PROTEST IN EGYPT TAKES A TURN AS WORKERS GO ON STRIKE

[At dawn on Wednesday, hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators remained camped out at Parliament, where they had marched for the first time on Tuesday. On the 16th day of the uprising, there were reports of thousands demonstrating in several other cities around the country while protesters began to gather again in Tahrir Square.]

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

 

Striking museum workers outside the Supreme Council  of Antiquities 
in Cairo on Wednesday. More Photos »

CAIRO — Protesters demanding the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak appeared on Wednesday to have recaptured the initiative in their battle with his government, demonstrating a new ability to mobilize thousands to take over Cairo’s streets beyond their headquarters at Tahrir Square and to spark labor unrest.

As reports filtered in of strikes and unrest spreading to other parts of the city and the country, the government seemed to dig in deeper. Mr. Mubarak’s handpicked successor, Vice President Omar Suleiman, warned on Tuesday that the only alternative to constitutional talks is a “coup” and added: “We don’t want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools.”

But the pressure on Mr. Mubarak’s government only intensified, a day after the largest crowd of protesters in two weeks flooded Cairo’s streets and the United States delivered its most specific demands yet, urging swift steps toward democracy. Some of the protesters had been inspired by an emotional interview with an online political organizer on Egypt’s most popular talk show.

At dawn on Wednesday, hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators remained camped out at Parliament, where they had marched for the first time on Tuesday. On the 16th day of the uprising, there were reports of thousands demonstrating in several other cities around the country while protesters began to gather again in Tahrir Square.

By midday, hundreds of workers from the Health Ministry, adjacent to Parliament and several hundred yards from Tahrir Square, also took to the streets in a protest whose exact focus was not immediately clear, Interior Ministry officials said.

Violent clashes between opponents and supporters of President Mubarak led to more than 70 injuries in recent days, the state-owned newspaper Al Ahram reported, while government officials said the protests had spread to the previously quiet southern region of Upper Egypt.

In Port Said, a city of 600,000 at the mouth of the Suez Canal, protesters set fire to a government building and occupied the city’s central square. There were unconfirmed reports that police fired live rounds on protesters on Tuesday in El Khargo, 240 miles south of Cairo, resulting in several deaths. Protesters responded by burning police stations and other government buildings on Wednesday, according to wire reports.

On Tuesday, the officials said, thousands protested in the province of Wadi El Jedid. One person died and 61 were injured, including seven from gunfire by the authorities, the officials said. Television images also showed crowds gathering in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city.

Increasingly, the political clamor for Mr. Mubarak’s ouster seemed to be complemented by strikes in Cairo and elsewhere.

In the most potentially significant action, about 6,000 workers at five service companies owned by the Suez Canal Authority — a major component of the Egyptian economy — began a sit-in on Tuesday night. There was no immediate suggestion of disruptions to shipping in the canal, a vital international waterway leading from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

More than 2,000 textile workers and others in Suez demonstrated as well, Al Ahram reported, while in Luxor thousands hurt by the collapse of the tourist industry marched to demand government benefits. There was no immediate independent corroboration of the reports. Al Ahram’s coverage was a departure from its usual practice of avoiding reporting that might embarrass the government.

At one factory in the textile town of Mahalla, more than striking 1,500 workers blocked roads, continuing a long-running dispute with the owner. And more than 2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in the city of Quesna went on strike while some 5,000 unemployed youth stormed a government building in Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor.

For many foreign visitors to Egypt, Aswan is known as a starting point or destination for luxury cruises to and from Luxor on the Nile River.

In Cairo, sanitation workers demonstrated around their headquarters in Dokki.

In the lobby of Al Ahram — the flagship government newspaper and a cornerstone of the Egyptian establishment — journalists on Wednesday were in open revolt against the newspaper’s management and editorial policies.

Some called their protest a microcosm of the Egyptian uprising, with young journalists leading demands for better working conditions and less biased coverage. “We want a voice,” said Sara Ramadan, 23, a sports reporter.

The turmoil at the newspaper has already changed editorial content, with the English-language online edition openly criticizing what it called “the warped and falsified coverage by state media” of the protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

Several of the dozens of protesters occupying the lobby on Wednesday said the editor of the English-language division heads to the square to join the protests every night, joined by many of the staff.

The scattered protests and labor unrest seemed symptomatic of an emerging trend for some Egyptians to air an array of grievances, some related to the protests and some of an older origin.

In Port Said on the Suez Canal, about 300 slum dwellers set fire to some parts of the local government’s administration building and torched several motorcycles, protesting a lack of state-financed housing, Reuters reported. Police did not interfere, and the protesters set up tents in the city’s central Martyrs’ Square, similar to those in Tahrir Square.

On Tuesday, in a war of attrition with protesters for public opinion, Egyptian officials sought once more to declare the revolt a thing of the past.

Vice President Omar Suleiman, who is leading an American-endorsed “orderly transition” toward elections in September, said Mr. Mubarak had appointed a committee of judges and legal scholars to propose constitutional amendments.

The committee put Egypt “on the path of peaceful and orderly transition of power,” Mr. Suleiman said on state television.

All the members, however, are considered Mubarak loyalists. Although broadly committed to a transition, the Obama administration was trying to influence many of the details. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called Mr. Suleiman to ask him to lift the 30-year emergency law that the government has used to suppress and imprison opposition leaders, to stop imprisoning protesters and journalists, and to invite demonstrators to help develop a specific timetable for opening up the political process. He also asked Mr. Suleiman to open talks on Egypt’s political future to a wider range of opposition members.

Mr. Suleiman has said only that Egypt will remove the emergency law when the situation justifies its repeal, and the harassment and arrest of journalists and human rights activists has continued even in the last few days.

Mr. Suleiman warned the protesters, most of whom are opposed to any negotiations while Mr. Mubarak is in power, that the only alternative to talks is a “a coup.”

“And we want to avoid that — meaning uncalculated and hasty steps that produce more irrationality,” he said, according to the official news agency.

“There will be no ending of the regime, nor a coup, because that means chaos,” Mr. Suleiman said. And he warned the protesters not to attempt more civil disobedience, calling it “extremely dangerous.” He added, “We absolutely do not tolerate it.”

On Tuesday , young organizers guiding the movement from a tent city inside Tahrir Square, or Liberation Square, showed the discipline and stamina that they say will help them outlast Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Suleiman, even if their revolt devolves into a war of attrition.

Many in the crowd, for example, said they had turned out because organizers had spread the word over loudspeakers and online media for demonstrators to concentrate their efforts on just Tuesdays and Fridays, enabling their supporters to rest in between. And while Mr. Mubarak remains in office, they say, there is no turning back.

The independent group Human Rights Watch said that it had confirmed more than 300 fatalities during the protests by visiting hospitals in a few Egyptian cities. “The government wanted to say that life was returning to normal,” said Mahmoud Mustafa, a 25-year-old protester standing in front of Parliament. “We’re saying it’s not.”

Many in the crowd said that they were newly inspired by the interview on Monday night with Wael Ghonim, a Google executive, who had been the anonymous administrator of a Facebook group that enlisted tens of thousands to oppose the Mubarak government by publicizing a young Egyptian’s beating death at the hands of its reviled police force.

In a tearful conversation, Mr. Ghonim told the story of his “kidnapping,” secret imprisonment in blindfolded isolation for 12 days and determination to overturn Egypt’s authoritarian government. And on Tuesday, both Mr. Ghonim and the host, Mona el-Shazly, came to Tahrir Square to cheer on the revolt.

Some protesters said they saw the broadcast as a potential turning point in a propaganda war that has so far gone badly against them, with the state-run television network and newspapers portraying the crowds in Tahrir Square as a dwindling band of obstructionists doing the bidding of foreign interests.

Organizers had hinted in recent days that they intended to expand out of the square to keep the pressure on the government. Then, around 3 p.m., a bearded man with a bullhorn led a procession around the tanks guarding the square and down several blocks to the Parliament. Many of the protesters still wore bandages on their heads from a 12-hour war of rocks and stones against Mubarak loyalists a few days before.

“Parliament is a great pressure point,” said Ahmed el-Droubi, a biologist. “What we need to do is unite this protest and Tahrir, and that is just the first step. Then we will expand further until Mr. Mubarak gets the point.”

Back in Tahrir Square, more members of the Egyptian elite continued to turn up in support of the protestors, including the pop star Shireen Abdel Wahab and the soccer goalkeeper Nader al-Sayed. Brigades of university employees and telephone company employees joined the protests, as did a column of legal scholars in formal black robes.

Many at the protests buttonholed Americans to express deep disappointment with President Obama, shaking their heads at his ambiguous messages about an orderly transition. They warned that the country risked incurring a resentment from the Egyptian people that could last long after Mr. Mubarak is gone.

Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Anthony Shadid, Mona El-Naggar, Thanassis Cambanis and Liam Stack. 
@  The New York Times