The Skeptic الشكاك

603 Tehran Police Chief (Confirmed) ‘Spitzered’

A spokesman for the Iranian judiciary has confirmed that Gen. Reza Zarei, the chief of Tehran’s police force, is in jail, pending investigation. He would not confirm the charges, or whether they involved engaging in an Oriental orgy of 300-like proportions.

You heard it here first.

602 Sadrist Penguins

Pure, pure genius:

Via the father of the movements.

601 Gunshots, Bread, Identity

I’ll write more later. I’m still busy with work after a weekend out of town (this is why I work through most weekends), but I wanted to flag a few quick items in the meantime:

• The Good: Kifaya leader George Ishaq and at least nine journalists detained for trying to cover the situation in Mahalla (see last post) have been released. Good. Reuters photographer Nasser Nouri was among them. His photos were among the best from last weekend’s unrest, and he got them at the price of a rubber bullet to the leg and a weekend in jail. The man deserves a nice, fat, all-expenses paid holiday to a seaside resort of his choosing (are you listening, Mr. Wright?).
• The Bad: Yesterday a court in Cairo rejected an appeal to free Isra’a Abd al-Fattah, who spread word of the April 6 strike via Facebook, and six others. They are in custody pending investigation. Isra’a told Al-Masry al-Youm: “I am not a hero or a leader. I am just an Egyptian girl who loves her country and who received a message saying: ‘Stay Home,’ which I forwarded to my friends only.”
• The Ugly: The fate of hundreds of other detainees taken from around the country last week is still unknown. Al-Masry al-Youm has an eloquent photo showing one of them, a wounded demonstrator chained to his hospital bed, on the front page today. Family members are still in the dark, and it’s not clear a) who’s in custody, b) what, if anything, they’re charged with, and c) whether they have any sort of legal representation. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued condemnations and calls for an investigation into the use of excessive force by police. I can’t find the Amnesty statement online, so I’m posting both after the break.
• The Ugly: Police have arrested a man in al-Sharqiyyah governorate for firing gunshots in a bread line when bakers refused to give him more government-subsidized bread than his daily family ration allowed. The price of bread has increased by 50 percent over the past year.
• The Good: Two fantastic posts on religion and identity in Egypt. “To veil or not to veil: that is the goddamn question” Egyptian journalist, blogger, and muhaggibah Pakinam Amer asks. Read it alongside Forsoothsayer‘s excellent post on being an Egyptian, an Arab, and a Copt. “I am an Arab,” she declares, no matter what the diaspora Copts say.
• The Good: ‘Al-Qaeda’s Arithmetic of Response,’ a solid guest post from a mutual friend of Abu Muqawama‘s and mine. In the hands of a lesser researcher, each paragraph of this would have been a stand-alone article. Londostani, who actually knows what he’s talking about, needs to write a book, if only as an antidote to all the self-aggrandizing opportunists making a buck off 9/11 via Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com.
• The Good: McClatchy correspondent Hannah Allam’s excellent account of her recent trip into Sadr City.

AI and HRW statements below the break…

More…

600 Ominous News

I’ve been following Wael Abbas’ Twitter updates as he returns from Mahalla al-Korba. Look at this string:

• saw them arrest amina abdulrahman myself while i was hiding in the entrance of a building (about 6 hours ago)
• they r arresting journalists with no discrimination (about 6 hours ago)
• ana lessa rage3 min el mahalla now (about 6 hours ago)
• abado 3ala george ishaq min beeto (about 6 hours ago)

Update: I just spoke with Wael. He told me police are preventing journalists from interviewing family members of those detained in the recent unrest in Mahalla al-Korba, and that they have arrested journalists approaching the police station. Some of the journalists were released after a few hours, he said, but he couldn’t account for all of them. He’s preparing to post photos and videos from Mahalla now. Keep checking his site, and the Hisham Mubarak Center for Legal Aid’s blog on Katib.org, for more.

I’m signing off for the weekend. Back Sunday.

599 Kifaya Organizer Detained

Via email:

Statement no. 22
Demonstrators’ Defense Committee
George Ishaaq arrested and his house searched

George Ishaaq, leading Kefaya activist had just returned home in El Bostan street, Cairo after a long day of preparation for a Kefaya conference to reply to the allegation of the Egyptian government regarding the recent Mahalla demonstrations on the 6th and 7th of April, when state security officers broke into his house searching all his papers and books. Ishaaq was alone. They confiscated papers and books from his library and seemed especially interested in “The Butterfly’s Flutter” by political activist Ahmed Bahaa Shabaan, a book which describes the evolution, nature and future of the Kefaya movement. SSI also took Ishaaq’s mobile phone and prevented him from contacting anybody. After about an hour of search his wife arrived and found them all over her house. For a moment she thought she must be in the wrong place. Irritated by the heavy police presence in her house and their rude manners she asked them to leave the house. They refused. When they tried to take the computer of her son Shady, she refused and insisted that the computer belongs to her son and not his father. They demanded to see her mobile. She denied using a mobile, upon which SSI arrested George Ishaaq and took him to a place, that remains unknown until now.

http://hmlc.katib.org/news

Organizations in the defense committee:
Hisham Mubarak law Center, El Helali alliance for liberties (Bar association), Group of democratic lawyers, Helaly foundation for liberties, Association for freedom of thought and expression, Egyptian association for development of community participation, center for trade union and workers services, human rights association for rights of prisoners, human rights legal aid group, Arab center for the independence of the judiciary and legal profession, Sons of the land association, coordinating committee for trade union and workers rights and liberties, association of justice supporters, freedom committee at El Tagamuu party, Arab organization for criminological reform, Arab foundation for the support of civil society and human rights, El Mahalla lawyers’ committee.

Also, via Hossam (whose coverage has of the strike and the Mahalla Intifada has been really fantastic), an English translation a booklet by Mostafa Bassiouni (of Al-Dustur)and Omar Said (of Al-Badil) on 2007 wave of labor unrest in Egypt. When Bassiouni or Said talk about labor in Egypt, I listen. They’re probably the two best labor correspondents in the Egyptian press. I’ve seen them both in action, and they’re incredible to watch. I’m looking forward to reading this.

598 The Mahalla Intifada

A protester runs from a tear-gas canister in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla, April 6 (Photo: AP/Nasser Nasser)

The local council elections were today, but their results were a foregone conclusion even before the country’s largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, withdrew its candidates and called for a boycott. The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) won 70 percent of seats uncontested before polls opened. A few independents may win in some districts. Most of them will join (or re-join) the NDP after the election. So much expense and bad press could be saved by appointing the local councils.

In Cairo, after Sunday’s apocalyptic sandstorm, all-out security lock-down, and marginally successful general strike, the elections passed as a non-event.

A coalition of opposition groups is calling for a repeat of the April 6 “general strike” on President Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday, May 4. Secular activists have set up a Facebook group called “We don’t want the Brotherhood with us on May 4.” They will likely get their way. After the detention of 1,000 Brotherhood members and the group’s withdrawal from the elections, it’s unlikely that they’ll send members out to protest on President Mubarak’s birthday.

In the meantime, all eyes have been on Mahalla. Officials have confirmed that a 15-year-old boy, Ahmed Ali Mabrouk Hamada, was killed in yesterday’s protests over the high cost of living when police shot him with a rubber bullet at close range. On Sunday night, there were reports of two other fatalities, a 20-year-old man and a 9-year-old boy. The Daily News reported the deaths on Monday, but I’ve yet to see official confirmation. At least 90 protesters have been injured, hundreds more have been arrested, Mahalla City Hall has been ransacked, businesses and buses have been torched, and the images and the videos (more here, here, here, and here) coming out of the industrial town look like Gaza, circa Fall 2000.

Certainly nothing like this has happened in Egypt since police brutally crushed an August 1989 strike at a steel mill in Helwan, a southern industrial suburb of Cairo. But the comparison more frequently drawn, particularly given clashes in bread lines that have left seven dead in recent months, is with the 1977 bread riots. The comparison hasn’t been lost on the government, which has raised grain subsidies, ordered the Army to begin baking and distributing bread, canceled import duties on some foodstuffs, and indicated it will begin paying market prices for Egyptian grain in an effort to encourage domestic production.

Mahalla was quiet today. There were a few more arrests. Labor organizers were interrogated. But the big news was Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif’s trip to the city at the head of a delegation of Cabinet ministers. They came to appease the workers and to thank them for standing up to the ruffians and the troublemakers.

Arabist, on his way back from Mahalla, tells me by phone that all the workers he spoke to said the rioting had nothing to do with them, but rather was the work of poor youths frustrated by a lack of opportunity and a rising cost of living (look for his post tonight).

If true, this suggests the “Mahalla Intifada” has more in common with the 1977 bread riots than the 1989 strike in Helwan. This has troubling implications for the government. The Mubarak administration has effectively pacified strike after strike over the past year or so by acceding to the workers’ demands, but it can hardly right the country’s economic and agricultural imbalances overnight. More than a third of Egyptians live on $2 or less a day.

It’s hard to imagine what grander step the government could take to alleviate pressure on hungry citizens than calling in the Army to bake bread—especially given that a substantial retreat from the sort of free-market reforms that have driven the country’s growth in recent years would spook foreign investors and creditors. I expect it will try to find one in the weeks to come. But in the meantime, I expect it will look to its massive security apparatus to keep the lid on.

This is a temporary solution at best, and at worst a provocation. Streets filled with riot police (such as we saw in Cairo last Sunday), mass arrests (such as we’ve seen over the past month), rigged elections (such as we saw today), and jail sentences for high-profile critics (such as we’ve seen in the past weeks and years): all give the impression of a government pitted against its people. It’s an impression that isn’t lost on the people. But it’s an impression that must change if the country is to weather the gathering storm.

597 The Strike

Frankly, I’m still not sure what happened today. Word is, Egyptian police arrested more than 500 people nationwide, including the daily crop of Brothers, roughly 180 workers in Mahalla, and opposition activists of various tendencies (like bloggers Malek Mostafa and Mohammed al-Sharqawy). Things got serious in Mahalla. How serious hasn’t yet been confirmed. The best place for emerging information is 6april.blogspot.com.

Personally, this is the image I’ll take from an afternoon downtown and an evening in Sayeda on the day the Egyptian opposition called for a strike.

596 Malek Arrested, Editors’ Verdict Postponed

Friends report that activist and blogger Malek Mustafa and a handful of activists from the banned Labor Party have been arrested and are currently in the Old Cairo police station. I’m told the Labor Party guys will face charges of handing out flyers urging people to participate in a general strike tomorrow. It’s unclear whether Malek will also face charges or whether police will release him as April 6 draws to a close. The SMS grapevine is back, blogs and Facebook groups have been set up, and non-activist/journalist/ngo-type friends have counseled me to stay out of public places.

***

After a charged session, judges in a Giza court postponed delivering a verdict on the appeal of four newspaper editors until May 3. In September 2007, a court in Cairo sentenced them all to one year in prison on charges of “spreading false news” and defaming the president, the president’s son, and senior ruling-party officials. I was disappointed that the lawyer who brought the suits, who today was wearing two Mubarak 2005 pins, would not talk to me. Outside the court, a G-man in a gray suit told me, “The country is fucked. Really fucked.”

This afternoon, the sky clouded over, the barometer dropped, and it became oppressively still. Just now, improbably, a sandstorm rolled in. I need to shut the windows.

595 Harum Scarum

Via Worthy Oriental Gentleman, for your entertainment: “Elvis, a thieving midget, dancing girls, and an Oriental souq.”

594 Nice and Quiet

I’ve been making a lot of fuss over those cases in which Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP)’s political machine has coughed and sputtered, so I figure it’s only fair to give credit where it’s due. This is how it’s done:

The governor of Egypt’s Red Sea governorate, Abu Bakr Hassan Mohammed al-Rashidi, yesterday announced that the NDP had won all 14 seats on the governorate’s local council unopposed after the sole independent candidate graciously bowed out of the race.

In the central governorate of Minia, Governor Fouad Saad al-Din Mohammed Saad al-Din announced that the NDP had won 2,264 seats, or 90 percent of the total, unopposed.

Congratulations, sirs!

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