January 25, 2011
Today belongs to the youth! Using Twitter and Facebook and who knows what else, tens of thousands young men and women took to the streets of Egypt. They gathered to protest the Mubarak regime. Twenty thousand filled Cairo’s Tahrir square. They protested in Suez, Fayoum, Ismailia, Kafr el Sheikh, Bultim, Mahallah, Mansour and cities from Alexandria in the North to Aswan in the South. Nothing of this magnitude this has happened in Egypt before.

The government had warned the leaders of the few political parties Egypt allows to stay away. The leaders obeyed but their people turned out. The Mufti (highest Islamic authority) issued a fatwa forbidding participation but Muslims turned out. The Church forbade its members from participating; Christians turned out too. The Muslim Brotherhood refused to back the demonstrations—less than 150 of them came. Still, the government claims the Brotherhood incited the protests and admits to jailing 212. For years the Mubarak regime has raised the specter of “Islamic fundamentalism” to scare the Western powers into supporting it.

Despite the warnings, the young people of Egypt protested by the thousands. They demanded change not as party loyalists, not as members of NGOs, and certainly not as Muslims or Christians but as Egyptians—the most for the first time. This is not an ideologically driven event. It is certainly not religiously inspired. It is populist and nationalist.

While organized by those with access to the Internet, the youth of all Egypt’s social classes met in the streets; students from the elite American, German and British Universities of Cairo and the 20-year-old peddler near my building. The three men buying cigarettes at his kiosk had been in the Tahrir Square demonstrations and planned on returning. One, a gardener in the small park across the street said, “I can’t live on 240 pounds a month.” (40.00$) I didn’t say that teachers make less. Students from the elite American, German and British Universities of Cairo.

The government was blindsided. It permitted the ‘standing’ demonstration thinking, as did the rest of the country, only the usual 200 activists would show. Local media coverage was virtually non-existent; a function of surprise and self-censorship. I heard of the demonstrations from my daughter in the States who’d heard about them on NPR. Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, was probably the first to air here but most of us followed the events on YouTube because of the ‘functional’ blackout in the news.

The most immediate impetus is likely a soaring cost of living and grinding poverty.  But people don’t need political science to know that dictatorships support the corruption of their cohorts who siphon off public coffers. People know they can’t survive on the dregs.

They chanted “Change. Liberty. Social Justice.” “No to dictatorship. Mubarak must leave. This government must fall.” Some carried pictures of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1952 revolution.) The have specific demands: Mubarak must resign. His son Gamal must not inherit the presidency. Parliament and councils elected in the country’s most fraudulent election must be dissolved, the constitution revised, and new election held which are fair and free.

There were echoes of Tunisia in the air. In Cairo, protesters were and remain peaceful to a fault. The police was reasonably restrained—at first. By afternoon, everything changed. They set upon the young people with batons. They shot water cannons, tear-gas and rubber-tipped bullets and used cattle prods. They killed four in Suez and bloodied hundreds  in Cairo and the rest of the cities. By evening, the situation took a turn for the worse. Surrounding the thousands in Tahrir  Square, they closed off the routes of escape, blanketed it with teargas and shot into the crowd. They jammed the airwaves and blocked cell-phone reception. Armed vehicles, sirens wailing, sped across the bridge near me. Despite Ministry of Interior guarantees it arrested hundreds and hundreds of people, including 80 journalists. One was from the UK Guardian newspaper. You can hear his moving report from a police van on the paper’s electronic home page. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/audio/2011/jan/26/egypt-violence-jack-shenker-arrest-audi

The protestors pledged to stay the course. No one quite knows what this means but everyone I’ve met is cheering them on. And, true to the Egyptian sense of humor, they say, “When we win this round, we’ll have a rematch with Tunisia!”

January 26, 2011

Although the Hesham Center for Human Rights has 1000 confirmed names and knows of many more arrested, the government has admitted to only 500. Today it called for the use of ”all necessary” force to disperse any gathering and strict enforcement of Egypt’s notorious Emergency Law that makes it illegal for over 5 people to congregate.

The streets are choked with security: policemen in riot gear and dusty blue vans, armed vehicles and water cannons. Facebook and Twitter were closed down for a while—the internet savvy youth used proxy sites. And though bloodied and reduced in numbers, people are still demonstrating: ‘walking’ in Cairo’s streets to offer less of a convenient target, calling for by-standers to join.

And as I write tonight, 500 people are demonstrating at the Lawyers’ Syndicate while literally thousands of police are dispersing supporters with batons to the legs and head.

The EU and France, even the United States has called for respecting the right to peaceful demonstration and called for police restraint and non-violence.

Egyptians are still demonstrating and, while in smaller numbers, they’re all over the country: in Cairo, Alexandria, Mansoura and Suez.
Change will happen;  maybe not this week or next. Maybe not even this year. But things are going to change. They already have.
Calls have gone out for a ‘Friday of Rage’ tomorrow, January 28th, 2011. Demonstartions scheduled for after noon-time prayers.

Dr. Winter is an Egyptian-American psychologist in Seattle who currently lives in Cairo, Egypt during the academic year where she is Visiting Professor of Practice at the American University in Cairo’s Graduate School of Education. She is a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, the Arab American Community Coalition in Seattle, and the Arab American Institute’s Pacific Northwest representative. Her numerous consulting positions include the U.S. Department of State where she trains women in the Middle East to run for public office and the creation of training programs for panels of mediation specialists in over 450 Egyptian family courts. She and her colleague, Sheryl Ga Feldman, operate the website www.myeyeonegypt.net

The future will be here in April and Code Pink: Women for Peace has already won it (thus answering President Obama’s State of the Union call to “win the future”). The color coded threat warnings our government has been bombarding us with since shortly after September 11, 2001, will be gone. The fear-mongering tactic that Code Pink was named in mockery of will have been mocked right out of existence.

This interview aired live to 35 million households on Free Speech TV via DIRECTV channel 248, DISH Network channel 9415, and streamed on freespeech.org to thousands of online viewers.

In the collaborative and uniting spirit of One Nation Working Together, please feel free to share this video widely. You can even embed this video interview on your website, blog, or other social media sites.

Here’s the link to more of Free Speech TV’s coverage of the One Nation March: http://bit.ly/9IBiVQ

It’s hard to know what to make of a President and an administration that brings over 90,000 troops home while ordering 50,000 soldiers along with 75,000 military contractors to remain.

Over 150,000 personnel are still stationed in Iraq and the US is supposed to be completely out of the country by 2011. That’s next year. Bringing home thousands by the end of this August is a good step, but we really need to step on it. Obama’s speech strikes me as an exercise in Orwellian double-think: the US is simultaneously withdrawing and expanding its military presence in Iraq. So which is it? And, importantly, how does the peace movement communicate with people who think the war is effectively over at the end of August?

Jeremy Scahill has written recently in The Nation that “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is presiding over what is shaping up to be a radical expansion of a private, US-funded paramilitary force that will operate in Iraq for the foreseeable future…”.

Unfortunately, the State Department is dragging its heels as much as the Pentagon and has requested funds from Congress to hire 6,000 – 7,000 more “security contractors” and train them like soldiers. While working under the auspices of the State Department, these new personnel would have the status of “diplomats.” But who ever heard of a diplomat trained like a soldier and armed with a gun?

This one step forward, one-hundred steps backward approach to Iraq makes many a head spin, but one thing is clear: That so many troops are coming home so soon after Obama took office a year and a half ago is a victory not of the war, but of the peace movement.

As Obama emphasized in his speech, by the end of August over 90,000 troops will have come home since he took office and hundreds of bases will have been closed or turned over to Iraq.

The work of countless activists and organizers has changed the political landscape and now we’re seeing some results. We’ve marched, protested, signed petitions, and written letters to the editor. Without the peace movement’s dedicated organizing and mobilizing to elect a candidate who would commit to ending this war, we wouldn’t be seeing so many of our soldiers returning “as promised and on schedule” during this “season of homecomings,” as Obama put it. But we still have a long way to go. In his recent speech, Obama didn’t say a thing about military contractors, or those so-called diplomats who are doing the work of soldiers.

And, unfortunately, Obama plans to keep another, more disastrous, promise of his this year — to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Will our troops come home from Iraq only to be redeployed to Afghanistan?

Unlike under Bush, there will be no speak of “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq from the Obama administration. We have helped turn the tide of public opinion against the Iraq War enough that no one is buying it anymore. Partially thanks to WikiLeaks, few will be buying wholesale into the Afghanistan War either. The peace movement can make use of this new information to expose war crimes and bring this injustice to an end.

Before Obama took office, many of us began to feel hopeless about ending the Iraq War. Now we have to realize, with some healthy skepticism, that an end (of sorts) is in sight. What kind of end to the Iraq War do we envision and how are we helping to bring it about? How can we take the lessons learned from our organizing to end the Iraq War to our work to bring an end to the quagmire in Afghanistan?

Your voice is needed. Write a short Letter to the Editor or an online comment about the Iraq debacle.

With the troops coming home from Iraq, we should reflect on the results of this devastating invasion. We need to flood the media with our comments and our recommendations for lessons learned from this unjust war.

Click below to go to our Letter to the Editor page, where you can find newspapers near you to submit your letter to:

http://bit.ly/iraqdebacle

Cockburn must not be, in Twitter-speak, “following” many members of several left organizations, including CODEPINK, UFPJ, AFSC. They’ve sent tweet after tweet calling on Obama to keep his promises, to stop the Afghan war, to end the drone attacks, and more. In fact, last month, these groups coordinated a National Media Day of Action on Afghanistan to spread the word on why we must stop the war in Afghanistan via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and traditional media letters to the editor, op-eds and more. The goal: to change public opinion against the war.

Unfortunately, their efforts did not catch on with “the Twittering classes” as the conflict in Iran has. The “masses,” for now, are largely uninterested to tweet about ending the Afghan war and in critiquing Obama — at least on the foreign policy front. (This could also explain why, despite valiant efforts by peace groups, the country appears to have no energy for “mobilizations, actions, civil disobedience” as demonstrated by increasing activism around health care, food reform and climate change and dwindling numbers in anti-war street actions. We’ve proof from just yesterday, as few people turned out for the torture accountability actions planned nationwide — though in Pasadena and elsewhere, however, CODEPINKers tried their best). The masses are instead caught up in the fervor of the Iranian protests, fueled by front-page images of beautiful young women, horrifying viral YouTube videos and widespread national outrage and mistrust toward the current Iranian government based on its history of crackdowns on rights, secret torture, etc.

Of course, anti-war groups would LOVE to know — where are the YouTube videos depicting the 80 Pakistani civilians just killed in a U.S. drone attack? Where’s the outrage (and mistrust) toward the U.S. government, based on its torture practices, its killing of innocents, the U.S.’ policies toward Afghanistan? Do we need to see beautiful women victims? Until the “Twittering classes,” or the majority of Americans, feel as comfortable critiquing the often-terrifying practices of their own government, we’ve a long way from “three million…rousing tweets” to “mount any sort of political resistance at home!” Suffice to say, of course, many members of these groups are trying their best to get them there, tweet by tweet.