Solidarity in search of a vision

Solidarity with the Palestinians is reaching new heights.But what next? asks Amira Howeidy
The name of 20-year-old Mohamed El-Saqqa, a commerce student at Alexandria University who was killed by anti-riot police on Tuesday, will be remembered for some time to come.
For the first time since the outbreak of daily anti- Israeli and anti-American demonstrations, which have continued throughout the past two weeks, anti-riot police attacked the crowd with shotgun pellets to contain Tuesday's protests.
But this was also a protest on an unprecedented scale. The massive demonstration of 8,000 students at Alexandria University spilled out into the Mediterranean city itself, as thousands of citizens joined in.
This popular outburst, which is occasionally referred to as an "Egyptian Intifada," is taking on different shapes and forms as it gains momentum.
Approximately 260 students were injured and taken to three different hospitals in the Alexandria protest, while security forces arrested 50 people, sources told Al-Ahram Weekly.
According to a statement issued by the Interior Ministry, the clashes between anti-riot police and the students occurred when students insisted on taking the demonstration outside campus and "hurled stones at the police, injuring 33 officers and policemen,some of whom suffered direct eye injuries and broken bones."
The protesters attacked the police with stones and empty water bottles and also damaged vehicles and a number of shops. "After five hours of restraint and using tear-gas and water cannon in vain," police forces "were forced to shoot to stop the rioting which got out of control," said the statement.
Student sources, interviewed by the Weekly, claim, however,that they wanted only to march to the American Cultural Centre to deliver a protest statement, an act which they wanted to coincide with US Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit to Egypt on Tuesday.
Tuesday's violent events might prove to be a turning point in the two-week-long popular outburst against Israel and the US, which has ranged from massive demonstrations on the scale of those at Alexandria to daily picketing.
Some are worried about its consequences. "I'm quite pessimistic," says Bahieddin Hassan, director of the Cairo Human Rights Research Centre. "All this is happening at a time when there is no organised political movement in Egypt, none at all. On the other hand, the security apparatus' performance lacks political sense."
"In the total absence of political parties or any political movement, Egypt will pay a heavy price as a result. And this is the responsibility of the government, which has done all it can to eliminate political activity in Egypt," Hassan told the Weekly.
But political stagnation and the unguided nature of the popular reaction does not seem to be stopping independent individuals from doing things their own way.
Rola Qudsi puffs her cigarette smoke towards the ceiling of Café Riche in downtown Cairo. She is fired up about an idea that she and her friends developed a few days ago. Next to her chair on the floor are 1,000 neatly-wrapped Palestinian paper flags, only a fraction of the 40,000 she and her friends printed earlier in the day.
"We want to express our solidarity differently," she says. "We want to make a 'visual statement' that will illustrate solidarity with the Palestinian cause, a reiteration of our refusal to accept the violations, and a commitment to peace at the same time."
The idea is to encourage people to prominently display the Palestinian flag from their homes to illustrate the number of individuals supporting the Palestinian struggle. The campaign is picking up quickly and some streets in Cairo have already responded well to the concept of visual solidarity. By Tuesday morning, small Palestinian flags hanging in clusters were visible in some streets in Abdin, Helmia and Heliopolis.
Qudsi said she got the idea after her experiences last week, when she and a group of her friends attended the 1 April demonstration in front of Cairo University.
"This was the first time we had joined a demonstration and as we walked towards the main gate of Cairo University, we found thousands of central security forces, and the entire area was full of tear gas," she said. "It made us think of other ways to support our Palestinian brethren."
More importantly, many would argue, hanging a flag from your home window is safe and legal. Egypt's emergency law, which has been in force since 1981 following the assassination of President Anwar El-Sadat, bans both street demonstrations and the collection of donations without the permission Ministry of Social Affairs.
Although Egyptians have grown accustomed to living under emergency law for over more than two decades, effective popular support for Palestine has proved to be difficult in light of the numerous restraints. The government has often turned a blind eye to many pro-Palestinian activities, ranging from solidarity demonstrations to sending donations without official permission.
It is in this environment that thousands of Egyptians, responding to the Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, have become politically charged and highly mobilised -- and are now finding ways to act. Israel's invasion of Palestinian-controlled territories and its humiliation, killing and destruction of Palestinian life and property over the past two weeks, has been met in Egypt by passionate non- stop daily demonstrations across the nation. Although less media attention has been given to these protests of late, they continued to be staged throughout this week. The weekly "launch pad," so to speak, seems to be the Friday noon prayers, most notably in Al-Azhar mosque.
But despite public pressure to cut off ties with Israel, Cairo still wants to keep diplomatic channels open "to serve the Palestinian issue."
Does this mean, many are asking, that demonstrations and other forms of solidarity have failed to achieve their objectives?
"No," Salah Eissa, editor of Al-Qahira newspaper, told Al-Ahram Weekly. "I think the massive demonstrations in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world have worried the American administration. One can clearly see that it is adopting a milder language against Arafat. I think this is because it has sensed the degree of hostility towards it."
People across the country are beginning to ask questions. Now that the momentum is growing, what next? What does this public outburst mean? Has something changed in Egyptian political life? Are we becoming more politicised? Are these the first signs of the strengthening of civil society? Has the fear of the emergency law been broken? And, more pressingly perhaps, what to do with a politically charged nation in the absence of a meaningful, let alone strong, political movement?
"I don't support the claim that the Egyptians were once indifferent and have now stopped being that," argued Galal Amin, an economics professor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and author of a socio-political study of modern Egyptian society, What happened to the Egyptians? "What makes the expression of public sentiments so strong is in fact the magnitude of the injustice [inflicted on the Palestinians] on one hand, and the ineffectiveness of the Arab governments, which has been quite startling actually," he said.
The rage and frustration in this respect, he told Al-Ahram Weekly, "is cumulative; you can be patient for a long time, but then you will explode and this is what the people did." Moreover, the demonstrations taking place abroad and in the Arab world developed, as Amin put it, "a feeling of shame that massive protests are occurring elsewhere but not here. So it's quite contagious."
Like many of her colleagues, Sherine Abul- Naga, an associate professor at Cairo University, has been actively participating in the two-week- long demonstrations and pickets. Questions such as "now what?" and "what next?" serve only to irritate her. "Everybody is asking this question," she snapped. "Well, we have to stress that the magnitude of the demonstrations and protests is new to the Egyptian street. So when we start asking, 'now what?' we're actually aborting a popular movement because no one should expect these demonstrations to create an immediate or direct effect."
So far, it is "only a solidarity movement," Abul- Naga told the Weekly. But that is good enough, she suggests, "because this is a wake-up call after a long sleep. We are non-politicised, so in that sense what's happening is really important. An entire generation has stories to tell from this experience. People are expressing their opinion, that's new. Yes, some of it was violent -- damaging American food chains and clashing with the police -- but wasn't this the case when we started having a free satellite media? At the beginning people were shouting at each other non-stop, now they've matured and they know how to talk with each other. This is exactly what's happening with the Egyptian society. Give it time and we'll see how it moves on from there."
For people like Amin, it is essential that the government or political movements capitalise on this moment. "I don't understand why the government doesn't try to be cunning and use this public outrage as a pressure instrument with the US," he asked. On the other hand, he pointed out, "it's high time Camp David was scrutinised by seasoned lawyers for loopholes. Surely it's not about the duties of Egypt alone. Israel has duties to fulfil too. So we should be asking, has it?"
Meanwhile, El-Qudsi continues hanging up her flags, while others are awaiting the re-launch of this week's protests after Friday prayers.
Protest diary
Friday 5 April
FOLLOWING Friday prayers, 5,000 worshippers at Al-Azhar mosque staged anti-Israel demonstrations and called for jihad. Similar post-Friday-prayer demonstrations took place in several governorates across the nation, including the Delta cities of Kafr El-Sheikh and Tanta and in the Upper Egyptian urban centre of Qena. During their prayers, worshippers performed the salat al-ghaeb, the prayer for the absent.
The Cairo-based Palestinian Women's Union issued a statement condemning the escalation of violence by "Zionist forces" against the Palestinian people and their leadership. The statement called on US President George W Bush and the international community to enforce Security Council resolution 1402 that demands immediate Israeli withdrawal from all Palestinian areas invaded since 29 March 2002.
The Union of Artistic Syndicates issued a statement addressed to Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat expressing their admiration of his "valiant stance in facing the monstrous Israeli war machine supported by the US."
The board of the Pharmacists' Syndicate announced a boycott of imported American medicines that have a generic equivalent in Egypt.
Saturday 6 April
HUNDREDS of people staged a demonstration in front of Arab League headquarters at Cairo's Tahrir Square while Arab foreign ministers were holding an extraordinary meeting on the situation in the occupied territories. Protesters demanded the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador. The Press Syndicate held a sit-in in solidarity with the Palestinians. Central security forces were deployed at the entrance and in the vicinity of the journalists' organisation to prevent protesters from taking to the streets.
The Arab Parliamentary Union held an extraordinary session that called on the international community to intervene for the protection of the Palestinians and demanded Israel's withdrawal from the territories it occupied in the West Bank. It announced the organisation's continued support for the Intifada.
Later in the day, the Egyptian Popular Committee for Solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada met at the Press Syndicate where a convoy packed with LE80,000-worth of donations in the form of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies received by the committee set off for Gaza. It arrived on Monday.
Sunday 7 April
HUNDREDS of lawyers at the Bar Association held their third anti-Israeli demonstration in two weeks followed by a 3-hour sit-in.
Jumping on the bandwagon, an Internet service provider published an ad in the daily Al-Ahram encouraging users to dial its "free Internet" number. "Their resistance: the Intifada; our resistance: support," said the ad. This translates into "donating 5 per cent of the revenues," it explained. (In Egypt, Internet users only pay the cost of the telephone call they make to connect to an ISP; a portion of that fee is paid by the telephone company to the ISP.)
In Al-Wafd, mouthpiece of the opposition Al-Wafd Party, Saudi billionaire Sultan Kamal Adham published two full-page ads in the form of two articles, one entitled "Shame on you Bush, when will you move to control Sharon?" The other saluted Egyptian popular reaction.
In the same vein, the Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions hung anti-Israeli banners bearing slogans including, "Israel is the mother of terrorism," in a position of prominence outside its headquarters on Al-Galaa Street in downtown Cairo.
Al-Wafd announced it will donate 10 per cent of its ad revenues to the Palestinians.
Monday 8 April
TENS of thousands of students demonstrated at universities across the country. In the capital, students from Cairo, Ain Shams and Helwan universities protested against the Israeli aggression; in the country's north, the campuses of Tanta and Suez Canal universities witnessed similar protests, while in the south, students at Sohag and El-Minya shouted slogans denouncing Israel.
For the first time since demonstrations began late last month in Egypt, a group of 50 women, most of whom were Americans and students at the American University in Cairo (AUC), organised a short-lived protest in front of the heavily-guarded US Embassy in Garden City, Cairo. A massive security presence dispersed the demonstrators in less than 15 minutes. Meanwhile, thousands of students at AUC held anti-Israel demonstrations for the second week running. AUC's senate passed a resolution on Palestine expressing "dismay and shock at" the killing of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli military.
The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Mohamed Sayed Tantawi described Sharon's policy as "terrorist."
Tuesday 9 April
THE FIRST Egyptian demonstrator was killed at Alexandria University since protests began late last month. Central Security police shot Mohamed El- Saqqa, 20, with a shotgun pellet as clashes with the university's students turned violent.
Ahead of the arrival of US Secretary of State Colin Powell, thousands of Egyptians held demonstrations at the universities of Alexandria, Al-Azhar, Banha (in the Delta) and Tanta. Approximately 260 students were injured at Alexandria University, five of whom are reportedly in serious condition. Police arrested 50 students and clashes erupted when the students attempted to march out of the campus to the American Cultural Centre to deliver a petition objecting to Powell's visit.
In Cairo, a group of approximately 100 intellectuals, journalists, Nasserists, leftists, Islamists and their sympathisers had their demonstration in front of the People's Assembly cordoned off by anti-riot police.
Wednesday 10 April
OMAR El-Sibakhi, head of the Friends of Human Rights Organisation (FHRO) and professor at Alexandria University, issued a statement recounting the events that took place the day before at Alexandria University. The statement, which was addressed to the ministers of interior and education as well as the speaker of parliament, accused anti-riot police of responding violently to the demonstration that he described as "peaceful." El-Sibakhi also called for a "serious and fair" investigation into the security response.
The Arab Programme for Human Rights Activists issued a statement calling on the people of the Arab world to hang black flags in protest "against the [Israeli] massacres" against the Palestinians.
The Pilots' Union -- a non-official organisation of Egyptian pilots -- called on the national carrier, EgyptAir, to suspend all flights to Israel.
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Protest diary
See: Invasion
Solidarity 4 -10 April 2002
Street days 4 -10 April 2002
Pondering the next step 4 -10 April 2002
Cairo acts 4 -10 April 2002
Invasion 4 -10 April 2002
'There are limits' 23 - 29 November 2000
The cost of vengeance 23 - 29 November 2000
'In my heart, only Palestine'
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