Category: Blog

Judge fines Mubarak, Adly $5000

Posted on By 3arabawy

From AFP:

Judge fines Mubarak, minister $5,000
13/3/2007
CAIRO: An Egyptian court has ordered President Hosni Mubarak and his interior minister to pay more than $5,000 in compensation to a man jailed for seven years without charge, security and judicial sources said on Tuesday.
The administrative court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria on Monday approved Hamed Yassin Hamed’s request for compensation from the president and Interior Minister Habib Al-Adli for being kept in prison for seven years.
The government is appealing the decision.
Hamed was arrested in Alexandria in 1989 on suspicion of having  links with Islamist groups and then released in 1996, without ever  having been formally charged or appearing before a court, said the  judicial source.
Human rights organizations have repeatedly criticized the Egyptian government for “arbitrary” and prolonged detentions of suspected Islamists, often without charge.

Socialist Students denounce military tribunals

Posted on By 3arabawy

Egypt’s Socialist Students denounced the regime’s move to try the Muslim Brotherhood leaders in front of military tribunals, announcing their solidarity with the Islamist detainees, and called for wider coordination with the MB and Ghad Party youth, as well as with young activists from other political tendencies–against Mubarak’s regime.

Textile strikes continue

Posted on By 3arabawy

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports that 270 textile workers at Mansoura-España garments factory have started their second strike in less than one month.

The workers are demanding, according to the paper, their unpaid February salary, their “social raises” which have not been paid since 1995 (Jeeez!!), and their Labor Day grants which the management stopped paying since 2002!!!

There is strong female presence in the garments’ factories labor force in general. It’s heart warming for me to find out not only thousands of them are taking part in the strike movement, but also (according to the interviews I conducted in Mahalla, Kafr el-Dawar, and chats I had with labor activists in Cairo) the female workers have tended to be more militant than their male colleagues.

In the case of Ghazl el-Mahalla December strike for example three thousand female workers from the garments factory stormed other sections of the company that had male colleagues who haven’t gone on strike yet, and started chanting “El-regalla fein?! el-hareem ahom!” (Here are the women! So where are the men?!) Their colleagues, feeling ashamed, joined the strike.

I wonder if the plight and the resistance of the female garments workers are ever discussed by those posh feminists of Suzan Mubarak’s National Council for Women.