Tag: Activism

One of the weirder sides of globalization:

Egypt-animal-protest
Giant chicken loses head outside Cairo KFC

CAIRO, Feb 17, 2007 (AFP) – A man dressed in a bright yellow chicken suit protesting cruelty to animals outside a fried chicken outlet in downtown Cairo Saturday was knocked down and had his chicken head yanked off by restaurant employees before being hustled away by police, witnesses said.
Jason Baker, a United States citizen, was part of a protest being staged by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) against Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) for the way its suppliers allegedly treat the animals.
PETA claims KFC suppliers engage in unnecessary cruelty, including drugging and breeding the chickens so that they grow overlarge and become crippled.
As photographers and bystanders crowded around Baker and another PETA activist, Nadia Montasser, a scuffle broke out and Baker was knocked over by KFC employees yelling, “he is not Egyptian,” which they subsequently proved by removing his chicken head.
Montasser and Baker were taken away by police but released soon afterwards.
“They have just proved our point,” Montasser said on being freed. “If this is how they treat humans imagine how they treat chickens?”
She acknowledged, however, that PETA could not say for sure if chickens were being mishandled by KFC Egypt but that was not the point of the protest.
“We are not targeting KFC Egypt, it is a worldwide campaign aginst KFC,” she said, adding that the movement wanted the company to implement specific policies to ensure there was no cruelty.
“We have no relations with the company outside,” said the manager of the branch on Tahrir Square, in the heart of Cairo. “We are an Egyptian company with all Egyptian employees, supplied by Egyptian farmers.”
According to Tariq Tawfiq, vice president of the chamber of food industries, fast food chains in Egypt use state of the art slaughterhouses that try to ensure the birds are as calm as possible when they are killed.
“The way you treat chicken has a great impact on the quality of the taste, if you treat the chicken right, and keep them calm then their meat is much more tender,” he said.
Last May, Baker dressed up as a giant sheep and presented flowers to the Australian embassy in Cairo after it recommended suspending sheep exports to Egypt because of the conditions of the abattoirs.

Click here more shots on Flickr or on the pics for a larger size.

Photos by Amro Maraghi for AFP.

[Thanks, Paul]

A few days ago, Kifaya announced that George Ishaq, its general coordinator for the last two year, will be stepping down. His replacement is Abdel Wahab al-Messiri, a renowned philosopher best-known for his Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism — the most comprehensive and serious study of these issues in Arabic. When I first read about this a couple of days ago in the Daily Star, I couldn’t believe it. Al-Messiri is a heavy caliber academic known, among other things, for being a critic of Arab anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial (although there is some controversy on his views on the Holocaust and Zionism, since he is an anti-Zionist, but I am not familiar with the arguments – update). He has lectured widely in the West, notably the US. This would suggest a major change in Kifaya’s direction is possible.

I spoke to al-Messiri briefly a few minutes ago — he confirmed the appointment but declined to give me an interview before Kifaya drafts its new policy next week. (Watch this space.) I haven’t been reading a lot of Arabic newspapers for the past week so it’s quite possible I missed coverage in Arabic, but the Daily Star and other English-language outlets have not really grasped the potential significance of al-Messiri’s appointment.

Last month, Kifaya, a rag-tag collection of socialist, Nasserist, anti-globalisation and human rights activists, held a protest on to celebrate its two-year anniversary. As per usual, a small number of demonstrators were pinned down to the Press Syndicate building, outnumbered by Central Security Forces by at least five to one. The protest was a far cry from the founding outing of Kifaya, on 12 December 2004, which marked the birth of the first overtly anti-Mubarak non-violent movement. Although that protest was even smaller, it was groundbreaking in that it was Egypt’s first movement that overtly campaigned against President Hosni Mubarak’s re-election and against the prospect of an inheritance of power scenario for his son Gamal.

Over the next year, Kifaya jolted the Egyptian political class out of its complacency and pushed back the margins for political activity. Its message, that Egyptians had enough (“kifaya” in Arabic) of poor governance and one-man rule, reverberated across the country and was partly embraced by Egypt’s traditionally cautious opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood and liberal parties such as al-Ghad.

Fast forward two years later and Kifaya seems to be heading nowhere. Its primary goal, preventing Mubarak’s re-election, has clearly failed and Gamal Mubarak’s ascendancy continues. Kifaya never reached enough critical mass to become a genuine popular movement, with the same activist faces seen at most protests. It has tried to widen its campaign to include social issues such as rising prices, unemployment and poverty, but to no avail. Neither political party nor underground revolutionary movement, Kifaya has stagnated.

In early December, Egyptian newspapers reported that at least seven senior figures in the movement quit over what they say is the dominance of Kifaya by a few personalities. While this will have a negative impact on its organisational efforts, core Kifaya members are frequently members of several groups and may redirect their efforts towards other activities, such as supporting activists or taking an interest in opposition party politics, since several left-wing parties are expected to undergo a change of leadership early next year. Another alternative is the establishment of new specialized institutions, such as the “Union of the Unemployed” created in mid-December, that campaign on specific issues.

It will be interesting to see what al-Messiri’s leadership brings to Kifaya.

Also read: a 1999 profile of al-Messiri by Fayza Hassan.

Ok ok. My apologies to the fine boys who come out to make sure that law and order are maintained during these demos. Sometimes you just can’t resist though.

Today’s Kefaya demo at Sayeda Zeinab mosque, marking the thirty-year anniversary of the Bread Riots, was more energetic than usual, and the crowd seemed more diverse. At the same time security seemed more at ease, though the tactics followed routine practise: squish the protestors into the smallest possible space and keep a troupe of beltagaya posted around the corner just in case.

I’ve posted a couple of other shots of the proceedings on my flickr site.

Also see Hossam Hamalway’s report here or check out a contemporary account of the events by Henry E. Mattox, economic reporting officer at the US Embassy at the time. He seems to have observed the events from the vantage point of his office, but he did offer this:

The root cause of the recent unpleasantness was what we in the economics racket call in technical terms an effort to extract blood from the corpus of a turnip.

And then he went on to describe how the government has “painted itself into an uncomfortable corner” with “this subsidy lashup.”

Worth noting that Sadat’s government got itself out of the corner not by easing off subsidies while doing something about the repressive and corrupt mode of economic “management” that they enabled, but by a cheap sleight of hand: keeping the price of bread the same while reducing the size of the loaves (oh yeah, and bashing a lot of heads). So the working class today finds itself in the same position as 1977: dependent for their daily bread on a regime that acts like a violent dead-beat dad, at once stifling the ability of those without the capital to buy up state assets at knock-down prices to support themselves, and unable to provide an alternative.

Mattox’s conclusion also says much about the nature of US-Egyptian state-level relations, though perhaps unintentionally. After bemoaning the billions of dollars that the subsidies are costing the Egyptian government, referring to cutting out the subsidies as “bringing sanity” and hiding under his well-polished desk for several days, Maddox reports that “the natives are quiet again.”

What a relief.