The Telephone Equipments Manufacturing Company are staging protests in front of the General Federation of Trade Unions in Galaa St, downtown Cairo.
Tag: workers
Tens of Mahalla suspects to face trial in an Egyptian exceptional court
Sarah Carr reports:
The trial of 48 men and one woman accused of a range of criminal offences allegedly committed during the April 6 clashes will begin on Aug. 9, their lawyers told Daily News Egypt.
The group — five of whom are at large — will be tried in an exceptional court on what lawyers allege are spurious, trumped-up charges including “criminal damage to public and private property, assault of a public official, unlawful assembly of more than five people and illegal possession of weapons.”
The announcement by workers in the Ghazl El-Mahalla Spinning Mill that they would go on strike on April 6 had prompted calls by activists and political opposition groups for a nationwide general strike on the same day.
When the Ghazl El-Mahalla strike was aborted following intense intimidation by security bodies and worker disunity, hundreds of people in the Delta town of Mahalla, in which the factory is located, took to the streets shortly around 4 pm.
According to journalists and eyewitnesses, the crowds of people which converged on the main square were protesting rising food prices caused by soaring inflation.
While the government alleges that it was criminally-motivated thugs who were responsible for the ensuing violence that broke out on April 6 and 7, eyewitnesses say that heavy-handed policing by hundreds of security body troops who allegedly used live ammunition against crowds was the real cause of the violence.
A 15-year-old boy, Ali Mabrouk, was shot dead while standing in the third floor balcony of his home on the night of April 6.
His family told Daily News Egypt that central security force troops were underneath the house at the time of the shooting.
Hundreds of people — including children — were rounded up and arrested over the course of the two days.
According to defense lawyer Ahmad Ezzat of the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, some of the group of 49 who were either detained or remain in detention, have alleged that they were tortured.
The charges against the group — some carrying lengthy prison sentences — will be heard by an exceptional court established under the emergency law which lacks basic guarantees of due process.
Human Rights Watch in a statement issued on Friday called on Egyptian authorities to quash the transfer of the case to the Supreme State Security Court.
“The Supreme State Security Court was established under Egypt’s emergency law in 1980 and follows procedures that violate internationally recognized fair trial norms,” the statement reads.
“In violation of guarantees of the independence of the judiciary, two military judges may sit alongside the Security Court’s regular bench of three civilian judges,” it continues.
In addition to concerns about the trial process itself, lawyers and activists have expressed concern both about the police investigation process and the motives for bringing the charges.
In early June Egyptian daily El-Badeel published parts of the public prosecution office’s questioning of a state security officer involved in the case.
Muhammad Fathy Abdel-Rahman told the public prosecution office that he had relied on “80 or 90 sources” to gather evidence against those alleged to have committed crimes on April 6 and 7 in Mahalla.
Abdel-Rahman reportedly refused to divulge the name of these sources — some of whom are not police — in order to “protect their safety.”
He was also quoted as saying that not all the sources were actually present at the scene of the events.
Furthermore, Abdel-Rahman allegedly told the public prosecution office that he and other members of the police investigation squad did not actually take part in surveillance of suspects “because of the scale of the events” in Mahalla.
In an op-ed published this month in the Socialist Worker, a British publication, activist Hossam El-Hamalawy alleges that the 49 are “scapegoats for the uprising” in Mahalla and describes the legal process against them as a “show trial.”
Journalists.. Which side are you on?
I’ve started reading this awesome book: “Shaking the World: Revolutionary Journalism by John Reed,” which I bought from Bookmarks. I want to quote some excerpts from preface, written by Paul Foot on 28 September 1998:
I write this on the day after marching to lobby the Labour Party conference in Blackpool and I am reading the newspapers. Blackpool was chock full of journalists. They crammed into the Winter Gardens, scavenging for gossip. Is Tony Blair falling out with Gordon Brown? What is Robin Cook going to say about electoral reform? At least 500 of the best journalists of our generation spent their day searching for and producing, exactly nothing.
Meanwhile the march of several thousand surged through the streets. These marchers had stories to tell: real stories, about hospitals starved of nursing care, about slashed firefighting capabilities, about impoverished old age pensioners and corrupt local authorities. Yet not a single of those conference journalists even considered spending a moment with the marchers. In the next morning’s papers, full of idiotic intrigue, the entire march had been obliterated.
No wonder the word ‘journalist’ has become almost a term of abuse in socialist circles. If this is the way journalists behave, surely they must be part of the capitalist conspiracy to exploit and humiliate working people? In truth, however, the word journalist describes only a person who writes about the contemporary world. Since the single most obvious fact about the contemporary world is that is ultimately divided into two classes, a journalist can write for one class or the other. Of course it is much easier and more profitable to write on behalf of the authorities. But the history of the century is lit up by journalists who wrote against the stream.
Perhaps the greatest of these was John Reed. He was born in 1887 into a privileged family and was taught to be a ‘writer’. He developed the necessarily elegant and sophisticated writing style. A glorious career in American journalism was cut short when he was sent to cover a strike by the Industrial Workers of the World at Paterson, New Jersey. What he saw in that strike–he was cast into prison almost by accident and left to rot–convinced him that there were two sides to every story and he eagerly ranged himself on the side of the exploited people everywhere.
The difference between Reed and the sort of journalists who clambered around the conference hall at Blackpool was marvelously illustrated during his coverage of the Mexican Civil War in 1913. When he arrived on the scene, the official O’Boozes covering the war were getting drunk and filling rubbish at Presidio, on the US side of Rio Grande. Reed swam the river and did not rest, until he came to the camps of the revolutionaries Zapata and Villa. He reported the war from the point of view of the starving people who were claiming the land for themselves. These reports made him famous, but his fame never for a moment deflected him from his political commitment. His language became less and less ornate, more and more direct.
When the Russian Revolution broke out in October 1917, Reed,who was reporting the world war in Europe, made a bee-line for it. The result is perhaps the greatest piece of journalism ever: Ten Days that shook the World. The book’s brilliance is not just its descriptive power, but its understanding and admiration for the swirling initiatives of the mass working class party which kept the revolution going.