Egyptian revolution gathers pace.

[Park Life 71]

Mohamed ElBaradei urges world leaders to abandon Hosni Mubarak

 

Criminal acts by government-backed thugs and a regime killing its own people make negotiations impossible, says Nobel laureate

 

 

Mohamed Elbaradei protests cairo Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei addresses anti-Mubarak protesters in Tahrir Square. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

 

Mohamed ElBaradei has called on the international community to urgently withdraw support from "a regime that is killing its people", following a day of intense violence in Cairo that left at least one dead and several hundred more injured.

 

The Nobel peace laureate, who some want to see leading a transitional government in a post-Mubarak Egypt, told the Guardian that the "criminal acts" of government-backed thugs in the capital yesterday had made any negotiations with the Mubarak regime impossible.

 

"Today's violence is again an indication of a criminal regime that has lost any common sense," said ElBaradei. "We have no intention whatsoever – at least I speak for myself on this – in engaging in dialogue with this regime until the number one person responsible for this, who is Mubarak, leaves the country. He must get out."

 

Following a speech by Mubarak on Tuesday night in which the Egyptian leader promised to step down in September, there had been speculation that a loose coalition of anti-Mubarak groups would rethink their refusal to accept an offer of discussions with newly appointed vice-president Omar Suleiman. But amid scenes of running street battles between anti-government protesters and pro-Mubarak forces, many of whom were found to be carrying police identification, ElBaradei said the opposition's resolve to force Mubarak out immediately had only been strengthened.

 

"First of all this is not a negotiation – we the people have legitimate demands and we would like to tell the government what to do. Our freedom is not up for negotiation. Secondly how can you negotiate with a regime that is killing its people? When the regime tries to counter a peaceful demonstration by using thugs, some of whom are police officers in plain clothes – we've seen their IDs – there are few words that do justice to this villainy and I think it can only hasten that regime's departure."

 

"After today people are realising just what they're dealing with," added the 68-year-old. "Now they're not just talking about the man responsible leaving the country, they're also talking about putting him on trial. If he has an iota of dignity left, he should leave. Mubarak has received a vote of no confidence by the entire Egyptian people … I hope he has the intelligence to realise that it is better for him to leave now before the country continues to go down the drain, economically and socially."

 

Despite the bloodshed, ElBaradei called on pro-change demonstrators to continue taking to the streets in huge numbers. "I think Friday will be a very big day in that respect. But even if they don't, even if they are repressed and crushed, there is still no going back. This is a new era – just look in protesters' eyes. The Egyptians have grown in confidence, they've tasted freedom, and there's no way back."

 

He also confirmed that he had been contacted in recent days by the British government as well as a number of other international leaders. "My message to them is simple: the sooner Mubarak leaves, the better it is for everybody and the quicker we can restore normality and stability in Egypt and establish the cornerstone of democracy in the Middle East."

[Park Life 71]

"The End is near. I have no illusions about this regime or its leader, and how he will pluck us and hunt us down one by one till we are over and done with and 8 months from now will pay people to stage fake protests urging him not to leave power, and he will stay "because he has to acquiesce to the voice of the people". This is a losing battle and they have all the weapons, but we will continue fighting until we can't. I am heading to Tahrir right now with supplies for the hundreds injured, knowing that today the attacks will intensify, because they can't allow us to stay there come Friday, which is supposed to be the game changer. We are bringing everybody out, and we will refuse to be anything else than peaceful. If you are in Egypt, I am calling on all of you to head down to Tahrir today and Friday. It is imperative to show them that the battle for the soul of Egypt isn't over and done with. I am calling you to bring your friends, to bring medical supplies, to go and see what Mubarak's gurantees look like in real life. Egypt needs you. Be Heroes."

Edited February 3, 2011 by Park Life

[Park Life 71]

Anti-Mubarak supporters gain forward postions.

[Neville Neville Neville 0]

Clearly not being led by Ashley

 

Anti-Mubarak supporters gain forward postions.

[Park Life 71]

Clearly not being led by Ashley

 

Anti-Mubarak supporters gain forward postions.

 

[Park Life 71]

Some ministers of the falling regime have been blocked from leaving the country and their bank accounts frozen.

 

Victory and freedom is in sight of the brave people in Tahrir square.

[Park Life 71]

With no clear or single leadership, this is one of the most exciting moments in any revolutionary movement. Four or five different groups are helping to organise and energise this core rise of the people who in the most are just fed up with the economic situation and the ongoing repression.

It is quite a new thing also that a lot of the information and organising was done over facebook and twitter and mobile phones as the state apparatus and formal media was completely bypassed.

Big day today.

Big day for the future of the whole middle east.

Bid day for the future of mankind.

[Park Life 71]

CHRISTIANS PROTECTING MUSLIMS AT PRAYER

 

[Park Life 71]

The organizational skills of the ultras, fanatical Cairo soccer fans, are emerging as opponents and supporters of embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak determine the fate of the 82-year-old Egyptian leader’s 30-year rule.

 

The influence of the ultras, supporters of bitter Cairo rivals Al Ahly Sports Club and Al Zamalek, is evident in the battle tactics employed by Mubarak’s opponents in the struggle for control of Tahrir (Liberation) Square in downtown Cairo.

 

With an estimated fanbase of 50 million supporters, Al Ahly is one of the largest, if not the largest African soccer club and certainly its most crowned.

 

The ultras’ experience is also reflected in the setting up of social services for the mass of protesters camped on the square in tents behind barricades and the introduction of a division of labour among them.

 

Egypt’s passion for soccer was on display on the square with protesters playing football as a pastime until the eruption of deadly violence with the appearance on Wednesday of pro-Mubarak forces determined to dislodge them. At least 13 people are believed to have been killed in the last 24 hours.

 

As organizations, the ultras distanced themselves from the protests from the outset. Yet they also made clear that they had no objection to their members applying their skills to the effort to topple the Egyptian leader.

 

Al Ahly ultras

In a statement last week, Al Ahly’s ultras said they were determined to remain non-political but that the group’s members were free as individuals to participate in the demonstrations. “The group emphasizes that its members are free in their political choices,” the group said in a statement on Facebook.

 

The experience the ultras bring to the protests and the confrontation with the Egyptian leader’s supporters is evident in a 2009 video posted on YouTube.

 

A founder of Al Ahly’s ultras recalls the group’s employment of pyrotechnics already in the group’s early days.

 

“The biggest game of the season for our ultras is the away trip to Ismailia, which is considered to be the most dangerous game in Africa due to the hatred between the two sets of fans and the political problems that go back to the 1960s,” the ultra leader, who insisted on anonymity, said.

 

“We decided to organize the biggest pyro show in the history of Egypt: pyro wasn’t widely used in Egypt and not more than two or three at a time, as it was banned by the police and they would arrest you on the spot if you use anything.”

 

While not certain of the precise identity of the protestors he was watching on video emerging from Egypt, soccer writer Davy Lane noted their degree of sophisticated organization and battle tactics.

 

“There were designated rock hurlers, specialists in turning over and torching vehicles for defensive purposes and a machine-like quartermaster crew delivering projectiles like clockwork on cardboard platters,” Lane observed from afar.

 

Much in the way that a municipality would organize services, protestors assigned tasks to various groups, such as the collection of trash. They wore masking tape on which their role, for example medics or media contacts, was identified in writing.

 

Street battle-hardened ultras, meanwhile, joined those patrolling the perimeters of the square and controlling entry. In a reflection of a trend towards greater religiosity evident in Egypt for years, entry to the square is separate for men and women.

 

In many ways the contrast in sophistication that the ultras bring to the organization and battle tactics of the opposition with its lack of a clearly defined leadership reflects the fact that the driver of events in Egypt, as well as the wave of protests sweeping other Middle Eastern and North African countries, is youths who initially often rallied around a Facebook group rather than an ideology.

 

Established in 2007, the ultras—modelled on Italy’s autonomous, often violent fan clubs—have since proven their mettle in past confrontations with the Egyptian police, who charge that criminals and terrorists populate their ranks.

 

The ultras' key role in the rebellion against Mubarak’s rule extends a tradition of soccer’s close association with politics in Egypt dating back to when the then-British colonial power introduced the game to the North African country in the early 20th century.

 

Founded about a century ago as an Egyptians-only meeting place for opponents of Britain’s colonial rule, Al Ahly, which means The National, was a nationalistic rallying ground for common Egyptians. Its players still wear the red colours of the pre-colonial Egyptian flag.

 

Dressed in white, Zamalek, which first was named Al Mohtalet or The Mix and then Farouk in honour of the then-hated and later deposed Egyptian monarch, was the club of the British imperial administrators and military brass as well as the Cairo upper class. The clubs’ bitter feud was no less political once Egypt became independent.

 

Reflecting Egypt’s popular mood when Israel attacked Gaza in late 2008, Al Ahly striker Mohamed Aboutrika, Africa’s 2006 best player of the year, was slapped with a yellow card during an Africa Cup of Nations match in Ghana for wearing a shirt that read "sympathize with Gaza" in Arabic and English.

 

With approximately half the clubs in Egypt’s national league sponsored by government ministries or state-owned companies, Egypt’s is a different game of soccer. Alongside Islam, soccer was, until the revolt against Mubarak’s rule, the only legitimate arena where pent-up emotions and anger could be expressed.

 

“There is no competition in politics, so competition moved to the soccer pitch. We do what we have to do against the rules and regulations when we think they are wrong,” says an El Ahly ultra after his group last year overran a police barricade trying to prevent it from bringing flares, fireworks and banners into the stadium.

 

“You don’t change things in Egypt talking about politics. We’re not political

[Park Life 71]

[Park Life 71]

[Park Life 71]

Rumours spreading pro-democracy might march on the Palace. Kind of a deadlock right now.

 

5m on the streets of Egypt.

 

300,000 in an around Liberation sq.

[LeazesMag 0]

If you don't want to know the result, look away now.

 

Highlights will be shown later

[LeazesMag 0]

CHRISTIANS PROTECTING MUSLIMS AT PRAYER

 

 

who is going to win ? Muslims, The west, or a multi cultural paradise ?

[Billy Castell 0]

Who else thinks that the army will eventually get bored and directly take over? Sure, the USA may suspend its funding for a year or two but they'd be happy with a strong man in charge if it stopped the bearded loonies taking over.

[Ayatollah Hermione 14059]

Breadhelmet is my Man of the Match.

 

 

Hey Muburak - Baguette the fuck out!

[trophyshy 7084]

Breadhelmet is my Man of the Match.

 

 

Hey Muburak - Baguette the fuck out!

[ToonMarshy 2]

There was a bloke walking round with a breezeblock on his head - i still fail to see how that would help him in any way shape or form!

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

that has cheered me up; quality improvisation there with the bread

[Park Life 71]

that has cheered me up; quality improvisation there with the bread

 

Breadhead ftw.

[Meenzer 15731]

Interesting brainstorming session/limp-wristed licence fee-funded wank [delete as applicable]:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulm...ts_kicking.html

 

Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere

 

Paul Mason | 19:07 UK time, Saturday, 5 February 2011

 

We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.

 

What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?

 

My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study this and also the participants themselves.

 

At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for.

 

In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:

 

1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future

 

2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany.

 

3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable.

 

4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected.

 

5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman.

 

6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.

 

7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.

 

8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.

 

9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.

 

10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.

 

11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.

 

12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.

 

13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas twith he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village.

 

14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met people who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy; then they're writing a book about something completely different. I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this week.

 

15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be more complex because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline.

 

16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour revolutons - the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a "meme" that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak.

 

17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here - it is for example the things people swap by text message, the music they swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc which those in authority fail to spot.

 

18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed.

 

19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites.

 

20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the individual.

 

Some complications....

 

a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such.

 

are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters.

 

c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to go online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the oppositional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world.

 

d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out.

 

e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than just the protesters.

 

(For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has quickly become a "meme" that crosses political tribal boundaries under the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the contents of Hansard.)

 

That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments.

 

Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you may, vent your analog-era spleen below.

[Park Life 71]

Too much power and money has been taken out of the system and has gravitated back to the center.

 

This has combined with a new type of alternative mass media and alternative/new forms of personal media/intercommunication (all the new platforms). The takeup has been high and info is moving at lightning speed around the world.

 

 

I would say the absolute main reason is PRIVATE TIME. There has never been so much leisure time ever before for the middle class and their offspring around the world and this has combined with the lack of oppurtunities (especally in the middle east) for relatively well educated masses that has risen over the last two decades.

 

The critique of the system is always perpetrated by those educated within the very system that needs destroying/changing.

[Park Life 71]

Mubarak gone!

 

Well done Egyptian folks.

[acrossthepond 878]

To think that two weeks ago I was predicting to KSA that this could never succeed in Cairo. Mubarak was thought to be a monolith, like the other 'untouchable' rulers of the ME - I think they will be quaking in their palaces this afternoon! With any luck the fucking Saudis will be next.

 

But this isn't over by any means. Don't be surprised at all if this is just a shrewd move by the army to sacrifice someone whose position had become untenable, only to replace him with Omar Suleiman, who's just another Mubarak clone, to continue an effective military dictatorship. Mubarak may have gone but the problems of Egypt have not.

 

I'll leave the pessimism aside for a little while and celebrate this though. Egypt is free! Masr harra!

[Meenzer 15731]

Yep, this is the PR victory but the longer view is what's important. Still, worthy of a wee dram tonight all the same </muslimalcoholironybutwhatthehell>