He was into birds from an early age I heart my Dad: all round wowzers blazers bloke, word collector, guardian of punctuation, and list maker extraordinaire.
Happy birthday
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
We were helped down by mountain rescue
Tuesday night was spent with the crème de la crème of Egypt’s left-wing community at the mozza Marcel Khalife concert: it was a bit like being at a protest without the riot police, and with everyone in their Sunday best. Excitement was high, but not as high as our seats, which were on the top balcony or row or whatever the nomenclature is, and so far up that I could almost touch the ceiling. Being stuck in the seat for two hours with the ceiling causing static to my hair reminded me of my journey from Abdel Meneim Reyad to City Stars in the rain by microbus, when we got stuck on the October Bridge for forever.
I paid 100 Egyptian pounds for this ticket, which irked me slightly given that 1. I was sitting on the roof and, 2. I spied plenty of empty seats millions of miles below in the balcony and had understood that ticket price was linked to scarcity. The front row was of course occupied primarily by the leadership of the Tagammo3 political party, who were rewarding themselves for the hard work ofhording the best tickets distributing the tickets fairly and in an egalitarian fashion.
I was even more irked to see that while I had dusted off one of two dresses I own in order to comply with the Opera’s dress code (and as a result spent the evening wobbling around in painful high heels because even I wont wear brown suede slip-ons with a dress), I saw numerous men dressed in jeans with ties slung round their necks in order to distract attention from their legs. They looked stupid, but not as stupid as me involuntarily doing my Tina Turner dancing walk.
I understood that mozza Marcel had appeared on the stage when the audience started clapping, and when I got out my periscope I did indeed see a distant speck in a green scarf clutching a wooden instrument of some sort. It was like looking at him on Google Earth. He and the bloke next to him on the double bass then proceeded to bang out instrumental jazz fusion music which might charitably be called experimental. Alternatively, if you are a philistine from Croydon, you might term it shite.
Things looked up when mozza Marcel’s sons Ramy and Bachar appeared on stage. In conformity with the tradition in the Arab world of sons joining the same profession as their fathers (see: Gamal Mubarak) Bachar is a superb percussionist and Ramy is a Julliard-trained piano virtuoso. They banged out a lovely song about love before starting the Mahmoud Darwish-penned ‘Jawaz Safar’ which is wowzers blazers.
Alas in the middle of Jawaz Safar there was an attack of the bollocks and it descended into jazz improv. Peter on double bass started knocking out a random order of notes as is customary while Ramy on piano suddenly felt the need to stand up, lean over the piano and earnestly play the keys or the strings or whatever they’re called, inside the piano. The sound was unremarkable and he looked like he was looking for something he had accidentally dropped inside it.
As is inevitable, the cacophony on stage was eventually matched by the buzz of people chatting and sending SMSes and getting up to have a fag as can only be expected when people in front of you on a stage are producing the sound equivalent of releasing one’s bowels.
Mozza Marcel & sons eventually remembered that they were giving a public performance and regrouped, and then did a rousing song involving audience participation which was enjoyed by all.
One member of the audience bellowed out ‘O3’NEYYA LE MA7ALLA YA MARCEL’ [a song for Mahalla, mozza Marcel] which mozza Marcel resolutely ignored. Which pissed me off immensely. Later, he announced that the next song was for ‘kell el sho3oob el Arabeye men el mo7eet lel khaleej’ [all the Arab peoples, from the Med to the Gulf], a classification which I suppose encompasses Mahalla.
There was a superb moment of petulance during which mozza Marcel got out his handbag and told us off. What happened is that he started strumming the opening notes of his classic song about his mum’s bread, which is better than it sounds and extremely moving. Two notes in and somewhere in the auditorium a passing flea expectorated phlegm softly, causing Marcel to cease and desist and announce ‘el og’neyya hai keteer ma7taja samt, samt kebeer’ (or something like that) [this song really requires silence, complete silence]. This being Egypt, the response of the audience was to clap, which only incensed mozza Marcel further and suddenly I had got my money’s worth.
Near the end of the concert he started thanking us for coming and telling us that we had lit up the opera etc, causing one impassioned woman to bellow out NO NOOOO, presumably in protest at his buggering off early. He told her off, too, requesting ‘la7ze wa7de sa3’eera’ [one moment] from the ill-mannered woman, in a prissy manner. He then explained that a huge artist from the world of Egyptian music would join him on stage and we all held our breaths waiting for a big star to appear as we mentally went through the list of still-alive Egyptian musicians on www.mawaly.com to guess who it possibly could be. “HASSAN MOTAZ!” he declared, before an unknown man leaped on stage to the rippled murmur of “who who who who who??” and weak clapping.
Hassan Motez actually turned out to be a gifted cello player who gave a wicked and passionate solo and I’m certain that he left the Opera House with a thousand new fans.
I’ve seen mozza Marcel twice now, once last night, once in London, and while his performances are always technically brilliant, they lack soul, and are slightly dull as a result. He is the Pete Sampras of the music world.
I paid 100 Egyptian pounds for this ticket, which irked me slightly given that 1. I was sitting on the roof and, 2. I spied plenty of empty seats millions of miles below in the balcony and had understood that ticket price was linked to scarcity. The front row was of course occupied primarily by the leadership of the Tagammo3 political party, who were rewarding themselves for the hard work of
I was even more irked to see that while I had dusted off one of two dresses I own in order to comply with the Opera’s dress code (and as a result spent the evening wobbling around in painful high heels because even I wont wear brown suede slip-ons with a dress), I saw numerous men dressed in jeans with ties slung round their necks in order to distract attention from their legs. They looked stupid, but not as stupid as me involuntarily doing my Tina Turner dancing walk.
I understood that mozza Marcel had appeared on the stage when the audience started clapping, and when I got out my periscope I did indeed see a distant speck in a green scarf clutching a wooden instrument of some sort. It was like looking at him on Google Earth. He and the bloke next to him on the double bass then proceeded to bang out instrumental jazz fusion music which might charitably be called experimental. Alternatively, if you are a philistine from Croydon, you might term it shite.
Things looked up when mozza Marcel’s sons Ramy and Bachar appeared on stage. In conformity with the tradition in the Arab world of sons joining the same profession as their fathers (see: Gamal Mubarak) Bachar is a superb percussionist and Ramy is a Julliard-trained piano virtuoso. They banged out a lovely song about love before starting the Mahmoud Darwish-penned ‘Jawaz Safar’ which is wowzers blazers.
Alas in the middle of Jawaz Safar there was an attack of the bollocks and it descended into jazz improv. Peter on double bass started knocking out a random order of notes as is customary while Ramy on piano suddenly felt the need to stand up, lean over the piano and earnestly play the keys or the strings or whatever they’re called, inside the piano. The sound was unremarkable and he looked like he was looking for something he had accidentally dropped inside it.
As is inevitable, the cacophony on stage was eventually matched by the buzz of people chatting and sending SMSes and getting up to have a fag as can only be expected when people in front of you on a stage are producing the sound equivalent of releasing one’s bowels.
Mozza Marcel & sons eventually remembered that they were giving a public performance and regrouped, and then did a rousing song involving audience participation which was enjoyed by all.
One member of the audience bellowed out ‘O3’NEYYA LE MA7ALLA YA MARCEL’ [a song for Mahalla, mozza Marcel] which mozza Marcel resolutely ignored. Which pissed me off immensely. Later, he announced that the next song was for ‘kell el sho3oob el Arabeye men el mo7eet lel khaleej’ [all the Arab peoples, from the Med to the Gulf], a classification which I suppose encompasses Mahalla.
There was a superb moment of petulance during which mozza Marcel got out his handbag and told us off. What happened is that he started strumming the opening notes of his classic song about his mum’s bread, which is better than it sounds and extremely moving. Two notes in and somewhere in the auditorium a passing flea expectorated phlegm softly, causing Marcel to cease and desist and announce ‘el og’neyya hai keteer ma7taja samt, samt kebeer’ (or something like that) [this song really requires silence, complete silence]. This being Egypt, the response of the audience was to clap, which only incensed mozza Marcel further and suddenly I had got my money’s worth.
Near the end of the concert he started thanking us for coming and telling us that we had lit up the opera etc, causing one impassioned woman to bellow out NO NOOOO, presumably in protest at his buggering off early. He told her off, too, requesting ‘la7ze wa7de sa3’eera’ [one moment] from the ill-mannered woman, in a prissy manner. He then explained that a huge artist from the world of Egyptian music would join him on stage and we all held our breaths waiting for a big star to appear as we mentally went through the list of still-alive Egyptian musicians on www.mawaly.com to guess who it possibly could be. “HASSAN MOTAZ!” he declared, before an unknown man leaped on stage to the rippled murmur of “who who who who who??” and weak clapping.
Hassan Motez actually turned out to be a gifted cello player who gave a wicked and passionate solo and I’m certain that he left the Opera House with a thousand new fans.
I’ve seen mozza Marcel twice now, once last night, once in London, and while his performances are always technically brilliant, they lack soul, and are slightly dull as a result. He is the Pete Sampras of the music world.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Marcel, keteer 7elwe
Recent comedy breaks in the misery:
1. While in Mahalla we had to keep an extremely low profile because of the habit of the Mahalla police station to suck journalists into its bowels. Foreign-looking journalists were prevented from entering Mahalla on Friday in any case, at police checkpoints. It didn’t help that 1. I look and sound foreign and 2. Wael Abbas, high profile blogger and jailer of torturers was in our party.
Even Jennifer Rush, the 80s singer we endured on the way to Mahalla on Sharshar’s “Old is Gold” hits tape seemed to know something we didn’t when she bellowed out I’m heading for somethingggggggggg.
Luck was on our side that day. We thought it was game over at the police checkpoint when a policeman asked for our IDs. We were sure that he would notice the foreigner and Mr Abbas in the back. In a moment of pure cinema, just as he was about to look at my ID his superior came bounding over and admonished him for checking IDs without an officer being present. The officer politely told us that we could proceed.
The many activists and journalists who were detained – illegally - at checkpoints outside Mahalla for hours were not so lucky.
Once in Mahalla we consumed beverages in a coffee shop and then walked at high-speed back to the car. Rounding a corner, we went past a police car full of plain-clothes policeman just as two youths walked past, one of whom shouted out at top volume “DAH WAEL ABBAS!” [IT’S WAEL ABBAS!]
2. Being an aficionado of all things Lebanese, Sharshar was particularly excited when it was announced that bearded Beiruty crooner and Oud maestro Marcel Khalife is coming to Cairo. He proceeded immediately to the Tagamoa party headquarters to buy tickets, and found that they had all sold out.
Not to be defeated he searched, assiduously, for tickets, and found that he could get some from a friend of his, Nagy. Nagy told him that he had got the tickets from the black market. The ticket tout had wanted 250 le for them, to which Nagy said “mesh keteer schwaya, 250 geneeh?” [isn’t 250 le a bit much?] to which the tout responded “ya basha deih Marcel Khalifa, deih gamda geddan! Mozza!” [mate, you’re talking about Marcel Khalifa, she’s really fit].
1. While in Mahalla we had to keep an extremely low profile because of the habit of the Mahalla police station to suck journalists into its bowels. Foreign-looking journalists were prevented from entering Mahalla on Friday in any case, at police checkpoints. It didn’t help that 1. I look and sound foreign and 2. Wael Abbas, high profile blogger and jailer of torturers was in our party.
Even Jennifer Rush, the 80s singer we endured on the way to Mahalla on Sharshar’s “Old is Gold” hits tape seemed to know something we didn’t when she bellowed out I’m heading for somethingggggggggg.
Luck was on our side that day. We thought it was game over at the police checkpoint when a policeman asked for our IDs. We were sure that he would notice the foreigner and Mr Abbas in the back. In a moment of pure cinema, just as he was about to look at my ID his superior came bounding over and admonished him for checking IDs without an officer being present. The officer politely told us that we could proceed.
The many activists and journalists who were detained – illegally - at checkpoints outside Mahalla for hours were not so lucky.
Once in Mahalla we consumed beverages in a coffee shop and then walked at high-speed back to the car. Rounding a corner, we went past a police car full of plain-clothes policeman just as two youths walked past, one of whom shouted out at top volume “DAH WAEL ABBAS!” [IT’S WAEL ABBAS!]
2. Being an aficionado of all things Lebanese, Sharshar was particularly excited when it was announced that bearded Beiruty crooner and Oud maestro Marcel Khalife is coming to Cairo. He proceeded immediately to the Tagamoa party headquarters to buy tickets, and found that they had all sold out.
Not to be defeated he searched, assiduously, for tickets, and found that he could get some from a friend of his, Nagy. Nagy told him that he had got the tickets from the black market. The ticket tout had wanted 250 le for them, to which Nagy said “mesh keteer schwaya, 250 geneeh?” [isn’t 250 le a bit much?] to which the tout responded “ya basha deih Marcel Khalifa, deih gamda geddan! Mozza!” [mate, you’re talking about Marcel Khalifa, she’s really fit].
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Delta Blues Two
Three days after violent crashes between security forces and demonstrators in Mahalla El-Kobra, a fragile calm had returned to the town on Friday. A day off, shop shutters were drawn and the sun-bleached streets mostly empty. Only broken windows, patterned tent fabric disguising destroyed store fronts and the huge security presence in this tiny town testified to the anger which exploded this week.
It is an anger which the embattled ruling regime knows it has only contained – clumsily, and brutally – rather than placated. The siege-like conditions still imposed in Mahalla make this clear. Daily News Egypt travelled as part of a group of five journalists and human rights activists to the town last Friday. On its outskirts traffic suddenly ground to a halt, creeping forward at a painfully slow speed.
Twenty minutes later it became clear why: tens of plain-clothed state security men swarmed the road checking the personal identification of each and every driver attempting to enter the town.
Nasser Nouri, the Reuters photographer who caught the first day of clashes in a series of explosive, and now iconic, images of protestors trampling on a destroyed poster of Hosny Mubarak, was himself detained on Friday, as he attempted to enter Mahalla in a microbus. He was locked in a room in the Mahalla train station until his release the same evening.
A group of some thirty university academics and doctors who attempted to go to Mahalla to express solidarity with the victims of this week’s events were held at a police checkpoint 20 km outside of Mahalla on Friday at 11 a.m. Refused entry, and prevented from moving, they were held until 3 p.m. before being escorted back to Cairo.
Reports of journalist arrests had been coming out of the town all week. On Wednesday Amina Abdel Rahman was arrested while interviewing relatives of detainees protesting outside a police station in Mahalla. Her release was ordered by the public prosecution office after she was cleared of the charges laid against her but she was kept in police detention, illegally, and started a hunger strike. She was eventually released on Saturday.
They day before our party headed to Mahalla James Buck, an American photographer, was arrested in Mahalla while photographing the protestors outside the Mahalla police station with his translator, Mohamed Marei. Like Abdel Rahman, Buck and Marei were cleared of charges by the public prosecution office but were kept in police detention, illegally. Buck was released Friday evening. His Egyptian translator was not.
This series of transgressions is a blunt attempt to silence reports leaking out about the earlier abuses committed by security bodies, and it has failed. This is despite the best efforts of the state-controlled media to portray the two-day uprising in Mahalla as an orgy of thug-led vandalism and looting – a repeat of events in January 1977 when the possibility that President Anwar Sadat would increase the price of bread led to protests in which tens of people were killed during clashes with security forces. The two-day protests – driven by poverty, hunger and anger - were labelled “the revolution of the thieves” by the state-controlled media.
Inside Mahalla the town’s main square had been transformed into a garrison, with some thirty security trucks parked in it. Backup forces had reportedly been drawn in from surrounding governorates. There was a security presence outside every mosque we drove past (there were rumours that a protest would start after Friday prayers ended) and government buildings were heavily guarded with rows of riot police carrying teargas launchers.
Even the state council, and the public library were surrounded, which would seem to indicate an awareness on the part of the authorities that it is state symbols which risk being the target of protestors’ anger. It is hard to reconcile this distribution of troops with the claims made by state-run media that the events in Mahalla were thug-led, random acts of criminal damage.
The symbolic importance of bread is not lost on the government. Subsidised bread feeds the millions of Egyptians who fall below the poverty line, and when international wheat shortages led to bread shortages last month - and deaths in queues at bakeries as people fought over bread - the government was quick to call in the army to bake in an attempt to make up the shortfall.
But anger at corruption, police abuses, poverty and skyrocketing prices is less easy to patch over, or contain. The situation becomes even more ominous when middle-class, white-collar workers join in demonstrations of discontent; on March 23rd university professors throughout Egypt launched a one-day strike in protest at low pay while doctors threatened to go on strike in February at chronically low wages unable to keep pace with the price of basic commodities.
In March workers at the publicly-owned Ghazl El-Mahalla Textiles Factory – Egypt’s biggest industrial enterprise - announced that they would go on strike on April 6th. Workers at the factory had previously launched two strikes - in December 2006 and September 2007, and won both of them. The announcement of the Ghazl El-Mahalla strike was followed by calls for a general strike across Egypt on the same day by opposition group Kefaya and political parties. Calls for the strike – in protest at corruption, prices of food and police abuses amongst other complaints - quickly spread across the Internet.
The Ghazl El-Mahalla strike was called off on Saturday night amidst intense pressure by security forces and worker divisions between the League, which supported strike action, and workers loyal to the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS), which did not. Egyptian daily El-Dostoor reported in the days leading up to the strike that five labour leaders from the factory had been summoned to Cairo by the state-controlled Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions where they allegedly signed a pledge not to strike.
American University in Cairo professor Joel Beinin, an expert on the Egyptian labour movement, told Daily News Egypt that while he doubts that labour leaders with a long history of organising would have signed a pledge not to strike, he does think that the government succeeded in dividing leadership in the factory when it partially acceded to one of the workers’ demands and raised food allowances to LE 90 in the lead-up to April 6th (workers had called for a food allowance of LE 150).
“The majority of the workers in the Ghazl El-Mahalla strike committee supported a delay in strike action,” Beinin says. “The thinking was, ‘OK the government has met some of our demands, let’s wait and see if they meet the rest of their promises in July.”
Whatever the truth about the factory’s internal politics, the strike failed, but by the afternoon of April 6th events had gained a momentum all of their own. Beinin, who was in Mahalla to meet factory workers at the end of the morning shift, witnessed the first clashes between protestors and security forces on Sunday which started at 4 p.m.
“It was immediately obvious that the majority of the demonstrators were not factory workers. At least half of the protestors were children under 14,” Beinin told Daily News Egypt.
Beinin has no doubts that the protest he witnessed in the town’s main square was not organised in advance.
“It was completely spontaneous. There were no placards or posters prepared and I didn’t hear the set political slogans usually heard at protests,” he said.
Beinin says that the response of security bodies was violent from the beginning.
“Security bodies responded with violence to the protestors from the start. I saw plain-clothed thugs [employed by security forces during demonstrations] throwing rocks at people, deliberately throwing them upwards so that they would land on people’s heads.”
Nouri echoes this. He told Daily News Egypt that police responded immediately with violence to the initially peaceful protest, later using teargas and firearms to disperse the crowd.
Some 150 people – including children - were detained on the first day of protests. Swedish journalist Per Bjorklund witnessed a demonstration which gathered outside the Mahalla train station. He showed Daily News Egypt a film he made of thousands of demonstrators converging on Mahalla’s police station, where they joined detainees’ families protesting outside the police station. He says that the procession was completely peaceful, save for a few low-key skirmishes. Violence only erupted outside the police station when demonstrators gathered and started chanting “let them out! Let them out!”
“I didn’t see any looting, all the violence was mainly directed at the police. Even small traffic police posts were being attacked,” Bjorklund told Daily News Egypt.
Rights groups frequently criticise Egyptian security bodies for the misuse of force against both individuals and crowds. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights repeatedly states in its reports that torture inside police stations is systematic and endemic. In December 2005 Egyptian security bodies were heavily criticised for the violent way in which they dispersed a protest by Sudanese refugees and asylum-seekers (including children) in central Cairo. Nearly thirty people died, either asphyxiated in the crush caused when the police stormed the camp, or beaten to death.
At least one person died during last week’s events in Mahalla, fifteen year-old Ahmed Mabrouk Hamada, who was shot while standing in the 3rd-floor balcony of his house. We went to Hamada’s home and spoke to his family about the circumstances of his death.
“It was about 11 at night, and Ahmed was playing on his computer,” Ahmed’s father, Ali, told us.
“I told him ‘go to bed, Ahmed, you’ve got school in the morning’. He said OK, turned off the computer, and went to bed. We heard noise in the street, and Ahmed got up and stood in the balcony next to me, looking down at what was happening. We saw soldiers and officers dressed in black, and then heard ‘open fire! Open fire!’
“My son screamed in pain, and I looked over at him and found his face covered in blood. He fell to the floor. We called the emergency services, twice, but they told us they would not come, and so me and some neighbours carried Ahmed to a neighbour’s car.
“We took him to the El-Hoda private hospital, they refused to admit him. We then took him to the Al-Aas hospital, where he died.
The family’s house is in a side-street, well removed from the scene of protests. Ali took us to the balcony where his son was shot, where we found a large piece of cloth still covered in his son’s blood. The neighbouring balcony, to the left, is pitted with a vertical line of what appear to be bullet marks.
Mohamed, a friend of the family, told us that the bullet which killed Ahmed entered his head through his jaw and exited from his temple, suggesting that he was shot by a gun fired from below. The fact that the bullet travelled three stories up and went through his head would seem to indicate that it was live ammunition which killed Ahmed: rubber bullets are usually non-lethal unless fired at short range.
In the absence of an official investigation it is impossible to say with complete certainty who fired the gun which killed Ahmed. However, in a statement condemning the use of unnecessary lethal and excessive force by security bodies, Human Rights Watch states that according to the bystanders it interviewed, “no one other than the police fired live ammunition during the demonstrations.”
Ahmed’s uncle Alaa El-Shioumy says that the family are not interested in monetary compensation for his death. All they want is an official acknowledgement of responsibility and an apology.
“We want an official statement saying what happened is haram, wrong, an injustice... It’s enough for an official to say that the Interior Minister will not ignore this, and will investigate it. Do human lives have no value?”
An article published in Egyptian daily Al-Badeel on Friday claimed that an official from the ministry of social solidarity, Adalaat Abdel Hady, had ordered that LE 1,000 be paid to Ahmed’s family. El-Shioumy says that this has not happened.
Also present in the house was Ahmed El-Sayyed, whose son is currently amongst the roughly 215 people detained in Mahalla.
El-Sayyed told us that his son, Mahmoud, was arrested on Monday while working in his shop and was not involved in the protests.
“Some 15 police officers arrested my son while he was in his shop and took him away. I have no idea where he is now. They hit Mahmoud's colleague over the head with a chair – he had to have ten stitches. He told me what happened to Mahmoud,” El-Sayyed said.
El-Sayyed was amongst the hundreds of relatives of detained people who congregated outside the Mahalla police station. He was amongst the people who tried to help Buck and his translator to escape arrest by putting them in a taxi. He had no idea that they were subsequently pulled out of the taxi and detained.
“The families of detained people, about 150 people, stood outside the police station every day until yesterday night [Thursday] when the police sprayed water on the protestors, who were mostly women and children. They told us that if we continued to stand outside the police station we would be arrested, too.”
The Taha Hussein school in Mahalla, vandalised and ransacked by unknown parties has been presented by the state media as evidence that the events of April 6th and 7th were acts of criminally-led rioting, rather than an expression of popular discontent. El-Sayyed questions this, and suggested that the looting of the school, and the subsequent coverage of it, was orchestrated in order to prove the government case.
“The police stood by and watched as youths stole computers from the school and rode off with them. When the Egyptian television crew [state controlled] arrived, they went straight to that school. They didn’t film the protests, the people being beaten in the streets… they only filmed the things they wanted to film.”
In a press conference given on Friday evening in the Hisham Mubarak Law Center in Cairo, lawyer Khaled Ali said that there have been widespread violations of the rights of those detained in connection with the events of April 6th, both in Mahalla and elsewhere in Egypt.
“Lawyers do not know the exact numbers or whereabouts of detainees because the public prosecution office is denying them the right to visit clients” Ali said.
“In addition, people have been held without charge for more than 24 hours in violation of the law.”
“Arrests of journalists in Mahalla are an attempt to terrorise the media into not covering the crimes taking place there. Journalists like Amina Abdel Rahman have been held for more than 24 hours without charge, their release has been ordered by the public prosecution office but they remain in detention.
“This is what happened to James Buck’s translator, Mohamed Marei. My question is, why was Buck released and Marei kept in detention? Why are Egyptians treated as second-class citizens in their own country?”
This is a (much) longer version of an article published in Daily News Egypt.
It is an anger which the embattled ruling regime knows it has only contained – clumsily, and brutally – rather than placated. The siege-like conditions still imposed in Mahalla make this clear. Daily News Egypt travelled as part of a group of five journalists and human rights activists to the town last Friday. On its outskirts traffic suddenly ground to a halt, creeping forward at a painfully slow speed.
Twenty minutes later it became clear why: tens of plain-clothed state security men swarmed the road checking the personal identification of each and every driver attempting to enter the town.
Nasser Nouri, the Reuters photographer who caught the first day of clashes in a series of explosive, and now iconic, images of protestors trampling on a destroyed poster of Hosny Mubarak, was himself detained on Friday, as he attempted to enter Mahalla in a microbus. He was locked in a room in the Mahalla train station until his release the same evening.
A group of some thirty university academics and doctors who attempted to go to Mahalla to express solidarity with the victims of this week’s events were held at a police checkpoint 20 km outside of Mahalla on Friday at 11 a.m. Refused entry, and prevented from moving, they were held until 3 p.m. before being escorted back to Cairo.
Reports of journalist arrests had been coming out of the town all week. On Wednesday Amina Abdel Rahman was arrested while interviewing relatives of detainees protesting outside a police station in Mahalla. Her release was ordered by the public prosecution office after she was cleared of the charges laid against her but she was kept in police detention, illegally, and started a hunger strike. She was eventually released on Saturday.
They day before our party headed to Mahalla James Buck, an American photographer, was arrested in Mahalla while photographing the protestors outside the Mahalla police station with his translator, Mohamed Marei. Like Abdel Rahman, Buck and Marei were cleared of charges by the public prosecution office but were kept in police detention, illegally. Buck was released Friday evening. His Egyptian translator was not.
This series of transgressions is a blunt attempt to silence reports leaking out about the earlier abuses committed by security bodies, and it has failed. This is despite the best efforts of the state-controlled media to portray the two-day uprising in Mahalla as an orgy of thug-led vandalism and looting – a repeat of events in January 1977 when the possibility that President Anwar Sadat would increase the price of bread led to protests in which tens of people were killed during clashes with security forces. The two-day protests – driven by poverty, hunger and anger - were labelled “the revolution of the thieves” by the state-controlled media.
Inside Mahalla the town’s main square had been transformed into a garrison, with some thirty security trucks parked in it. Backup forces had reportedly been drawn in from surrounding governorates. There was a security presence outside every mosque we drove past (there were rumours that a protest would start after Friday prayers ended) and government buildings were heavily guarded with rows of riot police carrying teargas launchers.
Even the state council, and the public library were surrounded, which would seem to indicate an awareness on the part of the authorities that it is state symbols which risk being the target of protestors’ anger. It is hard to reconcile this distribution of troops with the claims made by state-run media that the events in Mahalla were thug-led, random acts of criminal damage.
The symbolic importance of bread is not lost on the government. Subsidised bread feeds the millions of Egyptians who fall below the poverty line, and when international wheat shortages led to bread shortages last month - and deaths in queues at bakeries as people fought over bread - the government was quick to call in the army to bake in an attempt to make up the shortfall.
But anger at corruption, police abuses, poverty and skyrocketing prices is less easy to patch over, or contain. The situation becomes even more ominous when middle-class, white-collar workers join in demonstrations of discontent; on March 23rd university professors throughout Egypt launched a one-day strike in protest at low pay while doctors threatened to go on strike in February at chronically low wages unable to keep pace with the price of basic commodities.
In March workers at the publicly-owned Ghazl El-Mahalla Textiles Factory – Egypt’s biggest industrial enterprise - announced that they would go on strike on April 6th. Workers at the factory had previously launched two strikes - in December 2006 and September 2007, and won both of them. The announcement of the Ghazl El-Mahalla strike was followed by calls for a general strike across Egypt on the same day by opposition group Kefaya and political parties. Calls for the strike – in protest at corruption, prices of food and police abuses amongst other complaints - quickly spread across the Internet.
The Ghazl El-Mahalla strike was called off on Saturday night amidst intense pressure by security forces and worker divisions between the League, which supported strike action, and workers loyal to the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS), which did not. Egyptian daily El-Dostoor reported in the days leading up to the strike that five labour leaders from the factory had been summoned to Cairo by the state-controlled Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions where they allegedly signed a pledge not to strike.
American University in Cairo professor Joel Beinin, an expert on the Egyptian labour movement, told Daily News Egypt that while he doubts that labour leaders with a long history of organising would have signed a pledge not to strike, he does think that the government succeeded in dividing leadership in the factory when it partially acceded to one of the workers’ demands and raised food allowances to LE 90 in the lead-up to April 6th (workers had called for a food allowance of LE 150).
“The majority of the workers in the Ghazl El-Mahalla strike committee supported a delay in strike action,” Beinin says. “The thinking was, ‘OK the government has met some of our demands, let’s wait and see if they meet the rest of their promises in July.”
Whatever the truth about the factory’s internal politics, the strike failed, but by the afternoon of April 6th events had gained a momentum all of their own. Beinin, who was in Mahalla to meet factory workers at the end of the morning shift, witnessed the first clashes between protestors and security forces on Sunday which started at 4 p.m.
“It was immediately obvious that the majority of the demonstrators were not factory workers. At least half of the protestors were children under 14,” Beinin told Daily News Egypt.
Beinin has no doubts that the protest he witnessed in the town’s main square was not organised in advance.
“It was completely spontaneous. There were no placards or posters prepared and I didn’t hear the set political slogans usually heard at protests,” he said.
Beinin says that the response of security bodies was violent from the beginning.
“Security bodies responded with violence to the protestors from the start. I saw plain-clothed thugs [employed by security forces during demonstrations] throwing rocks at people, deliberately throwing them upwards so that they would land on people’s heads.”
Nouri echoes this. He told Daily News Egypt that police responded immediately with violence to the initially peaceful protest, later using teargas and firearms to disperse the crowd.
Some 150 people – including children - were detained on the first day of protests. Swedish journalist Per Bjorklund witnessed a demonstration which gathered outside the Mahalla train station. He showed Daily News Egypt a film he made of thousands of demonstrators converging on Mahalla’s police station, where they joined detainees’ families protesting outside the police station. He says that the procession was completely peaceful, save for a few low-key skirmishes. Violence only erupted outside the police station when demonstrators gathered and started chanting “let them out! Let them out!”
“I didn’t see any looting, all the violence was mainly directed at the police. Even small traffic police posts were being attacked,” Bjorklund told Daily News Egypt.
Rights groups frequently criticise Egyptian security bodies for the misuse of force against both individuals and crowds. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights repeatedly states in its reports that torture inside police stations is systematic and endemic. In December 2005 Egyptian security bodies were heavily criticised for the violent way in which they dispersed a protest by Sudanese refugees and asylum-seekers (including children) in central Cairo. Nearly thirty people died, either asphyxiated in the crush caused when the police stormed the camp, or beaten to death.
At least one person died during last week’s events in Mahalla, fifteen year-old Ahmed Mabrouk Hamada, who was shot while standing in the 3rd-floor balcony of his house. We went to Hamada’s home and spoke to his family about the circumstances of his death.
“It was about 11 at night, and Ahmed was playing on his computer,” Ahmed’s father, Ali, told us.
“I told him ‘go to bed, Ahmed, you’ve got school in the morning’. He said OK, turned off the computer, and went to bed. We heard noise in the street, and Ahmed got up and stood in the balcony next to me, looking down at what was happening. We saw soldiers and officers dressed in black, and then heard ‘open fire! Open fire!’
“My son screamed in pain, and I looked over at him and found his face covered in blood. He fell to the floor. We called the emergency services, twice, but they told us they would not come, and so me and some neighbours carried Ahmed to a neighbour’s car.“We took him to the El-Hoda private hospital, they refused to admit him. We then took him to the Al-Aas hospital, where he died.
The family’s house is in a side-street, well removed from the scene of protests. Ali took us to the balcony where his son was shot, where we found a large piece of cloth still covered in his son’s blood. The neighbouring balcony, to the left, is pitted with a vertical line of what appear to be bullet marks.
Mohamed, a friend of the family, told us that the bullet which killed Ahmed entered his head through his jaw and exited from his temple, suggesting that he was shot by a gun fired from below. The fact that the bullet travelled three stories up and went through his head would seem to indicate that it was live ammunition which killed Ahmed: rubber bullets are usually non-lethal unless fired at short range.
In the absence of an official investigation it is impossible to say with complete certainty who fired the gun which killed Ahmed. However, in a statement condemning the use of unnecessary lethal and excessive force by security bodies, Human Rights Watch states that according to the bystanders it interviewed, “no one other than the police fired live ammunition during the demonstrations.”
Ahmed’s uncle Alaa El-Shioumy says that the family are not interested in monetary compensation for his death. All they want is an official acknowledgement of responsibility and an apology.
“We want an official statement saying what happened is haram, wrong, an injustice... It’s enough for an official to say that the Interior Minister will not ignore this, and will investigate it. Do human lives have no value?”
An article published in Egyptian daily Al-Badeel on Friday claimed that an official from the ministry of social solidarity, Adalaat Abdel Hady, had ordered that LE 1,000 be paid to Ahmed’s family. El-Shioumy says that this has not happened.
Also present in the house was Ahmed El-Sayyed, whose son is currently amongst the roughly 215 people detained in Mahalla.
El-Sayyed told us that his son, Mahmoud, was arrested on Monday while working in his shop and was not involved in the protests.
“Some 15 police officers arrested my son while he was in his shop and took him away. I have no idea where he is now. They hit Mahmoud's colleague over the head with a chair – he had to have ten stitches. He told me what happened to Mahmoud,” El-Sayyed said.
El-Sayyed was amongst the hundreds of relatives of detained people who congregated outside the Mahalla police station. He was amongst the people who tried to help Buck and his translator to escape arrest by putting them in a taxi. He had no idea that they were subsequently pulled out of the taxi and detained.
“The families of detained people, about 150 people, stood outside the police station every day until yesterday night [Thursday] when the police sprayed water on the protestors, who were mostly women and children. They told us that if we continued to stand outside the police station we would be arrested, too.”
The Taha Hussein school in Mahalla, vandalised and ransacked by unknown parties has been presented by the state media as evidence that the events of April 6th and 7th were acts of criminally-led rioting, rather than an expression of popular discontent. El-Sayyed questions this, and suggested that the looting of the school, and the subsequent coverage of it, was orchestrated in order to prove the government case.
“The police stood by and watched as youths stole computers from the school and rode off with them. When the Egyptian television crew [state controlled] arrived, they went straight to that school. They didn’t film the protests, the people being beaten in the streets… they only filmed the things they wanted to film.”
In a press conference given on Friday evening in the Hisham Mubarak Law Center in Cairo, lawyer Khaled Ali said that there have been widespread violations of the rights of those detained in connection with the events of April 6th, both in Mahalla and elsewhere in Egypt.
“Lawyers do not know the exact numbers or whereabouts of detainees because the public prosecution office is denying them the right to visit clients” Ali said.
“In addition, people have been held without charge for more than 24 hours in violation of the law.”
“Arrests of journalists in Mahalla are an attempt to terrorise the media into not covering the crimes taking place there. Journalists like Amina Abdel Rahman have been held for more than 24 hours without charge, their release has been ordered by the public prosecution office but they remain in detention.
“This is what happened to James Buck’s translator, Mohamed Marei. My question is, why was Buck released and Marei kept in detention? Why are Egyptians treated as second-class citizens in their own country?”
This is a (much) longer version of an article published in Daily News Egypt.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Delta blues
When I went to Mahalla this morning it was dead. We had received reports en route that the long-awaited strike had been aborted after security bodies flooded the factory with plainclothes policemen who stopped the first sign of trouble, and this was clear from the sleepiness of the town when we arrived. Yes there were security trucks, but surprisingly few given police proclivity to rolling out armies at the suggestion that e.g. a government opponent might fart in a public area.
Inside the factory, members of the media were processed before we were escorted inside to watch the happy workers happily doing their jobs. I had a huge fight with the men who escorted us inside, who said they were from the factory industrial safety team, but who were obviously receiving instructions from above. I had arrived already tetchy after waiting 40 minutes for Gazius, a lawyer from Mansoura who we picked up en route and whose idea of a sound meeting point is the end of a bridge nobody has ever heard of. My already fragile nerves were put to the test again in the factory when the industrial safety men rolled out the bollocks about following procedures for our welfare and made us wait, needlessly, for twenty minutes. So agitated was I by this, and disappointed by the non-strike, that I ended up bellowing at them while they stood twenty metres away shushing me.
The majority of journalists left Mahalla at around noon – it seems that none of us had any clue about what was planned and thought the action would be in Cairo. It’s a decision I bitterly regret but it has taught me the importance of both generating reliable contacts and of never trusting a situation which is just too calm to be real. Luckily, some activists stayed behind, and now reports are coming in that over 7,000 people started demonstrating in Mahalla at around four p.m.. They were immediately set upon by security bodies who used teargas, stun guns and, most sickeningly, live ammunition: two people (a 20-year old man and a 9-year old boy) have apparently been killed.
According to a journalist I spoke to Cairo this afternoon some 62 people have been arrested, including Magdy Hussein, the leader of the Labour Party who led the calls for the general strike. In Cairo the close, oppressive weather and murky beige skies were the ceiling of a city which had been transformed into a giant prison cell. Green and blue security trucks were everywhere, as were rows and rows of black uniformed riot police. The city itself was eerily empty, and perhaps for the first time in Egypt’s recorded history the October Bridge was moving freely at 5 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon.
There was a big protest in the Lawyers’ Syndicate, hermetically sealed by the rows of riot police. I went inside and half-heartedly watched it, but was so depressed by Mahalla, and by the government’s victory, that I didn’t even have the heart to take many photographs. It started raining midway through. “Allah akbar! Shayfeen rabbina!” [God is great, look what he can do!] protestors shouted in response to the rare sight of precipitation. It was dirty, greasy water which covered us. The government must have been rubbing their hands together in glee.
Outside the journalists’ syndicate there was a small group of some ten people gathered. One man was wearing a red fez. A journalist told me that the fez-wearer was making the point that things were better in Egypt under the king, pre-independence. This depressed me even further and I buggered off.
This afternoon I went to visit a homeless family. Five of them live in a tent, in a dirty alley, ten minutes away from Tahrir Square. The father is unable to work and could not keep up with rent payments and the family were evicted. They went to live in a public garden for two days until the local council seized their belongings and told them they couldn’t have them back until they produced proof of a permanent address. And now they’re living in a tent. Two of the children are under 16. The father applied for emergency housing in 2005. He has heard nothing since.
In that alley there was no general strike, no protests, no Mahalla, no government, no hope, no nothing. Five people living in a tent erected on top of rubbish, and animal excretions which I slipped around in when I photographed the tent. And what was most upsetting was the man’s calmness, his politeness, his resignation. His defeat.
The government won 2-0 today. Cairo’s streets were empty not because people were striking but because of government fear tactics which stopped people leaving their homes. The general strike failed as we all knew it would and, as predicted, Mahalla was the main focus - it reaped the backlash. They broke Mahalla – the strike and then its people – to teach them a lesson. To punish Mahalla for giving hope.
Inside the factory, members of the media were processed before we were escorted inside to watch the happy workers happily doing their jobs. I had a huge fight with the men who escorted us inside, who said they were from the factory industrial safety team, but who were obviously receiving instructions from above. I had arrived already tetchy after waiting 40 minutes for Gazius, a lawyer from Mansoura who we picked up en route and whose idea of a sound meeting point is the end of a bridge nobody has ever heard of. My already fragile nerves were put to the test again in the factory when the industrial safety men rolled out the bollocks about following procedures for our welfare and made us wait, needlessly, for twenty minutes. So agitated was I by this, and disappointed by the non-strike, that I ended up bellowing at them while they stood twenty metres away shushing me.
The majority of journalists left Mahalla at around noon – it seems that none of us had any clue about what was planned and thought the action would be in Cairo. It’s a decision I bitterly regret but it has taught me the importance of both generating reliable contacts and of never trusting a situation which is just too calm to be real. Luckily, some activists stayed behind, and now reports are coming in that over 7,000 people started demonstrating in Mahalla at around four p.m.. They were immediately set upon by security bodies who used teargas, stun guns and, most sickeningly, live ammunition: two people (a 20-year old man and a 9-year old boy) have apparently been killed.
According to a journalist I spoke to Cairo this afternoon some 62 people have been arrested, including Magdy Hussein, the leader of the Labour Party who led the calls for the general strike. In Cairo the close, oppressive weather and murky beige skies were the ceiling of a city which had been transformed into a giant prison cell. Green and blue security trucks were everywhere, as were rows and rows of black uniformed riot police. The city itself was eerily empty, and perhaps for the first time in Egypt’s recorded history the October Bridge was moving freely at 5 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon.
There was a big protest in the Lawyers’ Syndicate, hermetically sealed by the rows of riot police. I went inside and half-heartedly watched it, but was so depressed by Mahalla, and by the government’s victory, that I didn’t even have the heart to take many photographs. It started raining midway through. “Allah akbar! Shayfeen rabbina!” [God is great, look what he can do!] protestors shouted in response to the rare sight of precipitation. It was dirty, greasy water which covered us. The government must have been rubbing their hands together in glee.
Outside the journalists’ syndicate there was a small group of some ten people gathered. One man was wearing a red fez. A journalist told me that the fez-wearer was making the point that things were better in Egypt under the king, pre-independence. This depressed me even further and I buggered off.
This afternoon I went to visit a homeless family. Five of them live in a tent, in a dirty alley, ten minutes away from Tahrir Square. The father is unable to work and could not keep up with rent payments and the family were evicted. They went to live in a public garden for two days until the local council seized their belongings and told them they couldn’t have them back until they produced proof of a permanent address. And now they’re living in a tent. Two of the children are under 16. The father applied for emergency housing in 2005. He has heard nothing since.
In that alley there was no general strike, no protests, no Mahalla, no government, no hope, no nothing. Five people living in a tent erected on top of rubbish, and animal excretions which I slipped around in when I photographed the tent. And what was most upsetting was the man’s calmness, his politeness, his resignation. His defeat.
The government won 2-0 today. Cairo’s streets were empty not because people were striking but because of government fear tactics which stopped people leaving their homes. The general strike failed as we all knew it would and, as predicted, Mahalla was the main focus - it reaped the backlash. They broke Mahalla – the strike and then its people – to teach them a lesson. To punish Mahalla for giving hope.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
April 6th
I will be in Mahalla tomorrow covering the strike in the Ghazl el-Mahalla textiles factory, the 3rd strike since December 2006. I’m super excited about going, mostly because it will mean meeting workers who not only won two previous strikes, but succeeded in getting rid of the company chairman and board of directors, i.e. heroes. In addition I find the atmosphere at even small scale sit-ins and protests electrifying so 20,000 men and women standing up to their management, the government, the state security army and their own bloody union (!) should be amazing.
About the their own bloody union thing: I’ve been reading bits and pieces about the Egyptian labour movement, including an excellent booklet by Mostafa Bassiouni about the surge of strikes and sit-ins which began after the December 2006 Ghazl el-Mahalla strike. This strike was opposed by the workers’ official union, as was their next strike in September; women workers attacked the union chief with their shoes when he tried to persuade them to call off the strike, which I think is the least he could have expected. Tellingly, during negotiations at the end of the strike, the workers’ union was on the same side of the table as factory management.
This is a legacy of the Union of Workers’ Syndicates of Egypt established in 1957, a three-level organisation which seems to suffer from the same cronyism, corruption, lack of transparency and crippling bureaucracy which afflicts the majority of governmental institutions in Egypt. Bassiouni points out that on more than one occasion the same individual has been both head of the Union and the minister of manpower. Given that at this time the state was the largest employer and most members of the Union were employed in the public sector, this meant that the individual employed in both these roles was supposed to simultaneously represent both workers and their employer. Bonkers.
Being as it is, stuffed full of NDP supporters, this Union has demonstrated that it is inimically opposed to workers’ interests, and in particular their right to strike. The Ghazl el-Mahalla workers have their own organisation now, the Rabta, or League, which will be leading the calls for a number of demands tomorrow in a factory which seems to have been turned into a military barracks in anticipation of the strike.
Mahalla reinvigorated the labour union movement in 2006 and it has inspired calls for a general strike throughout Egypt tomorrow. Here are the details, provided in a charmingly odd English translation of the original Arabic:
About the their own bloody union thing: I’ve been reading bits and pieces about the Egyptian labour movement, including an excellent booklet by Mostafa Bassiouni about the surge of strikes and sit-ins which began after the December 2006 Ghazl el-Mahalla strike. This strike was opposed by the workers’ official union, as was their next strike in September; women workers attacked the union chief with their shoes when he tried to persuade them to call off the strike, which I think is the least he could have expected. Tellingly, during negotiations at the end of the strike, the workers’ union was on the same side of the table as factory management.
This is a legacy of the Union of Workers’ Syndicates of Egypt established in 1957, a three-level organisation which seems to suffer from the same cronyism, corruption, lack of transparency and crippling bureaucracy which afflicts the majority of governmental institutions in Egypt. Bassiouni points out that on more than one occasion the same individual has been both head of the Union and the minister of manpower. Given that at this time the state was the largest employer and most members of the Union were employed in the public sector, this meant that the individual employed in both these roles was supposed to simultaneously represent both workers and their employer. Bonkers.
Being as it is, stuffed full of NDP supporters, this Union has demonstrated that it is inimically opposed to workers’ interests, and in particular their right to strike. The Ghazl el-Mahalla workers have their own organisation now, the Rabta, or League, which will be leading the calls for a number of demands tomorrow in a factory which seems to have been turned into a military barracks in anticipation of the strike.
Mahalla reinvigorated the labour union movement in 2006 and it has inspired calls for a general strike throughout Egypt tomorrow. Here are the details, provided in a charmingly odd English translation of the original Arabic:
Protest against Oppression & Corruption
Tomorrow's peaceful strike, Sunday April 6, 2008
Cairo, April 5 2008,
No Work
No University
No School
No School
No Selling
We need Just Judiciary
We need Enough Salaries
We need Work
We need Education for our Children
We need Appropriate Transportations
We need Hospitals
We need Medicines for our Children
We need Freedom and Dignity
No Thug Policemen
No Cases Fabrication
No Price Hikes
No Patronage
No Torture in Police Stations
No Protection Money
No Corruption
No Bribes
No Detentions
Tell your friends and family to also start work strike by tomorrow APRIL 6.
Arabic Network for Human Rights Information backs the Egyptians right to strike. http://www.hrinfo.net/en/reports/2008/pr0405.shtml
Always with his finger on the pulse even from California Hossam has a great roundup of what’s planned for tomorrow here. The Hisham Mubarak Center has set up a ‘Front for the Defence of Egypt’s Protestors’ which is already sending alerts out via the ever useful Facebook. One activist, Mostafa Khalil, has already been arrested in Mansoura, accused of membership of an illegal organisation (opposition group Kefaya) and has been detained for fifteen days.
The group has just sent a message saying that blogger Malek has been arrested.
I have mixed feelings about the sagacity of the call for a general strike tomorrow, mostly because I’m not sure how appeals for a strike sent out via Facebook and the Internet will succeed in mobilising the millions of Egyptians who do not use these media. I showed Samia - who cleans my house and does not use the Internet - a statement about the strike and she had heard nothing about it. She clearly identified with the motivations behind the strike but her main priority is her daughter, who goes to Helwan University. I’ll tell her not to go to university on Sunday, she told me. In protest? I asked. No, in case something happens to her in a demonstration or something, she replied.
At the other end of the class spectrum Egyptians on an English language mailing list I subscribe to have expressed their objection to the strike as being anti everything but not pro anything and generally not being constructive. One computer programmer friend described it as ‘mass vandalism’ and ‘aih kalam’ [nonsense]. He said that nobody in his office would strike tomorrow.
Part of the problem is that a strike on this scale is hugely ambitious, and can never hope to bring together the disparate groups of Egyptian societywith their competing priorities and concerns in a joint action. This necessarily undermines the strike’s momentum, since in order to succeed a strike action necessarily requires clear leadership, a defined set of demands and solid organisation, all of which are lacking in this case. Critically, in relying on the Internet to mobilise people the strike’s organisers have possibly missed a huge swathe of Egypt’s population.
Having said that, I’m all for any kind of civil disobedience, particularly if it succeeds in making only a small dent in the general state of apathy which exists in this society. There is a fear surrounding political activism and protests; over 25 years of the emergency law, and the corrupt, heavy-handed police force which enforce it have transformed social protest into a crime for many Egyptians. If tomorrow’s protests succeed in breaking this taboo then this is no bad thing.
It’s self-evident, but in the absence of a viable alternative to the current regime, change will never happen through political protests such as this. Tomorrow will be a busy day for security bodies - who will no doubt respond with their usual blunt tactics - but it will only create the briefest of ripples in the stagnant pool of the regime. Those outside the circle of patronage and privilege i.e. the majority of the population, who have plenty of grievances but no one to back, have not been mobilised. Critically, fatigue, poverty and the all pervasive apathy are neutralising the anger necessary to fuel any successful mass protest.
The government has clumsily succeeded in very temporarily containing the bread crisis and averted a repetition of 1977 when the people spontaneously rose up in January against the possibility of bread prices rising. Nor is it 2003 when thousands gathered in Tahrir Square against the war in Iraq. Like a strike, to generate enough motivation to participate in a protest on any significant scale people must feel real anger against/passion for something or someone. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the nebulous mix of grievances – corruption, police abuse, poverty, a crippling malaise generally – which are daily life in Egypt are not enough to bring about political change at the moment.
Which brings us back to Mahalla, and the power wielded by workers. The 25,000 workers who went on strike in Ghazl El-Mahalla were twice successful in making the factory’s administration (the government) comply with their demands; they possess the economic clout which the regime quite literally cannot afford to ignore. And theirs is not an isolated case, as is illustrated by the victorious sit-in held by the Real Estate Tax Collectors at the end of 2007/early 2008. Notably, as Bassiouni points out, sit-ins and strikes held in 2007 in nearly all cases resulted in the workers winning. Even more notably, Ghazl El-Mahalla held a protest for a national minimum wage in February indicating a widening of their cause beyond their own demands.
Always with his finger on the pulse even from California Hossam has a great roundup of what’s planned for tomorrow here. The Hisham Mubarak Center has set up a ‘Front for the Defence of Egypt’s Protestors’ which is already sending alerts out via the ever useful Facebook. One activist, Mostafa Khalil, has already been arrested in Mansoura, accused of membership of an illegal organisation (opposition group Kefaya) and has been detained for fifteen days.
The group has just sent a message saying that blogger Malek has been arrested.
I have mixed feelings about the sagacity of the call for a general strike tomorrow, mostly because I’m not sure how appeals for a strike sent out via Facebook and the Internet will succeed in mobilising the millions of Egyptians who do not use these media. I showed Samia - who cleans my house and does not use the Internet - a statement about the strike and she had heard nothing about it. She clearly identified with the motivations behind the strike but her main priority is her daughter, who goes to Helwan University. I’ll tell her not to go to university on Sunday, she told me. In protest? I asked. No, in case something happens to her in a demonstration or something, she replied.
At the other end of the class spectrum Egyptians on an English language mailing list I subscribe to have expressed their objection to the strike as being anti everything but not pro anything and generally not being constructive. One computer programmer friend described it as ‘mass vandalism’ and ‘aih kalam’ [nonsense]. He said that nobody in his office would strike tomorrow.
Part of the problem is that a strike on this scale is hugely ambitious, and can never hope to bring together the disparate groups of Egyptian societywith their competing priorities and concerns in a joint action. This necessarily undermines the strike’s momentum, since in order to succeed a strike action necessarily requires clear leadership, a defined set of demands and solid organisation, all of which are lacking in this case. Critically, in relying on the Internet to mobilise people the strike’s organisers have possibly missed a huge swathe of Egypt’s population.
Having said that, I’m all for any kind of civil disobedience, particularly if it succeeds in making only a small dent in the general state of apathy which exists in this society. There is a fear surrounding political activism and protests; over 25 years of the emergency law, and the corrupt, heavy-handed police force which enforce it have transformed social protest into a crime for many Egyptians. If tomorrow’s protests succeed in breaking this taboo then this is no bad thing.
It’s self-evident, but in the absence of a viable alternative to the current regime, change will never happen through political protests such as this. Tomorrow will be a busy day for security bodies - who will no doubt respond with their usual blunt tactics - but it will only create the briefest of ripples in the stagnant pool of the regime. Those outside the circle of patronage and privilege i.e. the majority of the population, who have plenty of grievances but no one to back, have not been mobilised. Critically, fatigue, poverty and the all pervasive apathy are neutralising the anger necessary to fuel any successful mass protest.
The government has clumsily succeeded in very temporarily containing the bread crisis and averted a repetition of 1977 when the people spontaneously rose up in January against the possibility of bread prices rising. Nor is it 2003 when thousands gathered in Tahrir Square against the war in Iraq. Like a strike, to generate enough motivation to participate in a protest on any significant scale people must feel real anger against/passion for something or someone. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the nebulous mix of grievances – corruption, police abuse, poverty, a crippling malaise generally – which are daily life in Egypt are not enough to bring about political change at the moment.
Which brings us back to Mahalla, and the power wielded by workers. The 25,000 workers who went on strike in Ghazl El-Mahalla were twice successful in making the factory’s administration (the government) comply with their demands; they possess the economic clout which the regime quite literally cannot afford to ignore. And theirs is not an isolated case, as is illustrated by the victorious sit-in held by the Real Estate Tax Collectors at the end of 2007/early 2008. Notably, as Bassiouni points out, sit-ins and strikes held in 2007 in nearly all cases resulted in the workers winning. Even more notably, Ghazl El-Mahalla held a protest for a national minimum wage in February indicating a widening of their cause beyond their own demands.
Workers possess an irresistible combination of motivation, organisation and influence and have demonstrated their preparedness to ‘illegally’ exercise their legitimate right to strike in violation of draconian legislation which demands amongst other stipulations that 2/3rds of a Syndicate’s board agree to the strike (unlikely given their makeup, see above). I’ve bored you all about this before, but I’ll say it again: the bravery of these men and women, who have so much to lose, is incredible.
Monday, March 31, 2008
El zolm beyawga3
A strange paradox in Egypt is that it is the incredible, miracle-level stuff which works while the ordinary and the routine seem to fail. Maria Golia expressed this well; she describes Cairo as being held together by rubber bands. How is it that the haphazard, logic-defying physicality of this city - with its buildings stapled onto buildings and precarious rooftop shacks and weary working donkeys and perilously overloaded, listing buses – survives and persists while the basics, the ABC, seems to fail?
I was reminded of this on Wednesday, when a court sentenced newspaper editor Ibrahim Eissa to six months imprisonment for publishing articles suggesting that Hosny Mubarak might be slightly unwell. He was charged with spreading false information liable to undermine national stability. The implication is that by suggesting that the 80-year old Mubarak might not be in the best of health, Eissa had scared off foreign investors. I had previously attended the court session when defence witnesses were heard. One after the other they repeated the same thing: Egypt’s economy grew at the time the articles published and, in any case, it is impossible to gauge the effect the articles had on the economy, if any at all.
This was confirmed by someone who works in foreign investment in Egypt and who is on a mailing list I subscribe to. He said that Gamal’s succession to the throne is such a foregone conclusion that rumours/facts about Hosny bowing out before the curtain finally falls are neither here nor there. A couple of years ago when opposition movement Kefaya still had wind in its sails ‘no to inherited rule’ was a chant regularly heard at demonstrations and protests. The chants have faded now - perhaps temporarily – but in the silence is a sigh, a tacit acceptance of the unacceptable, of the anomaly made ordinary.
But then how can ordinary be gauged when the reference points have become so skewed, so perverted? In an age when honesty is a liability and policemen are criminals and water is poisonous and truth is fabricated in a closed room somewhere, notions of good and evil are redundant, the accoutrements which are the first things thrown off a sinking ship.
A foreigner resident in Egypt who has been following the AUC 8 trial reminded me of this recently. Seven of the Sudanese defendants were released on bail by a court at the beginning of March until the next court hearing in May. There was hysteria when the judge made the announcement; ululations and screams and a relative of one of the boys passed out flat on the ground in happiness.
They weren’t released of course. They are currently being held in a prison in Alexandria, their detention made “legitimate” by the addition of a new charge concocted by state security after a week during which they were held entirely illegally. The 7,000 LE bail paid by their families and friends has disappeared, as has all hope that they will be released. “It’s not right,” said the foreigner, and I found myself wondering at the foolish naivety, or lofty idealism of such a statement – what has right got to do with anything? Wrong and right have become the Sunday best outfit reserved for special occasions, for religious ceremonies and visits by foreign dignitaries. They have no place in the everyday. How can one win a war whilst wearing the tight collar of respect?
Last week Om Nakad telephoned me and told me to go to Kitkat, where a man who had been tortured by the police was due to appear before the public prosecution office.
The office was in a huge, newly-constructed tower block with mirrored windows and a grand reception area worthy of The Law. The lift does not work of course, and it was a six-floor trek up. Upon arriving, out of breath, we were met by a lawyer who filled us in. Hany had been at home at 2 p.m. with his wife and son when an anti-drugs division had suddenly burst in and demanded that they lead him to a known drugs dealer in the area, slapping him about a bit to demonstrate that they meant business. He did as they wanted, but was held afterwards. When he presumed to ask why he was being held, and why the police broke into him home without a warrant he was whipped with the long glue sticks used in glue guns (used by the police to seal packages of evidence) before charges of drug dealing were fabricated against him.
Everyday in the morning individuals arrested during the night are brought before the public prosecution office for the ‘3ard’, presentation. I arrived at around 1 p.m. that day and the 3ard had still not begun. Instead, two rows of men sat on the ground next to the lifts in a busy hallway. Bedraggled, unshaven, barefoot and shackled the men reminded me of chattels: the poorest, most vulnerable members of a society viewed as criminals not because of the crimes they had supposedly committed but because of their offence of being nobodies and knowing nobody.
Hany was amongst them, tiny and fragile-looking and handcuffed to his neighbour. I found myself thinking he doesn’t look that bad, he’s only got a black eye…before I realised that I was comparing his treatment to that of deaths and extreme brutality in police custody rather than against the yardstick of what is supposed to happen, which is no abuse at all; the offensive again becoming the ordinary.
I wanted to photograph Hany, to document his injuries. Om Nakad requested permission and the police guards refused so we went to the head of the prosecution office to complain. The offfices of members of the public prosecution office are all in one corridor access to which is granted or denied by a couple of officious individuals whose sole purpose seems to be to make life as difficult as possible for defence lawyers and journalists. Om Nakad is a formidable opponent and we eventually gained access to the district head’s office.
He turned out to be slender, moustachioed and bespectacled man who had one of those small round badges clipped into the hole on his suit lapel where flowers are put during weddings. I couldn’t read what was written on the badge, neatly adjusted and arranged like everything else in the room, but the sparse order of his desk, and his own demeanour, were suggestive of a man who likes rules and, more than that, likes to embody rules.
Om Nakad explained that we were following a case involving the ‘excessive’ use of force by the police. There was the briefest of flashes of something, followed by a silence, before he reached for a piece of paper and asked for the name of the person involved. He then requested that we wait outside, back in the hallway and, for the first time, closed his office door. Om Nakad said that he was calling the police division implicated in the case, that this is always what happens. Who knows.
Five minutes later we heard one of the officious individuals say to a guard ‘haat Hany zeft dah’ [bring that bloody Hany] before Hany himself appeared, stumbling along the corridor with the guard who had banned us taking his photograph before collapsing in the hallway. We were summoned into the office of a member of the public prosecutor office, this time a young man at the beginning of his career still in the process of cultivating the arrogance which seems part of the job description of being a member of the public prosecution office.
I have yet to work out whose side the public prosecution office are on. All of its members I have come in contact with have, without exception, demonstrated an identical, very particular, type of arrogance. It is reminiscent of British public school aloofness and is perhaps the product of being in an all-male environment; a mixture of machismo and privilege finished off with that most dangerous of attributes, power.
In his early 20s, well-dressed and smoking, this member of the public prosecution office fitted the description perfectly. I was allowed to attend the pre-investigation ‘discussion’ during which the accused man has five minutes or so to briefly present his side of the case. I would not be admitted to the investigation itself, which only lawyers may attend. Hany stood in front of the young man’s desk, rubbing his hands together and explaining to ‘el basha’ what had happened. El basha meanwhile looked everywhere except at him, at his desk, at his cigarette, at a package brought in midway through the conversation while Hany, who seemed to shrink during the process, continued talking, seemingly to nobody.
El basha refused to allow us to photograph Hany’s injuries before we were dismissed until the investigation began. Once outside Hany was not returned to the group of men shackled and sat on the ground in the hallway - the guards had got wind of our determination to photograph him. “Ana 7’abayto” [I’ve hidden him] one of them said with a self-satisfied smile. “Search high and low and you’ll never find him.” And Hany had in fact disappeared into the bowls of the building.
The investigation began half an hour or so later, in front of a different, and indifferent, member of the public prosecution office. I went in, tried my luck, but was sent out and prowled round the building’s corridors while I waited. It being 3ish and near the end of a shift, the building gradually emptied of its condemned men and the hoards of women and children who had set up camp in its corridors.
The way in which buildings change when their human inhabitants desert them has always interested me. It is like watching the way a landscape changes during sunset. The cruelty of this building was exposed in its bareness; echoing, impossibly long hallways, dirty walls and corners overflowing with rubbish, all testimony somehow to a legal system fallen victim to the same mixture of neglect, abuse and revulsion which runs throughout this society.
Hany spent over an hour inside, while outside I argued over a chair with one of the officious individuals who tried to force me to stand up until a policeman explained that he had in fact allowed me to sit on it. Om Nakad eventually emerged and told me that they had taken so long because the public prosecution official had insisted on taking periodic breaks – that is when he wasn’t settling up playlists on his laptop, which had apparently provided the soundtrack to Hany’s interrogation. Before the interrogation started Hany had again provided a brief summary of what had happened to him, prompting the public prosecution office person to say “hangeblak 7a2ak” [we’ll see that you get justice]. “El zolm beyawga3” [injustice hurts] Hany replied, but even pain can become normality.
I was reminded of this on Wednesday, when a court sentenced newspaper editor Ibrahim Eissa to six months imprisonment for publishing articles suggesting that Hosny Mubarak might be slightly unwell. He was charged with spreading false information liable to undermine national stability. The implication is that by suggesting that the 80-year old Mubarak might not be in the best of health, Eissa had scared off foreign investors. I had previously attended the court session when defence witnesses were heard. One after the other they repeated the same thing: Egypt’s economy grew at the time the articles published and, in any case, it is impossible to gauge the effect the articles had on the economy, if any at all.
This was confirmed by someone who works in foreign investment in Egypt and who is on a mailing list I subscribe to. He said that Gamal’s succession to the throne is such a foregone conclusion that rumours/facts about Hosny bowing out before the curtain finally falls are neither here nor there. A couple of years ago when opposition movement Kefaya still had wind in its sails ‘no to inherited rule’ was a chant regularly heard at demonstrations and protests. The chants have faded now - perhaps temporarily – but in the silence is a sigh, a tacit acceptance of the unacceptable, of the anomaly made ordinary.
But then how can ordinary be gauged when the reference points have become so skewed, so perverted? In an age when honesty is a liability and policemen are criminals and water is poisonous and truth is fabricated in a closed room somewhere, notions of good and evil are redundant, the accoutrements which are the first things thrown off a sinking ship.
A foreigner resident in Egypt who has been following the AUC 8 trial reminded me of this recently. Seven of the Sudanese defendants were released on bail by a court at the beginning of March until the next court hearing in May. There was hysteria when the judge made the announcement; ululations and screams and a relative of one of the boys passed out flat on the ground in happiness.
They weren’t released of course. They are currently being held in a prison in Alexandria, their detention made “legitimate” by the addition of a new charge concocted by state security after a week during which they were held entirely illegally. The 7,000 LE bail paid by their families and friends has disappeared, as has all hope that they will be released. “It’s not right,” said the foreigner, and I found myself wondering at the foolish naivety, or lofty idealism of such a statement – what has right got to do with anything? Wrong and right have become the Sunday best outfit reserved for special occasions, for religious ceremonies and visits by foreign dignitaries. They have no place in the everyday. How can one win a war whilst wearing the tight collar of respect?
Last week Om Nakad telephoned me and told me to go to Kitkat, where a man who had been tortured by the police was due to appear before the public prosecution office.
The office was in a huge, newly-constructed tower block with mirrored windows and a grand reception area worthy of The Law. The lift does not work of course, and it was a six-floor trek up. Upon arriving, out of breath, we were met by a lawyer who filled us in. Hany had been at home at 2 p.m. with his wife and son when an anti-drugs division had suddenly burst in and demanded that they lead him to a known drugs dealer in the area, slapping him about a bit to demonstrate that they meant business. He did as they wanted, but was held afterwards. When he presumed to ask why he was being held, and why the police broke into him home without a warrant he was whipped with the long glue sticks used in glue guns (used by the police to seal packages of evidence) before charges of drug dealing were fabricated against him.
Everyday in the morning individuals arrested during the night are brought before the public prosecution office for the ‘3ard’, presentation. I arrived at around 1 p.m. that day and the 3ard had still not begun. Instead, two rows of men sat on the ground next to the lifts in a busy hallway. Bedraggled, unshaven, barefoot and shackled the men reminded me of chattels: the poorest, most vulnerable members of a society viewed as criminals not because of the crimes they had supposedly committed but because of their offence of being nobodies and knowing nobody.
Hany was amongst them, tiny and fragile-looking and handcuffed to his neighbour. I found myself thinking he doesn’t look that bad, he’s only got a black eye…before I realised that I was comparing his treatment to that of deaths and extreme brutality in police custody rather than against the yardstick of what is supposed to happen, which is no abuse at all; the offensive again becoming the ordinary.
I wanted to photograph Hany, to document his injuries. Om Nakad requested permission and the police guards refused so we went to the head of the prosecution office to complain. The offfices of members of the public prosecution office are all in one corridor access to which is granted or denied by a couple of officious individuals whose sole purpose seems to be to make life as difficult as possible for defence lawyers and journalists. Om Nakad is a formidable opponent and we eventually gained access to the district head’s office.
He turned out to be slender, moustachioed and bespectacled man who had one of those small round badges clipped into the hole on his suit lapel where flowers are put during weddings. I couldn’t read what was written on the badge, neatly adjusted and arranged like everything else in the room, but the sparse order of his desk, and his own demeanour, were suggestive of a man who likes rules and, more than that, likes to embody rules.
Om Nakad explained that we were following a case involving the ‘excessive’ use of force by the police. There was the briefest of flashes of something, followed by a silence, before he reached for a piece of paper and asked for the name of the person involved. He then requested that we wait outside, back in the hallway and, for the first time, closed his office door. Om Nakad said that he was calling the police division implicated in the case, that this is always what happens. Who knows.
Five minutes later we heard one of the officious individuals say to a guard ‘haat Hany zeft dah’ [bring that bloody Hany] before Hany himself appeared, stumbling along the corridor with the guard who had banned us taking his photograph before collapsing in the hallway. We were summoned into the office of a member of the public prosecutor office, this time a young man at the beginning of his career still in the process of cultivating the arrogance which seems part of the job description of being a member of the public prosecution office.
I have yet to work out whose side the public prosecution office are on. All of its members I have come in contact with have, without exception, demonstrated an identical, very particular, type of arrogance. It is reminiscent of British public school aloofness and is perhaps the product of being in an all-male environment; a mixture of machismo and privilege finished off with that most dangerous of attributes, power.
In his early 20s, well-dressed and smoking, this member of the public prosecution office fitted the description perfectly. I was allowed to attend the pre-investigation ‘discussion’ during which the accused man has five minutes or so to briefly present his side of the case. I would not be admitted to the investigation itself, which only lawyers may attend. Hany stood in front of the young man’s desk, rubbing his hands together and explaining to ‘el basha’ what had happened. El basha meanwhile looked everywhere except at him, at his desk, at his cigarette, at a package brought in midway through the conversation while Hany, who seemed to shrink during the process, continued talking, seemingly to nobody.
El basha refused to allow us to photograph Hany’s injuries before we were dismissed until the investigation began. Once outside Hany was not returned to the group of men shackled and sat on the ground in the hallway - the guards had got wind of our determination to photograph him. “Ana 7’abayto” [I’ve hidden him] one of them said with a self-satisfied smile. “Search high and low and you’ll never find him.” And Hany had in fact disappeared into the bowls of the building.
The investigation began half an hour or so later, in front of a different, and indifferent, member of the public prosecution office. I went in, tried my luck, but was sent out and prowled round the building’s corridors while I waited. It being 3ish and near the end of a shift, the building gradually emptied of its condemned men and the hoards of women and children who had set up camp in its corridors.
The way in which buildings change when their human inhabitants desert them has always interested me. It is like watching the way a landscape changes during sunset. The cruelty of this building was exposed in its bareness; echoing, impossibly long hallways, dirty walls and corners overflowing with rubbish, all testimony somehow to a legal system fallen victim to the same mixture of neglect, abuse and revulsion which runs throughout this society.
Hany spent over an hour inside, while outside I argued over a chair with one of the officious individuals who tried to force me to stand up until a policeman explained that he had in fact allowed me to sit on it. Om Nakad eventually emerged and told me that they had taken so long because the public prosecution official had insisted on taking periodic breaks – that is when he wasn’t settling up playlists on his laptop, which had apparently provided the soundtrack to Hany’s interrogation. Before the interrogation started Hany had again provided a brief summary of what had happened to him, prompting the public prosecution office person to say “hangeblak 7a2ak” [we’ll see that you get justice]. “El zolm beyawga3” [injustice hurts] Hany replied, but even pain can become normality.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Lahazaat gamoosa*
I have recently watched two films with nearly all-female casts, Caramel, in which four women in Beirut subject us to their various trysts with men, and the appallingly-named Lahzaat Onootha (‘Moments of Femininity’ for crying out loud) in which four women in Cairo subject us to their various trysts with men.
There was no better celebration of International Women’s Day this March than watching adult women cry, fret and whine their way through the man-related trials which apparently dominate their entire existences. My invisible corset got tighter and tighter inducing an insurmountable feeling of nausea as around me various suffragettes raised themselves from the dead and clapped their hands in horror as their years of hunger-striking and chaining themselves to railings was undone by a woman in leggings crying over her boyfriend.
While Caramel compensated for the sophomoric storyline with excellent art direction, elements of humour and a highly-entertaining bonkers old woman, Moments of Femininity increased the already excruciating pain of its insufferable plot with acting so wooden I wanted to whittle a club out of it and beat myself to death.
But then there was not much that lead character Ola Ghanem et al could have done with a script this poor. A sense of camaraderie developed amongst the ten people in the audience watching the film when I went - much in the same way that people trapped in a sinking ship band together - and much of the film was spent exchanging mirthful comments about the quite spectacular direness of the film. It was a sort of group therapy. Midway through one man loudly declared “a failure of a scene from a failure of a scriptwriter,” which just about hits the nail on the head.
The film was essentially a series of disjointed and poorly-crafted scenes lumped together one after the other with little thought given to minor considerations such as plot credibility, continuity and the audience’s sanity.
Rather than trouble themselves with thinking up credible events, the film’s scriptwriters propelled the plot - for want of a better word - forward by engineering chance encounters in public venues so unlikely that we can only conclude that these characters live in a town with a total population of 6.
The first of these encounters occurs when Joumana Mourad – who suspects her bouffant-haired husband Wael (played by Ibrahim Yousry) is having an affair - busts him when she walks in on him schmoozing a woman in a bar. We have no idea at all how she deduced that he would be there but that is apparently little import.
This encounter is eclipsed by another bar scene, this time involving Nabil El-Hagrassy.
El-Hagrassy and his sideburns play the role of uncle to Amira, a widow with a young son who has started dating Mahmoud. Unbeknownst to Amira however, Mahmoud has started dating Amira after making a LE 200 bet with his work colleagues, which is understandable. He professes to genuinely loving her, which is not.
I have been unable to find out the name of the actress who plays Amira, which is a shame, because she should be commended for her unique ability to strip lines of any feeling or humanity entirely. She delivers lines in a tone similar to that of my mobile phone, which has a voice function and announces the identity of incoming calls. Only Amira does it with less passion.
In the bar scene Mahmoud’s colleagues are having a tipple when a scantily-clad somewhat bovine woman - who we are to believe is irresistibly seductive – walks past and the men consider making a bet to see which man can convince Ms. Bovine to go out with him, “like Mahmoud did with Amira.”
The camera pans to the table next to their and lo and behold! It’s Amira’s uncle and his sideburns sitting open-mouthed with Amira’s brother-in-law. The extremely camp El-Hagrassy prances over to the men’s table and starts a catfight before in the next scene preceding to drop the bombshell to Amira, who manages to cry while looking bored.
This chance encounter allows the director to waste five minutes during which we see Mahmoud pining for his lost love against flashbacks of him and Amira doing coupley things in various venues, to music.
These are the exact same scenes which we had to sit through when they first got together, and this happy event was conveyed to us through scenes of Mahmoud and Amira doing coupley things in various venues, to music.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, Hussein El-Imam makes a prat of himself playing the role of a playboy company manager constantly shadowed by two assistants, one Russian, one Thai.
Little can be said about the unedifying spectacle of the middle-aged El-Imam suddenly bursting into song and dance during a company meeting while holding a golf club and wearing sunglasses except that it will haunt my nightmares forever.
Whoever directed Moments of Femininity appears to think that it is perfectly acceptable to replace substance with salaciousness. This is the only explanation I have as to why a scene of three of the female leads asleep in bed wearing little other than full makeup is suddenly thrust upon us, before we then see Ola Ghanem and her bosoms showering to a soundtrack which sounds like it is borrowed from a 1980s light porn movie.
The scene is entirely unrelated to those which precede and follow it and serves no purpose whatsoever. Unless you are a 13 year-old boy without access to the Internet.
On the plus side, there were a few moments of high comedy, such as when Mahmoud in his grief bellowed “Amiraaaaaaaa!” underneath her balcony and sounded like the Incredible Hulk.
Also, one of the character’s hair moved backwards and forwards when he talked giving him the appearance of a man with a live mammal on his head.
In fact if it didn’t take itself so seriously Moments of Femininity could very easily have turned into a spoof.
This was a painful to endure film which could have addressed interesting issues such as women’s right to divorce, social perceptions of women in Egyptian society etc but instead chooses to take the path of fluffy, puerile and un-entertaining light entertainment.
Originally published in Daily News Egypt.
*Title courtesy of Sharshar.
There was no better celebration of International Women’s Day this March than watching adult women cry, fret and whine their way through the man-related trials which apparently dominate their entire existences. My invisible corset got tighter and tighter inducing an insurmountable feeling of nausea as around me various suffragettes raised themselves from the dead and clapped their hands in horror as their years of hunger-striking and chaining themselves to railings was undone by a woman in leggings crying over her boyfriend.
While Caramel compensated for the sophomoric storyline with excellent art direction, elements of humour and a highly-entertaining bonkers old woman, Moments of Femininity increased the already excruciating pain of its insufferable plot with acting so wooden I wanted to whittle a club out of it and beat myself to death.
But then there was not much that lead character Ola Ghanem et al could have done with a script this poor. A sense of camaraderie developed amongst the ten people in the audience watching the film when I went - much in the same way that people trapped in a sinking ship band together - and much of the film was spent exchanging mirthful comments about the quite spectacular direness of the film. It was a sort of group therapy. Midway through one man loudly declared “a failure of a scene from a failure of a scriptwriter,” which just about hits the nail on the head.
The film was essentially a series of disjointed and poorly-crafted scenes lumped together one after the other with little thought given to minor considerations such as plot credibility, continuity and the audience’s sanity.
Rather than trouble themselves with thinking up credible events, the film’s scriptwriters propelled the plot - for want of a better word - forward by engineering chance encounters in public venues so unlikely that we can only conclude that these characters live in a town with a total population of 6.
The first of these encounters occurs when Joumana Mourad – who suspects her bouffant-haired husband Wael (played by Ibrahim Yousry) is having an affair - busts him when she walks in on him schmoozing a woman in a bar. We have no idea at all how she deduced that he would be there but that is apparently little import.
This encounter is eclipsed by another bar scene, this time involving Nabil El-Hagrassy.
El-Hagrassy and his sideburns play the role of uncle to Amira, a widow with a young son who has started dating Mahmoud. Unbeknownst to Amira however, Mahmoud has started dating Amira after making a LE 200 bet with his work colleagues, which is understandable. He professes to genuinely loving her, which is not.
I have been unable to find out the name of the actress who plays Amira, which is a shame, because she should be commended for her unique ability to strip lines of any feeling or humanity entirely. She delivers lines in a tone similar to that of my mobile phone, which has a voice function and announces the identity of incoming calls. Only Amira does it with less passion.
In the bar scene Mahmoud’s colleagues are having a tipple when a scantily-clad somewhat bovine woman - who we are to believe is irresistibly seductive – walks past and the men consider making a bet to see which man can convince Ms. Bovine to go out with him, “like Mahmoud did with Amira.”
The camera pans to the table next to their and lo and behold! It’s Amira’s uncle and his sideburns sitting open-mouthed with Amira’s brother-in-law. The extremely camp El-Hagrassy prances over to the men’s table and starts a catfight before in the next scene preceding to drop the bombshell to Amira, who manages to cry while looking bored.
This chance encounter allows the director to waste five minutes during which we see Mahmoud pining for his lost love against flashbacks of him and Amira doing coupley things in various venues, to music.
These are the exact same scenes which we had to sit through when they first got together, and this happy event was conveyed to us through scenes of Mahmoud and Amira doing coupley things in various venues, to music.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, Hussein El-Imam makes a prat of himself playing the role of a playboy company manager constantly shadowed by two assistants, one Russian, one Thai.
Little can be said about the unedifying spectacle of the middle-aged El-Imam suddenly bursting into song and dance during a company meeting while holding a golf club and wearing sunglasses except that it will haunt my nightmares forever.
Whoever directed Moments of Femininity appears to think that it is perfectly acceptable to replace substance with salaciousness. This is the only explanation I have as to why a scene of three of the female leads asleep in bed wearing little other than full makeup is suddenly thrust upon us, before we then see Ola Ghanem and her bosoms showering to a soundtrack which sounds like it is borrowed from a 1980s light porn movie.
The scene is entirely unrelated to those which precede and follow it and serves no purpose whatsoever. Unless you are a 13 year-old boy without access to the Internet.
On the plus side, there were a few moments of high comedy, such as when Mahmoud in his grief bellowed “Amiraaaaaaaa!” underneath her balcony and sounded like the Incredible Hulk.
Also, one of the character’s hair moved backwards and forwards when he talked giving him the appearance of a man with a live mammal on his head.
In fact if it didn’t take itself so seriously Moments of Femininity could very easily have turned into a spoof.
This was a painful to endure film which could have addressed interesting issues such as women’s right to divorce, social perceptions of women in Egyptian society etc but instead chooses to take the path of fluffy, puerile and un-entertaining light entertainment.
Originally published in Daily News Egypt.
*Title courtesy of Sharshar.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Washout
The week I have just spent at the Doctors’ Syndicate sit-in was an interesting first-hand lesson in Egyptian union politics, the weakness of a fragmented labour movement and the dangers of temperamental Shattafaat.
The sit-in was organised after the Syndicate unilaterally ‘postponed’ the strike doctors had voted for with an overwhelming majority during an emergency general assembly meeting in February. Doctors voted to hold a two-hour strike on the 15th March in order to draw attention to their demands for a 1,000 LE minimum wage – senior doctors working in ministry of health hospitals are paid an average of 600 LE per month. Samia, who cleans my house three times a week, takes 720 LE per month.
Syndicate head Hamdy El-Sayyed had publicly expressed support for the strike, taking part in two protests outside the People’s Assembly during which he went on at length to the media about the iniquity of current wage scales. El-Sayyed is a tiny man with a big voice whose emotions are impossible to fathom behind his impenetrable and unchanging gaze. During one of the protests he was given a placard to hold up for a photo op and looked – as far as it was possible to tell – thoroughly uncomfortable, like a tourist on a Nile cruise forced against his will to don a belly dancer costume.
But then there has been an element of masquerade about the Syndicate’s handling of the strike generally. A week before the strike was meant to take place Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said during a radio interview that strikes in ‘vital sectors’ are illegal (a position refuted here, in Arabic). The Syndicate reacted by announcing that the strike had been postponed ‘out of concern that striking doctors would suffer legal repercussions’, only a few days before it was meant to go ahead. I find it impossible to believe that during the continuous negotiations between the Syndicate and the ministry of health in the lead up to the 15th the necessity of telling El-Sayyed that the strike he had endorsed was supposedly illegal slipped ministry officials’ minds…Was this move planned by the government from the beginning or was it a response to growing support for the strike? Was it orchestrated in concert with the Syndicate? Who knows.
On the first day of the sit-in El-Sayyed arrived at the Syndicate in his chauffer-driven car, got out and walked past the protestors as if they did not exist, with that inscrutable mask of his – just as he had done during a previous protest at the Syndicate. I was disconcerted by this, and contrasted it later with his sycophantic reception of a government figure of some sort during the Doctor Day ceremony held at the Syndicate.
I made friends with an eccentric, pleasantly odd, unemployed middle-aged doctor who appears to use the Syndicate as his office and seems to know everyone employed in anything medical-related in Qasr el-Aini and its environs. The first time he spoke to me after seeing me at the People’s Assembly protests he asked me for the address of the newspaper’s office. “Maybe I will write you a letter,” he said - which broke the ice in fine style.
We once found the chauffeur sitting in the Syndicate’s reception once, jiggling his keys and wearing sunglasses. “You remind me of Gamal Abdel Nasser in those sunglasses of yours” eccentric doctor said. The chauffeur smiled, said nothing, continued shaking his keys, as impenetrable as his guvnor.
An unpleasant discovery I made during the sit-in was the exact extent of security body involvement in the everyday workings of the Syndicate, which might be termed insidious if it weren’t for the fact that there is nothing stealthy about it. The officer assigned to the sit-in was a man who looked like a cross between American TV chef Emeril Lagasse and James Gandolfini, if both were mixed together and then struck with a bus. State security officers seem to spend 90% of their time talking into mobiles, and this bloke was no exception: during the daily protests at 2 p.m. his job was to repeat into his mobile the slogans chanted by the main chanter. He did this at the same times as the other doctors repeated the chants, so it looked like he himself was joining in the protest.
When not doing this he ate lib, scowled or smoked, or did all three at the same time. At the very beginning of the sit-in (when I suppose he didn’t know what to expect and had to show them who’s boss from the getgo) he had an altercation with a protestor who was filming the crowd with his mobile phone and filmed the officer – who he had no way of knowing was an officer (and even if he did, so what?). The men grappled over the mobile before they were separated and tempers cooled, but in his anger in the immediate aftermath he pointed at one of the sit-in’s leaders, Dr Mona Mina and, his face contorted with fury, bellowed “YOU’RE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING SAID HERE TODAY” like a petulant dictator on crack.
It soon became obvious however that the small group of mainly middle-aged doctors who gathered on the Syndicate’s steps everyday and who hushed the chant leader every time he strayed into politics were not about to start the revolution. The police presence at protests gradually grew less and less. The officer spent his time wandering around the Syndicate, smoking, talking to staff and drinking coffee. I went into an administrative office in the Syndicate once and found him there, slumped in a sofa and chewing gum, and immediately buggered off. Outside a lad from the buffet was wandering around with a tray of Turkish coffee saying, “fein Osama basha” [where’s basha Osama] before someone directed him to the administrative office.
This was apparently an entirely normal state of affairs. And of course it is – imagine the power wielded by an unchecked group of over 100,000 individuals with an independent leadership, and imagine the threat posed if this group coordinated with other large bodies. So unions are emasculated using various means, including freezing the elections of Syndicates whose members predominantly belong to an opposition political bloc i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood, as is the case with the Doctors’ Syndicate, whose elections have been frozen since the early 1990s.
And it is for this reason why any organised challenge to all this is so exciting. The sit-in organised by Doctors Without Rights was tiny, never really gaining momentum despite the commitment of the doctors who attended. Protestors called off the sit-in for one day during the Doctors Day ceremony at the ‘request’ of the Syndicate (= security bodies) and on Tuesday rugs were laid on the steps where previously the protestors had been standing, and not a single protestor came. I think this was a fatal mistake, but then I haven’t got children to worry about.
The sit-in was nonetheless a rare expression of dissent against both Syndicate hegemony and the state, both of whom are shafting doctors.
I was disappointed that university professors – who are striking tomorrow and who have more or less the same demands as doctors – did not show support to doctors during the sit-in. I am told there was an appearance on the first day by members of the March 9 university professors lobby group but that was the extent of it. I went to a press conference on Wednesday by university professors ahead of the strike, returning to the sit-in afterwards, and was given to understand that members of the university professors strike committee would join the protest. They did not, even though three of the university professors who spoke during the press conference are themselves doctors.
I noted the same lack of coordination within a single profession when I covered a couple of strikes within the Egyptian National Railways recently. The protest by train conductors was incredibly impressive; they turned out in huge numbers, laid down on train tracks, were noisy, organised and determined, and won. But two months later when I told one of them about a protest by train drivers I was covering in Beni Suef, he had no idea about it.
This fragmentation is a natural consequence of political repression I suppose. The Doctors’ Syndicate demonstrated its appreciation of how useful the divide and rule formula is during the emergency general assembly meeting held yesterday. After an electric two-hour session during which Syndicate leaders were interrupted by doctors shouting out slogans and tempers rose and El-Sayyed threatened to walk out the Syndicate ‘voted’ to continue negotiations with the government and to hold a two-hour protest outside hospitals on the 23rd with regional syndicates permitted to organise their own protests. This decision was ‘approved’ by Syndicate members despite the fact that for two hours speaker after speaker from regional syndicates voiced their support for strike action.
Mona Mina asked the gathering whether they supported the idea of a two-hour protest outside the hospitals on the 6th April. The response was overwhelmingly yes, and yet Syndicate heads picked the 23rd out of the air and pushed the decision through in a noisy and chaotic vote during which half of the assembly could not hear what treasurer Essam el-Erian was saying. One doctor in the audience shouted out “enta faashel zay Fathy Sorour!” [you’re a failure like (People’s Assembly speaker) Fathy Sorour].
Towards the end of the meeting the call of nature I had been ignoring for an hour became too strong to resist and I made my way to the water cabinets. While I was doing the necessary I was suddenly aware of an intense feeling of wetness on my calves, and discovered that the Shattaafa – the bidet function installed in toilets in progressive countries – was apparently an automaton, and had decided to switch itself on.
Alas so lost was I in reflecting on the emergency general assembly, and what I would have for dinner, that it took me some moments to register the ocean of water gathering at my feet - by which time my trousers were almost entirely saturated.
I contemplated standing outside in the sun for half an hour rather than walking back into a room of 1000 doctors who would all think that I had had suffered an incontinence-related mishap, but unfortunately at that exact moment El-Sayyed threw a tantrum which was not to be missed.
There is a big screen in the Syndicate reception showing the events inside the main hall, and just as I walked past it, bow-legged, all hell broke loose. One of the speakers had apparently suggested that health minister Dr Hatem el-Gabaly be stripped of Syndicate membership. I didn’t hear why but I would assume that it’s because el-Gabaly has done bugger all for doctors. NDP member El-Sayyed took fierce umbrage at the mere suggestion of this, standing up and attempting to walk out in a demonstration of impressive obsequiousness.
Having shown where his loyalties lie he was eventually placated and returned to his seat before the Syndicate ‘voted’ and everyone went home, many with a feeling that they had just witnessed a farce, one of them in very wet trousers indeed.
The sit-in was organised after the Syndicate unilaterally ‘postponed’ the strike doctors had voted for with an overwhelming majority during an emergency general assembly meeting in February. Doctors voted to hold a two-hour strike on the 15th March in order to draw attention to their demands for a 1,000 LE minimum wage – senior doctors working in ministry of health hospitals are paid an average of 600 LE per month. Samia, who cleans my house three times a week, takes 720 LE per month.
Syndicate head Hamdy El-Sayyed had publicly expressed support for the strike, taking part in two protests outside the People’s Assembly during which he went on at length to the media about the iniquity of current wage scales. El-Sayyed is a tiny man with a big voice whose emotions are impossible to fathom behind his impenetrable and unchanging gaze. During one of the protests he was given a placard to hold up for a photo op and looked – as far as it was possible to tell – thoroughly uncomfortable, like a tourist on a Nile cruise forced against his will to don a belly dancer costume.
But then there has been an element of masquerade about the Syndicate’s handling of the strike generally. A week before the strike was meant to take place Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said during a radio interview that strikes in ‘vital sectors’ are illegal (a position refuted here, in Arabic). The Syndicate reacted by announcing that the strike had been postponed ‘out of concern that striking doctors would suffer legal repercussions’, only a few days before it was meant to go ahead. I find it impossible to believe that during the continuous negotiations between the Syndicate and the ministry of health in the lead up to the 15th the necessity of telling El-Sayyed that the strike he had endorsed was supposedly illegal slipped ministry officials’ minds…Was this move planned by the government from the beginning or was it a response to growing support for the strike? Was it orchestrated in concert with the Syndicate? Who knows.
On the first day of the sit-in El-Sayyed arrived at the Syndicate in his chauffer-driven car, got out and walked past the protestors as if they did not exist, with that inscrutable mask of his – just as he had done during a previous protest at the Syndicate. I was disconcerted by this, and contrasted it later with his sycophantic reception of a government figure of some sort during the Doctor Day ceremony held at the Syndicate.
I made friends with an eccentric, pleasantly odd, unemployed middle-aged doctor who appears to use the Syndicate as his office and seems to know everyone employed in anything medical-related in Qasr el-Aini and its environs. The first time he spoke to me after seeing me at the People’s Assembly protests he asked me for the address of the newspaper’s office. “Maybe I will write you a letter,” he said - which broke the ice in fine style.
We once found the chauffeur sitting in the Syndicate’s reception once, jiggling his keys and wearing sunglasses. “You remind me of Gamal Abdel Nasser in those sunglasses of yours” eccentric doctor said. The chauffeur smiled, said nothing, continued shaking his keys, as impenetrable as his guvnor.
An unpleasant discovery I made during the sit-in was the exact extent of security body involvement in the everyday workings of the Syndicate, which might be termed insidious if it weren’t for the fact that there is nothing stealthy about it. The officer assigned to the sit-in was a man who looked like a cross between American TV chef Emeril Lagasse and James Gandolfini, if both were mixed together and then struck with a bus. State security officers seem to spend 90% of their time talking into mobiles, and this bloke was no exception: during the daily protests at 2 p.m. his job was to repeat into his mobile the slogans chanted by the main chanter. He did this at the same times as the other doctors repeated the chants, so it looked like he himself was joining in the protest.When not doing this he ate lib, scowled or smoked, or did all three at the same time. At the very beginning of the sit-in (when I suppose he didn’t know what to expect and had to show them who’s boss from the getgo) he had an altercation with a protestor who was filming the crowd with his mobile phone and filmed the officer – who he had no way of knowing was an officer (and even if he did, so what?). The men grappled over the mobile before they were separated and tempers cooled, but in his anger in the immediate aftermath he pointed at one of the sit-in’s leaders, Dr Mona Mina and, his face contorted with fury, bellowed “YOU’RE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING SAID HERE TODAY” like a petulant dictator on crack.
It soon became obvious however that the small group of mainly middle-aged doctors who gathered on the Syndicate’s steps everyday and who hushed the chant leader every time he strayed into politics were not about to start the revolution. The police presence at protests gradually grew less and less. The officer spent his time wandering around the Syndicate, smoking, talking to staff and drinking coffee. I went into an administrative office in the Syndicate once and found him there, slumped in a sofa and chewing gum, and immediately buggered off. Outside a lad from the buffet was wandering around with a tray of Turkish coffee saying, “fein Osama basha” [where’s basha Osama] before someone directed him to the administrative office.
This was apparently an entirely normal state of affairs. And of course it is – imagine the power wielded by an unchecked group of over 100,000 individuals with an independent leadership, and imagine the threat posed if this group coordinated with other large bodies. So unions are emasculated using various means, including freezing the elections of Syndicates whose members predominantly belong to an opposition political bloc i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood, as is the case with the Doctors’ Syndicate, whose elections have been frozen since the early 1990s.
And it is for this reason why any organised challenge to all this is so exciting. The sit-in organised by Doctors Without Rights was tiny, never really gaining momentum despite the commitment of the doctors who attended. Protestors called off the sit-in for one day during the Doctors Day ceremony at the ‘request’ of the Syndicate (= security bodies) and on Tuesday rugs were laid on the steps where previously the protestors had been standing, and not a single protestor came. I think this was a fatal mistake, but then I haven’t got children to worry about.
The sit-in was nonetheless a rare expression of dissent against both Syndicate hegemony and the state, both of whom are shafting doctors.
I was disappointed that university professors – who are striking tomorrow and who have more or less the same demands as doctors – did not show support to doctors during the sit-in. I am told there was an appearance on the first day by members of the March 9 university professors lobby group but that was the extent of it. I went to a press conference on Wednesday by university professors ahead of the strike, returning to the sit-in afterwards, and was given to understand that members of the university professors strike committee would join the protest. They did not, even though three of the university professors who spoke during the press conference are themselves doctors.
I noted the same lack of coordination within a single profession when I covered a couple of strikes within the Egyptian National Railways recently. The protest by train conductors was incredibly impressive; they turned out in huge numbers, laid down on train tracks, were noisy, organised and determined, and won. But two months later when I told one of them about a protest by train drivers I was covering in Beni Suef, he had no idea about it.
This fragmentation is a natural consequence of political repression I suppose. The Doctors’ Syndicate demonstrated its appreciation of how useful the divide and rule formula is during the emergency general assembly meeting held yesterday. After an electric two-hour session during which Syndicate leaders were interrupted by doctors shouting out slogans and tempers rose and El-Sayyed threatened to walk out the Syndicate ‘voted’ to continue negotiations with the government and to hold a two-hour protest outside hospitals on the 23rd with regional syndicates permitted to organise their own protests. This decision was ‘approved’ by Syndicate members despite the fact that for two hours speaker after speaker from regional syndicates voiced their support for strike action.
Mona Mina asked the gathering whether they supported the idea of a two-hour protest outside the hospitals on the 6th April. The response was overwhelmingly yes, and yet Syndicate heads picked the 23rd out of the air and pushed the decision through in a noisy and chaotic vote during which half of the assembly could not hear what treasurer Essam el-Erian was saying. One doctor in the audience shouted out “enta faashel zay Fathy Sorour!” [you’re a failure like (People’s Assembly speaker) Fathy Sorour].
Towards the end of the meeting the call of nature I had been ignoring for an hour became too strong to resist and I made my way to the water cabinets. While I was doing the necessary I was suddenly aware of an intense feeling of wetness on my calves, and discovered that the Shattaafa – the bidet function installed in toilets in progressive countries – was apparently an automaton, and had decided to switch itself on.
Alas so lost was I in reflecting on the emergency general assembly, and what I would have for dinner, that it took me some moments to register the ocean of water gathering at my feet - by which time my trousers were almost entirely saturated.
I contemplated standing outside in the sun for half an hour rather than walking back into a room of 1000 doctors who would all think that I had had suffered an incontinence-related mishap, but unfortunately at that exact moment El-Sayyed threw a tantrum which was not to be missed.
There is a big screen in the Syndicate reception showing the events inside the main hall, and just as I walked past it, bow-legged, all hell broke loose. One of the speakers had apparently suggested that health minister Dr Hatem el-Gabaly be stripped of Syndicate membership. I didn’t hear why but I would assume that it’s because el-Gabaly has done bugger all for doctors. NDP member El-Sayyed took fierce umbrage at the mere suggestion of this, standing up and attempting to walk out in a demonstration of impressive obsequiousness.
Having shown where his loyalties lie he was eventually placated and returned to his seat before the Syndicate ‘voted’ and everyone went home, many with a feeling that they had just witnessed a farce, one of them in very wet trousers indeed.
Monday, March 17, 2008
We taught the Americans everything they Guantanaknow
AMNESIAC: So are these men whose release was ordered by a court 12 days ago and who are still in detention being held legally or illegally?
PERSON IN PUBLIC PROSECUTION OFFICE: Both.
AMNESIAC: ...
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
In training
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I have lost count of how many times Egypt has thrown its best and its worst at me simultaneously, in the exact same moment. It’s strangely exhilarating, the clash of emotions this produces; a mixture of expectation and fear and anger and joy.The day before yesterday the Doctors’ Syndicate cancelled the strike it had planned for the 15th March after Prime Minister Nazif reminded (read: threatened) them that public sector strikes are ‘illegal’. I went to a protest on Sunday they organised at the Doctors’ Syndicate headquarters on Qasr el-Aini which was as usual policed by the men in black with the bling on their shoulders.
One particularly enthusiastic young doctor started chanting, and the others joined in until at one point the four-lane street in front of them suddenly fell eerily silent (from my vantage point I could see that the police had stopped traffic briefly - for a reason which (guess what!) was not clear, but which had nothing to do with the protest). Heyya el shawara3 fadya laih…ento nawyeen 3ala aih? [why are the streets empty…what do you intend to do?] improvised the bright young spark to a ripple of laughter from the protestors and the police while a sudden bolt of tension screeched what if?
Yesterday I went to el-Wosta in Beni Suef to report on a protest organised by train drivers who would like parity in wages and conditions with their counterparts based in other Egyptian governorates. In their honour, I went by train, and yesterday night telephoned Tareq the train conductor to enquire about the train timetable.
Early the next morning I found myself in an office on platform 8 being offered tea by Said and Sergios, heads of something or other train-related, underneath the obligatory picture of Hosny. They deposited me on a train with Eissa the conductor who absolutely refused to let me pay for a ticket because of the article.
After passing through endless anonymous railway stations I arrived in a cold, overcast and overwhelmingly beige el-Wosta, which has the most dilapidated railway station I ever have seen. The footbridge over the tracks is made of irregular wooden slats giving it the appearance of a smiling toothless old hag. Unnervingly, the slats bounce. The footbridge itself leads to what can only be described as a graveyard containing the calcified and rotting corpses of trains and carriages. One of these wrecks has actually been turned into an ersatz office by train drivers.
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I found sixty or so train drivers next to the office, waiting with their banners to march on the railway union office. I took pictures as they picked their was across the tracks before we arrived at the union office. A table was brought outside, three representatives sat down, the men crowded round them and I was promptly summoned to talk to the state security “basha” who informed me that I was not allowed to take pictures or report anything without a press card.Thus began the tedious routine of negotiations and ID production and testing limits. There is a certain arrogance about security officers which I have always found exceedingly irritating, the demonstration of authority. This particular officer was a huge middle-aged man with a round face and doleful eyes. He smoked incessantly and examined my ID as he fingered prayer beads in the other hand. Everything about him was unhurried, including his response to questions addressed to him, and the way in which his minions hopped around him reminded me of the birds you see on hippo backs in nature documentaries.
In the end I was invited to “drink tea” in his office where the very polite negotiations again resumed, my position severely weakened by the absence of a press card - which I have never previously been asked for. It was decided that I wouldn’t attend the union meeting, but that I could interview the train drivers afterwards, and so I ended up sitting on a bench outside his office like a naughty schoolgirl, almost within earshot of the meeting. Yet another absurd situation, the smallest encounter with the snake of unaccountable power whose hissing you can hear everywhere you go.
The men emerged triumphant from their meeting (two of their demands were met) but in their capacity as ‘hosts’ were indignant that I had been given school detention. As is required, they thanked the security boss effusively for his role in their success (refraining from arresting them all perhaps?): the usual ode of it wouldn’t have been possible without you ya basha, while he smiled his lazy smile, looking above their heads. Paying dues. He reminded me of a sheriff, and in fact there was something a bit Western about his office, which was essentially a wooden cabin on whose porch he stood wide-legged, surveying the plains.I returned to Cairo by microbus in the company of train driver Essam, and the journey was undoubtedly one of the most exhilarating, and terrifying of my entire life. We waited an hour while the microbus driver mafia negotiated passengers. This mainly consisted of an exchange of mother-related insults, and a sudden ya ebn metnaaka [son of a whore, but whose intensity is closer to motherfucker] would suddenly rattle round the microbus where Essam and I sat silently, me writing my article. The need to acknowledge the miscreant in our midst proved too strong for Essam and he tutted through the embarrassment.
After every last seat was filled the driver eventually obliged us and we set off. He veered off the four lane motorway in order to take a shortcut along a two-way narrow countryside road at such speed that my right leg spent the entire first ten minutes of the journey braking a non-existent peddle, entirely involuntarily. It didn’t help that Essam and I were sitting at the front.
Luckily, we rejoined a motorway which cuts its way through the moon-like topography of the Beni Suef desert and raced along to a stirring soundtrack of Sha3by and chillout music recorded off Nogoum FM. The driver was as usual a 22 year-old who looked like he had just imbibed Colombia’s entire annual Cocaine production and who drove accordingly. We came so close to the bumper of vehicles that I could probably have counted the driver’s nasal hair in his rear view mirror if it wasn’t for the sudden velocity with which our microbus driver veered out from behind the car in front and overtook it.
I am not of a nervous disposition when it comes to driving at breakneck speed with boy racers but did experience a slight heart flutter when the microbus threatened to veer off the road at 100 km an hour when the driver fumbled with the cassette player, or when he spurned the steering wheel and expressed his disgust at something by clapping his hands together for what seemed like 89 hours.
The sight of a Volvo full of moustachioed, turbaned Saidis in full uniform, the driver’s hand dangling out of his window clutching a cigarette, all of them looking effortlessly cooler than Robert de Niro in his Godfather days could ever hope to have been, more than made up for this.
And did you know that microbus drivers on the Beni Suef route greet each other during the day by turning their windscreen wipers on?
When I didn’t have my eyes closed Essam and I passed the time by chatting. He told me that he has been a train driver for 16 years, has three children and takes home 450 a month. He told me that he envied my ability to speak English. I asked him whether he has the time to study it and he described his schedule. He starts work at 10 p.m. and finishes at around 8 a.m., takes a microbus back to Giza, where he lives, washes, sleeps, and then gets up again to go back to work. He stated this simply, an explanation rather than a complaint, and it was then that I noticed how bloodshot his eyes were, how dishevelled he looked. He had been at work the previous night, gone straight to the meeting (which finished at 1.30 p.m.) spent an hour in a microbus waiting for it to move and would eventually put me on the metro and wave me off from the platform – before sleeping for perhaps an hour and a half and then repeating the process all over again, minus the journalist.
Essam isn’t unusual, but he is an ordinary hero, as are all the men who endure corruption, poor pay and appalling conditions within the Egyptian railways and challenge this, constantly under the watchful eyes of the languorous, smiling security officer and fully aware of the consequences of disturbing the snake.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Fe baytoona regl
Having a mother in the house has proved highly inimical to blogging, and in fact to all and any activity outside:
Watching the Fatafeat cookery channel
Listening to complaints about dust
Listening to complaints about lack of grandchildren
Listening to snoring
She watched Bored at the Ring one night while I sat behind her, trying to block it out, and for two hours she delivered a series of remarks addressed to no one. I noted them down, for posterity:
Look at the power of the ring.
Oh no! Haye7’osho el myya! [They’ll go into the water]
Quick! Quick! Quick! Quick!
Dah ye7’awwaf sheklo dah [He’s frightening, that one]
Ya boy. [Jesus he’s ugly]
Yeeee. Oh my God. Look what he’s doing to him.
Ah look a bird took him away. That’s good.
“The Shire”
Hmmm…Viiiiiiiggo.
She’s got a marvellous voice.
Ya ommy. [Yikes]
No, it’s evil.
Yeeee 7aram. We23oo. [Poor things, they fell]
Fatafeat in particular has been the soundtrack to this state visit, and the mother has been particularly delighted with Chef Andrew, a corpulent, Chavvish, red-haired individual who announces during trailers that he is ‘masry-canady’ [Egyptian-Canadian] and that ‘el 3araby beta3na mkassar bass el 2akl mesh mkassar’ [our Arabic is crap but our food isn’t]. He also addresses his mother, saying ‘insh2allah enty mabsoota men el 2akl’ [I hope you’re happy with the food] which always sends my own mother into paroxysms of laughter mixed with choked comments about skipping the country because of the embarrassment of having a red-haired son who speaks appalling Arabic, which, quite frankly, is rich coming from her.
Her second favourite channel after Fatafeat is, inevitably, Rotana Zaman [Rotana Yesteryear]. For the first two weeks whenever she put it on she would cry out in delight ‘Allah! Bossy ya Amnesiac, film 2adeem!’ [Oh how nice! Look, Amnesiac, an old film!] until she proved Pavlov right and noticed a pattern.
We had another houseguest during my mother’s visit, a long lost cousin who was born in Egypt but left decades ago and now resides in Miami. He wore slip-on loafers without socks, which I thought was only allowed if one is a member of Wham. He also sported a variety of violently-hued V-neck sweaters one of which, he remarked, is the exact same shade of orange as the uniform sported by employees of a rubbish collection service in Cairo.
My mother shares with me an urge to create codenames for people, and the cousin did not escape this affliction. She recycled an old joke which revolves around the film ‘fe baytoona raglun’ [there is a man in our house], replacing homograph ragl (man) with regl (leg). The cousin became known as regl, as in ‘howa regl fein?’ [where’s leg?] and regl kharrag [leg’s gone out]. It was all harmless fun and we thought that he had forgotten all his Arabic anyway until my mother witnessed him conversing with a gentleman from west Sudan. Sudanese Arabic to my ears often sounds like it is being spoken underwater, but alas Regl demonstrated an alarming proficiency.
Watching the Fatafeat cookery channel
Listening to complaints about dust
Listening to complaints about lack of grandchildren
Listening to snoring
She watched Bored at the Ring one night while I sat behind her, trying to block it out, and for two hours she delivered a series of remarks addressed to no one. I noted them down, for posterity:
Look at the power of the ring.
Oh no! Haye7’osho el myya! [They’ll go into the water]
Quick! Quick! Quick! Quick!
Dah ye7’awwaf sheklo dah [He’s frightening, that one]
Ya boy. [Jesus he’s ugly]
Yeeee. Oh my God. Look what he’s doing to him.
Ah look a bird took him away. That’s good.
“The Shire”
Hmmm…Viiiiiiiggo.
She’s got a marvellous voice.
Ya ommy. [Yikes]
No, it’s evil.
Yeeee 7aram. We23oo. [Poor things, they fell]
Fatafeat in particular has been the soundtrack to this state visit, and the mother has been particularly delighted with Chef Andrew, a corpulent, Chavvish, red-haired individual who announces during trailers that he is ‘masry-canady’ [Egyptian-Canadian] and that ‘el 3araby beta3na mkassar bass el 2akl mesh mkassar’ [our Arabic is crap but our food isn’t]. He also addresses his mother, saying ‘insh2allah enty mabsoota men el 2akl’ [I hope you’re happy with the food] which always sends my own mother into paroxysms of laughter mixed with choked comments about skipping the country because of the embarrassment of having a red-haired son who speaks appalling Arabic, which, quite frankly, is rich coming from her.
Her second favourite channel after Fatafeat is, inevitably, Rotana Zaman [Rotana Yesteryear]. For the first two weeks whenever she put it on she would cry out in delight ‘Allah! Bossy ya Amnesiac, film 2adeem!’ [Oh how nice! Look, Amnesiac, an old film!] until she proved Pavlov right and noticed a pattern.
We had another houseguest during my mother’s visit, a long lost cousin who was born in Egypt but left decades ago and now resides in Miami. He wore slip-on loafers without socks, which I thought was only allowed if one is a member of Wham. He also sported a variety of violently-hued V-neck sweaters one of which, he remarked, is the exact same shade of orange as the uniform sported by employees of a rubbish collection service in Cairo.
My mother shares with me an urge to create codenames for people, and the cousin did not escape this affliction. She recycled an old joke which revolves around the film ‘fe baytoona raglun’ [there is a man in our house], replacing homograph ragl (man) with regl (leg). The cousin became known as regl, as in ‘howa regl fein?’ [where’s leg?] and regl kharrag [leg’s gone out]. It was all harmless fun and we thought that he had forgotten all his Arabic anyway until my mother witnessed him conversing with a gentleman from west Sudan. Sudanese Arabic to my ears often sounds like it is being spoken underwater, but alas Regl demonstrated an alarming proficiency.
Monday, February 25, 2008
His parents wanted him to be a pimp
Overheard at doctors' protest about wages:
MAN: Ana 3owez afham ya Meneim...enta aih bezzabt...[I want to know what you are exactly, Meneim].
MENEIM:...
MAN: Maba7ess?...Sa7afy?... [Police investigator?..Journalist?]
MENEIM: La2, doctor lel assaf. [No. I'm a doctor, alas].
MAN: Ana 3owez afham ya Meneim...enta aih bezzabt...[I want to know what you are exactly, Meneim].
MENEIM:...
MAN: Maba7ess?...Sa7afy?... [Police investigator?..Journalist?]
MENEIM: La2, doctor lel assaf. [No. I'm a doctor, alas].
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Bread & butter II + omm-nipresence
Here I talk about the excellent Metro, Egypt's 1st graphic novel for adults, and its author Magdy el Shafee. Magdy very kindly gave me a lift back to civilisation from City Very Far Stars, but only after we had found his car, which he apparently frequently loses within the bowels of the megamall. Luckily, he found it quite quickly - unlike the last time, when he spent half an hour looking for it.
This is an article about a young man who went into the notorious Omraneyya police station and was dumped, unconscious, in the street two days later. He subsequently died of the injuries he sustained while inside the police station.
Here I eat delicious food while being watched by a psycho elephant.
Also, today I perused the spam on my Amnesiac.inanities gmail account while the matriarch was talkingat to me, wearing a plastic shower cap in preparation for her ablutions.
FACT: she put on said appendage at 1 p.m. GMT + 2, and had her shower at 2.30 p.m. GMT + 2.
Now my mother is a wonderfully entertaining, lovely, human being but has the female tendency to go on and on and on about lost necklaces and washing machines while her interlocuteur is clearly engaged in something complex and involved like separating genuine emails from offers of penis extensions or large sums of cash from terminally ill minor dictators.
This aural assault compromised my mail scanning abilities and, as a result, I pressed 'empty spam' just as my eye caught a glimpse of 'Alia' (I think) and 'hi' and 'blog' and no mention of the word penis, and alas away it went into the cyber ether.
Inadvertendly deleting emails from people who have taken the time to write to me gives me a pain similar to that which was produced the time I dropped a mobile down a toilet in Luxor, so Alia (if indeed I read the name right) re-send, bitte schon.
This is an article about a young man who went into the notorious Omraneyya police station and was dumped, unconscious, in the street two days later. He subsequently died of the injuries he sustained while inside the police station.
Here I eat delicious food while being watched by a psycho elephant.
Also, today I perused the spam on my Amnesiac.inanities gmail account while the matriarch was talking
FACT: she put on said appendage at 1 p.m. GMT + 2, and had her shower at 2.30 p.m. GMT + 2.
Now my mother is a wonderfully entertaining, lovely, human being but has the female tendency to go on and on and on about lost necklaces and washing machines while her interlocuteur is clearly engaged in something complex and involved like separating genuine emails from offers of penis extensions or large sums of cash from terminally ill minor dictators.
This aural assault compromised my mail scanning abilities and, as a result, I pressed 'empty spam' just as my eye caught a glimpse of 'Alia' (I think) and 'hi' and 'blog' and no mention of the word penis, and alas away it went into the cyber ether.
Inadvertendly deleting emails from people who have taken the time to write to me gives me a pain similar to that which was produced the time I dropped a mobile down a toilet in Luxor, so Alia (if indeed I read the name right) re-send, bitte schon.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Luckily, she didn't ask if they had any Swedes instead
My mother - who is currently lighting up Egypt with her presence – was propositioned only five days into her trip here, which isn’t bad for a senior citizen.
I was not privy to the exchange, because I was slightly ahead of her in a foggy rage after madam refused to get in a flamin taxi and I was forced to carry home industrial size bottles of bleach and General detergent. Apparently, some bloke asked her, “3owzeen 3arab?” [do you want Arabs?] Was it the attractive 45 degree tilt of my right shoulder? Or my mother’s purple duvet coat?
It might have had something to do with the newly polished state of both our heads, for less than an hour earlier we had been at the barbers. We went to one of those super duper extra posh places where woman call their hairdressers ‘cheri’ and don’t take their sunglasses off when they’re having their hair washed.
Getting my hair cut is just above dying in the list of things I least like doing and last week’s visit confirmed its excruciating painfulness. I was given to Ihab, who was a queen of momentous proportions and pronounced his Ts like ‘chee’ without any hint of irony. He lamented my scalp’s sad state of disrepair (which had become apparent when two people were required to comb it. My hair has recently acquired the texture of hangers stuck together). ‘Entchee mohmela sha3rek’ [you’re neglecting your hair] Ihab admonished me through pursed lips, before attempting to persuade me to cut a layered fringe.
I was then forced to stand up and not allowed to move my head while he attacked it with scissors and violently swung my face back into position whenever it moved a millimetre and told me that he had entered makeup artistry and hairdressing because ‘ana fanaan wel wesh tableau’ [I’m an artist and the face is a canvas] to which I had nothing at all to respond with and weakly asked if I could sit down.
I thought the mental and physical torture would end when I eventually did sit down. Alas not. While using his hairdryer to give my scalp 3rd degree burns he asked me ‘entchee 3arfah laih lazem takhchee balek men sha3rek?’ [do you know why you should take care of your hair?] ‘3alashan atgowwez?’ [so I can get married?] I mumbled thinking that any old crap would end the conversation. He looked at me in the mirror scornfully and said ‘Maho ana mesh 3owez atgowwez wana wakhed baaly men sha3ry’ [I don’t want to get married and I take care of my hair] – which was debatable because he had the beginnings of a mullet. It turned out that we should take care of our hair because if we don’t take care of our hair the split ends creep up and up entangle themselves round our brains while we sleep and we are cast out of respectable society as a result and forced to live with woman who have moustaches.
Ihab got his revenge in the end, when I made the fatal mistake of allowing him to blow-dry my hair as he saw fit. The result is not something I wish to dwell on, but suffice to say my mother’s comments were: “did you mean it to look like that?” and “hello, Farah Fawcett gone wrong!”
She herself ended up with a Hilary Clinton helmet-style hairdo and serves her right.
I recovered from the hair experience by going to watch a Nubi vs. Sa3di soundclash in Wikalet el-Ghoury. It was DOUBLE WOWZERS BLAZERS and involved loads of drumming and mawwal and Nubi dancing and bafflingly, all this wickedness was for zero pounds and null pence.
Here are some pictures what I took with my camera. Notice the 4th picture, where the man in the foreground with his back to the camera is about to take a free kick, and the bloke on the right is protecting the crown jewels.
I was not privy to the exchange, because I was slightly ahead of her in a foggy rage after madam refused to get in a flamin taxi and I was forced to carry home industrial size bottles of bleach and General detergent. Apparently, some bloke asked her, “3owzeen 3arab?” [do you want Arabs?] Was it the attractive 45 degree tilt of my right shoulder? Or my mother’s purple duvet coat?
It might have had something to do with the newly polished state of both our heads, for less than an hour earlier we had been at the barbers. We went to one of those super duper extra posh places where woman call their hairdressers ‘cheri’ and don’t take their sunglasses off when they’re having their hair washed.
Getting my hair cut is just above dying in the list of things I least like doing and last week’s visit confirmed its excruciating painfulness. I was given to Ihab, who was a queen of momentous proportions and pronounced his Ts like ‘chee’ without any hint of irony. He lamented my scalp’s sad state of disrepair (which had become apparent when two people were required to comb it. My hair has recently acquired the texture of hangers stuck together). ‘Entchee mohmela sha3rek’ [you’re neglecting your hair] Ihab admonished me through pursed lips, before attempting to persuade me to cut a layered fringe.
I was then forced to stand up and not allowed to move my head while he attacked it with scissors and violently swung my face back into position whenever it moved a millimetre and told me that he had entered makeup artistry and hairdressing because ‘ana fanaan wel wesh tableau’ [I’m an artist and the face is a canvas] to which I had nothing at all to respond with and weakly asked if I could sit down.
I thought the mental and physical torture would end when I eventually did sit down. Alas not. While using his hairdryer to give my scalp 3rd degree burns he asked me ‘entchee 3arfah laih lazem takhchee balek men sha3rek?’ [do you know why you should take care of your hair?] ‘3alashan atgowwez?’ [so I can get married?] I mumbled thinking that any old crap would end the conversation. He looked at me in the mirror scornfully and said ‘Maho ana mesh 3owez atgowwez wana wakhed baaly men sha3ry’ [I don’t want to get married and I take care of my hair] – which was debatable because he had the beginnings of a mullet. It turned out that we should take care of our hair because if we don’t take care of our hair the split ends creep up and up entangle themselves round our brains while we sleep and we are cast out of respectable society as a result and forced to live with woman who have moustaches.
Ihab got his revenge in the end, when I made the fatal mistake of allowing him to blow-dry my hair as he saw fit. The result is not something I wish to dwell on, but suffice to say my mother’s comments were: “did you mean it to look like that?” and “hello, Farah Fawcett gone wrong!”
She herself ended up with a Hilary Clinton helmet-style hairdo and serves her right.
I recovered from the hair experience by going to watch a Nubi vs. Sa3di soundclash in Wikalet el-Ghoury. It was DOUBLE WOWZERS BLAZERS and involved loads of drumming and mawwal and Nubi dancing and bafflingly, all this wickedness was for zero pounds and null pence.
Here are some pictures what I took with my camera. Notice the 4th picture, where the man in the foreground with his back to the camera is about to take a free kick, and the bloke on the right is protecting the crown jewels.
Monday, February 11, 2008
We're Ghana party*
I have never, ever seen anything as bonkers as last night’s post-African Cup glory celebrations, which I (forcibly, given that we couldn't move the car for two hours after the match) enjoyed in the vast boulevard of Nasr City’s Abbass el Akkad Street.The game itself we watched on a TV on top of a fridge in a Shisha den with pretensions of being a Parisian café. It was called Excellan, and wasn’t at all.
But who cares about pizzas which made Umm Nakad vomit and orders which never arrived when one is watching the pride of Egypt win! It was a fantastic game, despite Metaab’s appalling miss. I have always previously turned a blind eye to the fact that Metaab is actually quite a poor player because he has such lovely hair, but can no longer continue to do so with a clear conscience.
Superstar Abu Trika! Wael scary Gomaa! Zedan and his 90s rapper hairdo! Hagary and his fantastic
It was during the awards ceremony that an uprising without the violence or regime change erupted outside. In the space of approximately ten minutes the four lane street was brought to an absolute halt, choked with flag-waving, roaring madmen, a bit like 7eyna Meysara without the misery. I had thought that - being of British heritage - I knew everything there was to know about post-match frenzied lunacy, but yesterday’s celebrations were of a different nature altogether.
There was a surreal quality to it, the black, white and red of hundreds of flags drifting through the darkness, suddenly illuminated by the flame from the impromptu torch of an aerosol can’s spray set ablaze upwards into the sky. And through these lights thousands upon thousands of people walking and dancing and singing and charging through the streets to a symphony of ole ole ole, and masr…masr.I saw women sitting on car roofs clutching babies as the cars paraded through the streets, a young man dragged along the ground behind a speeding car until he conceded defeat and released his grip and rolled to a halt, six children sitting in the boot of a car while in front an entire family clapped and cruised their way through the crowds, a topless man dancing to sha3by music on the roof of a car, two men smoking on the top of a 50 metre high advertising hoarding, a man sitting on the bonnet of a car as it sped along October Bridge at at least 50 km per hour.
It is not an exaggeration to say that yesterday the populace took over the streets in a night of organised and markedly police-free chaos. I didn’t see a single policeman yesterday night, not even a police car. Compare this with the protest I had attended earlier that afternoon, when a doctors’ protest (which was attended by perhaps 60 mostly middle-aged, extremely sedate, protestors) apparently required some 300 plus riot police.
How is it that thousands of young men in a state of heightened excitement can take to the streets without at least a few acts of major vandalism/physical assault occurring? Is it because alcohol is (mostly) taken out of the equation? I couldn’t help but compare with the UK, where football matches require major police mobilisation to control and contain the inevitable fallout afterwards.
Perhaps it’s because Egypt’s young people are so used to being watched and patrolled by an intrusive and controlling state apparatus that simply descending into the streets en masse and shouting and dancing is enough to placate the stifled instinct for rebellion which surely must exist.
Or perhaps it’s because last night we could for once say that we love Egypt because of something, rather than despite everything.
*Post title is unabashed recycling of an earlier post's title. Inability to resist poor wordplay yet again prevails.
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