Sunday, May 23, 2010

Democracy in Egypt

This is a cry of an Egyptian worker during the era of Mubarak, his colleagues and him have been in a sit-in beside the Egyptian Parliament for two weeks now in an attempt to ask the government to just do its job...Amonsito, their company, has been sold to an Adel Agha, and since then he has silenced the machines, drove the workers to the pavement and fled the country. The wrokers demanded either they reclaim their pensions or get back to work, neither of which the government did. Today, as workers tried to storm the police cordons and expand their protest, they were beaten and arrested.
This worker wants his message to be sent to the world via this video taken by Philip Rizk, so here it goes:
Philip Rizk: Could you tell me what happened?
Worker: Security forces faced us, the officers beat us up with their batons, we kept trying to hold back their blows...This is because of the committee...of course Hussein Megawer is a thief, so is Aisha Abd El-Hady the Minister (of Manpower and Immigration)...they are all a gang and have conspired with Banque Misr to steal the assets of this guy (Agha) which is estimated at 1.5 billion pounds, and our rights have been denied...they decided we deserve a 106 million pounds, they are all *thieves*; they want to give us only 50 million pounds but we refused. Hence the result (pointing to his fresh wounds). They are forcing us to accept this meagre offer and the security forces are directing them. We have been threatened and detained and we're expecting things to get ugly...but we're not leaving even if they shoot us. May they detain us all and put us behind bars...This is our country and we are its people...the cries for democracy are mere slogans. I hope my words reach the whole world, I hope the world knows how democracy is like in Egypt. We are only asking for our rights.

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