La città mediterranea è il termometro della crisi egiziana.
La grande diversità sociopolitica e alcuni fattori geografici
e urbani la rendono perfetta per la ‘politica della strada’.
I crocevia delle proteste.
http://temi.repubblica.it/
Category: Essays & Articles
Marching to Sidi Gaber: Alexandria’s Epicenter of Upheaval
Pro-Morsi supporters clash at Sidi Gaber, 28 June 2013. Photo by Sameh Meshally
A brief but long-lasting moment occurred on 19 May 2012, one that would awaken me to the changing realities in our neighborhood since the January 25 Revolution. It was late at night, while standing on my balcony overlooking Cleopatra Square, Alexandria, at the height of the first leg of the 2012 presidential campaign. A scuffle broke out between a group of political campaigners tearing up posters of candidate Amr Mousa, and shop owners and residents who supported Mousa. I ran down to film the incident, only to be tackled by undercover “security” who mistook me as part of the group. One yelled: “We are taking you to army headquarters.” Then a voice was heard: “Leave him, he is one of us” (as in to say, a resident of the area). It turned out to be my barber. In exchange for letting me go, I had to delete the video footage—which I pretended to do but did not.
I took a few steps back in disbelief. Someone I had trusted turned out to apparently be a part of an informal former regime loyalist network. This same group has attacked revolutionary protest marches that pass frequently through this area with bottles and knives. This same Port Said Street was the site of several human chains formed by former regime loyalists in order to prevent revolutionary protests from moving on, often unsuccessfully.
The motives behind their actions soon become apparent.
Stroll some one hundred meters or so, and you end up in Sidi Gaber–Alexandria’s budding Tahrir Square, second only to, or possibly eclipsing, the Qa’id Ibrahim Mosque courtyard–where the military’s fiercely guarded northern command headquarters is based. The barber and his friends see themselves as the first line of defense against encroachment on the “guardians of the nation.” Whether they were paid or not, I could not verify.
Sidi Gaber recently featured fierce protest violence during the pro-Morsi demonstrations on 5 July. Out of the thirty deaths across Egypt, a staggering seventeen occurred in Sidi Gaber alone. This includes the heart-wrenching video of what appeared to be pro-Morsi supporters throwing two teenagers over a ledge, resulting in the death of one of them. A week earlier, American student Andrew Pochter was stabbed to death in the same area.
How International Events Played into Egypt’s Crisis
First published in the Atlantic Council
Egypt’s road to the current crisis has been, in part, shaped by an understated yet unhealthy obsession on the part of Egyptian political groups in scanning the international terrain for allies to bolster domestic positions and fuel their narratives.
While many Egyptians are proud to have exported Tahrir Square-styled civil disobedience to rest of the world, it is not always a one way street.
Egypt’s political groups and movements pick up certain international signals and cues allowing them to frame their activities to their supporters as part of a universal necessity and embed themselves in a grandiose narrative to which they are, somehow, central.
The 2012 Gaza-Israel conflict was a key moment in this process in which President Mohamed Morsi’s brokering of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel resulted in praise lavished on him by President Barack Obama and the Western press. Morsi interpreted this as a green light for a significant power grab, issuing the November 2011 constitutional declaration, which in turn ensured that a highly flawed constitution was rammed through. Seen as having satisfied the international norms of acceptance, the Brotherhood agenda came out in full force, albeit recklessly.
Continue reading “How International Events Played into Egypt’s Crisis”
A Visual Breakdown of Egypt’s Political Deadlock
We have come to the current crisis that sees an Egypt that is politically stillborn and has been unable to resurrect the old regime nor can it establish a new one. What I have attempted to do is illustrate this by examining the constellation of actors that are contributing to this deadlock. The plotting of different groups on the map is based on news data, policy statements, interviews, and my experience with Egypt’s urban politics. At this stage it is not intended to be a scientific diagram nor is it an exhaustive list of all players. It is only to illustrate the gravity of the deadlock that has brought us to 30 June.
The former regime, according to Hazem Kandil, rested on a power triangle that consisted of an uneasy partnership between the military, security sector (interior ministry) and the political establishment. The 2011 events disrupted this balance resulting in the enhancement of the military’s role and saw former regime remnants, Islamists and revolutionaries seeking to fill the political vacuum.
1. Military
The military is the dominant actor and backbone of the transition, much of the current political rival suspicions and deadlock can be traced back to the military’s opaque decision making and centralisation of power when it was governing the country in the interim period. While the military is relatively de-politicised, it is nonetheless desperate to preserve its economic privileges and ensure the country does not enter a “dark tunnel” as General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi puts it. This partly explains why it looked more favourably upon the Brotherhood who were less likely to dismantle the political economy than the revolutionaries were.
el-Sissi may have inadvertently emboldened the revolutionary camp by implicitly warning Morsi’s supporters that the military will step in if people are attacked during the planned protests.
Yet the military is still reeling from having its prestige damaged during its 2011 and 2012 rule, and it is unlikely to see a role for itself in the political scene even after today’s expected coup d’état. The military has never viewed its purpose as a force for change.
Continue reading “A Visual Breakdown of Egypt’s Political Deadlock”
Mediating the Arab Uprisings
Amro Ali, “Saeeds of Revolution: De-mythologizing Khaled Said” in Mediating the Arab Uprisings. Eds. Bassam Haddad, Adel Iskander (Washington DC: Tadween Publishing, 2013).
Abstract:
From “Facebook revolutions” to “Al Jazeera uprisings,” the outburst of popular activism across the Arab world has either been attributed to the media, drawn up by the media, observed through the media, or decontextualized by the media. Bloggers become icons, self-proclaimed experts becoming interpreters of unfolding events, stereotypes are cultivated, and autocratic regimes continue to subdue freedom of the press. The uprisings have become the most compelling media stories in recent memory. With much at stake, the burden of relaying human narratives accurately and responsibly is a burden on all journalistic establishments worldwide.
In a unique collection of essays that covers the expanse of the Arab popular protest movements, Mediating the Arab Uprisings leaves no stone unturned by offering spirited contributions that elucidate the remarkable variation and context behind the fourth estate’s engagement with these mass protests.
So while the public debate about the coverage of the Arab uprisings remain effervescent and polarizing, the essays in this volume go beyond the cursory discussion to historicize media practice, unsettle pre-existing suppositions about the uprisings, puncture the pomposity of self-righteous expertise on the region, and shatter the naiveté that underlies the reporting of the uprisings. The volume includes essays on the tribulations of covering Syria, the contextualization and demythologizing of Facebook activism, the New York Times’ reporting rituals on Palestine, the tumult of Egypt’s media post-Mubarak, the ominous omnipresence of perennial media darling Fouad Ajami, the faltering of Al Jazeera Arabic in the wake of the uprisings, the gendered sexuality of reporting Egypt, and journalism’s damning failure on Iraq. The first volume of its kind on this pressing topic, Mediating the Arab Uprisings is a primer for the curious reader, a pedagogical tool for media studies and communication, and a provocative collection for the seasoned scholar.
This initiative was supported by the Middle East Studies Program at George Mason University.
The Buck Dies Here: Why Egypt’s Interior Ministry Refuses to be Tamed
Article originally published in The Atlantic Council’s ‘Egypt Source’ (4 April 2013)
Ambushes, kidnappings, torture and murder have come to characterize Egypt’s security sector’s engagement with the Egyptian public in both pre- and post-revolution Egypt. This has left many asking: How did the interior ministry survive its pre-Mubarak incarnation given that one of the revolution’s key demands was police reform?
The issue is more complex than simply looking at how former autocracies were able to reform their police forces during their transition to democracy. The problem arguably starts with how Egypt’s elite – the military, the Muslim Brotherhood, and former regime loyalists – relate to the 18 day uprising.
Nabil Abdel-Fattah in his book “Elite and Revolution: State, Political Islam, Nationalism and Liberalism” argues that the elite are still unable to comprehend the gravity of the 2011 events. This view sheds light on why they are unable to generate a national post-revolutionary project, post-democratic movement or an overhaul of the security establishment, simply because a number of them conceive of the 2011 events as a “mere democratic protest movement.”
As Abdel-Fattah notes “The majority have not absorbed the nature of the event and the end of the legitimacy of 23 July 1952 with its generations, ideas and legacy…The conflict is still at its peak , and reveals two speeds running together in Egypt: one attached to the legitimacy of 1952 and another that claims a still unclear revolutionary legitimacy.” In other words Egypt is experiencing an ideational and generational war that has pitted two appeals to historical legitimacy against one another.
Continue reading “The Buck Dies Here: Why Egypt’s Interior Ministry Refuses to be Tamed”
(Video) Making sense of Egypt’s changing role in the Middle East
Viral Images: On the case of Khaled Saeed – by Sophie J Williamson
Click here to read the article: Viral Images: On the case of Khaled Saeed (PDF)
My article (June 2012) and collection of art on Khaled Saeed has been used as the basis of a feature piece in the UK Art Monthly magazine, titled “Viral Images: On the case of Khaled Saeed.” Beautifully written by London curator Sophie J Williamson, she expands on the threat posed by viral imagery to Morsi’s regime. With the author’s permission, I have uploaded a copy of the article to my site.
Below are some quotes from the article:
“The photo [of the brutalised khaled Saeed] itself was taken after an autopsy, which sparked disputes about whether some of the injuries seen in the image were delivered before his death or were the outcome of postmortem examinations. Saeed’s neighbour, Amro Ali, has since published an in-depth critique of the events, “Saeeds of Revolution: De-Mythologizing Khaled Saeed”, which gives an insight into Saeed’s somewhat dubious past. However, the discrepancies in these details were not important to the thousands of Egyptians who redistributed the image through their Facebook and Twitter accounts. The image quickly became independent of any objective retelling of its story; it stood for itself as telling of a seemingly objective reality of police brutality and the loss of individual dignity prevalent across the country”
“In Hito Steyerl’s insightful essay ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, she describes the life of the online image as one of acceleration and deterioration; ‘a copy in motion’. The ‘poor image’ is one which has been ‘thrust into digital uncertainty’ – somersaulted through successions of uploading, downloading, reformatting, re-editing and
redistribution; quality is transformed into accessibility. In turn, image-value is defi ned not by resolution and content but by velocity, intensity and spread. This is not only true of the physical quality of the image, as Steyerl speaks about it, but also of the depth of meaning, understanding and context of the image.”
“The economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of
worldwide distribution within a structure that facilitates almost
instantaneous appropriation, enables the participation of a
much larger group of producers than ever before. Users become
the editors, critics, translators and (co-)authors within a constant
frenzy of imagery production and re-production.”
“The vague language of President Mohamed Morsi’s
new constitution, especially with regard to freedom of
expression, inevitably reinforces concerns over the growing
tyranny of the permanent state of emergency declared
since the revolution. Using Giorgio Agamben’s definition
of sovereign power as the ability to decide on the state of
exception, to defined what is permitted – who is included
and who is not – Morsi effectively places himself outside
the law. Agamben argues that sovereignty is therefore
based on the ability to impose exclusion and is ‘the hidden
foundation on which the entire political system rested’.
While for Morsi, and Hosni Mubarak before him, this is
possible with established figures and organisations, it is
much harder, arguably impossible, to censor in its entirety
online activity which is spearheaded not by an individual but
by the masses”
“The image of Saeed proves that the digital image is not
as ephemeral as we might commonly think; as Steyerl argues: ‘just as a photograph is lodged in paper, the digital image is lodged in a circulatory system of desire and exchange.’”
Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing)
Click here to get your copy of “Mediating the Arab Uprisings” (Tadween Publishing).
http://tadweenpublishing.com/collections/frontpage/products/mediating-the-arab-uprisings
With contributions from myself, Linda Herrera, Adel Iskandar, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, VJ Um Amel, Vivian Salama, Nir Rosen, Anthony Alessandrini, Maya Mikdashi, Shiva Balaghi, Amal Hanano, and others…
Description:
“From “Facebook revolutions” to “Al-Jazeera uprisings,” the outburst of popular activism across the Arab world has either been attributed to the media, drawn up by the media, observed through the media, or decontextualized by the media. Bloggers become icons, self-proclaimed experts becoming interpreters of unfolding events, stereotypes are cultivated, and autocratic regimes continue to subdue freedom of the press. The uprisings have become the most compelling media stories in recent memory. With so much at stake, the burden of relaying human narratives accurately and responsibly is a burden on all journalistic establishments worldwide.
In a unique collection of essays that covers the expanse of the Arab popular protest movements, Mediating the Arab Uprisings leaves no stone unturned by offering spirited contributions that elucidate the remarkable variation and context behind the fourth estate’s engagement with these mass protests.
So while the public debate about the coverage of the Arab uprisings remain effervescent and polarizing, the essays in this volume go beyond the cursory discussion to historicize media practice, unsettle pre-existing suppositions about the uprisings, puncture the pomposity of self-righteous expertise on the region, and shatter the naiveté that underlies the reporting of the uprisings. The volume includes essays on the tribulations of covering Syria, the contextualization and demythologizing of Facebook activism, the New York Times’ reporting rituals on Palestine, the tumult of Egypt’s media post-Mubarak, the ominous omnipresence of perennial media darling Fouad Ajami, the faltering of Al-Jazeera Arabic in the wake of the uprisings, the gendered sexuality of reporting Egypt, and journalism’s damning failure on Iraq. The first volume of its kind on this pressing topic, Mediating the Arab Uprisings is a primer for the curious reader, a pedagogical tool for media studies and communication, and a provocative collection for the seasoned scholar.
This initiative was supported by the Middle East Studies Program at George Mason University.”
The Maddening Betrayal of Potato-Seller, Omar Salah
Published in openDemocracy
Republished in Ahram Online
An Egyptian army conscript walks up to 12 year old Omar Salah Omran, a sweet potato seller – outside the front gates of Cairo’s US Embassy close to Tahrir Square – and requests two potatoes from the young street vendor. Omar answers, “I’ll do so after I go to the bathroom”. The allegedly untrained soldier retorts with a mix of cockiness and jest that he will shoot Omar if he doesn’t comply immediately. On Omar’s reply, “you can’t shoot me” – the conscript, on the alleged presumption that his weapon was not loaded, aimed two bullets piercing through Omar’s heart. He died instantly. (Based on Omar’s father’s television interview with host Mahmoud Saad)
The entire incident was over in ten seconds. The fallout continues.
Many Egyptians were humbled and awoken to another Egypt with the release of a gripping video of Omar speaking to a Life Makers charity member in which he says “I am tired of this job”: he says he wants to learn to read and write. There is an inherently troubling dimension in Omar’s demise that goes beyond the “accidental” nature of it. It is the callous disregard by the state that instigated and attempted to cover up the crime, and a society that no longer gives a second look to the plight of child labour.
Continue reading “The Maddening Betrayal of Potato-Seller, Omar Salah”