The journalist Robert Fisk has written about the Egyptian dictatorship.
He reminds us of Amr Wake, a star of many Egyptian movies, accused of treason when he described a country whose people were either imprisoned or lived in fear of arrest. Waked, whose criticism of the government earned him, this month, a sentence of eight years in an Egyptian prison (in absentia, of course, because he lives in Europe.) Waked like dozens of novelists, artists, journalists and other Egyptian literati – was among those who originally and naively supported the bloody coup which brought Sisi to power. Virtually ignored in the west where freedom of speech, workers’ rights and liberty are “precious”, “sacrosanct”, “close to our hearts” Waked was expelled from the government-controlled Egyptian actors’ union for “treachery”. They were condemned for “betraying the nation” and working for “the agenda of conspirators against Egypt’s security and stability”.
Amnesty has complained about the Egyptian government’s “punitive campaign against workers and trade unionists to deter and punish them from mobilising or going on strike”.
It was Egypt’s traditionally powerful trade union movements, which historically fought the British colonial power as well as the Nasser and Sadat regimes, and which played a powerful but tragically disregarded role in the revolution which destroyed the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.
Egypt’s great cotton industry in the Delta north of Cairo has been the centre of this often forgotten revolution, an export centre whose workers have great industrial power – if and when they are permitted to exercise it. They struck under British rule and they staged successive rebellions under Mubarak. The most important of these occurred in 2006 when women cotton workers led their menfolk in an uprising against the regime in the big industrial city of Mahalla. They used social media to bring tens of thousands of workers from the countryside into the central square of the city – it was, in fact, also called Tahrir Square – and set up tent encampments under fire from police tear gas. They even called for the overthrow of Mubarak – a demand typically ignored by most of us journalists, who were only interested in Islamist opposition to Egyptian government rule – but it impressed the dictatorship of the time, which immediately gave the citizens of Mahalla pay rises, improved conditions, new workers’ canteens and shorter hours. And, although we reporters did not identify this when it happened, the cotton workers of Mahallah were among the first industrial groups to arrive in Cairo’s far bigger Tahrir Square when the uprising really got under way in January of 2011.
The Egyptian army, which stage-managed the aftermath of the revolution, realised very shrewdly that working class solidarity could be just as dangerous as Islamic unity. The independent trade union of Egyptian workers who had now thrown off the official union movement of government stooges, was a quite different creature.
By 2015 when the Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court decided that the right to strike “goes against Islamic teachings and the purposes of Islamic Sharia” law. This ruling came only a day after Sisi had attended a labour day celebration alongside the regime’s own General Federation of Egypt Trade Unions, whose president, Gebali Al-Maraghi, described Sisi – who would win the supposed presidential election last year with 97.08 per cent of the “votes” – as a hero and “Egypt’s saviour”. Maraghi said that Sisi had restored Egypt’s dignity. Maraghi handed Sisi a “code of honour” of ‘his Egyptian workers whose second article rejected strikes and committed the union to “dialogue with the government and business owners”. Maraghi gave a newspaper interview in which he said that “our task is to carry out all the demands made by the president in his meeting with workers, increasing production and fighting terrorism”.
He reminds us of Amr Wake, a star of many Egyptian movies, accused of treason when he described a country whose people were either imprisoned or lived in fear of arrest. Waked, whose criticism of the government earned him, this month, a sentence of eight years in an Egyptian prison (in absentia, of course, because he lives in Europe.) Waked like dozens of novelists, artists, journalists and other Egyptian literati – was among those who originally and naively supported the bloody coup which brought Sisi to power. Virtually ignored in the west where freedom of speech, workers’ rights and liberty are “precious”, “sacrosanct”, “close to our hearts” Waked was expelled from the government-controlled Egyptian actors’ union for “treachery”. They were condemned for “betraying the nation” and working for “the agenda of conspirators against Egypt’s security and stability”.
Amnesty has complained about the Egyptian government’s “punitive campaign against workers and trade unionists to deter and punish them from mobilising or going on strike”.
It was Egypt’s traditionally powerful trade union movements, which historically fought the British colonial power as well as the Nasser and Sadat regimes, and which played a powerful but tragically disregarded role in the revolution which destroyed the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.
Egypt’s great cotton industry in the Delta north of Cairo has been the centre of this often forgotten revolution, an export centre whose workers have great industrial power – if and when they are permitted to exercise it. They struck under British rule and they staged successive rebellions under Mubarak. The most important of these occurred in 2006 when women cotton workers led their menfolk in an uprising against the regime in the big industrial city of Mahalla. They used social media to bring tens of thousands of workers from the countryside into the central square of the city – it was, in fact, also called Tahrir Square – and set up tent encampments under fire from police tear gas. They even called for the overthrow of Mubarak – a demand typically ignored by most of us journalists, who were only interested in Islamist opposition to Egyptian government rule – but it impressed the dictatorship of the time, which immediately gave the citizens of Mahalla pay rises, improved conditions, new workers’ canteens and shorter hours. And, although we reporters did not identify this when it happened, the cotton workers of Mahallah were among the first industrial groups to arrive in Cairo’s far bigger Tahrir Square when the uprising really got under way in January of 2011.
The Egyptian army, which stage-managed the aftermath of the revolution, realised very shrewdly that working class solidarity could be just as dangerous as Islamic unity. The independent trade union of Egyptian workers who had now thrown off the official union movement of government stooges, was a quite different creature.
By 2015 when the Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court decided that the right to strike “goes against Islamic teachings and the purposes of Islamic Sharia” law. This ruling came only a day after Sisi had attended a labour day celebration alongside the regime’s own General Federation of Egypt Trade Unions, whose president, Gebali Al-Maraghi, described Sisi – who would win the supposed presidential election last year with 97.08 per cent of the “votes” – as a hero and “Egypt’s saviour”. Maraghi said that Sisi had restored Egypt’s dignity. Maraghi handed Sisi a “code of honour” of ‘his Egyptian workers whose second article rejected strikes and committed the union to “dialogue with the government and business owners”. Maraghi gave a newspaper interview in which he said that “our task is to carry out all the demands made by the president in his meeting with workers, increasing production and fighting terrorism”.
From then on, all talk of independent unions was over; workers’ representatives were imprisoned or threatened with arrest.
Full article here
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/02/egypts-brutal-crackdown-on-workers-rights/
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