Call For Solidarity with the Youth and People of Egypt Egypt Share Tweet The situation in Mahalla has become far more serious than the media would lead us to believe. The police opened fire on the unarmed demonstrating workers and killed at least four. Here we publish an appeal for solidarity that we have received from Egypt. The Egyptian youth and the Egyptian people rose up on Sunday April 6 for their economic rights. The biggest and most crucial movement was in the city of Mahala Kobra, the biggest industrial city in Egypt that changed into a battlefield leading to several dead and wounded people and hundreds of detainees. The effect of the strike on Sunday was very clear since the early morning because the majority of the stores and transport stopped working. The central security forces succeeded in forcing the workers in the textile factories to resume work and threatened them with brute force. But after the work time, the workers went out on massive demonstrations in the streets of the city, where the security forces brutally tried to prevent them from demonstrating and used all kinds of tear gas, fake bullets and beating them. Eventually, when they failed to prevent it, they used real bullets and killed four people among the demonstrators. More than 350 people were detained in this city alone. Today, April 7, the demonstrations broke out again, and a new battlefield emerged. The smoke raised in the city due to burning cars and stores. The government isolated the city from all other parts of Egypt and also cut off the electricity to prevent any means of communication. Journalists and media were prevented from going into the city. We, the Union of Progressive Youth in Egypt, members of WFDY, ask our comrades in the youth organizations and unions around the world to express their solidarity with the struggles of the Egyptian people and youth against a dictatorship brutally treating its people with the complete support of US imperialism. We ask you to demonstrate in front of the Egyptian embassies in your countries or at least to send a petition to every embassy objecting against these brutal practices of the Egyptian government killing and detaining the peaceful people. We also ask you to send us (Chebelal@yahoo.com) copies of your activities and statements in order to publish here. [Also send a copy to editor@marxist.com] [You can find your local Egyptian Embassy here.] Our email: Chebelal@yahoo.com Union of Progressive Youth Egypt, April 7, 2008 See also: Egyptian April 6 - a dress rehearsal for bigger events in the future by Jean Duval and Fred Weston (April 7, 2008) Egyptian workers take strike action – Urgent international solidarity appeal by Marxy.com (April 7, 2008)
