Egypt Intifada

Since early Sunday morning, the day that a planned general strike across the country was suppressed by the state, things have been hot in Egypt. I've been trying to keep up with a major factory strike, clashes with police, arrests of hundreds of protesters, including children and bloggers. Much of the protests across Egypt have to do with very low wages for factory workers, the less than $2 a day that almost half the country lives off of, and looming food crises. At the center is Mahalla al-Kobra, a factory town north of Cairo whose 20,000 workers have striked before. Protests turned violent on Sunday and have persisted. Observers drew immediate connections to Palestine, with citizens throwing stones and soldiers firing bullets and tear gas.

Hossam el Hamalawy, whose blogging is tireless, chronicles the Mahalla Intifada.

I wrote a quick piece for The Huffington Post about the "failed" strike. While the myriad opposition movements -- Muslim Brothers, factory workers, urban professionals, intellectuals -- seem disorganized, to say a planned nationwide general strike failed seems unfair. How would we protest in a country where police raid your home and arrest you for blogging and sending text messages about attending public demonstrations?

Photo is from Reuters photographer Nasser Nouri.

- freddy

Media in Egypt opening up and getting clamped down

A question about alternative media in Cairo would probably prompt someone, say a university educated but underemployed 20-something in a cafe (too many fit the profile), to talk at length about blogging. About the blogs of students, journalists and activists who might identify as part of the Muslim Brotherhood (their official website, Ikwan Web, is very popular.) About the imprisonment of a former religious university student sent to jail for 4 years because of what he wrote about Islam and President Mubarak on his blog this time last year. Or about the English language blogs of a collection of high-profile bloggers, most independent reporters, among them the Arabist.net and 3arabawy, where one can always read up on struggling Egyptian workers' strikes (sometimes reported on via text message from another blogger on the scene) and, in the last few weeks, the impromptu market and mayhem along Egypt's temporarily-open border with Gaza.

Perhaps the most publicized blog from Egypt in the international press is MisrDigital (some of it's in English), where photojournalist Wael Abbas has been posting leaked vidoes of police brutality and torture (many shot on cellphones) for well over a year. YouTube tried to pull his account late last year (Google strikes again, possibly bowing to calls to limit political dissent in countries like Egypt and Turkey) only to re-neg and allow him his own channel! Recently Abbas, like many other Egyptian journalist/activists, traveled from Cairo to Gaza to report firsthand the scene along with breached border (photo above). He's won a series of reporting awards, been interviewed on Al Jazeera and CNN, but just hopes he won't be arrested by his draconian government.

That's the biggest question with all of the opening up of what reporter Hossam el-Hamalawy, who runs the blog 3arabawy, described to me last year as this new kind of "citizen journalism." Blogging in Egypt as a political act took off with major protests after another round of rigged referendums and presidential elections in 2005, when a more coherent and collective opposition movement, ("Kifaya," Arabic for "Enough!") began making its name heard, most often through the channels of blogging and the independent print media. Where it ends has as much to do with repressive state politics in Egypt, and the increasing worry that companies like Google, which control sites like YouTube, will let online access get entangled in politics and international diplomacy.

The US gives Egypt a greenlight for mass arrest and torture of men believed to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood; Egypt's doing the dirty work against Islamism, so they say, even if the Brotherhood rejected violence decades ago and is a (tacitly) tolerated political party in Egypt now. Who are some of the casualties? For one, a law-school graduate and blogger named Abd al-Menim Mahmoud, representing the more progressive side of the Muslim Brotherhood (“what I reject is not liberalism as a political ideology, but Western foreign policy") whose already gone to jail numerous times for what he writes online.

- freddy

Iraqis filming Iraq

This small video blog operation equips Iraqis with cameras and other gear to go out and get the kinds of stories that foreign journalists can't. It's a war-born example of new media and citizen journalism on a shoestring, as well as a better window into what, say, the Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran looks like on any given patrol day, or how crowded (and, for a time, relatively safe) Basra's streets were during Ramadan this past November. One of their Iraqi videographers, 22 year-old Ali Shafeya Al-Moussawi, was killed this past December, underlining the ongoing risks for all reporters there, foreign or Iraqi, as the war approaches its fifth year.

The site is run by Brian Conley, a 26-year-old American journalist and film-maker, who worked in Baghdad long enough to train and equip independent Iraqi journalists to produce a short video news clip each week, uploaded to the site every Monday. Since winning a number of video blogging awards after its launch in 2006, Conley's expanded to Mexico with a sister site, Alive in Mexico, covering "everything from street battles in southern Mexico to Mexican culture and history." He runs the site out of the States, escaping from what he described to the BBC as "'live from' journalism."

"Essentially, there's something lost when you send someone from another part of the world, or with a specific audience in mind, to tell another individual's story.

We are striving to build journalism in the voice of locals, so that people in different parts of the world can communicate almost directly to their audience around the world."

The site's been in the red for a few months now, surviving on online donations, so it's no threat to big foreign bureaus yet. But given how much outlets like the New York Times and CNN rely on local stringers in Iraq, it raises questions about training locals to produce their own news versus relying on them to file reports for an American audience. Besides, where else can you watch video about Iraq's gold markets, or Little Baghdad in Damascus?

- Freddy
(with my blog from Egypt, Cairo Post)