The IUF is requesting international support for a campaign to free three imprisoned trade union leaders in Eritrea. Tewelde Ghebremedhin, Chairperson of the IUF-affiliated Food, Beverages, Hotels, Tourism, Agriculture and Tobacco Workers Federation and Minase Andezion, secretary of the textile and leather workers' federation, were arrested by security police on March 30 and remain in detention. On April 9, police arrested Habtom Weldemicael, who heads the Coca-Cola Workers Union and is a member of the food and beverage workers' federation executive.

Thank you for the piece by Gerald Caplan on solidarity in Genocide. That effort of transcending the differences in partial or total annihilation for the sake of an ideology is to be commended, but the effort falls short. The space is too brief to deal fairly with the reasons for this.

Uniquely unique

One should accept that all genocides are both unique and generic. But, the idea that, historically, morally or ethically, we shall one day devise a sort of Richter Scale for genocidal horror is beyond sadness because it would fall into the very system which was inaugurated with the wiping out of Indigenous people, Amerindians followed by ripping Africans away from their homes in ways which can be imagined as similar to current processes in various parts of the Planet.

Hitler's words quoted by Caplan illustrate something deeper. By then, as far as the System was concerned, who remembered the Native Americans, Africans and African Americans as people? The circumstances were different, but the objective was the same: wipe out any obstacle which dares to stand in the way. The difference between Hitler and Capitalism is that the latter does not have a name even though so many crimes have been perpetrated in its name.

It is easier to scapegoat Hitler than, say, institutions which pass today as standing up for humanity. If fidelity to humanity is going to create an unassailable foundation for Never Again, then it should not fear calling for something like Reconciliation with Truth. Such a process principled by a truth process based on an ethic of truth would be organized at a distance from States or institutions deriving their legitimacy from states. It would be rooted in the kind of preoccupation which is highlighted in Caplan's piece.

The international development agency ActionAid's Get On Board campaign on Tuesday in Nairobi, Kenya, launched an international drive to overhaul the fight against HIV/AIDS and ensure that funding for the disease helps HIV-positive people, AFP/Yahoo! News reports. The new HIV/AIDS campaign is part of an effort to collect data about the African epidemic and deliver it to the Group of Eight meeting in Scotland in July, according to AFP/Yahoo! News.

A new report by the ICFTU on core labour standards in Nigeria, which coincides with Nigeria's trade policy review at the WTO this week, shows serious shortcomings in the application and enforcement of all eight core labour standards, particularly with regard to the lack of trade union rights of workers including the right to strike, discrimination and child labour.

After a tireless week of campaigning, the Global Action Week for education came to an end, leaving the corridors of power resounding with the call to 'Send my Friend to School'. Children and young people in over 100 countries have shown their passion in demanding the basic right of every child to receive a quality education. Politicians have responded to their calls by making firm commitments and pledges on education in countries across the globe. Visit www.campaignforeducation.org for more details and news.

People in rich nations need to give up their "caricature of sub-Saharan Africa" and to recognise and support real progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, Eveline Herfkens, executive coordinator of the Millennium Campaign told a meeting here last week. The Millennium Campaign is being pushed by the United Nations to advance moves towards the goals agreed by world leaders at the United Nations in September 2000.

On the 24th day of April 2005, the civil society in Ethiopia was scheduled to officially launch the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) campaign under the motto "Enough with Poverty!" "Enough with Poverty" is part of the GCAP and the MDG campaign organized by a range of civil society actors in Ethiopia, including national coalitions; women, youth, students and teachers associations; community based organizations; associations of the physically disabled and poor peoples associations. The city government of Addis Ababa, in an official letter written on 18 April 2004 and copied to the federal and city police commissions, cancelled the public gathering and postponed it for an indefinite period of time. The authorities gave no reason for canceling this peaceful demonstration other than stating in the letter that "… [they] found it necessary to postpone the public rally for various reasons…."

Mango has launched a new campaign called "Who Counts?" that urges aid agencies and NGOs to tell the people they aim to help how much money they are spending on projects on their behalf. Evidence shows that this radically improves impact and reduces fraud. For more information visit www.whocounts.org.

In this keynote address to the Toronto Armenian Community on the 90th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Gerald Caplan explores the ‘solidarity of sorrow’ between the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides. What these three genocides have in common transcend their differences and all people who believe in justice should work together for genocide prevention, he writes.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots in the spring rain.

T. S. Eliot wrote these haunting, unforgettable words in his epic poem The Waste Land. This was 7 years before the Armenian genocide, which we commemorate on April 24 and which we have no evidence Eliot was touched by. It was 21 years before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the 2nd World War, during the black heart of the Holocaust, which we commemorate on April 19 and which Eliot could hardly have conceived only 2 decades later. And it was 72 years before the genocide in Rwanda, the great genocide of the late 20th century, occurring almost exactly half a century after the world, emerging from the nightmare of Hitler, vowed Never Again. April, when the lilacs bloom again.

The 20th century has gone down in historical infamy as the Century of Genocide. I'm sorry I don't know whether the 1904 genocide by the German army of the Herero people of south-west Africa (now Namibia), the first genocide of the last century, also took place in April. But we do know that the near-genocide of the Fur people of western Sudan has now entered its 3rd April with little respite and no adequate international intervention. We also know from Rwanda and Darfur that Never Again has been trivialized as so much rhetorical bombast by public figures on public occasions, sound and fury signifying little. We now know that unless major strategic or economic interests are at play, if nothing is at stake beyond mere human life, on however massive a scale, then the accurate description of the state of our times is Again and Again and Again.

What we also know, I'm afraid—and this is an equally dismaying observation---is that for a very large number of those descended from victims and survivors of the genocides of our time, the precise concept is in any event NOT Never Again. It's that never again will OUR people be the victims of such a calamity.

I am honored and humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address on this historic occasion. But I also feel outraged and almost morally defeated—as you all must surely be--- that the central message of this 90th anniversary remains the relentless effort to persuade our own government in Ottawa, the Government of the United States, and—I single it out for reasons that I'll try to make clear---the government of Israel, to perform a simple act of justice. We must continue to insist that each of them officially recognizes that in 1915, a classic genocide, wholly consistent with the definition set down 35 years later in the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, was deliberately inflicted upon the Armenian people living in Turkey by the Turkish government and army and their proxies.

It happens to be among the several terrible ironies of this humiliating situation that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born Jewish lawyer who coined the word genocide and almost single-handedly pressured the United Nations into adopting the Convention in 1948, cited the annihilation of the Armenians as a seminal example of genocide.

I have asked myself why I was selected for this role today. I assume my good friend Aris Babikian, well-known to you all as a community representative, played a key role in this decision. I'm very sorry family matters have prevented Aris from being here today. For those who may not know, I want to tell you that in my view, Aris Babikian is the best single ambassador that the Canadian Armenian community has. NOT because he never stops lobbying anyone with the slightest power and influence about the injustice of non-recognition, although that is true. But because he is THIS community's link to OTHER communities who have shared comparable tragedies. In fact, I regret to say frankly, in my experience Aris is one of only few Armenian Canadians who have shown a genuine interest and who has reached out to such other communities.

And that's why I believe I'm here. Because like Aris, I believe in the solidarity of sorrow and the solidarity of victims.

My own special focus is Rwanda. For various reasons, I came to write a long report, a history, in effect, of the Rwanda genocide. Called "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," it documents the organized slaughter in 1994 of perhaps 800,000, perhaps a million - no one yet knows for sure - Rwandan Tutsi and thousands of pro-democracy Rwanda Hutu, and the complicity in or indifference to this genocide by members of the international community. When the report was published, I found myself unable simply to walk away and begin new and unrelated pursuits. I feared that the memory of the genocide, only 6 years after the tragedy, had already almost vanished, assuming any but a bare minority ever knew the truth about it in the first place beyond a few horrific TV images.

Working from my home, I founded an international voluntary movement called Remembering Rwanda, dedicated to commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary of the genocide. (The 11th anniversary, on April 7, passed with barely a murmur; I doubt many outside Rwanda knew of it at all.) From the start, I particularly sought out the support and cooperation of Jewish and Armenian organizations.

I had two reasons. I instinctively believed that the solidarity of victims would be obvious to these two communities above all, so that the simple fact of shared victimhood would lead their survivors and descendants to rush to support each other. And I believed (as someone who has always been involved in political action for social change) that for good practical reasons of increased influence, the more of us that we could unite in a common cause, the better for us all.

Despite my long years in the political trenches, I seem to have been stunningly naïve. Of course we found some support. A number of prominent Jews in North America, Europe and Israel lent us their names. A few prominent Armenians did the same. Aris managed to get the agreement of several international Armenian organizations to use their names as well, but I believe that I only ever spoke to a couple of their members in total. During last year's three-day commemoration in Toronto for the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, Aris alone showed up on behalf of the Armenian community. I can tell you how gratified the Rwandans were by his presence. In the dozens of other cities throughout North America and western Europe where commemorations took place, sometimes a few known Armenians were involved, sometimes none at all. Why should this be? I asked a number of people. The bottom line always seemed to be a preoccupation with the Armenian genocide to the exclusion of any other.

This is of course understandable. We naturally all feel most strongly the loss of our own family and kin. But beyond that, the Armenian people, like the Rwandans in certain ways, still must cope with the special burden of official denial. They are assaulted by the harsh reality that the Turkish government to this day refuses to acknowledge the crime that was committed and lobbies incessantly against recognition of the genocide by other governments. I know that this insult continues to drive the Armenian community.

Nevertheless, I must tell you frankly that I found the general disinterest of Armenians in the Rwandan genocide to be not only morally disappointing but from your own point of view, politically short-sighted.

As for the Jewish communities of the western world and the government of Israel, with notable honorable exceptions they failed to respond in a positive manner. I believe that most of the western Jewish and Israeli establishments were more or less indifferent to the Rwandan genocide.

In regard to the Armenian genocide, I must report that these same elements were in the vanguard of denial.

I fully understand that these are very sensitive and delicate matters, and it's much easier not to raise them at all. But that would be running away from uncomfortable truths carrying important lessons. I want instead to try to talk about them as carefully as possible. I'm sure the fact that I'm Jewish- wholly non-religious, even anti-religious, but yet Jewish to my core - complicates the issue considerably. These are thoughts I have tried to work out for several years. Today seems to be an appropriate forum for articulating them.

On the walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, are inscribed one of Hitler's more intriguing statements. In 1939, just before he launched his aggression against Poland, triggering the Second World War, Hitler explained that he was dispatching special death squads to Poland that would deliberately slaughter large numbers of Polish men, women and children. But he wasn't remotely concerned about the reaction. "Who, after all," he asked, "speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" In other words, he was saying, with sufficient shamelessness, you could literally get away with murder, even murder of the ultimate kind. For the past eight decades, a series of Turkish governments and their supporters have largely confirmed Hitler's cynical insight, as they have denied the very existence of the genocide and attempted to undermine all attempts to have it recognized.

As it happens, in recent years their bullying and intimidation tactics have increasingly failed, as a growing number of countries have officially recognized the genocide. But to our shame, Canada has not, the United States has not, and Israel has not.

One year ago, the House of Commons in Ottawa voted to recognize the genocide by a large margin, 153 votes to 68. But the entire cabinet voted against the resolution, citing the need to maintain good relations with Turkey. So the bizarre situation in our own country is that the Canadian House of Commons recognizes the genocide of the Armenians, but the government of Canada officially does not.

In the United States, although George Bush promised recognition in his first presidential campaign, he soon enough reneged in the face of joint pressure from both Turkish officials and significant Jewish-American organizations, such as the highly influential American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. This is not often widely discussed publicly. But it's perfectly familiar in American political circles since Congress too has been convinced by this same tenacious lobby to reject resolutions calling for recognition. This lobbying effort was hardly unknown, having been documented last year by the Israeli daily Haaretz among other sources.

I should also stress that on the other hand, and as one would have hoped and expected, prominent among those publicly calling for American government recognition of the genocide were a significant number of Jewish Americans. They included Holocaust scholars, rabbis and community leaders, all of whom had concluded from the evidence that there was absolutely no question that a classic genocide had been inflicted on Turkey's Armenians.

The cooperation between Turkish officials and these Jewish American organizations naturally reflects Israel's own position on the question. That position is an adamant refusal to acknowledge the 1915 genocide, regardless of the evidence. In fact so strongly has this policy been maintained by a series of Israeli governments that it is, unfortunately, fair to say that rather than indifference, rather than the passivity of the bystander, Israelis, with a few notably courageous exceptions, have taken active measures to undermine attempts to safeguard the memory of the Armenian genocide. One of these, I'm afraid, has been to deny that a genocide ever occurred. Here we have the most appalling irony of them all: that those who consider that denial of the Holocaust is tantamount almost to a 2nd Holocaust, have now become deniers of the genocide of the Armenians.

The motives of this almost Orwellian stance are, however, clear enough. There are two.

The first, and the better-known, is based on Israel's determination to maintain a strategic alliance between itself and Turkey in the Middle East. Israel's vital interests are deemed to be at stake here, not to say it's very survival. This is an understandable and easily defended position. But it's a position that places realpolitik and national strategic interests ahead of ethics, ahead of the solidarity of genocide victims, and ahead of Israel's self-declared claim to be a different kind of nation, indeed a "light unto the nations". This is a position that says that even the common fate of genocide cannot take priority over Israel's perceived self-interest.

But this leads to the 2nd reason for Israel's refusal to recognize the genocide, one that I find far more difficult to understand or to share. It is precisely the refusal to accept that the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, or the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, or the Holocaust and any other human catastrophe, can be equated in any way.

As the Jerusalem Post editorialized a decade ago: "There is nothing in history like the Holocaust. It was not even JUST a genocide." The Holocaust must be seen as transcendent, as being in a separate category, from all other presumably "ordinary" genocides like the Armenians'.

I want to say again that these are remarkably sensitive issues, frankly uncomfortable and difficult to discuss. They are felt passionately and unforgivingly by many. For many Jews, both in Israel and the western world, recognizing other genocides somehow diminishes the singularity, the uniqueness, of what Hitler did to the Jews of Europe, and on this uniqueness they are uncompromising. Nothing, they declare, can compare to the Holocaust. It is incomparable. It is unprecedented. It is unique. It is even, in the actual words of two scholars determined to end any possibility of further debate, "uniquely unique".

The significance of this debate has been described by one Israeli scholar this way: "From Auschwitz came two people: a minority that insists it will never happen again, and a majority that insists it will never happen to US again."

This is a helpful way to frame the debate. It points out that the lesson of the Holocaust, or at least the implication, can be seen as either particularistic or universalistic, as either a unique episode in human history applicable only to the Jewish people or a grotesque reflection of the potential capacity of human nature for depravity. Of course every event in history is unique and unprecedented in certain ways, and beyond question some aspects of the Holocaust are literally unique, that is to say, nothing else like them had ever happened before or indeed since. But the same, alas, can be said of aspects of both the Armenian and Rwandan genocides.

I believe that what the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides have in common transcend their differences.

For what all three have in common is that in each case, a cabal of conspirators set out explicitly and deliberately to exterminate all the members of the target group for the simple reason of WHO they were, not what they did. What all have in common is a demonstration that whether Turks in the circumstances prevailing in 1915, or Germans in the context of Nazi Germany and World War 2, or Rwandan Hutu in the ambience of the 100 days after April 7, 1994 - in each of these circumstances, ordinary Turks and ordinary Germans and ordinary Rwandans perpetrated crimes that no one would have thought them - or any other human being - capable of. I believe that in advance, few of them would have believed themselves capable of such a descent into barbarism.

For that reason, I consider that I too am capable - under unfathomable but feasible circumstances - of perpetrating similar crimes. For that reason, I see in the Holocaust a universal and not a particular lesson.

I see that any people anywhere may suddenly become the victims of unspeakable atrocities.

I see the solidarity of sorrow, not the competition of victims.

I see that all racism, all bigotry, all hatred, all anti-democratic behaviour must be opposed without compromise.

I see the need to fight for the rights of the oppressed and the victimized wherever in the world they may be.

Let me conclude with a quote from an article written in 1918 by a man named Shmuel Tolkowsky. Tolkowsky mattered. He was secretary to Chaim Weizmann, then the leader of the world Zionist movement and later the 1st president of the State of Israel. The article, written only three years after the genocide of the Armenians, was called "The Armenian Question from the Zionist Point of View". It is reproduced in a recent book given to me by Aris Babikian called The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide, written by an Israeli, Yair Auron.

"We Zionists look upon the fate of the Armenian people with a deep and sincere sympathy," Tolkowsky wrote. "We do so as men [he meant humans], as Jews, and as Zionists. As men our motto is…'I am a human being. Whatever affects another human being affects me.' As Jews, our exile from our ancestral home and our centuries of suffering in all parts of the globe have made us, I would fain to say, specialists in martyrdom; our humanitarian feelings have been refined to an incomparable degree, so much so that the sufferings of other people - even alien to us in blood and remote from us in distance - cannot but strike the deeper chords of our soul and weave between us and our fellow sufferers that deep bond of sympathy which one might call the solidarity of sorrow. And among all those who suffer around us, is there a people whose record of martyrdom is more akin to ours than that of the Armenians?"

Today I would add: "Or that of the Rwandans?"

So I hope that Armenians, Rwandans and Jews, and all women and men who believe in justice and a better, more equitable world, will work together for genocide prevention, will work together to end the terrible calamity in Darfur, and will work together to ensure that when we meet again 10 years from now, we will commemorate together the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, mildly comforted that, at long last, the entire world will finally have come to acknowledge the terrible, indisputable reality of your history.

* Please send comments to

The International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) has launched a new publication aimed at equipping human rights activists around the world with essential tools to campaign more effectively for freedom of expression and press freedom.

"During the period 1999-2005, the South African government, in its haste to embrace genetic engineering, authorised the import of a staggering 2 683 033 tons of GM maize seed from the US and Argentina: 2679 tons for field trials; 4 264 tons for commercial planting; 1 779 115 tons as unspecified commodity imports; and 899 500 tons for animal feed."

Civil Society Coalition for Quality Basic Education (CSCQBE), a Coalition of more than 54 NGOs active in advocating quality basic education in Malawi is pleased to inform the general public about the 2005 global campaign for education action week. As part of its contribution CSCQBE has organized a number of activities that include a national launch, follow up district launches, media advocacy and stakeholder workshops.

‘'It is not an easy job. Sometimes I get booed and taunted. At crucial moments I get chased out of places where the practice is much more prevalent,'' complains 34-year-old Ann Marie Caulker, who is championing the campaign to end the age-old tradition of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Caulker's strategy is simple. Through her Katanya Women's Development Association (KADWA), she has recruited hundreds of young girls, aged between 12 and 18, the prime target for FGM, and placed them in skills training centres. The girls learn tailoring, dyeing, weaving, soap making and embroidery.

"We cotton farmers, people living with HIV/AIDS, youth, women, cross border traders and economic justice activists participating in the Global Week of Action Economic Justice Festival in the Harare Gardens, Zimbabwe, 13 April 2005 note with great concern testimonies given by cotton farmers. The peasant farmers have lamented the grand robbery that has pushed their households into abject poverty. The enemy is known. It is the unfair low prices that cotton is fetching in the current marketing season. It is the unfair world trading system. It is the failure of global institutions such as the WTO to deliver social justice to the poor and downtrodden producers of this earth."

Akpabuyo Bakkasi Green Movement (ABGREMO) a youth based NGO working for the protection of the last remaining mangrove of Nigeria and the human rights of the coastal communities through education and action programme, is organizing International Children Mangrove & Poetry Competition for children between age 5 – 15 years as part of our activities to mark "Earth Day 2005".

African civil society organisations have stepped up a new push for debt cancellation of the 39 billion US dollars paid by African states to lenders annually ahead of crucial World Bank, International Monetary Fund meeting set for April 16-17. "We have been strategising for popular action and public mobilization to put pressure on the World Bank and IMF to reform the policy agenda and cancel debts owed by African nations and improve the quality and quantity of aid," Kumi Naidoo, secretary-general of the Johannesburg-based CIVICUS (World Alliance for Citizen Participation) told Xinhua in an interview. "African nations are also spending an average of 40 percent of their annual budgets on servicing debts which were given ages back but which the various nations still have to re-pay as part of national obligations," Naidoo said.

Churches and church-related organisations around the world are leading events during the Global Week of Action on Trade, taking place from 10-16 April 2005. Actions are being planned in over 80 countries, involving faith groups and civil society organisations. Campaigners are challenging the myth that free trade helps to reduce poverty and are calling for changes in international trade rules to safeguard the rights of all people. Events in South Africa focus on trade issues close to home. Especially the textile industry and the agricultural sector continue to suffer severely from unjust international trade rules and increasingly experience piercing levels of job losses.

The Organisation Development and Community Management Trust (ODCMT) has launched the Global week of Action on Trade Justice in Zambia. The week starts from 10th - 16th April 2005, where as many campaigns as possible across the world active on trade come together in united action. The idea is for all organisations, networks and movements to take action in their own national and regional campaigns. The aim is to challenge unjust local, regional and international trade and put forward alternatives by delivering the biggest global mobilization we have ever seen. The Global Week of Action triggers massive mobilization in Zambia for trade justice and it will gather momentum in the run up to the World Trade Organisation Ministerial summit in Hong Kong.

AFRODAD, a Pan African regional organization working on Debt and Development issues is looking for a self-starter to join its secretariat as a Programme Director for Lobby and Advocacy.  The position is based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Basic requirements include an advanced degree in social sciences; knowledge of and experience in research and advocacy for Debt Cancellation at both regional and international levels; analytical, creative, strategic and problem-solving skills; the ability to simplify, summarise and communicate complex information. Working knowledge and presentation skills in both English and French/Portuguese are added advantages. Good communications, interpersonal and networking skills, including the ability to work with a diverse range of people; project development, fundraising, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and report-writing skills are essential. Interested applicants can email their CVs in confidence with a covering letter to: [email protected]/ [email protected]

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has amended the Constitution to allow for multi-party elections in September. Mubarak’s firm grip on power, however, means that he is unlikely to face a serious challenge. Rather, writes Joel Beinin, the future of Egyptian politics will depend on whether popular political initiatives are capable of building a social movement for change.

President Husni Mubarak’s unexpected announcement that Article 76 of the Egyptian constitution will be amended to permit a direct and competitive vote in the September presidential election has captured the attention of the international and local media and political classes. The substance of the proposed constitutional amendment, announced on February 26, remains undetermined. While the president will not run unopposed in a single-party referendum, as he has done on four previous occasions, a multi-party contest might not end his 24-year rule. Past multi-party elections for the parliament have been plagued by voter intimidation, fraud and other dirty tricks intended to pad the ruling National Democratic Party’s majority.

It is far from clear that Mubarak’s decision heralds the birth of genuine electoral democracy on the Nile. Moreover, focusing on top-level political maneuvering misses the pressure from below that has played a significant role in forcing this concession from the regime.

For the last several months, a disparate collection of burgeoning movements among several sectors of Egyptian society has converged upon one message: opposition to the status quo. Since December 11, 2004, the Kifaya (Enough) movement has organized three demonstrations demanding that Mubarak step down and that he refrain from handing off the presidency to his son, as happened in Syria and in the “democratic” US-allied monarchies of Jordan and Morocco. Kifaya activists have collected well over 1,000 signatures of public figures on a petition calling for a direct and contested presidential election. Members and supporters of the Ghad (Tomorrow) Party have loudly protested the incarceration of their leader Ayman Nur. Human rights activists have continued to criticize the regime’s arbitrary roundups of Islamists in response to the October 7, 2004 terrorist bombings in the Sinai resort of Taba. Workers have engaged in long strikes protesting the business-friendly policies favored by Mubarak -- and, even more so, his son Gamal. In covering these developments, the non-governmental media have gone well beyond previous limits on freedom of the press.

Since 1952, no Egyptian head of state has been targeted directly in this manner. A taboo has been broken, and there is no telling where these popular movements may lead.

A strike against privatization

Some 12 miles north of Cairo, 400 textile workers at the Qalyub Spinning Company, a branch of the ESCO conglomerate, have been conducting a sit-in strike since February 13. They are protesting the government’s sale of their mill to a private investor because they believe private-sector management will not maintain the levels of wages and benefits they have achieved since ESCO, like most other significant Egyptian manufacturing firms, was nationalized in the early 1960s. The strike began because the government and company management failed to deliver on promises to provide an adequate early retirement package in response to a shorter ten-day strike in October 2004.
Privatization of the public sector has long been strongly supported by Washington, as well as Egypt’s creditors at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Fearing social unrest, the Mubarak regime delayed the recommended privatization measures for years before moving with relative vigor to sell off state-owned enterprises in 1993. Despite several bitter wildcat strikes and indications that privatization was contributing to a greatly widened gap between rich and poor, that state passed over 100 factories into private hands between 1993 and 1999. In May of 1999, the International Monetary Fund declared itself satisfied that Egypt was finally heeding its advice. But the selloffs stalled as the economy stagnated. The sale of the Qalyub Spinning Company is part of a renewed wave of privatization. Textiles, one of the largest and perhaps the most storied of Egyptian industries, have been targeted because the sector has been in crisis since the 1970s due to competition from east and southeast Asia.

The first step in preparing firms for privatization is reduction of the labor force. The six ESCO mills employed some 24,000 workers in 1980; they have been reduced to 3,500 by a combination of attrition, a hiring freeze since 1987 and five waves of early retirement packages, the last in 2000. At ESCO’s Bahtim facility, the administrative offices, garage and spinning mill were all sold to a private investor without any obligation on his part to employ the workers who previously worked there. The striking ESCO workers believe that the long years they have worked in the mill -- many have 20 to 30 years seniority -- entitle them to continue working there rather than being replaced by new workers who will undoubtedly receive lower wages and benefits. Basic monthly wages now range from 250 Egyptian pounds ($43) to 600 pounds ($103) a month -- below the poverty line at the lower end of the scale.

The Qalyub Spinning Company workers believe the state is divesting itself of valuable assets without due process -- and at bargain-basement prices. Gamal Shaaban, a skilled worker with 23 years seniority, asked, “With what right was the sale [of this mill] conducted?” The workers own 10 percent of the firm, but they were not consulted about the sale. “Muhsin Abd al-Wahhab al-Gilani [the CEO of the public-sector holding company that owns the mill] agreed to the sale. Was the company his property or the property of the people?”

Muhammad Gabr Abdallah, a night supervisor with 28 years seniority at ESCO and a spokesperson for the workers, led a tour of the mill and explained that in 1999 the company was valued at 60 million pounds. In 2003 the government invested 7 million pounds in capital improvements, including computerized spindles. It then concluded a three-year lease agreement for 2.5 million pounds a year with a businessman named Hashim al-Daghri, expecting that he would buy the mill. Before the lease expired, the mill was sold to al-Daghri at the steeply discounted price of 4 million pounds.

The ESCO workers are highly conscious that their strike questions the fundamental direction of Egypt’s economic strategy. Not only are Gamal Mubarak and his entourage of US-educated economists and business tycoons intent on introducing more free-market policies, but in December Egypt also concluded a trade agreement with the US creating seven Qualifying Industrial Zones where foreign and domestic factory owners will be free to pay structurally lower wages. Rashid Muhammad Rashid, the new minister of industry who is associated with the younger Mubarak, attempted to parry nationalist criticisms of the agreement by claiming that the zones would revitalize the struggling textile sector. Indeed, the Qalyub facility is not the only mill on the auction block. Gilani announced on February 25 that the Delta Spinning and Weaving Company is up for sale.

“Ask the government”

Because of the political importance of the Qalyub strike, activists from the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services in Helwan have supported the workers. Journalists from al-Ahali, the weekly of the legal left National Progressive Union Party, and the open-minded English-language al-Ahram Weekly have written sympathetic accounts. The new English-language weekly, Cairo, published an equivocating report that nonetheless contained more information than is commonly available in Arabic.

In contrast, Ibrahim Nafie, chief editor of al-Ahram, made it known that he was not enthusiastic about covering the strike in the quasi-official, Arabic-language daily. The workers have received no support from the state-sponsored Federation of Spinning and Weaving Unions. Federation spokesman Ali Muhammad Mansour agrees, however, that ESCO cannot pay the workers an adequate retirement package. Early retirement packages have been an integral but controversial component of Egypt’s privatization schemes. The downsized workers first receive a lump sum, which the state encourages them to invest in a small business, and then a monthly stipend that is often much less than the pension they would have received had their factory remained state-owned. Workers have long complained that the stipends are too low to meet the rising costs of living. In the severe downturn that has afflicted Egypt’s economy since 1999, the limited appeal of the lump sum payment has also diminished. The ESCO trade union representative resigned because he did not want to bear any responsibility for the packages on offer to the Qalyub Spinning Company employees.

ESCO’s management is equally aware of the import of the strike. Sitting at his desk below a poster of the shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca, the manager of the mill, Sayyid Abd al-Fattah, an ostentatiously pious Muslim with a large prayer scar on his forehead, evaded direct answers to questions put to him by a group of journalists. He complained that the workers were “pressuring” him and the private investors to accede to their demands. To buttress his claim that the current strike and the one in October 2004, for which three days’ wages were deducted from workers’ pay checks, were illegal, he pulled the text of the New Labor Law (Number 12 of 2003) out of his desk drawer and quoted the appropriate sections. It is almost impossible to conduct a legal strike in Egypt, as this requires the approval of the government-controlled trade union federation.

The striking workers have proposed three options to the ESCO management and the government. They want their mill to remain in the public sector. If that is impossible (as is likely since the contract of sale has already been signed), they want the workers to be permitted to transfer to other mills of the Egyptian Holding Company for Spinning and Weaving, which manages all textiles firms in the public sector. If they cannot be transferred, they want to receive “reasonable” early retirement packages. The third option is the sticking point, because while 10 percent of workers’ monthly wages are deducted for retirement benefits, the company has not paid its matching 20 percent share into the retirement fund since 1992. Consequently, the retirement fund is not able to pay out an adequate retirement package. Abd al-Fattah was asked if the company’s failure to prime the fund was not as illegal as he asserts the strike to be. He responded, “Ask the government.”

Political Islamists

The 287 workers at the Egyptian-Spanish Asbestos Products Company (Ora Misr) in Tenth of Ramadan City, one of six satellite communities built by the state to ease population pressure in greater Cairo, have been on strike since November 20, 2004. The owner of the factory, Ahmad Abd al-Azim Luqma, is known as a member of the Muslim Brothers -- an illegal but semi-tolerated Islamist party widely considered the largest and most organized opposition force in Egypt. The workers assert that he arbitrarily fired 52 workers after the Ministry of Labor Power closed the factory because of health code violations. Luqma has also refused to pay the workers’ wages since September. They claim he intends to sell the plant’s stock of raw materials and to evade paying the fine the government has imposed on him and the compensation due workers for health damages.

The Muslim Brothers have a long history of breaking strikes and opposing militant trade union activity going back to the 1940s, when they clashed with communists in the textile center of Shubra al-Khayma, north of Cairo. The Brothers continued to oppose the left during the 1980s and 1990s. But in this period the Brothers-Labor Party alliance adopted a more pro-labor stance, though this did not necessarily lead to pro-labor practices. Since the 2001 death of Adil Husayn, a former communist who became an Islamist and a leader of the Labor Party, the Brothers have returned to their traditionally pro-business stance.

At Ora Misr, the workers’ factory-level trade union committee is supporting their strike, although their trade union federation is not. The government, although it is no friend of the factory owner, has not acted decisively to break the impasse.

Some suspect that the government is highly strategic about when it chooses to confront the Muslim Brothers. The regime knows the extent of the Brothers’ popular support, and, for that reason, its leaders are periodically arrested. But an all-out assault on the Brothers carries many political risks in an already unstable political situation.

Muhammad Mahdi Akif, who assumed the mantle of general guide of the Society of Muslim Brothers just over a year ago, has announced that the Brothers will support a fifth term for Husni Mubarak on the grounds that the Qur’an says that Muslims should obey their leader. This is a political maneuver designed to persuade the government to legalize the society -- a long-sought goal. Liberal-minded leaders of the Muslim Brothers -- those now in their fifties who joined during the Islamic upsurge of the 1970s -- objected vociferously and publicly to Akif’s statement. The organization is deeply split, and it is unclear if it can maintain its historically tight discipline.

A different face of Islamism was evident at the February 22 press conference called by Human Rights Watch to publicize its report on the mass arrests and torture of at least 800 residents of the northern Sinai town of al-Arish following the Taba terrorist bombings. Eight women from al-Arish -- wives, mothers and sisters of those incarcerated -- attended the event. They call themselves salafis -- a reference to the era of the Prophet Muhammad and the first four caliphs. Salafis believe that Islamic faith and legal practice should be derived solely from the example of this first period in Islamic history. One woman, speaking in a polished Cairene accent, announced her name and related the tales of several of her imprisoned male relatives. She said that her brother, who has been in jail for 18 years, urged her to speak out strongly against the regime. Otherwise her husband, who was arrested without a warrant or a judicial order after the Taba bombings, and is being held without charge, would remain in jail for 18 years as well. She then sharply and directly attacked Husni Mubarak using language rarely heard in public.

According to Human Rights Watch, Egyptian authorities are holding as many as 2,400 people without charge following the sweep in the coastal town, despite having identified only nine people as having a hand in the Taba attacks. On March 4, some 50 women in al-Arish demonstrated against the continuing detention of their male relatives and shouted anti-government slogans. Police intervened and closed off the area.

American-style opposition

Members of the Ghad Party, which embraces pro-US, pro-free market policies, have shouted slogans and hung banners out the windows of their headquarters in Talaat Harb Square, a major Cairo intersection, on numerous occasions since their leader was arrested on January 29. Nur, a wealthy, aristocratic lawyer, was arrested on the rather ridiculous charge that he forged signatures on the petition to found the party. Some believe Nur was jailed because he published a draft of a new constitution with far more substantial changes than Mubarak and his acolytes are now discussing.

The Ghad Party proposed abolition of the emergency laws in force since 1981, limits on the nearly dictatorial powers of the president, and a limit on the number of presidential terms in office. These demands echo those of other parties and influential individuals. In other words, in contrast to the largely formalistic “national political dialogue” that convened at the end of January, Nur and the Ghad Party put some of the substantive political issues facing Egypt on the public agenda. Although still incarcerated, Nur has announced he will run for the presidency. He is the most credible candidate who can be put forward by the legal parties. One of the apparent devils in the details of Mubarak’s “bombshell” is that parties the regime does not recognize -- like the Muslim Brothers -- will not be allowed to field a candidate.

There is little doubt that Husni Mubarak will win even a relatively free election, assuming that he runs, because the political, media and educational infrastructure for a viable democratic political system does not exist and cannot be installed by September. A similar scenario would likely apply if the father contrived magnanimously to withdraw his name from the race in favor of the son. Consequently, the future of Egyptian politics will not be determined by the amendment of the constitution.

Rather, it will depend on whether these popular political initiatives are capable of building a social movement for change. While such a movement has not yet coalesced, challenges to the regime by human rights activists, workers and other marginalized strata show no sign of abating and are becoming increasingly sharp. Ahmad Sayf al-Islam, the director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, assisted Human Rights Watch in its investigation of the al-Arish detentions. At the HRW press conference he accused the government of breaking into his home and stealing his laptop computer for a second time two days earlier. Sayf al-Islam’s exceptionally bold public statement addressed itself to “tyrants, pharaohs of Egypt” and concluded, “the fish starts rotting from the head. Don’t you smell the rot of our fish?”

* Joel Beinin is a professor of Middle East history at Stanford University and an editor of Middle East Report. This article was originally published in Middle East Report Online (http://www.merip.org/). It is reproduced in Pambazuka News with permission.

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