Category: Communiqués

Categories
Communiqués

Latecomers crash the party

The readers of this blog, what few may remain, have surely longed for an update on events in Occupied Cairo. Because, yes, it’s still quite occupied. Even from the beginnings of celebrations of Mubarak’s resignation, groups were chanting “this isn’t an end, this is just the beginning.” The myriad labor actions in the past week give this chant credence, if nothing else. We now find ourselves in the midst of a strange occupation by the Egyptian military and military police, and the demands of those who went out in the streets are now caught between the military’s paternalistic calls to go home and keep quiet and the murmuring of others who seem to just want things to go “back to normal.”

A lot has been written on the Egyptian military recently, and as far as this post goes it should suffice to say that they’re not to be trusted as benevolent protectors. The other danger though, is more peculiar, not marked by any uniform and not even as confrontational or identifiable as the Baltagiya that we saw roaming the streets with weapons and posters of Mubarak a couple weeks ago.

It seems now that you’ll inevitably find at least one troublemaker milling about Tahrir and any given Labor strikes/demonstrations, all basically the same type. These troublemakers generally seem to be on last week’s news cycle courtesy of State TV, and from their words and accusations you can tell they’ve not spent a day in Tahrir. In the middle of a group of people all calling for the same thing (better wages, a change in government structure, etc.) you’ll find one of these types pick on someone in the crowd–sometimes a journalist, a foreigner, but not necessarily–and start making wild accusations about foreign agents, journalism ruining Egypt’s reputation abroad, or whatever. It’s as if they were paid provocateurs how effectively they distract and rile up a crowd, but the fear is that these are autonomous cretins who sat out the past three weeks and now feel like it’s time for them to get their say in. I’ve had several friends (all of them Egyptians) targeted in these sorts of situations, and while they’re generally resolved without violence they’re an absolutely disgusting spectacle, preventing participation by some and the transmission of the exact sorts of images that have given the Egyptian people the admiration of the world in past weeks.

It’s uncertain how these types are best dealt with, one suggestion has been just to fight fire with fire and accuse them of being National Security or Intelligence (they are, after all, doing the same work gratis). Solidarity and shared understanding amongst those protesting and demonstrating will also be a primary mechanism of fighting this sickness, preventing it from getting a foothold within the crowds. While these may work to diffuse an immediate confrontation, the bigger question still points back to the culpability of the Egyptian state media in propagating these lies and suspicions, and their failure–even after their apparent change of heart–to actively rehabilitate all the propaganda they put out. State media still needs to either be shut up, taken over by revolutionary forces or effectively countered by distribution of alternative information, etc. The latter is currently being attempted by many fronts with some efficacy (this could be seen when protestors outside the state TV building shouted “Where’s Al Jazeera? The Liars are right there!”) but stronger remedies may still be needed.

The second group, called only half-jokingly “the cleanup thugs” or “the chic thugs” are the groups of youth cleaning up downtown and Tahrir. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing to see the city sparkle (excepting the dust) but this isn’t just some apolitical adopt-a-midan program. We saw this first as almost all the anti Mubarak and anti-regime graffiti was painted over, washed out or otherwise erased. Also the stones that people had pulled from the pavement to defend the midan were suddenly carted off, where others had plans to make a monument of them. As symptomatic of the rest of their work, these groups basically sought the disappearance of all traces of the revolution, its battles and its calls for liberty and dignity. To so carelessly push aside this recent history because it somehow violates Egyptian middle class propriety (keep quiet, eyes forward) is dispiriting. A revolution was born in the square just as people were dying in it, and it’s not hardly the time to say “yalla let’s get back to cairo traffic.”

Apologies for the scattered quality of these thoughts, gentle readers, but the post-Mubarak scene and reorganization is still a work in progress, making writing a bit confusing.

source: Latecomers crash the party | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=339

Categories
Communiqués

autonomia reading group Birmingham University

Discussion Notes on Let’s Spit on Hegel 2/9/2011

The question that both guided and helped to clarify points in our discussion was ‘What is the specific autonomist gesture in Let’s Spit on Hegel?’ Here, much of our discussion focused on the master-slave dialectic and the rejection of subsumption. The following paragraph, taken from page six, clearly maps outs this rejection:

Two positions coexist in Hegel: one interprets woman’s destiny in terms of the principle of femininity, while the other sees in the slave not an unchanging principle of essence, but rather a human condition, the historical realization of the gospel maxim that “the last shall be first.” Had Hegel recognized the human origin of woman’s oppression, as he did in the case of the slave’s, he would have had to apply the master-slave dialectic in her case as well. But in doing so he would have encountered a serious obstacle. For, while the revolutionary method can capture the movement of the social dynamics, it is clear that woman’s liberation could never be included in the same historical schemes. On the level of the woman-man relationship, there is no solution which eliminates the other; thus the goal of seizing power is emptied of meaning. Emptying of meaning the goal of seizing power is the distinctive feature of the struggle against the patriarchal system as a concurrent and successive stage to the master-slave dialectic. (6)

What renders the master-slave dialectic inoperative? For Rivolta Femminile it is the irreducible difference between woman and man—this relation evacuates the master-slave dialectic of any reductive or subsumptive power. On the one hand, this irreducible difference calls for a radical critique of equality. Here, women cannot simply be included with the realm patriarchal power or equated with the privileged male subject position. Therefore, equality as a process of inclusion can only manifest as “what is offered as legal rights to colonized people” and/or the “world of legalized oppression and one-dimensionality” (4).  There was some debate and admittedly some confusion as to the status and use of the term humankind. It is used throughout the text and would seem to present the very problem that is being critiqued in master-slave dialectic. Humankind could very well provide the fundamental category to which the man-woman relation is reduced or subsumed. However, we ultimately rejected this reading. On the other hand, this irreducible difference positions women as a revolutionary class. For, this rejection of the master-slave dialectic extends to what the collective refers to as Marxist-Leninist ideology. Where Marx and Lenin did not include women in class composition or integral to a revolutionary schema women are understood to both comprise the working class and open up its revolutionary possibilities.

Our discussion of selected chapters from Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven was brief. One movement that did present itself as necessary to situating the Autonomia movement was the simultaneous generalization of the proletariat and the localization of politics. With the formation of the Autonomia movement came the inclusion of groups heretofore excluded from the proletariat as well as an intense focus on the factory floor.

Categories
Communiqués

A short update after great disappointment

Last night in Tahrir Square there were thousands of people waiting to hear the presumed resignation speech of a fascist dictator on his last legs. Instead we heard a condescending old man tell us he was not going anywhere and that we should all go home and get back to work. The cries of outrage lasted for hours afterwards and, if anything, the speech served to galvanize the protest movement. We heard immediate roars of ‘get out, get out’ then calls to remember the dead, ‘my brother’s life is not that cheap’.

Group calls shortly afterwards responded to the speech by calling for a march the next morning to the Presidential Palace. Others, inspired by rage immediately started to move towards the palace and the state TV building, Maspero. Surprisingly, both groups arrived at their destination without bloodshed. As I write there are 10s of thousands moving towards the Presidential Palace and around 15000 in front of Maspero demanding it cease broadcast.

People on the square widely presumed that this speech was designed to cause anger and ultimately violence so that brutal repression could be justified. Demonstrators have so far kept their calm despite the murderous response of the police force to the early days of the revolution and the terrible images we have seen since the internet was switched back on.

The thousands on their way to the Palace will find a few thousand already there, a field hospital already set-up in anticipation of violence and tents and blankets arriving to accommodate the occupation of the grounds. In the same way we took Tahrir and Parliament we will take the TV building and eventually the President’s Cairo residence.

The resilience of the Egyptian people to all the tactics of propaganda, physical violence and murder has been steadfast. We will not stop until this regime falls.

source: A short update after great disappointment | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=335

Categories
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

Categories
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