Egypt:
The Persistence of Protest
Egyptian protesters hold a giant Egyptian flag as they gather in Cairo's Tahrir Square during a mass rally against the country's military rulers on 23 December 2011. (Photo: AFP - Filippo Monteforte)SCAF’s unrelenting and violent crackdown on protesters over the past few weeks failed to stop hundreds of thousands of Egyptians – including those who support the de facto military rulers – from taking to the streets Friday.
Cairo - Tahrir Square once again became an epicenter of street action, with hundreds of thousands taking to downtown Cairo Friday. Protesters here referred to the day as the “Friday of Restoring Honor,” while participants chanted slogans in defense of Egyptian women’s dignity.
“Egyptian women won’t be stripped” cried male and female protesters of all walks of life. Their call was in response to the military’s violence against women protesters calling for the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to hand over power to a civilian government.
“Because the photo was published, we all saw what the soldiers did to the girl they stripped and dragged,” said Tahrir Square protester Alaa Abdel Rahman, in reference to a photo of such an incident that has stirred public opinion for days. “But I was here throughout recent days, when we suffered extreme violence. And I can guarantee that she was not the only victim. I saw many young girls being stripped and beaten, among them a field doctor.”
Downtown Cairo saw five nights of excessive violence against protesters last week. Starting at dawn on Friday December 16, a total of five different night raids saw military police, the army and the widely despised Central Security Forces attack protesters demanding SCAF hand over power.
A total of 17 protesters were killed and almost 2,000 injured in the latest round of violence in Cairo, according to the Martyrs and Injured Committee run by volunteer field doctors. Weapons used against protesters have included live ammunition, rubber bullets, electric batons, stones launched from the top of government buildings and tear gas.
The violence began in a drive to break up a three week long sit-in at the gates of the Egyptian Cabinet building in a sidestreet in downtown Cairo. While the sit-in was peaceful, protesters resorted to street resistance tactics, responding to the military and Central Security Forces’ violence with stones and Molotov cocktails.
Protesters streaming into Tahrir Square through Friday also made calls for an end to violence. “We rose up against violence during the January 25 revolution. Our collective suffering of violence at the hands of the former regime’s security forces was one of the main reasons why we all decided we had to do whatever it took to oust Mubarak,” said engineer Hakem Bassiouni.
“Things have not changed, rather they have become worse. The army is attacking not only the protesters, but also the very principles of the revolution. People taking part in the Cabinet sit-in were there to defend the revolution,” added protester Bassiouni. “However, SCAF has done nothing to fulfil the people’s goals.”
One of the key popular demands uniting Egyptians against former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime was “Bread, Freedom and Social Justice.” In the view of Tahrir Square protesters Bassiouni and Abdel Rahman, none of these goals have yet been achieved.
“People taking part in the protests through the past week, when the army was shooting directly into the crowd, were mainly poor people who had nothing under Mubarak, and still have nothing today,” said Abdel Rahman. “SCAF has done nothing to help the Egyptians.”
One of the most unpopular facets of Mubarak’s regime was its political and trade relations with Israel. “Has SCAF stopped exporting gas to Israel? No it hasn’t,” said Abdel Rahman. “Meanwhile, poor Egyptians have suffered a shortage of butane gas for the house. This is unjust. That’s why we’re here.”
At the same time, a far smaller but no less emotionally charged demonstration on Abbasiya Square saw tens of thousands gather in SCAF’s defense. At first sight, there were ironic similarities with the Tahrir protest, including the presence of a plethora of street vendors, Egyptian flags, music and families with children.
But the two protests’ messages were radically different. In Abbasiya, crowds chanted “the people and the army are one hand.” Chants also accused presidential hopefuls Mohammed El-Baradei and Amr Hamzawy of being “traitors,” while members of the April 6 movement were described as “collaborators.”
Holding up a poster describing independent Egyptian media outlets such as CBC and ON TV as “collaborators,” 43-year-old Gamal (who withheld his surname) said he had visited Tahrir Square and had only seen leftists with a foreign agenda there.
“As for incidents of violence against young girls, we have to admit that the army has made mistakes,” said Gamal. “But one has to wonder, what were they doing there?” The SCAF supporter also referred to the case of Alia Mahdi, who published a nude photograph of herself on her blog in November, in an act of protest against military rule.
“We have our customs and traditions in Egypt,” said Gamal. “You can’t do that kind of thing and not expect consequences.”
In a protest guarded by small numbers of military personnel, SCAF supporters raised their voices against foreign intervention in domestic affairs. One poster hanging down from the bridge above the square pictured US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
A man standing on the bridge took off his shoe and hit the image repeatedly, while scores of onlookers down on the square cheered him on. “Focus on the Monica Lewinsky scandal,” read the caption, in response to Clinton’s statement earlier this week denouncing violence against Egyptian women protesters.
Back in Tahrir, young protester Ahmed Taha believed Egyptians’ mistrust of foreign intervention was shared among all protesters out on the streets Friday. “The US can say whatever it likes about our revolution,” said Taha. “Starting January 25, the Egyptians have started to shape our own political destiny. I believe SCAF’s resorting to anti-Western discourse is just a tactic to rally support in its favor.”
Over the past week, in the midst of violent attacks against protesters calling for the end of military rule, state-run media escalated an information campaign warning of foreign intervention in Egypt. Articles and television reports blamed leftist groups and foreigners in Egypt of attempts to bring down the Egyptian state.
The campaign had Abbasiya protester Gamal convinced, while ON TV reported its team had to leave that demonstration because it had suffered violence at the hands of protesters. “I agree that everyone has the right to protest,” said Gamal. “But we need to think of the future of the state.”
Gamal went on to say that although he supported SCAF for now, he also wanted them out of politics as soon as possible. “If they don’t leave power by June 2012, which is when they have promised to hand over power to an elected president, I too will go down to Tahrir,” he said.
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0Dec 23 2011
![[“My people, and I am free to make pee pee on them.” Image by Eric Knecht]](http://www.jadaliyya.com/content_images/3/2-Peepee.jpg "[“My people, and I am free to make pee pee on them.” Image by Eric Knecht]")
[“My people, and I am free to make pee pee on them.” Image by Eric Knecht]This week a group of students from Mansoura, a city two hours north of Cairo in the Daqahliyya governorate, decided they wanted to respond to recent military brutality against demonstrators in the capital. Over the past week, and independent of any political movement or organization, the group launched an awareness campaign involving a barrage of anti-SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) graffiti.
As one of the organizers explained, it is not the first time that political graffiti has been sprayed around Mansoura, but it is likely the first time that it has been done on such a large scale, organized fashion.
Above, one of the organizers looks over a tag just after it is completed. The text reads “My people, and I am free to make pee pee on them” with a soldier zipping his fly, a replica of one of the several images that have gone viral over the past week.
Below, on a pillar inside Mansoura University’s campus, a drug user is depicted with the text “addicted to freedom.”
The same tag appears in several places throughout Mansoura University’s campus. Below is another example, carefully placed between older paint that reads “down with military rule.”
Beyond these more creative tags, there is also the more straightforward. Below, one such piece simply proclaims “NO SCAF” (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces):
But graffiti was not the only thing the campaign had in mind. As one organizer explained, part of raising awareness about violence in Cairo involves dispelling ongoing rumors and conspiracy theories – some of which go as far as blaming activists and foreign elements of provoking, and even elaborately staging, much of the military abuse. To this end, a projector accompanied by a compilation of video clips was brought to various locations for anyone willing to endure a stream of violent attacks on demonstrators.
At the city’s municipal center, the graffiti campaign continued. Below, students make their mark directly on the government building.
Meanwhile, in front of the same building, a small press conference is held, attended by several Mansoura political groups. A statement is read denouncing the military’s violence and announcing the various groups’ participation in a Friday demonstration against the military council. Below, a banner held at the press conference displays several recent images from Cairo, the most prominent of which is the now infamous image of the girl in the blue bra accompanied by the word “Liars,” as published on the front cover of Tahrir News just a few days earlier. The text on the top of the banner reads “What are you waiting for? For this to happen to your sister?”
Elsewhere on the municipal building, an image of the late Ahmed Zaki, an iconic Egyptian actor, stares down the SCAF with the message “We will get our revenge, military council.”
Interestingly, the police, seen below, do not seem to mind the surrounding graffiti ‘assault’ on their city’s property.
As the students continue tagging various places in Mansoura, with relatively little resistance, an increasing number of people want to help out. Below, a member of the Youth of the Square Movement admires one of the stencils.
On Thursday morning, the campaign, in its third day, is excited to use a new stencil that was emailed in from a friend in Mit Ghamr, a small city also located in the Daqahliyya governorate. Below, the stencil is carefully cut out with a box knife.
And this is what it looks like when it is sprayed out.
The graffiti, a silhouette of the woman in the blue bra being dragged by the military, reads “Would you accept this for your mother?? Would you accept this for your sister??”
Below, a piece of graffiti surrounded by campaign flyers reminds us that all of this comes in the context of ongoing parliamentary elections; Mansoura will be voting on 3 and 4 January. (Click here for a photo essay on electoral campaigning in Mansoura)
After a long three days, a few organizers from the campaign take a break, sitting above one of their tags outside the School of Medicine at Mansoura Univeristy.
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Egyptian Military Adviser Calls
Attack on Woman Justified
By ROBERT MACKEY
An adviser to Egypt’s military rulers said in a newspaper interview published on Thursday that a brutal attack on a female protester by Egyptian soldiers on Saturday was justified because the woman had insulted the army.
Thousands of Egyptian women took to the streets of Cairo this week to protest the beating of the woman, whose black abaya was stripped back to reveal her underwear during the attack.
Asked about video and photographs of soldiers hitting and kicking the woman, Gen. Abdel Moneim Kato, a retired officer who advises the ruling military council in Cairo, told the Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that the female activist had been insulting the army through a megaphone before she was stripped and beaten.
That justification for the brutal beating comes eight months after the generals put in power by President Hosni Mubarak sentenced another activist, Maikel Nabil, to three years in prison for “insulting the armed forces” on Facebook.
According to an English-language summary of the general’s comments published by The Egypt Independent, a Cairo daily, the adviser also defended the use of live ammunition against protesters, which he claimed was permitted by the terms of the Geneva Conventions. But, as another retired general told The Independent, the conventions govern the rules of war between states or militias and contain no such provision permitting attacks on civilian protesters.
In fact, one protocol, adopted in 1977 to govern the conduct of armies during civil wars, states clearly that even then, “the civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack.” The same protocol also bars soldiers from engaging in “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, rape, enforced prostitution and any form or indecent assault.”
General Kato — who called protesters delinquents “who deserve to be thrown into Hitler’s ovens” in another interview this week — also claimed that activists calling for an end to military rule were agents of foreign governments who had paid children to attack soldiers.
While the woman whose beating sparked such outrage has yet to speak publicly, a woman who attempted to come to her aid, and was then pummeled by soldiers herself, spoke to CNN from her hospital bed on Thursday.
The second woman, Azza Hilal Suleiman, told CNN: “There’s no justice. I don’t know how long we’ll go without justice. We didn’t ask for anything but to be free in our own country. We’ve been oppressed by the military, by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and by the police. I don’t know how much longer they will continue to kill us.”
Ms. Suleiman, who said her father was an army general, added: “My family isn’t like the men in the military now. My family was very decent and pure. What’s happening in the military now is dirty. Humans without conscience or mercy or humanity, what right do they have to do this to people?”
Another female activist gave this account of the beating and sexual assault she endured on Saturday after she was captured by soldiers to Mosireen, a Cairo film collective.
Since Egyptians without access to the Internet or satellite television might not have seen the video of the attack on the women, and on other protesters, activists took to the streets of Cairo with portable projectors to screen the footage on Thursday. The activist and blogger Lilian Wagdy reported that supporters of the army had tried to stop one such screening by destroying the projector, which sparked an impromptu protest march in the Cairo district of Heliopolis.
Lilian Wagdy, via TwitPicActivists screened video of Egyptian soldiers attacking protesters on a Cairo street on Thursday night.
Some of the activists also painted graffiti images of the attack on the pavement and asked Egyptians to consider whether they would accept such an assault if the victim was their mother.
جرافيتى فى المنصورة ..اترضاة لامك :) pic.twitter.com/N7IdnlzS
>via: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/egyptian-military-adviser-calls-a...