Strikes raise pressure on Mubarak
Bus drivers and other public transport workers went on strike in Egypt today as mass protests continued in an attempt to remove President Hosni Mubarak.
Thousands of protesters packed into Cairo’s central Tahrir Square for a 17th day, vowing not to give up until he steps down despite a host of sweeping government concessions.
Organisers planned another huge protest tomorrow, hoping to repeat scenes on Tuesday when about a quarter of a million people turned out and helped revitalise the movement.
Khaled Abdel-Hamid, speaking for a coalition of groups behind the protests, said they wanted Egyptians to show up at six separate rallies on main squares in Cairo from which they would all march to Tahrir Square.
Protests calling for Mubarak’s removal have been spreading since Tuesday outside Tahrir Square.
Strikes also have erupted in a several sectors – among railway and bus workers, state electricity staff and service technicians at the Suez Canal, in factories manufacturing textiles, steel and beverages and hospitals.
Witnesses said hundreds of doctors in white coats marched down a street from the Qasr el-Aini hospital to the square, chanting “Join us, O Egyptian.”
The labour strikes come despite a warning by Vice President Omar Suleiman that calls for civil disobedience are “very dangerous for society and we can’t put up with this at all.”
Impoverished Egyptians are heavily dependent on public transport and the strike threatened a new blow to the hard-hit economy.
Ali Fatouh, a bus driver in Cairo, says buses were locked in the garages and won’t be moved “until we achieve our demands,” which include salary increases. He says organisers are calling on all 62,000 transportation employees to participate.
Some buses were still seen on the streets early today and it’s not immediately clear how widespread the strike is.
Mustafa Mohammed, a bus driver since 1997 who earns about 550 Egyptian pounds (about £60) a month), said Egyptians deserve a better life.
“We are immersed in debts,” the 43-year-old driver said as he joined a crowd outside the administration building on the outskirts of Cairo. “We are staying until our demands are met. If our demands are not met, we will join Tahrir, and camp there.”
He said the administration sent a senior employee to “throw us a bone” with a holiday bonus but that wasn’t enough.
Egyptians have been infuriated by newspaper reports that the Mubarak family has amassed billions, and perhaps tens of billions of dollars in wealth while, according to the World Bank, about 40 % of the country’s 80 million people live below or near the poverty line of two US dollars a day. The family’s true net worth is not known.
The protesters filling streets of Cairo and other cities since January 25 have already posed the greatest challenge to the president’s authoritarian rule since he came to power 30 years ago.
They have wrought promises of sweeping concessions and reforms, a new Cabinet and a purge of the ruling party leadership, but Mubarak refuses their demands that he step down before September elections.
US-based Human Rights Watch has said about 300 people have been killed since the protests began, but it is still compiling a final toll.
The White House warned Egypt’s leaders to expect unrelenting protests unless they start to show real reforms and a transition to a freer society, dismissing governmental concessions so far as not having met even the minimum threshold of what people want.
Obama administration officials were also increasingly blunt in describing the limits of their leverage, reasserting that the United States is not seeking to dictate events in Egypt – and that it cannot.
“We’re not going to be able to force them do anything,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.
Still, Gibbs and other officials called on Egypt’s leaders to end the harassment of activists, to broaden the make-up of their negotiations with opposition leaders and to lift a repressive emergency law.
