Security forces' ongoing crackdowns on workers' movement

Mada Masr
Labor politicized or politicized labor?

August 27, 2013

Jano Charbel

Security crackdowns against two labor strikes — at the Suez Steel Company and Scimitar Petroleum Company — and a potential one at the Misr Textile Company in Mahalla, have been eclipsed by news of crackdowns against the Muslim Brotherhood.

Receiving negligible media coverage, these industrial actions were crushed by police and the Armed Forces within the span of less than one week.

Security forces arrested two strike leaders as they surrounded the Suez Steel Company on August 12, while the strike at the Scimitar Petroleum Company was forcefully put down on August 17 and a host of strikers briefly detained, with legal charges leveled against them.

Furthermore, on August 21, police forces stormed and searched the homes of four workers from the Suez Steel Company, and arrested one union leader in the process. Fourteen strikers from the company have been threatened with prosecution and/or dismissal.

The demands of the Suez Steel Company workers include the payment of their wages for the month of July and the payment of overdue profit-sharing. Meanwhile, workers at the Scimitar Petroleum Company have been demanding overdue bonuses and the reinstatement of several sacked workers, along with better wages and working conditions.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to frighten or threaten the workers, the army deployed its APCs earlier this week inside and around the Misr Textile Company in Mahalla where nearly 20,000 workers are on strike demanding improved wages and overdue bonuses. Army officers have reportedly called on workers to end their strike and to move towards negotiations.

But in a context where the security apparatuses are mobilized against any protest movement in the wake of the current regime's war on the Muslim Brotherhood, industrial actions are slammed as destabilizing and quelled. Moreover, the ruling regime has recently tried to associate them with what it deems a Brotherhood threat.

According to Fatma Ramadan of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), “these latest crackdowns are part of the security forces’ ongoing policy against industrial actions.” She explains that since the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak, the security apparatuses are “repeatedly attempting to criminalize workers’ strikes and protests and to portray striking workers as trouble-makers, counter-revolutionaries, hired-hands and provocateurs seeking to harm the economy.”

In relation to the current period following the ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi in July, Ramadan adds, “The police are utilizing these exceptional laws as a pretext to crackdown on striking workers. Under these exceptional circumstances and this atmosphere of fear, striking workers are being labeled as terrorists or agents of the Muslim Brotherhood, along with other baseless accusations.”

Amr Youssef, a union organizer at the Suez Steel Company whom police arrested as he attempted to enter the factory gates on August 12, recounts that 14 workers have been threatened by both their employer and the security forces. "They’ve threatened to sack us from our jobs, while also claiming that we are Muslim Brotherhood supporters," he explains.

“In our earlier protests, they had claimed that we were feloul (Mubarak loyalists,) then they claimed we were communists seeking to destroy the company and destabilize the Egyptian economy. In reality we are non-affiliated workers. We are not feloul, communists, or members of the Brotherhood,” he says

Youssef explains that a large contingent of security forces, including several police trucks and APCs had been deployed outside the main entrance to the Suez Steel Company on August 12. Security forces identified Youssef, along with fellow unionist Rauf Abdel Khaleq, as they attempted to enter the company premises. They were both taken to the local police station, questioned, threatened and then released within a few hours.

“Several of our coworkers tried to follow the police truck carrying us away from the company, but security forces prevented them from doing so. A scuffle broke out, and the troops ended up breaking a worker’s arm and injuring two others,” he says.

 “Prior to these clashes, we were chanting for [Armed Forces General Commander Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi so as to show the security forces that we are not political opponents of the regime,” he adds.

“In its so-called ‘fight against terrorism,’ we advise the state not to scapegoat striking workers,” says Adel Zakariya of the independent Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services. He called on the ruling authorities to “prevent the exploitation of workers, and to respect their legitimate rights to protest and strike — as is stipulated in international conventions to which Egypt is signatory.”

But following these crackdowns against workers at the Suez Steel Company and the Scimitar Petroleum Company — along with several crackdowns against the Brotherhood — Sisi addressed the nation on August 18, speaking in defense of the ailing national economy and against work-stoppages. “We must seek to double our production,” he said.

Sisi also sought to associate labor protests with the Muslim Brotherhood: “Don't give anyone the chance to interrupt your work. Let's all work, let's build our country and let's move forward. This is what we need to do.”

Moreover, Sisi called on workers to take action against “instigators” of strikes. He added, “Tell those neighbors, please no more. If we can do this, we will effectively contribute to avoiding bloodshed and casualties. Moreover, we will help quell this sedition. And again, don't let anybody interrupt production because this is another means of tearing the country down.”

However, Sisi did not mention the negative economic repercussions associated with his heavy-handed security crackdowns, curfews and emergency law.

Ramadan of the EFITU, explains that “the imposition of emergency law and curfews are clearly affecting labor rights, including the right to work, organize, and to strike, along with other rights.”

Similarly, Saud Omar, secretary of the Suez Regional Workers’ Federation asserts that “all exceptional laws harm workers’ rights and liberties. Curfews and emergency law may lead to even more punitive measures against workers, and further deterioration of labor freedoms.”

Three days after Sisi’s address, on August 21, security forces stormed and searched the homes of four workers from the Suez Steel Company who had been accused of instigating the strike. On the same day, unionist Mohamed Mabrouk was arrested at a security checkpoint and taken to the local police station where he was questioned and threatened.

Mabrouk who was detained for around 24 hours, says, “I was not physically harmed or abused at the hands of the police, but conditions in detention there are inhuman.”

Like his coworkers Youssef and Abdel Khaleq before him, Mabrouk was reportedly told to accept resignation from the company in return for monetary compensation.

“Police officers told us to return to work and stop obstructing production, or to accept our employer’s offer of LE150,000 (around US$2,146) to leave the company,” Youssef recounts. He adds that a senior officer at the police station said to him, “if a man is tired of his wife, he divorces her.”

Shortly after some 2,100 workers launched their strike on July 23, the Suez Steel Company’s Managing Director, Rafiq al-Dauw, filed complaints to prosecutors, security forces and local authorities against the 14 “strike instigators” whom he wants to sack.

According to Ramadan, “the Suez Steel workers had similarly filed complaints to local authorities against the company owners and administrators accusing them of breaching their labor rights, yet the workers’ complaints fell on deaf ears.”

Ramadan adds that “prosecutors ignored these workers’ demands, while the police and Armed Forces have again sided with the employers.  Mubarak’s old security apparatus is still in power, and thus they will continue to protect employers’ interests at the expense of workers’ rights.”

After a month-long strike, workers at the Suez Steel Company expressed their willingness to return to work on August 22 — yet indicated that they may re-launch their strike at any time if the employers refuse to meet their demands.

However, according to Zakariya, seven workers out of the 14 so-called instigators appear to be in the process of being sacked, while the remaining seven are being threatened with the same fate. Nevertheless, workers have been demanding their reinstatement.

Dauw could not be reached for comment; neither could the Scimitar Petroleum Company’s administrators or workers.

Meanwhile, at the Scimitar Company, operating by the Red Sea town of Ras Ghareb, the number of workers assaulted and/or detained during the crackdown on August 17 has not been confirmed. However, this crackdown did succeed in ending a three day work-stoppage from August 14-17. An unspecified number of striking workers at the company have reportedly been referred to prosecution.

While both the Suez and Scimitar companies have resumed operations following crackdowns — Scimitar went back to work on August 17, and the Suez Steel Company resumed production on August 22 — further protests and strikes at these companies may still be expected, however.

Ramadan says that she expects both industrial actions and security crackdowns to continue. “Hunger and social injustice will continue to fuel labor protests across the country. No amount of arrests, trials, crackdowns or exceptional laws will be able to end these labor actions.”

“Only an inclusive social dialogue with workers and their unions will be able to decrease labor unrest. Until then, workers will continue to struggle for their rights, and for the demands of the revolution: Bread, freedom, social justice, and human dignity.”

Mahalla textile workers strike, amidst divisions

REUTERS
Army-rule divides Egypt's once united worker heroes

August 28, 2013

Maggie Fick

EL-MAHALLA EL-KUBRA (Reuters) - The workers at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company once locked arms long enough to wring pay rises out of the Egyptian state, and inspired the pro-democracy uprising of 2011 that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

Now, divided and cowed, with the army in power once more and armored vehicles inside their gates, their story could stand for the failure of Egypt's entire pro-democracy movement to build on the revolution against authoritarian rule and unite in a common cause.

The April 6 movement for social justice that began the uprising took its name from the date in 2008 when the workers of the largest textile firm in the Middle East downed tools, along with many others in the gritty industrial city of el-Mahalla el-Kubra, and were bullied back to work by the security forces.

But since the army toppled Mohamed Mursi, Mubarak's successor and Egypt's first elected leader, on July 3, and security forces shot dead hundreds of supporters of his Muslim Brotherhood, key figures in Mahalla's labor movement are not speaking to each other. They barely even share the same goals.

Widad el-Demerdash, who has worked at the state-run firm for 29 of her 47 years, fondly recalls the heady days of a series of strikes in 2006, when she and her colleague Amal el-Saeed helped to win bigger production bonuses for the factory workers.

"This was a big achievement," she said in an interview at her apartment on Monday, her day off. But the smile turns to a frown when she is asked about Saeed.

They no longer have "any relationship", she said, accusing Saeed of having joined the Brotherhood.
Demerdash agreed with the argument of the new military-led rulers that the Brotherhood is a "terrorist group" bent on destroying Egypt, in language that lays bare how polarized society has become during the most violent period in the Arab republic's modern history.

"Whoever becomes 'Brotherhood' and sells out their principles is no longer a human being," she said.

"THEY HAVE RIGHTS TOO"

Like many who backed the army takeover, Demerdash supports the violent crackdown on the Brotherhood that has followed. More than 1,000 people, mainly pro-Mursi Islamists, have been killed since July 3. The toll includes about 100 soldiers and police.

For her part, Saeed denies having joined the Brotherhood but condemns those who vilify Egypt's oldest Islamist movement. "I'm trying to tell people: 'The Brotherhood are your neighbors, they are people and they have rights like you'."

Like many of the 2011 revolutionaries, she says she voted for Mursi last year only because she could not bring herself to support his rival in the run-off, Mubarak loyalist Ahmed Shafik.

"I was among the first people to say 'Down with Mubarak'," she said. "There was no democracy in the past, and I fought for that. Now today, I'm still supporting democracy."

Saeed said the removal of Mursi had taken Egypt backwards, and that she feared the consequences for the labor movement.

She acknowledged that Mursi's government had failed to address workers' longstanding demands for a guaranteed minimum wage and limits on bosses' pay, but said progress on those and other issues such as delivery of unpaid bonuses was now less likely than ever.

"Who do we speak to now? Where is the government? The army is in charge of everything," she said in an interview on Sunday in Mahalla, where posters of army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi abound in cafes, on buildings and at traffic circles.

For all that, there seems little doubt that most workers at the factory, which has a long history of labor activism, backed the army takeover and are content for now to acquiesce.

FORCED TO CHOOSE

"The army needs to stabilize things now," said Kamel Mohamed Fayoumi, an activist who was himself arrested when Mubarak's government sent plainclothes security forces and riot police to intimidate workers during the 2008 strike.

Joel Beinin, a history professor at Stanford and an expert on labor and protest movements in the Middle East, said Egyptian workers had often succeeded in the past by managing to lay aside political differences.
"They have bread and butter interests on the line and understand they need to be united to win them," he said.

Political upheavals mean that the monolithic trade unions that largely toed the state line under Mubarak have given way to a profusion of smaller, more independent unions.

But Egypt is now is so polarized between Mursi's Islamists and the entrenched military-backed establishment that "neither the workers nor anyone else" have been able to bridge the gap.

"So people have been forced to choose. Neither choice is very good in terms of workers' interests," said Beinin.

Even those like Fayoumi who suffered under Mubarak's police state did not speak out when the army and police thwarted a strike at Misr Spinning and Weaving Company on Monday and another protest at a Suez steel factory earlier in the month.

The Mahalla protest attracted only a few hundred participants - and was quickly followed by the deployment of armored personnel carriers inside the factory compound.

Local media reported that they were protecting the factory's power station, but labor leader Mohamed El-Attar, a Mursi supporter, said even Mubarak had never dared to send troops to confront labor protests.

"These vehicles were sent by the army to terrorize workers," he said. "We must ask, who are the real terrorists in this country today?"



(Reporting by Maggie Fick; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Alistair Lyon)
*Photo courtesy of Egynews.net

Polarised, politicised & biased: Covering Egypt

Daily News Egypt 

Polarised, politicised and biased: Covering Egypt

August 21, 2013 

Sarah El Masry

On 13 August, security forces carried out operations at Al-Nahda Square and near Rabaa Al Adaweya Mosque to disperse sit-ins in support of ousted president Mohamed Morsi, leading to over 800 deaths from the sit-ins and over 1300 deaths in total all over Egypt as a result of violent attacks on police stations, churches, Coptic-owned shops and houses and street violence.

The media coverage of the dispersal, as well as the narrative of the events leading up to it, has varied among different outlets, with many seemingly supporting a party in the conflict.

One post that has gone viral on social network websites juxtaposes the coverage of sit-in dispersal by two major channels; it describes how on Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr (owned by the state of Qatar) viewers saw security forces brutally shooting at the brotherhood members and supporters; while on Al-Arabiya (owned by Saudi Arabia) one saw the same security forces helping out protesters.

The post reflects the state of polarisation in the media, both local and international, is covering the Egyptian crisis. It also points to how the framing of the current events in Egypt is politically charged by the position of media outlet owners.

The scene on TV

Polarisation is not a new phenomenon to the Egyptian media scene, and has been widely growing after the January 25^th Revolution. However, at some point under Morsi, media narratives began to polarise around the two sides of political conflict in Egypt; the Islamist and the opposition.

The majority of TV channels, both private and state-owned, belonged to these two camps; religious channels backed Islamists, and secular channels represented the opposition. There were some individual anchors and presenters who mostly remained impartial and less biased, but the sweeping majority mirrored the ubiquitous polarisation on the street.

Both camps have been accused of creating conspiracy theories, spread rumours and exchanged real and false accusations. Islamist channels, particularly Al-Nas and Al-Hafez, often exploited sectarian rhetoric against Egyptian Copts, claiming that they constituted the majority of protesters against president Morsi. Meanwhile, Morsi’s government blamed the media for its failures; during the gas crisis in June Bassem Ouda, former supply minister, blamed the media in a statement for spreading inaccurate information about the shortage of gas which led people to line up for hours to fuel their vehicles. On the other hand, the secular media accused the government of cracking down on freedom of expression.

The day the military ousted Morsi, several Islamist channels such as Al-Nas, Al-Hafez and Misr 25 (owned by the Muslim Brotherhood) were shut down by the interim government. Security officials also raided the offices of Al Jazeera Mubasher a day after the ouster.

Although the closure of these channels was slammed by local and international human rights organisations, the government justified it as a means to “prevent perpetuating violence and spreading hatred in the country” according to armed forced spokesman Ahmed Ali. Today very few channels, mostly non-Egyptian, still represent the interests of the Brotherhood.

Rasha Abdulla, an associate professor and the former chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo, explains: “The local media reflects the deep polarisation in the Egyptian society. Today, most people are so angry with the Brotherhood that has done a terrible job managing the country. That’s why when media outlets adopt an anti-Brotherhood lens, they think it is the patriotic thing to do.”

Abdulla adds: “However, media professionals should be able to separate themselves from that polarisation. What we see on TV is one-sided and the voices of the other camps are missing.”

Observations of the local media outlets show that the state-owned channels such as Nile News alongside privately owned channels such as CBC, ONTV and Dream TV have been blatantly covering events in Egypt’s recent crisis from one side only that is the side of the current interim government.

“Sometimes you can’t distinguish if these channels are reporting news or airing PR campaigns for the military. Even if the general audience accepts and welcomes this huge dosage of propaganda, these channels should seek some objectivity,” says Abdulla.

Hosts of talk shows and guests on these channels have been openly defending the state’s decisions and the security measures taken against the brotherhood members and supporters and mobilising people explicitly. ONTV’s morning show, TV presenter Amani El-Khayat supported her interviewee’s call for the people “to go down and form popular committees to protect themselves and their properties against the Brotherhood’s protesters.”

Yosri Fouda, the TV presenter of the popular Akher Kalam (Final Word) programme on ONTV issued a statement at the end of July on his Facebook page criticising the channel’s coverage, saying: “I’d like to note my reservations and extreme sadness over the media’s detrimental coverage of what is happening in Egypt… my channel included.”

On the other hand, channels such as Al-Hiwar have given a platform to the Brotherhood, airing statements of their leadership and dedicating its coverage to televising the marches of Morsi’s supporters.

Ahmed Kheir is the executive director of the Support for Information Technology Centre (SITC, an NGO working on media and right to information related issues), which follow news coverage to monitor violations, defined as bias by omissions, labeling, using misleading terminologies, distortion of facts, and lacking context.

“I see no local media channels, with the real sense of the word. What we have today is media that aims at inciting people. It is one-sided and deprives the audience’s right to access comprehensive information about the situation in Egypt. We know this because of the very few independent media outlets,” says Kheir.

Kheir notes that even the non-news content of these channels is politically charged; “Patriotic songs and movies seem to be chosen specifically to frame people’s knowledge and awareness.”

According to Abdulla, international media were slightly better in their coverage, but they suffered other problems.

“First, they lack context… Second, some facts and components are hard to represent or report on. Reporters, photographers and photojournalists run the risk of being beaten, hit, shot at or even detained. All these elements can affect reporting [for TV or print] and lead stories and reports to be one-sided and lacking in context,” she says.

Kheir notes: “There is a sentence that is used extensively, ‘the first civilian elected president ousted by the military’ and it lacks the fact about the people’s protests on 30 June. It misleads the listeners and wins their sympathy before they even continue the rest of the report.”

“Cairo gained the attention of the coverage while what’s happening elsewhere in rural areas and the attacks on churches were barely covered,” he added.

Abdulla believes international media can be excused from the lack of rural coverage, since it is difficult for foreign journalists to navigate, but local media have better access and know their way around.

Abdulla says Sky News Arabic (owned by the UAE) and the BBC were among the channels that tried to report as objectively as possible about Egypt. “They exert an effort to be balanced and they try to keep the principles of reporting in mind,” she says. Kheir believes Sky News Arabic has recently sunk into a bit biased coverage after the UAE showed support to Egypt.

It’s no better in print or online

Print and electronic media are also influenced by the same polarised coverage.

Abdulla says: “In print media, the borders between opinions and news pieces seem to blur. If it is an opinion story, you can pick sides as much as you want, but for news reporting you have an obligation to keep the basic elements of reporting.”

SITC has recently issued a manual for journalists on how to write accurate and professional news pieces; the centre said it saw a necessity in issuing such a manual after recording many violations of how news pieces were written in local print media.
 
“There are many criteria for how news pieces should be presented to readers; looking at most of newspapers in Egypt today, only very few abide by these criteria. This affects how readers perceive news,” says Kheir.

The platform of local electronic media is no better, says Bassil Nofal of Media Credibility Watch, a website that assesses and rates news websites. It highlights false news, makes a cumulative point system for each website for the number of invented stories they report and interacts with these websites in an attempt to improve reporting.

“Polarisation and bias increase every day. In our work, the number of false news stories has been on rise for the past two months, they’d be equivalent to almost six months of false news,” says Nofal.

According to the watch’s recent monthly report, the overall number of violations was 3885 found in a sample of news stories including 2278 news pieces from 17 news websites.

The popular Youm 7 Newspaper website has received a warning from the watch for publishing 19 false news stories during the month of August, before the end of the month.

“This contributes to rumours and affects the credibility of news in general,” he says.

Nofal notes that a significant issue in local online news websites stems from the fact that they translate some news from foreign websites.

“This is a huge problem because not only could the translation be inaccurate, but also some websites intentionally block names of sources, which disfigures the news and misleads the readers.”

Is radio more objective?

For Kheir, it is only logical for the news coverage and talk shows on radio to be impacted by the overall polarisation atmosphere. He particularly refers to Radio Masr (Radio Egypt) which is the state-owned station.

“I think Radio Masr follows the same policy of Nile News [state-owned news TV channel], they branch from the same root,” he says.

Nisreen Okasha, a news anchor and a presenter of a daily show on Radio Masr disagrees with Kheir. To her, polarisation took place during the year of Morsi’s rule.

“Under Mubarak, our station used to be limited like most media outlets in Egypt, only after the revolution did we experience an awakening, or a wave of freedom. The January 25^th revolution brought us a new hope to be professional in our reporting. However, a few month after Morsi’s elections we experienced many interventions in our work and arbitrary measures against those who do not abide,” she says.

Okasha said that after the ouster of Morsi, the freedom that was stripped from them under the Brotherhood’s rule was back.

Recently, a Radio Masr listener would notice that the station plays national and patriotic songs almost all day. Also, in its talk shows, there is a heavy presence of security experts, most notably the Retired Major General Sameh Seif al-Yazal, who is known to side with the state’s policies.

Okasha believes that neither the patriotic songs nor the choice of the guests on the talk shows is part of a policy imposed from the top; they are rather voluntary actions by the workers and presenters at the station who suffered under the Brotherhood regime.

“Playing the patriotic songs is a tradition workers have grown accustomed to, but I believe our news coverage is impartial. We used to cover the sit-ins at Rabaa and get calls from the Brotherhood’s supporters. The only thing that may have affected this coverage is our limited resources and the shortage in correspondents.

“But I would understand if there are discrepancies in objectivity when it comes to talk shows because they are the responsibility of individual presenters,” she says.

Kheir points out that the current practices of the different media outlets are reminiscent of those under the deposed President Mubarak, under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and under Morsi.

“The media keeps playing a father figure; it attempts to impose a certain vision on the audience and blocks other information from it. They are the same suppressive practices we’ve been longing to terminate all along,” he says.


*Photos courtesy of DNE

Egypt: Authorities crack-down on Syrian refugees

TIME

Egypt’s Military-Backed Government Cracks Down on Syrian Refugees

As Egypt's new government solidifies its power, Syrian refugees face growing vitriol and arrests

Aug. 24, 2013

 

Sam Kimball

 

 

In his small flat in the Masaken Uthman neighborhood on the desert outskirts of Cairo, Hamid pulls prayer beads tensely through his dry fingers, his legs folded beneath him on the living room floor. A flickering television illuminates the walls and a rotating fan beats the hot air. “It was night,” he says, recounting his recent arrest. “Two friends and I were in the apartment. There was a pounding on the door.” It was an investigator, Hamid recalls. “Evening, boys,” the officer said. “Your passports.”

Two months before, when Hamid’s residency had expired, Mohamed Morsi was still in the presidency, and Hamid wasn’t worried about being deported from Egypt, where he’d found a sanctuary from the war in his native Syria. But in the xenophobic atmosphere following Morsi’s ouster, overstaying one’s papers has taken on a new danger. “Come with me,” the investigator said, and he took Hamid into the night.

On July 25, the night before Egyptians took to the streets to support military chief Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s “war on terror,” Qasim, who fled from Dara’a in southern Syria in early March of this year, was also detained by Egypt’s Homeland Security forces.

Along with his elderly father, he was taken from their home in Masaken Uthman by a security officer wearing civilian clothes. Qasim’s yellow card, which guarantees protection by the U.N. Refugee Agency, did nothing to help him. Waiting for them below their dilapidated apartment tower were five security cars and a troop of Homeland Security officers.

Hamid (who asked that TIME not use his real name), Qasim, and 17 others were arrested in one fell swoop on July 25 and accused of meddling in Egyptian affairs. The Homeland Security agency, successor of the Mubarak-era state-security body that was abolished after the 2011 revolution, questioned them aggressively about demonstrations at a former Muslim Brotherhood sit-in in northeastern Cairo. Exasperated, Qasim told them that most of the Syrians living in Mesekeen Uthman didn’t even know where the sit-in was.

“Too bad. Some of you have been going to protests with weapons and causing trouble,” a Homeland Security officer told Qasim. “Those people have ruined everything for the rest of you.”

Hamid and Qasim’s experience has become commonplace among Syrians in Egypt since the military-backed ouster of Morsi in early July. Mohamad Elmasry, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo, says Syrian refugees are being scapegoated by the military-backed regime, part of a larger campaign to criminalize the Muslim Brotherhood.

“According to coupist logic, since the Muslim Brotherhood had been generally supportive of Gazans and Syrian refugees, it must follow that Gazans and Syrian refugees are harmful to Egypt,” Elmasry says. “Syrian refugees have been blamed for Egypt’s worsening economy, among other things.”

Media praise for the military and demonization of the Brotherhood and minority groups is nothing new in Egypt. What is shocking, Elmasry says, is how many Egyptians have accepted the disparaging stories about Syrians and been willing to participate in acts of repression. “The past few weeks have witnessed civilian arrests, violence against Syrian refugees and destruction of businesses and other property owned by Syrians,” Elmasry says.

“It’s true that security measures have been tightened in Egypt, but the basic policy remains the same,” Nasser Kamel, the Assistant Minister for Arab Affairs in Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, says of Syrian refugees. “I do recognize that some media outlets do not make the distinction [between average Syrian refugees and Brotherhood supporters],” he says. Regarding claims of cooperation between authorities and the media to vilify Syrians and deflect attention from the military’s crackdown, Kamel dismisses them categorically as “totally false and wrong.”

According to rights workers, the scapegoating of Syrians began almost immediately after calls for Morsi’s removal. “After the 30th of June, I am afraid to leave my apartment because the Egyptian media is saying that Syrians support Morsi,” Amin Kazkaz, a Syrian rights activist in Cairo working with a local refugee-assistance organization, tells TIME.

Since Morsi’s ouster, pro-military television hosts like Lamis El Hadidi from Egypt’s CBC channel regularly spout anti-Syrian vitriol, likening them to the Muslim Brotherhood. “She says things like, ‘I support Assad because he’s killing you and you deserve it,’” says Kazkaz, noting that the Egyptian authorities often tolerate this kind of hate speech. In a statement in July, the Arab Network for Human Rights Information condemned the rhetoric against Syrians and Palestinians, declaring that El Hadidi, among several others, were the worst purveyors.

An accurate number of Syrians arrested is hard to determine. Kazkaz says that hundreds of Syrians have been arbitrarily detained over the past month and a half. Mohamed Dayri, from the U.N. Refugee Agency’s Cairo office, puts the figure at 160 arrested since early July.

Nathaniel Kim, assistant director of the Tadamon Council, Egypt’s largest refugee-serving organization, asserts that the number is far higher. He says that since June 30, there have been more than 500 Syrians arrested in Cairo and Alexandria, but there are likely hundreds more arrests outside of the major cities going unreported. He notes that the U.N. Refugee Agency’s numbers are lower because they only track those registered with the U.N.

The targeting of Syrian refugees has raised concerns that Egypt might return to a Murabak-style security state. Elmasry thinks that is a real possibility. “I don’t think there’s any question that what has happened in Egypt is part of a larger counter–Jan. 25 revolution,” he says.

“The constitution has been suspended; numerous media outlets have been shut down without due process; there have been numerous political arrests, also without due process. Mubarak’s notorious state-security apparatus has been reintroduced.”

If the persecution of vulnerable Syrian refugees is an indicator of political trajectory, Egypt’s future may well be grim. Elmasry worries about the future for Syrians if the military-backed regime continues to solidify its power. ”Policies forcing them out of Egypt are likely, and I would not be surprised to see more anti-Syrian vigilante violence, particularly if media rhetoric continues to be as hysterical as it is,” Elmasry says. “I hope I am wrong.”

*Photo courtesy of the Associated Press

New York Times

Egypt Widens Crackdown and Meaning of ‘Islamist’

 

DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

August 24, 2013

CAIRO — Having crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian authorities have begun cracking down on other dissenters, sometimes labeling even liberal activists or labor organizers as dangerous Islamists.

Ten days ago, the police arrested two left-leaning Canadians — one of them a filmmaker specializing in highly un-Islamic movies about sexual politics — and implausibly announced that they were members of the
 Brotherhood, the conservative Islamist group backing the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi. In Suez this month, police and military forces breaking up a steelworkers strike charged that its organizers were part of a Brotherhood plot to destabilize Egypt.

On Saturday, the chief prosecutor ordered an investigation into charges of spying against two prominent activists associated with the progressive April 6 group.

When a journalist with a state newspaper spoke publicly about watching a colleague’s wrongful killing by a soldier, prosecutors appeared to fabricate a crime to punish the journalist. And the police arrested five employees of the religious Web site Islam Today for the crime of describing the military takeover as a coup, security officials said.

Police abuses and politicized prosecutions are hardly new in Egypt, and they did not stop under Mr. Morsi. But since the military takeover last month, some rights activists say, the authorities are acting with a sense of impunity exceeding even the period before the 2011 revolt against Hosni Mubarak.

The government installed by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi has renewed the Mubarak-era state of emergency removing all rights to due process or protections against police abuse. And police officials have pronounced themselves “vindicated.” They say the new government’s claim that it is battling Islamist violence corroborates what they have been saying all along: that it was Islamists, not the police, who killed protesters before Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.

“What is different is that the police feel for the first time in two and a half years, for the first time since January 2011, that they have the upper hand, and they do not need to fear public accountability or questioning,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

In the more than seven weeks since Mr. Morsi’s ouster, security forces have carried out at least three mass shootings at pro-Morsi street protests, killed more than a thousand Morsi supporters and arrested at least as many, actions Ms. Morayef characterized as “massive police abuse on an unprecedented scale.” But even beyond the Islamists, she said, “anyone who questions the police right now is a traitor, and that is a protection that they did not have even in 2010,” when public criticism was tolerated and at least a few complaints were investigated.

Prosecutors had already begun investigating Mohamed ElBaradei, the liberal former United Nations diplomat, for “betraying the public trust.”

President Obama has said the new government is on a “dangerous path” marked by “arbitrary arrests, a broad crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s associations and supporters” and “violence that’s taken the lives of hundreds of people and wounded thousands more.”

Warning that “our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” the president canceled a planned joint military exercise. He pledged a review of the $1.3 billion a year in military aid to Egypt, and the State Department took steps to hold back some of the roughly $200 million in nonmilitary aid. But mindful of Egypt’s importance in the region, he stopped short of declaring the takeover an illegal “coup” or cutting off the aid, instead urging an early return to democracy.

Officials of the new government insist they are committed to establishing the rule of law, as soon as they overcome what they describe as the mortal threat to Egypt of violence by the Brotherhood and other Islamist supporters of Mr. Morsi.

The police appear to be rounding up Brotherhood members on the basis of their affiliation, without other publicly known evidence of crimes. Mr. Morsi is being held incommunicado at an undisclosed location. But government spokesmen insist that every individual, including Mr. Morsi, will be tried by a court and released if acquitted.

“It is up to the courts,” Nabil Fahmy, the interim foreign minister, said in a recent interview. All will be handled “in accordance with the rule of law,” he said.

But some of the recent charges, like those against the two Canadians, strain credibility. Tarek Loubani, a Canadian physician with Palestinian roots and a history as a liberal and pro-Palestinian activist, was in Egypt on his way to the Gaza Strip to provide training to Palestinian doctors. John Greyson, a liberal Toronto filmmaker whose work often focuses on cosmopolitan sexual themes, was with him, documenting the trip for a possible movie. A lawyer for the two said they were stopped at a checkpoint near a street battle, trying to walk back to their hotel after the 7 p.m. curfew.

“They were just in the wrong place at very much the wrong time,” the lawyer, Khaled El-Shalakany, said Saturday.

The exact circumstances of their arrest were unclear. In a public statement, Egyptian prosecutors accused them of “participating with members of the Muslim Brotherhood” in an armed assault on a police station and “taking part in bloody crimes of violence.” Prosecutors told reporters at the time that the police had detained 240 Brotherhood “members,” including two Canadians. (Mr. Shalakany said they remained in jail as “overwhelmed” prosecutors tried to deal with a backlog of hundreds of arrests in the crackdown.)

At the Suez steel plant, workers started a sit-in several weeks ago over compensation, health care and the firing of about a dozen employees. On Aug. 12, state news media reported that the Egyptian military had tried to force an end to the strike, arresting two of its leaders. “They picked the ones with beards!” a bystander shouts in a video of the arrests.

An army statement at the time used unmistakable coded language to blame the Islamists, charging that “infiltrating elements” who were “exploiters of religion” were trying to poison the workers’ meetings “in the name of religion.”

A state-run newspaper quoted the interim labor minister, Kamal Abu Eita, saying that security forces had found Brotherhood members from another factory involved in the strike. A privately owned newspaper supporting the military takeover, Youm El Saba, quoted Mr. Eita blaming the Brotherhood for inciting strikes in several cities.

Among some supporters of the new government, “Islamist” has become a popular indictment. After Mr. Obama criticized Egypt’s crackdown on the Islamists, Tahani el-Gebali, a former judge close to the military, publicly accused him of having ties to the Brotherhood, claiming his Kenyan half brother directed investments for the group.

The activists with the April 6 group being investigated for spying, Asmaa Mahfouz and Esraa Abdel Fattah, were associated with the group when it was working in opposition to Mr. Mubarak. State news media reports on Saturday indicated the charges were a revival of old allegations that the group had worked on behalf of Western powers to stir unrest in Egypt. The notion was first floated by Mubarak intelligence agencies and the generals who succeeded him, no evidence has emerged to support the claims, and the group has denied the charges.

The journalist who spoke out about his colleague’s killing had been driving with the colleague, Tamer Abdel Raouf, the head of the local office of the official newspaper, Al Ahram, in the delta province of Beheira. When their car was at a checkpoint, soldiers enforcing the 7 p.m. curfew shot and killed Mr. Abdel Raouf.

The authorities have granted journalists a curfew exemption, and Mr. Abdel Raouf was driving a car bearing an official press badge from a meeting with the governor. A military spokesman offered no apology, only condolences, and warned others not to try to speed through checkpoints.

The next day, the journalist who had been in the passenger seat, Hamed al-Barbari, began giving television interviews contradicting the spokesman. Rather than speeding, Mr. Barbari said, his colleague was shot in the head while slowly turning his car in response to a soldier’s instructions. “A foolish act” by one soldier, said Mr. Barbari, who was injured when the car crashed.

About two hours after he spoke, a prosecutor arrested Mr. Barbari in the hospital and placed him in custody for four days, for allegedly possessing an illegal shotgun in the car at the time of the episode.

Prosecutors set a court date to begin investigating a citizen complaint against Mr. ElBaradei after he quit as vice president to protest the police violence against the Islamists. (A conviction could carry only a fine, and he had already left the country.)

Last week, a prosecutor even opened an investigation into some of the young organizers behind the protests calling for the military to remove Mr. Morsi. The prosecutor was weighing a complaint of “disturbing the public order” because they criticized the release from prison of Mr. Mubarak.

Such a case would be an attack on the new government’s first supporters. Prosecutors have not yet begun a full investigation of the complaint and could still set it aside.

“It is ridiculous,” said Mai Wahba, a leader of the group.


*Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.
*Photo by Bryan Denton, courtesy of The New York Times

Omar Aziz, Syrian anarchist's impact on self-organization in the revolution

Tahrir-ICN

The life and work of anarchist Omar Aziz, and his impact on self-organization in the Syrian revolution

August 23, 2013

Leila Shrooms

Omar Aziz (fondly known by friends as Abu Kamal) was born in Damascus. He returned to Syria from exile in Saudi Arabia and the United States in the early days of the Syrian revolution.

An intellectual, economist, anarchist, husband and father, at the age of 63, he committed himself to the revolutionary struggle. He worked together with local activists to collect humanitarian aid and distribute it to suburbs of Damascus that were under attack by the regime.

Through his writing and activity he promoted local self-governance, horizontal organization, cooperation, solidarity and mutual aid as the means by which people could emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the state. Together with comrades, Aziz founded the first local committee in Barzeh, Damascus.

The example spread across Syria and with it some of the most promising and lasting examples of non-hierarchical self organization to have emerged from the countries of the Arab Spring.

In her tribute to Omar Aziz, Budour Hassan says, he “did not wear a Vendetta mask, nor did he form black blocs. He was not obsessed with giving interviews to the press …[Yet] at a time when most anti-imperialists were wailing over the collapse of the Syrian state and the “hijacking” of a revolution they never supported in the first place, Aziz and his comrades were tirelessly striving for unconditional freedom from all forms of despotism and state hegemony.”

Aziz was encouraged by the revolutionary wave gripping the country and believed that “ongoing demonstrations were able to break the dominance of absolute power”. But he saw a lack of synergy between revolutionary activity and people’s daily lives. For Aziz it didn’t make sense to participate in demonstrations demanding the overthrow of the regime  whilst still living within strict hierarchical and authoritarian structures imposed by the state.

He described such division as Syria being subject to the overlapping of two times “the time of power” which “still manages the life activities”, and “the time of Revolution” belonging to the activists working to overthrow the regime. Aziz believed that for the continuity and victory of the revolution, revolutionary activity needed to permeate all aspects of people’s lives.

He advocated for radical changes to social organization and relationships in order to challenge the foundations of a system based on domination and oppression.

Aziz saw positive examples all around him. He was encouraged by the multiple initiatives springing up throughout the country including voluntary provision of emergency medical and legal support, turning houses into field hospitals and arranging food baskets for distribution.

He saw in such acts “the spirit of the Syrian people’s resistance to the brutality of the system, the systematic killing and destruction of community”. Omar’s vision was to spread these practices and he believed the way to achieve this was through the establishment of local councils. In the eighth month of the Syrian revolution, when wide-spread protests against the regime were still largely peaceful, Omar Aziz produced a discussion paper on Local Councils in Syria where he set out his vision.

In Aziz’s view the Local Council was the forum by which people drawn from diverse cultures and different social strata could work together to achieve three primary goals;  to manage their lives independently of the institutions and organs of the state; to provide the space to enable the collective collaboration of individuals; and activate the social revolution at the local, regional and national level.

In his paper Aziz lists what he thinks the core concerns of the local councils should be:

1. the promotion of human and civil solidarity through improving living conditions especially through provision of safe housing to the displaced; providing assistance, both psychological and material to the families of the wounded or detainees; providing medical and food support; ensuring the continuity of educational services; and supporting and coordinating media activities. Aziz notes that such acts should be voluntary and should not be a substitute for family or kin support networks. He believed it would take time for people to feel comfortable outside of the provision of state services and adjust their social behavior to be more cooperative. Aziz believed the council’s role should be kept to a minimum allowing for the development of unique community initiatives.
2. the promotion of cooperation including building local community initiatives and actions and promoting innovation and invention which Aziz saw as being stifled by half a century of tyranny. The local council would be the forum through which people could discuss the problems they face in life and their daily conditions. The local council would support collaboration and allow people to devise appropriate solutions to the problems they faced including on issues relating to infrastructure, social harmony and trade, as well as issues that required solutions external to the local community. Aziz also saw a key role as being the defense of territory in rural and urban areas that had been subject to expropriation and acquisition by the state. He rejected the urban expropriation of land and marginalization and displacement of rural communities, which he saw as a method used by the regime to enforce its policy of domination and social exclusion. Aziz believed it necessary to ensure access to land which can satisfy the necessities of life for all and called for a rediscovery of the commons. He was realistic but optimistic. He noted that “it is clear that such acts apply to safe locations or areas quasi- ‘liberated’ from power. But it is possible to assess the situation of each area and determine what can be achieved.” Aziz advocated for horizontal linkages to be made between councils to create linkages and interdependence between different geographic regions.
3. the relationship with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the interrelation between protection and defence of the community and the continuity of the revolution. Aziz believed that it was essential to coordinate between the popular civil and popular armed resistance. He saw the role of the FSA as to ensure the security and defence of the community particularly during demonstrations, support securing lines of communications between regions, and provide protection for the movement of people and logistical supplies. The role of the council would be to provide food and housing for all members of the FSA and coordinate with the FSA on security for the community and the defence strategy for the region.
4. the composition of local councils and organizational structure. Aziz saw a number of challenges facing the formation of multiple local councils. The first was the regime, which repeatedly stormed cities and towns in order to paralyze the movement, isolate the people in enclaves, and prevent cooperation. Aziz argued that to respond to such onslaughts by the state, mechanisms of resistance needed to remain flexible and innovative. Councils would have to scale up or down according to need and adapt to power relations on the ground. He believed this flexibility was essential for the community’s desire for freedom to be realized. He also saw the challenge in encouraging people to practice a way of life and social relationships which were new and unfamiliar. Also service provision needed to be maintained and it was necessary to find a way to get an independent source of power in the face of cuts, as well as supporting the development of economic and social activities. For this reason he believed local council members should include social workers and people with expertise in various social, organizational and technical fields who have both the respect of the people and a potential and desire to work voluntarily. For Aziz the organizational structure of the local council is a process that begins with the minimum required and should evolve depending on the level of the transformation achieved by the revolution, the balance of power within a given area, and relationship with neighboring areas. He encouraged local council’s to share knowledge, learn from the experience of other councils and coordinate regionally.
5. the role of the National Council is to give legitimacy to the initiative and gain the acceptance of activists. It should seek funding in order to carry out necessary work and cover expenses which it may not be possible to be cover at the regional level. The National Council would facilitate coordination between regions in order to find common ground and foster closer interdependence.[5]

Omar Aziz’s work has had a huge impact on revolutionary organization in Syria. Whilst the mainstream political opposition failed to achieve anything of note in the past two years, the grassroots opposition movement, in the face of violent repression, has remained dynamic and innovative and has embodied the anarchist spirit.

The core of the grassroots opposition is the youth, mainly from the poor and middle-classes, in which women and diverse religious and ethnic groups play active roles (see here and here ). Many of these activists remain non-affiliated to traditional political ideologies but are motivated by concerns for freedom, dignity and basic human rights. Their primary objective has remained the overthrow of the regime, rather than developing grand proposals for a future Syria.

The main form of revolutionary organization has been through the development of the tansiqiyyat; hundreds of local committees established in neighborhoods and towns across the country. Here, revolutionary activists engage in multiple activities, from documenting and reporting on violations carried out by the regime (and increasingly elements of the opposition) to organizing protests and civil disobedience campaigns (such as strikes and refusing to pay utility bills) and collecting and providing aid and humanitarian supplies to areas under bombardment or siege.

There is no one model but they often operate as horizontally organized, leaderless groups, made up of all segments of the society. They have been the foundation of the revolutionary movement creating solidarity amongst the people, a sense of community and collective action. See here  about Yabroud’s (Damascus suburb) efforts to organize in the absence of the state. Some local committees have elected representatives such as in Kafranbel Idlib, where a committee of elected representatives have made their own constitution (see here).

Youth activists from Kafranbel keep the popular protest movement alive and have gained world wide fame for their use of colorful and satirical banners at weekly protests (see here). They also engage in civil activities such as providing psychosocial support for children and forums for adults to discuss issues such as civil disobedience and peaceful resistance.

At the city and district levels revolutionary councils or majlis thawar have been established. They are often the primary civil administrative structure in areas liberated from the state, as well as some areas that remain under state control. These ensure the provision of basic services, coordinate the activities of local committees and coordinate with the popular armed resistance.

Undoubtedly as state provision of services has disappeared from some areas, and the humanitarian situation has deteriorated, they have played an increasingly vital role. There is no one model for the Local Councils, but they mainly follow some form of representative democratic model. Some have established different administrative departments to take over functions previously held by the state. Some have been more successful and inclusive than others which have struggled to displace the bureaucracy of the old regime or have been plagued by infighting.

Whilst the main basis of activity is very much at the local level, there are a number of different umbrella groups which have emerged to coordinate and network on the regional and national level.

These include the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), National Action Committees (NAC), the Federation of the Coordination Committees of the Syrian Revolution (FCC) and the Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC). None represent the totality of local committees/councils and they have different organizational structures and differing levels of engagement or non-engagement with the formal political opposition. See here  for an interactive map which shows the coordinating committees and councils, as well as the flourishing of many other civil initiatives and campaigns in a country where such activity was previously brutally repressed.

A major threat facing these diverse initiatives has not only been the persecution of activists by the regime, lack of resources, the onslaught of the state’s attack of civilian areas and increasingly deteriorating security and humanitarian conditions. Some local councils have been hijacked by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces.

For example, in Al Raqqa non-local rebel groups with salafi/takfiri leanings took much of the power away from the local council. As they have tried to impose an Islamic vision which is alien to almost everyone, the people of Raqqa have been holding continuous protests against them. In this video here from June 2013 people are demonstrating against arrests of family members by Jabhat Al Nusra. The women are shouting “shame on you! You betrayed us in the name of Islam”.

Throughout August 2013 the people of Al Raqqa have been protesting almost daily against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) demanding the release of hundreds of detainees, abductees and missing persons. Likewise in Aleppo revolutionaries launched the ‘enough is enough’ campaign calling for an end to rebel abuses and for accountability.

This demonstration from June 2013 was held in front of Sharia Court in Aleppo after the killing of a child for allegedly insulting the prophet Mohammad. The people here are calling for the murderers to be brought to justice saying “”The Sharia Committee has become the Air Force Intelligence!” (the most brutal security branch of Assad regime). In Idlib people have also been protesting against a Sharia Committee which has been established, here they say “we are against the regime, against extremist killing and oppression” and are calling for the return of professional lawyers (independent judiciary) to the court (instead of religious men).

Omar Aziz did not live to see the often seemingly insurmountable challenges that would beset Syria’s revolutionaries, or the successes and failures of experiments in local self-organization. On 20 November 2012, he was arrested from his home by the mukhabarat (much feared intelligence service). Shortly before his arrest he said “We are no less than the Paris Commune workers: they resisted for 70 days and we are still going on for a year and a half."

Aziz was held in an intelligence detention cell of 4 by 4 meters which was shared with 85 other people. This likely contributed to the deterioration of his already weak health. He was later transferred to Adra prison where he died from heart complications in February 2013, a day before his 64th birthday.

Omar Aziz’s name may never be widely known, but he deserves recognition as a leading contemporary figure in the development of anarchist thought and practice. The experiments in grass roots revolutionary organization that he inspired provide insight and lessons in anarchist organizing for future revolutions across the globe.

Comics: Mubarak under "house arrest" as his "trial" continues

Comics by Carlos Latuff and Operamundi
Mubarak to face hardships under house arrest
 

Deposed despot Hosni Mubarak freed from prison

NBC News

Egypt's deposed autocrat Hosni Mubarak freed from prison

August 22, 2013

Charlene Gubash and Alastair Jamieson

Egypt's deposed autocrat Hosni Mubarak was freed from prison and placed under house arrest Thursday, deepening the country's deadly divisions following the removal last month of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

The military man -- who ruled Egypt for 30 years with an iron fist until he was overthrown in the 2011 Arab Spring uprising -- was ordered released by a Cairo court on Wednesday after more than two years in detention.

Mubarak's lawyer, who was aboard a helicopter with him, confirmed that he was flown from Tora prison and taken to Maadi Military Hospital because of the state of his health. He left the prison at about 4 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET.)

Interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi ordered that Mubarak be formally kept under house arrest to comply with the country's month-long state of emergency.

The decision appeared designed to ease some of the criticism over the court ruling and to ensure that Mubarak appears in court next week for a separate trial, Reuters reported.
His wife, Suzanne, has been living in Cairo and keeping a low profile, occasionally visiting Mubarak and their two sons in prison.

The court ruling came after Mubarak was cleared of one of his corruption cases.

However, he is currently awaiting a retrial over the death of protesters seeking his overthrow in 2011, which could put him back behind bars. He also faces investigations into at least two other corruption cases.

Egypt's youth campaign group, Tamarod, said Mubarak's release was a threat to national security. "We will not remain silent about freedom for any killer of the Egyptian people," it said in a statement issued before his release.

Mubarak is the second deposed ruler of Egypt to be behind bars, along with the Brotherhood's Morsi, who was democratically elected in 2012 following the collapse of Mubarak's regime, only to be ousted by the military on July 3.

The 85-year-old Mubarak may have no political future, but his release could rile already strained emotions and raise questions about whether the popular uprising that ended his 30-year rule has given way to a new form of jackboot government.

Since his ouster, Morsi has been held incommunicado at an undisclosed location. Several top leaders and other figures of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group from which Morsi hails, have been arrested and charged.

The clampdown appears to have weakened the Arab world's oldest and arguably most influential Islamist group.

Brotherhood supporters have called on Egyptians to hold "Friday of Martyrs" marches against the military takeover.

A grouping calling itself The National Coalition to Support Legitimacy, which has been demanding Morsi's reinstatement, told The Associated Press in a statement: "We will remain steadfast on the road to defeating the military coup."


*NBC News' Ian Johnston, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
*Photo by EPA

Egyptian Workers After June 30

Middle East Research and Information Project

Egyptian Workers After June 30

August 23, 2013

Joel Beinin

The independent labor movement that has flourished in Egypt since the ouster of former president Husni Mubarak enthusiastically supported the Tamarrud (Rebel) campaign for the huge June 30 demonstrations asserting a popular vote of no confidence in President Muhammad Mursi.

The Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS), Egypt’s most experienced (and during the 1990s only) labor-oriented NGO, claims to have gathered 200,000 signatures for the Tamarrud petition through its six regional offices. Three independent trade union organizations -- the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), the Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress (EDLC) and the Permanent Congress of Alexandria Workers (PCAW) -- also collected signatures and monitored workers’ participation in the demonstrations.

These independent federations and hundreds of their constituent local unions have been established since the ejection of Mubarak because the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) created in 1957 has always functioned as an arm of the state.

The Tamarrud campaign demanded early presidential elections, but the Egyptian army seized the opportunity of the mass gathering to depose Mursi on July 3, claiming, with some justification, that its coup was the will of the people. The army has invoked this supposed popular mandate for all of its actions since, including the killings of some 1,000 pro-Mursi demonstrators since the Muslim Brother’s removal. Most of these people died in the army’s violent dispersal of two sit-ins on August 14.

The number of anti-Mursi protesters on June 30 was at least 2 million. Some estimates are much higher.

Hence, a large number of workers must have participated. After the military issued its July 1 ultimatum to Mursi to resolve the crisis, the EFITU and EDLC called for a nationwide general strike on July 2. The strike never materialized. The reason is that the independent trade union movement is primarily a local, not a national force.

Despite the limited capacity of the EFITU and EDLC to mobilize at the national level, for the last two and a half years, workers have escalated the protest movement that began in the late 1990s. In the decade before Mubarak’s ouster well over 2 million workers participated in some 3,400 strikes and other collective actions.

The total number of workers collective actions in 2011 was 1,400; in 2012 it reached 1,969. According to the Egyptian Center for Social Rights (ECESR), in the first quarter of 2013 there were 2,400 social and economic protests. At least half involved workers and publicly employed professionals -- doctors, engineers and teachers.

This unprecedented social movement contributed substantially to delegitimizing the regimes of both Mursi and Mubarak. Mursi’s Muslim Brothers have historically had little support among industrial or service workers.

Moreover, the Brothers are just as committed to the free-market fundamentalism promoted by the international financial institutions as the Mubarak regime was. When workers continued to strike and protest, Mursi’s administration, like the Mubarak regime, often granted their economic demands but ignored their political demands and undermined their organizational autonomy. Its repressive measures were often more severe than those of the late Mubarak era.

Workers clearly hoped for better treatment with Mursi gone, particularly since one of their own, veteran trade unionist Kamal Abu Eita, accepted a post in the interim cabinet. One month later, those hopes are dashed. Abu Eita stood by while security forces crushed a militant strike at the Suez Steel Company, located in the Canal Zone city that, not coincidentally, was in the vanguard of the revolutionary forces that compelled Mubarak to step down.

“Champions of Production”

After Mubarak’s demise, Ahmad Hasan al-Bur‘i, a specialist in labor law at Cairo University’s Faculty of Law and a proponent of independent trade unionism, served as minister of manpower and migration for nine months. With input from independent trade unionists and labor-oriented NGOs, his ministry drafted a Trade Union Freedoms Law. It would have fully legalized independent trade unions.

Al-Bur‘i had already directed the ministry to register such unions on the grounds that Egypt’s international treaty commitments, including ratified conventions of the International Labor Organization, overrode national legislation granting a trade union monopoly to the ETUF. The military, the Muslim Brother-dominated parliament, which met from January to June 2012, and the Mursi administration all refused to enact the legislation.

Interim prime minister Hazim al-Biblawi, who was installed after the army deposed Mursi on July 3, named al-Bur‘i as his minister of social solidarity. Al-Bur‘i announced that his first priority was enacting the Trade Union Freedoms Law. But his ministry does not have direct responsibility for the matter. Nonetheless, the appointment was an olive branch extended to independent trade unionists to win their support for the transitional government.

Abu Eita, the founding president of the EFITU, accepted the military’s embrace. He warmly welcomed its July 1 ultimatum to Mursi. After Mursi’s removal, Abu Eita proclaimed, “Workers who were champions of the strike under the previous regime should now become champions of production.” The EFITU later issued a “clarification” saying that it did not intend to forgo the strike weapon.

Abu Eita has long been involved in national politics and has been criticized for playing that game according to norms that have changed little since the toppling of Mubarak. He was a founding member of the Nasserist Karama (Dignity) Party (unrecognized by the Mubarak regime). Karama participated in the 2011-2012 parliamentary elections as part of the Democratic Alliance led by the Muslim Brothers’ Freedom and Justice Party. Abu Eita won a seat in the parliament -- the only worker to do so.

Interim premier al-Biblawi named Abu Eita minister of manpower and migration. In order to accept the post, Abu Eita resigned as EFITU president. He now has direct responsibility for the future of the Trade Union Freedoms Law. But neither a majority of the business-friendly cabinet, which includes some Mubarak-era figures, nor the military, the ultimate source of power, are likely to support the legislation drafted by al-Bur‘i.

Coup or Cooptation

Even before the Suez steel strike, there was sharp debate over Abu Eita’s acceptance of the ministry and the army’s transitional “road map.” Some believed that his presence in the cabinet represented a victory for the workers’ movement and that Abu Eita would ensure that workers’ main demands were met. This was the position of a majority of the EFITU leadership. Its executive board issued a statement supporting the “road map.” Others worried that Abu Eita’s appointment was an effort to coopt the movement.

Both claims contain elements of truth. Abu Eita would never have been appointed were it not for the mass social movement in which he has been a prominent leader. Yet neither the government nor the army can countenance the decentralized direct democracy from below that is the strength of the workers’ movement.
EFITU executive board member Fatma Ramadan sees Abu Eita’s appointment as cooptation.

According to her, he did not consult with other EFITU leaders before suggesting that workers would abandon the strike weapon. On July 10 she stated, “As a union federation our role must be to uphold all workers’ rights, including the right to strike…. We cannot possibly call on workers to protect the interests of businessmen by forfeiting labor rights under the pretext of bolstering the national economy.” Ramadan believes that “the military and the fuloul (old regime remnants) kidnapped [the June 30 movement].”

The Permanent Congress of Alexandria Workers, an independent regional federation not affiliated with the EFITU or EDLC, also issued a statement rejecting Abu Eita’s apparent support for a hiatus in the strike movement.

Ramadan, the PCAW and the ECESR supported the June 30 demonstrations. But they also openly opposed interim president ‘Adli Mansour’s July 8 constitutional declaration and the military’s “road map.” The Alexandria trade unionists expressed their distrust of al-Biblawi because he had been a minister in the first post-Mubarak transitional government appointed by the military chiefs and is known as a proponent of neoliberalism.

The Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights posted a detailed critique on its website entitled “A Constitutional Coup Against the Principles of the Revolution.” It protests that there was no consultation with the political forces that spearheaded the June 30 demonstrations over the contents of the constitutional declaration. Moreover, it says, the charter “ignored…economic and social rights, such as the right to housing, health, medical treatment, food, drink, clothes, insurance, pensions, social security and the minimum and maximum wage. It failed to link wages to prices or to specify the right to worker representation on corporate boards and in profit sharing.”

The Center for Trade Union and Workers Services also supported the June 30 demonstrations. Since then, it has refrained from open expressions of support or criticism of the military regime while issuing research papers documenting the Muslim Brothers’ anti-worker policies.

The CTUWS has historically prioritized building a broad-based workers movement over participating in national politics. Partly for this reason, unions aligned with the CTUWS withdrew from the EFITU in the summer of 2011. After a year and a half of grassroots organizing, on April 24, 2013, they established the Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress with 186 affiliated unions.

Yusri Ma‘rouf was elected president of the EDLC, a signal highlighting its commitment to defend the right to strike. He had been sentenced to three years in prison for leading a strike of 1,500 workers at the Alexandria Container and Cargo Handling Company in October 2011. On June 17, 2013, an appeals court overturned his conviction, ruling that “sit-ins and strikes are guaranteed by the constitution, and the defendants simply exercised this right.” The judiciary first articulated that principle in 1986. The Mubarak regime, the military and the Mursi government all ignored it.

Criticism of Abu Eita has become sharper as the new government’s intentions become more obvious. Fatma
Ramadan issued a statement in early August referring sarcastically to the “present” the new minister had given the strikers in Suez: After pledging repeatedly to back them in the cabinet, he did nothing of the kind, going so far as to lend rhetorical support to the strikebreaking “thugs” by invoking the “champions of production” line. The statement lamented that the working families of Suez would spend a “gloomy feast” at the close of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.

The interim vice president for international affairs, Mohamed ElBaradei, resigned in protest over the August 14 massacre. He was the interim government’s most credible liberal figure despite his political ineptitude. His departure underscored that Egypt’s army and internal security forces are the linchpins of the present regime, as they were under Mubarak. No matter how popular the army may be at the moment, workers now face an emboldened authoritarian state that is openly hostile to their rights and aspirations.

Too Close for Comfort

The minister of defense and commander of the armed forces, Gen. ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, called for nationwide demonstrations on July 26 to give him a mandate to confront “violence and terrorism” -- a thinly veiled reference to the Muslim Brothers. Several human rights NGOs, including the ECESR, issued a declaration expressing concern about al-Sisi’s intentions.

The EFITU released a statement affirming workers’ rights to freedom of expression, to demonstrate peacefully and to strike, while simultaneously supporting “the right of all the apparatuses of the Egyptian state to confront terror and violence.” Those same apparatuses were breaking strikes and attacking demonstrators during the Mursi administration. They have continued to do so since its dissolution.

The July 26 demonstrations (and counter-demonstrations by supporters of ousted president Mursi) were massive. Among those who answered al-Sisi’s call was the Egyptian Trade Union Federation, which pledged to muster all of its 5 million members. In fact, the ETUF has no more than 3.8 million members, and most of them cannot be mobilized because the ETUF’s structure is thoroughly undemocratic and unrepresentative.

The ETUF opposed all but one of the strikes that occurred during the last 15 years. Independent trade unionists who expressed support for military intervention in ousting Mursi now find themselves uncomfortably close to a key institution of the Mubarak regime.

In December 2012 Mursi installed al-Gibali al-Maraghi, a Mubarak-era union apparatchik, as ETUF president and appointed him a member of the upper house of Parliament (the Shura Council). This move was widely viewed as an offer by the Muslim Brothers to share control of the ETUF with former Mubarak supporters. That bargain is now defunct. Although the ETUF’s future is uncertain, its leadership has indicated willingness to line up behind the government and the army.

That government, however, now includes Kamal Abu Eita, whose appointment those same ETUF leaders strenuously opposed. They previously accused him of criminal behavior for establishing an illegal union federation in contravention of the existing trade union law, which technically remains in force. Meanwhile, Abu Eita’s first public promise -- that a new minimum wage law would be issued by July 21 -- was not fulfilled.

The main victories of the workers’ movement since Mubarak’s ouster are the establishment of independent trade unions and federations and the enactment of a monthly minimum wage of 700 pounds (about $100), although enforcement of the latter is uncertain. These gains were won by direct action on the street. Since Mubarak’s demise, thousands of workers have been jailed, fired or disciplined for engaging in strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations, many more than in the last decade of the Mubarak era. Nearly all of these actions were local.

As was the case under Mubarak and Mursi, the priorities of the independent trade union movement and its supporters are: reinstatement of fired workers; permanent status for many others who have worked for years on “temporary” contracts without benefits; a raise in the monthly minimum basic wage to 1,500 pounds; establishment of a maximum wage; protection of the right to strike; and adoption of the Trade Union Freedoms Law. These priorities are more likely to be achieved by continued popular mobilization than by reliance on a government installed by the military.


*Photos by Jano Charbel
 

Egypt: Mass attacks on churches & Christian sites

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Egypt: Mass Attacks on Churches

Christians Say Pleas for Protection Fell Largely on Deaf Ears

August 22, 2013

 

 

(New York) – Egyptian authorities should take the necessary steps to protect churches and religious institutions against mob attacks, Human Rights Watch said today. Since August 14, 2013, attackers have torched and looted scores of churches and Christian property across the country, leaving at least four people dead. Authorities should also investigate why security forces were largely absent or failed to intervene even when they had been informed of ongoing attacks.

Immediately following the violent dispersal of the Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo on August 14, crowds of men attacked at least 42 churches, burning or damaging 37, as well as dozens of other Christian religious institutions in the governorates of Minya, Asyut, Fayum, Giza, Suez, Sohag, Bani Suef, and North Sinai. Human Rights Watch has verified with family members and a lawyer that at least three Coptic Christians and one Muslim were killed as a result of sectarian attacks in Dalga, Minya city, and Cairo.

“For weeks, everyone could see these attacks coming, with Muslim Brotherhood members accusing Coptic Christians of a role in Mohammad Morsy’s ouster, but the authorities did little or nothing to prevent them,” said Joe Stork, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Now dozens of churches are smoldering ruins, and Christians throughout the country are hiding in their homes, afraid for their very lives.”

 

Human Rights Watch spoke with 43 witnesses, priests, and Coptic activists, who confirmed the attacks on 42 churches, dozens of Christian institutions and schools, and Coptic-owned business and homes. Human Rights Watch visited 11 sites in Minya city and Bani Suef, where attacks took place, and spoke to the head of the security directorate for Minya governorate.

In the vast majority of the 42 cases Human Rights Watch documented, neither the police nor the military were present at the start or during the attack. In one case, in Dalga, a village in southern Minya governorate, residents said that men had attacked the local police station around the same time. In Kirdassa, Giza, west of Cairo, an activist said that mobs attacked the local police station, killing15 officers according to the Associated Press, before attacking Al-Mallak church. A priest in Malawi, a town in Minya governorate south of Minya city, told Human Rights Watch that he called emergency services and police multiple times while mobs burned his church, but no one came. Another Dalga resident said that on August 16 the governor promised to send armored personnel carriers to protect Copts from ongoing violence, but that none came.

“We [church officials] spoke to the prime minister, minister of interior, and a military official asking them to intervene,” Coptic Bishop General of Minya Anba Makarios told Human Rights Watch on August 19. He said the officials promised to send protection, but it never arrived.

In Hadeyeq Helwan, 30 kilometers south of Cairo, a resident told Human Rights Watch that one armored personnel carrier finally arrived on the afternoon of August 17, a day after the St. George Church there came under attack.

Residents in Minya city told Human Rights Watch that in the week following Morsy’s removal from the presidency on July 3, someone had spray-painted Coptic-owned store fronts in Minya’s city center with a black “X” to distinguish them from Muslim-owned buildings. Those marked subsequently came under attack.

The attacks come after weeks of sectarian discourse by Muslim Brotherhood supporters at the Nahda and Rab’a al-Adawiya sit-ins in which speakers claimed or insinuated a link between Copts and Morsy’s removal. One speaker, Assem Abdel Magid, said on July 24,“Copts and communists are supporting Sisi in the killing of Muslims.” A YouTube video of a pro-Morsy march on July 12 shows marchers chanting “Islamic Islamic despite the Christians” while passing a church.

Some Muslim Brotherhood leaders have condemned the recent sectarian attacks. On August 16, Dr. Mourad Ali, spokesman of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, released a statement that said, “Pursuant to our party’s indivisible principles, we strongly condemn any attack, even verbal, against Copts, their churches or their property.”

Others however have suggested a Coptic role in the ongoing crackdown on the group. On the afternoon of August 14, the Freedom and Justice Party Helwan Branch posted a statement on the group’s Facebook page accusing Pope Tawadros, the religious leader of the Egyptian Coptic community,of participating in Morsy’s removal and of inciting Copts to block roads, encircle mosques, and storm them. The message ended with, “For every action there is a reaction.” On August 16, the Muslim Brotherhood website published a story with the headline,“The police and the church open fire on the al-Haram march at Giza tunnel and Murad Street.” Several residents and clergy in areas where church attacks occurred said that local religious leaders incited groups to attack churches.

Sectarian attacks against Christians had increased even before the August 14 action against the camps. On July 5, following Morsy’s ouster on July 3, four Copts were killed in Luxor governorate. On July 23, Human Rights Watch called on the Egyptian authorities to take steps to protect Christians, investigate attacks, and hold those responsible to account.

“While a few Muslim Brotherhood leaders have condemned these attacks, they also need to tell the group’s followers to stop inciting violence by insinuating that the Coptic minority is responsible for the crackdown,” Stork said.

 

Sectarian Attacks Since August 14
Most of the attacks occurred in Upper Egypt. John Sameer, 21, a resident of Minya city, 250 kilometers south of Cairo, told Human Rights Watch that at 10 a.m. on August 14, he saw crowds of thousands of men on trucks and on foot approaching his neighborhood chanting anti-Christian slogans directly aimed at the Egyptian Coptic community. “Tawadros, you are a coward for the Americans” and “Tawadros, you coward, get your dogs out of the square,” he said they chanted, referring to the head of the church and the participation of Christians in June 30 protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square calling for Morsy’s removal from power.

Sameer said that the crowd attacked the al-Amir Tadros Coptic Church that afternoon, breaking in and taking the church safe, then setting the building ablaze. Sameer, who went to the scene to observe, said that men around the church were carrying Molotov cocktails and that at least five had assault rifles, but they did not attack him. Sameer followed the men as they attacked and burned approximately 20 shops, three other churches, the Coptic boys’ school complex, the Saint Joseph’s girls’ school, the Gunud al-Maseeh orphanage, and the Jesuit community center. Sameer said that security forces were absent throughout the incident, and emergency vehicles and firefighters did not come to extinguish the fires despite calls for help.

Philimon Sameer, John’s brother, 24, told Human Rights Watch that he approached al-Amir Tadros Coptic Church at around 3 p.m. to try to save it, but that four bearded men threw rocks at him and other Copts trying to extinguish the fire. He said no police or security services came to stop the attack, despite the fact that the church is 20 meters from the Minya governorate’s security directorate. He said he saw several Christian institutions and Christian-owned businesses in the area looted and burning, including the al-Anba Arsanious Hall church building, the Roxy supermarket, the Rozina Café, and the YMCA building. No one was injured in these attacks, he said.

Father Bernaba at the Mar Meena Coptic Church in Minya city told Human Rights Watch that a large crowd attacked his church on the afternoon of August 14, setting fire to the church clinic and services building, and damaging the front exterior of the church itself. He said that security forces and police did not come to stop the attack. At midnight, however, when attackers returned, security forces dispatched an armored personnel carrier. It deterred the attackers, who moved away from the church.

Wissam Mamduh, 19, a resident of Sohag city, 450 kilometers south of Cairo, told Human Rights Watch that at 9 a.m. on August 14, he observed a group of approximately 150 men march from a sit-in at Thaqafa square toward the St. George Coptic Church nearby, chanting “Islamic Islamic,” a common chant by proponents of an Islamic state. After storming and looting the church, the men set it on fire. He said that the men also attacked and burned dozens of Coptic-owned businesses and homes in the area. The security services did not arrive for another two hours, after everything was on fire, he said.

In Dalga, a village in southern Minya governorate, three witnesses told Human Rights Watch that mobs attacked churches and Coptic homes as soon as the news of the Cairo sit-in dispersal reached residents of the town. Gamil Nagih, 21, said that at 7:45 a.m. he heard the imam of a nearby mosque announce over the mosque loudspeakers, “Go help your brothers in Rab’a.” At 9 a.m. he said, he saw thousands of men gathering outside Saints Mary and Ibram church. The men broke the through doors while shouting “Islamic, Islamic,” he said. The attackers then looted the church and set it on fire. The attackers also torched 20 Coptic homes and looted and burned Coptic-owned shops in the area, he said.

Human Rights Watch visited the remains of the Franciscan girl’s school and church in Bani Suef, 125 kilometers south of Cairo, which a mob attacked and burned on August 14. Father Boulos Fahmy, a Catholic priest affiliated with the school, said that at around 9 a.m. the nuns, who were alone at the school, contacted him by phone telling him that a mob was threatening the school. He notified the police, who sent a car to deter the attackers but it departed less than an hour later after a nearby police station came under attack, he said. The men returned soon after, looting and setting fire to the school and church. The men forced three nuns to leave the school and walked them through nearby streets, verbally abusing them. Local Muslim residents rescued the nuns from the mob and escorted them away to safety.

Deaths
Another Dalga resident, Sameer Lamie, 31, told Human Rights Watch that a crowd of men gathered outside his home before 9 a.m. A group of armed men eventually broke down his door and entered his house. He said the men shot his cousin Iskandar Doss twice, while Lamie, his mother, and Doss’s wife and daughter-in-law escaped by climbing to the roof. Lamie said the attackers fired birdshot at him, hitting him in his side with 13 pellets, and they hit his mother with a pellet under her eye. Lamie said he learned later that Doss died of his wounds. He said that no security forces or police arrived during the attack.

In Minya city, residents, family members, and the Christian owner of the Mermaid boat restaurant, along the Minya city corniche, told Human Rights Watch that two Mermaid employees – Bishoy Mikhail, a Copt, and Ihab Ali Ahmed, a Muslim – died while hiding in the bathroom of the boat after a mob set it on fire. Human Rights Watch researchers visited the boat on August 19 and viewed the charred remains of shoes, pants, and a mobile phone on the floor of the bathroom.

An employee of a neighboring boat restaurant, Al-Dahabiya, told Human Rights Watch that at 11 a.m. he heard a commotion at the Mermaid boat. He said: “I called the administration and told them, and at 11:15 a.m. I saw flames coming out of the boat, and then a group of 70 people approached and said they would burn the [Dahabiya] boat too.” When he asked them for a safe exit, they told him to jump into the Nile with his staff and swim away. When he responded that some staff could not swim, the men allowed him and the staff to leave unharmed from the front entrance. He said the men then torched the Dahabiya boat restaurant.

A Coptic shop owner in the Cairo neighborhood of Ezbet al-Nakhl died from gunshot wounds after a group of men attacked his shop, next to the Abu Siffin church, activists from the Maspero Youth Union told Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch could not confirm the man’s death with family members.

In spite of the four deaths, most residents with whom Human Rights Watch spoke in Minya city said that attackers targeted buildings instead of people.

Attacks on Police and Police Response
Church clergy throughout Upper Egypt expressed frustration and desperation that security services did not quickly intervene to stop the widespread attacks. The pastor of the al-Mashyakhiya Evangelical Church in Malawi, a village in Minya governorate, told Human Rights Watch that he watched as attackers looted and burned his church on the afternoon of August 16. He said:
At 5:30 p.m., around 200 people came and started shooting at the church, they entered and looted the halls, the church, a seven-story building, and set it all ablaze. They took everything, all the equipment, furniture, everything. I called the police and army on their hotlines ... no one came, the church is gone…
Bishop Makarios told Human Rights Watch that authorities failed to protect churches despite repeated warnings, and that on August 19, five days after the attacks, police still had not returned to the streets in adequate numbers since the morning August 14.

Ishak Ibrahim, a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, told Human Rights Watch that a group of men attacked a police station in Kirdassa, Giza, before moving on to loot and burn al-Mallak church. The Associated Press, which interviewed the sole police officer who survived the attack, reported that the mob killed 15 officers and then mutilated their bodies. A YouTube video purportedly filmed after the attack shows a group of officers lying on the ground in pools of blood.

Maj. Gen. Abdelaziz Qura, head of the Minya security directorate, told Human Rights Watch that on August 14, when news of the sit-in dispersal reach Minya, “groups simultaneously attacked police stations and some churches in Minya. They were shooting live fire at security forces, and the security forces did not leave their positions because they didn’t want anyone to free the prisoners [held in police stations], like what happened in January 2011.” He said that groups attacked 12 police stations in Minya governorate, six of which they burned to the ground, and that attackers killed 13 police officers and wounded another 30 with live fire. He said that police have arrested 41 men in Minya, some of whom he believes belong to Islamist groups, and that prosecutors have initiated investigations of all church attacks.

Qura confirmed that security forces had not moved to protect Christian-owned buildings and churches since August 14, saying that police could not deploy at full strength without assistance from military armored personnel carriers, but that he expected the security situation to improve by August 21.

According to Reuters, at least 100 members of the security forces have been killed throughout Egypt in attacks on police stations and check points or in clashes with protesters since August 14. The authorities should investigate such violence and ensure criminal accountability, with due judicial process, of those found responsible, Human Rights Watch said.

Incitement to Attack Christian-Owned Buildings and Churches
In addition to Islamist rhetoric relating to support by Copts for Morsy’s removal, residents and priests told Human Rights Watch that local groups and religious leaders also incited groups to target Christians. At least 10 residents in Minya city told Human Rights Watch that in the week following Morsy’s removal, someone spray-painted a black X on Coptic-owned store fronts in Minya’s city center to distinguish them from Muslim-owned buildings.

Human Rights Watch researchers observed these markings on August 19 on many of the damaged businesses. One Christian shop owner in Minya, Alfons Massoud, 70, said that at 3:30 p.m. on August 14 young boys with knives and between 20 and 30 bearded men with guns attacked and burned a neighboring shop bearing the X mark. He said that they torched his shop after seeing that it had a Coptic name.

Bishop Makarios told Human Rights Watch that he heard local mosque preachers inciting sectarian attacks when the sit-in was being dispersed, saying “Islam is in danger, the infidels will eradicate Islam, go defend your brothers in Rab’a.” He noted that approximately 80 churches in the area had received anonymous phone calls warning of impending attacks against them in the week leading up to August 14.

A witness told Human Rights Watch that an imam at a mosque in the Cairo neighborhood of Maasara called over the mosque loudspeakers for the eviction of Coptic residents. Mina Lamie, 29, a neighborhood resident, said that on August 15 he heard the imam say, “The Copts are behind all of this, they participated on June 30 ... we have to burn the churches.” He said that at 11:30 p.m. thousands gathered and began chanting, “The people demand the eviction of the Copts.” No churches in the area were actually attacked, Lamie said.

List of Churches Burned or Damaged Since August 14

1. Al-Amir Tadros Coptic Church
2. Al-Anba Mousa Church 
3. Evangelical Church  
4. Al-Rasuliya Apostolic Church
5. Mar Meena Coptic Church
6. Mar Meena Church 
7. Evangelical Church 
8. Baptist Church
9. Saints Mary and Ibram Coptic Church
10. Al-Mashyakhiya Evangelical Church
11. Good Shepherd Catholic Church and School
12. Mar Yohanna Church  
13. Adventist Church   
14. Al-Rasuliyya Church 
15. Mar Gergas Coptic Church
16. al-Qowsiyya Bishopric and Chruch
17. Evangelical Church  
18. St. Therese Church  
19. Nahdet al-Qadasa church
20. St. George Coptic Church and Diocesan Office
21. St. Mary Church   
22. St. Mary Church   
23. Al-Amir Tadros al-Shatbi Church
24. Al-Shaheeda Damyana Church
25. Evangelical Church   
26. Al-Amir Tadros Church  
27. Al-Mallak Church   
28. St. Mary Church   
29. Karmet al-Rosul Church  
30. St. Mary Church   
31. Al-Younaniyya al-Qadeema Church
32. Good Shepherd Catholic Church and School
33. Saviour’s Anglican Church
34. Franciscan Church and School
35. Mar Gerges Church
36. Mar Gerges Church Services Building
37. Franciscan Catholic Church and School

Churches Attacked, Not Damaged

1. Al-Malak Church  
2. Abu Teeg Bishopric
3. Franciscan Church and School 
4. St. George Hadayeq Church
5. Abu Sifin Church