Author: Occupied Cairo

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Communiqués

The regime’s dirty tricks will be its own destruction

No one saw it coming; when protesters took to the streets on January 25th no one expected that less than two weeks later the demonstrations would bring the 30-year autocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak almost to its knees.

And yet its brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters and the lengths it was willing to go to in order to decimate the will of the Egyptian people who had taken to the streets indicates that the continued presence of this regime is unsustainable.

Not that it was ever the most benign of regimes at the best of times, with a brutal human rights record and a curtailing of personal and civil liberties the norm. However, the scandalously dirty tricks put into play since Jan 25th would spell the end of any government in any country in the world. The fact that it hasn’t so far in Egypt is an indictment of the spineless attitude of the international community towards their strongman Mubarak.

It began with the attacks on protesters throughout Cairo on Jan 25th who finally converged on Tahrir Square, after which security forces blasted almost 500 tear gas canisters into the square to break up the protests. They must have thought that would be the end of it. It wasn’t.

As the protests continued, and the people refused to be cowed into submission, greater steps were taken to suppress what must have been at that point no more than an annoyance to the regime. It culminated by Friday Jan 28th into a complete shutdown of the Internet and mobile phone communications.

Consider for a second a government that is willing to do that to an entire population. An act of sabotage by a country’s own government, over the gathering of an amount of people not out of place at a Rock festival. All that was left was for the government to shut down landlines, television, water and electricity to put Egyptians into the Stone Age. One suspects the only reason they didn’t was so that more people didn’t take to the streets. Had they felt it would have worked, they’d have done so.

Here the resilience and kindness of the Egyptian people came to the fore, with people in the area opening their homes to protesters to use the landlines to call their families, supplying them with water, onions and vinegar to counter the effects of the tear gas.

This is a government that in recent years had prided itself on its modernity; its cheap rhetoric about the advancement of Egypt into the age of the Internet, foreign investment and prosperity a bombastic calling card for the puffed-out suited chests.

And that wasn’t the end of it. By Friday evening – after having failed to end the demonstrations with (American made) tear gas, water cannons and bullets – security forces disappeared en masse to leave the country in a chaotic void.

A video that surfaced later showed prisoners breaking out of a prison in Fayoum with security forces standing around and not intervening. Numerous reports of the looting that followed seemed to indicate that it was the work of government-affiliated baltagiya – or thugs. These thugs would also surface later in an even more outrageous maneuver.

The army took to the streets to restore order and a curfew was enforced. After the million-man march on Tuesday Feb 1 Mubarak gave a speech later that night in which he stated that he would not run again for President. Some Egyptians felt that now was the time to stop the protests, and for normal service to be resumed.

Less than 15 hours later government-sponsored armed thugs descended on Tahrir Square in another brutal attempt to crackdown on the protests. The army did next to nothing to stem the attacks, which led to an overnight battle where the protesters heroically and miraculously managed to keep control of Tahrir Square. By Thursday the death toll since Jan 25th was conservatively placed at 300 with another 5000 injured and thousands others detained. All violence was instigated by the regime, whether through the Interior Ministry’s security forces or the thugs that always rear their heads come election time.

Meanwhile, Egyptian State television continued to broadcast what can only be described as the news service from the Twilight Zone, a world where things that happening on the ground weren’t happening at all, or if they were, were the work of a surreptitious, foreign, sabotaging hand.

State television accused the Tahrir protesters of being foreign agents, seduced by foreign currency and KFC meals, oblivious to the fact that in the parliamentary elections last November an NDP candidate from Zamalek, Hisham Khalil, was buying votes with – you guessed it – KFC meals.

Accusing the protesters of being agents of Israel, America, Hamas and Hezbollah (figure out how that would make sense yourself) State TV also neglected to mention that Mubarak’s regime is a tremendously close ally of the US and that Israel was one of the few governments to staunchly support him, along with Silvio Berlusconi and Dick Cheney. A group of supporters to be proud of.

What arose from that State TV propaganda – masterminded by Information Minister Anas El-Fiqi – can only be described as a disgusting witch-hunt of journalists and foreigners in Egypt that led to the stabbing of Greek and Swedish photographers, and neighborhood watches suspecting even Egyptians of being foreigners and therefore in need of detainment. Not only was this a gross incitement of violence against innocent people on the part of El-Fiqi, the effects it will have on Egypt’s main source of income – tourism – remains to be seen but surely cannot augur well.

A girl who claimed that she was an activist who was trained by Israelis and Americans in Qatar to create chaos in Egypt aired on Mehwar TV in pixilated glory turned out to be a reporter for the newspaper “24 Hours” who had fabricated the story and has now been suspended.

State TV presenter Hala Fahmy resigned her post and headed to Tahrir Square, not before telling Al-Jazeera that El-Fiqi was personally involved with the thugs who attacked Tahrir Square on Wednesday Feb 2.

The treasonous behavior of the regime since Jan 25th makes it very difficult to stomach that it should remain in power for the next six months. It couldn’t be trusted prior to Jan 25th and its actions since have shown an utter callous disregard for the future of Egypt and its people; merely a stubborn resolve to cling to power at the expense of the country.

What also galls has been the reaction of Mubarak’s Western allies, whose pathetic role will not be forgotten in the annals of history nor by the Egyptian people. It is grossly insulting that a major reason for the reticence of Western governments to tell Mubarak to stand down for the benefit of Egypt is concern for Israel’s security. Again the Egyptian people come last. The support of citizens – and not governments – in the international community has been its one saving grace.

There is also a fear of an Islamist takeover in case Mubarak stands down. A cursory trip to Tahrir Square will show this to be an absurd notion. The protesters are a wide cross-section of Egyptians: young and old, religious and secular. And even if Egyptians do pick an Islamic government – which I personally believe will not happen – is that not democracy? One hopes that we hear the last of the lip service by American officials about democracy and human rights. When it comes down to it that is not what the US government will support in Egypt and the Middle East.

There is no great foreign-led conspiracy, it is the regime that has been behind the murder, terror and sabotage that has gripped Egypt since Jan 25th and it is that which makes their position untenable, irrespective of how successful they have been in pitting Egyptian against Egyptian as has been the case in some instances.

They are now paying lip service to reforms they forcibly withheld for three decades and are only seemingly giving in because of the efforts of the protesters and the ones who gave their lives for a better Egypt. They are not the ones who should be leading reforms, they should be held accountable for their actions since all this begun, not to mention before that.

The one source of optimism and hope is the people continuing to hold fast inside Tahrir Square, who have managed to overturn every negative perception of the Egyptian people as a passive, disheveled and unorganized populace. Standing side by side in solidarity, cleaning up the square it is in Tahrir where Egypt’s future should lie and it will be a gross miscalculation to think otherwise.

By Abdel-Rahman Hussein

source: The regime’s dirty tricks will be its own destruction | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=328

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Communiqués

On food

Food has always been an issue in Egypt, whether happy arguments such as who makes the best tameyya or koshari in town, or the persistent anxiety of Egyptians about food prices and how to make the means to buy enough food. Recently, with the events of the past weeks, I’ve been thinking about food quite often.


News about checkpoints almost always has to do with whether they will or will not allow food into Tahrir square at a given point. There seems to be no consistent policy for what is allowed in Tahrir and what isn’t (except for weapons, citizen checkpoints ensure that no weapons enter the square). One isn’t sure whether this is an intentional policy of irregularity and uncertainty or simply irregularity among the army soldiers at checkpoints acting on whims to the same effect. Similarly, there have been reports of confiscation and destruction of food by pro-Mubarak thugs, throwing bread into the Nile in what looks like a small scale scorched-earth tactic. At other times, such as “Bloody Wednesday,” besieged protestors had to time their entry and exit from the square carefully to avoid getting beaten or possibly killed on their way to get food.

The sharing of food within the square, partially a consequence of this forced supply shortage,  is similarly astonishing. Egyptians have a sense of hospitality tied to their food culture, and encountering anyone even a stranger while they eat you will likely be encouraged to join them and share their meal. This is largely rhetorical, of course, but I have no doubt that if you were to actually take someone up on this offer they would follow through. I don’t know that this speaks to some deep fact about the Egyptian people, that sort of essentialism has been disproven in many other ways these past two weeks. I think it’s more their knowledge of just how important food is, how vital it is when scarce. The encampment within Tahrir square has demonstrated and deepened this over and over in the past few weeks, illustrating not just scarcity in concentration but also generosity beyond what one would imagine.

Collections have gone around as people try to leave Tahrir to go buy snacks or sandwiches to bring back for everyone, and no one has any doubt or hesitation contributing. There’s not even a sense of charity, it’s something stronger and more profound. Everyone is hungry together and there’s the feeling that even if you don’t see the food bought then you may be paying for a later bite, or helping to prop up the strength of someone standing next to you in front of a banner or barricade.

I might end this post with a personal reflection, at risk of being maudlin. As I stood locking arms with two strangers in a ring formed around one of the makeshift forward clinics by the museum, a man came by with some sweets, breaking off a piece for each of us and either handing it to us or even putting it in some people’s mouths if we couldn’t reach for it. I hadn’t eaten all day, and not much in the past couple of days. Smelling it I felt hungry then for maybe the first time, and while I then felt weak and that I needed to eat, I almost couldn’t take it, refusing at first but giving in to his hospitable insistence. Who was I, and where do I come from that I deserve to share food with these people who have been fighting for so much longer than me, who’ve scraped together some of what little they may have had (particularly as they were now not working, and the hand-to-mouth connection was cut off). I wanted to cry right there, out of shame but also happiness; the former because I didn’t deserve this, and the latter because it came so freely and without reservation. Several other times people came by with food, water; a man offered us a half a piece, maybe less, of pita bread. It seemed no one would finish anything they started eating, knowing surely there was someone else to pass it to.

At another point later I shared some Koshari with a friend and another person. I couldn’t eat more than a couple bites before I felt full, and I remember taking up a spoonful from the plastic dish and just staring at it, looking intently at its contents and on the verge of thought but not thinking anything. I was glad to share these passing meals, I found it strange how good everything tasted, while nervous and tired, even without an appetite. As if this were not a time for food to taste good.

source: On food | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=318

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Communiqués

The political carnival

A revolutionary, organic, engaged, democratic space has emerged in Tahrir Square. Numbers swell and fall throughout the day, people come and go, but intense and sophisticated political engagement remains a fixture. From debates about the relative merits of parliamentary vs presidential systems, to proposals about consititutional reforms, to suggested programmes of political transition, there is only one thing on everyone’s mind. Some debates are held around the numerous microphones, with crowds cheering or booing the speaker’s proposals. Some are held in small circles on the ground that attract passers by eager to listen or voice an opinion, all are open to everyone to participate.

And as the square takes on a feeling of semi-permanence, representatives from all the other revolutionary factions in Egypt have arrived. Young men and women from Alexandria and Suez, from Mansoura and all across the country are settling down in Tahrir to contribute towards the building of a new democracy. In Alexandria, a chant doing the rounds is The Mandate is with Tahrir.

The question on everyone’s lips is how will a unified mandate emerge? Right now, no one knows for sure. But we do know two things. That whatever happens, for the first time in decades, there is a space in Egypt that is home to total freedom of thought and expression and political creativity. And that whatever mandate – or mandates – present themselves from the square, if they are not completely satisfying to the protestors, they won’t be going anywhere. A new society has taken root in Tahrir, and it wont be driven out until the people have won their freedom.

source: The political carnival | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=314

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Communiqués

The Dead and Wounded

Reports on casualties from the protests in Egypt vary between three points: the first being the underestimates of official sources within the Egyptian government, the second that of more reputable third parties such as the UN, and the third, unofficial figures likely true that are still higher. Just as much of the Egyptian population living in informal areas are not counted in population estimates, so they may be as invisible in their deaths. Many wounds as well, untreated or ignored as desperate protesters returned to the defense of their encampment, fall into the grey areas and peripheries of the counts. We often take these numbers (official or unofficial, listed or unlisted) as metrics of violence or ways to gauge the enormity of the situation, or as martyrs for a noble cause, or as tragic heroes of a a revolution. In the end though, the common denominator is that these people are dead, and the descriptions all fall short of the meaning of this, its outcomes, its effects, its consequences.Those slain by state security or government thugs are more than the metaphors they become, but while the metaphors live on these people will never again speak or eat or laugh or cry or even rise up in anger again.Beyond all interpretations,

The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all tombs, I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war. The unfortunate who has no hope of a change for the better has less reason to throw away his life than the prosperous who, if he survive, is always liable to a change for the worse, and to whom any accidental fall makes the most serious difference. To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope. “Pericles’ Funeral Oration” Thucidydes

source: The Dead and Wounded | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=276

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Communiqués

Second guessing the army

A solely military checkpoint was set up on the Western side of Qasr el Nile bridge on Friday. On Saturday, this checkpoint became considerably more hostile, with aggrssive soldiers attempting to confiscate my camera and succeeding in confiscating my lighter. I was told I could claim it back at the end of the day. I didn’t try to exercise that right. Then the primary checkpoint, at the entrance to Tahrir, was a disorganized nightmare. Queues for the men and women were combined, barbed wire was erected, the crowd was kept waiting, growing frustrated. Foreigners living in Cairo were not allowed in. Swaggering officers now checked IDs, a job previously performed by civilians.

Again, today, entrance to Tahrir was challenging. Taking between twenty and forty minutes for the peak of the day (between 12 and 6). Again, the Army, with riot helmets on and guns round their necks, were administering the entrance.

This evening the army tried to move its post forward at the entrance to Midan Tahrir by the Egyptian museum. The young protestors on the square sat in front of the tanks to prevent the move in to the square and fighting broke out between the army and the young people. The army started firing but the young people would not retreat. The army grabbed three of the young people and took them in to a detention centre in the Egyptian Museum. At the moment there is a face off between the army and the young protesters at the museum entrance to the square. The protestors are chanting: ‘give us back our brothers’.

These are not the first people to be arrested by the Military Police. For all their claims of neutrality, the army has been busy arresting citizens and foreigners and confiscating equipment – my battery and memory card are among them.

Either they are replacing the neighbourhood watches, who people increasingly feel to be overzealous, they are preparing for a momentous event, or they are slowly tightening their control over all of Cairo.

source: Second guessing the army | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=307