Workers' Liberty

Last week thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh went on strike in protest at rising food prices. Factory workers earn as little as a $1 a day and have seen the price of rice increase by a third since last year. Some 30 million people in Bangladesh – nearly a quarter of the population — may be going without a daily meal.

Workers at Mahalla in the Nile Delta have suffered a fresh wave of repression from Hosni Mubarak’s regime after a series of militant strikes, protests and demonstrations beginning on April 6th. The Egyptian police arrested hundreds of workers, demonstrators and even journalists reporting on the revolt, as the regime seeks to silence working class people angry at low wages and massive food price inflation which has seen bread prices go up nearly 50% in the last year.

The class struggle in Egypt, rising since 2006, has reached a new pitch in the last few weeks.

On Sunday 16 February, more than 10,000 workers from the Misr (Egypt) Spinning and Weaving Company textile mill in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla el-Kubra, north of Cairo, staged a mass demonstration against prices rices, low wages and the regime of Hosni Mubarak, joined by thousands more working-class people from the town. The Mahalla workers’ action was followed by similar, smaller-scale actions and protests by workers across Egypt.

The class struggle in Egypt, rising since 2006, has reached a new pitch in the last few weeks.

On Sunday 16 February, more than 10,000 workers from the Misr (Egypt) Spinning and Weaving Company textile mill in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla el-Kubra, north of Cairo, staged a mass demonstration against prices rices, low wages and the regime of Hosni Mubarak, joined by thousands more working-class people from the town. The Mahalla workers’ action was followed by similar, smaller-scale actions and protests by workers across Egypt.

The left devotes much of its efforts to campaigning against imperialism, which is no surprise given the present foreign policy of the American and British governments.

Hossam al-Hamalawy, an Egyptian blogger, journalist, and labor activist currently at Berkeley's School of Journalism, is reporting on his blog that 15,000 workers at the Ghazl al-Mahallah textile factory in Egypt have gone on strike.

The longest and strongest wave of worker protest since World War II is rolling through Egypt.

By Amina Saddiq

22 year old Egyptian blogger and former law student Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, or Kareem Amer as he is known online, was arrested by the authorities in Alexandria on 22 February and charged with the following offences:

Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, better known by his Internet pseudonym Kareem Amer, is a 22-year-old Egyptian law student. On February 22, 2007, Kareem was sentenced to four years in prison: three years for ‘contempt of religion’, and one year for ‘defaming the President of Egypt’. Why?

[Posted 28 Feb, 2007]
22 year old Egyptian blogger and former law student Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, or Kareem Amer as he is known online, was arrested by the authorities in Alexandria on 22 February and charged with the following offences:

By Mike Rowley

In last year’s multi-party presidential elections, the first such in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the oldest and largest political-Islamist organisation in the world, did not stand a candidate.

By Mike Rowley

The government of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak claims an 83% “yes” vote on a 54% turnout in its constitutional referendum last week. This will allow opposition candidates to stand for the presidency against Mubarak, but only if they are selected by the dictator’s own oddly named “National Democratic Party”.

Israeli socialist and peace activist Uri Avnery comments here on recent demonstrations against Mubarak in Egypt and on the growth of Islamism in the Middle East. The demonstrations have been severely repressed. That is bad, but it is also worrying that the forces that are initiating the demonstrations are growing. How should socialists face up to this reality?

The following article by Gamal Essam El-Din, Al-Ahram weekly gives some insight into the social and political crisis in Egypt and the sort of nationalist and Islamist arguments which are being proposed to deal with it

The following article by Gamal Essam El-Din, Al-Ahram weekly gives some insight into the social and political crisis in Egypt and the sort of nationalist and Islamist arguments which are being proposed to deal with it

Workers from Esco's Qalyoub textile mill staged a sit in at the headquarters of the government-controlled General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) on Saturday and Sunday 19-20 March. The workers are protesting the government's sale of the Qalyoub mill to industrialist Hashem El-Daghri. They are demanding either to remain in the public sector in order to salvage job security and social security benefits or else an adequate early retirement package. They have been on strike since 13 February.

By Pablo Velasco

• Support Egyptian asbestos workers

• Release imprisoned Chinese workers
• British hypocrisy over the Chagos islands

At our meeting on 3 March, Haringey & Hackney AWL branch discussed Islamism in Egypt.

Clive Bradley gave a talk about the issue: this is a summary of what he said.

Egypt is one of the birthplaces of modern Islamism - that is, of political movements based on Islam that take the form of a modern political party. In 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in Egypt.

On 15 March, 21 defendants in the latest round of the Queen Boat trials in Egypt were sentenced to three years' imprisonment for "debauchery". The affair began when 55 men were arrested on the Queen Boat, a gay disco, in May 2001.