Tag: europe

Italy: GENERAL STRIKE!

Posted on By 3arabawy

First Greece and now Italy!

Thousands of workers, students, pensioners and the unemployed marched in heavy rain through cities across Italy on Friday to protest the government’s handling of the economic crisis.
A daylong general strike by Italy’s largest union curtailed services at hospitals and schools, shut down banks and post offices, while the demonstrations snarled traffic in Rome, Milan and other cities.
With Europe slipping into recession, anger over its economic woes has been bubbling over into protests and unrest across the continent.
Thursday’s strike was called a month ago by the CGIL union to put pressure on the conservative government of Premier Silvio Berlusconi.
In Rome, protesters waved unions flags and held up banners reading “united against layoffs” and “more jobs, more wages, more pensions, more rights.”
The government said the strike by the left-leaning CGIL was politically motivated and would further damage the economy, which has contracted for two consecutive quarters.

Solidarity from Vienna with the Mahalla 49

Posted on By 3arabawy

I received the following message from our comrades in Austria:

Dear friends of the Mahalla workers and all over the World.
In Solidarity with the 49 workers, whose show trial starts on the 9th of August, we staged a protest in front of the Egyptian embassy.
We chanted “Long live the International solidarity” and we were greeted by Austrian construction workers.
One of them was the son of a Mahalla resident and he was really happy to see such an act of solidarity in Vienna. We told him that we owe much to the Mahalla workers who were such an inspiration and whose action was felt like an earth quake all over the world.
Also we chanted slogans like: Mubarak – terrorist, Olmert – terrorist, George Bush terrorist to make clear that we from the international antiwar movement see those three as allies against the Arab people.
An activist from the solidarity with Gaza campaign joined in, and she spoke to personnel from the embassy and passersby, about the situation in Gaza and the responsibility of the Egyptian state for not helping the people in Gaza.
In Solidarity
Your friends from Linkswende in Austria

Click on the pic below to watch a couple of pix from the demo

I’d like to thank the Austrian comrades for their solidarity, and I hope comrades around the world would stage similar protests and solidarity actions soon, as the trial is due to start on 9 August.

Our Lebanese comrades told me during the Marxism Festival that they received an overwhelming positive response from the Egyptian migrant workers they encountered in Beirut while they were distributing leaflets in support of Mahalla last spring following the uprising.

Another thing I heard from the British comrades when I went down to Portsmouth was that the copies of Socialist Worker that had Mahalla’s news on the frontpage were eagerly picked up by the Muslim (largely Bengali) worshipers at the town’s local mosque where the SWP sets up a stool outside on Fridays, trying to approach the local Muslim population (which is eating shit and suffering from racism in this little English town).

I urge socialists outside Egypt, especially in places where there is a substantial presence of Egyptian migrant labor community (say like Lebanon), or in Europe where there are Arab and Muslim communities to devote more attention to the solidarity with the Mahalla detainees and to the Egyptian labor movement in general.. Not only that will help us tremendously in Egypt in terms of easing the regime’s crackdowns on the labor movement, but propaganda and agitation around that issue could also be one of the venues to start building bridges with the ME migrant communities you have in your countries.