Tag: Activism

Fouad Mourtada is free

The Moroccan who was jailed for putting up a fake profile of Prince Moulay Rashid has been freed. This is great news, and while it should have never gotten to this, better late than never. I suppose the king wanted to make sure the message got across that the royal family is a no-go area for satirists and critics.

CASABLANCA, March 18 – Fouad Mourtada was released from Oukacha Prison at approximately 8:00pm local time today, having received a royal pardon.Mr. Mourtada, a 26-year old IT engineer, was taken into custody on February 5th, 2008, and was questioned regarding a fake Facebook profile of King Mohammed VI’s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid, which he had created on January 15. During his interrogation, Mr. Mourtada reports that he was beaten, spat on and insulted.On February 22, Mr. Mourtada was sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of $1350 for creating the fake profile. The official charge was identity fraud of an electronic document.Following Mr. Mourtada’s detention, an international online movement arose calling for his release and, following sentencing, for a full pardon. On Saturday, March 1, young activists used a Facebook group to organize worldwide protests opposing Mr. Mourtada’s imprisonment, which occurred in Rabat, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Washington DC, Montreal, Madrid, and London. A video of the protests was later posted on YouTube.Mentions by international news organizations, such as the BBC, encouraged Moroccan domestic media to take up the story, which increase pressure on the government to act.Tonight Mr. Mourtada is staying at the house of friend in Casablanca. He will retain to his family tomorrow.

Khaled Hamza

Khaled Hamza is the editor of www.ikhwanweb.com , the Muslim Brothers’ impressive English website. I met Khaled several months ago and he’s a very affable, intelligent man. Last week he was arrested after meeting a human rights activist in the Nasr City neighborhood of Cairo and thus become the latest Egyptian web activist to be imprisoned. Even for those who don’t agree with the MB’s religious, political or social views, Khaled is the type of person you wish you saw more often in Egyptian journalistic life. The way Ikhwanweb has been run, notably the inclusion of many points of views that are critical of the Ikhwan, is a testimony to his own open-mindedness (note to current MB leaders: you could learn something here about not being thin-skinned, as you were when your political program was criticized).

There is an online petition calling for Hamza’s release here.

Update: What he says.

Bidoun Winter 2008: Souffles and Maghrebi counter-culture

The Winter 2008 issue of Bidoun, the Middle Eastern arts and culture magazine, has been out for a few weeks now. For some weird reason I can never access it directly from Egypt, it only works through a proxy like proxyfellow.com or hidemyass.com, but it’s worth the trouble to check out the striking cover (below) and some of the articles they put online, such as the essay on Moroccan counter-culture in the 1960s/1970s by Issandr El Amrani. Get the print issue (in Cairo from the Townhouse gallery, elsewhere at good magazine stores) to read about Ismail Yassin and much more.

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(No, I don’t think that building really exists.)

Chairman of Ghazl Mahalla sacked

Al-Ahram announced this morning that Mahmoud Gabali, the chairman of Mahalla for Spinning and Weaving, has been sacked and that workers would be given 135 days of pay. The decision, taken by the company’s board, was based on accounting inconsistencies detected by the Central Auditing Agency, a government watchdog. Apparently the audit uncovered irregularities in inventory stock, large discounts given to local traders, and other possible signs of mismanagement or corruption.

The decision appears to meet most of the pay-related demands of the workers and has been greeted with joy by those who organized the biggest strikes in decades at the factory this year. It appears the government has finally shown sense and investigated the allegations made by the workers regarding the chairman of the company. This will no doubt encourage workers elsewhere to persevere with their own demands. I am certain that Hossam, who is traveling at the moment, will follow up with more details once he gets news from his labor activist contacts.

Update: Here is an English report.

Some thoughts on the YouTube ban

The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker has highlighted YouTube’s decision to block the Egypt torture videos page, which we recently covered. In his post Brian says points how this removes a crucial tool at the hands of bloggers to distribute and publicize cases of human rights abuses and build a campaign against Egypt’s systematic use of torture.

Reading the comments on the post, there is legitimate discussion that footage of gratuitous violence violates YouTube’s terms of use and that it may not be the most appropriate place for these videos for other reasons (since most of its content is essentially funny home videos). Fair enough. Some people suggested that rights groups should be hosting the videos, which seems like a good idea (although it might limit their reach, since way more people visit youtube.com than amnesty.org). That’s a good idea too, except that rights groups, even the big ones, don’t really have the kind of technology necessary to handle traffic spikes and maintain video databases (which I assume means buying license rights to various software, codecs, etc.)

So here’s an idea: why not encourage YouTube, Google Video and others to provide their expertise to maintain servers for activists, separately from their commercial products if necessary? This would be a great vote of confidence in web companies, especially after the fiasco of Yahoo and Google selling out to China in recent years. Don’t want their names on it? Fine. But they have technology and resources that have radically transformed the away activists can break news and mobilize international interest. So rather than sticking to just “don’t be evil,” how about some “be good”?

Israeli activists call on Mubarak to break Gaza siege

Just got wind of this:

Fifty Israeli peace and human rights activists have approached Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, via the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv, calling upon him to immediately open the Rafah Border Crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to free movement of persons and goods, and thus break the siege imposed at the order of Defence Minister Barak, and which is pushing the population of the strip over the edge of humanitarian disaster.

“We saw no choice but to take this step and approach the Egyptians directly. This after the Defence Minister, to whom the option of cutting Gaza’s electricity supplies was for the time being denied, found the horrible substitute of drastically cutting the supply of vital foodstuffs. Those who don’t raise their voices are accomplices. The government of Israel is completely uncaring about the terrible suffering it is causing to a million and half inhabitants of the Strip for whom it is responsible. It also does want to understand what is said by its own military experts: that causing this suffering does not in any way help the people of Sderot – on the contrary, it increases and exacerbates the shooting of Quassam missiles.

We do not accept that the only choices left are to starve the inhabitants of Gaza or to conquer the Strip at the cost of terrible bloodshed. There is another way, the way of mutual ceasefire and negotiations which should include all parts of the Palestinian people” say the initiators of the letter of the fifty.

The full letter is after the jump, I think the activists are involved with Gush Shalom / Peace Now, although this does not appear to be an official move on the organization’s part . I would say this is one occasion for Egyptian and other pro-Palestinian activists to back the Israeli activists’ calls, no matter what their stance on normalization might be. I may be wrong about this having been out of the country most of the summer, but I have heard of little Egyptian activism to get the border open (legitimate security concerns of Egypt notwithstanding).
Continue reading Israeli activists call on Mubarak to break Gaza siege

Rural Egypt’s Return to the Ancien Regime

Middle East Online has a translation of a Monde Diplomatique article I’d previously linked to on the reversal of agrarian reform in Egypt. This excerpt deals with the new law passed in the 1990s that has led to many farmers losing land and helped former landlords regain land they had been forced to sell under Nasser:

The 1992 law changed farmers’ lives profoundly. Average rent values have risen 10-fold, and now represent between a third and a half of gross annual income. Perhaps three-quarters of the farmers renting in 1996 have given up because of debts. Farmers have had to indebt themselves to pay rent, and households sell jewels and livestock, reducing expenditure (less meat in the diet, fewer children at school). As the number of very small holdings has declined, those over 10 feddans (4.2 hectares) have improved in number and surface area. It is clear that inequalities in the distribution of agricultural land are again rising, despite the advances between 1952 and 1980 and the relative immobility thereafter.

Over the past 10 years there have been social explosions over land in the governorate of al-Minufiyya, where Kamshish lies. They are the result of manoeuvres by former landowners and have been ignored by the media. Dispossessed families used the new legislation to recover their previous holdings, or obtain more attractive parcels. There have been violent clashes between farmers and the police or hired agents working for these families. Villagers have been intimidated, illegally imprisoned (and tortured), or summarily tried and heavily sentenced. The Land Centre for Human Rights considers that between 2001 and 2004 there were 171 deaths, 945 injuries and 1,642 arrests.

Recent funny YouTube videos

Below are some anti-Mubarak activist videos, some quite funny.

The very last one is the best, to the tune of the theme song from a movie (I forget its name) about a young man who saves to be able to marry only to have his money taken and the girl he wanted married off to someone else. He sings this song as he arrives at her wedding, describing what was done to him by her family and asking for his money back. Altogether, it packs quite an emotional punch and has hilarious adaptations of cinema posters lampooning regime figures.

Of course this site in no way endorses their content!