Remarking January 25- A Series of Six

An event does not happen in a circle- more likely in a broken sphere. 

The wave of protest that lead to the January 25 Revolution did not start in Tahrir.
It occurred  in places, spaces, some of which were hidden, unspoken of, some darker than others. In every telling of histories there are silenced moments, yet every moment has its voice.
Detached and intertwined, these are six stories of the Egyptian "January 25 Revolution"- told by some of the silenced voices. Filmed violently. Collected and edited by Intifadat Intifadat. 



Cairo Intifada (6:00)

On January 28th 2011 hundreds of thousands of Egyptians went to the streets all across the country with one aim: to oust a political regime void of legitimacy. Cairo Intifada follows protestors in the Cairene neighborhood of Imbaba.



The Downfall of Mubarak (6:23)

On February 10th Hosni Mubarak makes one last TV appearance before the Egyptians successfully oust him from power the following day. Experience the transition.



These people are not leaving- Mahalla workers in the January 25 Revolution (6:47)

Since 2006 the 21,000 workers of the Mahalla Textile Company have been striking and protesting against the suppressive economic policies of the Egyptian regime. Without these actions the January 25 revolution may never have come about. On February 17th 2011 the workers are back on strike.



We were imprisoned in our clothes- The workers of Turah in the January 25 Revolution (6:54)

"My son, my niece, my cousin, my father - they're all in Midan Tahrir too. I am no different. The whole country is demanding their rights. I demand my rights too." said Abdalla one of the workers carrying out a weeks long sit-in in the neighborhood of Turah. The revolution in the factory space.



We Want Freedom- The Story of Mohamed Zaghloul (2:59)

On his way home from work Mohamed Zaghloul experiences a citizen's arrest. Members of a popular committee stop him, beat him and hand him over to the military police. There he is tortured and faced with up to a five year prison sentence.


We will not return to the era of slavery- Fighting the Anti-Strike Law (4:57)

On April 12, two months after the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces secretly pass a new decree outlawing all strikes, protests and sit-ins. The street and the workers react.

The trial outside the court المحاكمة برة المحكمة

ده مش الموضوع
this is not the issue



ده الموضوع
this is the issue

ام خالد- ام شهيد ثورة ٢٥ يناير
Om Khaled- the mother of a martyr of January 25 revolution


ام محمود- ام شهيد ٢٥ يناير
Om Mahmoud- the mother of a martyr of January 25 revolution


ابو محمد- اب شهيد ٢٥ يناير
Abu Mohamed- the father of a martyr of January 25 revolution


مصطفى مرسي، اب شهيد ثورة ٢٥ يناير
Mostafa Morsy- the father of a martyr of January 25 revolution


ابو موحاب، اب شهيد ثورة ٢٥ يناير
Abu Mohab- the father of a martyr of January 25 revolution


تارق، اخ شهيد ثورة ٢٥ يناير
Tariq- the brother of a martyr of January 25 revolution

Tahrir August 1st: Masquerading a Lost Legitimacy

At 2:16 in this clip you hear a crowd chanting, “al-geish wal shae'b, eed wahda” or “the army and people are one hand, united.” This is the absurd anthem that has rung throughout Cairo since military forces were deployed on Egypt's streets on January 28th. There is certainly a fetish among wide portions of the Egyptian public with the male machismo of the military, hence the cheering on of green mannequins’ phallic clasp of the gun facing the “dirty” demonstrators.

Read On

seeking donations for the national democratic party تبرعات للحزب الوطني

seeking donations for the national democratic party تبرع للحزب الوطني from tabulagaza on Vimeo.

Cairo Intifada

Days of Anger from tabulagaza on Vimeo.

what i expect to happen in egypt

sorry this is rough. I will be back soon to edit. Heading out to tahrir now.


Friday night I witnessed the tanks roll into Tahrir square downtown Cairo on Friday night. To my amazement the crowds cheered. So for the most part the demonstrators are celebrating the military presence on the streets of Cairo. One demonstrator told me "the police protect us from our enemies, they won't do us any harm." Until last night demonstrators holding a permanent sit-in in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo were surrounded by a number of military tanks charing cigarettes and jokes with soldiers, while one soldier I saw joined the protestors for evening prayer.

This morning about 11am security officials stormed the Aljazeera office in downtown Cairo and closed the office. Two mobile phone carriers sent out messages that people should stay home to protect their homes from the looting. According to Aljazeera earlier today the protestors are no longer sitting on the tanks and there are reports that the military presence is spreading all over Cairo. Via @justimage the US embassy is calling on its citizens to leave Egypt, via Dutch journalist Dirk Wanrooj Heineken and Shell have evacuated their employees. @monasosh reports at 12:15 the military are tightening access for civilians to Tahrir Square. At 1pm the satellite carrier Nile Sat blocks Aljazeera Arabic from viewers in the Arab world. Choppers are increasingly flying over the skies of Cairo.

Despite the positive attitude of the people towards the army, there is no reason to believe that the military shares any interests with the common Egyptians on the street. The reason people are calling for change is that they are tired of economic policies of the Mubarak regime, they have had enough of police violence and a government that does not provide for its people. The faltering Egyptian regime's allies are interested only in what they term "stability" which means prosperity for a small class of Egyptian elites and upper middle class on the backs of the labor of the vast population. What this process entails is the selling off of Egyptian natural resources and enslaving of the Egyptian labor force working to next to nothing while food price go through the roof. The reason for this is the decisions made by the Egyptian policy makers in line with the logic of neo-liberal institutions like the World Bank and IMF, seated in the USA that primarily benefit the economies of the global North.

As we slowly approach sundown and the supposed recent daily curfew in Cairo I expect tonight will be different than the past few days. At some stage the military is going to stop acting as a mediating force and will try to take direct control. I have no illusions that they are acting as anything but a vessel for this sort of "stability" that the global North desires. In Egypt we are no longer in the age of military coups, it is not a question of who has the most influence within the military and what they can get away with, it is a matter of the interests of external forces are and these external forces are looking for the right partner within the current Egyptian regime. What does this mean on the ground? There will be harsh clashes between demonstrators against the military who will quickly switch sides. But the people will not let go easily. In the middle of all this there a lot of looting taking place especially in the suburbs. This has a mix of sources, many of the looters are police officers following orders to loot just like Fateh PA members did during Hamas' initial rule in the Gaza Strip. Other looters are petty criminals released from police stations, partly by the police themselves before they fled, also involved are opportunists who are simply hungry under the economic pressure of living under the circumstances existent in Egypt today.

All this to say, this mass mobilization of the Egyptian street is not without purpose. Rather, this is a powerful manifestation of the will of the people. As I walked the streets amongst protestors I was constantly amazed by the extreme attention protesters paid to parked cars and stores we passed by. The heart of this protest is a strong rejection of a tyrant, the rejection of classist economic policies and proof of the failure of neo-colonial capitalism everywhere.

January 29: Two Moments

game over Mubarak طلب الشارع: يسقط حسني مبارك from tabulagaza on Vimeo.

Egyptians welcome the army المصريين يرحبون قوات الجيش from tabulagaza on Vimeo.

My Images from Today and Yesterday

more

more soon

Egypt: What's Coming

Considering this jittery position of the powers that be,



(they provide their friends with these,)



and the jittery position of him,



i think our "allies" will put in place this guy



@bencnn
ElBaradei at airport says the point of no return has been reached must be peaceful change govt must stop using violence #Jan25 #Egypt
8:12pm January 27

whom "the people"



didn't elect.

This is maybe a tip toe better than what we have lived under for the past 30 years... but it is a continuation of Egypt's neo-liberal "reforms" a la mr. fayyad

... just a guess

and i dont like it.

Around here we need to start thinking about alternatives to the nation-state, because after all the "post-colonial moment is still colonial"

Visiting An Egyptian Worker Intifada

On May 18 the sidewalks of the Egyptian Parliament is packed with workers.

Leading the crowd is the 14-year-old daughter of the union leader.

In the heat of the day, about 30 workers from the Amonsito textile factory huddled under the shade of a tree.

“We are not workers, we are rejects,” the factory union leader Khaled el-Shishawy, who is known simply as sheikh Khaled said.

Read on

The workers returned after government officials and the crediting bank shirked responsibility on an agreement signed 55 days earlier.

Before returning 12 days ago, sheikh Khaled told me, “If we return to our sit-in, it won’t be the same as last time. Things will be different.”

More pictures of the workers' sit-in here.

The Shattering of the Egyptian State- Labor Uprising in Review

Kareem el-Beheiry was 20 years old when he first took part in a labor strike in December 2006.

"I didn't know what a strike was," said el-Beheiry, the Mahalla Textile Factory's first blogger.

The next day he saw a scene that changed his life. "I saw a woman crying in front of a TV camera, saying she could not feed her kids."

The blogger, shocked by the scene, thought to himself, "Does this really exist in Egypt?"

It does, according to Esam Shaban, a researcher at the Afaq Ishtiraqeyya Center. Over 80 percent of Egyptians are poor, Shaban says, and conditions have worsened over the past five years.

While the Egyptian government often claims that increasing poverty is a result of global market fluctuations, others suggest that Egypt's problems are the direct result of growing gentrification and the government's economic policies.

In the late 1990s the government began privatizing industry, which had been under state control since the 1950s. The education and health sectors were then privatized in the early 2000s. Many factories that had previously been nationalized were bought by foreign investors seeking quick profits. They were attracted by Egypt's lax labor laws, accentuated by a new law in 2003.

In the mid-1990s, farmers were stripped of the protective laws as the government stepped in to protect large landowners and cut subsidies to small farmers.

"Today even working two jobs is not sufficient to provide for a family," Shaban says. "It has caused an economic crisis and people can't remain quiet about this." Many Egyptians have taken to the streets to protest their economic plight.

"On the Egyptian street," says Shaban, "the individual act of discontent became a collective act of protest."

A turning point came in December 2006 when over 24,000 workers at a state-owned textile factory in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla launched a massive strike. On the third day of the strike, labor leader Jihad Taman noticed el-Beheiry filming and thought he was a security agent. When el-Beheiry showed him his factory ID card, Tamam took el-Beheiry under his wing.

The December 2006 strike broke down a barrier of fear among Egyptian labor activists. By the time of the next strike, in September of 2007, the blogger and his fellow strikers were chanting against the World Bank's role in the "colonization" of Egypt and calling for the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak.

News and images of the 2006 and 2007 uprisings spread across Egypt like a virus. Soon, strikes, sit-ins and protests were springing up all around the country.

On 6 April, 2008 food prices hit a new high, and once again Mahalla was the site of dissent.

With the aim of preventing another major strike, security forces closed the textile factory compound. State security trucks from around Egypt surrounded the Delta city. Workers subsequently called off the strike as security made it impossible for them to congregate.

Mahalla, however, was not easily pacified. When security forces beat a woman and her daughter, they ignited the people's anger. For days the clashes continued, with scenes reminiscent of the Palestinian Intifada becoming a reality on Egypt's streets.

Infrastructure, like police cars and train tracks, were set ablaze with the intention of sending a message: Under this regime, life has become unbearable.

In the 6 April uprising, the demands of the workers and the general population overlapped. People called for lower food prices as workers called for a minimum wage.

During the 6 April strike, state security agents arrested and tortured el-Beheiry along with many other labor activists. He was released 73 days later. In 2009, the government transferred el-Beheiry to Cairo and in 2010 he was fired.

In May 2008 a 10,000 person sit-in of real-estate tax collectors caused the government to give in to demands for a 300 percent wage increase. On 21 April 2009, thousands of tax collectors gathered at the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration, forcing Minister Aisha Abdel Hady to recognize their independent union, the first in Egypt since 1957.

At the end of 2009 more and more sit-ins moved to the sidewalks of downtown Cairo. When workers' calls for government interference--particularly in recently privatized factories--went unheeded, they moved to the gates of parliament.

On 8 February workers of the Tanta Flax and Oils Factory started a sit-in on the doorstep of the Council of Ministers in downtown Cairo. In January, the factory's union head, Salah Mosallam, along with nine others were fired in retribution for launching a number of strikes in Tanta. After the Saudi factory owner locked the factory, workers moved their protest to downtown Cairo, calling for their re-instatement or severance payments in accordance with Egyptian law.

"The example of the Tanta Flax Company has proved that the policy of privatization is a failure," said independent MP Gamal Zahran.

After more than two weeks of sitting-in, the roughly 400 protestors rolled up their blankets and went home after the union head came to an verbal agreement with Minister of Manpower and Labor Aisha Abdel Hady and the factory representatives.

But while the Tanta workers may have been temporarily placated, their action brought about a new tactic for Egypt's labor movement. Their 16-day sit-in started a new wave of sit-ins on the sidewalks of the Egyptian parliament.

Workers from the Salemco and Amonsito companies repeated the Tanta Flax scenario almost as if they were following the same script. It seems as though workers have discovered that in order to have their voices heard, they must take their protests to the streets of Cairo.

So far, even this kind of pressure has only brought limited results as factory owners have repeatedly neglected to uphold the promises they make to force the workers off the street. A few weeks after their settlement, the Tanta Flax and Oil Company workers were back on the streets of downtown Cairo.

While the ongoing strikes have empowered Egyptian labor activists, conditions are still not ideal.

"We say the street is ours, but when security forces beat Bahaa Saber in public and then tortured him behind closed doors, this remains only a slogan," says Mahalla blogger el-Beheiry, referring to the 6 April 2010 protest at which an activist was violently beaten in front of masses of onlookers and rolling video cameras.

"Protests don't show the democracy of the government, they prove the failure of the government, they show there is no government," el-Beheiry says.

The Egyptian government's inequitable economic policies are working to shatter the concept of the state as a paternal figure, according to Shaban. "Confidence in the state that controls everything, that turns the water on and off, has been lost."

El-Beheiry thinks that protests need to be combined with direct action. "I like the idea of workers in Argentina. Let us privatize the factories for ourselves. This must be tried in Egypt," he says, referring to events during Argentina's 2001 economic crisis where factory owners fled the country with their savings and workers took over factory administrations and ran the shop floors themselves.

On 19 February MP Nasha't el-Qassass from President Mubarak's National Democratic Party called for protestors to be shot. The parliament responded by recommending to him to the Values Committee.

The following day protesters held placards reading, "Shoot us."

"The media has been central in spreading the news of protests," Shaban says. Today protesters are benefiting from the coverage of local and international media outlets as well as citizen journalism tools, like blogs, twitter, and live video feeds.

Last month, lawyer Khaled Ali from the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights handed in the papers for a case calling on the Egyptian government to set a fair minimum wage. Hundreds gathered at the Minister's Council lead by Independent Tax Collector Union head Kamal Abu Eita chanting, "For those living in castles, a maximum wage, for those living in graves, a minimum living wage."

On 1 May, sugar factories in the Qena Governorate went on strike due to unbearably low wages. At the end of April, 9000 workers at an aluminum factory in Naga Hamadi called for the implementation of a LE1200 a minimum wage.

Meanwhile, the five different groups of protesters on the sidewalk of the parliament buildings united to raise their voice in protest on May Day.

"On Labor Day, workers are supposed to be given benefits, year after year we are being given crises," says el-Beheiry.

Later today, workers and activists from all around the country will protest before the Council of Ministers. They will call for the implementation of a court case that was raised and won by worker Nagy Rashad against the Egyptian government. According to the court ruling, the prime minister is required to introduce a minimum living wage in accordance with market prices by 1 May. The current minimum wage, set in the mid-1980s, is LE35.

Meters from where many of the sit-ins have been taking place, an old mural reads, "Democracy ascertains the rule of the people." But for the people sleeping on the sidewalk, this sounds like a hollow platitude.

JPost: Fatah "Intifada" vs. Hamas

The Jerusalem Post can finally appease its readers by writing of an "intifada" that has broken out between Palestinian factions in Gaza. Monday morning a second Hamas vehicle was blown up by unidentified Fatah members. As someone in Jerusalem once told me, the Israelis have never had it better, the Palestinians are attacking and killing each other and for the most part are leaving Israel alone. As I have been trying to point out for the past many months the story goes much deeper than Palestinian "Extremist Muslims" hate and kill "Secular Nationalists" and vice versa.

Division has very often been the strategy to control a people, especially when the occupied population is bigger than the occupying power. One has to look past what the media is telling in its most common platforms in order to see that this is also the case in the Gaza Strip. In no way does this excuse either members of Fatah or Hamas of the actions they are perpetrating, but one always must look beneath the surface for the root of disease. Violence is no natural state of being.

This is the Jerusalem Post's superficial perspective of what takes place in Gaza, by using the Palestinians' own language of "intifada' they are demonizing their Palestinian neighbors and solidifying their place in the annals if history as a self-destructive people that are not to be trusted, who are naturally inclined to such inter-fighting.

"There are increasing indications that Fatah is trying to organize an intifada against Hamas, as Fatah members in the Gaza Strip try to snap out of what one commander termed a state of "depression" following their defeat at the hands of Hamas in June...

Fatah officials expressed deep satisfaction with the anti-Hamas demonstrations...

Hamas leaders said they did not rule out the possibility that Fatah members would resort to an "armed struggle" against the Islamist movement.

They added that there was growing evidence that Fatah was preparing for armed attacks on Hamas figures and institutions. They also noted that over the weekend Hamas militiamen discovered a weapons factory inside the house of a former Fatah security commander in the Strip."

Aljazeera provided this report of a Hamas cartoon that is communicating to Gaza's children this deepest of divides between the two factions. A division driven by external forces and kindled by conditions that bring us back to a mentality of survival of the fittest.