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Arabica Robusta

Anti-democracy Obama, Anti-democracy Neoliberals And US-Backed Egyptian Military Coup A... - 0 views

  • Islamist, socialist … elected, legitimate … who cares? Presumably, the WSJ thinks the Egyptians now have 17 years in which to think themselves lucky when any who dissent are tortured with electricity, raped, thrown from planes or – if they're really lucky – just shot.
Arabica Robusta

ROAR Magazine - powered by FeedBurner - 0 views

  • On November 26, 2013, we saw the first implementation of a new Egyptian law effectively banning any and all protest not approved and regulated by the Ministry of Interior. This is the same Interior Ministry whose soldiers have killed thousands of protesters, maimed tens of thousands and tortured unknown others in recent years. This security apparatus is acting with renewed arrogance since the July coup that returned the Egyptian Army to a position of direct authority.
  • Hours later, the “No Military Trials for Civilians” campaign organized a protest against the new anti-protest law as well as the inclusion of military trials for civilians in the constitution currently being drafted. This time, the police beat and arrested dozens, among them some of Egypt’s most renowned activists, the same people who fought the injustice and oppression of Mubarak, the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood, and now Abdel Fattah al Sisi and the puppet civilian government in place since the coup.
  • Hours later, the police stormed Alaa Abdel Fattah’s home without a search warrant, beat him and his wife and kidnapped him; all this for charges of organizing the protest on the 26th. The following morning the prosecution questioned him at the Cairo Security Directorate and extended his detention to four days pending investigation.
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  • We will not protest at the whim and convenience of a counterrevolutionary regime and its armed enforcers. After the generals’ latest attempt to co-opt the revolution by kidnapping the June 30 protests for their own desire for power, the January 25 Revolution has returned to the streets. We will oppose the system everywhere we can. Stand by our side. This system must fall.
Arabica Robusta

Comrades from Cairo: "we don't need permission to protest" | ROAR Magazine - 0 views

  • On November 26, 2013, we saw the first implementation of a new Egyptian law effectively banning any and all protest not approved and regulated by the Ministry of Interior. This is the same Interior Ministry whose soldiers have killed thousands of protesters, maimed tens of thousands and tortured unknown others in recent years. This security apparatus is acting with renewed arrogance since the July coup that returned the Egyptian Army to a position of direct authority.
  • Hours later, the “No Military Trials for Civilians” campaign organized a protest against the new anti-protest law as well as the inclusion of military trials for civilians in the constitution currently being drafted. This time, the police beat and arrested dozens, among them some of Egypt’s most renowned activists, the same people who fought the injustice and oppression of Mubarak, the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood, and now Abdel Fattah al Sisi and the puppet civilian government in place since the coup.
  • Hours later, the police stormed Alaa Abdel Fattah’s home without a search warrant, beat him and his wife and kidnapped him; all this for charges of organizing the protest on the 26th. The following morning the prosecution questioned him at the Cairo Security Directorate and extended his detention to four days pending investigation.
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  • We will not protest at the whim and convenience of a counterrevolutionary regime and its armed enforcers. After the generals’ latest attempt to co-opt the revolution by kidnapping the June 30 protests for their own desire for power, the January 25 Revolution has returned to the streets. We will oppose the system everywhere we can. Stand by our side. This system must fall.
Arabica Robusta

Trade unions and the construction of a specifically Tunisian protest configuration | op... - 0 views

  • Yet, one local trade union may save the day.  If it did, it would not be doing so for the first time.  For this is no ordinary union.  The Tunisian General Union of Labour (UGTT) has affected the character of Tunisia as a whole since the late 1940s.  It impacted significantly the 2011 revolution and the transition period, and is likely to impact the future. In this, it is unparalleled elsewhere in the Arab world.  And it is largely because of it that one may confidently say that Tunisia is not Egypt, or Syria or Yemen. Indeed, to understand Tunisia, one must get to grips with its labour movement.
  • UGTT has been the outcome of Tunisian resistance and its incubator at the same time.  For example, in 1984 it aligned itself with the rioting people during the bread revolt; in 2008, it was the main catalyst of the disobedience movement in the Mining Basin of Gafsa; and, come December 2010, UGTT, particularly its teachers’ unions and local offices, became the headquarters of revolt against Ben Ali. 
  • In 1978, UGTT went on general strike to protest what amounted to a coup perpetrated by the Bourguiba government to change a union leadership judged to be too oppositional and too powerful.  The cost was the worst setback in the union’s history since the assassination of its founder in 1952.  The entire leadership of the union was put on trial and replaced by regime loyalists. Ensuing popular riots were repressed by the army, resulting in tens of deaths.
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  • With a labour movement engrained in the political culture of the country, and at all levels, a culture of trade unionism has become a structural component of Tunisian society.  There has not been a proper sociology of this.  But the implications are important. I enumerate some of them here in the form of observations:
  • One challenge to leftist parties after 2011 has been how to move away from being trade unionists and become politicians: in other words, how to think beyond small issues and using unionist means to tackle wider issues.  This has been expressed by prominent leftists, such as the late Chokri Belaid, who challenged his heavily conformist party to think like a party, not like a union. This meant finding different, broader bases for political alliances and laying out projects for society at large.
  • The radicalisation of UGTT in fact finds its roots in this evolution as the university in Tunisia, particularly in the 1970s and 80s was a space of radical activism and left wing politics. 
  • While the absence of women in leadership could be explained by the very nature of trade union work, which requires time and presence in public places which are not very friendly to women; but this remains a serious weakness of UGTT, and a profound challenge. In Tunisia, this is particularly important, as the role of women has been a marked feature of the society at large and of its protest culture in particular, throughout the post-independence period, both within and outside the labor movement.
  • Post 2011, UGTT seems to have regained a cohesion it lacked during the Ben Ali period when the gap between the leadership and the grassroots was widening.
  • A combination of the symbolic capital of resistance accumulated over decades, a record of results delivered for its members and a well-oiled machine at the level of organisation across the country and every sector of the economy, has made UGTT unassailable and unavoidable at the same time.
mehrreporter

Iran dispatches Arab-Africa diplomat to Sisi inauguration - 0 views

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    Tehran, YJC. Amir Abdollahian is going to attend Egypt's presidential inauguration while the Iranian President was officially invited.
Arabica Robusta

tabula gaza - 0 views

  • The widespread indifference toward the August 14 massacre that accompanied a rising fascistic spirit just confirmed that fall from grace.
  • Though I do not affirm the Brotherhood's cause to return to power, I believe in their right to dissent. All those that risk their bodies, like Bassem, risk the bullet. I will by no means try to justify the shocking actions of Egyptians that started the morning of June 30, the rise of the fascistic, the acceptance of the torment of others. The most powerful tool to these ends is the discourse of terrorism that has fed into the deep fear in the hearts of so many living inside a regime of terror. 
Arabica Robusta

Juan Cole: Saad's Revolution - Juan Cole's Columns - Truthdig - 0 views

  • Having become a democracy activist in the 1990s, Ibrahim helped make films instructing peasants how to vote. In Egypt’s class-ridden, hierarchical society, the elite around President Hosni Mubarak viewed these activities as seditious.
  • But Ibrahim’s most serious infraction was to indirectly slam the increasingly obvious moves by Mubarak and his wife Suzanne to install their son, Gamal, as the future president-for-life. In an interview on satellite television, Ibrahim was asked about the tendency toward dynastic rule in the Arab world, with longtime Syrian dictator Hafez Assad ensuring he would be succeeded by his son Bashar. Ibrahim joked that the Arabs had invented a new, heretofore unknown form of government. It joined the republic (in Arabic, jumhuriya) with the monarchy (mamlakiya), creating the ... jumlukiya! We might translate the term as “monarpublicanism.”
  • Ibrahim was often cited by the neoconservatives who backed the Iraq War, but he did not return their esteem. He denounced them for cynically using the Sept. 11 attacks “to advance hegemonic designs” and complained that the Iraq debacle had turned the world against the U.S., causing the original sympathy generated by the attacks to evaporate.
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  • When the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood unexpectedly did well in the 2006 Egyptian parliamentary elections, he implied, Washington pressure on Mubarak to democratize vanished. Ibrahim warned that the future of the Arab world was democratic, and that the opinion polling done by his Ibn Khaldoun Institute demonstrated that the democracy would have a strong Islamic coloration.
Arabica Robusta

Libya and Beyond - IPS - 0 views

  • With Libya providing huge percentages of the oil and gas imported by powerful European countries – especially Italy – and with the UK working hard the last several years to burnish Libya’s image so that British Petroleum could claim a privileged stake in the Libyan oil industry and General Dynamics UK could sign lucrative weapons contracts, western countries came late and soft to criticize Qaddafy’s violent assault.
Arabica Robusta

Chavez gambles on Gaddafi diplomacy - Features - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  • Gregory Wilpert, co-founder of the Venezuela Analysis website, said there had been a "vigorous debate" within the pro-Chavez camp in Venezuela over the regime's ties to Libya. "One segment is defending Gaddafi as a fellow revolutionary and another camp is condemning him and is urging the government to do so too," said Wilpert.
  • Charles Jones said Chavez would "bridle at Gaddafi's total disregard for constitutionality... Chavez places huge emphasis on elections and public support."
Arabica Robusta

The Arabs in Africa - 0 views

  • Although just one aspect of the current situation in Libya, I suggest that it should give us pause to consider the stakes of this conceptualization of a basic Arab-African or Arab-black antagonism—one that not only formulates these as mutually exclusive categories but also pins them against one another in the context of the Libyan revolution.
  • Just a handful of commentators have questioned the veracity of the “African mercenaries” charge while maintaining their support for the uprising.
  • there is scant evidence that these people are, first of all, participating in state-sponsored violence against the popular uprising, and, second, were brought into Libya for this explicit purpose. On the contrary, we know that Libya was already home to a significant number of foreign workers—including some two million black African migrant workers. We should also note Libya’s documented history of racial discrimination. Almost one year to the day before the February 17 Day of Anger that jumpstarted the revolution, UN Watch, an independent organization monitoring the UN, issued a statement entitled, “Libya Must End Racism Against Black African Migrants and Others.”
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  • In light of this recent history, the videos and photographs of “African mercenaries” raise disturbing questions. Are the men we see pictured here perpetrators of state-sponsored violence, are they victims of racism, or is it possible that both of these things may be true at the same time?
  • What we can learn from the framing of violence in Darfur is that Arabs are not considered “Africans” by policymakers, journalists, and organizations, and that Arabs and Africans may be seen by these same groups as fundamentally different, and consequently face fundamentally different kinds of problems—suffering differently, inflicting harm differently, and handling politics differently—in a manner that hinders “our” own consideration of them together.
  • The area that is considered vulnerable to this regional unrest stretches at least from Algeria to Iran and has been called the Arab world or the Middle East, despite the fact that Iranians are not Arab and most of Algeria lies west of France. This geography does not, however, appear to reach far south of the Mediterranean, at least where Africa is concerned. Although the two successful revolutions thus far lay on the African continent, there has been an overall failure to consider their effect in terms of sub-Saharan African politics and places such as Gabon, Mauritania, Djibouti, and Uganda.
  • politics of geopolitics. First, what we should recognize is that terms such as “Africa” and “the Middle East” function not only on the basis of geography or actual political ties, but as stand-ins for racial signifiers. Despite a shared history of European colonialism in its different manifestations, Africa and the Middle East nonetheless bear extremely different histories of representation or historical imaginaries within the European continent (which is, I would point out, also not a continent, but something like a subcontinent).
  • If Qaddafi has brought in foreign mercenaries--and I'm not saying he hasn't--this doesn't change the way the discourse around these mercenaries is tied up in broader race relations.
Arabica Robusta

The Genie is out of the Bottle - Gush Shalom - Israeli Peace Bloc - 0 views

  • They could appear in West Asia as European conquerors, who see themselves as a bridgehead of the “white” man and as masters of the “natives”, like the Spanish conquistadores and the Anglo-Saxon colonialists in America. That is what the crusaders did in their time. The second way was to see themselves as an Asian people returning to their homeland, the heirs to the political and cultural traditions of the Semitic world, ready to take part, with the other peoples of the region, in the war of liberation from European exploitation.
  • The most common conclusion was that democratic elections would inevitably lead to the victory of “Islamist” fanatics, who would set up brutal Taliban-style theocracies, or worse. Part of this, of course, is deliberate propaganda, designed to convince the naïve Americans and Europeans that they must shore up the Mubaraks of the region or alternative military strongmen. But most of it was quite sincere: most Israelis really believe that the Arabs, left to their own devices, will set up murderous “Islamist” regimes, whose main aim would be to wipe Israel off the map.
Arabica Robusta

Robert Fisk: Dark humour in a time of dictatorship - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The In... - 0 views

  • For the US presidency and State Department and the Pentagon are now so in thrall to everything Israeli that Israeli intelligence – which, for its own reasons, wanted to keep Mubarak as dictator – carries more weight than US diplomatic reports or America's own intelligence files. Thus, Robert Gates praised the Egyptian army for its "restraint" when he should have praised the millions of pro-democracy demonstrators for their restraint.
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