Shot in Cairo carrying flowers: Shaimaa al-Sabbagh

From The New York Times:

A woman was killed on Saturday in Cairo when the police fired shotgun pellets at a handful of socialist activists carrying flowers and marching to Tahrir Square to commemorate the hundreds of demonstrators killed there during the revolution that began on Jan. 25, 2011, her fellow activists said.

The protester, Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, was shot at close range and died a short time later, reported Aswat Masriya, a local news site that quoted a statement from the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, which organized the march.

Read the rest.

Cartoon: The woman died, by Andeel, via Andy Carvin.


UPDATES:

Egypt: Video Shows Police Shot Woman at Protest – Human Rights Watch, 1 February 2015.

Coming to Mourn Tahrir Square’s Dead, and Joining Them Instead – By David D Kirkpatrick, New York Times, 3 February 2015.

Recent video tweets

Here a video miscellany from recent twitterings:

A twelve year old Egyptian comments on recent events, via Hussein Ibish and Sarah Brown. Interview by Egyptian newspaper El Wady, in Cairo on Oct 19, 2012, and posted on YouTube by the Free Arabs blog.

Al Bowlly sings Melancholy Baby, a British Pathé short from the 1930s, via George Szirtes. More here and here.

Betty Boop at the circus with Bimbo and Koko, Boop-Oop-A-Doop.

An interview with eteran session musician Carol Kaye, found via britishmaid. Here’s more, and more.

For democracy, but against majoritarianism

The following comment by Hussein Ibish, on the current political crisis in Egypt, links with the theme of my previous post on representative democracy and the filibuster. From PBS NewsHour yesterday:

HUSSEIN IBISH: I think we need to be very clear, much clearer than we have been, with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and around the Middle East about what our values are and our interests are, and to not be fascinated by trying to understand them. They are not that difficult to understand. They are the religious right of the Arab world and they want power.

So, for example, one of the things we really need to stress is that the only way out of this situation for Egypt -- and this is a message for the Muslim Brothers and the president, and it's a message to the military -- is an election. Clearly, there was one, but clearly the Egyptian public is not satisfied. We don't have a stable situation.

We don't really have a workable constitution. We don't have a functioning parliament. All of those things require the will of the people to be respected.

And also we need to make the point again and again that not only do we have our interests, but also our values are not democracy as majoritarianism.

There are individual rights, human rights, women's rights, minority rights that have to be respected even by 50 percent plus one.

Twit Archive 21-31 May 2011

Below the fold, old tweets on Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Gaza. Also publishing, illustration, music and film.

Above, drawing by Louis Crucius (or Crusius), from the BibliOdyssey blog of book art.

Late entry

 Above, Betty Boop for President, also downloadable from archive.org.

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There’s been nothing here up to now about Obama’s re-election campaign, and rather than missing out altogether, here are a couple of last minute links: Jeff Weintraub writes about Obama vs. Romney on torture, and via Singularly Soupy comes a Letter of Note, Our differences unite us.

So in line with those posts I hope for a second term, but for a second term a little different from the first. Here’s Shadi Hamid on Middle East Lost. And as the war goes on, but ‘not in our name’, Terry Glavin asks Happy Now?

Twit Archive - 1-10 May 2011

Lots of Libya tweets, Syria, Yemen and Egypt tweets, death of Bin Laden tweets, and one Mickey Mouse tweet linking to a review of Race to Death Valley, volume one of the Fantagraphics reprints of Floyd Gottfredson’s wonderful 1930s newspaper strips.

Also:
Revisiting the Inquisition in Mallorca, a New York Times story on the 1691 burning of 37 Jews in Gomila Plaza, Palma.

Clips from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s film Kaos, based on Luigi Pirandelo’s stories of Sicily, music by Nicola Piovani, here and here.

Weimar Art on Magritte’s période vache.

Nina Simone, Sinnerman, and The Wailers, Sinner Man.

Tweets below the fold.

Maspero massacre

Ahram Online: Protest against persecution of Copts in Egypt attacked with bloody force

Ahram Online: Egyptian Military attacks Alhurra TV

BBC News: Cairo clashes leave 24 dead after Coptic church protest

EA WorldView: Egypt Latest - At Least 19 Killed in Clashes Over Christian March

Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist blog: Maspero and sectarianism in Egypt

Zeinobia at the Egyptian Chronicles blog: Black Sunday - 1954 Redux

Some Twitter reports and reactions this evening.

Twit Archive - 1-16 February 2011

Tweets below the fold on Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Iran, and Libya . . . with a short musical interlude from Gonzo the Great, via Kevin Gendreau.

Twit Archive - January 2011

Tweets below the fold from Tunisia to Tahrir.

Also, art links to Norman Saunders (above) at Monster Brains, Olga Dugina and Andrej Dugin at Lines and Colors, Kate Beaton draws The Adventures of Sexy Batman, while Michael Sporn serves a feast of Feininger in parts one, two, three, and continued later in four, five, and six. Sweeter still, Stephen Kroninger scans Magic in Frosting by John McNamara.

#IsraeliEmbassy #Cairo

Tomorrow’s hangover will not be good. Below the fold, a snapshot of Twitter reports and reactions in recent hours from inside and outside Egypt, newest on top.

“Trusting someone is the first step to being defeated”

Two Egyptian bloggers write on Friday’s protests at Alexandria’s State Security HQ, Egypt’s equivalent of the Stasi:
Z…space, State Security downfall, Alexandria, 4-5th March 2011
Egyptian Chronicles, The fall of the State security kingdom in Egypt ‘Alex’

A selection of videos at EA WorldView.

Photos by Sarah Carr of citizens inside Nasr City State Security HQ.

Lots more photos by citizen investigators online, of mountains of shredded paper, of underground cells.

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Update from today’s EA WorldView live blog:

1740 GMT: Many reports are coming in of the Egyptian Army firing shots into the air and chasing and beating protesters outside the State Security Headquarters at Lazoghly in Cairo.

There are also reports of "thugs" assaulting protesters from the other side. Demonstrators are trying to regroup in Tahrir Square.

More from Egyptian exile Aimée Kligman, Egypt's Amn Al Dawla security police turn on Egyptian civilians.

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Added Monday 7th, a summary of events with photos and links at Global Voices, Storming State Security.

On Flickr, recovered documents from the State Security office at Amn El Dawla.

On non-violence, and on what is possible

Iranian blogger Pedestrian writes today in reaction to a TV report on how Egyptian demonstrators organised and prepared for protest:

Of course, I couldn’t help but compare their situation to Iran, when actions of this sort would never be possible. (Ahmed would have been imprisoned and tortured for attending the workshops, for “treason and attempting to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran” long before he could put what he learned to use).

But the very interesting methods they employ during protest: they set up first aid centers, they give out food, they prepare eye drops for the tear gas, they hug militias, they have a functional group which stands strong even when one or two of them are taken into custody, etc, etc, … none of this would ever be barely imaginable in Iran or in any place where the state killing machine is leagues more lethal and vicious.

You see, it’s not just the protesters who were nonviolent, the militias stopped attacking during prayer. Fighting, like shopping in a bazaar or a first date, is a social negotiation first and foremost where conflicting worldviews translate to physical maneuvers.

This isn’t to say that outright violence is going to get anyone anywhere. But rather, quite the opposite, in what sort of setting does nonviolence as a strategy even make sense? Does it in the case of Iran?

More.

Related, The New York Times on Gene Sharp, Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution. See also comments at the Small Wars Journal.

Earlier on this blog, a post on John Runnings, an American peace activist strongly influenced by him, and a second post also mentioning Gene Sharp.

As the SWJ is paying attention to Gene Sharp, will the next big thing after COIN for the US military be training in use of non-violent strategy and tactics? It surely has a place if a force is to have full spectrum capability.

Non-violence does not necessarily indicate virtue. It is possible for organisations to adopt tactical non-violence without signing up to to a pure non-violence strategy, just as it’s possible for organisations like Hamas or previously the IRA to use both democratic and terrorist methods. From John Runnings’ writing:

There is a form of non-military strife that can register outrage that is no physical threat to the opponent. This means is overlooked by those who assume that resistance must be passive when applied to resistance to the military. This form of non-military strife was used by Tshombe in 1962 when he was trying to secede Katanga from the Congo, as reported by U. Thant in his book, VIEW FROM THE U.N. (pg. 140).

“It was in Finland, where I arrived on the night of July 11, 1962, that I received the most disturbing news from the Congo. The message was to the effect that Mr. Tshombe had changed his tactics.

On that day, a planned and viciously conceived assault by thousands of Katangese women and children was made on Indian troops at a roadblock in Elisabethville. These troops - cursed, abused and spat upon by the Tshombe-organized women and children - displayed a most remarkable restraint and discipline under extreme provocation, and never fired on the mob. I also received report from Robert Gardener, United Nations representative in the Congo, that Mr. Tshombe had informed him that he would employ civilian demonstrations, especially women and children, instead of troops, to provoke the United Nations force, in cynical contempt for the safety and well-being of his own people. This change of tactics posed new problems for the force and put a very great strain on the troops.”

I was disappointed in U. Thant that he failed to admire the courage displayed by the women and children that were able to stand up to armed threat of the United Nations of the world and defy them. He later spoke of Tshombe and his colleagues as “a bunch of clowns”. (I would propose that some of the attributes of the clown might be encouraged in anti-warriors. The charm of the clown is that they do the unconventional with elan, to make people laugh, in contrast to the military whose efforts are seldom amusing.)

And suppose Saddam Hussein had withdrawn his military, and sent women and children to occupy the Iraq-Kuwait border to get in the way and to spit upon the American tanks and soldiers. Would Clinton have had the political climate to fire on them? What fun the world media could then have had, showing the United States military in confrontation with little boys trying to spit on the tanks, though they had not yet learned to spit over their chin?

This is not to play down the many virtues of Gandhi’s more pacifist approach. But it is important to know that vulnerable challenge may be successfully used by people who are not saints(...)

Added: Nonviolence in the Arab streets, with Gene Sharp, Sherif Mansour & Mubarak Awad, from Radio Times on WHYY. Mubarak Awad is a Palestinian campaigner promoting non-violent methods. He’s also a supporter of Iran’s Green Movement: see this earlier post for more.

25 Bahman in Iran, 14 Feb in Bahrain

Iran

Live blog at Tehran Bureau and EA WorldView.

Comment from Gene at HP. More from that quarter on selective solidarity.

More from Azarmehr on Egyptian solidarity.

Committee to Protect Journalists on Iran’s imprisonment of journalists.


Bahrain

Today’s Egypt and Beyond live blog at EA WorldView turns to Bahrain.

Glen Carey at Bloomberg, Bahrain Human-Rights Organization Urges King to Free Detainees, and Omar Al-Shehabi at CIF on Bahrain, both via Iraqi American Mojo.

From Foreign Policy magazine last December, Why the Bahrain elections matter, by Kristin Smith Diwan, and from September, Bahrain's Shia crackdown, by Steven Sotloff, and The Internet in Bahrain: breaking the monopoly of information, by Fahad Desmukh.

Ali Abdulemam, blogger and Global Voices contributor, imprisoned in Bahrain since 5 September.


Meanwhile . . .

 . . . in Yemen (more), in Algeria (more), in Libya, in Morocco . . . and what now in Gaza? Also, more from Mojo on why democracy in Iraq has been difficult.

Old fellow you’d best step away

From Victorian valentines you haven’t seen, at Uncle Eddie’s Theory Corner.

Gone. Next?

Four weeks after, and Mubarak follows Ben Ali*. Next up, the revolution comes home?

At International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Egyptian Activist’s Message to Iranians: Learn From Egyptians, And We Learned From You.

Comment from Potkin Azarmehr and Alan A. at HP.

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports, Group of Egyptian protesters call on Iranians to revolt against Tehran govt.

Pedestrian on Iranian state media coverage of Egypt.

Iran’s Green Movement plans to rally on February 14th/25 Bahman in solidarity with the people of Egypt and Tunisia. More at Tehran Bureau and EA WorldView.

*Caution from Max Fisher at The Atlantic, After Mubarak, Egypt’s Revolution Is Far From Over, and at Global Voices, Egypt: A List of Demands from Tahrir Square.

The regime sheds its skin?

Breaking via Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News, Lyse Doucet of BBC News. More at NY Times Live blog and EA WorldView live blog.

Wael Ghonim tweets, “Revolution 2.0: Mission Accomplished #Jan25,” but from past experience, the phrase “mission accomplished” means “real fight just beginning.”

Highter Military Council statement.

Context: At PRI’s The World, Robert Springborg of the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey outlines the persistence and depth of the military’s political control of Egypt.

Update: So Mubarak spoke, “like a father to his children”. Abu Muqawama comments, “well, I think we can all agree that speech will calm everyone down,” and Abu Aardvark looks at options for responding to the worst speech ever.

Robert Springborg, via Reuters:

It’s an enormously provocative step. There are desperate men, willing to gamble the fate of the nation for their own personal interest. It's a very sad historic moment for Egypt.

The speeches tonight are not intended to bring an end to the crisis in a peaceful way but to inflame the situation so there is justification for the imposition of direct military rule. They are risking not only the coherence of the military but even indeed, and I use this term with advisement here, civil war.

I think it needs to be made perfectly clear (by outside powers) that Mubarak and his regime are forfeiting Egypt’s future. Egypt is in an economic crisis. It is going to have to be bailed out and the short answer to what they are doing now is that it will not be bailed out with anything like a military regime in place that is associated with Mubarak, Omar Suleiman and these people who are part of this regime.

More reactions.

In the Maxwell Smart department, this from FP’s The Cable:

CIA Director Leon Panetta was forced to clarify his statement earlier today when he said, “I have heard there's a strong likelihood Mubarak will step down this evening,” explaining that his comment was based on news reports, not intelligence data.

No one on a horse

The heroes are the ones in the street. The heroes are each one of us. There’s no one on a horse, smacking his saddle and moving the people. Don’t let anyone deceive you and tell you that. This is the revolution of the youth of the internet. This is the revolution of the youth of the internet, which then became the revolution of the youth of Egypt. And now it’s become the revolution of all of Egypt. There is no hero here, and there is no one who should take the seal. We are all heroes. That’s it.

In case you haven’t yet seen the Dream TV interview with Wael Ghonim following his release Monday, you can watch and read about it in this post at The New York Times news blog, The Lede. An alternative translation is available as a YouTube playlist here, but I think it’s incomplete. Wael Ghonim’s Twitter feed is here. Today’s clips of his CNN interview and his address at Tahrir Square are in today’s live blog on Egypt by The New York Times.

See also EA WorldView for more on this and other events, including new protests in previously quiet Upper Egypt, new strikes, and a new focus of protest in Cairo outside the Parliament. More on the Parliament protest in this NY Times video. Reports on Monday described a government strategy of constraining and isolating the Tahrir Square protest, while normalising the rest of the city. The Parliament protest is one way of countering that. Egypt’s decentralised mass movement is not playing chess, it’s playing Go.

An extra link from The Wall Street Journal, Thugs-for-Hire Leave Mark on Protests, Egyptians Say, by Sam Dagher. The opening:

As popular anger against the Egyptian regime swelled last month, Saeed was locked up in a prison at a Cairo police station. The station's chief approached him with a bargain: Saeed would attack and help disperse the protesters that were converging on Cairo's Tahrir Square—and in return, Saeed recalled, the chief would erase the drug and illegal-arms-possession charges pending against him.

More

Image from The Game of Go, the National Game of Japan, by Arthur Smith, available for download at the Internet Archive.

Endgame in Egypt?

In Foreign Affairs magazine, Egypt’s Democratic Mirage: How Cairo’s Authoritarian Regime Is Adapting to Preserve Itself. Joshua Stacher argues that the army has actively and successfully protected the regime, while playing the part of protector of the people:

Despite the tenacity, optimism, and blood of the protesters massed in Tahrir Square, Egypt's democratic window has probably already closed.
[...]
Although many of the protesters, foreign governments, and analysts have concentrated on the personality of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, those surrounding the embattled president, who make up the wider Egyptian regime, have made sure the state's viability was never in question. This is because the country's central institution, the military, which historically has influenced policy and commands near-monopolistic economic interests, has never balked.

More, via The Arabist.

Is it over? And even if this event is over, is it all over?

To the question, is the army on the side of the people, or on the side of the regime, the answer always has to be the army is on the side of the army. The real question always was and still is, where does the army believe its interests lie? Not with Mubarak for much longer, but then what? It depends on how strong the forces of change are. If those forces are strong enough, the army will change in order to preserve itself.

The army is not an individual, but a group, and it cannot wholly isolate itself from wider changes in the nation, and in the global culture. The national culture has shown itself to be capable of radical changes, and those changes are obviously linked to broad long term escalating international technological and cultural forces.

Alongside that, the army’s closest international ally is the US, and this must be important culturally as well as economically. How do younger members of the Egyptian military regard their organisation compared with the US military: the world’s most advanced, and under democratic control?

The army entered the square. But in this future-now world everywhere becomes part of the public square, even the army, even the barracks. Change won’t be shut out.

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More on the Egyptian army in The New York Times: Egypt Stability Hinges on a Divided Military, by Elisabeth Bushmiller.

My 36 Hours in Egyptian Captivity, by Dan Williams of Human Rights Watch:

There was no doubt that the army was in charge of the raid. At one point, a major general showed up at the Hisham Mubarak center and other officers worked hand in glove with a uniformed policeman, plainclothes state security agents and assorted abusive henchmen.

More. See also: Two Detained Reporters Saw Police’s Methods, from Friday’s New York Times.

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Egypt: Revolution Pessoptimism, from The Traveller Within, refering to the release of blogger Wael Ghonim.

Al Jazeera: Blogger’s release ‘reignites’ Egypt.

The Guardian: Facebook campaigner Wael Ghonim strikes a chord on Egyptian television.

The Wall Street Journal: Google Executive Emerges as Key Figure in Revolt.

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Also in the WSJ: Foreign Islamists Get Little Support in Egypt.

At Foreign Policy, Is it time to send in the lawyers? Nathan J. Brown on Egypt’s boobytrap constitution.

On revolutions and what follows after, The revolution of flowers: to thaw in dancing jasmines, by Bob from Brockley.

On the BBC World Service, Mubarak’s Egypt, from 2009, on lots of stuff, including the army.

“Greetings from the center of the world.”

So begins The Tahrir Show, a post by Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, on arriving in Cairo.

I’m too overwhelmed by it all today to pick out many individual items. Bob has a good set of links, and kindly points to my twitterings, but if you want to keep up don’t follow me on Twitter, follow some of the people I follow.

This exchange between David Brooks and Gail Collins at The New York Times site lays out an optimistic view on wider implications for the Middle East, and it’s an optimism I share for what that’s worth.

But the Middle East is not the only context. Tunisia and Egypt are African countries. From an editorial in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian:

. . . the tinder was stacked dry and ready for decades in Egypt. The levels of poverty, frustration and repression are if anything higher further south. Is it too much to hope that Africans choose to treat the Egyptian and Tunisian protests, with all their peril and potential, as our own?

More, via Al Jazeera live blog.

As usual, in depth live blogging by EA WorldView, The New York Times, and The Guardian, along with live coverage from BBC News and Al Jazeera, provides more detail than I can keep up with.

Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey arrested

The Guardian Live Blog of today’s events reports that Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey has been arrested and his blog suspended. News of his arrest came in a tweet from his friend Ramy Yaacoub.

Update - he’s been released. @RamyYaacoub:

OnPhone W/ @SandMonkey: "We were just released after a 2 hour arrest, the beating came before the arrest" #SandMonkey

More at Global Voices. See also their story on Egyptian blogger and Google Middle East staffer Wael Ghonim, missing since Thursday of last week.

Below is Sandmonkey’s last post before his arrest, recovered from Google’s cache.

Mubarak’s mob rule

Live blogging: EA WorldView, The Guardian, The New York Times.

BBC News live coverage, Al Jazeera English live stream.

BBC News this morning:

Early-morning gunfire has rung out around Tahrir Square in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, killing several people. Sustained bursts of fire lasted for two hours as anti-government demonstrators tried to stay in control of the square.

More.

Guardian journalist Jack Shenker this morning, tweeting as @hackneylad:

Egyptian doctor in #Tahrir says 7 dead overnight from clashes with pro-Mubarak thugs, reports sniper fire

After seeing Mubarak shut down phone, internet, and train services, and attempt to maintain rule through mob violence and murder on the streets, can anyone still seriously argue that he stands for stability?

No stability for the economy, from Alex Evans at Global Dashboard, Egypt: cash gets scarce as banks stay closed.

Marko Attila Hoare lays it out, Egypt: The West faces another Bosnia moment.

Paging Malcolm Gladwell. Photo © Lauren Bohn.