Port Said in Revolt

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Apr 1, 2013 Egypt
[A protester throws a tear gas canister back at police during street battles outside Port Said`s Security Directorate. On the right, poster of a protester killed in January`s clashes visible. 7 March 2013. (Photo by AFP/Jonathan Rashad)] [A protester throws a tear gas canister back at police during street battles outside Port Said`s Security Directorate. On the right, poster of a protester killed in January`s clashes visible. 7 March 2013. (Photo by AFP/Jonathan Rashad)]

Port Said in Revolt

By : Jonathan Rashad

Tears in the eyes, bullets on the ground, and blood on the pavements - as injustice prevails. That is Port Said.

The city has witnessed unrest again in March in response to an Egyptian court ruling that sentenced twenty-one Port Said residents to death for alleged involvement in killings that happened during a 1 February 2012 football riot, which left seventy-four dead . More than forty-six were killed in Port Said over the past two months during clashes.
      \"\"
                [Riot police throw rocks at protesters from the rooftop of Port Said`s Security Directorate. 7 March 2013
                                                                             (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
    \"\"
                       [Skirmishes between residents and riot police.7 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
              \"\"
                [A police conscript fires a tear gas canister at protesters. 7 March 2013 (Photo by AFP/Jonathan Rashad)]
           \"\"
                   [A protester throws a tear gas canister back at police during street battles outside Port Said`s Security
                      Directorate. On the right, poster of a protester killed in January`s clashes visible. 7 March 2013
                                                                           (Photo by AFP/Jonathan Rashad)]

   \"\"
                                 [A protester throws a tear gas canister back at police during clashes. 7 March 2013 
                                                                          (Photo by AFP/Jonathan Rashad)]
            \"\"
                               [A protester throws a home-made petrol bomb at police during clashes. 7 March 2013 
                                                                          (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
             \"\"
                   [A protester runs away as a special forces police officer fires tear gas during clashes. 7 March 2013
                                                                                (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
             \"\"
             [Interior Ministry`s special forces chase protesters with shotguns. 7 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
             \"\"
                   [Ossama Riyad, twenty-seven, receiving treatment at Al-Amiri hospital after being shot in the waist
                         by police with metal pellets during clashes. 8 March 2013  (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
              \"\"
                    [Residents march in the streets of Port Said in objection to the killing of protesters. 8 March 2013  
                                                                         (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
            \"\"
                  [Army soldiers guard the governorate headquarters amidst clashes between residents and riot police.
                                                        7 March 2013  (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
            \"\"
                          [A protester takes a break after throwing petrol bombs at riot police during clashes outside
                                           Security Directorate. 7 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
            \"\"
                 [“Mourning” sign hung outside a school in Port Said. The majority of schools and shops in Port Said
                    were closed as part of a civil disobedience action, in solidarity with slain protesters. 10 March
                                                                      2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
              \"\"
                   [El-Sharq police station after it was attacked by angry residents. 7.62mm caliber shots can be seen
                                                   on the wall. 8 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)] 
            \"\"
                [Lieutenant Mahmoud Nasrallah after getting shot in the face with bird-shot pellets from angry residents.
               Nasrallah claimed that three police conscripts were killed during clashes. “Five police officers were taken
                  hostage by protesters during clashes and were exchanged for protesters we arrested,” adds Lieutenant
               Colonel Mohamed Ismail El-Adawy - deputy chief of El-Sharq police station in Port Said. Also, El-Adawy
                      claimed that police did not use live ammunition. 8 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
             \"\"
                  [Funeral march of twenty-four-year-old protester Ahmed Abdelhalim, who was shot in the head during
               clashes with police outside Port Said`s Security Directorate. 8 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
            \"\"
                  [A protester holds spent bullet casings found after clashes outside Security Directorate. 7 March
                                                                    2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
             \"\"
               [Military police guard Security Directorate after withdrawal of riot police. Personnel left the headquarters
                   after Interior Minister gave orders and riot police - along with special forces - went back to the other
                               governorates - as they were brought from Ismailiya, Arish and Rafah. 8 March 2013
                                                                             (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
           \"\"
              [Port Said residents gathered by Suez Canal and burned tires to prevent boats from docking, in objection
                     to the verdict of the football riot trial. As twenty-one were sentenced to death, five sentenced to
                 twenty-five years, six sentenced to fifteen years, three sentenced to ten years, two sentenced to five
                                  years and twenty-eight acquitted. 9 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
            \"\"
               [Khaled Sedik - a thirty-three-year-old electrician and one of the twenty-eight acquitted - prays
              at the grave of protesters killed during recent clashes outside Security Directorate. Sedik was one of those
             responsible for security coordination with riot police during the match in February 2012. "We were brutally
                 tortured and humiliated in prison, they even stopped giving us food and water," he adds. The witness
              who testified against Sedik kept changing his testimony, which led to his release. Sedik was jailed for one
                                         year pending investigation. 10 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
            \"\"
              ["My life is ruined. My two-year-old daughter keeps saying please God, save Daddy. Kill my husband in a
                public square if there`s any concrete evidence that proves he killed anyone," weeps twenty-five-year-
               old newly-wed Wafaa Mohamed. Wafaa is the wife of Mohamed Mahmoud El-Boghadady, twenty-six,
               a local tuk-tuk driver who was sentenced to death in the stadium riot case. "The coroner said that all
                     victims were killed due to stampede, so why is my husband charged with “killing intentionally
                                   with a weapon,” asks Wafaa. 10 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
            \"\"
                   [Portrait of eighteen-year-old Mohamed Hosni El-Khayat - held by his father - who was sentenced to
                twenty-five years in the stadium case. Mr. Hosni claimed that he could not afford to pay a lawyer to help
                  prove his son`s innocence. "My son was just passing by during the violence around the stadium and
                was arrested randomly by police. What`s his charge and where is the evidence that he`s guilty?" Hosni
                 adds. Worth mentioning: Lieutenant Mahmoud Nasrallah confirmed that many were arrested randomly
                following the violence around the stadium area last year. 10 March 2013  (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)] 
            \"\"
               [Mohsen El-Sherif, thirty-three, one of the twenty-one sentenced to death in the stadium massacre, who
               is currently a fugitive, as he has not turned himself into police custody. "I had the opportunity to escape
                  and leave the country many times but I did not because I did not commit a crime. I am innocent.
                      I was framed by false evidence when I refused to disclose to police the names of members of
                                                   Port Said`s Ultras, the Green Eagles," explained Mohsen. 

                 Mohsen was charged with “throwing rocks” and was sentenced in absentia. He claims he is not hiding
                                                       and continues his daily life despite facing execution. 

              "Ahly fans know that the SCAF (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) and the Interior Ministry were
                   behind the massacre. Why do they want to take revenge against the people of Port Said?" added
               Mohsen. He said that he would eventually turn himself in. 10 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
        \"\"
                    [A banner that reads "we will never forget you.” The banner includes portraits of protesters killed
                 during clashes. As more than fort-six have been killed in Port Said over the past two months during
                                               clashes with police. 8 March 2013 (Photo by Jonathan Rashad)]
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Nov 13, 2012 Lebanon
Yasser Alwan By :
Yasser Alwan

Imagining Tahrir

I.

Egyptians saw themselves for the first time through their own eyes in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in January and February 2011, and reveled in that encounter. Participating in and recording that experience was to become part of the consciousness of a community that was ready to move heaven and earth to restructure Egyptian society for the better.

The consciousness was individual in that it established one person’s experience among the crowd, it was moral because recording everything became imperative for a community working so hard to sustain itself and build a new society. And it was collective. No one refused to be in a photograph or a video before the “Battle of the Camel” on 2 February brought infiltrators and thus suspicion into Tahrir. People often sought out the cameras because we felt – as the Salah Jaheen/Abdul Halim song declared every day – that we were part of the same picture, that divisions within Egyptian society mattered less than the ties that bound people together in that community. (To photograph on the streets of Cairo like this before 28 January would have met with a hostile response). That collective consciousness also asserted itself through the internet as individuals and the groups they formed then and there uploaded material to show the world the who, what, why and how of Tahrir, and to motivate fellow Egyptians to come down and join them.

The consciousness of Tahrir intertwined with image, sound and word in a cathartic expression of dizzying proportions. Uneven in focus, low-resolution, super-fast, choppy, and artless to the extreme, ranging from the mundane to the heroic: in that stream-of-consciousness material a powerful sense of wonder and discovery and of being there emerges.

The amount of recorded data is so enormous that all attempts to gather and organize it have failed. This material comes from innumerable and rival sources – for everyone who owned a mobile phone used it to record something of those first eighteen days. In this material – scattered throughout the four corners of the country – lies the collective memory of the revolution.

II.

The center of world events for a short time, Tahrir also captured center stage in the international media. Photographers, journalists and camera crews parachuted in from everywhere. The televised revolution these professionals produced was telegenic. It consisted of 1) a simplified, visually coherent story of easily recognizable good guys and bad guys, 2) courageous, attractive, industrious, and well-spoken protestors, 3) violence turned into spectacle (fighting and bloodshed without any of the pain), and 4) correspondents who take risks to bring you the news. The revolution had a neat beginning and a neat end. End of story. Everyone goes home, except for the locals who are still living through the fallout.

The professional photographers were conspicuous in Tahrir because they usually carried the largest, most sophisticated cameras, and often more than one. They produced those hi-res, sharp, colorful, stop-action images that the world saw almost immediately. They worked hard to play substitute for our eyes.

They came from everywhere. They competed intensely to get the most exciting shots. They sought the best vantage points from above, or from within the action, and they took risks that some demonstrators would not. I met an articulate freelance photographer from Japan who knew nothing about Egypt but knew that Tahrir would get him published. A French camera crew that had just arrived wanted to photograph and interview those bloggers who had already appeared in the French media. They did not have time to look around and explore. Most revealing was that so many of the photographers I met already had a good sense of the photos they hoped to make – as if they were working from a prepared visual script: as if the unfolding of the actual events was secondary. Almost none of them spoke Arabic.

These photojournalists could very well have cared about the protestors and the future of Egypt. The point is entirely irrelevant to their raison d’etre and modus operandi. They are the foot soldiers of the mainstream media – an international system of visual management. News is a bureaucratic process in which the photographer provides raw material for the finished product – a visual façade that shows us day in and day out that the only drama in life stems from the dramatic: revolution, war, famine, natural and man-made disasters, spectacular discoveries and incredible athletic feats.

Technological developments have taken our eyes to the heavens, the depths of the oceans, the heart of matter, and the infra-red and ultra-violet spectra. Even to that oxymoron, night vision. We even see through disembodied cameras. We see more, but less introspectively. We are rarely able to see beyond the precisely controlled façade that surrounds us. The façade has convinced us, through the realism of photographic images, that they are a shortcut to the truth -- and that there is nothing else worth seeing.

III.

Late evening, 28 January 2011, the southern border of Tahrir along the Mugamma: The fighting here continued long into the night, long after I had any energy to give. I did not photograph the clashes, the courage, recklessness and restraint of the demonstrators, the injured and the suffocating. I did not know what I could do with a camera: not yet, perhaps not ever, certainly not during. When I sat down to rest, it dawned on me that my first photos would focus on this Interior Ministry stronghold and hub of bureaucratic coercion. I had been harassed and warned umpteen times by hardcore security personnel that photography was prohibited here – even though I never considered it – over the last twenty years. This would become my very personal revolt in the wider revolution.

In fact, I have been photographing the revolution for twenty years. The daily struggle of the average Egyptian has underpinned my portraiture. Bread! Freedom! Social Justice! The main slogan of the revolution is at the center of that struggle. My portraits in Tahrir are the tip of an iceberg. In them you will not find outright references to political protest precisely because the long revolution unfolds at a pace and in forms that the media are unable to recognize or represent.

My photography suggests (and the revolution confirms) that the Egypt we have been presented with is a preconceived projection – whether in the nineteenth-century photography of Maxime du Camp, through today’s (state-controlled or international) media, or the tourism industry. Photographs merely added an aura of truth to that illusion.

I photograph in order to see for myself, to try to see through the façade, and thus to deepen my own understanding of the world. I rarely leave Egypt to do this because discoveries are just around the corner – if you look carefully, if you elicit photos rather than produce them, if you are willing to interact instead of just observe, and if you are willing to seek and tease out rhythms in life that do not appear as soon as you show up with a camera. My work suggests that there is plenty of drama in daily life, that photographs can depict human encounters based on solidarity, and that they can plumb more than the immediate moment.

Photographing in Tahrir Square was a new challenge. Time compressed and things happened too fast, but since everyone was using a camera, no one was about to arrest me for photographing the Mugamma. With the withdrawal of the security apparatus and the establishment of a community, the taboo against photographing strangers (and anything other than a glossy touristic scene) evaporated and hostility toward photographers disappeared for a while. People were coming toward me for once, people who once would have regarded me with initial suspicion. No matter from what walk of life, Egyptians were proud and wanted to record their newly discovered sense of citizenship. Young men – Egypt’s greatest abandoned human resource – found self-respect not based on swagger and bravado, but on their willingness to protect the square at the cost of their lives. In turn they earned the respect and gratitude of everyone in Tahrir. But all in all, it took me too long to make sense of these changes - I had internalized the taboos, especially that of photographing unrelated women.

The future is collaboration. Across culture, social class, and gender. We all see the Arab world – including most of us who live here – through the occupied territories that the media have made of our eyes. Only together, through an expanded sense of ourselves, by exploring the world that we are all complicit in making and by acknowledging the pain we have caused others, can we create a better world. That was the promise of Tahrir for eighteen amazing days.