Egyptians surely rank amongst the most patient and non-confrontational of peoples. But every now and then they get fed up and explode. It happened in 1952 as a result of colonial tensions coupled with the inaction of an opulent monarchy. While King Farouk feted his son’s birthday, enraged mobs stormed the streets of downtown Cairo, laying them to waste. It happened again in 1977, when Sadat raised the price of bread, misjudging his grip on a disillusioned populace, triggering nationwide riots that forced him to back down. When will it happen again?
The list of grievances plaguing average Egyptians is long, but let’s run through it once more, literally for the hell of it: a cynical regime; ostentatious upper-class; malignant unemployment; derisively underpaid workers denied the right to strike; price hikes that make a further mockery of the pittance they earn; widespread overcrowding in under-serviced homes; religious and state restrictions that squelch all manner of self-expression; poor primary education and health care; off-the-scale pollution and environmental devastation. Add anger and humiliation as an impotent world stands by and watches the destruction of Lebanon, alongside that of Palestine and Iraq.
No point asking, ‘where are the Arabs?’ meaning Arab leaders. Everyone knows they’re in their palaces hedging their bets. Although the oil card they collectively hold – if wisely played – virtually trumps all others, and could conceivably provoke a bloodless revolution that would redress a global power imbalance and place the world, in the eleventh hour of its need, on a healing track towards alternative energy – they squabble and dither. Their attention is instead directed towards stifling every trace of dissent issuing from justifiably outraged citizens.
It is truly soul-curdling to watch riot and plainclothes police line up to discipline other Egyptians for sympathizing with fellow Arabs and condemning, as all people of conscience must, Israel’s deplorable use of force and America’s sickening support of it. Time after time, a few hundred brave souls assemble, only to be bullied by a few thousand police.
A more useful question at this juncture is where are the Egyptians, 70 million of them? Why, under the weight of such misery, has a resistance failed to coalesce? Why do demonstrations remain pitifully small? Why aren’t people thronging the squares? God knows, they agree that what they are seeing, indeed living, is terribly wrong. Why aren’t they striking en masse, bringing the country’s meager enterprise to its knees, not to beg for war but to demand – once and for all – better lives, justice and peace?
The likeliest reasons are fear and fatigue. No one wants to get their head bashed in, especially on a hot day, an empty stomach and in-between shifts of demeaning jobs. More importantly, the Egyptians’ time-honored weapons are wit and fortitude. Sadly, the latter is no longer enough, and the former is presently lacking.
Egypt’s opposition movements need to find new formulas for peaceful dissent that outmaneuver state security. Small demonstrations, plus a large police presence, equals photos of police brutality, something we’ve seen enough before. Such images do not advance the opposition, they simply frighten people away. The point of protests is to build solidarity; the trick is to offer ways for people to publicly express opinions and find not only safety, but strength, in numbers. To do this, however, organizers have to start thinking outside the blockade.
Aside from re-assessing the location and conduct of demonstrations, given the constraints of martial law, more subversive tactics are required. The annals of resistance offer varied suggestions but on a basic level, a color linked with the movement that everyone wears, could serve as an identifying mark, a statement of intent. Only when people are able to partake in group action, and see signs that their daring is shared (not to mention feel good about themselves for speaking up) will they gain confidence and therefore power as their numbers grow.
Large-scale peaceful protest works. Granted, Egypt has no Gandhi, no Martin Luther King, or at least such individuals have yet to come forth. But people have plenty of big, common problems. It is precisely for this reason the country is so assiduously policed.
The state cannot openly admit that by forbidding political participation, legal strikes and protests, it has created the conditions for a potentially explosive mob. But the overwhelming police presence and brutal handling of demonstrations inadvertently admits just that; things could indeed get out of hand.
By deploying thousands of cops to curb a handful of citizens, the state is not showcasing its strength but betraying its fears and its weakness. Violence and violent repression –state sponsored or otherwise – is always a sign of weakness, a failure of intelligence, imagination, compassion and restraint, qualities that should distinguish us from animals but seldom do.
Today’s opposition may be in its early stages, compared to those that ousted the British and the French. But now as then, Egypt has the makings of a formidable resistance – as the country’s inertia proves. From Egypt’s leaden bureaucracy, to its low-grade economic growth, to the derelict condition of cities, towns and countryside, people perform halfheartedly because so little of their effort accrues them any good. Sooner or later this great and thwarted energy will have to be directed – not towards mayhem or Qur’an waving – but a concerted, popular movement that can restore people’s dignity by providing them a platform from which to demand and win their rights.
Mass strikes don’t just happen by themselves. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were great organisers, who devoted the bulk of their efforts to mobilising the poorest and most humiliated people.
dupe, didn’t you guys publish this a few days ago?
I don’t know as much about Gandhi, but certainly the American Civil Rights movement was not built on the poorest and most humiliated, but on sophisticated groups who had laid down political bases among different groups – lawyers, students, churches, laborers, etc. MLK captured the media’s attention (it always loves the heroic loner image) but his true power was built on helping bring these different groups coming together in a common agenda. Without those base groups, and that coordination, I think resistance groups end up more like the US anti War movements, lots of noise, no program, no legacy.
Low-cost pathways to participation or identification with protest movements like movement colours or attending protests are well and good, and help to strengthen solidarity, but at the end of the day that solidarity has to translate into or link to something more sustained and organized.
Something has to happen between protests, or the protests must link to organizations if they are to translate their energy into results or even be seen by the wider public as representative of a social trend. I think Kefaya tried to use protests to launch multiparty coordination committees last year, but those fell apart due to doctrinal bickering, no? If only they could agree on a very basic common minimum programme…something more systematic than “down with Mubarak,” perhaps basic rules for election monitoring and the freeing of restrictions on candidacy.
Egypt is not exceptional in its lack of political participation, it’s always a minority that is politically mobilized in any society, and it’s pretty creditable that people get out as much as they do given the restrictive climate. But as in any society, you need to routinize movement networks, create institutionalized avenues for political participation, draw in people gradually with small successes and opportunities for identification. How do you do that in a context where you can’t even collect signatures and the contact info of people attending a protest for further mobilization, because people are so afraid of government/security service monitoring?
MLK and Gandhi did not succeed by protests alone, they linked to established organizations and networks – black churches and student committees in the case of the US civil rights movement, and even then it was a slow and laborious mobilization process (cf. Doug McAdam’s zillion studies on the US civil rights movt mobilization), and the Congress party and its local committees were very important in turning Gandhi’s charisma into a mass movement.
What would “new formulas for peaceful dissent” or civil disobedience look like in Egypt, do you think? Muazzafeen boycotting their jobs, large peaceful prayer meetings in public places, strikes, filling jails? Large peaceful protests haven’t worked so well thus far, have they, the Ikhwan have filled lots of jails and nobody seems to give a damn.
Alaa – I thought I did, but it seems to have disappeared…
What kind of religious restrictions is Golia referring to in the list of grievances?
Hung out, hung over and unable to concatenate, let alone cohere, I have plagiarized something out of Wikipedia. Note changes changes necessary for it to be applicable.
Hope this helps move the discussion forward.
A cargo cult [substitute “opposition groupâ€�] is any of a group of religious [read “politicalâ€�] movements that occurred in Melanesia [“Egypt, the US and Britainâ€�], in the Southwestern Pacific [“Northern Hemisphereâ€�]. The Cargo Cults [“Egyptian opposition groups, Cindy Sheehan et al, etc ad nauseumâ€�] believe that manufactured western goods (‘cargo’) [“democracyâ€�] have been … [blah blah. Like any semi-competent plagiarist I cut the parts that didn’t fit my needs]. Cargo cults thus focus on overcoming what they perceive as undue ‘white’ [“repressive and anti-democraticâ€�] influences by conducting rituals [“demonstrationsâ€�] similar to the white [“democraticâ€�] behavior they have observed [“or read aboutâ€�], presuming that the ancestors [“founding fathers and other long dead liberal typesâ€�] will at last recognize their own and this activity will make cargo [“democracyâ€�] come. Thus a characteristic feature of Cargo Cults is the belief that spiritual agents [who else? JFK jr.?] will at some future time give much valuable cargo and desirable manufactured products [“democracyâ€�] to the cult members.
I totally disagree with Maria’s view on publishing pix of police crackdowns. We shouldn’t treat the people as children who should be safeguarded from “horrible” pix. We have to show those pix, and actually put emphasis on what’s happening during demos.
Are we supposed to lie to those we invite for demos, and tell them police doesn’t beat anybody, so as to convince them to come? No.
Actually, MANY of the current young activists have joined the pro-democracy movement after they saw the TERRIBLE pix of women being sexually assaulted by NDP thugs on May 25 “Black” referrendum day.
Part of taking those pix also is documenting what’s happening, so when it’s pay back time you know who committed what abuse.
Primarily, the main point that should be made to explain why Egyptians have not joined into the public sphere of political participation (btw, this is only a part of being politically active) is not because the government sprinkles security guards like icing for a birthday cake but because they’ve cut of all access point to mobilization. I mean look at it, all political parties have been undermined both legally and politically, syndicates have not really gained momentum in recruting people, universities have security gurads quelling any politically concievable act, and labor union are virtually non-existent. So it’s not that Egyptians are non-confrontational or patient, it’s that the do not participate in the political public sphere partly because they’ve got no way to reach it properly (alongside ineffective organization of the public sphere as well.)
But it would be interesting to start rearticulating defintion of being ‘political’ and see how many Egyptians in their own ways challenge their government or a dominating ideology.
[…] This has direct relevance to Maria Golia’s piece below on “new formulas for peaceful dissent.â€� […]
SP may be right about the politically mobilized being a relatively small segment of societies, but I just can’t understand why, when there’s so much consensus about the problems – and not only in Egypt. Yes Ali, Egyptians have long been denied political participation – but they’ve watched their bid for rights erode ever since the (so-called) revolution – it didn’t happen overnight. This regime has done a great job of obstructing leadership but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people capable of leading and supporting change, and maybe that’s what’s finally coming about. Of course organizing a resistance doesn’t happen overnight and isn’t, in itself enough – coherent alternatives are wanting as SP says– and cargo cults probably ain’t one of them �
But Hossam, I wasn’t suggesting that photos of protest-disruption not be published, only that resistance leaders explore new ways of making their points that attract more supporters. And I do think that the strike technique could work SP– imagine the moazzafin really staying home – everyone, in fact, in the street – just stopping – until some damn body from state TV comes round and records every last one of their grievances and the big guys listen – and we watch them listen – and they see and are enlightened and so great is their remorse that they dissolve into murky little puddles from whence the flower of Egyptian youth, against all odds, blooms…
Ok, I’m dreaming, but…. as mentioned in that article, righteous indignation surely runs through many a vein, and for lack of a better means of expression, ends up as the (negative) social changes we’re seeing: profound anomie, random aggression (esp. against women) and the conflation of religion with politics. In other words, things may get worse before they get better.
“not towards mayhem or Qur’an waving”…
Those kind of random cheap shots don’t help anyone.