Pakinam Amer Bio 05 Dec 2006
World Politics Watch Exclusive
CAIRO, Egypt -- During the latest protest against sexual harassment here last month, women were once again the victims of harassment. This time, however, the assaulters were none other than Egypt's security policemen.
At a Nov. 15 protest, female protesters were stalked, groped, shoved and pushed around. In one case, a woman in flowing black robes and a colorful bright scarf was held by the arm, dragged over a flight of stairs and shaken by her veil as bystanders and a fellow male protestor were hurled back.
The humiliated young woman -- in her early twenties -- was not the only one who was manhandled.
"I came to protest injustice against women and I myself was disgraced," said a human rights activist who was present during the rowdy picket.
This and similar protests have followed reports of a series of on-the-street harassment incidents directed at females during Muslim Eid al-Fitr celebrations in downtown Cairo. The demonstrators, most of them women, were protesting against what they deemed the "blatant" and "widespread" phenomenon of on-the-street sexual harassment.
At the end of October, in the wake of the holy month of Ramadan -- when Muslim worshippers fast and observe acts of piety -- women and girls who took to the streets in celebration of the end of the fasting month were touched in sensitive areas, groped and had their clothes torn and their veils pulled off their heads in one busy downtown area.
What fueled protests in the weeks that followed was that the presence of security police and local policemen during the Eid incidents did not prevent dozens of men from encircling women -- in groups of two and three -- and taking turns groping and touching them as the women screamed and kicked back.
The accounts of the Eid harassment filled Cairo blogs and circulated by email before public and private TV channels started reporting it."
The cowardly officer is standing helpless, while Egyptian women are humiliated," a middle-aged Egyptian woman shouted in anger as she stood by the Cairo journalists syndicate to protest last month.
The enraged woman, a mother of two police officers herself, had publicly called upon her sons to resign in protest, condemning a system that reportedly failed to protect women.
The uncovering of such an incident has indeed sparked a wave of shock among many Egyptians -- but not among many women, who say that incidents of harassment, both fleeting and long-lasting, are the norm on Cairo streets, and in taxis, public buses and shopping malls.
The harassment is usually fleeting -- a man touching a woman and quickly moving away, or a man masturbating on the street while catcalling or hissing at a passing woman -- but the effects on the victims, some women say, can be devastating.
Women wearing head scarves, even fully veiled women with only their eyes showing through a small opening in a see-through face veil, or munaqabat, are targeted as much as unveiled women who wear their hair long and dress in tight pants or short sleeves. The unspoken reality is: If you are a woman in Cairo, then you will likely experience some type of harassment by a man.
Women first shared their stories of harassment on Internet forums and public blogs, and long-suppressed hurt and humiliation finally surfaced as the women voiced their anger in public last month.
The Eid harassment incident has provoked a storm of negative reactions in Cairo, where women are still sometimes blamed for dressing "provocatively," and thereby provoking harassment from men.
However, in the end, the incident has successfully uncovered a growing and disturbing attitude of violence against women.
Some of Egypt's outspoken youth were responsible for taking the debate to the street.
A group of young Egyptians, an offshoot of Egypt's Kifaya (Enough) movement and other "resistance" factions, formed a movement called "The Street is Ours," whose main goal is to fight harassment of women in all its forms.
The group is now gaining supporters by the day, and Web sites are being dedicated solely to their cause.
The groups says the Eid incident is reminiscent of an incident that occurred in May 2005, a few months before last year's presidential elections, when female journalists and activists were beaten and sexually harassed in public.
And in their last protest, the women of "The Street is Ours" faced the same kind of harassment that they had gathered to strike against. The streets in which some of the female activists chose to rage were both their last solace and their enemy.
Nadia Mabrouk, a Kifaya member and a leading protestor, was aggressively taken to a police truck and was forced to spend the night in custody; the main charge was "creating chaos." In other words, she was arrested for protesting, an act banned by the Egyptian constitution in the absence of a security permit.
Ironically, Mabrouk was targeted on the same downtown street, by the Metro cinema, where the first acts of Eid harassment were reported.
Reuters stringer Abdel-Nasser el-Nouri was beaten by plain-clothed security "thugs" (his own term) when he attempted to take pictures of Mabrouk as she was being violently pushed around."
They dragged me to one of their cars and drove to the end of the street," el-Nouri said. "They let me go, but warned me against going back to take pictures."
When el-Nouri was replacing the batteries of his digital camera, the security personnel snatched them away from his hands and shattered them, mistaking the batteries for film.
Pictures taken of security men manhandling women usually end up on opposition papers' front pages -- a notion which scares the police, said el-Nouri.
"Well, pictures bring them trouble. It creates a crisis for them -- it embarrasses them in front of the world and in front of their superiors, especially when it is pictures of women being beaten."
Wael Abbas, another eyewitness and the blogger who first blew the whistle on the Eid harassment, described how female protestors were cornered by members of riot police.
"More than one girl was held in the police trucks," he said. "They foiled the protest. The activists tried to move to [the nearby] press syndicate to continue protesting but they were pushed back.
"The only protection the women had was their fellow protestors, and they were at times helpless against hundreds of heavily armored riot police who converged on the demonstration scene by the truckload.
At one point during the protest, the activists were pushed into a diner and were locked inside by riot police -- as the restaurant customers watched with mouths agape.
The main entrance of the restaurant was cordoned off, special security forces dressed in black stood in a line by the restaurant. Pedestrians were told to change routes.
Apparently shaken by what she saw through the restaurants wide glass windows, a female diner spoke to a local English-language newspaper.
"Look at what they are doing to the women!" the diner told a reporter for Egypt's Daily Star as the police cracked down on the young protestors before her eyes.
Pakinam Amer is a Cairo-based journalist and writer.
Link: http://www.worldpoliticswatch.com/article.aspx?id=386
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