Tag: left

Live-blogging public talks

Posted on By 3arabawy

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.

Trade Unionist and Blogger Jack Stephens

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.

Ghazl el-Mahalla Labor Leader Gehad Taman القيادي بغزل المحلة جهاد طمان

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.

Labor blogger freed after weeks of torture

Posted on By 3arabawy

AFP interviews Kareem el-Beheiri:

A blogger released after weeks behind bars over deadly protests at Egypt’s biggest textile plant for higher pay and controls on prices, said Monday he and his fellow detainees suffered weeks of “torture”.
“We were subjected to electric shocks, to beatings and there was no food and or drink for the first few days,” blogger Karim el-Beheiri told AFP a day after his release. “We went through weeks of torture and humiliation.”
Beheiri, Tarek Amin and Kamal al-Fayoumy, three worker activists, were arrested on April 6 at the Misr Spinning and Weaving company in the Nile Delta industrial city of Mahalla after riots which left three people dead and hundreds detained.
An interior ministry official confirmed the three had been released but denied they had been mistreated.
“These are false accusations,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. “Everything took place within a framework of human rights.”
They were accused of “inciting unrest, damage to property and demonstrating,” a security official told AFP, adding that of the hundreds detained in connection with the Mahalla riots, eight remain in custody.
The three were fired from their jobs after their arrest, said Beheiri, whose detention was condemned by international human rights watchdogs.
“Many of us had never seen the inside of a prison before,” Beheiri said, describing his first weeks at Borg al-Arab prison near the Mediterranean city of Alexandria sharing a small cell with 25 people as “terrifying.”
“We had bread thrown at us. They would dip their hands in our food before throwing it at us,” said Beheiri who, with the others, mounted two hunger strikes while in detention.
On April 16, the prosecution ordered the release of several detainees including Beheiri, Fayoumy and Amin, but the three remained behind bars until Sunday.
Beheiri said that during interrogations at state security headquarters in various Egyptian cities, questioning focused mainly on his blog and his connections to other bloggers.
“It’s the new fashion,” he said of a large-scale crackdown against Egypt’s cyber dissidents.
He said the first thing he wanted to do when he got home after the release was to blog the events.
“But I couldn’t remember my own password. It was so frustrating,” he said.
Symbolic of their rise to power, Egyptian police have arrested several political bloggers in recent months.
But despite Egypt’s Internet explosion, the cyber realm remains largely the preserve of the young and educated in a country where 40 percent of the population of 80 million people cannot read.
Nevertheless, Egypt’s bloggers, who rarely conceal their real identity, have taken on the role of bridging the gap between civil society’s desire for democracy and workers’ demands for better pay and working conditions.

Here’s a press release from RSF, and more updates on the detainees from the HMLC blog could be found here.