Harrying the marrying

Amnesiac is in a taxi with associates on the October Bridge on a balmy, breezy night.

The moustachioed, bawdy taxi driver slows down as he passes a wedding in order to inspect the couple who are standing against the bridge’s railing encircled by three girls on a moped, a video camera and pounding music.

Driver [on his horn, congratulationary, looking intently through passenger window]: Teeet teeet tet tet teeet

Pause.

Driver: Aih dah! El 3aroosa wa7shah gedddddddan. [Blimey! The bride is reallyyyy ugly!]

Ya saaater! [Bloody hell!]

Laih yabny keda?!? [Why'd you do it son?]

Asta3’for Allah el 3azeem. [May God forgive me]

Pause. Driver exits bridge onto Corniche.

Driver: La2 bass kaanet wa7sha fe3lan. [She really was ugly]

El masal y2olak aih: ‘Ya wa7’ed el 2erd 3ala maalo, yero7 el maal we yefdal el 2erd 3ala 7aalo.’ [As the saying goes: choose the monkey cos of his wealth and the wealth will go and you'll be left with the monkey]

Ya3ni law heya keda ba3d el coiffeer ommal 2ablaha sheklaha kaan 3amel ezzay? [If she looks like this after the hairdressers what did she look like before?]

3andina el 7areem wa7shah bass mesh keda ya rabby. [Where I'm from women are ugly but by God not like that]

Labour unrest has minimal effect on economy, say experts

Originally published in Daily News Egypt

During a question and answer session broadcast recently, Gamal Mubarak was asked why people continue to queue for hours for government-subsidized bread despite government promises that its free-market policies will transform the economy.

Mubarak, general secretary of the ruling National Democratic Party’s Policy Committee, pointed to the Chinese experience where, he said, the transition from a state-directed economy to free market policies has not been without teething pains: results cannot be expected immediately.

However, he failed to mention that China’s privatization process has been accompanied by a surge of industrial action instigated by migrant workers whose economic circumstances force them to accept nightmarish employment conditions in sweatshops.

There are clear parallels between the Chinese scenario and the situation in Egypt, itself in the throes of the transition to a neo-liberal economy initiated after its 1991 structural adjustment program agreements with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The privatization process has necessarily meant reduced government investment in, and the sell-off of, Egypt’s previously dominant public sector. This has translated into job losses and reduced job security for Egypt’s industrial workers, some of whom have been forced to seek precarious employment in the newly-expanded private sector.

Workers at a labor rights workshop attended last month by Daily News Egypt made reference to a resignation form workers in some privately-owned companies are routinely made to sign at the start of their employment.

The date is left blank and filled in by management as necessary, allowing companies to ‘legitimately’ dismiss employees at will, with minimal or zero compensation.

Joel Beinin, a professor of history at Stanford University and director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo, says that the free market policies introduced over the past two decades has not translated into enhanced standards of living for the majority of Egyptians.

“The main cause [of industrial unrest] is the neo-liberal agenda which is creating a new Egypt for 10 percent of the population while disenfranchising industrial workers and white collar employees, especially those in the diminishing public sector,” Beinin says in an article published in Le Monde Diplomatique this month.

This is particularly apparent at the moment as Egypt grapples with the fallout from the international wheat crisis.

Diminishing bread supplies (millions of Egyptians living below the poverty line depend on government-subsidized bread) and skyrocketing inflation led to an uprising in the industrial Delta town of Mahalla on April 6 and 7, during which thousands of Mahalla residents protested against rising food prices. A 15-year-old boy was killed while standing on the balcony of his home, allegedly by security forces using live ammunition.

It is unsurprising that this took place in Mahalla, home to the Ghazl El-Mahalla textile factory whose six-day December 2006 strike (over 20,000 workers went on strike) is credited with instigating the nearly 600 incidents of industrial action the country witnessed in 2007.
Journalists Mostafa Bassiouny and Omar Said suggest in a study of industrial action during the course of 2007 that workers strikes between December and September alone translate into the loss of nearly 648 million work hours.

Beinin suggests that Mahalla is significant because of its legacy of spearheading industrial action.
“There is no doubt that Mahalla has a huge significance,” Beinin told Daily News Egypt. It is the biggest industrial enterprise in Egypt and the first nationalized enterprise.”

“When workers in Mahalla went on strike in 1947, their gains were eventually shared by other textile workers,” Beinin continued.

The strike planned for April 6 at the city’s Misr Factory collapsed through a combination of divisions among worker and security body interference.

Keen to placate workers — and by extension angry Mahalla residents — a delegation led by Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif went to Mahalla on April 8 and announced that workers in the Misr Factory would receive a month’s bonus. Textile workers in other companies would receive a 15-day bonus.

But how much economic influence do Egypt’s workers now yield?

Tagammu Party economic expert Gouda Abdel Khaleq suggests that economic restructuring has weakened their influence.

“The power of trade unions has been on the decline for the past 20 to 30 years,” Abdel Khaleq told Daily News Egypt.

“Two factors are important here. Firstly, there is the fact that trade unions have been under state control since 1952, and secondly, the impact of neo-liberal policies — the new industrial sectors are not unionized.”

The government seeks to encourage foreign direct investment through the establishment of industrial zones.

The Qualified Industrial Zone (QIZ) in areas such as Cairo’s 10th Ramadan City, Suez and the coastal governorate of Damietta attract foreign investors because of the favorable trade terms and their proximity to the European market.

EFG-Hermes economist Mohamed Abu Basha says that foreign investment is primarily in these as yet, non-unionised areas. “As a developing country in its early stages of attracting foreign investment the priority is to attract as much as you can — particularly given that we are trying to diversify out of petroleum-directed FDI because it’s capital intensive and doesn’t provide employment opportunities. … There are no direct benefits for the people,” Abu Basha told Daily News Egypt.

Abu Basha suggests that the wave of industrial action Egypt saw in 2007 had little effect on investor activity in Egypt.

“Strikes are of minimal concern to investors. It doesn’t affect them directly because it doesn’t affect the budget deficit — their main concern. This is evident by the fact that money kept coming into the country during 2007.”

“The events of Mahalla were of little concern to investors because they occurred in the context of an international crisis,” Abu Basha continued.Beinin confirms the limited effect that strikes have had on the economy.

“Labor unrest clearly hasn’t had any effect on macroeconomic indicators, which have continued to grow over the past three years.”

However, he qualifies this by pointing out that “a good part of what is sustaining GDP is both not self-sustaining, and outside the purview of the labor movement.”

Beinin points to the sale of the public sector and the construction boom caused by the upper classes’ demand for luxury housing and gated communities as examples of non-sustainable GDP income.

He suggests that this “raises question marks about the success of Egypt’s neo-liberal economic policy.”

This month the government announced a 30 percent increase in the wages of public sector employees, just days before a general strike planned for May 4. On May 6, a bill was approved which eliminated or reduced energy subsidies and increased the price of fuel, a move which critics warned would exacerbate already steep inflation and eliminate the arguably notional benefits of the 30 percent rise.

Is this series of seemingly contradictory, perhaps even knee-jerk, decisions — taken in the context of increasing economic hardship for the majority of the population — an indication that government policy is unable to shelter the country from the vicissitudes of the global economy?

Abu Basha thinks not.“The economy has been continuously growing at seven percent with some setbacks in the form of a wave of inflation in 2004, food subsidy cuts in 2006 and food price increases this year.”

“People will not feel the benefits of economic programs in three years: it takes eight years of continuous growth before this happens,” Abu Basha continued.
Beinin says that the number of Egyptians living below the poverty line has increased since the introduction of neo-liberal policies.

What does he envisage the future holds for the workers’ movement during the course of Egypt’s privatization?

“There are two possibilities: laborers will either be crushed for a period of time until capital has become established — as happened in China — or, depending on how long the current workers’ upsurge lasts, workers might be able to reach non-unionized people,” he suggests.

Even if this does not happen, and the negative impact of FDI (as experienced by workers in other developing countries) does not mobilize workers in the ever-expanding private sector to rally together, Beinin points to strikes in white-collar sectors, by teachers, doctors and civil servants, as evidence that even if industrial unrest does not influence the economy directly, it has the capability to inspire other movements.

“The tax collectors' strike, by white-collar workers, was twice the size of the Mahalla workers strike. It’s scary. They went on strike and the government responded quickly.

“Clearly, there are things which are indirectly or directly inspired by the workers’ movement.”

Maye3gibhoosh el 3agab

Here is a photo for Fully P of a menu in a Zamalek restaurant which induced a feeling which was half vomit half laughing. I bet there's a word for it in the German language, which seems to categorise every feeling known to man. Something like sickhahaschlafen, to laugh while containing vomit.

Anyway this might put an end to his moaning about this blog becoming too miserable. Chances are slim, however, for he is a moany old woman.

Caught

Today was Ibrahim Eissa’s appeal of his conviction on the farcical charge of undermining national stability by publishing articles suggesting that Hosny is not in the best of health.

The Abbaseyya court building is fairly typical of most of the court houses I have frequented in Cairo. The grey, monolithic prosaicness of its external architecture somehow embodies the unremitting, uninspired, functionality of the cases I seem to end up attending, many of which are brought by '7esba' (political score settling) lawyers: an unthinking, almost automaton, trigger response to perceived attacks on select interests which cares nothing about the nuances in the law, about justice and detail, and instead turns what should be a scalpel into a sledgehammer.

The building’s interior is testimony to the neglect, the relentless repetition of the everyday corvee and the death of inspiration which have given birth to cases such as that against Eissa. It is dark, suffocating, filthy, desperate. Half-torn Lawyers’ Syndicate election posters leer out from grubby corners while locked cupboards line corridor walls, stickers affixed on them reminding passers-by of the oneness of God. Snatched shots of offices reveal rooms bordered not with walls, but with case documents, floor to ceiling, hundreds upon hundreds of complaints and losses and gains towering over the clerk sitting in front of them.

The exception to this is the lawyers’ room, a corner of high animation, almost a boys’ club of tea drinking and joke making and strategy planning. A girl passes between them offering for sale a collection of law books. Nobody buys them.

Outside a toilet sits a middle-aged woman, on an upturned bucket. Next to her, above her on a chair, sits a girl of about 12 with short ingénue hair and earrings, eating a biscuit. She clutches the biscuit with both hands, her thin fingers are flayed oddly, her eyes follow movement slowly. The woman has tied her to the chair, a thin piece of beige string tied round her waist and affixed to the armrest. She admits you to the filthy toilet before returning to her bucket seat.

Later on someone – a foreigner who attended the trial - also needed to use the toilet. I took her to it and found the woman sitting next to the absent girl. She told me that the toilet was not for women’s use. But I’ve just used it I told her, growing increasingly agitated by the madness of her argument. I know, she said, but now it’s not for women. Go upstairs. We complied, went upstairs, and I looked back to see the women untie the girl and lead her by the rope into the toilet.

There were children in the courtroom, too, The two sons of a litigious lawyer who has already raised one unsuccessful criminal case against Eissa and so has decided to try his luck with a civil claim. There is something positively Dickensian about this man, his odd features, his obsequiousness to the court and disparagement of defence lawyers, the hunch of his shoulders as he addressed the judge, the black prayer beads wrapped around his left hand shining ostentiously as he gesticulated. His sons, he said, had been deeply disturbed by the reports published in El-Dostoor about the president’s health and had come crying to him in his office, traumatised. He requested that they be able to present their testimonies to the court.

Behind me his youngest son – who appeared to be six years old – slept. The older boy was perhaps ten and enjoying watching Dad at work like any child his age would.

There was an interesting moment shortly before the verdict (an adjournment) was pronounced when by chance and in the chaos the two boys and Eissa ended up sharing the same bench in the courtroom. Eissa looked over, caught the older boy’s eye. Ezzayak, he laughed. There was the briefest of hesitation, a charged confusion, but Eissa’s irresistible affability and – perhaps – the boy’s as yet unspoiled decency prevailed, and he responded: I’m fine.

There is undoubtedly something despicable about an apparatchik father prepared to use his own children as tools in his boot-licking campaign. But there is not a lot separating him from the beggars I saw outside the court house, one with a cleanly amputated foot. The bright red end of his leg burned fiercely in the sunshine. Further on was another beggar, with two symmetrical limbs missing. Exigent, impossible, circumstances call for the maiming of what is closest, seems to be the moral of the story.

Letter from Kamal El-Fayyoumy, Tareq Amin and Karim El-Beheiry to the Judges' Club

Below is my translation of a letter handed out today at a Journalists' Syndicate protest about the individuals still being detained in connection with the April 6th roundup.

The letter is to the Judges' Club which is their version of a syndicate.

The media's virtual silence about the continued detention of these men - compared with the media circus surrounding Israa Abdel Fattah's detention - is pretty marked, and pretty sad.

Letter to the Judges' Club

We, three political detainees, address the letter below to the Judges' Club and its head Zakareya Abdel Aziz from the Borg el-Arab Prison in Alexandria...

Dear Sir,

A week has passed on our hunger strike and we are extremely weak. We are appealing to you as the last and only resort for all who have suffered injustice in Egypt.

We would like in the beginning to correct certain information which has reached the press about our (the three of us) having been transferred to the prison hospital as a result of our hunger strike.

The truth is that we are still in prison after the administration refused to call an ambulance to take us to hospital, and as a result of the inability of Karim el-Beheiry and Tareq Amin to stand on their feet - as a result of their extreme weakness. Instead, a "nurse" was summoned to examine Karim, whose condition has seriously deteriorated.

We would like to know the reason why we remain in detention. We will continue the hunger strike until we either die or receive this information.

We were tortured in the state security headquarters in Mahalla on the 6th, 7th and 8th April. Officers tortured Karim using electricity while Tareq Amin and Kamal el-Fayyoumy were insulted verbally and physically assaulted. We then spent eleven days in Borg el-Arab prison in a cell with individuals with criminal convictions. When the Tanta court ordered that we be released we were held for four days in the El-Salam police station [noqtat shorta] situated between Mahalla and Tanta before we were taken to Borg el-Arab prison were we began our hunger strike.

From our detention cell, we call on you and all political currents to take action and apply pressure in order to secure the release of all those detained in connection with the events of Mahalla.

Signed

Kamal El-Fayyoumy, Tareq Amin, Karim El-Beheiry

Detained workers from Mahalla

Borg el-Arab Prison

Wing 22, Cell 5

Notworking

This unknown individual attempted to add me on Fartbook, no doubt as part of a sweep of females in the Egypt network. I liked his arresting combination of candour and misanthropy.


Mohamed H____
is fuck off.
Updated on Monday


Networks: Egypt
Sex: Male
Interested In: Women
Relationship Status: Single
Looking For: Friendship
Birthday: October 1
Political Views:Other



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Interests:cars
Favorite Music:Hip-Hop, Rock, Electronic, Jazz, Pop
Favorite TV Shows: mesh 3aref
Favorite Movies: tokyo dirft & kazblnka
Favorite Books:mesh ba7ab el books aslan
Favorite Quotes: mafesh aslan 7ad 3edel
About Me: ma7desh fahem 7aga



Glitter text: "Fucken love"

Panacea update

Here someone called Angus tells me off.

Panacea Day

Here's an article about Pangea Day which I endured last Saturday at the Pyramids, escaping death through exposure to both extreme cold and an Oprah to the power of 99 level of mawkish sentimentality. I witnessed Khaled Abol Naga say 'if I had a minute to send a message to the world, I'd send love. I am a man in love. And now here's Wust El Balad. They're in love, too!"

Also, he pronounced 'infamous' in-famous which was one of the few laughs of the evening. He seems a lovely bloke though does our Khaled.

Not being a woman of society, can someone please tell me whether such elitist, extreme differences in treatment of the VIPs and the rest is the norm?? i.e. sofas, free bar, waiter service for the VIPs and crap chairs and overpriced Hardees for the plebs.

For one day it’ll be like the world is sitting round a giant camp fire!” declared actress Lucy Liu at the start of Pangea Day on Saturday night.

How her words and the Pangea Day motto (“Pangea Day plans to use the power of film to bring the world a little closer together”) grated on the great unwashed masses without VIP passes who attended Pangea Day in Cairo.

People were brought together at the Pyramids, but rather in the way members of the nobility were forced to involuntarily come into contact with their vassals while surveying their lands. The organizers of Pangea Day were careful to ensure that not even this degree of fraternization occurred between the precious VIPs and the rest of us, the common ones who, alas, they had to invite because otherwise it would just be 150 people sitting on sofas in the desert. And that’s not very Pangea, is it!

Pangea is the name given to the world before the continental drift happened and all the countries of the world were still bonded together in one big blob.

American Egyptian documentary filmmaker (“Control Room”) and Pangea Day creator Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize in 2006, a $100,000 prize given by the annual Technology Entertainment Design conference, which grants winners “a wish to change the world.”

She used the prize to create a day on which locations in Cairo, Kigali, Rio de Janeiro, London, Los Angeles and Mumbai would be linked through four hours of films, music and "visionary speakers," broadcasted simultaneously across this war-torn feuding planet so that “people can see themselves through others, through the power of film” and focus on what they have in common, rather than what separates them.

Unfortunately, at the Pyramids the plebs were separated from their VIP pass-holding brethren by a barrier which herded them into a raised elevated platform behind the opulent VIP area immediately in front of the stage.

Such was the segregation that there were two separate entrances and two separate parking lots and, to rub in it even further, the organizers had for some reason known only to themselves placed the plebs’ chairs approximately 30 meters back from the barrier making it even more difficult to see the stage.

As is logical, the non-VIPs dragged their chairs over to the barrier and watched as below the VIPs sat in Shangri-la on their luxury sofas being fed sushi and alcoholic beverages by white-gloved waiters while we (ineluctably, because there was nothing else on offer and we were in the desert) ate curly fries and meat-based products from a fast-food chain which had erected a tent behind us.

Egyptian actor/TV host Khaled Aboul Naga cheered things up when he bounced on stage to briefly talk about the Pangea Day concept, which included a "world music" segment when bands from across the globe would perform. Egypt offered Wust El-Balad (scheduled performer Mohamed Mounir had cancelled at last minute) who sang a song about there being no black or white and no divisions between people.

It is difficult to overstate just how much the event’s organization lent a painful irony to the whole proceedings. This was possibly the single event where Cairo’s penchant for exclusivity — and exclusion — conflicted, violently, with the night’s ethos. It was like holding a Greenpeace annual conference in a nuclear power station.

Exhibit A: Shots of the audience were shown in all six cities. In Egypt these shots were restricted to the VIPs, ignoring the riff raff at the back almost entirely. Egypt was the sole location out of the six to feature such blatant severance.

Exhibit B: A short film in which we see men playing volleyball over a giant wall constructed on the US–Mexico border. The non-VIPs watch the VIPs eating sushi from the barrier like a load of Oliver Twists.

Some of the films — despite a few embarrassing technical glitches — were original and thought-provoking. The most outstanding offering was “Inja” (Dog), a film from South Africa directed by Steve Paslovsky.

Dog is an unusual exploration of the evils of apartheid. A young boy employed on a white Afrikaans farmer’s farm adopts a puppy for whom he makes a collar out of the rope used to hoist up a flag on the farm.

In the next scene the farmer instructs the boy to put the puppy in a sack before proceeding to kick him savagely while he tells the boy, “He must learn.”

He then instructs the boy to open the sack, despite the latter’s protests that the crying puppy would think it was him that beat him — which is in fact what happens, and the puppy grows into a dog which attacks black people.

The farmer eventually pays the price, however, when he has a heart attack in a field while erecting a fence with the boy who has now grown into an adult farmhand. When the farmhand attempts to approach the farmer in order to give him the pills which will save the dying man, he is prevented from doing so by the dog, which attacks him.

A poignant film from France showed a man who gets on an underground train and announces to the passengers that he is a single man looking for love and marriage and invites interested woman to get off at the next stop.

One woman follows the man’s speech avidly and rushes off at the next stop only to be told by the man through the window of the train, “Madame, it was a sketch…”

Pangea night was an occasion for finding and celebrating commonalities within the divisions which separate people while ignoring the reasons behind these divisions.

This was illustrated by a film called “Road Work” in which a US soldier in Iraq who photographed the aftermath of a fatal accident between a US army vehicle and a civilian car carrying a father and son.

The soldier reflects on the causes of the accident (“what if we had turned our headlights on?”) and compares the father’s grief with his own at the loss of his infant daughter. This is a very personal testimony, and, like all the films shown on Pangea Day, does not concern itself with bothersome details about political responsibility or finger-pointing. Rather, world evils such as war and hunger are painted over with the veneer of individual inspirational stories in a Live Aid fashion; only without the fundraising.

I suppose that there is a place for all this, but this type of hope-and-love peddling is not everyone’s cup of tea.

This writer and her companions were also not touched by the feelings of world unity described in personal testimonies on the Pangea Day website, but this may have had more to do with the event’s organization, or our stony hearts, rather than Pangea Day itself.

Fueling us

Around four months ago I was on a bus going from Dokki to the Mohandiseen end of Sudan Street. The bus was one of the privately-owned, medium-sized (i.e. not a microbus and not a big bus) vehicles which shuttle people around Cairo. That it was privately-owned is relevant here because of the fracas which developed when a woman got on insisted that she would only pay 25 piastres for her trip.

As far as I can tell, there is a degree of negotiation involved in the setting of fares on this buses which is absent from state-run bus services (the green buses of an identical size to the vehicle involved in this scenario charged a fixed fare of 1.25 LE for a ticket two weeks ago. This has no doubt changed after the fuel price increases. In contrast, privately-run buses and microbuses stagger fares according to the length of the passenger’s journey.) Flustered, and laden with bags, the woman got on and sent a 25 piastre note to the taabi3, the fare-collector, who in this case also happened to be the driver’s 12 or 13 year-old son.

The taabi3 - who was possibly the only endearing, non-surly, pubescent teenager in the world – politely told the woman that the fare was 50 piastres, prompting the woman to set him straight, in no uncertain terms. Baba, he said to his father, the woman says it’s only 25 piastres to Boula2. At this point the driver got involved via the medium of the inclined mirror above the windscreen which runs the width of the bus and which allows drivers to simultaneously drive, admonish passengers, talk to their taabi3 and ogle girls’ bottoms .

A noisy, tense discussion ensued between the driver and the woman, conducted through the mirror. The driver’s son, who clearly idolised his father, followed attentively, his eyes darting back and forth between the woman and his father as he chewed his fingernails. The woman - who found support in other passengers - would not be moved, and the driver eventually conceded defeat. I remembered the times as a child I had witnessed my own father involved in tests of will and thought how terrible it must have been for the kid to watch his father suffer such a public humiliation.

Interestingly, a woman got on a few minutes later with two kids in tow, one of whom had a birth defect in his hand and was unable to form words, communicating in sounds intelligible only to his mother. The family seemed to be friends with the driver, who resolutely refused to accept the woman’s attempts to pay their fares. The boy stood at the front of the bus behind the driver, smiling and fascinated by the view out of the windscreen, periodically calling out a sound to which his mother responded from the back of the bus aywa ya 7abiby, ana hena [yes darling, I’m here]. He made sounds at the other passengers, too, and at the driver, who smiled and laughed with him before helping him into the seat next to him where he pointed at things excitedly.

This is a long-winded illustration of what 25 piastres means, and why recent increases in the price of solaar (the fuel used to fill up buses) which have translated into a 25 piastre increase in the price of fares are such bad news. A seminar I went to yesterday said that the increase will add up to an extra 15 LE per month (0.25 x 2 x 7 x 4) on the transport costs of regular microbus users. Probably a conservative estimate, given that many commuters use more than two microbuses a day.

While my ability to comment on the sagacity of the price increases is to some extent compromised by an incomplete understanding of economics, I think even a moron could tell you that:

1. To increase the price of a transport fuel will cause the price of everything to increase. This is disastrous in the context of already high inflation.

2. To raise public sector wages by 30% one day and then two days later wipe out the notional benefits of this wage increase with a package of price-increase measures is at best contradictory, at worst insulting. The government claims that it has had to raise revenue in this way to cover the 30% wage increase. This is either duplicitous or stupid or both. An economist in the seminar yesterday suggested that it was intended to send the message, ‘look what happens if we raise wages.’

3. The notional 7 percent growth of the economy brought about by neo-liberal economic policies has not translated into better standards of living for all. The World Bank estimates that 23% of Egyptians live below the poverty line.

4. The government individuals who made this decision don’t know the meaning of 25 piastres. Other than when they hand a 25 piastre note to the child cleaning their windscreen at a traffic light, possibly.

I spoke to an investment economist the other day and he was telling me about how Egypt’s economic policy is primarily focused on attracting foreign direct investment into the country. Now proponents of FDI champion it because, they say, it’s a cheap way of bringing industrial expertise and infrastructure into the country and raising revenue i.e. the foreign company builds a factory using local material and then employs, trains and passes on skills to the local workforce. Furthermore, they argue, unlike other forms of investment it’s less easy for the foreign investors to pack up and bugger off at the first signs of economic or other forms of instability in the host country.

Here comes the however.

However, sharing skills with the developing world is never the motivation of a multinational which sets up shop abroad, as is self-evident. It is seeking low production costs, cheap labour and weak or non-existent labour regulations which allow it to suck its workers dry without having to worry about troublesome health insurance payments or toilet breaks or severance remuneration or workers’ need to rest or earn enough to send their children to hospital. Unsurprisingly, it is usually countries with repressive political regimes which attract multinational investors.

Industrial zones in Egypt such as the QIZ areas are highly non-unionised: I’ve heard that there is not a single workers’ union in the 6th October industrial zone – can anyone confirm this? A compliant workforce is all part of the game plan of course, and it is unlikely that strong labour regulations will be put in force to protect the ever growing numbers who will join the private sector as Egypt continues to sell off its public sector.

It will be interesting to see how the Egyptian labour movement responds to this new threat and how it changes the dynamics of employer – syndicate negotiations. (Syndicates are all members of the state-controlled Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions).

I asked the economist why the allegedly growing economy had not translated into a better standard of living for Egyptians whose economic suffering is increasing. He was phlegmatic, and pointed to the depreciation of the pound, the international wheat crisis and the wave of inflation and said that Egyptians wouldn’t feel the benefit of Egypt’s new economic policies immediately.

It’s become trendy in recent years to talk about ‘responsible, ethical capitalism’, Adherents of this theory suggest that capitalism is capable of being a force for good, capable of changing people’s lives. The problem is that even before we get to the economic, mathematic calculation reasons why this is mostly stuff and nonsense, we have to acknowledge that human beings and their troublesome profit-reducing needs don’t even enter into the capitalism equation. The evidence of this is currently being felt in microbuses across Egypt.

The day Egypt was stillborn

I spent yesterday afternoon roaming around downtown Cairo looking for the general strike that never was.

Facebook warriors had announced that yesterday – Hosny’s 80th birthday – a(nother) general strike would be held and that everyone would wear black, the sequel to April 6th, when opposition groups attempted to mobilise the masses in protest at rising food prices, corruption…etc. The streets were empty on the 6th but - as yesterday proved - many people stayed home not in protest, but because televised Interior Ministry threats against ‘troublemakers’ had led them to conclude that it was best just to stay indoors and keep out of the way.

There is also of course the Mahalla element: workers at the Ghazl Mahalla factory were going to strike on the 6th and this would seem to account for the momentum which the 6th had and yesterday lacked. And then there is the impact made by the Mahalla uprising, brutally-contained street protests which eyewitnesses agree occurred spontaneously and independently of the clarion calls made by the cyber leaders of the virtual revolution.

Yesterday was business as normal, apart from the green central security trucks parked conspicuously in roads leading to the public spaces which host political protests. Soldiers - seemingly the only people wearing black today - sweltered both inside and outside the trucks. I have always found it interesting that the only difference between these vehicles and those used to transport prisoners, is 1. their colour and 2. the fact that the door at the back is locked when prisoners are inside and left open for soldiers. All in the same wheeled boat.

A line of thin soldiers stood in front of the green vans outside the Lawyers’ Syndicate in their too-big black spacemen helmets, clutching their thick-barrelled teargas guns. Opposite, on the Syndicate’s steps, a handful of people chanted, guided by the apparition of a Moses-lookalike in white who raised his arms above his head and asked Mobarak ‘e7na weladak wala kelabak?’ [are we your children or your dogs?]

Alas nothing at all was parted when revolutionary Moses raised his arms, not the ocean of traffic which surged through Galaa Street nor the plain-clothed thugs stationed outside the Syndicate and paid LE 20 a time to knock people about at protests as necessary.

Much has been made of the role of new technology in political activism: Facebook in particular has suddenly turned into a revolutionary freedom fighter after for so long being a fatuous, image-obsessed piece of nonsense: a bit like Angelina Jolie, perhaps. It is terribly a la mode at the moment to theorise about what this means for the Egyptian political resistance and modes of dissent, and I think today’s non-events will have exploded a few nascent theories.

Which is not to say that Facebook isn’t useful, practically speaking. The crusade currently being led against it in the state-controlled press, and rumours that the government will block it demonstrate that it has the potential to be a useful tool, but in the same way that radio transmitters were of use to the French Resistance: there has to be something to transmit in the first place, someone to transmit to, and an unwavering commitment to transmitting it.

There is much to be said for a forum which allows people to gather in a way they are from forbidden from in the real world but it’s a serious error to mistake this for mobilisation, or even commitment. Israa Abdel Fattah, the unfortunate and unwitting moderator of an April 6th Facebook group who was arrested and placed in political detention for 15 days demonstrates this.

She was lionized while incarcerated, made into a symbol of Egypt the oppressed woman, only to emerge from detention to announce that she had ‘repented,’ and thanked the authorities for treating her so well in prison. She has a sad little piece in El Dostoor today under the headline ‘me? In political detention?! Who am I to be in political detention?!’ Aung San Syu Kyi this is not, and her experience illustrates the crucial difference between bandwagon and conviction politics.

A middle-aged man I was speaking to the other day expressed his admiration of this new generation of technical pioneers. He singled out Wael Abbas for particular praise, saying that Abbas had accomplished in one year what he couldn’t do in twenty, and accused members of his generation who attack Facebook crusaders, of ‘jealousy’. I pointed out that members of my own generation were equally critical of them (Facebookers, not Abbas); of their lack of a clear agenda and disconnection from reality and real people (how many of Egypt’s 80 million people own a computer, never mind are members of Facebook?) He responded by saying that at least they were doing something, making the regime take notice, and predicted that eventually a movement with clear objectives would emerge and more importantly, credible leaders to guide it.

Perhaps, but it will take more than this to shake people out of the catatonic state nearly 30 years of oppression and corruption have produced. How yesterday’s Al Ahram headline (a full-page picture of Hosny with the headline ‘the day Egypt was reborn’) did not single-handedly provoke a revolution is beyond me, but then it should be given a prize for combining historical revisionism with such nauseating levels of sycophancy. In this it is only rivalled by an article published the day before yesterday entitled ‘why we love you Mobarak’.

This charade, combined with Mahalla and the ongoing associated administrative detentions, combined with the prosecution of journalists in cases brought by government lackeys, combined with never-ending police brutality, combined with fear which sits on your chest like a stone is what it means to live in a police state. I have only just began to realise what this actually means (and only very remotely) because of my job, and now have incredible respect for the people who not only risk everything through political dissent, but have the motivation and the strength to keep fighting day after day after day in the face of such ugliness and more than anything, such stupidity.

It is perhaps its stupidity which is the worst thing about this regime - stupidity which manifests itself in its lack of vision, inability to formulate policies to feed its people and its short-sightedness - but which are also evident in the pointless petty harassment, the nonsensical rules which dictate the minutiae of everyday life while buildings collapse and small children fix cars twelve hours a day.

I was reminded of this the other day when Muslim Brotherhood member Abdel Moneim Mahmoud was detained at Cairo Airport and banned from travelling to a conference on press freedom in Morocco (state security have a list of the names of individuals banned from leaving the country). Completely pointless, and if its image they’re worried about, the incident generated more bad press for Egypt than anything he could have possibly said in Morocco.

Yet again too disorganised to send anything on time

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

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 of hording 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.

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].

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.

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.

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:

Protest against Oppression & Corruption

Tomorrow's peaceful strike, Sunday April 6, 2008

Cairo, April 5 2008,

No Work

No University
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.

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.

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.