Women don't protest in Egypt? We Disagree.

Front cover of The Independent 2nd February 2011. Cirlcing female protesters shows strong female presence in Tahrir Square.


LA Times reports on female presence in Cairo demonstrations and what this means for women's rights in the country. 'It's a revolution of how we are perceived', says one lady in central Cairo.

Read LA Times article here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-egypt-women-20110203,0,7694267.story

You Tube video entitled 'The Bravest Girl in Egypt'. One girl leads protest chants:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwIY6ivf70A&feature=youtu.be

Young female activist in Tahrir Square gives punchy summary of what the people want right now in Egypt. Interview includes who the pro-Mubarak supporters really are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtLJpzUp2Z8&feature=youtu.be

........... Blood Not Ketchup...........

Amnesty Wales has just launched its teaching packs for primary schools, making primary school children aware of key topics of human rights.

Amnesty claims that the pack 'encourages young children to think about others and contains creative suggestions to bring human rights to life through artistic projects'. These are the first educational materials for 5-11 year olds that focus on human rights; helping teachers explore topics of fairness and freedom, in the classroom.

Some examples of the content include: what it means to belong to a group, how a child understands their identity and, for older children, the history of the U.N and what it stands for.

One of the lesson plans targets a personal frustration of mine: childrens' relationship to food. In this lesson, aimed at children between 5 and 7, the class are asked to draw what they ate for dinner the night before. They are then asked to consider; 'how it got onto their plate, where it came from, who was involved in growing, moving and preparing it'. In the age of peri-peri chicken, popcorn chicken and flame-grilled steak childrens' awareness of meat production begins at its preparation, rather than its origin.

This food lesson aims 'to explore where an everyday item comes from and how it reaches us, and encourage pupils to make links between their own lives and the lives of other people around the world'.

Just as this one activity removes the gap between meat and meal, the concept of the pack from Amnesty is to make links between the child in Wales and the rest of the world.

Education Minister Leighton Andrews and Keith Towler, Children's Commissioner for Wales, launched the first free, bilingual pack for primary schools in Wales at the Model C.I.W. School, Carmarthen.

Whilst this is only the start of a Human Rights education system, in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘Where, after all, do human rights begin? In small places, close to home; in the everyday world of human beings – the neighborhoods they live in .. '.

To see the full lesson plans dowload pack in English/Welsh from: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=10458

Photojournalist Killed in Protests

Photograph: Corentin Fohlen/AFP/Getty Images, for The Guardian

French photographer Lucas Mebrouk Dolega was killed when police fired tear gas during the street protests in Tunis. The photographer, aged 32, was in Tunis for the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA) capturing the unrest, when he sustained fatal head injuries from a gas canister that was fired at crowds of demonstrators. Below is a collection of his final shots.

DOLEGA'S LAST(ING) IMAGES:

Enough is enough, numbers speak on Avenue Habib Bourguiba.

No longer cautious to show emotion in central Tunis.

Flailing from tear gas police aimed at protesters.

Developments too overwhelming for some.

Tear gas plumes into Tunis side streets

Why There's No Mosque in Port el Kantaoui

With leader of a Tunisian-banned Islamist party, Rached Ghannouchi returning to Tunisia in a couple of weeks, how will this shake up the slant of the opposition.

Tunisia's closest allies have, in recent years, been France and the United States. What the Tunisian Government under Ben-Ali offered to these nations was its heavy-handed treatment of what it saw as Islamic Fundamentalism. This was a point alluded to by David Kirkpatrick in his article for the New York Times on the 12^th January, where he writes of Tunisia: ‎'United States officials gave it high marks for its aggressive persecution of terrorism suspects'.

In Ben Ali's regime it was not encouraged for males to have full beards, for Muslims to pray at 3am prayers or to own what the regime saw as excessive amounts of Islamic literature. A student in Sousse told me how in 2009 one of his colleagues, a devout Muslim, went to 3am prayers and was never seen again. Unconfirmed reports are that the student was seized by undercover police. He is still missing. Under Ben Ali, Muslims were treading on eggshells. With the removal of the President Muslims will enjoy a freedom that they have not had for a quarter of a decade: to go to prayers when they want, wear what they believe right and follow their religion without restriction of practice. The relief that many practising Muslims will feel has brought about speculation that an Islamic party may come to the forefront as a contender for ruling the new Tunisia.

Tunisia has been screaming for freedom: freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of religious expression. What would an Islamic Government mean for Tunisia?

TRIPLE WORD SCORE at Enfidha Airport

Enfidha Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia's newest International Airport welcomed its first landings in the Spring last year. The airport at Enfidha, located between the two well-established tourist resorts of Sousse and Hammamet, was the new talking point of the Tunisian economy.

Tunisia's main charter airport, Habib Bourguiba International, located in nearby Monastir, proudly holds the name of the country's first President under Tunisian independence. Yet, on the 15^th November 2011, one day after Tunisia's leader fled the country 'Enfidha Zine El Abidine Ben Ali International Airport', had lost its ring. Letters were plucked off the airport building this weekend. With the removal of every vowel comes the question of renaming... 'Mohamed Bouazizi International Airport', perhaps?

Bouazizi's City Flame

On the 7^th January 2011, walking through South Kensington, I heard chants in Tunisian Arabic. On Kensington Road was assembled a party of around thirty people holding opposition banners and uniformly shouting against Ben Ali.

My companion, a Tunisian National, was visibly nervous as I spoke to one of the protesters, asking what was going on. One woman from the group told me about, the now Arab martyr, Mohamed Bouazizi. Her words ran so quickly from her mouth like flames, without hesitation, and my friend hung on to her words, as if hypnotized by the confidence with which she spoke against Tunisia's regime. 'It is enough, enough unemployment, enough turning blind to what they do … this student [Bouazizi] was taking initiative, making some income, like any man in this country [the UK] can do, and what they did closing him down is so typical, we have had enough'. The lady was Algerian, married to a Tunisian and both were now living in the UK.

What I noted about this encounter, and what comes into my head every time Tunisia hits the headlines, was the charge coming off this one lady as she spoke. Her words now seem relics: 'imagine doing something like this in Tunisia, standing and speaking against the Government the way that we are here'. As I looked at the huddled group of North Africans on a puddled January pavement on Kensington Rd, I imagined the same huddle on the tiled streets of Tunis, and I shuddered.

My companion stood on my toe and gestured that we move on, as we were walking away he said: 'that man, the one in the middle, is the biggest rebel against Ben Ali, he is wanted all over Tunisia. If he came back to Tunisia, and someone killed him, they would not even go to prison, that's how much the President wants him.'

I asked why he was so keen to leave the protest, he told me he was petrified in case one of the video cameras caught his face, 'It would be so dangerous'.

Who could have predicted that seven days later five thousand people would be on Avenue Habib Bourguiba in the Tunisian capital shouting 'degage' with fists hammering the syllables, whilst Bouazizi's flames set the whole of Tunisia ablaze.

No More Blu-Tac, Ben Ali

That doughy, waxen face of Ben Ali that greeted sweaty Europeans at arrivals, jolted dosing drivers awake on main roads and reflected the glassy sunlight on street corners back into the eye of the onlooker, will be hanging limp from billboards across Tunisia.

I have never been comfortable with photographs on my walls due to that back-of-the-neck-shiver feeling, that the people in them are staring at me. Yet this is a feeling the Tunisian nation has lived under every time they drove their moped through town, walked to a shop to buy 20 Mars cigarettes or to pick up a tin of harissa. This is more than the sense that the pasted-up faces of your Vogue cut-outs will tut in disgust from your bedroom wall when you trim your toenails and blow your nose. Ben Ali's clammy little hands, either adjusting invisible cufflinks, comically clasping or jovially waving at passers-by comes with a secret handshake, not a glassy stare. Podgy hands that gesture a waving reminder: 'I'm here, and I saw you'.

Today in Tunisia, the portrait that wall-papered the nation was laid on the road, throwing down a gauntlet for drivers- daring them to speed over the dictator's face. Youths watched, egging on every car to accelerate over the ex-president, and his milky wrists. When one car hesitates, the crowd heckles and groans. Their disappointment is short-lived as a following car makes sure the tyres really press into the image, pausing as the wheels make contact and beeping in celebration as the car moves forward. On the 15th January 2011, the image that was once obligatory wallpaper, became the people's carpet.

WORTH A WATCH: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KBfJFgYwd0

Beware of Men in Half-Burnt Hats

With prisons being burnt down in towns including Monastir, Bizerte and Mahdia, criminals have been let loose to ravage the communities; burning down buildings and breaking into houses. One local in Mahdia told me: 'I have made a sword … myself and my cousins are carrying swords at night in our own neighbourhood. Girls have been raped and there is shooting after dark, everything has changed here'. Yet speaking to a resident in the capital about the release of criminals and burning down of prisons, she dismissed the suggestion that it was Tunisian 'voleurs', or criminals, that were committing these, largely nocturnal, crimes. Her view was clear: 'people know that the ones that are killing people are the police and that the police have freed the prisoners to put fear into the people'. She continued, 'those people are with Ben Ali, they are paid to burn, to kill, to scare; they are the real terrorists'.

It seems like Tunisia, with the ceiling torn off, is in the whirl of a masquerade ball. Police are dressing as civilians, gangs are donning police hats, whilst newly released prisoners stroll amongst them all.

When I heard that the troops would be sent in to restore some order, I was concerned how the Tunisians would react to this familiar face of control, now the boundaries had been smashed. Seeing images of protesters greeting the army surprised me. Asking a student in a Tunis suburb what she thought of the military presence leaking into towns across the country, she chirped: 'listen, the army are neutral, not like the police. They don't listen to anyone's orders, they will help us'. With the amount of current shape shifting in the country, it is no wonder that Tunisians are embracing the army: their camouflage is the only uniform that stands out.