Parallel Entities: A Step Towards Chaos or Democracy?

Intellectuals, activists and politicians have disagreed about the call to create workers’, students’ and political entities parallel to the official bodies and organizations which are already in place, in the light of what the creation and election of the latter have experienced blatant intervention by the government. This intervention has reached the extent of violent aggression and the use of weapons such as knives and other types of blades against university students who created a “free” student union. This has also included the disregarding and elimination from candidate lists of thousands of workers who sought to run for office during the latest workers’ elections. These issues came up within the context of a heated debate hosted by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies’ Ibn Rushd Salon on the 26th of November 2006 during a lecture entitled : ” Parallel Entities: A Step Towards Chaos or Democracy?”
Dr. Mohammed El Beltagy, a parliament member representing the Muslim Brothers, began his speech by pointing to the fact that the Brothers are against the existence of a state of chaos, and in fact appreciate the existing state institutions and are keen to strengthen them as well as strengthen the various democratic tools and mechanisms which the brothers have supported and accredited as part of their understanding of the civil state without this being antithetical to the fact that the Brothers have an Islamic project.
El Beltagy clarified that looking to the student and worker climate over the past fifteen years shows how all their mobilization mechanisms have been paralyzed, where the ruling regime has become sensitive to any form of elections, considering them an exposure of the bankruptcy of its own mechanisms. It deals with them either through postponing, such as what happened during the local elections or through counterfeit and fraud and reverting to bullying and aggression as in the case of the general elections and the student and worker elections. El Beltagy was quoted saying “we support all the mechanisms and tools of democracy and accept them as the way of governance when they are in the form of enforcing and insisting on our rights, and not just consenting to the status quo.”
He also noted the difference between the case of the students and other cases involving syndicates, where the former allows for some internal mobilization. Despite its being a student movement, it has come to seriously aggravate the sensitivities of the ruling regime, which has regressed to arbitrarily eliminating student candidates and arresting some of them.
El Beltagy said that the results of the student elections in universities were announced by the presidents of the universities at the same time. Some results were not announced at all, appointing instead students to the official union who had not run for student office in the first place, while thousands were demonstrating because their candidacies were not accepted.
He stated that the state’s administrative framework now interferes in a form of party politics against the students, where the presidents of universities act with orders from state security apparatuses. The ruling National Democratic Party considers the Universities part of its party’s sub-organizations, said El Beltagy, accusing the ruling party of seeking to eliminate participation and the creation of generations with a weak sense of belonging, afraid to participate in the public sphere, and stressing that there exists a difference between the presence of political organizations and bodies inside the university, and between allowing students the opportunity to participate and the freedom of expression and opinion.
EL Beltagy also mentioned that Egyptian universities during the British occupation of Egypt embraced students belonging to the different political currents in society, and there existed the opportunity for debate and free competition and the exchange of opinions. He also criticized the government’s exaggerated spending on inessential activities in some universities at the time that other universities do not even have the means to facilitate the basics of their educational programs successfully. He also stated that the current minister of education is carrying out what he previously said he would : pulling the rug out from under certain political forces in the universities through other political forces. These others, however, were not students belonging to the NDP or its associated youth organization the Future Generation Foundation, but violent elements which invaded Ain Shams University and aggressively bullied its students.
Kamal Abbas, the director of the Syndicates’ and labor Services Institute in Helwan began with stressing the need for parallel entities and bodies in Egypt, contending with El Beltagy with a view that these bodies have the constituents to exist and succeed within the syndicate movement more than in any other area.
Abbas began with the notion that the plurality of syndicates is not new to Egypt, and is not simply on the table because of the fraud that took place in the last elections, which he called the “worst workers elections in the history of Egypt” where there was clear security interference and the elimination and arrest of hundreds of candidates, disregarding the fact of their political inclinations. He added that the idea of parallel of plural syndicates has always been on the table because of the capturing of the syndicate system by the government and its control over it, amounting to its complete subjugation to its authority since 1952. He indicated that a plurality of syndicates existed in Egypt before 1952, where there was competition for the improvement of workers conditions, after which all freedoms were confiscated by the Nasserite project, and syndicate leaders were thrown into prison.
Abbas attributed the reasons for alternative workers organizations to the presence of leftist leaders, since the 1970s, who believe in the importance of the existence of democratic institutions and the rights to hold strikes and sit-ins. At the same time, the official workers’ union stood against these demands and movements so that all the well known strikes and sit-ins since that time period have taken place outside the official syndicates and unions. Examples of these are the metro drivers’ strike in 1986 which was led by the Metro Drivers Association, the Kafr EL Dawwar workers strike in 1994, and the steel workers strike which the state responded to with 15,000 state security troops.
The official workers union, according to Abbas, is the only one which supported privatization and allowed workers to be fired. Abbas added that as a result of the privatization and free market policies pursued by the government, most workers are currently employed in the private sector with no corresponding syndicate or union membership. Abbas stressed that the original idea of popular organizations includes pluralism and diversity, is not threatening to the stability of the country, exists in many countries around the world, and has not been invented in Egypt. He also highlighted the fact that banning plural syndicates in Egypt goes against the international treaties and agreements which Egypt has signed concerning the rights to organization, and that the Supreme Constitutional Court in Egypt has granted workers the right to create organizations and syndicates. Abbas also stated that the current syndicate regime incorporates those who previously belonged to the National Socialist Union, moved to the Egypt Party after it, and later to the National Democratic Party when it was created. The General Workers Union has become unrepresentative of workers and stands against their movement to obtain their rights to hold strikes and sit-ins.
He clarified that an alternative workers organization could survive under certain conditions, the first of which that it not become part of the political race, but come instead from the workers themselves, especially those of them employed in the private sector and the industrial sector which employs 400,000 workers who have remained after the various privatization and early retirement policies. Another condition is that this new entity is chosen democratically, returning to the path followed by workers’ unions before 1952 in defending workers’ rights.
On his part, Dr. Mohammed El Sayed Said, deputy director of Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies stated that the existence of political pluralism and populist organizations presupposes the presence of free and fair elections, indicating that there is no true representation of the people’s will in the first place, in addition to their being systematic fraud in the electoral process. Said said that the slogan presented for the existence of parallel entities is a form of dissent and a search for alternatives in the shadow of methodical electoral fraud. He stressed that this is different from the concept of syndicate plurality, and that the disappearance of the phenomenon of competing syndicates in Egypt goes back to the lack of real syndicates in the first place.
Said added that raising the slogan for parallel entities comes in the very difficult social context which Egypt is going through at the moment. The country suffers from the unique problem of the decay and fragmentation of society’s major organizational infrastructure at an alarming rate.
Said stressed that he is not against the idea of plural syndicates, and that there may come the day when the call for plural syndicates must be made, but that the main motto that must be proposed is a call for the presence of the Egyptian population and the insistence on this presence, after the population has become, or has been made, absent, in addition to working on freeing the people from the culture of fear.
Joining the discussion, Essam Sultan, a lawyer in Al Wasat Party, stated that Egypt is at the doors of great social, political and economic change, and considered that the future would be more difficult and more dangerous if we cannot envision one made by our own hands and not created by others. He described the idea of parallel entities as brilliant in light of the political, social and actual shut down in society.
He considered the idea of parallel entities as coming belated to a society that is already seeing many alternatives to the state in different areas, stating that while the government is concerned with official decrees, other entities are in fact running politics, and society is being managed by different alternative rules. He held that societies do not have to stick to fixed political science definitions on their paths to progress, and stressed the importance of an Egyptian solution for what Egyptian society is going through, mentioning the Malaysian experience as an inspiration.
Concluding, Dr. Bahiy El Din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, suggested that bullying might be a different sort of parallel entity in itself, and wondered what other sorts of parallel entities might be seen in the coming period, and what the Muslim Brotherhood is thinking regarding the future of the development of such entities.
In a comment from the present audience, Saber Abu Al Fotouh, A Muslim Brotherhood parliament member objected to the wording of “parallel entities” since the origin in syndicates should be independence and the current workers organizations lack such independence and integrity. He explained that the Muslim Brotherhood proposed 1400 candidates in the last workers’ elections, only 1200 of which were able to obtain nomination papers, 850 of the 1200 were arbitrarily eliminated, while those of them who submitted their nomination through a legal messenger, had their messenger arrested.
In another comment, Mohammed Omar, a worker, supported the creation of alternative bodies, on the condition that such bodies not be created on a religious or political party basis, while Rahma Refaat, an activist, stated that the workers’ union law in Egypt is unlike any in the whole world. Amr Hamid, the general secretary of the free student union, indicated that the purpose of an alternative student union is to push to break down the legitimacy of the official student organization, adding that the free student union does not even know how it would fund the services students expect it to provide. On the other hand, Amr Salah El Din, a student at the Ain Shams Faculty of Medecine, added that the purpose of the free student union is to stand up to the arbitrary elimination and control faced by students who wanted to nominate themselves for the official student elections, and who tried turning to the courts, but found that path a very slow one.