May 4th, Mubarak's 81st Birthday

BBC: Egyptian police stifle protests

Police in Egypt have been deployed in large numbers to prevent a national strike by pro-democracy activists.

Police had orders to arrest anyone taking part, and a number of activists have been held in recent days.

Protests appear to have been small, but about 100 MPs, out of 454, walked out of parliament as part of the protest.
The organisers of Monday's action had urged people to wear black and called for protests including sit-ins at places of work or study.
The call to protest was circulated through SMS messages and social networking sites.



Ayman Nour
Opposition leader

The campaigners are pressing the government to raise the national minimum wage and are calling for a new constitution to be drafted.
Activists were hoping it would build on a protest demanding economic and political reform they held for the first time last year.
Three people died in the protests in April 2008 and hundreds were arrested.
Egypt is run under a emergency law that has been in place since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Brotherhood backing

The Muslim Brotherhood, believed to be the biggest opposition organisation in Egypt despite its being outlawed, has also backed the protest.

On Monday hundreds of riot police were stationed in city-centre squares and around universities to prevent demonstrators from gathering.

About 100 protesters gathered at the journalists' association headquarters in Cairo and chanted anti-government slogans.

Hundreds of students also demonstrated on university campuses in Cairo and the southern city of Assiut.

Ayman Nour , the leader of the opposition Ghad (Tomorrow) Party who has recently been released from jail, told the BBC Arabic Service that it was premature to judge the strike and that events were being organised throughout the day, across the country.

He said that change in Egypt was necessary to break the political stagnation in the country: "[Change] is desperately needed in Egypt after more than 30 years of one-person rule. Egypt deserves much better than that."

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7985608.stm

Egyptian bloggers face risks and repression - 06 Apr 09

6 April 2009, General Strike in Egypt

Egyptians have been going through very tough conditions. The common citizen is suffering from extreme poverty (about 40% of the population). Economical and political corruption have reached their highest levels ever. Corrupted businessmen, who are known for their support of the current corrupted Mubarak regime, are getting super rich,while the majority of the Egyptians suffer just to be able to barley provide for their families.

The Government policies ignores any real development in important services like education and health services and implement polices that serves only the rich businessmen and corrupted politicians.

The government argue that its policies have produced strong growth rates in recent years. However, these percentage points have come at the cost of destroying social welfare institutions and have fuelled spiralling inflation and unemployment.
Majority of the diminishing middle-class are affected severely by these polices, poor people struggle even to get bread. Many have died in bread queues that have lengthened due to the government policies.

Political situation is no better, While Mubarak and his men have been in power for more than 30 years, any opposition voices are punished with prison and torture, no matter which political stream you may join any opposition to Mubarek dictatorship is not tolerated by police forces, specially SSI which is the dirty arm of the Egyptian security forces. While the budget for interior ministry in Egypt is more than the budget for education, the crime rates are going drastically up and the prisons are filled up with people detained under the emergency laws with political charges.

Inflamed social reaction against the ruling regime is growing, especially when news of the corruption of businessmen and politicians is exposed daily in the media and displays of negligence and the utter lack of competence of bodies like social welfare institutions and civil defence authority have revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current administration is corrupt and incapable of dealing with emergencies.

We do believe that the problems we face may only be solved by fighting the dictatorship and corruption of the Mubarak aegime,as all major national election are forged in favour for National Democratic Party (NDP) headed by Mubarak and his son Gamal. Even the student union elections in universities, you may win only if you support NDP or at least if you are not part of any kind of opposition.

Since the sixth of April 2008 many sectors of the Egyptian people conducted a wide spread wave of strikes across the country. we believe that any group will not meet their demands in isolation from the rest the Egyptian people. the main problem faced by this nation is the tyranny created by the government itself to cover up the corruption and sweep away any opposition through political oppression, repression of freedoms and the systematic rigging of all elections.

We therefore call upon the Egyptian people, all sectors, leaders and trade union workers to make April 6th 2009 a day of strike and anger as one of the major steps on the path of civil disobedience as peaceful way in which we may achieve a major reforms in Egypt for a decent life for every citizen and for a better future.


Our Main Demands are:

1- Minimum monthly wage of 1200 Egyptian pound (about 210 $)

2- Indexation of wages

3- Election of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution to guarantee the country's political and trade union freedoms and to set a maximum of 2 terms for any president to stay in power.

4- Suspension of exporting gas to Israel

Free Youth of 6 April

Train Signalmen Strike

By Khair Ragheb, Wala’ Nabil, Mohamed el-Saadani 28/ 1/ 2009

The signalmen of the Railway Authority went on strike for three hours in protest against not receiving their bonuses.
They stopped all train traffic as of 1:00 p.m. by turning the red lights all the way up to Alexandria and down to Menya, causing a large number of passengers to return their tickets and take taxis.
700 signalmen first staged a sit-in in Cairo Station before they went on strike till 3:30 p.m. when their union members told them the minister of transport promised to meet their demands within 48 hours. They threatened strike again if their demands were not met by Thursday.
Mahmoud Sami, head of the Railway Authority, said he has no budget for their demands because he had disbursed a 50% bonus two months ago. But he said he would give LE 120,000 to the 2500 signalmen.
An official source with the Ministry of Transport told Al-Masry Al-Youm that the Railway Authority will in a few days submit a proposal for salary adjustments to the minister of transport and the prime minister to be effective as of July.
For her part, Minister of Manpower Aisha Abdel Hadi said that Cabinet will discuss the problems of the railway workers next week. She was more than half an hour late for a conference on Human Resource Development organized by the American Chamber of Commerce due to the strike.

Translated from the Arabic by Eltorjoman International
Originally published in:
http://www.almasry-alyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=196704

El-Malt Accuses Government of Wasting Public Funds and Committing Political Crimes

By Emad Fouad and Mohamed Abdel Kader: 28/ 1/ 2009

Gawdat el-Malt, chairman of the Central Auditing Agency (CAA), has fiercely attacked the government during a meeting of the Plan and Budget Committee of the People's Assembly yesterday.
Replying to MP Ahmed Ezz, he said we should not compare between the U.S., European and East Asian economies and the Egyptian economy with respect to debts, budget deficit and borrowing, because those countries borrow to invest, while Egypt borrows to cover its budget deficit.

He said that the government dues on July 13, 2004 when Dr. Ahmed Nazif became Prime Minister were LE 64.8 billion and that they have jumped to LE 101 billion on June 30, 2008, of which there are LE 52 billion in customs dues, LE 2. 3 billion in sales taxes, LE 2.4 billion with the local administration units, LE 1.8 billion with the services sector, LE 6.4 billion in legal fees and fines, LE 1.2 billion with economic and press institutions and LE 600 million with the registration bureau. Malt said that the net debts on June 30, 2008 have reached LE 666.9 billion, which is 74.4% of GDP. This includes LE 487.7 billion in government debts, LE 50.1 billion in debts of institutions and LE 138.1 billion with the National Investment Bank.
The head of CAA said that the per capita domestic debt until June 30, 2008 reached LE 8527 as opposed to LE 8295last year.
He said the government's internal and external debts of one year are LE 58.6 billion, with 20% in handling fees.

Regarding the projects carried out by the government, Malt said that they are not studied thoroughly and that they are a wasting of public funds, as the cost of some such projects may jump from LE 100 million to one billion due to amendments and imprecision. “I told Dr. Nazif so and he agreed with me,” he said.

Describing all this as political crimes, Malt said: “Everyone should monitor his subordinates, and Parliament should monitor the government. As CAA is only a consultant for Parliament, it cannot refer these crimes to the Attorney General.”

Translated from the Arabic by Eltorjoman International

Originally published in:

http://www.almasry-alyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=196705

Protests on Egypt border

Political circus in Egypt

UK Protest for Gaza outside the Egyptian Embassy

Palestinians brave Israeli assault to return home - 2 Jan 08

Egypt's Mubarak blocks Gaza aid convoy

CNN: Egypt is keeping journalists out of Rafah border

Gaza: 300 Yards Between Life And Death

RAFAH BORDER CROSSING


Mathematically, it’s not a tricky equation. Politically, though, it’s a complete conundrum. I’m talking about the scenes on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing Sunday.
Aid has been kept waiting on the Egyptian side of the border.
Aid has been kept waiting on the Egyptian side of the border.

It was the morning after the start of the Israeli ground assault on Gaza. In the dark, a few hours earlier, I’d been able to make out the sound of Israeli tank tracks grinding through southern Gaza; the whoosh of missiles fired by Apache attack helicopters into targets just a few hundred yards away and the rat-a-tat of assault guns as Hamas and Israeli fighters closed in on one another.

Now, it was light, and around 30 trucks lined up at the Rafah border gates. They were piled high with much needed medical supplies for the teeming hospitals of Gaza and the mounting casualties. The aid had come from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egyptian NGOs and even Scotland. There was even an eight-strong team of Greek trauma surgeons ready to go in and rescue the dying.

It would have been a heartening sight after the madness of the night except for one major detail — the border was closed, the gates firmly shut. That medicine was going nowhere.

And that’s the simple equation. Three checkpoints and 300 yards separated life-giving supplies from the Palestinian wounded and dying. There was fuel in the trucks, drivers at the wheel and politics in the road.

Now the border has been open sporadically over the last few days for a few hours at a time to let aid in and a trickle of wounded Palestinians out (about 120 since the current hostilities began). But Sunday was not one of those days.

The Egyptian border police said they couldn’t let the trucks through because the Palestinian border guards had fled during the night. Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships, I guess, can be expected to have that effect on employees of Gaza’s Hamas government.

The Egyptians also warned it was dangerous and they couldn’t guarantee anybody’s safety. War does tend to be a risky business.

The Egyptian government, meanwhile, has said it can’t fully normalize the border between Egypt and Gaza because that needs an agreement between Hamas and its rivals in the Fatah movement, as well as the presence of European Union monitors.

And as the apologies and public hand-wringing go on, the aid is blocked and the wounded are getting sicker; the dying expiring.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is no friend of Hamas. He did very strongly condemn the Israeli ground assault in a statement Sunday. But on the Egyptian street, especially here close to the border, many Egyptians see that as little more than public bravado.

They criticize him for not sending aid through and for not letting Palestinian refugees come across, at least temporarily. They also point to the fact that two days before Israeli airstrikes began, Mubarak was hosting Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni and permitting her to issue threats against Hamas from his couch.

Now clearly I’m not a Middle Eastern expert, but as I mull the chain on the gate at the Rafah crossing, the scale of human need in Gaza seems crystal clear while political red tape is keeping the medicine from the wounded and dying.

CNN Correspondent, Karl Penhaul
http://insidethemiddleeast.blogs.cnn.com/2009/01/05/gaza-300-yards-between-life-and-death/

Robert Fisk: The rotten state of Egypt is too powerless and corrupt to act

There was a day when we worried about the "Arab masses" – the millions of "ordinary" Arabs on the streets of Cairo, Kuwait, Amman, Beirut – and their reaction to the constant bloodbaths in the Middle East. Could Anwar Sadat restrain the anger of his people? And now – after three decades of Hosni Mubarak – can Mubarak (or "La Vache Qui Rit", as he is still called in Cairo) restrain the anger of his people? The answer, of course, is that Egyptians and Kuwaitis and Jordanians will be allowed to shout in the streets of their capitals – but then they will be shut down, with the help of the tens of thousands of secret policemen and government militiamen who serve the princes and kings and elderly rulers of the Arab world.

Egyptians demand that Mubarak open the Rafah crossing-point into Gaza, break off diplomatic relations with Israel, even send weapons to Hamas. And there is a kind of perverse beauty in listening to the response of the Egyptian government: why not complain about the three gates which the Israelis refuse to open? And anyway, the Rafah crossing-point is politically controlled by the four powers that produced the "road map" for peace, including Britain and the US. Why blame Mubarak?
To admit that Egypt can't even open its sovereign border without permission from Washington tells you all you need to know about the powerlessness of the satraps that run the Middle East for us.
Open the Rafah gate – or break off relations with Israel – and Egypt's economic foundations crumble. Any Arab leader who took that kind of step will find that the West's economic and military support is withdrawn. Without subventions, Egypt is bankrupt. Of course, it works both ways. Individual Arab leaders are no longer going to make emotional gestures for anyone. When Sadat flew to Jerusalem – "I am tired of the dwarves," he said of his fellow Arab leaders – he paid the price with his own blood at the Cairo reviewing-stand where one of his own soldiers called him a "Pharaoh" before shooting him dead.

The true disgrace of Egypt, however, is not in its response to the slaughter in Gaza. It is the corruption that has become embedded in an Egyptian society where the idea of service – health, education, genuine security for ordinary people – has simply ceased to exist. It's a land where the first duty of the police is to protect the regime, where protesters are beaten up by the security police, where young women objecting to Mubarak's endless regime – likely to be passed on caliph-like to his son Gamal, whatever we may be told – are sexually molested by plain-clothes agents, where prisoners in the Tora-Tora complex are forced to rape each other by their guards.
There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade in which the meaning of Islam has become effaced by its physical representation. Egyptian civil "servants" and government officials are often scrupulous in their religious observances – yet they tolerate and connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison torture. A young American doctor described to me recently how in a Cairo hospital busy doctors merely blocked doors with plastic chairs to prevent access to patients. In November, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm reported how doctors abandoned their patients to attend prayers during Ramadan.
And amid all this, Egyptians have to live amid daily slaughter by their own shabby infrastructure. Alaa al-Aswani wrote eloquently in the Cairo paper Al-Dastour that the regime's "martyrs" outnumber all the dead of Egypt's wars against Israel – victims of railway accidents, ferry sinkings, the collapse of city buildings, sickness, cancers and pesticide poisonings – all victims, as Aswani says, "of the corruption and abuse of power". Opening the Rafah border-crossing for wounded Palestinians – the Palestinian medical staff being pushed back into their Gaza prison once the bloodied survivors of air raids have been dumped on Egyptian territory – is not going to change the midden in which Egyptians themselves live.
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah secretary general in Lebanon, felt able to call on Egyptians to "rise in their millions" to open the border with Gaza, but they will not do so. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the feeble Egyptian Foreign Minister, could only taunt the Hizbollah leaders by accusing them of trying to provoke "an anarchy similar to the one they created in their own country."
But he is well-protected. So is President Mubarak.
Egypt's malaise is in many ways as dark as that of the Palestinians. Its impotence in the face of Gaza's suffering is a symbol of its own political sickness.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-rotten-state-of-egypt-is-too-powerless-and-corrupt-to-act-1220048.html

Egypt court convicts 6 April Mahala rioters

An Egyptian court has sentenced 22 people to jail for between three and five years over food riots in April.
They were convicted on charges of looting, assaulting police officers and possessing dangerous materials. Another 27 defendants were acquitted.
Security forces killed three civilians and arrested hundreds of people during two days of protests over rising food prices in the town of Mahalla al-Kobra.
The demonstrations were part of a wave of protests in Egypt over inflation.
Reading the verdicts, Judge Abdel-Maaboud blamed international economic forces for the sharply rising price of basic food staples in Egypt.
Despite allegations of police brutality during the riots, he praised the security forces for the restraint they had shown in quelling the protests.

No appeal
Some of those convicted shouted at the judge as he read the verdicts, and several hundred supporters chanted anti-government slogans outside the court in Tanta, north of Cairo.
The sentences - handed down by the Emergency Supreme State Security Court - can not be appealed and only President Hosni Mubarak can issue a pardon.
Most of the demonstrators during the April riots were workers at the town's textile mill, Egypt's largest.
The World Bank estimated at the time that global food prices had increased 83% in the past three years.
There have been a number of riots in Mahalla this year, as the highly-organised workforce has clashed with state security, says the BBC's Christian Fraser in Cairo.
Elsewhere in Egypt, 11 people were killed earlier this year as people clashed while standing in line to buy subsidised bread from state bakeries.
Source: BBC

Egyptian justice Contradictions

While famous figures like Mamdouh Ismail and Dr. Hani Surour who are members of the National Democratic party (which is headed by the president Mubarak), and many other members went to court in a variety of corruption and even manslaughter as in the ferry case, or like the case of contaminated blood bags, where a similar verdict of innocence were issued last month, it was related to Dr. Hani Surour, member of NDP and MP, as well as his sister and 5 others, having been accused of providing contaminated blood bags to hospitals which were known in the media as Hidelina case. All of those who are considered close to the president and government or hold powerful positions are never found guilty. And even if they did, the way to escape abroad is open to them. In the same time any members of the opposition are put in prison for expressing their views under a variety of false accusations, and even if they were declared innocent by the court of law the government refuse to comply and keep them detained under the claim that they are dangerous to the national security.

Or even like in the case of the Muslim brotherhood leaders where they were declared innocent of all charges twice yet the president ordered them to face one more unfair military trial which issued a prison verdict for the majority of them.

The message is clear, if you close to the president and the government you can do any thing and no one can touch you. However if you try to fight the corruption and say no to the oppression then you are a threat to the national security.

I guess this is the kind of justice we can expect from a dictatorship system, and as long as the people stay hushed and in fear not to rise against this corrupted system we will see a lot more of this justice that protects only the powerful.

Court acquits Egyptian ferry owner

An Egyptian criminal court has found the owner of a Red Sea ferry not guilty of manslaughter over the deaths of more than 1,000 passengers in an accident in 2006, court sources say.

Mamdouh Ismail, a member of Egypt's upper house of parliament at the time of the disaster, was tried in absentia because he left for the UK after the ferry disaster.
The Al Salam 98 ferry caught fire and sank en route to Egypt from Saudi Arabia in February 2006, claiming the lives of 1,034 of the roughly 1,400 people on board.
The court also acquitted four other defendants in Sunday's verdict, including Ismail's son.
The court, however, sentenced a sixth defendant, the captain of another ferry, to six months in prison for failing to take steps to save survivors.
Accusations
Ismail had been accused of contributing to manslaughter by failing to inform the authorities as soon as he heard of a problem aboard the ferry.
In video

However, he said that no one on the vessel contacted either him or his company when the fire broke out.
Egyptian authorities first heard of the disaster many hours after the fire broke out.
In 2006 a committee investigating the sinking widened the blame to include the state of Panama, under whose flag the boat was sailing.
A parliamentary report on the disaster blamed Ismail for serious violations of safety regulations.
It said the ferry had forged safety certificates, the life rafts and fire extinguishers were unfit for use and the ship did not have enough winches to lower rafts into the sea.
Egyptian authorities lifted a freeze on Ismail's assets in 2006 and removed him and his family from the list of people banned from travelling abroad after he paid about $57 million into a compensation fund for victims of the disaster.

'Shocking' verdict
Mohammed Ali Hassan, the lawyer representing the family of the victims, said that the court's verdict came as a shock to the families.
The Al Salam 98 ferry caught fire and sank [YVAN PERCHOC/AFP]"It seems that the court's judge completely ignored our prosecution committee report and the reasons announced with the verdict completely contradicted it," he said.
Hassan said the incident was the biggest accidental homicide case in the history of Egypt, "and despite all of this, the defence lawyers were acquitted," he said.
The defence lawyers will meet to discuss the verdict and to take appropriate action.
"I think the prosecution will appeal," Hassan said.
Al Jazeera's Amr el-Kahky in Hurghada, said: "Families gathered since early morning outside the courthouse, and after two and a half years, they gathered for the 22nd time and today they received a shocking verdict".
The families of the victims accused the government of masterminding the exoneration of the owner who operated the company "because he is an influential figure in the ruling National Democratic Party and is well connected with influential politicians in Egypt," he said.
Kahky said that families who gathered in front of the courthouse were those "who refused to be paid compensation from the Italian company that owned the ferry. Rather they hoped they would see someone responsible for the loss of many lives".
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2008/07/200872794038702694.html

Arrest of 26 of 6 April Movement by SSI

On the memory of the Egyptian revolution in 23 July. A new crime that is not strange to the system of repression of the Egyptian government. A group of the SSI (State Security Investigation) system dressed in civilian clothes attacked a group of young activists belonging to the “6 April” youth movement , “Solidarity Movement” and members of Al-Ghad Party and the Democratic Front Party.

They were on one of the shores of the city of Alexandria where the young people gathered to spend a recreational time, after they finished a symposium organized by Al-Ghad Party in Alexandria in conjunction with the 6 April youth movement and the solidarity movement for the release of political detainees in Egyptian prisons. After they left the symposium they started singing a series of national songs, raising the national flag of Egypt wearing white shirts with the word 6 April youth printed over it, they also tried to fly a kite with the Egyptian flag colours; however this was considered a crime of threatening the public security by the SSI officers. One of SSI officers run over the flag and shredded it, and a group of thugs of the SSI wearing civilian clothes attacked the youths beating them, using electric shocks and they sprayed them with some kind of a strange spray that some of them lost conscious afterwards.
About 26 young men and one girl were taken by a police car to one of the headquarters of the State Security Investigation, The girl was released later in the same day.
The arrested youth reported that they were beaten in several occasions. Their lawyers were banned from attending the interrogation of the youth who have not been released so far.
we in the 6 April youth movement call for the immediate release of Our colleagues as they have not committed any wrongdoing but that they loved their country and sang songs in love of their country, but that was considered a crime of threatening the national security of Egypt.

These are some of the names of the detainees :
Adel Khalid
Maheanor el Masry
Youssef Shaaban
Basem Fathi,
Amr Aly
Mustafa Maher
Nour el dine Sobhi
Medhat Shaker
Muaatasem ballah Mohamed
Tarek Tito
Mohamed Mahmoud
Ahmed Nassar
Ahmed Afifi
Ahmed Maher
Mohamed Refaat

Egypt's Facebook Face Off

While it's supposed to be a social networking site, Facebook has become the front line tool for the country's struggling democracy movement, as Sophie McNeill reports.

Young democracy activists have flocked to the social networking site, to choreograph widespread protests against President Hosni Mubarrak's 27-year rule.It's the perfect tool for them to voice their opinions, especially in a country that outlaws gatherings of more than five people. With the use of blog sites, Facebook and YouTube, their messages can now be projected globally.“They were horrified by Facebook because it was something totally new that they could not control,” says Nadia, a key promoter of a recent day-long general strike in which three protestors were shot dead and 400 were jailed, including her.McNeill manages to track down one of the co-creators of the Facebook page that promoted the recent strike. He's on the run from threats of imprisonment and rape. A few days later, he is dragged off the street by plain-clothed police to be detained and beaten at security headquarters. Upon his release he says;“All the questions were about people who were members of the Facebook group…this issue of the password made them take off my trousers…saying they would rape me…They were saying ‘think we can’t catch you? We can’. And they wanted to close the Facebook group and control the whole thing.”

http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/egypt39s_facebook_face_off_550575

Egypt's Facebook Face Off - Egypt

For over 27 years President Mubarak has ruled with an iron fist. With protests and strikes forbidden, activists are finding new ways to fight for democracy. Through Facebook, protestors can now find a voice.