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http://www.theragblog.com/
Peter Paul Markin comment:
When we were young, meaning those of
us who were militant leftist baby-boomers from what I now call the “Generation
Of ‘68”, we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to
tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics. Those scorned old leftists,
mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on or moribund Trotskyist
Socialist Workers Party members who had come of political age in the 1930s and
1940s had nothing to tell us young stalwart in-your-face- rebels who were going
to re-invent the world, re-invent it without the hurts and sorrows accumulated
from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human
progress.
Well, we fell significantly short of
that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads. Today I
am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had
anything going but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We
are now the Old New Leftists. Problem is that unlike our 1960s generation,
warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart
in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be. That
has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and
hubris, from trying to be heard. And the place they have congregated, for
better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.
So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what
is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with
some kind of name, and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home
here. The remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists.
Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that would
help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time new left
politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end
of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this
is a must read blog for today’s left-wing militants.
A Markin disclaimer:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest
to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Sometimes
I will comment on my disagreements and sometimes I will just let the
author/writer shoot him or herself in the foot without note. Off hand, as I
have mentioned before in other contexts, I think it would be easier, infinitely
easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the
“remedies” provided by the commentators in the entries on this website. But
part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real”
stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our
efforts. Read on.
**************
:
A People’s History of Egypt, Part 20, 1990-1992
The Mubarak regime, supported financially and militarily by the United States, was accused of serious human rights violations, including extensive use of torture.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak walks with President H.W. Bush on White House grounds, April 4, 1989. Photo by Doug Mills / AP.
The only legal leftist opposition party which the Mubarak regime still allowed in 1990, al-Tagammu, “absorbed many radical Egyptians” who still believed “that significant change” in Egypt “can be accomplished only by assembling democrats, Marxists, Nasserists, and independents into a united force against the present regime,” as the 1990s began, according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.
Although the Egyptian government under Mubarak was legally represented in the United States in the early 1990s by the Washington, D.C., law firm — Patten, Boggs & Blow — of the now-deceased Ron Brown (later a Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration), it continued to repress political dissidents in Egypt during the 1990s.
The movement to democratize Egypt.
On February 7, 1991, during the early 1991 attack on Iraq by the first Bush administration, at least 11 Egyptian students at Air Shams University in Cairo were arrested for producing leaflets containing anti-war material. And on February 8, Dr. Mohammed Mandour, Head of Psychiatry at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Cairo and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, and Dr. Emad Atrees were arrested after making public statements in opposition to the first Gulf War.Dr. Mandour was “reportedly tortured severely” by Mubarak regime security forces, according to the May 1991 issue of the UK-based Article 19 human rights organization magazine, Censorship News.
According to the same publication, “the EOHR recorded that Mohamad Abdel Fateh, a teacher and Sameh A. Said, a university student and EOHR members, were arrested and detained under a 15-day detention order, allegedly for possessing anti-war leaflets: and were “reported to have been tortured.” And on February 27, 1991 “the EOHR recorded that Hamdain Sabahi, journalist…was arrested allegedly for voicing his opposition to the [first Gulf war] at a student meeting, at Cairo University on February 24” and “was reportedly tortured.”
So, not surprisingly, the Human Rights Watch World Report 1992 summarized the human rights situation in Egypt under the Mubarak regime in the early 1990s in the following way:
One of the most noxious features of the system is the apparently pervasive use of torture in detention. According to the independent Egyptian Organization of Human Rights [EOHR] torture of suspected criminals in police lock-up is routine, while convincing evidence exists of the systematic use of torture against suspected political dissidents by the State Security Intelligence [SSI] force…The same Human Rights Watch World Report also observed:
The inescapable impression gained is that President Mubarak prefers to retain the reserve powers in the state of emergency as a means of guarding against popular discontent with government policies — and protecting his own seat… In 1991, the leading women’s organization in the Arab world, the Cairo-based Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, was told by the government to close down…
In bilateral aid, Egypt is fiscal 1991 received an estimated 1.3 billion in military assistance…from the United States. Despite well-documented abuses in Egypt that are widespread, persistent and serious in nature, including torture, the [Bush I] Administration apparently does not consider aid to Egypt to be barred by Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended, which prohibits security assistance to any “country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights’…It was not until September 2005 that opposition political candidates were finally allowed to run against Mubarak in Egypt’s presidential elections. And, according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt, “joint military exercises between Egypt and the United States have been ongoing since 1981” and “it is estimated that Egypt received more than $50 billion in U.S. aid between 1975 and 2004, and when indirect aid and non-governmental sources are factored in, the total is much higher.”
[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]
This entry was posted in RagBlog and tagged Bob Feldman, Egyptian History, Hosni Mubarak, Human Rights, People's History of Egypt, Rag Bloggers, Torture, World History. Bookmark the permalink.
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