Egyptian Trade Unionists Jailed

The toppling of the Mubarak regime in Egypt led to workers winning for the first time the right to free and independent trade unions. That right is now under threat as the current regime seeks to imprison trade union members at the IFFCO edible oils factory in Suez.

Those workers have faced severe repression but finally had a glimmer of hope when on 29 January the jailed workers were all acquitted of the "crime" of inciting a strike.

But the story doesn't end there.  The prosecution has appealed the decision and the workers will be tried again.  Fifteen IFFCO workers including the union President and General Secretary are barred from returning to work and union members are under pressure to "resign".

The International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) has launched a major online campaign to demand that the charges be dropped -- and an end to anti-union repression.

Please take a moment to send your message of protest -- it WILL make a difference:

Click here to send your message

Please share this message with your friends, family and fellow trade union members.

Thank you very much!

Eric Lee

Workers Jailed in Egypt

I sent you this message last week, but I'm not sure you saw it.  These workers need our support today, so if you can -- please add your name to this important campaign.  Thanks.

In late May this year, workers at the shipyard docks in Alexandria, Egypt organized a peaceful protest. Company management had refused to negotiate with them and rejected their demands.
Following their protest, the workers were summoned by the the military prosecution for interrogation. Fifteen workers presented themselves voluntarily and were surprised when they were all apprehended (except for one woman worker who was released on bail). A warrant was issued against the remaining eleven workers.

Today, the workers remain in jail as they await sentencing. Those jailed workers and their families have no incomes, while the other workers are on the run and could be jailed at any time.

The Center for Trade Union and Worker Services (CTUWS) has asked for our help to publicize this gross violation of human rights.  Together we've launched an online campaign demanding the release of the jailed workers.

Please show your support:

http://www.labourstart.org/go/alexandria

And please share this message with your friends, family and fellow union members.

Thank you!

Eric Lee

'Labour Start' & the murder of Giulio Regeni

UPROAR has resulted following the torture and murder in Egypt of the 28-year-old doctoral student at Cambridge University, Giulio Regeni, who disappeared in Cairo on the 25th, January 2016, and whose half-naked, battered body was found in a ditch on February 3rd, hours after Italian officials appealed to President Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt directly for help in locating the student.
Italy's interior minister, Angelino Alfano, has said Mr. Regeni's body bore evidence of 'inhuman, animal-like unacceptable violence' - exactly the kind of torture the security forces regularly inflict on Egyptians.  Though Egypt's authorities have denied their security forces were involved, the Italian press has not swallowed this and a headline in La Republica on Monday (8th, Feb. 2016) read:  'Giulio Regeni was tortured because they thought ha was a spy.'
Mr Regeni's dissertation research focused on trade unions, a tricky topic in Egypt, his friends say he was careful in how he carried out his investigations.
Last Friday the International New York Times ran an editorial which read:
'Under Mr. Sissi's government thousands of Egyptians have been imprisoned.  Torture and enforced disappearance are commonplace.  Academics, human rights activists and journalists have been singled out.  Mr. Regeni's murder is sure to put a deep chill on academic freedom in Egypt.'
It is good that bodies like 'Labour Start' are monitoring these events.

An Italian Murdered in Egypt

PEOPLE all over the world were shocked and saddened to learn of the torture and murder of Giulio Regeni, a young academic who was in Egypt to research the situation of independent trade unions. As Kamal Abbas, an Egyptian labour leader, has written:
'The announcement of Giulio’'s death came after 10 days of his disappearance. The condition in which the body was found reveals that Giulio was murdered viciously and was subjected to monstrous torture before his death. This caused international outrage.'

There have been open letters and online campaigns from Giulio's academic colleagues.

We in the trade union movement are also demanding answers from the Egyptian government, and the arrest and prosecution of those responsible for this horrific crime.

Please take a moment to support the LabourStart campaign:

http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2953

After you've sent off your message, please share this with you friends, family and fellow union members.

Thank you!



Eric Lee

In Defence of Comrade Corbyn

& the decline of New Labour 

THIS month the journalist, Nick Cohen, in STANDPOINT magazine, has address the issue of the Labour leadership campaign, and explained the success of Jeremy Corbyn by arguing that 'Tony Blair has discredited Blairism, enabling a far-left ideologue to gain control of the party despite his grotesque world-view'. 

Mr Cohen essay is perceptive in defining the rise of what he calls 'grotesque' Corbynism as a simple reaction to the monstrosities of the Blairites.  His point is that 'Jeremy Corbyn has never pocketed thirty pieces of silver [and that]  He says what he says because he means it, not because he has been paid to say it.'   On the other hand, some leading proponents of New Labour have moved in a world that most Labour people deplore: for example David Blunkett 'has joined the board of Oracle Capital, a group “dedicated to providing personalised services to high-net-worth individuals and their families,” with particular emphasis on offering advice to Russian and Chinese multimillionaires.'   

New Labour fanatic Lord Mandelson, for example, left office in the Labour government to found a lobbying company named Global Counsel, and its clients include Putin's pally oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska.  Nick Cohen writes: 'Lord Mandelson himself goes to St Petersberg to add what credibility he possesses to the propagandistic conferences Putin stages.'   

Of Blair himself, Mr Cohen writes that 'By hiring himself out to Egypt, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, Blair has destroyed his democratic “legacy” more thoroughly than his enemies ever could.'  After the Western financial crisis, these countries were the big spenders and Cohen writes that 'Blair, Mandelson and dozens of others sucked long and heartily at their teats.'   

To the Labour Party membership generally this kind of thing is appalling, and Mr Cohen insists: 'They will not allow another generation of centrist politicians to use the Labour Party as a stepping-stone to careers helping the rich maximise their fortunes.' 

Hence the rise of Comrade Corbyn in the polls for the Labour leadership.

There is another reason why Corbyn is more acceptable than the other three candidates to many Labour members: he's much clearer about where he stands on most things and at a time of focus groups this is refreshing for most of us. 

Yet, Corbyn is part of what Cohen calls 'the malaise on the modern Left' in that he often tilts to the Russian side of the argument on foreign policy.  In the Autumn of 1947, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled 'The Defence of Comrade Zilliacus' in which he responded to a letter to the Labour weeklyTribune from Mr. K. Zilliacus then a Labour M.P. on foreign policy:

'...I do not believe the mass of the people in this country are anti-American politically, and certainly they are not so culturally,  But politico-literary intellectuals are not usually frightened of mass opinion.  What that are frightened of is the prevailing opinion within there own group.  At any given moment there is always an orthodoxy, a parrot-cry which must be repeated and in the more active section of the Left the orthodoxy of the moment is anti-Americanism.'  

Just as Zilliacus had affection for the Soviet Union in the 1940s, so now Corbyn has told the old Communist daily, the Morning Star, 'the  EU and NATO have now become the tools of US policy in Europe'.  Corbyn says:  'The expansion of NATO into Poland and the Czech Republic has particularly increased tensions with Russia.' 

 Jaruzelski:  last Communist leader of Poland

In the last century the Poles preferred military rule by their own General Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski (see photo), rather than have another Russian invasion, and many Ukrainians fear Russia more than anything.   But this is Russia of the 21^st Century not the Soviet Union of the last century, what Nick Cohen calls 'a dictatorial kleptocracy, whose oligarchs stash their stolen money in Mayfair, Saint-Tropez and Palm Beach, and whose leader sends his armies over Russia's borders to grab territory of neighbouring states.  Putin boasts to the world that he wants to be the leader of its reactionary and illiberal forces.... the repression of minorities, particularly homosexuals.' 

This seems to be a kind of political hangover from the last century which, even though Russia is now clearly a reactionary regime, for some reason the British Left still can't rid itself of. 

The community of political parrots that composed a dominant chunk of the British Left was an anti-American foreign policy position when George Orwell was writing in 1947, but now as Nick Cohen writes 'Opposition to the West is the first, last and only foreign policy priority of many on the Left.'   This is a lazy kind of cookbook politics that requires the participant to sing in chorus with the fashionable in-crowd.  In his day George Orwell call this political in-crowd 'a mob'  in which there is 'an attempt to keep in with fashionable opinion' and to be 'anti-American is to shout with the mob'.  This kind of fashionable interpretive community which so influences much of our thinking on the liberal-Left is in a way reactionary and prevents clear thinking: I often catch it in myself and I notice it others close to me.  It results in a kind of humbug and hypocrisy's, and Nick Cohen captures this when he writes:

'Not just Corbyn and his supporters but much of the liberal Left announce their political correctness and seize on the smallest sexist or racist “gaffe” of their opponents.  Without pausing for breath, they move on to defend radical Islamist movements which believe in the subjugation of women and the murder of homosexuals.' 

Makes you think doesn't it?

Egypt & the Arab Spring

THIS week's condemnation of 529 Islamist members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death by a court in Egypt is an example of  an authoritarian  regime engaged in a vendetta.  In January 2012 on this blog we together with some supporters of the Northern Anarchist Network (NAN) then welcomed the Arab Spring, and supported Libya's rebellion against the Gaddafi regime. 

Last year, we likened the coup by the Egyptian military and the ousting of the Islamic government of Mr. Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party, to the rebelion of General Franco and some elements of the Spanish army against the legally elected republican government in Spain in 1936.  On Monday the condemning of 529 Islamists to death for the killing of a single police officer last summer is a shocking example of a judicial system victimising a political party and its supporters.

Thought the verdict is expected to be overturned on appeal, it is bound to stir up hatred and radicalise the Muslim brotherhood.  Legal experts, claim the verdict is the largest mass sentencing in modern Egyptian history. It followed a trial that lasted little more than two days — not enough time to make a case against even a single person, much less 529 people, charged with murder for the killing of a police officer in rioting that followed the ousting of Mr. Morsi.

The convicting so many people for involvement in one death is daft.  Though 16 of those charged were acquitted it in no way legitimizes the legal process. Only 123 defendants were in the courtroom; the rest were either released, out on bail or on the run.

The overthrow of the Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 was widely welcomed, but current events suggest that the hopes that the Arab Spring provoked two years ago have now been all but extinguished.
 

 

Media Crackdown in Egypt

THE arrest last Christmas of three Al Jazeera journalists, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy [a Canadian-Egyptian], Baher Mohamed [a young Edyptian producer] and Peter Greste [an Australian], by Egypt's state security is seen by Human Rights advocates as a political crackdown on the independent media.  This is only the latest threat to a free press in Egypt since the military government took power in a coup last summer. 

Among other charges, the journalists have been accused of meeting with sources from the Muslim Brotherhood, which was the legally elected Government and ruling party under President Mohamed Morsi until the military took over last year.  Curiously, the Egyptian regime is justifying its crackdown by comparing it to that of the Obama administeration's unpresidented crackdown on leakers in national security cases.  Something the Egyptian officials are cheerfully drawing attention to.

Other journalists with the English language service of Al Jazeera, which have taken an independent editorial line, have continued to work in Egypt.  But journalists, bloggers, academics and film-makers are being arrested in what human rights activists describe as a major clampdown on free expression in Egypt.  Human Rights Watch has said that the Egyptian authorities in recent months have 'demonstrated almost zero tolerance for any form of dissent.'

Egypt & Military Sedition

DOES the Muslim Brotherhood have a case in the present conflict in Egypt?  What has happened in Egypt, despite what seemed to be popular overthrow of Mohamed Morsi - the countries first democratically elected president, whether we like it or not is clearly military sedition.  'Sedition' is defined as 'a concerted movement to overthrow an established government'.  The more perceptive reader will see the similarity between what has happened in Egypt this Summer, and what happened in Spain during the military insurrection in July 1936.  

The successful military insurrection of the Spanish military in July 1936, which ultimately led to the dictatorship of General Franco, was military sedition against the then legally elected Republican government, just as the ousting of Mr. Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt is military sedition today.  Commenting on the whether Franco and the Spanish military had a case George Orwell wrote in a letter dated 1st, August 1937:

'I should not say that the (right-wing) rebels had no case, unless you believe that it is always wrong to rebel against a legally-established government, which in practice nobody does.'  

Some have tried to justify the seizure of power by the Egyptian military by saying that Mr. Morsi and his government were introducing an Islamic constitution that would overwhelm the opposition.  And yet, what is now happening in Egypt ought to give us real cause for concern.    

On Saturday, the editorial in the International Herald Tribune (IHT) declared:

'The generals who now call the shots in the world's leading Arab country and their handpicked  civilian government have halted efforts to reach a compromise with the Islamic supporters of the man they ousted:  Mohamed Morsi...  Instead, they have threatened to forcibly disperse tens of thousands of pro-Morsi civilians from sit-ins in Cairo.'

However much we may dislike Islamic extremism, it is impossible for those of us believe in civil liberties to defend this kind of thing, and the editorial in last Saturday's IHT persuasively argued:

'The Brotherhood, having been tossed out in a coup, might legitimately wonder whether the democratic process can ever be trusted.'

Today, the news reports say that  yesterday the Egyptian police postponed their threat to begin choking off the two Cairo sit-ins where tens of thousands have gathered to protest against the overthow of President Mohamed Morsi thus continuing the six-week standoff.  It is thought that the police called off their clear-up because their plan to end the sit-ins was leaked to the media (the A.P. reports).  But ministry officials have said, the police will start to step up their use of 'nonlethal tactics', including tear gas and water cannons.  It is not clear though if this is immediately on the cards.

Political Predictability, Egypt & the Arabs

'REVOLUTIONS OFTEN HAPPEN WHEN FOLK LEAST EXPECT THEM'

JAMES PINKERTON, a northern social thinker in the last half of the 20th century, used to say: 'Revolutions* often happen when folk least expect them'. He would also say; perhaps echoing Colin Ward, that the social philosophy of Anarchism '...is always on the cards'. In this respect his view has been born out by events in Egypt and Tunisia, where few pundits until recently seem to have predicted 'revolutionary' outcomes.

This is not just because of the problem as George Orwell perceived it: 'of the countless people hugging quite manifest delusions because the truth would be wounding to their pride', but because political prediction is harder than those who use cookbook analysis like to admit. Orwell, in 1944, talking about the absence of 'reliable political prediction' asked us to consider 'who foresaw the Russo-German Pact of 1939?' He admits that a 'few pessimistic Conservatives foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but the wrong kind of agreement, and for the wrong reasons.' Orwell then writes: 'so far as I am aware, no intellectual of the Left, whether russophile or russophobe, foresaw anything of the kind.' Indeed, Orwell goes on: 'the left as a whole failed to foresee the rise of Fascism and failed to grasp that the Nazis were dangerous even when they were on the verge of seizing power.' He claims they failed for the simple reason that 'the Left would have had to admit its own shortcomings, which was too painful; so the whole phenomena was ignored or misinterpreted, with disastrous results.'

Recently the British Left, which is 'vanguardist' almost to a man (or woman), would have been hard put to predict any kind of social or political revolt in places like Egypt or Tunisia, because of their addiction to the idea of the need for a party or movement to lead it. Hence, the most vital ingredient in the left-wing cookbook recipe was lacking: to them it would be like baking a loaf and expecting it to rise without introducing yeast. Recent events would seem to undermine the Leninist or even some Bakuninist** accounts of social revolution. Last Saturday, after the fall of Mubarak, a girl in Tahrir Square declared that: 'There was no government! We didn't need a government or police, as we policed ourselves in the Square and without street cleaners we cleaned-up after ourselves - it was wonderful!'

This Monday, the International Herald Tribune reported: 'In an outburst of civic duty, youthful volunteers swept the streets, painted fences and curbs, washed away graffiti that read "Down with Mubarak," and planted bushes in a square many want to turn into a memorial to the uprising.' Was this what David Goodway at the latest Northern Anarchist Network Conference and in his book that extolled the anarchist, Colin Ward, called 'The Seed Beneath the Snow'?

We don't know yet what all this portends but what we do know is that in the simple terms of overturning a dictator a revolutionary party is unnecessary. But it does show that reliable political prediction is tough. This is clear in the groans coming from the U.S. national intelligence community where last Thursday the national intelligence director sought to defend himself against criticism that they had failed to warn about the coming crisis in Egypt. 'We are not clairvoyant,' said director James R.Clapper Jr., at a hearing of the House intelligence committee. Mr Clapper and the head of central intelligence, Leon E.Panetta, said it would always be difficult to know precisely when a potential critical situation would turn explosive. Unpredictability is built into the human condition and it is impossible to know when a frustrated merchant in Tunisia would set himself alight, to mention an event that went on to feed into the Egyptian crisis. Mr Clapper speaking on worldwide threats to the United States said: 'Specific triggers for how and when instability would lead to the collapse of various regimes cannot always be known or predicted.'

Last night, an Arab commentator said that what is happening now is like what happened in Europe in 1848; it involves the 'disenthralling' of the Arab people with their rulers. Mr Panetta speaking to the House committee, outlined the problem; 'There's always been a feeling that the military ultimately could control any demonstration in any regime' but now 'the loyalty of the military is now something we have to pay attention to, because it's not always one that will respond to what the dictator may or may not want.'
These are all issues that must now engage those of us who crack-on to be 'social scientists' or political pundits.

* I am treating the word 'revolution' here as a verb - meaning something in the process of transformation, even as I write, rather than as a noun as something accomplished.

** I refer here to Bakunin of the Masonic secret groups; another version of Bakunin would be Bakunin's notion of 'spontaneous combustion' this version would be more appropriate in this 'season of discontent' in the Arab World.