The Mahalla April 6 Uprising: ‘It was ONE woman who started the intifada’

I’ve just come back home after a six-hour meeting with a number of labor organizers who were involved in the 6 April Uprising. I wanted to get more details about the Mahalla intifada and fill in some holes in the stories and reports. I’m in the process of collecting testimonies and I’m hoping in the near future I’ll be able to put together a longer posting.

But, one story I wanna share with you now is about the trigger of the uprising. What we read in all news reports is that the demonstration that took place in Mahalla’s El-Shoun Sq which launched the uprising was spontaneous. But the accounts of how this “spontaneous” demo came about remained vague and on occasions conflicting. According to what I heard today from the labor organizers:

The whole town was looking to the (Ghazl el-Mahalla) factory that day… with people walking by the factory compound, looking and waiting for the workers to come out on strike.. Everyone knew about the strike.. I mean everyone in the town.. And what happened in February was expected to be repeated on a larger scale this time… At least one car accident occurred near the factory and there was some funeral passing by too.. and in each of these occasions people will spontaneously gather around them thinking it might have been the workers from the compound who started the strike and were now marching.. As soon as they’d find out it wasn’t a demo they would disperse in the nearby alleys, but still had their eyes on the factory waiting in uncertainty. Meanwhile, inside the factory the security forces had already occupied it, and isolated the sections from one another to make sure if any agitation started in one section it would never spill over to the other… The Textile Workers’ League activists who were to lead the strike were rounded up and taken to State Security Police HQ…
Sometime around 3:30pm, however, ONE woman stood in El-Shoun Sq, and she started shouting slurs against Mubarak and his family, saying she couldn’t afford the prices of basic commodities any more… Few minutes later a child ran to her and started chanting against the increase of prices of sugar and cooking oil… A guy from the police showed up, and physically assaulted the woman, slapping and kicking her…. And that’s when the spontaneous demonstration by the youth in the square came about … So you can say that it was the women who started the December (2006) Strike, and it was one woman who started the (April) Intifada.

The identity of the woman however is disputed. Some said she was a woman from the garments section in the factory, while another activist denied that and said she was just a town resident. More stories from the Mahalla Uprising will follow in the coming postings.