Read this.
UPDATE: Michaela Singer has a report at the Daily News Egypt.
Tag: bloggers
Released labor activist vows to pursue the battle
From the Los Angeles Times, by Noha El-Henawy:
He was grabbing a cup of coffee at the factory cafeteria less than two years ago when he heard the call for a strike. “I wondered then what the term strike meant,” recalls Karim El-Beheiry. On his way out of the factory, he heard a fellow tell the press: “I don’t have enough money to satisfy the needs of my son.”
“I cried when I heard that,” remembers El-Beheiry, “and eventually decided to join the strike.”
The words stuck with El-Beheiry until they turned him from a disengaged lay worker into a prominent blogger and labor activist. But he did not know that his dedication to workers’ rights would cost him more than 50 days of imprisonment and torture for allegedly instigating a riot in April, at Mahalla town, the site of Egypt’s biggest spinning and textile factory and the stronghold of the nation’s labor force.
Upon his release, El-Beheiry affirmed to The Times that his experience behind bars, though painful, made him more determined about his cause. “Jail never changes ideas. Coercion and torture makes the person stronger. I love this country and I refuse to give up my rights,” El-Beheiry told The Times over the phone from Mahalla, about 75 miles north of Cairo.
The Mahalla factory has been the scene of several strikes over wages for the last two years. The first derupted in December 2006, when El-Beheiry was first introduced to the notion of labor advocacy. Since then, the 23-year-old worker has been mentored by leftist labor leaders until he eventually embraced a socialist ethos. His devotion was translated into the launching of two blogs (Egyworkers and Watch out You are Now in Egypt) to promote a labor-oriented agenda.
However, his concern with workers’ demands drew his attention to Egypt’s different malaises, he says. “All I had in mind was the labor question and how to retrieve my rights as a worker. However, my concern became broader and expanded from just asking for my rights to asking for civil liberties and freedom of expression,” he explains.
The unrest at the Mahalla factory culminated in a riot April 6 in which two people were killed and more than 100 wounded after police clashed with demonstrators, shooting rubber bullets and throwing tear gas bombs. Holding his camera, El-Beheiry recorded the violence and filed updates over the phone to local and international news organizations until he was caught off guard by police, who kept him in custody until Saturday.
“The first three days in custody were the worst three days in my life. They were days of torture, oppression and coercion,” says El-Beheiry, adding that he had his hands and legs cuffed and was kept blindfolded without food or water for three days.
“They wanted me to let on to other people and to make certain confessions. They tried everything with me but they did not get anything,” he recounts.
El-Beheiry declines to provide details on the way he was allegedly tortured. “I don’t want to remember those days. When I recall those moments, I cry not out of weakness but out of my inability to believe that a human being can get audacious enough to do that to another human being and that Egypt has become this police state.”
However, earlier, El-Beheiry told Agence France-Presse that he was subjected to beatings and electric shocks. “They would give you improper food. They would put their fingers in your food or throw it with their feet to you,” he recounts.
Egypt has recently witnessed several protests over inflation, which has raised the specter of public unrest, putting President Hosni Mubarak’s regime under unprecedented pressure. Young bloggers and Facebook activists have recently come to the fore as the main mobilizers of anti-Mubarak protests.
“Egypt is shaking and the people started to feel pressured. At one point they will explode out of hunger and their explosion will be catastrophic,” warns El-Beheiry.
Despite state retaliation, El-Beheiry vows to pursue the battle on the blogosphere. “I will never stop blogging; I will keep blogging about the labor moment even if it costs my life,” he affirms. “Facebook activists and bloggers carry Egypt’s hopes and they are the ones who retrieve freedom for Egyptians.”
Live-blogging public talks
A thing Comrade Jack does regularly and was very inspiring to me is live-blogging activist public talks, which I wasn’t necessarily familiar with in Cairo.. But I guess also Jack is helped by the fact that in San Francisco you can usually find an open wi-fi anywhere around activist or community centers.
I think it’s something useful and we need to do in coming activist conferences whenever we can.. say the coming Cairo Anti-War Conference, London’s Marxism, Cairo’s Socialist Days, or what have you. The organizers should do their best to make wi-fi internet access available for participants. This gives the opportunity for activists to live-blog the event, take photos and videos and upload them right away online to share with thousands if not millions of fellow activists around the world.
I don’t think the logistics of it is really difficult, right? Some friends had suggested that already in previous events in Cairo, but none got around to doing it. So, I’m just renewing the call to try to provide cyberaccess whenever we can for the audience. We complain all the time of the lack of media coverage of dissident news.. and while it’s true and has to do with how the mainstream media is structured in the first place, one way to counter that is take on the task ourselves: reporting the event, and spreading the word, image and audio to our increasing audience online. What we need is just a little cheap digital camera, a laptop, and wi-fi cyberaccess. Can the comrades at the Center for Socialist Studies for example try working on that for our future public meetings in the Center? Many of the talks and the discussions we organize, where labor leaders, community activists and others speak, need to be beamed somehow to the cyberspace.. By that we are spreading the word and the image to a wider audience, we can be inspiring others into action based on what they hear and see from the Egyptian experience, and in all cases this is the memory of the class that we are documenting. We need to get the words of Kamal el-Fayoumi, Tarek Amin, Kareem el-Beheiry, Gehad Taman, and all Ghazl el-Mahalla labor activists to a wider audience.
We need to familiarize the world with Mahalla in a much concrete way. What’s better to do? To just write about a 27,000-strong strike, or to write about it accompanied with pictures of the event, and see faces of their leaders, the men and women who did it, with videos of them recalling the events, talking about their personal experiences during that, how that shaped them.
I don’t think it’s nuclear physics to set it up, and I’m sure there are plenty of bloggers around in Cairo and Giza who can give us a hand with the technicalities of the process. Anyways, it’s just a thought.