I went last Thursday to my workplace, and I found out that there were over 3000 workers demanding their rights before they called a general strike in the construction site in Saudi Binladin Group. The workers were very angry, there workplace is one of the largest construction project in the country, which worth SR.100 billion. However, they live in a terrible conditions, one of the workers was telling me how he was living: “I live in a room 4m x 3m with 8 people, and for every 10 people there is only one toilet”. Another Egyptian worker was telling me about the working conditions and the restriction of religious freedom: “those are Zionists, they don’t even allow me to pray on time!!”, and another worker was speaking about the water at the site, which is infected and full of filth and insects: “the managers wouldn’t even wash their hands with it, but for us we have to drink it because it is the only drinking water at the site”. The others talked about the delayed salaries and the unpaid overtime: “can you believe that some of the workers here are paid only 700 riyals a month, and I am paid 1000 riyal, how would we survive??”.
Headteacher Juliet Strang has been removed from Villiers High School after a student strike and mass protests.
It is a great victory. To the joyous relief of everyone, her reign ended with an announcement to the teachers by the chair of governors on Tuesday morning.
Hundreds of students protested twice outside the school against the sacking of the school’s NUT union rep, Amerjit Virdee.
Amerjit has taught at the school for 28 years and is head of maths. Many see his sacking as an attack on the union.
A magnificent 4-hour strike by students on Tuesday of last week closed the school and was the key moment in the dispute.
Strang’s response was incredible. She locked out whole years of students. The police backed her up, refusing them access to the school.
It’s been another eventful day in Egypt and more and more this feels like what watching the revolutions taking place in Eastern Europe in 1989 felt like — but hopefully Egypt won’t be another China. The best place to watch it all go down is still Al Jazeera,as the official Wikileaks twitter also acknowledges: Yes, we may have helped Tunisia, Egypt. But let us not forget the elephant in the room: Al Jazeera + sat dishes.
For us watching from the outside in it’s hard to understand what is going on now in Egypt, but one thing is clear: this is a spontaneous uprising, fueled by the despair and anger of the average Egyptian, not something organised by either the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist organisations, or by what’s left of the secular leftwing opposition to Mubarak. This doesn’t stop the western defence analysis community from invoking the old Islamist terror bugbears of course. And as discussed at Blood and Treasure, Mubarak’s new vicepresident and prime minister are both hardliners not adverse to using violence to solve their problems. Which may mean that either Mubarak is preparing to unleashthe army (if it let’s itself be unleashed at this point) or that the security services are mounting their own coup first against Mubarak, then against the protestors. But can they stop this spirit?
(Ignore the horrid music)
Aussie net magazine Crikey reports on one of the more interesting cyberspace aspects of the Tunesian and Egyptian revolutions, the involvement of the 4chan hackers’s movement Anonymous in helping the protestors communicate with the rest of the world as well as attacking government communication channels. However:
It is also profoundly at odds in its ethos and methods with traditional NGOs and activist groups. This is not your traditional protest movement and elements of it would be deeply hostile to more traditional political activism. Anonymous is something that, because it grew organically in cyberspace rather than reflecting the cyber version of existing real world phenomena, looks and works differently to real-world organisations or movements we’re familiar with. Something important and new is happening here.
That’s because, in the final analysis, the US needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one. Whether the issue is Israel-Palestine, Hamas and Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, security for Gulf oil supplies, Sudan, or the spread of Islamist fundamentalist ideas, Washington wants Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous and influential country, in its corner. That’s the political and geostrategic bottom line. In this sense, Egypt’s demonstrators are not just fighting the regime. They are fighting Washington, too.
Let’s hope Cairo 2011 will be more like the Eastern European revolutions in 1989 than the failed revolution of ’68. So far even calling in tharmy hasn’t stopped the protests and now the headquarters of the “National Democratic Party” is on fire and helicopters and tanks are entering Cairo. Well over eight hundred people have been wounded, with god knows how many murdered like the poor sod in the video below:
For some reason the BBC thought people would want to know what Tony “mass murderer” Blair had to say about the Egyptian revolution; if you can stomach it, the audio is here — watching the video is liable to cost you your computer. Reactions from people with actual power, like Hillary Clinton is not much better: much finger wagging, little support for the demonstrators.
