Why Mubarak is Out

"J’ai été payé 5 000 livres pour semer le chaos dans les manifestations du Caire" | The Observers
►http://observers.france24.com/fr/content/20110203-ete-paye-5000-livres-semer-chaos-manifestations-caire-b

Ces images ont été filmées hier soir par Mohamed Abd Elatty, journaliste freelance et blogueur au Caire. L’homme qui y témoigne affirme qu’on lui aurait proposé la somme de 5000 livres (621 euros) pour intégrer les milices qui ont participé aux affrontements de mercredi sur la place Tahrir.

[...]

En Égypte, des milices connues sous le nom de « baltgia », formées de jeunes recrutés dans les quartiers pauvres, seraient parfois utilisées par les services de sécurité pour mater les manifestations. Selon certains analystes, ces baltgias serviraient ici à semer le chaos pour préparer une possible intervention des autorités pour rétablir l’ordre.

Pour mémoire, sur les « baltagiya » :
►http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/516/why-mubarak-is-out-

In the 1980s, the police faced the growth of “gangs,” referred to in Egyptian Arabic as baltagiya. These street organizations had asserted self-rule over Cairo’s many informal settlements and slums. Foreigners and the Egyptian bourgeoisie assumed the baltagiya to be Islamists but they were mostly utterly unideological. In the early 1990s the Interior Ministry decided “if you can’t beat them, hire them.” So the Interior Ministry and the Central Security Services started outsourcing coercion to these baltagiya, paying them well and training them to use sexualized brutality (from groping to rape) in order to punish and deter female protesters and male detainees, alike.

Why Mubarak is Out
►http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/516/why-mubarak-is-out

Mubarak is already out of power. The new cabinet is composed of chiefs of Intelligence, Air Force and the prison authority, as well as one International Labor Organization official. This group embodies a hard-core “stability coalition” that will work to bring together the interests of new military, national capital and labor, all the while reassuring the United States. Yes, this is a reshuffling of the cabinet, but one which reflects a very significant change in political direction. But none of it will count as a democratic transition until the vast new coalition of local social movements and internationalist Egyptians break into this circle and insist on setting the terms and agenda for transition.

I wonder how this Fulbright Post-Doctoral scholar living in California managed to detail in full the situation in Egypt without even once mentioning the influence of the United States and Israel into the upheaval mix. Vraiment, chapeau bas.

Le site Jadaliyya publie un très intéressant article d’un certain Paul Amar. Il s’agit, essentiellement, d’un panorama des forces en présence en Égypte. Si vous ne devez lire qu’un article aujourd’hui, celui-là me semble un bon candidat...

Why Mubarak is Out
►http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/516/why-mubarak-is-out-

Many international media commentators – and some academic and political analysts – are having a hard time understanding the complexity of forces driving and responding to these momentous events. This confusion is driven by the binary “good guys versus bad guys” lenses most use to view this uprising. Such perspectives obscure more than they illuminate. There are three prominent binary models out there and each one carries its own baggage: (1) People versus Dictatorship: This perspective leads to liberal naïveté and confusion about the active role of military and elites in this uprising. (2) Seculars versus Islamists: This model leads to a 1980s-style call for “stability” and Islamophobic fears about the containment of the supposedly extremist “Arab street.” Or, (3) Old Guard versus Frustrated Youth: This lens imposes a 1960s-style romance on the protests but cannot begin to explain the structural and institutional dynamics driving the uprising, nor account for the key roles played by many 70-year-old Nasser-era figures.

To map out a more comprehensive view, it may be helpful to identify the moving parts within the military and police institutions of the security state and how clashes within and between these coercive institutions relate to shifting class hierarchies and capital formations. I will also weigh these factors in relation to the breadth of new non-religious social movements and the internationalist or humanitarian identity of certain figures emerging at the center of the new opposition coalition.

#Égypte