — perhaps following orders to prevent excessive bloodshed, perhaps acting on their own — finally intervened. They fired their machine guns into the ground and into the air, several witnesses said, scattering the Mubarak forces and leaving the protesters in unmolested control of the square, and by extension, the streets.

Once the military demonstrated it was unwilling to fire on its own citizens, the balance of power shifted. American officials urged the army to preserve its bond with the Egyptian people by sending top officers into the square to reassure the protesters, a step that further isolated Mr. Mubarak. But the Obama administration faltered in delivering its own message: Two days after the worst of the violence, Mr. Wisner publicly suggested that Mr. Mubarak had to be at the center of any change, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned that any transition would take time. Other American officials suggested Mr. Mubarak might formally stay in office until his term ended next September. Then a four-day-long stalemate ensued, in which Mr. Mubarak refused to budge, and the protesters regained momentum.

On Thursday, Mr. Mubarak’s vice president, Omar Suleiman, was on the phone with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at 2 p.m. in Washington, the third time they had spoken in a week. The airwaves were filled with rumors that Mr. Mubarak was stepping down, and Mr. Suleiman told Mr. Biden that he was preparing to assume Mr. Mubarak’s powers. But as he spoke to Mr. Biden and other officials, Mr. Suleiman said that “certain powers” would remain with Mr. Mubarak, including the power to dissolve the Parliament and fire the cabinet. “The message from Suleiman was that he would be the de facto president,” one person involved in the call said.

But while Mr. Mubarak huddled with his son Gamal, the Obama administration was in the dark about how events would unfold, reduced to watching cable television to see what Mr. Mubarak would decide. What they heard on Thursday night was a drastically rewritten speech, delivered in the unbowed tone of the father of the country, with scarcely any mention of a presumably temporary “delegation” of his power.

It was that rambling, convoluted address that proved the final straw for the Egyptian military, now fairly certain that it would have Washington’s backing if it moved against Mr. Mubarak, American officials said. Mr. Mubarak’s generals ramped up the pressure that led him at last, without further comment, to relinquish his power.

“Eighty-five million people live in Egypt, and less than 1,000 people died in this revolution — most of them killed by the police,” said Mr. Ghonim, the Google executive. “It shows how civilized the Egyptian people are.” He added, “Now our nightmare is over. Now it is time to dream.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world ... wanted=all

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[compared2what?]

I would laugh if it wasn't so tragic.

Then do something about it.

[Plutonia]

[Edit to add the reference:]

I've got some idiot on my facebook hand-wringing about WMD research in Egypt, trying to kill my good vibes post.

Ask him if he's Aaron Barr in disguise. Lol

[compared2what?]

It was actually a suggestion that proceeded more from sympathy than otherwise. And respect, too. In fact, respect primarily. I mean, naturally, I do observe that DrVolin and I don't have bilateral relations in that regard. But, you know. My respect for him isn't based on his opinion of me. There are bigger things at stake. Anyway. FWIW, that post wasn't intended as a proximate occasion for flaming.

Though more power to you, under all circumstances, Plu. Needless to say.

[AlicetheKurious]

Once the military demonstrated it was unwilling to fire on its own citizens, the balance of power shifted.

Something interesting I just heard today, from a well-connected friend:

Remember that day when I said I kept hearing & seeing warplanes and helicopters flying over my house? I thought they were coming from the American military base and wondered what they were doing.

My friend said that at one point, the Egyptian Air Force received orders to fly over the demonstrators and shoot from the air. The pilots frantically called their parents and other family members and asked them what the pilots should do. Their families apparently told them to refuse to do this order at any cost, "even if you're court martialed, even if you're executed, do you hear me??!!"

As a consequence, the planes and helicopters did fly over the demonstrators, but then turned around and went back. Not one fired.

PS: That was a very, very intriguing article, vk. I've always said that the predators conspire transnationally against "us" and that only a transnational counter-conspiracy of the people can defeat them.

[compared2what?]

the predators conspire transnationally against "us" and that only a transnational counter-conspiracy of the people can defeat them.

QFT.

Also, for those who care, I'm now going back to part-time lurker status, the truth of which statement you can rely on, since (due to circumstance) I don't have any choice about it.

Salutes and salutations,

c2w

[AlicetheKurious]

On the other hand, Prof. As'ad Abu Khalil, who is not only an Angry Arab, but a Smart and Well-Informed one, as well, had this to say:

Look. Even if there are some attempts by US or other outside parties to influence events in Egypt and elsewhere, the underlying causes of the revolutionary efforts by people on the ground are largely domestic and home grown. Most people, I insist, have not heard of Sharp.

Here what the NYT story says: "For their part, Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability."

Now on Gene Sharp. My friend Amer reminded me that back in 2005, an American foundation had contacted me to hire me to review the quality of an Arabic translation of a book by Gene Sharp. I thought the task (and book) to be boring and I passed and I suggested that my friend, Amer, can do the job. He too thought it was boring. It seems that Sharp now wants to claim credit for the uprisings simply because his book was translated by an AMERICAN foundation into Arabic. Let us be clear: no one knows who he is, except those who were assigned to read it and peddle it. Why does the White Man insist on taking credit for everything good the natives do? As for the organization Otpor, I am told it has strong outside connections but its links to Tunisia and Egypt are non-existent or superficial and focusing on a few individuals who "were made available" to the NYT to talk to. I expect that the US, now that its puppet has fallen, wants to plant stories to try to fabricate an American links to the uprisings. Be vigilant: the propaganda and counter-propaganda have just begun.

(Paragraph breaks added for easier reading).

I don't know; I hadn't heard of Gene Sharp before Kate mentioned him. Perhaps he did influence some of the individuals involved, but remember that there were, at one point, more than 8-10 MILLION demonstrators and countless more collaborating to bring down this regime. The objectives of this revolution AND the methods struck a deep chord within the Egyptian people.

Besides, if Gene Sharp's methods are that effective, then what the heck is everybody waiting for? Overthrow all the tyrants!!!!

PS: Sorry to see you go c2w, and hope it won't be for long. I'm also sorry I'm not as good at you are at saying warm and generous and affectionate things to and about people. If I were, you'd be on the short list of people I'd be saying them to...

[AlicetheKurious]

Furthermore, as Angry Arab also points out:

"They started their day trying to rally poor people with complaints about pocketbook issues: “They are eating pigeon and chicken, but we eat beans every day.”" It is from a poem by Ahmad Fuad Najm and has been chanted by leftist protesters for years.

Ahmad Fuad Negm was an underground poet and songwriter whose subversive songs during the late 60s and 70s frequently landed him in prison, but which were circulated widely among Leftist youth (he's also the father of Nawara Negm, one of the most prominent and respected voices of this revolution). This is very important, because crucial to the momentum of this revolution was the use of highly meaningful symbols and words and songs that are unique to Egypt and meaningful not only to Egyptians but to Arabs who still remember when Egypt was at the very heart of Arab nationalism and the popular struggle for freedom.

Also: the city is called "Mahalla", not "Malhalla".

It's open to question how reliable this articles' account of the Egyptian revolution is, given these minor but significant errors.

[DoYouEverWonder]

I think the US and others were trying to provoke violence. They assume the rest of us are like animals, who will attack each other when we're under duress. In the past, agent provokers could easily get away with causing chaos. But because people can connect directly with almost anyone, anywhere, they can't get away with their games anymore. Everybody knows the score.

BTW: There was definitely an increase in military jets flying over my part of the world last week. I'm in the flight path between two big bases and I notice the difference when they're on a war footing.

[Plutonia]

Though more power to you, under all circumstances, Plu. Needless to say.

Oops! C2W, I meant to respond quickly to Luther's Facebook woes but due to intenet slowness hre, my post got dropped in behind yours.

Did not mean to offend or infer any flaminess in your direction.

[vanlose kid]

Once the military demonstrated it was unwilling to fire on its own citizens, the balance of power shifted.

Something interesting I just heard today, from a well-connected friend:

Remember that day when I said I kept hearing & seeing warplanes and helicopters flying over my house? I thought they were coming from the American military base and wondered what they were doing.

My friend said that at one point, the Egyptian Air Force received orders to fly over the demonstrators and shoot from the air. The pilots frantically called their parents and other family members and asked them what the pilots should do. Their families apparently told them to refuse to do this order at any cost, "even if you're court martialed, even if you're executed, do you hear me??!!"

As a consequence, the planes and helicopters did fly over the demonstrators, but then turned around and went back. Not one fired...

hey Alice, thanks for yet another look into what's happening in situ. i think what is significant here is the fact that 23 raised way back in the beginning of the thread, i.e. that the Egyptian mil being conscript based is more deeply rooted in the people than most other "professional" forces, perhaps. anyway, i think the 40% conscript base is what forced and still forces the top brass to make concessions. that is to say, they aren't certain whether they can win a civil war, which again is not to say that they have discarded the option entirely, but it's good to know. and i am pretty sure that the protestors know this too, which is why their stance towards the mil has been fairly effective so far. i just keep the distinction in mind because it helps explain possible and actual moves on the part of the top brass.

...

PS: That was a very, very intriguing article, vk. I've always said that the predators conspire transnationally against "us" and that only a transnational counter-conspiracy of the people can defeat them.

as for the article, it surprised me when i read it today, in that it mentioned someone i'd only just heard of yesterday in this thread: Gene Sharp. that and the whole post-hoc construction of American part ownership of the uprising. then again, it's the NYT. there practically a branch of the State Department. no real surprise there i guess. it's SOP as Doc Chomsky says:

The United States, so far, is essentially following the usual playbook. I mean, there have been many times when some favored dictator has lost control or is in danger of losing control. There’s a kind of a standard routine—Marcos, Duvalier, Ceausescu, strongly supported by the United States and Britain, Suharto: keep supporting them as long as possible; then, when it becomes unsustainable—typically, say, if the army shifts sides—switch 180 degrees, claim to have been on the side of the people all along, erase the past, and then make whatever moves are possible to restore the old system under new names. That succeeds or fails depending on the circumstances.

viewtopic.php?p=383441#p383441

also good to know the Doc As'ad is on top of it. nice takedown. thanks. Godspeed you and your peeps.

*

edit: mistakings and misspelling and suchlike botherous things.

*

[vanlose kid]

just side note on why i insist on using the term uprising re Egypt and not revolution, this article posted by Allegro over here pretty much covers it (although i might have and yet might make the point differently). the fat lady ain't sung yet is what i'm saying.

Blips #104
From The Martian Desk

by Gilles d'Aymery


"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
—Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)

(Swans - February 14, 2011) THE END OF AN ERA in 56 words? "In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, citizens, during these very difficult circumstances Egypt is going through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down from the office of president of the republic and has charged the high council of the armed forces to administer the affairs of the country. May God help everybody," announced the sober and stern Egyptian vice president. It took 23 days for Ben Ali to fall in Tunisia and only 18 for Mubarak. In both instances the military was instrumental in the process of removing the two autocrats -- by their refusal to shoot at and repress the peaceful insurgents. Why such a quick and swift outcome in Egypt -- an internal military coup, no less?

LET'S GIVE CREDIT to the youth, but let's also remember that these momentous events started with food riots. Yet the economic uprisings turned into a political upheaval. The youth of Tahrir ("Liberation") Square made little or no economic claims. In a commentary published in The Guardian on February 10, 2011, Ahmed Salah wrote: "This revolution is not for bread as much as for freedom. It was made principally by the educated, rather than the crushed poorer classes. And it is getting more and more popular as Egyptians balance values such as democracy, freedom, justice, dignity and transparency on one hand, and despotism, oppression, injustice, humiliation and corruption on the other." In a live BBC update of the same day (at 17:12 GMT) Firas Al-Atraqchi in Cairo tweeted: "Democracy! Liberty! Freedom of the Press! No Emergency Laws! Respect for Human Rights! These are the goals." Wael Ghonim, the presumably well-compensated marketing manager for Google in the Middle East and North Africa, who became a powerful organizer and a symbol of the uprising after having been jailed for 11 days, said that it was "the revolution of the youth of the Internet, which then became the revolution of the youth of Egypt. And now it's become the revolution of all of Egypt." It was the Al Jazeera Revolution sweeping across Egypt; that is, the revolt of the well to do -- doctors, professors, lawyers, and other professionals. They were chanting about political reforms, not socioeconomic changes. The regime expected that they would get tired eventually and that the financial losses to the country, estimated at about $300 million per day, were a bearable cost.

BUT THE CALCULUS began to evolve a few days ago when reports of increasingly widespread strikes surfaced. Factory workers, state and utilities employees, even some of the crews maintaining the Suez Canal started walking out in ever larger numbers. It was no longer about the disgruntled middle class or the loss of revenues generated by tourism and the financial sector. The masses were waking up and the entire Egyptian economic lifeline was being threatened. This shift back to economic demands has barely been reported in the US media, but it did occur. It was no longer just about Liberation Square, and the elites took notice. See what the insufferable Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times (Op-Ed, February 8, 2011). Keeping with the it's-all-about-democracy script ("[T]his uprising feels post-ideological,") Friedman did not waste time to ask, "[W]hose side is the army on?" And here were his hopes (this is worth quoting at some length):

The army could stick by Mubarak, whose only strategy seems to be to buy time and hope that the revolt splinters or peters out. Or the army could realize that what is happening in Tahrir Square is the wave of the future. And, therefore, if it wants to preserve the army's extensive privileges, it will force Mubarak to go on vacation and establish the army as the guarantor of a peaceful transition to democracy -- which would include forming a national unity cabinet that writes a new constitution and eventually holds new elections, once new parties have formed.

I hope it is the latter, and I hope President Obama is pressing the Egyptian Army in this direction -- as do many people here.
THE WISHES OF THE ELITES have been fulfilled. A military man has been replaced by a phalanx of military men -- the Higher Military Council (the military brass controls as much as 15 percent of the Egyptian economy). They may suspend or dissolve the parliament, keep the cabinet for a while, or appoint new figureheads and create a couple of committees to look into constitutional reforms and business corruption by a few selected scapegoats. They will eventually end the state of emergency, free political prisoners, and talk with representatives of the youth movement and the opposition. Hopefully, this transition will pave the way to a new "democratic" order in some undetermined future.

IN TUNISIA, four weeks after Ben Ali fled the country, a few people keep demanding that all politicians associated with the former regime of Ben Ali be removed from power, but it has not happened. Instead, the National Assembly and the Senate have voted to give the government of interim president Foued Mebazza and Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi the right to govern by executive decree in order to promulgate new laws regarding the amnesty of all political prisoners, the legalization and organization of political parties, the reform of the Constitution and the electoral code, and even the signature of international human rights laws. Apparently, the intention is to prepare for transparent legislative and presidential elections to take place in about six months. (Recall that a month ago, these elections were supposed to be held within 60 days...)

IN BOTH COUNTRIES, not a word is being pronounced about changes in socioeconomic conditions that would affect the economic power structure, the ownership of the means of production. This is an important point to note because Egypt and Tunisia share an important characteristic that has not been reported much in the media. Both countries engaged in a huge privatization of their assets beginning in the early 1990s, under the recommendations of the IMF and the World Bank. They were hailed as models of economic liberalism with impressive rates of growth for years. They were considered the only two countries in the Arab world that deserved to be included in the club of the "emerging countries." Economic systems that had been by and large state-controlled were almost entirely privatized. All sectors -- land, banks and insurance, real estate, industry, utilities -- were sold to the local, politically connected elites and to foreign investors for pennies on the dollar. During the same period these economies were redirected toward export markets, mostly the European Union, and became increasingly dependent on the importation of commodities (Egypt is the largest importer of wheat in the world). Fortunes were made by the few while unemployment and poverty shot up for the many.

WHEN THE GREAT RECESSION and the financial crisis hit in 2008, exports toward the EU and foreign investments dramatically decreased. The crisis was compounded by the spectacular increase in the prices of petroleum and essential food commodities triggered by financial speculation -- see "Food Commodities Speculation and Food Price Crises," by Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, September 2010 -- which led to food riots in more than 30 countries.

AS I REPORTED last month in my Blips #102, "according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the price of food staples ... has risen 36 percent in recent months. The FAO food price index, which was created in 1990, reached 223 points in December 2010, surpassing the peak of 213.5 points that occurred in June 2008..." One month later, in January 2011, the same food price index has increased another 3.4 percent to reach 231 points. The FAO indicates that these high prices will continue in the coming months. I wish that Ahmed Salah, who commented in The Guardian that "[T]his revolution is not for bread as much as for freedom," and all the "educated" advocates for freedom and democracy, could reflect on these series of facts. Can freedom and democracy bring food to the table, or as I read somewhere, "can you eat freedom and democracy"? (Can't eat Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet either...) In Tunisia, patience is running short as food is limited and expensive, protests have not subsided (234 dead and over 500 wounded as of early February), and thousands of migrants are fleeing poverty and swarming Italian shores.

OR FOR THAT MATTER, can a democracy create good jobs and low unemployment? Maybe Wael Ghonim and his educated friends could take a trip to Greece, or Spain, or Ireland, or even the U.S. to get some perspective. They may also want to ask whether a democratically elected government can share the country's wealth (or scarcity) more equitably. Here, it's worth it to take a little detour and visit the Gini coefficient (aka, Gini index), which is a measure, from 0 to 100, of the inequality of incomes in a country. The index would be equal to 0 if the distribution of incomes was 100 percent perfect, and 100 if it was 100 percent imperfect -- so the lower the coefficient, the more equality exists. One may be surprised to learn that according to the CIA World Factbook both Egypt and Tunisia have a lower Gini coefficient than that of the U.S. That is, the USA has greater inequality! So, democracy is not a necessary attribute to bring more equality.

INCIDENTALLY, another topic of much economic and ecological import for the future of Egypt was fully ignored by the protesters, the issue of water scarcity. In the summer of 2010 huge protests took place all over the country following drastic water shortages. According to the UN, 1,000 cubic meters per capita is the minimum a country needs before falling into water scarcity. The average per capita consumption last year was down to 700 cubic meters. Water deliveries are regularly cut for hours every day in poor neighborhoods. In some locations the price of drinking water is higher than the price of soda. Irrigated agricultural land suffers increased rationing. It is forecast that by 2025 the average per capita consumption will drop to below 400 cubic meters due to increased population and diminished availability of the overwhelming source of water, the Nile River, as the eight countries that share its bounty -- Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (soon to become nine when the Sudanese partition takes effect this coming July) -- are developing their own water projects and are increasingly contesting the 1929 and 1959 treaties that allocated almost all water from the Nile to Egypt. (Sorry, can't dig into this at this time and in this space. Do your due diligence with the help of your favorite search engine.)

FOOD, WATER, AND UNEMPLOYMENT are the biggest challenges the Egyptians face in the foreseeable future, and the "freedom and democracy" movement did not address them. Ben Ali and Mubarak embodied all the ills of Tunisia and Egypt. They are gone. However, the socioeconomic system of power and property remains in place. For these events to be called truly revolutionary these socioeconomic conditions must be fundamentally overhauled for the benefit of the entire population. Otherwise, in the wake of the current and well-deserved euphoria, one can expect much disappointment within the youth movement and renewed major riots.

. . . . .

C'est la vie...

And so it goes...

http://swans.com/library/art17/desk104.html

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[alwyn]

Alice, thanks for letting us know what's happening over there. Been following this since the internet was cut off in Egypt. I think some really truly amazing things are happening in the world, and I pray that people can take this example and keep the movement going. We are all under the yoke of the Plutocrats, and now we have a sterling example of a peaceful people's movement. I am inspired, and am going to repost your post on some different media, if it's OK with you?