Thousands protest the murder of Khaled Said on the hands of the police in Alexandria.

Security cracks down on Amonsito textile workers, Sunday 23 May, in front of the parliament.

Listen to the worker speaking at 2:33, drawing parallels between the state crackdown on the Amonsito workers to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Farmers from the village of Behout in the Delta province of Daqahliya, under threat of eviction, have alleged that a court verdict was forged by individuals who are claiming rights to their land.
On Sunday afternoon, some of the 28 families from Behout, gathered outside the public prosecution office in Cairo.
One farmer held up a placard reading, “Look, Gamal [Abdel Nasser] you distributed the land…How can Hosni Mubarak sell it?”
Farmers told reporters that they are the victims of an illegal attempt to take over land which was given to them under the Agricultural Reform Law after the 1952 revolution.
“Land was distributed to these farmers under the Agricultural Reform Law in 1962 and 1963. Each family took between two and five feddans,” lawyer Muhammad Refaat, who is representing the farmers, explained.
“The state provided full compensation to landowners whose land was sequestered. These farmers became the legal owners of the land after paying installments on it, and according to the appropriation system.
“However they subsequently discovered that the public prosecution office has issued a decision granting the heirs of Abdel Meguid El-Badrawy Ashour title to the land given to [the farmers in the 1960s].”
The farmers appealed the decision, and the Mansoura Court ruled in their favor on Dec. 28, 2008.
According to Refaat the individuals seeking ownership of the land “resorted to forging court verdicts.”
He says that they have a document according to which the Mansoura Appeals Court overturned the verdict of Dec. 28, 2008 and reinstated the public prosecution office decision.
“The ruling awards the entire land to one individual, Muhammad Mahmoud Abdel Rahman who appealed the verdict without our ever being informed of such. The first court session was on Feb. 10, 2009,” Refaat said.
“On Feb. 17 the appeals court overturned the verdict issued in favor of the farmers and reinstated the public prosecution office’s decision evicting them from the land. We knew nothing about the court session scheduled for Feb. 17 2009.”
Refaat listed what he says proves that the farmers have legal ownership of the land.
“Firstly, these people bought the land from the General Agricultural Reform Authority — from a governmental body, not from someone who will swindle them. Secondly, the price of the land was paid in full through installments paid over 40 years,” he explained.
“Thirdly, landowners were compensated in the 1960s and received the equivilent value of their land. Fourthly, how can the public prosecution office order that a farmer be thrown off his land when he owns this land and has been on it for more than 40 years?”
The lawyer told reporters that he is demanding a “transparent investigation into the forgery of this court verdict. If such an investigation is carried out the verdict’s invalidity will be established.”
Karama party MP Hamdeen Sabbahy was among the delegation which presented the farmers’ demands to the public prosecution office.
He condemned the “injustice” suffered by Egyptian farmers.
“This case is another installment in the injustice suffered by Egypt’s farmers who own land under the Agricultural Reform Law, and have been settled on it since the 1960s, but who nonetheless face unjust court verdicts evicting them from their land,” Sabbahy told reporters.
“These verdicts are issued in the interests of feudalists such as El-Badrawy Ashour and others who, without any genuine basis, claim that they own this land which has been cultivated by these farmers for years and which is their only source of income.”

Kefaya’s website said more than 40 youth were detained, but I was told by a journalist that the number is about 37.

No more information is available.

And what a cheap move to appease the national sentiments of the public. And I guess it worked for the confused nationalist opposition, including Hamdeen Sabbahi (see video below) of the Nasserist Karama, who declared support for the move.

I totally oppose this move. I do not trust the regime with one gram of uranium. Power could be generated by dzillion other safer ways than nuclear energy.

Down with Mubarak!

More than 100 workers assembled in the morning near the Mahalla Train Station, where two buses had been hired to transport them to Cairo. One bus was to carry a delegation to the Ministry of Social Insurance, to express solidarity with the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, and the other was to take the workers to the HQ of the General Federation of Trade Unions to stage a sit-in if their demands were not met.

The workers were shocked to find the buses’ owner showing up and instructing his drivers to leave immediately, citing threats from State Security agents of revoking the buses’ licenses and the closure of his business. The agents also were heavily present around the factory compound, and the city entrances/exits. When a group of workers moved to the train station, in an attempt to catch a ride to Cairo, they were met by State Security agents. They besieged the activists, including Muhammad el-Attar, in a circle, and refused to let them move for roughly an hour.

While a handful of workers managed to escape from the police, and trickled to Cairo in microbuses, back in the company, several hundred women workers in the garments-making Factory Section 4 went on strike for 45 mins, protesting the shortage in raw materials supply, which leads to the decrease in their bonuses, which are based on units produced.

Mahalla worker and blogger Kareem el-Beheiri has been following up on the situation there all throughout the day. You can read his postings here.

“There are murmurs in the factory among workers about a second attempt to go to Cairo and launch a sit-in at the General Federation,” he wrote. “There are also murmurs of possibly a new strike. Tension is running high.”

Those workers who managed to make it to Cairo, joined around 30 rights and labor activists who assembled inside the Ministry of Social Insurance compound around 1am to protest the closure of the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services offices in Naga’a Hammadi and Mahalla.

There was a group of Central Security Forces soldiers deployed outside the ministry building, in addition to usual faces from State Security’s Counter-Communism bureau and Qasr el-Nil Police Station. But they did not ban the activists’ silent protest. Still, it was amusing to watch plainclothes thugs deployed by the police to guard the ministry’s building.

The activists demanded to meet the Minister, and after negotiations with State Security agents, a delegation (including Kamal Abbas the CTUWS director and Karama Party MP Hamdeen Sabbahi) met with the minister’s assistant in charge of the NGOs portfolio, who basically told them, the decision to close down the CTUWS offices was not “the ministry’s call.” So who’s call was it, asked the activists. The woman refused to reply. “It’s of course a decision by State Security,” commented Kamal Abbas. Another meeting is scheduled on Monday between CTUWS officials and the Ministry.

Here’s a short video clip of today’s protest, shot by the anti-corruption watchdog Shayfeencom

The Center for Socialist Studies issued a statement denouncing the police assaults on labor activists and strikers. Human Rights Watch also blasted Mubarak’s regime’s crackdown on the CTUWS offices:

The Egyptian government should reverse its order to close two offices of the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS) and should cease harassing the organization, Human Rights Watch said today.
The organization offers legal aid to Egyptian factory workers, educates them as to their rights, and reports on labor-rights issues in the country. The Ministry of Social Solidarity has blamed the CTUWS for inciting widespread labor unrest around the country. Egyptian officials have ordered two branches of the CTUWS to close within the last two weeks.
“Closing the offices of a labor rights group won’t end labor unrest,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The government should be upholding legal commitments to Egyptian workers instead of seeking a scapegoat.”
On April 11, approximately 100 police officers arrived at the CTUWS office in the Nile Delta town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra to deliver an administrative decision ordering its closure. This came just over a week after General al-Sharbini Hashish, head of the Local Council in the southern industrial town of Naga` Hammidi, issued an administrative decision on March 29 ordering the closure of the CTUWS branch there on the grounds that it violated Egypt’s law on associations, though the order did not specify how.
Government action against the Naga` Hammidi branch of the CTUWS began in mid-March, when officials from the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration called the center’s representatives in for questioning, saying they had orders to investigate the legality of the center’s operations. Days before Gen. Hashish issued the order to close the center, the local representative of the Ministry of Social Solidarity requested CTUWS representatives to come to the local office of the Interior Ministry’s office of State Security Investigations. They declined the invitation.
The government’s moves against the CTUWS come amid continuing labor unrest throughout Egypt. According to a March 2 story in the independent newspaper Al-Masri al-Youm, there were 222 sit-ins, strikes, and workers’ demonstrations in 2006. The largest was a public-sector textile workers’ strike at a factory in al-Mahalla al-Kubra in December 2006.
That strike came after the al-Mahalla office of the CTUWS helped inform textile workers of Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif’s March 3, 2006, decree that all public-sector textile workers’ year-end bonuses should henceforth be equal to two months’ salary, up as much as 500 percent from a flat, pre-tax bonus of 100 Egyptian pounds (US$18). Factory managers initially denied that the decree had been issued, saying that it was a nonbinding political promise. When representatives of the government-affiliated General Textile Worker’s Union failed to make good on their election promises to extract the increased bonus from the government, more than 20,000 workers at the Mahalla al-Kubra textile factory went on strike until the government offered a 45-day bonus.
Since then, thousands of workers have resigned from the General Textile Workers’ Union, saying the elections were fixed in favor of the government’s candidates, and more than 30,000 textile workers at other factories in the Delta have staged protests. Thousands of cement factory and railway workers, some of whom told reporters they were inspired by the Mahalla workers’ success, have staged protests ranging from slowdowns to strikes. Officials from the Ministry of Social Solidarity have blamed the CTUWS for the unrest on television talk shows and on the floor of the Shura Council, the upper house of Parliament.

You can find the HRW statement in Arabic here.

Keep your eyes on Mahalla.

Some leftist and independent bloggers got extremely upset about that, and accused Karama of hypocrisy and clientalism to the Libyan regime.

Karama activists lashed out at their critics, and the whole debate, unfortunately, has currently descended into personal slurs over the web forums and the lefty mailing lists.

Here’s a report from the Daily Star…

Al-Karama rouses anger and debate

Cairo-based Al-Karama newspaper, published by Al-Karama political group – functioning much as a party and referring to itself as one – has stirred up anger and debate as it published a series of features about the “achievements” of Moamar Al-Gaddafi, revolutionary leader of neighboring Libya.
Al-Gaddafi, who has been in power for 37 years and shows no signs of being ready to leave office, is regarded by many as an eccentric individual.
From shocking statements, politically incorrect comments about Middle East affairs to a rather distinctive manner of dress – often donning robes, thick glasses and a turban and wearing high heels – Al-Gaddafi has often turned heads and raised eyebrows at Arab summits and high-profile meetings.
Nevertheless, Al-Karama (Dignity), a socialist, Nasserite party-like group, has chosen to sing his praises on the pages of their newly founded newspaper. The paper dedicated a full-fledged supplement to Libyan accomplishments, focusing on Al-Gaddafi’s “legacy” and featuring the headline “37 years of achievement.”
Al-Karama paper and party-to-be was founded by lower house MP Hamdein Sabahi and is renowned for advocating socialist ideas and denouncing internal government policies. One of its top members is Kefaya (Enough) movement co-founder Abdel-Halim Qandil.
In its headlines, the Egyptian “nationalist” newspaper has often been a fierce critic of the ruling government for “monopolizing” the ruling position for more than 25 years.
The newspaper has often accused the government of oppressing opposition and stamping out political diversity, to the point where the High Council for Journalism has questioned its conduct.
Libya, being an extremely closed country closely controlled by Al-Gaddafi and his council, features no political diversity. Democracy is not appropriately endorsed. Political parties are constitutionally banned.
Although civil societies and non-governmental organizations are permitted, their number is small, their activities are largely monitored and they are strictly required to follow national goals, outlined by the revolutionary committees.
In short, the Libyan regime is considered highly authoritarian, leaving little, if no, space for the opposition to express its opinion freely. Laws practically criminalize peaceful exercises of expression.
The media in Libya is mostly owned by the state. Censorship is systematic in the private media, which has very few outlets. Libya’s foreign policies are waning; its relationship to the West is impaired and tarnished by recently-removed sanctions that had been placed on it by the United States.
Human rights abuses have been reported by international human rights groups throughout the country. Arbitrary and secret detention, torture and death in custody have also occurred periodically.
“Unfair trials, particularly before People’s Courts established in 1988, continue to be reported,” said Amnesty International in its latest country report on Libya. “Legislation remained in force that provides for the death penalty for activities which solely amount to the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and association.”
The New York-based Human Rights Watch also deemed the country “abusive” and published a report last week condemning Libya’s conduct toward migrants and asylum seekers.
“The Libyan government subjects migrants, asylum seekers and refugees to serious human rights abuses,” read the report, “including beatings, arbitrary arrests and forced return.”
In June, the same human rights group had published a report about possible “killings” inside Tripoli’s prisons. “Stories began to filter out of Libya about a mass killing in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison … Libyan groups outside the country said up to 1,200 prisoners had died.”
Arguably, it is no surprise that political activists are “shocked” over Al-Karama’s praise of the country. Some of Egypt’s top political bloggers have even accused Al-Karama of taking funds from the neighboring Arab state.
“The matter is clear, no documents are needed … photographs or videos … the supplement was printed, distributed and sold. People have in their hands material evidence of [Al-Karama’s] crime,” wrote Wael Abbas, political writer, Kefaya member and owner of Misr Digital blogspot. Abbas added that there is no justification for their “betrayal and receipt of funding.”
Another political blogger and activist, nicknamed Assad, said that such behavior from Al-Karama implies “a double standard,” where the group seems to fight an internal battle against what they deem a repressive government in Egypt while supporting yet another “abusive” regime in Libya.
“How could you swear that you will never allow succession of power from [Hosni] Mubarak to his son, while you politically campaign for the succession of Seif Al-Islam Al-Gaddafi [Al-Gaddafi’s son]?” asked Assad, under the title “Pity Al-Karama.”
Al-Karama has been denied a party license by the Political Parties Court for several years. The group, however, has been allowed to publish a “partisan newspaper.” They have also established an official headquarters, where they recruit members.