#OSyd Occupy Friday, 23/03

On Friday night I headed along to the first (and hopefully not the last!) "Occupy Friday" night hosted by Occupy Sydney.

We are the 99%

It was a good response; I'd estimate that there was at least 50-60 people in attendance throughout the night, including around 40 marching down to the steps of the MLC centre tower, where the US consulate in Sydney is located, to show solidarity with #Occupy Wall Street protesters who have faced police violence in the last week.

Mic Check: I don't think George Orwell intended 1984 to be an instruction manual...

From the Facebook event:

Occupy Sydney will be hosting Occupy Fridays beginning on friday the 23rd and continuing every friday after that. Occupy Fridays seeks to facilitate a hub for arts, free education, creativity and ideas. Occupy Fridays is open to anyone and everyone and will be an open source event; which means that anyone involved can contribute and participate in determining the destiny of Occupy Fridays and the future of Occupy Sydney as a whole.

Occupy Fridays is a great way to engage for the first time or re-engage with YOUR Occupy Movement and explore alternatives to the current economic and social realities that govern our lives.

On Friday the 23rd, there will be a variety of ways to get involved which are fun and educational, including:

-Theme, The Australian Fun Exchange
-Free school workshops & teach-ins planned, including a freeschool on the financial system and a "know your rights" workshop. Also for anyone who wants to spontaneously hold a workshop can do so!
-Portugese conversation class at 10:30pm
-Placard making area
-Musicians Welcome and please bring your own instruments for jammin’
- Kid’s section -3-4pm
- Tiny Tents Task Force
-Yoga Lessons
- Friday Night Sustainable Cinema (Movie TBA)
- Stencil making (for Occupy Sydney T-shirts and such, bring an old T-shirt and spare material for flags and banners)
-Occupiers will be walking around getting voxpops from people for our "Have Your Say" project. If you'd like to contribute thoughts or ideas, they will be the strange people walking around with video cameras. They're pretty friendly. so don't be shy, get your voice heard!
-Also, anyone who wants to take part, we'll be heading to the MLC Centre steps around 8pm ish and hold a candle lit vigil to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters at OWS who suffered this wknd at the hands of NYPD brutality. BYO candle!

If you have any ideas or skills that you'd like to offer, come to the Occupy Fridays Working Group at 5pm on tuesdays, otherwise, come along, one and all! it’ll be a great night! Please come armed with ideas, musical instruments, a plate of food and a touch of mischeif!

Occupy Fridays will be an overnight event, so if you'd like to bring sleeping gear and occupy overnight, please do so but no tents please as that presents legal issues.

Occupy Fridays is also a drug and alcohol free event. Please respect that and make sure it remains a safe space for all participants!

Please invite your friends!

Support Occupy Sydney

The fact that #OSyd has survived the summer, maintaining a presence at Martin Place (unlike any other #Occupy in Australia), is definitely a good thing. Free Schools draw in similiar numbers to the 50-60 that were down there on Friday night - but the Free Schools are more focused on discussion and less on taking action; from speaking with many of the longer term occupiers, this is the first time in a long time that such numbers have been part of political action with the group.

There is a lot of thinking going on in #Osyd about what is the best way to move forward, to grow the movement now the initial excitement (read: media attention) over the idea of occupy has faded a little. The protest camp faces constant police harassment, as do individual occupy activists. In this context, I think events like Occupy Friday are crucial in mobilising people who, for whatever reasons, haven't gotten involved in #OSyd yet - or who got involved back in October then dropped away in response to the police harassment, their own time constraints and priorities, or whatever.

To me, #Occupy Sydney is above all a movement for the dispossesed; the homeless, the unemployed, the workers, the "aussie battlers", everyone who is on the short end of the stick in this society. Only a small number of those people are dedicated, motivated and convinced enough to be part of an overnight camp of a small number of people who are going to face police intimidation. #Occupy, or any movement which seeks to say that our economic and political system is the problem, needs to find a variety of different methods of organisation that all of those layers of people can relate to within their comfort zone, while still seeking to draw those people forward into the struggle.

Occupy Fridays seems to me a great tactic to do this; space for a variety of kinds of activism, collective mobilisation, and potentially building up numbers to renewed occupation on a scale the police can't just harass away. I think it's important that #OFri still maintains an emphasis political action, like the solidarity vigil, as well as organising and discussion. I'd encourage all socialists, anarchists and others seeking to change the system to come down to next week's Occupy Friday before/after the March to Jerusalem, and be part of the conversation :)

160 days of occupy... and counting :)

#Free Austin 11/03

On the 11th of March, myself and around 60-70 other activists, friends, family & colleagues of Austin Mackell rallied outside the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (or Department of Fucking Around and Timewasting, as I prefer) to demand our parachute Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, make public statements and take action on Austin's behalf.

Rally for Austin Mackell, 11/03

You can also check out three videos of the protest posted on YouTube.

Rally for Austin Mackell, 11/03 - boys in blue in the back...

A Change.org petition has been circulating calling for both Carr & Julia Gillard to intervene on Austin's behalf, along with an open letter in the same vein. Between my signing the petition yesterday and the time of posting, the signatures have gone up by at least a couple of thousand. Let's hope it hits ten thousand by the time I check tomorrow night...

Hillier Windsor, Austin's sister, speaking at the rally, 11/03.

Austin himself has written several pieces on the question of his arrest; the first is his firsthand account of the events in Mahalla, an amazing look at the belly of the beast which is worth reading for anyone who wants to understand how the police bureaucracy in a police/military state like Egypt actually runs. Since then, he's written another two pieces: one, a letter calling for Bob Carr to intervene, and another speculating as to the reasons why his arrest may be preceeding. As usual, Austin is able to see how the issue (in this case, his own arrest) gets to the heart of the post-January 25 balance of forces in Egypt and what it says for the ongoing revolutionary struggle.

The "Iron Lady" he identifies, Fayza Aboul-Naga is, according to Ahram Online, more well known internationally than General Tantawi; I doubt this is actually true, but either way it bodes poorly for Austin's case if it's become part of the maneuvering amongst Egypt's corrupt bureaucrats. Deckchairs on the Titanic, etc etc... And either way, it means pressure from the Australian government may make a real difference in the outcome, either for Austin's freedom to work or at the very least his freedom to leave the country.

Bob Carr probably won't be inclined to do this, given that he's about as corrupt a bureacrat as they come (check out this video on what he actually stands for), so your pressure is needed. I'd encourage everyone to sign the petition, or check out the series of letters to members of parliament Austin's posted on his blog, write your own, and come to the next protest calling for the government to take action.

Lee Rhiannon, Greens Senator, speaking at the rally, 11/03 - photo courtesy of Kate Ausburn

Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon spoke at the rally, and said that the Greens will be actively pursuing this issue through the parliament. According to her twitter account, the motion they put calling for the government to take action passed the senate this evening.

Yours Truly speaking at the rally, 11/03... photo courtesy of Kate Ausburn

Landmarks

In February this blog had its 2000th pageview. It's now sitting on 2256.

February was the month with the highest pageviews during this blog's existence sofar, reaching 653 (the same number as during October & November 2011 combined, when I was blogging during my travels and volunteering in Palestine).

During February, the highest traffic posts were Interview with the Palestinian People's Party, On Revolutionary Organisations Today (which is the highest individual post, with 212 discrete pageviews), and Eyewitness - Occupy Sydney - Day 116.

My biggest sources of traffic have been Facebook (where my post of On Revolutionary Organisations Today started exactly the kind of small-minded sectarian infighting between socialists that I was writing against), The Moor Next Door, Wikipedia and LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

With these things in mind, I'm going to be writing some posts about Australian politics in March, as well as Arab world politics.

 This article, in which I interviewed Austin Mackell, was originally printed in Green Left Weekly.

Egypt: Arrests 'a sign of desperation', says Mackell

Australian journalist Austin Mackell, United States student Derek Ludovici and Egyptian translator Aliya Alwi are facing charges of inciting people to vandalise public property after being detained by the police in the Egyptian city of Mahalla El-Kubra on February 11.

The group tried to interview Kamal Elfayoumi, a trade worker in the industrial city, when their car was surrounded by groups of local residents. Reports posted by Alwi on Twitter said: "Our car got rocked and beaten against the glass, got called a whore and all sorts of things. Police escorted us to station."

At first, the group thought they were simply being protected by the police. However, after several hours, the police told the group that they were being charged with "offering money to youth to vandalise and cause chaos".

Alwi said they were being transferred to military intelligence in the neighbouring city of Tanta. In the next three days, the group was moved back and forth eight times to stop supporters mobilising in their defence.

However, several activists from No to Military Trials, a network formed to prevent civilians being tried by military courts and other injustices, quickly arrived in Mahalla and began spreading attention to the issue online.

Under pressure from a campaign for their release within Egypt and globally, the three were released on February 14.

Austin told Green Left Weekly: "I've been banned from leaving the country while the charges are being investigated, but I'm trying to get home to renew my passport.

"The Egyptian authorities don't care about me overstaying my visa. I'm being charged with inciting people to vandalise public property, along with Aliya and Derek.

"[Foreign Minister] Kevin Rudd needs to publicly come out and defend me. Embassy staff have told me he is following the case, so he should do something.
 
"I'm a journalist, not a spy."

Mackell said the two Egyptians detained with the group, Alwi and their driver Zakaria Ahmad, were both treated far more aggressively than he and Ludovici. He said Ahmad was being beaten in an attempt to turn him against the others.

"It's a sign of desperation from [the military regime]," Mackell said.

"The targets of the strategy of talking about 'foreign hands' are not us [foreign journalists], they are Elfayoumi and the other activists here. It's an attempt to discredit their real work.

"I am just a means to that end."

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which controls the military authorities, assumed presidential powers when Hosni Mubarak resigned from office on February 11 last year.

Mahalla has been the epicentre of independent union activity and strikes for the past five years.

"The February 11 strike was a bit of a flop in Mahalla; less than 10% of workers in the factories took part," Mackell told GLW. "But Elfayoumi is still optimistic, he says the momentum in the factories is still building."

In Egypt, activists, unions, bloggers and journalists still face constant harassment from right-wing baltageya gangs paid off by the interior ministry and from official state forces.

"The most likely scenario is some people were there to instigate trouble," said Mackell. "They were not necessarily attempting to instigate trouble against us, but against the strike and the people who were marching.

“Then when we were there we became perfect targets."

More than 12,000 people have been arrested and 8000 charged by military tribunals since the uprising against former President Mubarak began a year ago. Many female detainees have been subjected to cruel and degrading "virginity tests".

In the face of the huge protests that have marked the one year anniversary of the overthrow of Mubarak, the Egyptian government has intensified attempts to discredit protesters and shift the blame away from itself for ongoing repression.

Al Jazeera English reported that a letter from the SCAF read on Egyptian State Television on Friday said: "Egypt is facing conspiracies that seek to topple the state and spread chaos … it will not bow to pressure to accelerate the transition to full civilian rule."

Despite this, millions continue to take to the streets.

The Arab Spring in 300 words or less

I wrote this short piece for an introductory 'zine put together by Resistance for upcoming orientation weeks at universities, summing up the struggles that emerged in 2011 and arguing how we should take them forward in 2012. Feel free to use it in any way, shape or form if you need an impossibly truncated description of the wave of revolt that's sweeping the MENA region to this day.

2011: The Arab Uprisings

2011 started with a wave of revolt in the Middle East – North Africa region that shattered the myth of Western democracy. It started in Tunisia, where Western-backed dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali tortured dissidents and supressed freedoms in the name of the "war on terror". But impoverished and repressed Tunisians fought back, and on January 14 Ben Ali was overthrown after 23 years in power.

The Tunisian example inspired everyone suffering under neoliberal economic attacks and police repression, and Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak was the next to fall. After massive street mobilisations across the nation by youth activists and wildcat strikes, Mubarak left office on February 11.

Despite the Western media spin that these were "Facebook revolutions" in which youth just wanted to win the same liberal democratic rights we enjoy here in Australia, the truth is these movements are clearly directed at the real cause of their oppression – the global economic system. The western-backed dictators of the region have enforced harsh neoliberal economic policies at the behest of the IMF & World Bank which have exacerbated crippling poverty for the majority and delivered unbelievable wealth to the chosen elites, both local & international.

The "Arab Spring" has lasted a full year, with no let up in the mass mobilisations, strikes and struggles against the regimes & the rich. And the victories in Egypt & Tunisia have inspired a wave of global struggle, both across the region and in the so-called Western democracies themselves.

Free Austin Mackell, Free Aliya Alwi, Free Derek Ludovici

Australian journalist Austin Mackell, American student Derek Ludovici, translator Aliya Alwi and veteran union activist Kamal al-Fayyumi were all detained by the police in Mahalla El-Kubra, Egypt on Saturday February 11 while attempting to interview workers in the city. I met Austin and Aliya in my time in Cairo in September, and I was immediately impressed with Austin's dedication to telling the dangerous stories in a country still ruled by a dictatorship. He had the sharpest understanding of the real forces at play in Egypt and the region of any Australian commentator I've ever read, and he has dedicated his work to profiling the most critical revolutionary struggles taking place. In short, the kind of person the SCAF doesn't want in the country.

For more info on the case & background to it, please check out the short piece I got up on Green Left Weekly last night.

Right now the latest is that Austin and Derek are to be deported, while Aliya will remain behind bars for at least several days. The charges against them are obviously fabricated; initially there were hopes that it was just a warning for Austin & other journos and he would be freed quickly, but clearly the situation is more serious than that.

For ongoing updates, follow Jess Hill, fellow Australian based in Cairo, and Shahira Abouellail, blogger on the scene in Mahalla.

Tasmanian blogger Bleeter has posted an open letter to his federal MP; please consider emailing it to your local representatives.

   

To: Julie Collins Julie.Collins.MP@aph.gov.au
Member for (the Australian Federal electorate of) Franklin
http://www.juliecollins.com/
Dear Ms Collins,
As my local Federal member, could you please inform me as a matter of urgency as to what assistance the Australian government is providing to my colleague, Austin Mackell, currently facing a court in Egypt after being charged on the weekend and allegedly about to be deported?
Further, I request a statement as to whether the Australian Government believes that Austin has received fair and reasonable legal defence, not limited to the question of whether less than two days is a fair and reasonable time to assemble a defence against the charges faced.
I also seek you to confirm or deny claims that the only Consular access Mr Mackell has received is a telephone call and whether this telephone call was secured against phone tapping procedures that are known to take place in Egypt under the current Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (of Egypt).
Regards,
Peter Lawler.

Please sign the petition calling for the release of Austin, Aliya and Derek.

I've written the below letter based on the text of the petition to the Egyptian Consul-General in Sydney at info@egypt.org.au; please consider sending one of your own, and encouraging civil society groups, unions, community organisations, etc to sign on and take action.

To Consul-General Ayman Aly Kamel & whom it may concern,

I am writing to express my concern at the reported arrest of Austin Mackell, an Australian journalist, along with several others including Derek Ludovici, Aliya Alwi and Kamal al-Fayyumi.

Austin Mackell is a freelance journalist, who moved to Egypt in February last year. His courageous journalism has sympathetically chronicled the Egyptian struggle for freedom. His writings have been featured in respected media outlets across the world, including The Guardian, Al-Akhbar, Crikey and newmatilda.

I write this as an admirer of the Egyptian struggle for freedom. However, Mackell’s journalism is not just valuable in recording Egyptian bravery. It is also important, because of the West’s hand in oppressing Egyptians, and indeed, much of the Arab world. Mackell’s journalism reminds us of the unpleasant truths of Western foreign policy. The Arab world knows perfectly well the role we play there – it is us who need to learn about it. Mackell belongs to the small category of Western journalists who expose the kind of truths that too often remain uncovered in Western media.

I urge the Egyptian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Austin Mackell, Derek Ludovici, and their translator, Aliya Alwi.

A variety of Austin's work published from Egypt can be read on the following websites:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/austin-mackell

http://newmatilda.com/2012/01/27/egypt-bread-freedom-justice

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2586/renovation-not-demolition

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11617&page=2

http://austingmackell.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/revolutionary-re-education-in-egypt/

Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any further information on Austin's case or those of the other foreign & Egyptian citizens who have been arrested alongside him.

Sincerely,

Patrick Harrison

The reports coming from Egypt are that the Australian Embassy is being "unresponsive" in supporting Austin, and doesn't have any personell at the trial in Mahalla. This is an outrageous yet unsurprising state of affairs; I think snap actions outside of DFAT offices here in Australia are well deserved.

Egypt: #OccupyCabinet, 28/11

I've been reading about the sit-in outside the cabinet which has been going on for a week now, so on the 28th of November I went down from Tahrir in the morning to have a look.