28 Jan 2011 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
I started today the Giza side of the river, across the Nile from Tahrir Square. Started from Moustafa Mahmoud mosque, a major landmark in the district of Mohandessin.
The protest was large from the beginning — at least 5,000 people, and probably more. The chants started as soon as prayers ended, around 1:30pm. Protesters marched through Mohandessin, completely shutting down a major road. The crowd seemed to grow steadily as the march continued.
Thanks to the blanket communications shutdown, the protests today took place in an information vacuum. On Tuesday, even during the demonstration, everybody was checking twitter both to coordinate and for news on what was happening across the country. This time nobody knew what was happening anywhere else — not even on the other side of the river in Tahrir Square.
Security forces were present in small numbers, but didn’t attempt to hinder the marchers. They marched unmolested for close to an hour until they arrived at Galaa Square, where the Galaa bridge is the first of two bridges that cross the Nile and lead to Tahrir Square.
The mood was defiant, and even a little festive. People could tell right away that they had achieved a major turnout and presumed that the same was happening elsewhere around the city. They felt like they had the advantage and the momentum. People watching from balconies cheered and waved Egyptian flags. I saw one elderly woman flashing them the V for victory sign.
Security forces had set up their cordon at the mouth of the Bridge, parking four large green police vans side by side, so that they blocked the entire bridge.
That area became the sight of an hour long battle. Security forces used lots of tear gas, indiscriminately. Some of it enveloped the Giza Sheraton, which overlooks the square. The firing was indiscriminate. One tear gas canister landed on the balcony of a nearby apartment, starting a fire; another landed in the passenger seat of a security forces van parked off to the side, starting another fire.
After the first couple volleys of tear gas, a debate broke out on a side street where people had fled on whether to abandon peaceful tactics. One angry young guy with streaming eyes was furious. People were trying to calm him down. He shouted: “Peaceful? Are you serious? After this?”
The young man, who would only identify himself as “an Egyptian citizen” told me:
I expect the government to fall today. There will be bodies in the streets, but it will fall.
I have a degree in information technology and for the last three years I’m sitting at home without a job.
Some of the crowd came well prepared. Swimming goggles and surgical masks soaked in vinegar, pieces of onion to hold under their noses to reduce the effect of the gas. And bottles of Pepsi — which I discovered today magically reduces the burning in your eyes.
Several times the crowd fell back from the tear gas. Several people were overcome by it. But they always regrouped and charged back. A local supermarket refused to open its doors to protesters but the manager agreed to pass out supplies of vinegar, water and onions. One lady, in response of protester appeals, dropped a huge bag of onions down to them.
An angry veiled woman in her 50s told me:
We don’t have an agenda. We only want the fall of the regime and all of its symbols. We’re not the Brotherhood and not the Wafd Party. We’re simply against oppression and corruption. This is a failed regime
Just before 3pm, the Central Security ranks guarding the mouth of the Galaa Bridge gave up and fell back — leaving their four huge trucks in the hand of the protesters. Gleeful youth crawled all over the vehicles, two of them holding up an Egyptian flag from the roof and others spray-painting “down with Hosni Mubarak” on the side. There was a bizarre scene for a while on the bridge where a few remaining Central Security guards were kind of lingering around their trucks looking bewildered and being completely ignored by the protesters. The police officers looked confused and depressed.
Some of the crowd decided to stay in Galaa Square and make sure they held it so that security couldn’t close ranks behind them.
An older man shouted: “It’s better if we control multiple places than just gather in Tahrir where they can bottle us up.”
Lots of others did move on toward Tahrir, crossing the island of Zamalek.
On the other side a major battle was already taking place half way across the Kasr El Nil Bridge — which is the final gateway into the square.
This was a much more violent scene, on both sides. About 2,000 protesters threw rocks and security forces, fired rubber bullets — a spray of little pellets that dig under your skin. I saw several protesters coming back with blood streaming from their faces.
One shouted: “Throw more rocks. Two more hours of this and they’ll collapse.”
A massive volley of tear gas and rubber bullets drove the crowd off of the bridge and back to Zamalek. People fled and eventually regrouped back in Galaa Square, 10 minutes away. There, right around 5 pm, something amazing happened. About 3,000 protesters were still holding the square. Suddenly huge crowds of marchers appeared from two different directions. Reinforcements. Each stream of marchers looked to be about 5,000 strong.
One of them told me they had come from Giza Square and had been fighting their own running battles and had finally broken through the security lines. Their arrival was a huge morale boost. As I was leaving a new cry was going up: “To Tahrir!”
One protester said:
It’s over, finished. This is the beginning of the end [for Mubarak]
28 Jan 2011 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
As Egyptian protestors gather for a fourth day of mass demonstrations on Friday, the government appears to be making a major push to restrict communications. Almost every internet service provider in the country stopped working Thursday evening and sms text messaging from mobile phones appears to have been blocked as well. On Friday morning around 10 am, multiple mobile phone networks also appeared to be blocked.
The government moves seemed to designed to achieve two goals: preventing the protest organisers from using Twitter and Facebook to organise the demonstrations, and restricting the ability of demonstrators to documents Friday’s events and deliver that information and footage to the outside world.
The push to restrict communications can only be regarded as an ominous sign, and a likely indicator that a harsh crackdown is planned today. I’ll continue to send updates as often as I can. This message is being sent from the BBC radio office, where they have a satellite internet connection.
28 Jan 2011 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa
Some of the curls were thrusting out of the obligatory veil, but last week on 1 Bahman 1389 (21 January) Iranians with curly hair staged a great gathering in Tehran’s Mellat Park in celebration of the glory of their hair. The result is this great video capturing The Day We Had Fun.
With authorities clamping down on every aspect of their public and private appearance (bans include tight jeans and tattoos and most recently for male students hair dyeing and eye-brow plucking) this crowd memorialised their natural attributes in a most simple way that could have taken place anywhere in the world. But in Iran the very nature of creating a scenario where people might meet strangers they share something in common with is prohibited and a source of anxiety for the government. Despite this the kinky-haired organisers insist that it was not a political move and its motives were some light relief. In fact anyone wishing to make it political was urged to refrain from comment.
The soundtrack to the day is Coldplay’s Talk. Political or not, the words resonate in this closed society:
“I’m so scared about the future and I wanna talk to you” and
“Well I feel like they’re talking in a language I don’t speak
And they’re talking it to me”
The event was first posted on an Iranian Facebook page devoted to “the curly-haired ones” in December, calling all curly-haired people to get together at 3pm by the lake and quickly attracted 681 “people attending”.
The text screens of the video tell of the “Cool things that happened on that day: We came across a Senegalese man with curly hair”, ending with “And finally, not a black crow in the sky”. When I was growing up “black crows” referred to the black shrouded women pervading our society so I’ll go with my interpretation and celebrate that none came to disturb the purity of a day full of joyful spirit.
As a curly haired Iranian Little Black Fish has joined this group, relishing the daily status updates and witty poems of the curly-haired ones:
“The distance between happiness and misery is the length of a strand of curly hair”
27 Jan 2011 | Uncategorized
Human Rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC was this week awarded the New York Bar Association’s annual award for distinction in law and international affairs. In his acceptance speech he proposed new legal principles for whistleblowers:
The First Amendment to the US Constitution is based on Madison’s principle that government information should be the people’s information too. I currently have a client, in Mr Julian Assange, who takes Madison’s principle to what some politicians and diplomats see as extremes. WikiLeaks has certainly made people around the world better informed about what their rulers do not tell them, but to tell the US Embassy instead. This is not the place to discuss my controversial client, other than to express the hope that he remains alive to give me instructions. Joe Biden and Mick Huckabee want him treated like a terrorist, Rush Limbaugh yearns for him “to die from lead poisoning from a bullet in the brain”, while Sarah Palin, as ever shooting from the lip, says “he should be hunted down like Bin Laden” (I suppose that would give him nine more years of freedom).
These shrill, exaggerated voices calling for the messenger to be killed come unhappily from the land of the First Amendment. WikiLeaks, whatever its failings, has at least enlightened the people of many countries around the world, from Tunisia to Indonesia, who now realise what their governments have been up to and how truly corrupt those governments are. It might be thought that the most astonishing secret revealed by WikiLeaks is that US diplomacy is both principled and pragmatic and that most foreign leaders place upon the United States the heavy burden of world leadership, most urgently in dealing with Iran and the prospect of a nuclear bomb in the hands of mullahs without mercy.
It can only diminish US leadership and dim the beacon of the First Amendment, to raise that old blunderbuss the Espionage Act of 1917, death penalty and all, and aim it beyond the jurisdiction at a publisher who is the citizen of a friendly country. Nor can it be helpful to America’s reputation for respecting due process to amend it retrospectively, as Senator Lieberman has suggested. What the WikiLeaks phenomenon calls for, surely, is a cool-headed appraisal not only of US government classification policy — these cables were apparently accessibly to over 2 million public servants, including 22 year olds — but to developing international media law principles for dealing with worldwide publishers of national security information.
A sensible rule might contain these principles:
1. Citizens everywhere have a democratic right to know what a government does in their name;
2. Governments and their public servants bear sole responsibility for protecting properly classified information;
3. Outsiders who receive or communicate confidential government information should not be prosecuted unless they have obtained it by fraud or bribery or duress;
4. National security exceptions should be precisely defined, should protect the identity of sources who are at risk of reprisals but should not stop whistleblowers from revealing human rights violations – the public has, at the very least, a right to know when a war fought in its name is killing innocent civilians through illegal targeting decisions.
I do not advance these principles as definitive but as the basis for a debate that the US Justice Department should be prepared to engage in with publishers – the New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian and Mr Assange included. It might end in an agreement that could be the basis for injunctive action in national courts, but not for criminal prosecution of publishers. That, surely, is wholly antipathetic to the spirit of the First Amendment.
The event was first posted on an Iranian