Category: Blog

Cement workers stage sit-in south of Cairo

Posted on By 3arabawy

More than 500 workers at el-Qawmiya Cement Company in Helwan staged a sit-in Sunday morning, in front of the office building of the CEO Nabil el-Gabri, demanding their full annual bonuses.

The workers were entitled to a total profit share of LE30 millions (roughly 10% of the LE306 million profits made by the company the previous year). In addition to the cash sums, part of this money should be allocated to the housing and social services. The management only paid LE13 millions, triggering industrial action from the workers today. The Factory Union Committee apparently lobbied for only another LE7 millions, which was refused by the workers, who demanded the full remaining LE13 millions.

The director of the Helwan State Security Bureau Officer Ashraf Shura showed up at the factory in person, and negotiated with the workers. The sit-in was disbanded around 5pm, after Shura promised the workers their demands will be met. The workers also chanted against their Factory Union Committee officials, calling for their impeachment.

[Above: An undated photo of the director of Helwan’s State Security bureau Officer Ashraf Shura, seen above in brown plainclothes. He was involved in torturing labor writer Mostafa Bassiouny, by beatings and electric shocks in 1999. Photo courtesy of Egyptian blogger Ahmad Abdel Fattah.]

3 killed in building collapse in Cairo working class neighborhood

Posted on By 3arabawy

More disasters in the working class neighborhood of Sayyeda Zeinab, the constituency of Fathi Surrur, the NDP parliament speaker:

CAIRO, May 6 (Reuters) – Three people were killed on Sunday when a 4-storey apartment building collapsed in a poor neighborhood of Cairo, security sources said.
They said two bodies had been pulled from the rubble, and authorities were working to recover the body of a third person from beneath the wreckage in the working class Sayyeda Zeinab neighborhood. Building collapses are a frequent hazard in poor parts of Egypt because of lax building standards and poor maintenance.

NYT: Denial and Democracy in Egypt

Posted on By 3arabawy

I never read or hear about this Francis J. Ricciardone, the US ambassador in Cairo, except when he’s inaugurating some “cultural project” somewhere, or mingling with the Sufis in Tanta.. and the story has to include always some comment he makes where he praises Mubarak’s “wisdom.”

I’m glad to see The New York Times is telling him to shut up…

In recent weeks, Egypt’s government has further trampled the rights of its citizens, closing several branches of the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, which provides much needed legal assistance to workers. This comes at a time when a growing number of government critics have been thrown in jail and on the heels of constitutional amendments that restrict rights and weaken standards for arrest and detention.
All of this somehow has escaped the Bush administration’s ambassador to Egypt who, in a recent television interview in Cairo, painted a chillingly sunny picture of President Hosni Mubarak’s government. While he acknowledged there were “some infringements and violations” of human rights, he declared himself “optimistic” about democratic progress in Egypt, adding that the judiciary and the government’s “commitment to the opinion of the common Egyptian citizen” would carry the day.
That not only contradicts reality — freedom of expression and assembly is actually diminishing — it contradicts the State Department’s latest human rights report, which says that Egypt’s rights record remains poor. Egypt’s jailed bloggers and beaten protesters can certainly attest to that.
After crackdowns weakened or destroyed so many of Egypt’s independent political organizations, democratic activists are hoping the burgeoning trade union movement will pick up the fight for democratic change. Which is why Mr. Mubarak has ordered the shuttering of the trade union centers.
With so many other things to worry about in the Middle East, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush also seem to have lost their earlier fervor for Egyptian democracy. Washington must warn Mr. Mubarak clearly about the costs — for Egypt’s long-term stability and its relationship with the United States — of such anti-democratic moves. Happy talk and denial just damage America’s credibility and enable more repression.