Anti-War Teach In Paper. MMU, 11 Feb. 2009

-    In order to link the three topics of Egypt, Arab leaders and resistance, let’s start with the most recent war in the Middle East, the war on Gaza:

-    Position of the Egyptian regime: the Israeli prime minister Tzipi Livni was visiting Egypt and meeting with the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abul Gheit two days before Israel started its war on Gaza. Egypt’s silence towards this aggression and the regime’s inability to condemn Israel or even summon the Israeli ambassador in Cairo to condemn the war lead us to believe that Israel in fact got the green light from Egypt to attack Gaza. The Egyptian regime did even what was worse than that: they closed the Rafah border crossing which connects Gaza and Egypt. This crossing was the only place where medical and food supplies could have reached the besieged Gazans. Under the watchful eyes of the Egyptian regime, hundreds of civilians in Gaza died not only because they were directly under Israeli shelling, but also because there was no emergency assistance or medical supplies that reached them in time. A week after the war started, and as quoted in the Egyptian press, Mubarak addressed the issue of the Rafah crossing twice. He said that Egypt will not open the border because Gaza is an occupied territory and remains, therefore, the responsibility of Israel, the occupying force. A few days later he said that Egypt would not open the border ‘in the absence of the Palestinian Authority and European monitors’, a reference to the 2005 border agreement formulated between the Palestinian Authority and Israel a year before the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections brought Hamas to power. The agreement expired a year after it went into effect and has not been renewed since. Even if we put aside the humanitarian necessity of opening the Rafah crossing, Mubarak’s words show that there were no legal foundations for keeping the crossing closed. This was also a stark violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which Egypt is signatory to.

-    Despite the anger and condemnation in protests all around the world to urge the Egyptian government to open the Rafah border crossing, Egypt would not risk its relations with Israel and the United States. Egypt is the second receiver of American military and financial aid after Israel in the region, receiving $1.5 billion annually. The Egyptian authorities only opened the Rafah crossing for very short periods because pressure was mounting and hard to ignore. Thousands of Arabs across the Arab world demonstrated calling for Rafah to open. However, until now, the Rafah border crossing remains closed. And then, they accuse the people of Gaza of ‘smuggling’ food supplies and medicine and basic necessities through tunnels which stretch between the Egyptian Rafah and Gaza. What do they want the people under siege to do in order to survive? Just wait in silence for their oppressors to squeeze them even further. Well, people in times like these actually take matters into their own hands and form their own means of resistance. Here in London, people demonstrated in front of the Egyptian Embassy, not only in front of the Israeli Embassy. It was incredibly disgraceful for the Egyptian regime when people around the world demonstrated against Egypt and condemned its support for Israel by closing the Rafah border crossing.

-    In a recent farcical statement by Mubarak’s son, Gamal, who is being prepared to succeed his father in power, said that the war in Gaza had divided the Arab world into two camps. The first, led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, had tried to find a quick solution to the crisis. However, the second, claiming to represent Palestinian resistance, ‘had tried its best to play with the emotions of the Arab street against Egypt, portraying Egypt as being against the resistance.’ Then, he added: ‘We are with the resistance, but we cannot be told what to do by others.’ This just shows what kind of lies are being told by the regime’s men in Egypt for propaganda purposes. The Egyptian police and central security forces have been crushing demonstrations on a daily basis across Egypt, and prohibiting people and convoys from reaching the Rafah border to transfer needed supplies into Gaza. Many protesters have been arrested and kidnapped and tortured in police stations because of their opposition to the war on Gaza.

-    The position of Arab leaders: All they could do was to hold summit meetings to discuss the situation. Did they issue any significant or abiding statement to force Israel to stop its aggression? None at all. The war on Gaza in fact has exposed the great complicity of all the Arab regimes and the fear they have in their relationship with Israel. There were Arab summits in Qatar and Kuwait. Both the Egyptian and Palestinian presidents did not attend the Qatar meeting, why? Because the Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal and other representatives from Hamas were invited. The most radical step that Qatar and Mauritania, for example, could take was to freeze their ties with Israel; and the most that Jordan could do was to warn that the war on Gaza would jeopardise the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. Has the Arab League and its leader Amr Moussa done anything to call for sanctions on Israel, for example, or end all kinds of normalisation between the Arab countries and Israel, or even close the Israeli embassy in Egypt? None of that at all. The only organised political movement which declared harsh condemnation and threats against Israel was Hizbullah, whose leader Hassan Nasrallah embarrassed all the Arab regimes, particularly Egypt, when he called upon the Egyptians to go into the streets in their millions to exert pressure on their government to open the Rafah border crossing. Thousands of people in Lebanon turned up for the protests when Nasrallah spoke, the protests which swept Beirut during the war on Gaza. And of course, as we know, the recent war on Gaza has parallels with the war which Israel waged on Lebanon and Hizbullah in the summer of 2006. As Israel attacked Lebanon, destroyed its infrastructure, and killed hundreds of civilians including children, attacked UN schools and shelters, and wounded thousands, the war on Gaza also destroyed its infrastructure, killed hundreds including children, attacked UN schools, and wounded thousands. However, what is so striking about the war on Gaza is that all this aggression on the civilian population took place under the watchful eyes of the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas was only next door a few kilometres away when one and a half million of his own people were under attack, and the most he could do was to call upon Israel to stop its aggression.

- Resistance: ‘Off to Gaza we go, martyrs by the million.’ And ‘Boycott Israel.’
In striking contrast to all this complicity, fear, and compromise on the part of Arab leaders, the war on Gaza has triggered a wave of mass protests in most capitals and cities of the Arab world. People in their thousands took to the streets in protest not only to condemn Israel’s war on Gaza and to express their outrage about this aggression, but also to condemn and protest and harshly criticise their own governments for not taking any action against Israel. The war on Gaza has once again revealed the gulf between Arab regimes and the masses in their millions. Despite the arrests, the beating up of demonstrators, the firing of tear gas, the masses have continued to take to the streets in their thousands in Morroco, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Bahrain, Oman, Sudan, Mauritania and many other capitals and cities.  

-    So, perhaps now the link between Egypt, Arab leaders, and resistance is clear. What we witness in the Arab world today is the great polarisation between Arab governments on one hand, their neoliberal policies and their crackdown on the freedom of expression and the increasing levels of poverty, unemployment, and state corruption; and on the other hand, the majority of their populations, who are the direct victims of these neoliberal policies, which have meant more job losses, rising inflation, an unprecedented housing problem, and unprecedented poverty.

-    There is determination amongst Arab leaders to crush resistance movements and to crush opposition groups through arrests, torture, imprisonment, and military trials (which cannot be appealed in some countries such as Egypt). Resistance groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Muslim Brotherhoods in Egypt are constantly under attack, not only by their own governments but also by Western regimes. Hence, we find that violations of human rights by Arab regimes against their own people are ignored by Western leaders and imperialist powers so as not to help in empowering such resistance groups. For example, why are Arab and Western leaders alike so intolerant of Hamas? Because Hamas succeeded in coming to power through democratic elections. And why did the Palestinians vote for Hamas? Because Hamas’s objective is to end the Israeli occupation of the West bank and Gaza. It is an Islamic organisation, yes, but more importantly it is an organised resistance movement that has challenged the corruption and complicity of Fatah. When Hamas won the elections in 2006, this came as a great surprise to Arab and Western leaders, and since then the people of Gaza have been subjected to all kinds of siege, intimidation, sanctions, blockades, and then a full-fledged war.

-    In Egypt, for example, the regime is very scared of the continuing rise of the Muslim Brotherhoods and their organised movement. The Muslim Brothers are by far the largest opposition group in Egypt and they have millions of followers across the country. They have the biggest representation of an opposition group in Parliament; and hence the Egyptian regime is using all kinds of intimidation which include arrests, torture in police stations, imprisonment, military trials, and the continuous crackdown on their peaceful protests. The regime claims that the Muslim Brotherhoods is an illegitimate political party; hence, when their candidates run for parliamentary elections, they are nominated as ‘independent’ candidates.

-    However, I want to make my point clear here: we might agree or disagree with the ideology of resistance groups such as Hamas, Hizbullah or the Muslim Brothers, but we certainly must protest the framing of these groups as ‘terrorists’. These groups are not terrorists. Hamas is not firing rockets on Israeli towns because they want to kill every Israeli and every Jew, but because their main concern in to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and to lift the siege on Gaza. Hizbullah did not kidnap the two Israeli soldiers in July 2006 because they wanted to get rid of every Israeli and every Jew, but because Israel was waging an aggressive attack on Gaza at the time and because Hizbullah wanted a just exchange for their political prisoners, which they have achieved a few months ago.

-    A brief historical outline of Egypt’s relationship with Arab nations since the 1952 coup d’etat which overthrew the monarchy and ended the British colonisation of Egypt:

•    The Golden era (1950s & 1960s): Nasser and Arab Nationalism, the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, the unity between Egypt and Syria.
•    The 1967 war with Israel, the defeat of Arab nations, and the occupation of Arab lands (Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights).
•    Sadat and the economic open door policy
•    The 1973 war with Israel, and Egypt gains back parts of Sinai
•    Sadat’s visit to Israel in 1977 and the signing of the peace treaty with Israel in 1979. All Arab nations break ties with Egypt.
•    Sadat’s assassination in 1981 by a Jama’a Islamiya member
•    Mubarak comes to power in 1981 and imposes an Emergency Law:

Since Mubarak came to power in 1981 (he has been in power for 28 years), he has imposed an emergency law, which grants police and security forces sweeping powers, allowing them, in effect, to hold Egyptian citizens indefinitely, without charge. This has included systematic torture in prisons and police stations, and in many cases leading to death. Despite the discontent, the anger and the protests to get rid of this law, the Parliament keeps renewing it every two years, under the pretext that it is there to protect the country from terrorism.

•    Mubarak’s neoliberal policies:

By the beginning of the 1990s, and as a result of agreements with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the Mubarak regime started implementing a structural adjustment programme. According to this programme, most of the public sector and services would be privatised, workers would be forced to go on early retirement, permanent contracts within work places would be replaced by temporary contracts, and in many cases with no contracts at all; new factories would be built in the new industrial cities, such as the 6th of October and 10th of Ramadan cities, so as to break up the workers’ collective power and shift the concentration of the major industries such as textile, metal, and cement from their traditional industrial basis in Helwan, Kafr al-Dawwar, Shubra and Mahalla, shift these to the new cities. In other words, all the relative gains which the working class achieved during the Nasser era in the 1950s and 1960s have been lost over the past two decades.

The structural adjustment programme has led to the impoverishment of the majority of Egyptians. Why? Firstly, it has led to a sharp increase in the percentage of unemployment, as well as the expansion of work in the informal sectors. Secondly, within the context of this programme, salaries and wages have not been linked to the rise in prices. In other words, the annual salary does not increase automatically in a certain percentage with inflation; it remains the same for as long as the employer wants. The average salary of a public sector worker will not exceed 300 or 400 Egyptian pounds a month (which is approx. £25 to 35). Thus, with the increasingly sharp rise in prices, and no trade unions to protect them, the working class have found themselves impoverished, unable to cope, and living in extremely dire conditions.

Resistance in Egypt

Now, I would like to speak about the resistance movement which is taking place in Egypt at the present. Since Dec. 2006, Egypt has been witnessing a wave of workers’ strikes which was ignited by the Mahalla textile workers in the Gharbiya district of Egypt (to the north of Cairo)

- In Dec. 2006, the Mahalla textile workers went on strike for three days, whilst occupying the massive forecourts of the Misr Spinning factory complex, demanding that the administration pay their overdue profit sharing bonuses. They demanded the neo-liberal Prime Minister Ahmad Nazeef and his government composed of the rich businessmen, to fulfil the promise they made to public sector workers of a 2-months bonus, in order to be able to cope with the rising food prices. When the government declined to pay the bonus, the Mahalla workers staged a 3-day strike. Mahalla is a working-class city to the north of Cairo, and its base, historically, has been the textile industry. I also have to mention that even though there is a labour law introduced in 2003 allowing for the right to strike, this right is so restricted as to make it impossible to actually carry out the strike. For example, it requires two thirds of the national union federation executive to authorise the strike, and since the national federation is state-controlled, its members never authorised a strike. Therefore, the Mahalla workers succeeded in breaking this law and bringing into being a whole new political culture of legalising and organising strikes. Even though thousands of central security and police forces were sent to surround the factory complex to break the strike in Mahalla, the 2006 strike could not be crushed because the textile workforce in Mahalla amounts to 27,000 workers, the biggest concentration of textile workers in Egypt and the whole region. And of course the textile industry is one of the most important for the regime, and the government relies heavily on its export revenues. Thus, the government simply could not ignore the Mahalla workers this time.

- However, when the workers’ demands were not met, in March 2007, 5000 Mahalla workers resigned from the textile workers’ union in protest at its failure to support their strike. Then, the Mahalla workers went on strike again in Sept. 2007, and this time for 6 days. Six days where the workers did not move from the textile compound, protecting their factories and their work, organising protests with chants, drums and placards, repeating slogans such as: ‘down down Hosni Mubarak’; ‘Strike is legal, legal against poverty and hunger’; and ‘Gamal, tell your dad, the Gharbiyya province hates him’.

- This time, all the demands were met, and the whole Board of Directors resigned in Nov. 2007, and a new one formed, which the workers agreed on. Another important outcome of the Mahalla strike was the formation of the independent Textile Workers’ League.

- Since the Mahalla strike in Dec. 2006, the movement has been sustained through triggering hundreds of other strikes, sit-ins and protests, the biggest wave of workers’ strikes since the 1940s, when Egypt was still under British colonialism. The movement has spilled over from the public sector to the private to the civil service, both in the old industrial areas to the new industrial cities, from big cities to smaller towns to remote villages. In the present movement, the workers have been highly organised in putting forward their demands and in creating their own strategies and tactics in order to put pressure on the government and make them respond to these demands. Between the first Mahalla strike in Dec. 2006, and the second one in Sept. 2007, more than 650 workers’ protests took place involving around 200,000 workers across the country. The movement has spread to include workers in various sectors such as the railway, cement, public transport, and tobacco, as well as civil servants such as the property tax-collectors, doctors, teachers and university lecturers, who have organised sit-ins, protests, went on hunger strikes, as well as fully organised strikes and the occupation of work places for days and sometimes months. Protests continue to this day, to the extent that no day passes by without some kind of protest or a sit-in in one form or another either in factories, in the streets, at the Press Syndicate, or even in remote villages.

- Nowadays, striking against dire working conditions has become part of the Egyptian workers’ and civil servants’ everyday activity. It has become at the heart of the workers’ movement and the political culture in Egypt.

- I would also like to say a few words about the 6th April 2008 General Strike, which was the first of its kind in Egypt since the end of WWII. The strike was called upon once again by the Mahalla Textile workers, and the main demand was to enforce the national minimum wage which has been agreed on, so as Egyptians could cope with the sharp increase in food prices.

- The 6th April strike, which then turned into a spontaneous mass uprising by the urban poor, and which swept the downtown area of Mahalla and continued on 7th April, were the first mass riots since the well-known 18 & 19 January 1977 uprising which spread across Egypt, when the government announced they were going to lift subsidy on basic food commodities like bread, sugar and rice.

- On 6th & 7th April 2008, we see a similar pattern, but even more significantly this time, it was sparked by an organised strike which was called upon by the Mahalla workers. The Egyptian police fired rubber bullets and opened tear gas as well as live ammunition on the protesters, but the demonstration grew even stronger with around 40,000 people in the streets throwing stones at the police forces. During this uprising, three people were killed and hundreds injured, and also hundreds arrested, of whom 49 remained in custody and got prison sentences ranging between 3-5 years. Until this day, the families of these detainees are protesting against these sentences and demanding the President to intervene to end this unjust situation.

- So, why did the urban poor rise in anger chanting slogans against Mubarak and his regime and tearing down a big poster of Mubarak, and stamping on it in frustration? This came as a response to the sky-rocketing food prices, and at a time when the majority of Egyptians can’t even find bread to survive on. In 2008, 17 people were killed whilst standing for hours, and sometimes days, in bread queues to feed their families. Just imagine how your life could be like, when you can’t find bread to feed your young children, because of course bread is the cheapest food item that the majority of Egyptians could afford. The present government composed of millionaire businessmen are denying Egyptians the only thing they could afford, bread. And we know that when people are hungry, they have nothing to lose, and they will do anything to survive.

- To conclude, I just want to say a few words about what has preceded this vibrant movement of workers’ protests and strikes.

The 1990s was a decade of extreme political repression, and the ability to protest or demonstrate was minimal. Then came the second Palestinian Intifada (or uprising) in 2000, which led thousands of Egyptians to demonstrate in the streets in the biggest demonstrations since the 1970s. This movement culminated in the establishment of the ‘Popular Committee in Support of the Palestinian People’. Then came the war on Iraq in 2003, and this turned things upside down in the streets. The war on Iraq, like the recent war on Gaza, was a defining historic moment in street politics in Egypt. In March 2003, around 50,000 people from all walks of life demonstrated in Tahrir Sqaure, the biggest square in downtown Cairo. This demonstration was reminiscent of the students’ revolt in the early 1970s. And then came the war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, which again sent thousands of people to the streets in protest against Israel, and the US, and of course against Mubarak, whose stance on the war was disgraceful. He couldn’t even send a message of condemnation to Israel. So, for three decades, street politics in Egypt was at its lowest, until the Iraq war. Then, in 2004, the Egyptian movement for Change, known as ‘Kifaya’, the Arabic word for ‘Enough’, was formed to protest against the regime’s plans to extend Mubarak’s rule and that his son, Gamal, would succeed him in power. Kifaya held the banner of ‘No to emergency law, No to succession, and No to extension’, and has sent a very strong message of discontent to the regime. This was the first time the regime became the direct target. The Kifaya movement has spread across Egypt in various provinces and districts, and even more significantly, smaller groups started springing out of it, like mushrooms: Doctors for change, teachers for change, students for change, Judges for change, Journalists for change, actors and artists for change, Citizens against inflation, and so on and so forth. However, all these groups were mainly composed of middle-class intellectuals, artists, writers, and human rights activists, as well as students. And then the wave of workers’ strikes came to strengthen and push forward the mass movement in Egypt. So far, the movement has been sustained and in my view it has become even more powerful with the recent protests against the war on Gaza. There is every reason on the ground to believe that the resistance movement in Egypt will grow even bigger against all kinds of injustices.