Hossam el-Hamalawy
Two weeks ago, a Giza police force from Warraq Police Station broke into the house of 43-year-old Fekri Muhammad Abbas at 2:30am, and tortured him, his wife and children, searching for hash.
The torture not only included the usual beatings with fists, kicks and whipping with sticks, etc.. but the police forced the citizen’s wife and daughter to strip naked and urinate on themselves!
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.
The victim of a rape attempt by two Underground Metro police corporals has dropped her complaint against them, after she was pressured by the police corporal’s family.