How Egypt's Revolution Became The World's

As Egyptians celebrated the ousting of Mubarak in February 2011, its revolution had become the world's [EPA]


The Revolutionaries Of The Arab World Pioneered Strategies Of Activism That Influenced The Movements Around The Globe. 

By Mark Levine 
Last Modified: 11 Feb 2012 16:27 
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Istanbul, Turkey - These are dates that bookend one's life. On September 11, 2001, a world order seemed to collapse with the Twin Towers. Whether you were 13 or 33, nothing would be the same. Battle lines were drawn; the United States would retalliate and everyone, Americans as well as Arabs, was forced to choose sides. All the sins of the United States - decades of support for dictatorships, occupation, coups, a global economic system that depended in good measure on the continued oppression of the peoples of the Muslim world - had become irrelevant, regardless of their role in producing al-Qaeda's terrible blowback.

The tenor of responses among mainstream Arab commentators could be summed up by the main argument of the first Arab Human Development Report, published in 2002. The report was celebrated in the Western media by the same voices that would cheerlead the US invasion of Iraq the next year because it was written by "Arabs themselves" and because it focused its attention almost exclusively on the internal problems plaguing the Arab world, while avoiding almost any discussion of the historical or current role of the West in creating and sustaining them.

The Arab authors of the Arab Human Development Report essentially exonerated the West from responsibility for the problems of the Arab world, turning their attention to "Islamic pressure" as a chief cause of the region's problems. Of course, such an analysis was filled with gaps that lessened the effectiveness of its analysis or proposed solutions, such as cutting military expenditures while increasing spending on education.

First Meetings Of Two 'Second Superpowers'

Around the same time that the anti-corporate globalisation movement was becoming a major force against neoliberalism in the West, the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in the occupied Palestinian territories mobilised a new generation of Arabs, who, thanks to non-state controlled Arab media, were exposed almost daily to the Palestinian struggle against occupation. It's not for nothing that the young activists who organised the initial Tahrir protests in 2011 could be seen wearing "End the Occupation" t-shirts, as many of them first become politically conscious and mobilised by the second intifada, opposition to which even "friendly" Arab governments such as Egypt's could not suppress.

"As the US invasion of Iraq loomed on the horizon, it was still an older generation of usually hard-left, Nasserist or traditional Islamist activists who led the emerging protest movement against it."

While the new generation of Arab activists was at least in part inspired by the surrounding alter-globalisation movement, before September 11 and the threat of a US invasion of Iraq, the Western and often hard-left anti-corporate globalisation movement essentially ignored the Middle East and larger Muslim world, despite the regions' crucial role in the emergence of globalisation. And so there was little understanding of the deeper structural dynamics underlying repressions and authoritarianism in the Arab/Muslim world, whether among countries aligned or opposed to the United States.

Because of this, leading sections of the anti-corporate globalisation movement, which had become more militant in the wake of increasing state violence against protesters (particularly at the Genoa G8 meeting in July 2001), moved further towards a simplistic anti-US imperialism rhetoric which, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, was ill-equipped to offer a serious alternative discourse to the "democracy through war" rhetoric of the Bush Administration. It was therefore unable to join a critique of US empire with a denunciation of the brutality of Saddam Hussein's rule and the structural problems highlighted by the Arab Human Development Report.

Similarly in the Arab world, as the US invasion of Iraq loomed on the horizon, it was still an older generation of usually hard-left, Nasserist or traditional Islamist activists who led the emerging protest movement against it, as epitomised by the "Cairo Conference Against US Hegemony and War on Iraq and in solidarity with Palestine", first held in Cairo in 2002, and several more times in the ensuing years. While the conferences included many civil society and human rights activists who would play crucial roles in the 2010-2011 revolutionary protests, this first iteration of a global peace and justice movement developed an anti-war discourse that put too little focus on Saddam Hussein's crimes, as well as the violence of the post-invasion Iraqi resistance, in favor of a singular focus on US-imperialism.

In a mirror image of Bush's rhetoric, standing with Iraq meant standing with the country's brutal government and after the invasion the "the legitimate Iraqi resistance", which was considered the "sole representative of the Iraqi people". One meeting in Beirut saw Western and Arab activists celebrate the Iraqi resistance even as members of the international peace movement were being held hostage and threatened with decapitation by insurgents, whose own brutality was increasing matching the US-launched violence in the number of victims it produced across Iraq.

Beginnings Of A New Consciousness

While travelling across the now-global peace and justice movement in the early to mid 2000s could often be an exercise in ideological futility, it was also clear that a younger generation of activists, both in the West and in the Arab world, was increasingly asserting itself and forging a more nuanced discourse. These activists could simultaneously hold the US and European governments to account for their history of imperialism and colonial rule, and support for repressive governments across the region, and devote increasing attention to developing a critique, and a method of resistance against what many activists would come to describe as their "internal occupation" by corrupt, authoritarian and often brutal regimes.

The energy of Tahrir proved far more agile and creative than the forces of repression [GALLO/GETTY]

By the time of the fourth Cairo conference in 2006, participants were focusing more energy on calling for a "new Arab movement for change" that would include much greater coordination and a focus on protecting civil societies against government repression. It's not a coincidence that this move occurred in the wake of the emergence of new forms of internet-friendly grass roots movements such as Kefaya, which would provide an incubator for developing the strategies and discourses that would ultimately launch the January 25 revolution.

Not surprisingly, the mid-2000s was the period when internet usage in the Arab world began to expand significantly, while the seeming institutionalisation of the US occupation in Iraq and lack of any movement towards democratisation in most Arab countries necessitated the emerging generation of activists to focus their attention on how to resist their own governments and the seemingly impenetrable systems of rule which protected them.

At the same time, the success of movements against authoritarian regimes in Serbia and countries of the former Soviet Union (inspired by the Zapatistas and other first generation anti-neoliberal movements of resistance in Latin America and Europe), and a growing appreciation of the creative strategies of largely non-violent but militant resistance they deployed, also provided inspiration for activists in their mid-to-late 20s, who were increasingly entering civil society as leaders of grassroots, internet-supported pro-democracy and human rights movements across the region.

Finally, and equally important, it took until the mid-to-late 2000s for the economic consequences of neoliberalism in the Arab world - which was being pursued with greater vigour by governments such as those in Tunisia and Egypt - to build a critical mass of immiseration among a large enough segment of the working class to produce serious worker revolts in industrial cities such as Mahallah, Egypt, in 2006 and 2008 and in Gafsa, Tunisia, in 2008. Desperation across the increasingly marginalised industrial hinterlands such as Sidi Bouzid, where the Arab Spring was sparked, also increased.

It was in this situation that militant labour activists, who had a long institutional memory of anti-government and anti-neoliberal resistance, joined with the cyber-generation of civil society activists to form movements such as April 6, and together would provide the nucleus of the "movement of movements" that would form the revolutionary coalition of late 2010 and 2011.

Labour activism was helped by the global financial crisis that erupted full-scale in 2008. This crisis gave renewed legitimacy to the anti-neoliberal movements in the United States and Europe - at the same time that its powerfully negative impact in the Arab world spurred civil society and labour movements to take more direct action against their governments, especially in Tunisia and Egypt. Young Arabs and young Americans for the first time could feel a common generational sense of forboding and lack of possibilities for the future, and through the internet could form a truly world wide web of disgruntlement, anger and increasingly urgency and solidarity.

History Changes Course

In the wake of the ousting of Ben Ali and Mubarak, Western governments and organisations have touted their role in helping to "train" the activists behind the revolutions. The reality was quite different. This generation of activists did not need the West to teach it how to use Facebook or Twitter or build more effective civil society structures. But it was able to use Western NGOs (both independent and government-sponsored) to help strenghten and support the local as well as pan-Arab networks of civil society, who so famously coalesced together in late 2010 with the outbreak of the Tunisian revolution. They were not the necessary condition for revolution, but they certainly helped enable it.

Ultimately, however, far from owing their success in any significant measure to Western tutelage or support, the soon-to-be revolutionaries in the Arab world were, in the second half of the past decade, pioneering strategies and styles of activism that, however influenced by the previous decade of protests globally, added new dimensions that would prove crucial to the initial success of the Arab Spring revolts.

It was this global network, with young Arabs in the lead (themselves inspired, it should be pointed out, by young Iranians the year before) which scored its largest victory on February 11, 2011, when Hosni Mubarak fled Cairo for what he thought would be the safety of Sharm El Sheikh. In the violent, yet heady, 18 days of protests that led up to his departure all the new techniques and discourse of protest coalesced in an unprecedented way - from Facebook to nationwide strikes, mass marches to violent attacks against government buildings, sit-ins to near civil war.

Protesters used every tool in an arsenal forged during the previous decade that included the best practices, insights and inspiration of a global panoply of thinkers, movements and cultural creatives, most of whom had dreamed of that day even as they never imagined it could happen so soon, and in such a joyous manner as it did.

And so, standing in Tahrir Square amid hundreds of thousands of people cheering and crying at the fall of Egypt's last Pharaoh, Egypt's revolution had become, in a very real sense, the world's. In a real sense, with Mubarak's departure the demons of September 11 were finally exorcised across the region, unleashing a wave of hopeful protest that shows little signs of abating any time soon.

Even if a steep price in blood is still being paid from Port Said to Homs, the energy of Tahrir and its sister squares across the Arab world, and now with the Occupy movements globally, have proved so far more agile and creative than the forces of repression and the status quo. At least today, we can be hopeful that they will ultimately produce dignity, justice and freedom, not merely for the peoples of the Arab world, but for the world as a whole.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).

Egypt: Return To Tahrir

Nine Months After They Toppled Mubarak, Some Protesters Fear That Their Revolution Is Under Threat From The Military.

By Reporter Elizabeth Jones
People and Power
Last Modified: 22 Dec 2011 10:57
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Last weekend, in response to the fresh outbreak of deadly violence in Cairo, Egypt's newly-appointed prime minister, Kamal el-Ganzouri, announced that those involved in the clashes were "not the youth of the revolution". 

These protests, he suggested, were in fact a "counter-revolution".

The prime minister's words must have come as a shock to Mossaab Shahrour, a 20-year-old student and kitchen fitter from the 6th of October City - a satellite city outside Cairo. Today Mossaab is walking with the help of a crutch. He was badly beaten outside the cabinet offices last Friday by soldiers wielding wooden poles and iron bars.

His close friend, 22-year-old Ahmed Mansoor, a recent graduate in media studies, was killed in the same attack when he was shot in the head.

I first met Mossaab in the secret headquarters of the April 6 Youth Movement last January. It was very much a hub of revolutionary planning and activity, and he was very much a revolutionary. He showed me how he and his colleagues protected themselves from beatings by the state security services by stuffing their clothes with newspaper.

He was one of the activists whose job it was to round up supporters from mosques, fire them up with chants and lead them to Tahrir Square. He was smiley and fun and never seemed to sleep. Mossaab has been committed to street politics since the very first mass protest at the beginning of the year.

When the cabinet, appointed by Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, announced proposals to permanently shield the military from civilian oversight in the new constitution, protesters returned en masse to Tahrir Square for the first time since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. Mossaab was among those who set up camp with other young April 6 activists demanding the military leave the political arena.

He and his fellow April 6 activists admitted they had made a mistake by leaving Tahrir Square earlier this year before the revolution was fully finished. This time, Mossaab said, they would not leave.

Mossaab was one of the young men staring down the security forces on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, one of the streets linking Tahrir Square to the Interior Ministry headquarters. He was not throwing stones. As the self-appointed photographer for April 6, he was capturing the violence on camera. He watched friends fall around him, most from the suffocating effects of the tear gas. Forty people died over a period of four days on that street and more than 1,000 were injured. Was it worth it?

"Of course it was worth it for freedom," he insists. "I know there were a lot of deaths and injuries but all this was done for Egypt. We would do anything for Egypt. We brought down the Mubarak regime; a lot were killed or injured and this was for a good cause. We are prepared to fight even more and more and more for our freedom, to achieve our goals."   

April 6 activists believed the elections should have been postponed until the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces - or SCAF as it is known - transferred power to a civilian authority. And some of the protesters genuinely believed they would succeed.

"I don't think the elections will go ahead," said Waleed Rashed, one of the co-founders of April 6 only five days before polls were scheduled to open. "I don't think so because no government will take that responsibility right now. No police will take that responsibility right now. I believe if SCAF do it they will be creating new problems."

Under pressure, SCAF did make some concessions, including an accelerated timetable for democratic transition. 

But elections, they insisted, would go ahead and polls opened as scheduled on Monday, November 28.

Most Egyptians seemed content that they did. For them, free and fair elections are an accomplishment in themselves and having the army oversee this transition to democracy creates a sense of stability. 

Members of April 6 also voted, eager to support this fledgling democracy even if it was not happening precisely in the way they hoped. For the young activists, there was no contradiction between voting in the election and continuing their protest against the current military regime. 

In particular, they disapproved of SCAF's appointment of Kamal el-Ganzouri as the new prime minister of the transitional council. He had been prime minister under Mubarak and the move reinforced the view on the street that 'Mubarak' is a culture as much as a man, and until that culture is eliminated entirely, there can be no meaningful political change.

That is why Mossaab, Ahmed and a number of other April 6 activists decided to camp outside the cabinet offices, the office from which el-Ganzouri works.

But last Friday, el-Ganzouri told the military to clear the streets of protestors in 15 minutes. Security forces clashed with protesters. Rocks rained down from the rooftops of government buildings. Riot police set tents alight and demonstrators responded by burning government offices.  

Mossaab was attacked: "The soldiers were using wood and iron bars to hit me. After I fell on to the ground they were hitting me on my legs, my arms and head. They were hitting me with their feet and stamped on my face with their shoes."

Live ammunition was also fired and a bullet hit Mossaab's friend Ahmed Mansoor in the head. He died almost instantly.

Since then the violence has continued. In all, 13 people have reportedly been killed. Over the last few days images of army thugs brutally beating and kicking a half-stripped woman protestor as they dragged her over the ground, have shocked the world. 

There has been widespread condemnation of the Egyptian army’s harsh response to the demonstrations. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, criticised the excessive use of force and Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, called the incidents she had seen on TV "shocking" and "not worthy of a great people".

Egyptian Female Protesters Beaten With Metal Poles

Day Of Shame In Egypt 

Submitted by "Sayf Maslul"

By INDERDEEP BAINS 
Last updated at 10:05 AM on 19th December 2011 
Courtesy Of "The Daily Mail"  

Shocking images revealing the brutality of Egypt’s armed forces in quelling protests caused outrage around the world yesterday.   

In a video broadcast on the internet, security forces dressed in riot gear are seen chasing a woman and beating her to the ground with metal bars before stripping her and kicking her repeatedly. One soldier stamps his foot hard on her chest. 

Other images showed women beaten unconscious. 

Brutal: This shocking image shows Egyptian army soldiers dragging this helpless woman on the ground and kicking her hard in the chest after ripping her clothes from her body

Outnumbered: This woman screams in pain as she is surrounded by five male soldiers during protests in the Egyptian capital and beaten with poles

After being viciously beaten by the ten-strong mob, the woman lies helplessly on the ground as her shirt is ripped from her body and a man kicks her with full force in her exposed chest.

Moments earlier she had been struck countless times in the head and body with metal batons, not content with the brutal beating delivered by his fellow soldier, one man stamped on her head repeatedly. 

She feebly tried to shield her head from the relentless blows with her hands.

But she was knocked unconscious in the shameful attack and left lying motionless as the military men mindlessly continued to beat her limp and half-naked body. 

Before she was set upon by the guards, three men appeared to carry her as they tried to flee the approaching military.

But they were too slow and the soldiers caught up with them, capturing the women and knocking one of the men to the ground.

The two other men were forced to abandoned their fellow protestors and continued running, looking helplessly back at the two they left behind being relentlessly attacked as they lay on the ground.

Brutally injured: This woman is left barely conscious and splattered in blood after being beaten the military in violent clashes between rock-throwing protesters and military police

Shameless: Egyptian army soldiers use brutal force to arrest this female protester and drag her by her hair during clashes with military police near Cairo's Tahrir Square

Violent: The heavy handed Egyptian army soldiers drag the arrested a woman protester off by her hair

This is just one of the hundreds of shameful injustices seen in Cairo's Tahrir Square where Egypt's military took a dramatically heavy hand on Saturday to crush protests against its rule.

Clashes with security forces continued for a third day yesterday near Egypt’s parliament. Soldiers erected huge concrete barricades, but an exchange of stones and firebombs continued. The army also used water tanks to spray the crowd and fired gun shots in the air.

At least ten have been killed in the violence, including two children aged 12 and 13. Two died after their skulls were fractured by stones thrown during the battles and at least six were shot dead, despite army and government claims that no live fire was being used. 

In Tahrir Square,  centre of the violence, demonstrators demanding an end to military rule have been camped out for the last few weeks. A 14-year-old girl pushed back her headscarf  to reveal a bloodied bandage. She was struck on the head by a stone thrown by a soldier on a rooftop. 

Her mother said they had come every day to protest against the brutal methods of the military council which has controlled the country since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted following mass street protests last February. ‘There is no justice in Egypt any more,’ she said.

Aya Emad said that troops dragged her by her headscarf and hair into the Cabinet headquarters. The 24-year-old said soldiers kicked her on the ground, an officer shocked her with an electrical prod and another slapped her on the face, leaving her nose broken and her arm in a sling.

Man-handled: Egyptian soldiers clash with this female protester and two male protestors near Cairo's Tahrir Square

Protection: A female and two male Egyptian protester use a metal sheet as a shield as they throw rocks at military police, unseen, behind the gates and inside the Parliament building near Cairo's Tahrir Square

Brave: Two women join protesters as they shout anti-military council slogans near the cabinet in Cairo

Mona Seif, an activist who was briefly detained Friday, said she saw an officer repeatedly slapping a detained old woman in the face.

'It was a humiliating scene,' Seif told the private TV network Al-Nahar. 'I have never seen this in my life.'

NOTE: The following video was not part of the above article. 

Egyptian Women March Against Military Brutality:

Guns Cannot Forever Be Used To Rule Arab Societies

By Rami G. Khouri 
November 24, 2011 01:28 AM 
Courtesy Of "The Daily Star"

The resurgence of protests and clashes with police in Cairo and other Egyptian cities this week is more significant than the mass rallies that led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak nine months ago. That’s because this week’s events touch on the heart of the problem of the mediocrity of the modern Arab world and its tattered states: the exaggerated role of the military in public life.

The striking differences between the January-February demonstrations and this week’s events are important to grasp for understanding what is happening in Egypt and the Arab world. The January-February demonstrations were largely non-ideological and lacked sharp political focus, reflecting as they did a widespread demand to get rid of the Mubarak regime and allow Egyptians to practice freely their rights as citizens and human beings. Today’s protests are very different, because they have a sharp ideological focus that actually demands policy changes, namely the military’s turning over power to legitimate civilian authorities.

The fate of this ideological battle between men armed with guns and citizens who have as their weapon an ability to bestow the legitimacy emanating from the consent of the governed resonates throughout the Arab world, where similar issues are being debated and resolved in a variety of ways. The contrast between the situations in Tunisia and Egypt this month is testimony to the fact that bad things happen to a country when the armed forces try to dominate the governance system. Conversely, good things happen when security agencies do their job of protecting security and leave the business of governance to the elected state institutions.

This military-to-civilian transition is not an easy one to make, but it is absolutely crucial if Arab countries are to have any hope of living and developing in normal conditions. The transition is all the more difficult in some cases, like Egypt’s, where the military has been in power without interruption since the 1952 revolution.

It should be no surprise that the first major revolts this year occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria – countries where individuals or families have held power for decades. In Jordan, mild protests since spring have publicly called on the intelligence department to stay out of people’s daily lives and the business of government. Throughout the Arab world, governance has remained erratic or mediocre, corruption has spread, and national potential has remained largely unattained because of the severe distortions resulting from soldiers administering state and society.

Despite their fine qualities, soldiers are not trained, equipped or qualified to run countries, and the modern Arab world is testament to their collective failures. More important, they do not have a mandate from citizens to run their countries. Egypt and Tunisia revealed that citizens respect their armed forces and want them to play a role in the transition toward democratic governance. The process is working smoothly in Tunisia because the military accepts the limits to its role; it is messy in Egypt because the military seems intent on maintaining a strong grip on public affairs and order.

This ideological struggle between military and civilian rule is playing out in the streets of Egypt because this is the only option available to Egyptians, who are increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of the transition from military to civilian rule. There are two critical issues that will define how serious are the transitions to democratic governance in the Arab world. One is civilian oversight of military and security institutions; the other is civilian oversight of national budgets and expenditures. Neither of those things has happened fully, but both remain firmly on the transformative agenda that still drives the populist revolts.

The events in Egypt continue to fill me with hope – despite the thousands of brave people who continue to die for their freedom in the region – because they reveal the true quality and depth of the values that ordinary people feel in their hearts, and want to see reflected in their governments and public life.

The most important value is the principle of the consent of the governed. Arab generals and colonels will have to learn this, or they will face the same fate as some ex-Arab leaders who are now dead, exiled or on trial because they thought guns could rule over all else in life.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly by THE DAILY STAR.

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 24, 2011, on page 7.

Arafats Road to Olslo began in the 1970s with the large scale funding pouring in from the Gulf countries [EPA]


Arabs Have Historically Revolted Every Decade Against Rulers and The West Has Counter-Revolted Most Attempts. 

By Joseph Massad 
Last Modified: 18 Nov 2011 10:45 
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

New York, New York - The current popular challenges to the Western-sponsored Arab dictatorships are hardly a new occurrence in modern Arab history. We have seen such uprisings against European colonialism in the region since its advent in Algeria in 1830 and in Egypt in 1882. Revolts in Syria in the 1920s against French rule and especially in Palestine from 1936 to 1939 against British colonial rule and Zionist settler-colonialism were massive by global standards. Indeed the Palestinian Revolt would inspire others in the colonised world and would remain an inspiration to Arabs for the rest of the century and beyond. Anti-colonial resistance which also opposed the colonially-installed Arab regimes continued in Jordan, in Egypt, in Bahrain, Iraq, North and South Yemen, Oman, Morocco, and Sudan. The massive anti-colonial revolt in Algeria would finally bring about independence in 1962 from French settler colonialism. The liberation of Algeria meant that one of the two European settler-colonies in the Arab world was down, and only one remained: Palestine. On the territorial colonial front, much of the Arabian Gulf remained occupied by the British until the 1960s and early 1970s, and awaited liberation.   

After the 1967 War

Amidst the dominant melancholia that struck the Arab world following the 1967 defeat by Israel's simultaneous invasions of three Arab countries and the occupation of their territories and the entirety of Palestine, the Palestinian revolutionary guerrillas' challenge to Israel's colonial power at the Battle of Karamah in March 1968 brought renewed hope to tens of millions of Arabs and renewed concern for the Arab neo-colonial dictatorships (Arafat's much exaggerated role of his exploits during the battle notwithstanding). The Palestinian revolution was inspirational to many but it also coincided with revolutionary efforts not only around the Third World generally but also in Arab countries as well, which in turn, had inspired the Palestinians.

The best revolutionary anti-colonial news in the Arab world after the June 1967 defeat would come from the Arabian Peninsula. It was in November 1967 that the South Yemeni revolutionaries delivered an ignominious defeat to the British and liberated their country from the yoke of colonial Britain, which had ruled Aden since 1838. The South Yemenis would soon found the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, which would last for 22 years before its ultimate dissolution by North Yemen and its Saudi allies.

In neighbouring Oman, the on-going struggle to liberate the country entered a new stage of guerrilla warfare under the leadership of the People's Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), which came together in September 1968 as a result of the unification of a number of Omani guerrilla groups fighting the British-supported Sultan Said bin Taymur. The PFLOAG had liberated territory in Dhofar from which it continued to launch its attacks to liberate the rest of the country. Indeed national liberation movements were active across the Gulf, and not least in Bahrain where an on-going national liberation struggle, a workers' movement, students and women's activism, all coalesced against British colonial rule and their local servants.

Repression

But the US-British-Saudi-Israeli alliance was determined to crush all the revolutionary groups that it could defeat and co-opt those that it could not crush. The effort started in the Gulf. Bahrain, which had been the hotbed of workers and anti-colonial unrest for decades, continued its struggle against British domination and the Bahraini ruling family allied with British colonialism. But as the British were forced out of South Yemen and the threat to their Omani client continued afoot, they transferred their military command to Bahrain, a step that was followed  by massive British capital investment in the country (as well as in Dubai). These developments expectedly brought more repression against the Bahraini people and their national liberation movement. Indeed, it was in this context that the Shah of Iran laid territorial claims to Bahrain and threatened to annex it to Iran as its "fourteenth province." 

His territorial ambitions would only be tempered by his Western allies and the United Nations in 1970, after which the Shah would give up on his claims in return for massive Iranian capital investment in the emerging small Arab states of the Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates. The West thanked the Shah for his magnanimity and continued to reward him diplomatically and politically.

On the Jordanian front, King Hussein's army would reverse the Palestinian guerrillas' triumphs and defeat them in a massive onslaught in September 1970. The PLO guerrillas would finally be expelled from the country completely in July 1971. However, the PLO guerrillas continued to have a strong base in Lebanon from which they continued to operate against Israel and the Arab dictatorships.

In Sudan, the communist party continued to get stronger in the late 1960s, until the 1969 coup by Ja'far al-Numeiri, who initially could not fully marginalise the communists and waited until he strengthened his regime in 1971 to do so. An attempted coup against his authoritarian rule failed. In its wake, he rounded up thousands of communists and executed all the party's major leaders, destroying the largest communist party in the Arab world. The Numeiri dictatorship would continue until 1985 and soon the democratic struggle against him would fail bringing in the Saudi-supported candidate Omar al-Bashir who seized power in 1989 continuing in Numeiri's footsteps.

Only the PFLOAG kept advancing in the early seventies, which required a massive effort on the part of the US-British-Saudi-Israeli alliance to defeat it. The Shah of Iran and the Jordanian King were subcontracted for the effort. They dispatched military contingents to Oman, and, abetted by British advisors, were finally able to defeat the guerrillas and safeguard the throne for Sultan Qabus, the son of Sultan Said, who overthrew his father in a palace coup in 1970 organised by the British.  With the final defeat of the Omani revolutionaries in 1976, the PLO remained the only revolutionary group that survived the onslaught alongside a poor and weak South Yemen, which would finally be swallowed up by the Saudi-supported North Yemen in 1990.

Co-Optation

Saudi and other Gulf money poured into the coffers of the PLO to make sure that Palestinian revolutionism, which was partially crushed in Jordan, would never turn its guns against another Arab regime again. Indeed, Gulf money would transform the PLO into a liberation group that was funded by the most reactionary regimes in the Third World. Arafat's road to Oslo began after the 1973 war and the massive funding he would begin to receive from all oil-rich Arab dictatorships, from Gaddafi to Saddam Hussein and all the Gulf monarchies. It was this domestication of the PLO that impelled Arab regimes to recognise it in 1974 as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and the main reason why they supported its recognition by the UN that same year. 

Indeed, Arafat's reactionary alliance with Arab dictators was such that some PLO intelligence apparatuses began to share intelligence on Arab dissidents with Arab dictators, including the PLO intelligence apparatus led by Abu Za'im who surrendered Saudi dissident Nasir Sa'id in December 1979 to Saudi intelligence based on the request of the Saudi ambassador to Lebanon. Said was never heard from again and is believed to have been killed by the Saudi authorities. On the diplomatic and solidarity front, while the Polisario front declared the independence of the Western Sahara in 1976, Arafat refused to recognise the state out of respect for his alliance with King Hassan II.

The New Uprisings

As the Palestinian revolutionary groups were the only ones not fully domesticated, as far as the US and other imperial powers were concerned, though they had become sufficiently domesticated from the perspective of the Arab regimes, the new challenge would come from the Palestinian people themselves who revolted in 1987 against their Israeli occupiers. It was this second Palestinian major revolt in half a century, which many now see as inspirational to the present uprisings across the Arab world, which had to be crushed. The Israelis tried their best to crush it but failed. The PLO took it over quickly lest a new Palestinian leadership supplant the PLO's own authority to represent the Palestinians. As the PLO took over the intifada, efforts were made by the Israelis and the Americans to finally co-opt the PLO and neutralise its potential as a spoiler of US and Israeli policy in the region. It was in this context that Oslo was signed and the PLO was fully transformed from a threat to Arab dictatorships, their US imperial sponsor, and the Israeli occupation, into an agent of all three, under the guise of the Palestinian Authority, which would help enforce the Israeli occupation in an unholy alliance with Gulf dictators and the United States. From then on, PLO/PA guns will only target the Palestinian people.

The US-British-Saudi-Israeli alliance in the region today is following the same strategies they followed in late 1960s and early 1970s and continuing the strategy they followed with the PLO in the early 1990s. They are crushing those uprisings they can crush and are co-opting those they cannot. The efforts to fully co-opt the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have made great strides over the last few months, though they have not been successful in silencing or demobilising the populations. On the other side, Bahrain's uprising was the first to be crushed with the efforts to crush the Yemenis continuing afoot without respite. It was in Libya and in Syria where the axis fully hijacked the revolts and took them over completely. While Syrians, like Libyans before them, continue their valiant uprising against their brutal regime demanding democracy and social justice, their quest is already doomed unless they are able to dislodge the US-British-Saudi-Qatari axis that has fully taken over their struggle - which is very unlikely.

The Palestinians

This brings us to the Palestinian scene. The Palestinian uprising or intifada of 1987 was the first unarmed massive civilian revolt to take place in decades. It was in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the first US invasion of the Gulf that the United States decided to co-opt the Palestinian uprising by giving political and financial benefits to a PLO class of bureaucrats who would proceed to sell out the Palestinian struggle. Thus Arafat neutralised the uprising at Oslo in 1993 and went on to wine and dine with Israel's and America's leaders while his people remained under occupation.

But If the Palestinians were a source of concern to the Arab regimes after 1968 lest they help other Arabs revolt against their dictatorships, today, it is the Palestinian Authority (PA) that is worried that the Arab uprisings may influence West Bank Palestinians to revolt against the PA, which continues its intensive security collaboration with the Israeli occupation and its US sponsor. Indeed, while the Israelis failed in the late 1970s in their effort to create a political body of Palestinian collaborators through their infamous Village Leagues, the PA became, not the new "Urban Leagues" that many Palestinians dubbed it, but a veritable National League of collaborators serving the Israeli occupation. The PA's recent bid for statehood and recognition at the UN and at UNESCO is an attempt to resolve the current stasis of its non-existent "peace process" and the dogged negotiations with the Israelis before the Palestinians revolt against it, especially given the dwindling dividends to the beneficiaries of the Oslo arrangement. 

The PA indeed has two routes before it in the face of the collapse of the so-called "peace process": dissolve itself and cease to play the role of enforcer of the occupation; or continue to collaborate by entrenching itself further through recognition by international institutions to preserve its power and the benefits to its members. It has chosen the second option under the guise of supporting Palestinian national independence. How successful it is going to be in its entrenchment bid remains to be seen, though its success or failure will be calamitous for the Palestinian people who will not get any independence from Israeli settler colonialism as long as the PA is at the helm.

As I have argued before, the Israeli-PA-US disagreement is about the terms and territorial size of the disconnected Bantustans that the PA will be given and the nature and amount of repressive power and weapons its police force would have to use against the Palestinian people, while ascertaining that such weapons would never have a chance of being used against Israel.  If Israel shows some flexibility on those, then the disconnected Bantustans will be quickly recognised as a "sovereign Palestinian state" and not a single illegal Jewish colonial settler will have to give up the stolen lands of the Palestinians and return to Brooklyn, to name a common place of origin for many Jewish colonial settlers. It is this arrangement that the PA is trying to sell to Israel and the US. Without it, the PA is threatening that West Bankers may very well revolt against it, which would be bad for Israel and the US. So far, neither the US nor Israel is buying it.

The Struggle Continues

As for the larger Arab context, those who call what has unfolded in the last year in the Arab World as an Arab "awakening" are not only ignorant of the history of the last century, but also deploy Orientalist arguments in their depiction of Arabs as a quiescent people who put up with dictatorship for decades and are finally waking up from their torpor. Across the Arab world, Arabs have revolted against colonial and local tyranny every decade since World War I. It has been the European colonial powers and their American heir who have stood in their way every step of the way and allied themselves with local dictators and their families (and in many cases handpicking such dictators and putting them on the throne).

The US-European sponsorship of the on-going counterrevolutions across the Arab world today is a continuation of a time-honoured imperial tradition, but so is continued Arab resistance to imperialism and domestic tyranny. The uprisings that started in Tunisia in December 2010 continue afoot despite major setbacks to all of them. This is not to say that things have not changed and are not changing significantly, it is to say, however, that many of the changes are reversible and that the counterrevolution has already reversed a significant amount and is working hard to reverse more. Vigilance is mandatory on the part of those struggling for democratic change and social justice, especially in these times of upheaval and massive imperial mobilisation. Some of the battles may have been lost but the Arab peoples' war against imperialism and for democracy and social justice continues across the Arab world.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He is author of several books including: The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006) andDesiring Arabs (Chicago University Press, 2007), and Colonial Effects (Colomibia University Press, 2011).

The Battle Of Cairo's Muhammad Mahmoud Street

Protesters from all social strata took part in the battle of Muhammad Mahmoud Street [EPA]


The Street Battles Taking Place In Cairo Are Emblematic Of Its Second Revolution: Tear Gas, Hair Gel and Tramadol. 

By Lucie Ryzova 
Last Modified: 28 Nov 2011 14:49 
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Cairo, Egypt - "The people in Muhammad Mahmoud are decidedly not revolutionaries, they are vandals," a police captain insisted in a phone-in to Yusri Foda's prime TV show Akhir Kalam. The officer in the video had a point. 

Four days into what is now known as the Second Revolution, the Egyptian state media admitted that "the Meidan" was populated with "protesters" who might even have "legitimate demands". 

But explaining, and even more so, understanding, what has been going on in Muhammad Mahmoud and large parts of the Abdeen neighbourhood remains problematic.

The Egyptian police has used numerous brutal methods to suppress the peaceful protesters who have been gathering in Meidan Tahrir ["Tahrir Square"] since Friday, November 18. In the early hours of Saturday morning, security forces cleared a small sit-in of musabi al-thawra - those wounded in the January/February revolution - from the saniyya (the "tray" - the circular grassy area about 70 metres in diameter near the entrances of Tal'at Harb and Tahrir Streets).

The tactical goal of such a brutal attack on a small number of protesters begs many questions. Supporters of the protesters rushed to their aid, and on the afternoon of Sunday 20, the military police once again cleared Tahrir Square.

Videos of security forces throwing bodies on refuse piles shocked the world. But ever since that Sunday, the square itself and the Tal'at Harb area to the north of it has been a perfectly safe, "liberated" zone, with the occasional exception of a teargas canister thrown deep into the crowds - and one particular exception of the vicious attack with a suspected nerve agent on Tuesday 22, just before midnight.

In fact, when people talk to each other on the phone to make sure their friends or loved ones are safe, one often hears "don't worry, I am in the Meidan" meaning: "I am safe." It is in Abdeen, the streets east of Tahrir Square between Muhammad Mahmoud Street and Meidan Bab al-Luq, leading to the ministry of interior, where a battle was waged during the past week.

And a battle it was. People went there knowing what they were getting into. They went there to fight. Police threw teargas canisters and used shotguns (occasionally also live ammunition); against them was a line of young men mostly throwing stones, but also Molotov cocktails and small homemade bombs.

The battle lines were drawn - on the first day of the Second Revolution - as a physical human barricade protecting the protesters in the square from the advance of police forces bent on clearing the area, but then developed into a battle for its own sake. As I write, on Thursday, November 24, the battlefront was demarcated by a wall being built by concrete blocks, imposing a makeshift truce.

But for the first five days of the battle, this fighting zone was constantly changing, consisting of advances and retreats closer and further from the Ministry of Interior, often penetrating deep into the Abdeen neighbourhood. This moving battlefield was marked by smells, sounds and collective body language.

Groups of young men on the front line were exposed to swathes of tear gas. Motorcycles carried the wounded and those exposed to the gas back to safety. Behind the front line, there were crowds of supporters and onlookers, escaping from the rain of tear gas and shotgun shells, and moving back and forth closer and further from the Ministry of Interior.

A Symbolic Battle

It was a "battle for the dakhiliyya ['the Ministry of Interior']", but that does not mean that any of the young men facing the police necessarily wanted or intended to take over the ministry's building. It was a symbolic battle - or more precisely, a frighteningly real and bloody fight over a symbolic location; the fight itself was the message.

The khatt al-nar ["firing line"] belonged to particular people who went there to beat and get beaten. Throughout the first week of the Second Revolution, Tahrir Square and the battlezone to its east each had its own demographic.

Each was a different crowd, but they can only be understood as a symbiosis - a specific social alliance - as both constructed and supported each other, and they increasingly overlapped. The square, the "safe" zone, contained a truly socially mixed crowd. People from all walks of life came there, often several times a day, in support of those who decided to camp out, to help "hold" the square and support its cause.

One saw a social mix rarely seen in Egypt (though it was famously present in the First Revolution): middle-class men and women, some of them activists but most of them not; young and old, in suits, kefiyehs and jeans, alongside the galabiyas and long beards of the salafis; bareheaded women as well as munaqqabat (fully veiled women).

On the front line, by contrast (and naturally so given the nature of the battle), the demographic was predominantly (though not exclusively) young male and socially marginal.

As in some of the key engagements of the First Revolution, major credit for holding the frontline goes to Egypt's football ultras. They know how to manoeuvre collectively, how to engage the police, and how to and play "hide, seek and hit" with the security forces. Crucially, they have a long-standing "open account" with the security forces, meaning that they had suffered at the security forces' hands, and wanted payback.

Ultras often provided the "leadership" (however improvised) and communicational and organisational know-how essential to survive major and prolonged exposure to tear gas and shotgun fire, and to make sure fighters changed and rested periodically. The ultras have no clear social profile: they include the lower as well as middle strata of Egypt's young men, united by age, codes of honour marked as much by loyalty to their team as by enmity to the security forces. What marks the ultras is both the will and the capacity to engage the police on something approaching an equal footing - though the logistical capacity to inflict damage is of course not comparable.

But while ultras' know-how might have helped substantially in articulating and holding the front line, the front line was made of many other young men who carried on the fight. Some were young Islamists, refusing to obey their official party line. But the majority of front line fighters came from the substantial population of young, socially marginal men from Cairo's peripheral 'ashwa'i ["informal"] neighbourhoods. They are sometimes called the wilad sis.

The wilad sis are young men who might be described as working class, though most are unemployed, underemployed, unskilled and semi-skilled, doing occasional jobs that change every day (though on most days, there is no "work"). They are often marked by a particular dress code and hairstyle that often involves copious quantities of gel (the word sis alludes to the attention they often pay to their appearance, considered by other Egyptians as almost effeminate).

In the past few years, motorcycle culture became widespread among this crowd. It was their cheap Chinese motorcycles, constantly moving the wounded back into safety, which provided the lifeline of the battle zone. Motorcycle "cavalry" was an important element of the Battle of Muhammad Mahmoud Street. Such tactics would not have been possible a few years ago.

Blurred Social Distinctions

The flood of Chinese motorcycles is a fairly new phenomenon. Unlike in Tahrir Square, marked by an articulate political culture and clear political stances and demands, the front line fighters who defend the safe zone of the square are the same crowd who "terrorise" downtown Cairo on foot, and recently on motorcycles, during both Muslim holidays Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha - a phenomenon much publicised in recent campaigns against sexual harassment. 

For many of the men battling police, it's less about politics and more about regaining their personal dignity [EPA]

In the Battle of Muhammad Mahmoud, the same unstoppable force of sheer young masculinity that temporarily engulfs downtown on the eIds was settling its longstanding accounts with the dakhiliyya.  

Increasingly distinctions between the young men on the front line (Islamist youth, ultras, and wilad sis) are blurred. All of them share a history of engagement with the regime and its harshly imposed order and an articulation of codes of honour.

For them, this is a battle that is not articulated as being "for something", but as a visceral fight to settle accounts with the security forces. For them, it is a battle of karama ["dignity"], but not of karama as a universal human honour. It is rather a historically and socially constituted honour that has a lot to do with how honour and masculinity were constructed locally. They were not fighting for any high-minded outcome such as democracy; in fact, most possibly they do not think anything "good" would come out of the fight. But the fight gave them back their dignity, even if temporarily.

Karama for them means their bodies not being subject to torture, not being mistreated at checkpoints and police stations, and having the small cash in their pockets extracted by each officer they pass so that they don't get thrown in the police station overnight - until they can produce more cash. They don't necessarily believe that any force (any political outcome that might come as result of this fight) would help them to recover their dignity. They fight to beat thedakhiliyya, to have beaten the dakhiliyya.

As I write, they have been battling the dakhiliyya for a week; as the battle goes on, it is increasingly addictive and contagious. Here, both the ultras culture and the Tramadol drug culture of the youth from marginal neighbourhoods hold major credit for their endurance. The ultras blurred the line between battle and sport early on; especially at night, the battlefield in Muhammad Mahmoud is often lit with shamarikh, the coloured flare fireworks used during football matches.

When a police advance was impending, the front line warned the crowds of supporters and onlookers at their back and prepared itself for an attack by regular, drum-like banging on metal fences. Police attacks and advances were also marked by cheering and whistling. The cheers, whistling, lights and smells of fresh rounds of tear gas soon to fall on and beyond the frontline, rather than being a deterrent, were actually energising. This energising combination of lights, smells and sounds of battle were contagious.

Also, running has a meaning. The crowds had long learned to not react to collective running, knowing the danger of stampede and cautious of the fact that such running might often be the action of provocateurs to create fear and panic. But close to the front line, running back and forth was a function of the fight, of the energy (to keep up the adrenaline) and self-protection necessary to endure.

Provocateurs on the payroll of the secret service were also responsible for lighting up rubbish bins in the streets of Abdeen on fire. Their purpose might again have been to create fear and chaos (and of course to feed the state media discourse portraying the events as acts of vandalism). But the real outcome was often the opposite: small localised fires in the side streets of Abdeen helped the fighters: they lit up the streets whose public lights had been off for the whole week, and more importantly, they acted as morale-boosters, adding to the dramatic battlefield mise-en-scene in which the line between what was a real fight and what was sport was increasingly blurred.

But while similarities with sport and stadium rituals are key to understanding the endurance of the fighters, what was going on in the streets of Abdeen was also decidedly not sport. It was a bloody fight with immense casualties inflicted disproportionately on the civilian side; but this fight was intended to be very physical (to hurt) on both sides.

Varied Intentions

In Egypt, power has a long history of inscribing itself on the bodies of its subjects. Torture and humiliation are endemic, and are performed disproportionately on this demographic. In the current fight, the police aimed its guns at the upper body, and specifically eyes.

Not everybody came to the battle line to fight. Many came to have a look, to hang out, to support their friends, and got dragged into the contagious atmosphere of the fight. All the rituals were so energising and adrenaline-making that anybody could become a fighter. Middle class activists (as well as Islamist youths) were also part of the front line, including middle-class activist women.

But the rank and file of the front line was from a different world, from a very masculine culture; they might fight hand to hand beside middle-class women activists, but they would never tolerate their women to be there; (and indeed they might harass foreign women when they see them, as totally "out of their place").  

Egyptian mainstream middle class culture can hardly relate to most of the front line fighters. This is what will maintain the upper hand for the state and state-allied media in defining them as thugs, or baltagiyya, whenever the camera gets uncomfortably close. The focus on middle-class martyrs has a positive function of "translating" the battlezone for the rest of the country and its middle class public.

In Tahrir Square as of Thursday morning, the effort to stress the martyrdom of the not-so-middle class youth was evident on banners across the Meidan: Rigala Bulaq al-Dakrur qadimuna li-shehada ["the men of Bulaq al-Dakrur coming for martyrdom"]. Bulaq al-Dakrur is one of the many informal but socially mixed neighbourhoods on the periphery of the formal city of Cairo.  

But the frontline and the Meidan are also part of one whole. The frontline's raison d'etre is (partly, originally) to protect the Meidan, even if it also developed into a fight for its own sake. Without the on-the-ground crowd of ultras and thewilad sis prepared to stop police violence with their own bodies, and most importantly, to hit back, the largely middle-class opposition could not have held the Meidan for long.

The strength of the Meidan, physical, political and intellectual (tens of thousands of people, substantially of middle class demographics, including the occasional celebrity, making politically articulated demands) made the fight on the frontline possible and somehow legitimate. Without the protection of the greater cause of the Meidan, the not-so-photogenic fighters would have been crushed by the brutal force of the army a long time ago, with nobody paying any attention. They would be both swept away and forgotten as vandals and baltageyya.

For most of the week, and until Thursday, the dynamics between the square and formal politicians had reached a standoff.

Formal political forces and political alliances that emerged during the past nine months are null and void in Tahrir Square. From the square it seems clear that the time for compromise has long since passed. Only radical solutions are acceptable: withdrawal of the army from politics, a complete restructuring of the police forces, and the imposition of a transitional government or presidential council with a clear time-frame and full powers.

A Battle Of Wills

From the position of formal politics, such solutions are not (yet) acceptable. One may question whether they ever will be. But the Meidan is determined to accept nothing less, this time, as the comparison with the January revolution is on everybody's lips; indeed, people are here because they see themselves as having been naïve back in the spring when they cleared the Meidan, leaving the SCAF in charge of the revolution.

It is now a battle of will: who will put conditions to whom: us or them? Who names the new government or transitional council: SCAF or the Meidan? Even if not everybody expresses their position in an articulate way, the general refusal to accept and trust the SCAF on the ground seems overwhelming. Just as the Meidan sees formal political channels (SCAF and parties alike) as illegitimate, the regime's tactic is to delegitimise the Meidan, to create a rift between it and the rest of the country, to pose the "Meidan" against the "street".

The moment to apply brute force has probably passed, but the army has not necessarily had its last word. Internal developments inside the army might be the one thing that resolves this Mexican standoff in one way or another.

But for most of the front line fighters, the battle is not about politics in the formal sense, but about resistance in the most basic, instinctive sense. The police might mean stability and order for mainstream middle-class society, but not for them.

Most of these youth come from neighbourhoods that never experience constructive policing. The police for them constitute a repressive regime that extracts rents and performs its crude power on their bodies. They have never seen anything good come of it, and cannot imagine that they ever will. The best that can happen for them is that the police stay away from their lives.

But while the momentous social alliance of the Meidan allows them, for the time being, to settle their accounts with the police "as men" (face to face, crude force against crude force), this is also a very momentous situation. 

Much of their determination comes from knowing that once the Muhammad Mahmoud Street battle is done, the police are likely to continue their blood feud back in their neighbourhoods, away from the scrutiny of the media, and far from the middle-class activists protected in the fight.

Lucie Ryzova is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Modern History, University of Oxford. She is a cultural historian working on modern Egypt.