Tagged: tear gas

Egypt Update: Central Cairo, Suburbs, Sinai

Bulaq in the shadow of luxury real estate development. Photo: Sherif Hafez. From Egypt Independent.

Land rights, labor, and violence in a Cairo slum (Tom Dale and Abdulkasim al-Jaberi, Egypt Independent, 15 July). Five-year-old Bulaq resident Amar Mohammed Salah is killed in a fire after staff at the adjacent Nile City Towers luxury development refuse to turn on water taps for Bulaq’s fire hose. (For earlier reporting on Bulaq, see Egypt Weekend Reading 7 July.)

Firsthand account: inside Ramlet Bulaq on the day of the clashes (Egypt Independent, 5 August). Continued coverage from Tom Dale and Abdulkasim al-Jaberi on Bulaq residents’ struggle against intimidation, neglect, and dispossession. Bulaq resident Amr Fathi is reportedly shot dead by a Nile City Mall tourism police officer after demanding overdue payment for his work as a temporary security guard. Protesting residents face gunfire, tear gas, and media spin.

A tale of towers and shacks (Mohamed Elshahed, Egypt Independent, 12 August). Crucial commentary on Bulaq that puts recent events in the context of Bulaq’s history and the larger issues of “the severe inequality sanctioned by the government in matters of urban development, the failure of emergency response mechanisms, and the narratives that dominate the media to fill the vacuum of fact-finding and comprehensive legal investigations.”

Save Bulaq General Hospital (Cairo Observer, 5 May).

Revolution of the thirsty (Karen Piper, Design Observer Group, 12 July). On water scarcity and privatization, Cairo’s luxury suburban developments, and the role of informal settlement residents in the revolution.

More recent news on Egypt has been dominated by 8 August attacks in the Sinai and President Morsi’s 12 August announcement of changes to the constitution and to the military staff. On The Arabist, Issandr El Amrani gives a useful summary and early thoughts on both these unexpected events: The Morsi maneuver: a first take (12 August) and On the attacks in Sinai (6 August). Unsurprisingly, US and Egyptian officials have accelerated talks on US assistance for “military equipment, police training, and electronic and aerial surveillance”: After Sinai attack, US and Egypt step up talks on security (11 August).

National Lawyers Guild Delegation Returns from Egypt with Evidence of Systematic Human Rights Abuses, Calls for Transparency and Accountability from U.S. Government

June 28, 2012
Contact: Azadeh Shahshahani, President-Elect, (212) 679-5100, ext. 15

This April, the National Lawyers Guild sent a delegation of U.S. lawyers, activists, and scholars to study Egypt’s ongoing revolution. In particular, the delegation investigated the role and responsibility of the U.S. government and American corporations in human rights abuses. It also documented how 30 years of U.S. military and economic intervention has violated Egypt’s popular sovereignty and locked the country in a web of debt.

The delegation met with a broad range of activists, including human rights advocates, youth leaders, Islamists, leftist intellectuals, and trade unionists. Delegates also met with many civil society organizations that provide vital legal and social services to poor and working class Egyptians who have been targeted by the state for their activism.

Through these meetings, the delegation gained important evidence of human rights abuses. The evidence implicates the military, the police, and state security forces in violent attacks on protesters, unlawful detention of activists, and the widespread use of torture, actions in which U.S. agencies have also been complicit.

Continue reading on the National Lawyers Guild website.

Facing Tear Gas – Tell Your Story

As we work to build bonds of solidarity between movements for justice across the globe, we are connected by common causes and by the state-repression we all suffer. One tool used to suppress dissent—from Egypt to Greece and from Bahrain to Oakland—is tear gas. As part of a broad campaign about how U.S. corporations profit from, and the U.S. government facilitates, the sale of tear gas used — sometimes lethally — to suppress popular protesters across the globe, we presented the “Popular Resistance, Militarized Repression” teach-in and published an article based on it, as well as a comic, which has been translated to Arabic.

Our friends at the War Resisters League have just launched a new site, Facing Tear Gas, inviting you to come forward and tell your story about tear gas. From the site:

Facing Tear Gas is a story-telling project of War Resisters League by and for people that have experienced tear gas all over the world. By making the links between these stories we hope to bring those that profit off of tear gas further into the public consciousness and, along with that, the inspiring movements the gas is used to squelch. This is part of a broader campaign to end the US’s role in the business of tear gas in solidarity with global nonviolent uprisings and those facing US-backed repression everywhere, including within the US. 

Please submit your story and spread the word.

No More Tears! – Land Day Arabic edition of our tear gas comic

Palestinian Land Day was initiated in 1976 after Israeli forces shot and killed six Palestinian citizens of Israel and injured many more in an attempt to crush (with tear gas, among other weapons) popular protest against the ongoing theft of Palestinian-owned land. On Land Day 2012, also the global day of action for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), the Global Justice working group is pleased to share the War Resisters League’s Arabic translation of our tear gas comic, with a special preface for Land Day.