The Pipeline in Egypt that supplies Israel with gas was bombed last Monday for the 13th time since the overthrow of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.
The attack was pulled out in the Massaeed area west of the Mediterranean coastal town of Al-Arish, North Sinai. The previous bombings took place in the same area.
No group has claimed responsibility for the pipeline attacks yet.
Shortly after Monday’s bombing, Abdel Wehab Mabrouk, governor of North Sinai, along with the peninsula security head, Gaber El-Arabi, and other high-profile governmental officials visited the exploded pipeline.
These officials claimed that a lot of efforts have been exerted by the government of late to put an end to the gas cylinders shortage in Egypt.
Egypt’s 20-year gas deal with Israel, signed in the Mubarak era, is extremely unpopular with many Egyptians, with critics accusing Israel of not paying enough for the fuel.
Many Egyptians deplore the fact that Egypt supplies Israel with gas amid the gas cylinders shortage all across the country.
Another reason why the pipeline was repeatedly attacked is that many Egyptians are pro-Palestinian and against the Israeli regime.
Getting to the pipeline has also become easier as security in Sinai was relaxed after Mubarak’s fall as the police presence thinned out across Egypt.
Previous explosions sometimes have forced weeks-long shutdowns along the pipeline run by Gasco, a subsidiary of the national gas company EGAS.
Gasco said it had resumed pumping gas to households and industrial factories in Al-Arish and began experimental pumping to Jordan and Israel last week.
The pipeline has been shut since the last explosion on 5 February.
Meanwhile the working class in Egypt are in a state of permanent revolution.
Egyptian postal workers’ have occupied the Central Administration of Postal Services demanding the communication minister resigns and that his ministry advisors are dismised.
The postal workers are striking across Egypt demanding a pay rise.
Hundreds of workers from the Egyptian Postal Services Authority (EPSA) have maintained their sit-in since last Sunday in front of the Central Administration of Postal Services in Cairo.
They are demanding the resignation of Communications and Information Technology Minister Mohamed Salem.
They also called for the dismissal of ministry advisors, who are supporters of the ousted Mubarak regime.
Workers additionally called for the formation of a parliamentary fact-finding committee to review the EPSA’s recent actions.
They further demanded that employee wages be restructured so as to be brought into line with the size of the authority’s investments, estimated at more than LE100 million.
On Sunday evening, the head of the EPSA, along with several security personnel, attacked Mohamed Saftawy, head of the independent union of postal workers, resulting in Saftawy being hospitalised.
On Monday morning, Saftawy attempted to file an official complaint against the head of the EPSA at Cairo’s Mosky police station.
He was surprised, however, to find that a counter-complaint had already been filed against him, in which he was accused of encouraging workers to strike.
The strike is spreading with postal workers in the governorates of Gharbiya, Qena, Ismailiya, Northern Sinai, Meniya, Sharqiya, Beni-Suwaif, El-Fayoum, Luxor and Aswan – which cover geographic districts from one end of the country to the other – have shut down 50% of Egypt’s post offices.
Colleagues in the governorates of Alexandria and Kafr El-Sheikh are set to join in the action as well.
Workers are demanding that the government purge the publicly owned postal services of hundreds of corrupt managers as well as tens of highly paid consultants.
The workers are also demanding a 7% annual pay increase to keep up with inflation and a 200% bonus for meeting annual production goals.
The struggle began when the postal workers’ strike was called last Friday by the newly formed Independent Union of Postal Workers.
Union delegates elected a strike committee composed of six rank-and-file representatives who cover various geographic districts in order to negotiate a settlement with the government.
In the weeks after the fall of former dictator Mubarak, thousands of postal workers organised several strikes and protests to demand that the new government replace officials tied to the old regime.
Workers also began a campaign to build new local and national unions to replace pro-Mubarak formations which are pro-management.
The Egyptian government’s post offices are not only used to deliver regular mail services but also to distribute pension cheques to millions of retirees.
l The burning question that has begun to be fought out on the streets of Egypt is that of leadership.
The role and position of the army after the ruling military council hands over power to a civilian president is one of the main areas of debate between presidential candidates, political parties and revolutionaries as Egyptians.
There is constant discussion about writing a new constitution, electing a new president and putting an end to the military-governed transitional period.
The term ‘safe exit’ will be ringing in the ears of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) during its remaining months in power.
The term spelled misfortune for former president Mubarak in the period before his downfall on February 11 of last year.
No one could have imagined that the same term would be also applied a year later to the SCAF (Egyptian military), which was cheered by millions of Egyptians on that historic evening when Mubarak stepped down.
Yet a series of political failures during the year-long transition period have pushed most revolutionary forces into the anti-SCAF camp.
The SCAF’s position is now a similar position to Mubarak after he failed to carry out reforms that might have allowed him to exercise an option of a safe exit.
The SCAF may even be in a more difficult position compared to Mubarak.
Indeed, due to the ‘exceptional’ and ‘transitory’ nature of its stint in office, the generals do not even have the luxury of granting the people reforms, which the well-empowered Mubarak could have done if he had wanted to.
A narrow range of choices force the SCAF, and the country as a whole, to ask what realistic exit scenarios might be available to the generals.
Several options have been proposed, despite the predicament.
Firstly is the Turkish Option. The most likely exit scenario, according to Professor Essam Shiha, a constitutional expert and member of the Higher Council of the liberal Wafd Party, is a constitution which resembles the Turkish one, prior to its most recent amendments.
The constitutional safe exit would guarantee the independence of the military and its leadership from supervision by other government bodies, and the safest option for members of the SCAF to escape prosecution by any authority in the country.
Such a constitutional safe exit would be tantamount to granting ‘parliamentary immunity’ to both the current military council – which would be the first military power to step down voluntarily in Egyptian history – and to any future military commanders.
The second exit scenario, proposed by Cairo University’s political science Professor Amani Massoud, is for the SCAF to back a loyalist presidential candidate.
The generals would try persuade political forces with popular support to consent to their candidate, or at the very least to neutralise any dissenters.
The victory of a SCAF-backed presidential candidate would allow it to maintain its effective rule and exit the scene unharmed.
The SCAF’s proposal of a ‘consensual president’ shows this option is already being seriously considered.
It did so to measure the degree of popular acceptance of such a president and the readiness of revolutionary forces to accept it, as it meant the generals themselves stepping down.
These first two scenarios, which depend mainly on arrangements with Islamist parties, are most applicable at this stage.
The political scene is relatively calm at the moment but is not calm all the time.
Since Mubarak’s ousted there have been a number of occasions when revolutionaries in Tahrir Square and elsewhere have called for the SCAF to step down immediately.
Revolutionaries condemned the military for cracking down on peaceful protests and betraying the revolution it claimed to be protecting.
Hundreds of thousands of people marched to demand a swift end to military rule on the revolution’s first anniversary in January.
If protests erupt again as the presidential elections near, the Turkish model or the loyal president option would have to be taken off the table.
Another scenerio that culd emerge is that of a coup d’état.
General Assem Geneidy, a security expert, has noted that the SCAF could induce generalised chaos in the country, in order to set the scene for a coup d’état.
In this situation, the SCAF could declare martial law, ban all political parties and activities, annul the election results, and completely suppress all freedom of expression.
This would represent a rerun of the 1952 Free Officers coup, led by the late president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Two years after the coup, which toppled King Farouk, Nasser destroyed all hopes for democracy by becoming the de-facto ruler for decades.
However the people’s ownership over taking the initiative in the January 25 Revolution put the masses in the driver’s seat, forcing the generals to think twice about employing the coup weapon to exit the scene.
General Assem Geneidy, the security expert, says that the SCAF will most likely face tremendous international pressure if the generals carry out a coup against the revolution and democratic transition, which could mean the end of any hope for safe exit.
The SCAF might attempt to pre-emptively coordinate with international allies ahead of any planned coup in order to at the least neutralise its friends/critics.
Still, there is no guarantee that the SCAF would be able to suppress public anger and outrage against an attack by the generals on the revolution and hard-won freedoms.
The fourth scenario that the SCAF might consider is to orchestrate a military coup, not by the council, but by middle-ranking officers.
These young officers would pose to the public as patriots who are simply angry with the SCAF’s failures to achieve the revolution’s goals; behind the scenes, they would remain loyal to the military council.
Such a coup against the SCAF by young radical-sounding officers could push public opinion to support these officers wholeheartedly; it could lend the rebels a degree of revolutionary legitimacy in the eyes of the masses, ultimately forcing any political or revolutionary current to think twice before attempting to stand in the SCAF’s way.
This scenario could present the young officers with an opportunity to issue decisions at will that would suppress any political opposition, guaranteeing either a direct safe exit for current members of SCAF, or at an indirect exit after holding show trials for some generals.
However, this scenario may not be acceptable to a many of the council’s 19 members who are unlikely to want to end their military careers on a note of humiliation.
Still, this scenario might remain the SCAF’s best option to exit safely, without precipitating a violent confrontation between the people and the army.
The only real way forward for the Egyptian masses is the working class building a a revolutionary leadership, in the form of a revolutionary party based on the example of the type of party that led 1917 Russian revolution, a Bolshevik Party.
It will organise the Egyptian working class to lead the urban and rural poor and the peasantry to carry though a socialist revolution that will put the working class into power in the form of a workers and small farmers government that will carry out socialist policies, and give the land to the peasantry and spread the socialist revolution throughout the Middle East and and North Africa.
Many young people think that this is the way forward.
