Giulio Regeni, italienischer Cambridge-Student in Ägypten, wurde am 5. Jahrestag der Revolution in Kairo entführt, gefoltert und jetzt tot an einer Straße aufgefunden. Die Folterspuren – u.a. Verbrennungen durch Zigaretten – weisen auf Polizei, parapolizeiliche Todesschwadron oder Geheimdienst als Mörder hin. Giulio Regeni forschte zu Sozial- und Arbeiterbewegungen in Ägypten und schrieb unter Pseudonym für die italienische Tageszeitung Il Manifesto. Hier sein letzter Artikel zu einer Versammlung unabhängiger GewerkschafterInnen aus Il Manifesto (auf englisch) und Berichte zu ihm.
In Egypt, second life for independent trade unions
The last report. Union members in a crowded assembly hall lashed out against the Egyptian regime’s latest efforts to suppress workers.
Editors’ note: We publish posthumously this article by Giulio Regeni, an il manifesto contributor who was based in Cairo while researching his doctoral thesis. On Wednesday, his tortured body was discovered in a ditch in the city. Because independent trade unions are a contentious topic in Egypt, Regeni asked us to publish this article under a pseudonym, as we have done in the past. Today, we publish this last dispatch under the author’s real name.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi presides over Egyptian Parliament with the highest number of police and military personnel in the history of the country, and Egypt ranks among the worst offenders with respect to press freedom. Yet independent trade unions are refusing to give up. The Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS), a beacon of independent Egyptian trade unionism, has just held a vibrant meeting.
Although the largest room at the center has 100 seats, the meeting hall could not contain the number of activists who came from all over Egypt for an assembly that was extraordinary in the current context of the country. On the agenda was a recommendation from Sisi’s ministers for close cooperation between the government and the country’s only official union, the Egyptian Trade Union Federation, with the explicit order to counter the role of independent trade unions and to further marginalize workers.
Although today the CTUWS is not representative of the complex galaxy of Egypt’s independent trade unionism, its summons was heard, perhaps unexpectedly, by a significant number of unions. By the end of the meeting, there were about 50 acronyms that signed on to the closing statement, representing various sectors from all over the country — from transportation to schools, from agriculture to the large informal sector, from Sinai to Upper Egypt, from the Delta to Alexandria to Cairo.
Movement in crisis
The government’s policy represents a further attack on workers’ rights and trade union freedoms, greatly restricted after the military coup of July 3, 2013, and so has been the catalyst of widespread discontent among workers. But until now, the unions have found it difficult to turn their frustration into concrete initiatives.
After the 2011 revolution, Egypt experienced a surprising expansion of political freedom. It saw the emergence of hundreds of new trade unions, a true movement, of which the CTUWS was among the main protagonists, through its support and training activities.
But over the past two years, repression and co-optation by the Sisi regime have seriously weakened these initiatives, so that the two major federations (the Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress and Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions) have not convened a general assembly since 2013.
Virtually every union acts only on its own, within its locale and industry. The need to unite and coordinate efforts, however, is deeply felt. That accounts for the great participation in the CTUWS meeting, as well as the many attendees who lamented the fragmentation of the movement and called for the need to work together, regardless of affiliation.
Comments from attendees came in by the dozen, concise, often passionate, and with a very pragmatic approach: The purpose was to decide together “what to do by tomorrow morning,” an appeal repeated like a mantra during the meeting, given the urgency of the moment and the need to draw up a short- and medium-term action plan.
Notable was the presence of a large number of women, whose actions were sometimes among the most appreciated and applauded by the predominantly male audience. The assembly concluded with a decision to form a committee, as representative as possible, to take charge of laying the groundwork for a national campaign on issues of labor and trade union freedom.
Regional conferences
The idea is to organize a series of regional conferences that, every few months, would convene in a large national assembly and possibly a unified protest. (“In Tahrir!” offered some of those present, invoking the square which was the scene of the revolutionary period of 2011-2013 but for more than two years has been off limits to any form of protest).
The agenda seems very broad but includes an underlying objective to counter Law 18 of 2015, which has recently targeted public sector workers and has been strongly contested in the past few months.
Meanwhile, in recent days, in different regions of the country, from Asyut to Suez to the Delta, board workers in the textile, cement and construction industries, went on strike for as long as they could. Mostly their demands concern the extension of wage rights and indemnities to public companies.
New wave of strikes
These are benefits that workers have ceased to enjoy following the massive wave of privatizations during the last period of the Mubarak era. Many of these privatizations after the 2011 revolution have been brought before the courts, which have often nullified them, noting several cases of irregularities and corruption.
Strikes against the revocation of benefits are mostly unrelated to each other, and largely disconnected from the independent trade unions that met in Cairo. But still they represent a significant development, for at least two reasons: For one, albeit in a manner not entirely explicit, they challenge the heart of the neoliberal transformation of the country, which has undergone a major acceleration since 2004, and which the 2011 popular uprisings and their slogan, “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice,” have substantially dented.
The other aspect is that in an authoritarian and repressive context under General Sisi, the simple fact that there are popular and spontaneous initiatives that break the wall of fear is itself a major spur for change.
The unions’ defiance of the state of emergency and the regime’s appeals for stability and social order — justified by the “war on terrorism” — signifies, even if indirectly, a bold questioning of the underlying rhetoric the regime uses to justify its own existence and its repression of civil society.
–> Originally published in Italian at il manifesto on Feb. 5, 2016
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Quelle: Il Manifesto
Tutta la verità
Tommaso Di Francesco
Temeva per la sua incolumità. Questa è la verità che per noi emerge e che vogliamo proporre e testimoniare sulla morte violenta al Cairo di Giulio Regeni, di fronte alle troppe reticenze ufficiose e ufficiali e alle gravi contraddizioni delle prime indagini tra la procura egiziana che conferma torture indicibili e il ministero degli interni del Cairo che le smentisce. E di fronte ad un governo italiano che ora chiede «verità», ma che si ritrova almeno contraddetto dal viaggio d’affari di una delegazione confindustriale guidata dalla ministra Guidi che al Cairo tesseva tranquilli rapporti economici con un regime militare responsabile di un colpo di stato definito dallo scrittore Orhan Pamuk «eguale a quello di Pinochet».
Affermiamo questo perché all’inizio di gennaio, dopo aver ricevuto un suo articolo – che riproponiamo oggi ine edicola con la sua firma convinti di adempiere proprio alle sue volontà – sulla ripresa d’iniziativa dei sindacati egiziani, insisteva con noi e a più riprese sulla necessità di firmarlo solo con uno pseudonimo. Capivamo che era molto preoccupato da questa insistenza ripetuta più volte nelle sue mail, tantopiù che già altri suoi articoli erano usciti con pseudonimi ogni volta diversi.
Non siamo abituati come manifesto alle speculazioni sulla vita altrui o ai retroscena complottardi, tantomeno ad abusare stile «asso nella manica» delle persone.
Siamo solo un giornale di frontiera che ha subìto attentati, sequestri come quello di Giuliana Sgrena, uccisioni come per Vittorio Arrigoni.
Ma in queste ore si rincorrono interpretazioni a dir poco incredibili, ufficiali e di alcuni giornali che, accreditando perfino la versione dei servizi segreti egiziani che naturalmente negano ogni responsabilità su un suo possibile fermo o arresto, rivolgendo l’attenzione allora sul fatto criminale puro e semplice, se non addirittura alla tesi dell’incidente automobilistico.
Alcune puntualizzazioni dunque sono necessarie: Giulio Regeni (oltre che essere in contatto con questo giornale e con il nostro lavoro d’informazione sul Medio Oriente come tanti collaboratori), è scomparso non in un giorno di «Vacanze sul Nilo» ma il 25 gennaio, quinto anniversario della rivolta contro Mubarak di piazza Tahrir 2011, in un intenso clima di mobilitazione giovanile, sociale e politico non solo di memoria ma inevitabilmente contro l’attuale regime militare del golpista Al Sisi; mobilitazione contro la quale si è scatenata, come negli anni precedenti, la repressione e le retate della polizia, stavolta con centinaia di arresti preventivi.
Giulio Regeni non era né un violento né un nemico dell’Egitto, al contrario amava quel Paese ed era esperto di lotte sociali, in particolare del sindacato egiziano e, dottorando a Cambridge, di crisi dei modelli economici del Medio Oriente. È deceduto, a quanto sappiamo finora, secondo la procura egiziana dopo violenze inaudite.
Difficile davvero immaginare la malavita cairota accanirsi senza motivo e senza tornaconto su uno straniero qualsiasi; altrettanto incredibile – ma vedrete che arriveremo anche a questo espediente – far passare questa morte come un crimine dell’Isis che, com’è ormai risaputo, ha ben altre modalità teatrali di esecuzione.
Sia chiaro. Noi non sappiamo chi siano davvero stati i suoi assassini e perché abbiano commesso questo crimine. Possiamo solo sospettare e testimoniare.
Ma chiediamo verità, tutta la verità al governo egiziano, al ministro degli esteri Paolo Gentiloni e al presidente del Consiglio Matteo Renzi.
Lo dobbiamo di fronte al dolore dei genitori e alla giovane vita così martoriata di Giulio Regeni.