Egypt: Tension, Conflict & Chaos Rein On Eve Of Vote

 With only a few hours to go until the polls open in the first phase of Egypt’s referendum on a proposed constitution, tension is high. Alexandria has become a symbol of this tension when a controversial local imam, Ahmed El-Mahalawy, urged worshippers to vote yes.

Mahalawy has a long history of urging sectarian attacks against Christians and non-believers. But even in his mosque he was challenged by a worshipper who was immediately set-upon by Muslim Brotherhood worshippers who beat him.

Ultimately conflict spilled outside the mosque, including the arrival of conservative Salafists with swords and knives. A gathering of anti-constitution protesters disarmed and beat the men and torched their cars before the riot police arrived. However, as we went to press the mosque was still surrounded after the imam took several protestors hostage and tortured them.

It was unclear if any of the protesters were still inside, several had been released. 

There were also other scattered reports of oppositionists being attacked and Muslim Brotherhood offices being vandalized. It’s clear that tensions across the country are extremely high.

This situation hasn’t been helped by the continuing inflammatory rhetoric by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, including President Morsy, and their Salafist allies. Morsy made a speech denouncing the opposition as counter-revolutionaries. There has been talk of thousands of martyrs and death threats against TV news anchors.

It remains to be seen what will happen when the polls open but there is every possibility, given the shambolic way that the Brotherhood and Morsy have handled the present crisis up till the present, that chaos will be the order of the day.

The sense on the ground is that few preparations have been made and that there aren’t even enough neutral observers, let alone outside observers & NGOs, to guarantee a fair vote.

With the majority of judges boycotting supervising the election Morsy had to pass a law splitting the vote up into two dates. But even with this measure to ameliorate the pressure on the few that have agreed to supervise, it is possible that there won’t be enough. It’s not even clear if the government knows who will and who won’t supervise.

"The commission has published on its website the names of judges who are scheduled to supervise the referendum, but I assure you that among those names are 2,930 judges who decided to boycott the elections' oversight," said Judges’ Club spokesperson Shady Khalifa.

It’s entirely possible that people will show up at their polling stations – if they know where they are located – and won’t be able to vote or the poll will be unsupervised. The entire legal status of this constitution, rushed through by the Brotherhood and their allies, could be called into doubt.

There is every likelihood that the Brotherhood’s heavy-handed fumbling of this self-inflicted political crisis will haunt them and that even a formal victory in the referendum will lack legitimacy. Combine this with the looming austerity measures – announced and then withdrawn by Morsy this week – and there is a recipe for further social explosions.

Whatever else happens, the Brotherhood has badly damaged their reputation. It’s not clear how they’ll recover.

Egypt: Morsy Struggles To Get Out Of Crisis

President Mohammad Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood, from which he comes, continued to resist popular pressure with a half-hearted concession combined with more threats on Saturday.

A meeting was held at the presidential palace with “opposition figures” that mostly included his supporters and opposition figures who are marginal to the present movement. No central figures or opposition parties were represented, having boycotted the summit.

Afterwards Morsy’s Prime Minister announced that his constitutional decree would be mostly rescinded but that the contentious referendum on the constitution draft would go forward.

This threatens to split the movement by granting what had been one of the demands of the movement. However, as many activists pointed out, this concession is effectively meaningless since the decree was intended to insure that the draft constitution that was agreed in a marathon session of the Constituent Assembly went forward.

More worryingly, statements by the Brotherhood leadership indicated a continued hardline against protests, which has already led to hundreds of injuries and several deaths. Morsy’s aides also mooted the possibility of declaring a form of martial law if protests continued. The military also announced that it would enter the fray if the instability continued.

This is an indication that the military leadership will come down on the side of Morsy and the Brotherhood. After decades of repressing the Brotherhood this seems like an anachronism. But in reality it’s not surprising since the constitutional draft guarantees that the military will retain its status as a “state within the state”. They are granted immunity from democratic oversight, including of the military budget. It also allows the military to try civilians in military courts and does nothing to challenge the military’s enormous economic power. Some estimates have the military controlling up to 20 per cent of the Egyptian economy.

The constitution draft also permits the repression of the media, including the arrest of journalists and shutting down media. It also effectively outlaws independent unions by forbidding any industry from having more than one union representing workers – meaning that the state controlled unions cannot be challenged.

The Brotherhood leaders also used sectarian attacks on the Coptic Christian minority in their press statements.

The main opposition organizations, however, continue to call for mobilizations before the referendum, set for December 15. The fact that Morsy is turning to the military is a sign of how desperate they are to contain the present crisis. Likewise the attempts at partial concessions. 

If the mobilizations can deepen and spread – as they seemed to do on Friday with demonstrations even in rural areas that have historically been Brotherhood strongholds - the slow and partial retreat of Morsy and the Brotherhood can become more pronounced. If nothing else it will ensure a large “no” vote in the referendum that will lay the basis for future struggles to extend the rights of woman, minorities and workers.

Egypt: "A Real Uprising Against The Muslim Brotherhood"

“Red Card Friday” Protests Draw Hundreds Of Thousands Across Egypt

The opposition to Morsi has sustained its momentum and spread deeper into Egypt with perhaps hundreds of thousands protesting in cities and towns across the country.  

The picture that Mubarak and now the Muslim Brotherhood try to paint of political opposition is that it only exists to any extent in Cairo. “Tahrir is not Egypt” is a slogan that has been used many times since the January 25 revolution in 2011.

And it is true that the Muslim Brotherhood has historically been very strong in many provincial and rural centres of Egypt.

But that support may be in decline if the spread of protests is any indication.

Not only are there major demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and the militant union town of Mahalla where the movement that led to Mubarak’s overthrow began in 2008. Today there were also demonstrations of hundreds and of thousands in smaller centres.

There were, for instance, demonstrations in villages in the province of Beheira, historically a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold. In Sharqiya, President Morsi’s hometown there were major clashes between oppositionists and MB supporters near his family home.

In Damietta farmers burned images of Morsi. The farmer syndicate leader walked out of the Constituent Assembly after they failed to include the rights of farmers. There have also been protests at the Morsi’s failure to pass a law forgiving debts for Egypt’s poverty stricken farmers.

As Egyptian socialist journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy tweeted: “Egypt is witnessing a real uprising against the Brotherhood.”

Year One Of The Egyptian Revolution

There will be gobs and gobs of text filling the pages, websites and on air coverage today about the 1 year anniversary of the start of the Egyptian revolution. A lot of it, particularly in North America, will be stupid, low level stuff - fears of the Islamists taking power, etc etc. Very little of it will have a deeper sense of the continuing dynamic heart of the revolutionary process that is unfolding in Egypt and which will likely continue to unfold over the next several years. I'd hate to be one to join in the stupidity and there is also lots and lots of excellent coverage out there, including eyewitness coverage on the ground in Tahrir. So, I will just summarize what I think are the three or four main points that are most important and often forgotten or avoided.

1) The Egyptian revolution is the most important political event since the fall of the former USSR. Because Egypt is an ally, in particular its military leadership who receive $1.3 billion, there is considerably less enthusiasm for bigging up the Egyptian revolution than there was the collapse of the rival Soviet empire in 89-91. But let there be no mistake, the revolution in Egypt - and throughout the region, lest we forget that there are active revolutionary processes still taking place in Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, etc - will profoundly reshape the world and the political alignments in a way no less profound than 1989. If it reaches its full potential - hell, if it reaches half its potential - this will be the biggest blow to US imperialism since Vietnam (in a different way of course) and perhaps larger since the Middle East is much more strategic to US interests.

2) This ain't over by a long shot. The fall of Mubarak was really just a beginning. It reconfigured the balance of class and political forces inside of Egypt in a profound way but the old regime is still in control. And the revolution, though it ebbs and flows, is nowhere near to exhausting itself. There are challenges for sure - for both sides - but there will be an extended period of jockeying and realignment that takes place over the next few years. Watch, in this next phase, for the Muslim Brotherhood, now in control of Parliament to face increasing challenges as their very moderate leadership fail to deliver on the aspirations unleashed by the revolution and they increasingly try to put an end to the revolutionary process. If the left is smart and works with the most militant and active sections of the Brotherhood, particularly the youth, I expect to see some splits (rather than just individuals as has been the case up to now, even if there have been large numbers of individuals) of significant size that move towards a position that Egypt needs a second revolution.

3) The class struggle is key. All eyes are on Tahrir, which has incredible symbolic power in the revolution. That is why the generals have tried to so hard to discredit the Tahrir sit-ins. But Tahrir is just the symbol. The real power of the revolution has always been with the very large working class in Egypt. It was when the working class moved into open struggle with an explosive strike wave that the generals gave Mubarak the shove. And it has been the ebbing and flowing of the strike waves over the past year that have won de facto trade union rights, built an independent union movement of hundreds of thousands practically overnight (no small thing - it makes them the first and largest mass democratic organizations in the country) and forced issues onto the agenda like a maximum and minimum wage, the right to strike and protest, etc. As the revolutionary process continues and matures, watch for the growing importance of the labour movement in Egypt and its spokespeople to become the high profile leaders of the revolution.

4) What happens in Egypt will determine the fate of the struggle elsewhere. We know that the revolution that began in Tunisia lit a fuse that spread to Egypt and then throughout the region. In Yemen there are now strikes in the military against the defense minister, a relative of the recently resigned president. In Syria all signs indicate that the state is beginning to disintegrate with shelling of rebel neighbourhoods in the capital city of Damascus taking place, as well as strikes and sit-ins around the country. But Greece is right next door to all this. And Italy and Spain are right across the water. If the revolution deepens and becomes clearly a class revolution against austerity and neoliberalism that starts to win important and visible victories this can't but inspire a spread of enthusiasm and tactics to Europe. Already, the Occupy movement and the indignados movement in Spain have to be seen as directly inspired by Egypt's Tahrir movement. If the working class takes centre stage in Egypt multiply the Tahrir effect by ten.

With all that in mind, I think it's an understatement to say that we live in exciting times. Happy Egyptian Revolution Day!

Arab Democracy Makes Netanyahu Nervous

I'll give the Israeli PM this: he's at least honest. Israel's interests lie with the continued existence of Arab dictatorships that are bought and paid for by the USA. Why? Because Israel is a vile colonialist and racist regime whose existence is only made possible by the fact that tens of millions of Arabs have been suppressed and prevented from expressing their democratic desires. Israel's "democracy" - truncated and deformed as it is by its ethnocratic character and by the Occupation - is only made possible by the denial of democracy for the vast majority of the regional population. Netanyahu, like all the best Zionist politicians of the past 100 years from Herzl onwards knows this.

"In February, when millions of Egyptians thronged to the streets in Cairo, commentators and quite a few Israeli members of the opposition said that we're facing a new era of liberalism and progress...They said I was trying to scare the public and was on the wrong side of history and don't see where things are heading," he said.

But time has proved him right, Netanyahu said. His forecast that the Arab Spring would turn into an "Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic wave" turned out to be true, he said.

OK, so his portrayal of why he opposes the Arab Spring is a lie. It is precisely its democratic aspirations that he loathes. But for saying as much of the truth as he can stomach, I'd like to wish Benny Netanyahu a happy thanksgiving, like I would a fat turkey.

Netanyahu: Arab world moving backward, not forward - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News:

'via Blog this'

Egypt's Revolution Continues To Burn

Lots of people hoped that everything would return to normal after the dictator Mubarak abdicated. They hoped that once the face at the top was changed people would be happy. None wanted this more than the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), led by Mubarak's childhood friend Field Marshall Mohammed Hussein Tantawi. At first they seemed to get their way. Tahrir Square, the beating heart of the revolution, was emptied and the revolutionaries went home. The military, while it used the language of the revolution and talked about its martyrs, tried activists in front of military tribunals, which handed out swift and harsh judgments. Strikes and protests were banned. Meanwhile, the cops who killed around 900 protestors during the revolution weren't prosecuted. Former regime figures weren't prosecuted for their crimes and theft. Others - "little Mubaraks" - were left in charge of public businesses, universities, hospitals, the government controlled unions.

But in a revolution the people rarely are happy to settle with cosmetic change. In the wake of Mubarak's fall, strike waves rolled across the country. After all, it had been a mass strike by millions that had forced the military's hand in turfing Mubarak. Now those workers had tasted their power, there was no putting it back in the bottle - even the military trials of strike leaders failed to quash the movement. This was combined with an mushrooming of independent unions, controlled by rank-and-file election and committed to bettering the conditions of the workers, rather than simply serving as a conduit to transmit the priorities and propaganda of the dictatorship. Many of those unions have now come together to form a union central representing everyone from tax collectors to hospital workers and bus drivers.

Sooner or later the movement was going to come up against the attempts by the military government to put a lid on any change. That time appears to be now. It seems clear that a new phase with a new decisive battle is taking shape in Egypt. Millions marched last Friday, demanding that the cops who killed protestors be put on trial - along with former regime figures. The demands include purging public life of officials from the former regime, whose loyalty is to the defeated dictatorship and whose interest is in rolling back the revolution. And from political demands, the revolution has now taken on social demands - demanding minimum and maximum wages to bring aid to the poor and close the massive gap between the richest and poorest. They want state industries that were sold at fire sale prices to Mubarak's cronies to be brought back under state control.

The immediate response of the government and the military leadership has been twofold. On the one hand, it was announced just prior to today's mass protests - including at Tahrir, which has been again been occupied by a permanent sit-in, like the early days of the revolution - that the deputy Prime Minster had resigned. He was a hated figure from the former regime and his departure is a clear victory. There were also several verdicts released which found former regime figures guilty. According to Al Jazeera:

Earlier on Tuesday, an Egyptian court sentenced Ahmed Nazif, Egypt's former prime minister, to a one-year suspended jail term.
Two other ministers from Hosni Mubarak's, the former president, cabinet were also sentenced to prison for fraud, judicial sources said.
Habib al-Adli, the former interior minister and one of the most reviled members of Mubarak's administration because of the brutality of his police force, was sentenced to five years and former finance minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali received ten years.
Al-Adli and Boutros-Ghali, who is being tried in absentia, have both been sentenced in other cases. This was the first time Nazif has received a court conviction.
The three were fined $15.6m and are to return the same amount to the state. Boutros-Ghali and Adli were fined another approximately $16.9m, sources told the AFP news agency.

But the military council, through its spokesman Mohsen El-Fangari also came on TV to deliver threats to the protestors in Tahrir, Suez and elsewhere. They were warned not to disrupt "public order." There is also a widespread belief that the military and the police have deliberately allowed criminal gangs to run rampant in Cairo as a way to make people long for the security of the dictatorship. In addition, there are shadowy forces - identically dressed men who show up at Tahrir with truckloads of rocks, attacks on Christian churches designed to foment inter-religious conflict - that are undoubtedly connected to the regime. The response, however, to El-Fangari was clear enough - tens of thousands of protestors took off their shoes and waved them in the air - a profound insult and demonstration of defiance in Arab culture that was a popular display whenever Mubarak spoke, prior to his resignation. And protestors intended, for the first time, to march past the Prime Minister's palace, something that never happened during Mubarak's final days.

As resentment and longing for change continues to burn throughout the Arab world, Egypt remains the key to everything. It is the most populous nation and a lynchpin, along with Israel, in America's Middle East policy. If the revolution can push forward in Egypt, deposing the corrupt and compliant military leadership - who own up to a third of the economy - they can help to bring about an historic transformation, the kind that happen once in a century.

Millions back on Egypt’s streets|16Jul11|Socialist Worker

Greek Meltdown: People vs Banks

Forget the riots in Vancouver by angry hockey fans, things are really on the boil in Greece. After a year of austerity measures that have all but killed the economy and which have driven down living standards substantially, the government is coming back for more. Not surprisingly, people are pissed. And when Greek workers get pissed, they have a way of letting you know.

Yesterday there was a 24-hour general strike against the new round of austerity measures. Those measures will certainly pay down some of the debt - or, rather, transfer it to the working class - but at the price of so damaging the economy that it is likely tax revenues will fall in the medium term, making further debt repayment difficult. Greek workers know this and so tens of thousands of them descended upon the Greek Parliament to vent their anger and frustration, calling politicians "traitors", "thieves", and "liars" and making the obvious point (obvious to everyone but the media) that it wasn't workers who caused the debt, so why should they pay for it?

I suspect that the European ruling classes fully understand the limitations of the austerity measures they are proposing but see no other way out. They will know that opening a full frontal assault on the most militant working class in Europe risks destabilizing the EU more generally, as resentment seethes against the various forms of austerity being wheeled out from Spain to the UK. Following on from the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt - and similar movements in other countries just across the Mediterranean Sea - youth and workers in Spain have occupied central squares that are shaking up politics in their country. In Greece, protestors are reported to be setting up tents in squares there as well. In the UK there is a planned strike by half a million public sector workers against attacks on pensions on June 30.

If the Greek working class can bring down the increasingly shaky Greek government in protest against austerity, that could have a serious, European-wide knock-on effect. For a moment yesterday, it looked like the government might collapse, as the Prime Minister offered to resign in order to form a cross-party government of national unity with the Greek Tories - New Democracy. New Democracy refused for opportunistic reasons and PM Papandreou was, instead, forced to turn back to his own restive Socialist Party. He will now hold a confidence vote in his leadership in order to whip them into line for the next round of slash and burn. It is, nonetheless, a sign of weakness on the part of the government, which is why markets slid around the world overnight.

But even if the government can defeat the working class in Greece, there is still the problem that austerity is unlikely to work in the short term. Russia is still recovering from the austerity of the early 90s, and has only done so because of vast natural resources and an authoritarian government that clamped down on the oligarchs who were stripping down the economy and socking away their cash in foreign banks. The Russian government also clamped down on civil rights and restored something like called Stalinism lite, killing independent journalists, crushing movements for autonomy and independence in former Soviet republics and preventing the emergence of any real political or economic opposition. In other words (limited) economic recovery through dictatorship. Hardly an attractive model to most Europeans, used to several decades (at least) of political democracy and civil freedoms.

The only thing that can save the European economy, and the living standards of the vast majority of the population, is for the Greek working class to soundly defeat the austerity package with such militancy that it puts the fear of good into the broader European ruling classes. That will open the possibility of a different response to the crisis for millions who are told there is no alternative. And the ruling classes will be forced to take on the real bandits and scroungers - the parasitic bankers, investors, currency traders, and speculators, not to mention the under-taxed and over subsidized private corporations - in order to avoid a worse fate at the hands of their own restive populations. Don't think that's possible? Neither did Mubarak and Ben Ali. As Karl Marx once wrote: "all that is solid, melts into air..."

Global markets shaken by Greek debt crisis - Europe - Al Jazeera English