First-Hand Account of Rabea Dispersal

[14 August 2013, Rabea Al-Adawiya during the aggressive dispersal of the pro-Morsi set-in. Image originally posted to Wikipedia] [14 August 2013, Rabea Al-Adawiya during the aggressive dispersal of the pro-Morsi set-in. Image originally posted to Wikipedia]

First-Hand Account of Rabea Dispersal

By : Mohamad Salama Adam and Lina Attalah

We reached the Rabea al-Adaweya sit-in at seven am on Wednesday, about an hour after the police and Armed Forces launched their coordinated attack to disperse the six-week long demonstration.

South of Nasr Street, tens of Muslim Brotherhood protesters gathered in front of a military cordon closing off the sit-in. As the daunting bangs of machine guns intermittently dispersed them, the protesters struggled to regroup several times, chanting, “We will bring Sisi down,” referring to military chief commander Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Military choppers were hovering over their heads. “We will bring you down,” they responded defiantly.

Some onlookers were standing at the surrounding buildings, terrified by the unfolding deaths. Others smiled at the thought that the sit-in, which paralyzed their everyday lives for over a month, was coming to the end. And still others went so far as to cheer for the masked Special Forces affiliated to the police as they left combat to rest away from the frontlines.

“What are you laughing at,” an angry protester screamed at a man watching the scene from behind a building gate, in what would evolve into one of several altercations. What was initially the periphery of the bloody clashes was quickly turning violent itself.

The soundscape of the clashes was no less terrorizing. While echoing bangs of birdshot and tear gas bombs are all too familiar in Egypt’s revolutionary times, this intensity of live fire was arguably unprecedented.

As the surrounding streets turned into miniscule warzones, we arrived at one area where there was a relatively safe movement into and out of the sit-in. We were parallel to Tayaran Street, one of the closest entry points to the sit-in’s main field hospital, a street through which the injured were carried to a make-shift hospital in the basement of a building.

Though this seemed to be the only site through which you could reach the sit-in without security intervention, Ahmad Zaatar, a protester from Beheira, insisted that the police lied about leaving a safe exit for the protesters, since their armored vehicles were stationed everywhere. While a couple of streets seemed to be clear of security, police would round protesters up further away from the sit-in, he claimed.

But we counted on the relative safety of this street leading to the sit-in, and stood there talking to Brotherhood members resting from six hours of non-stop clashes with the police.

Sitting on the ground and burying his head in between his legs, Ramy Ahmed, a schoolteacher from Monufiya, showed signs of grief and defeat. He had been in the security team when the attack started a few minutes before six am. 

Ahmed and his fellows had been expecting the imminent dispersal every day since the Cabinet mandated the Ministry of Interior to disperse the protests “by any means necessary” on 31 July in order to “fight terrorism.”

Ahmed said that every day, he would reach the threshold of fear around dawn prayers. But once that time passed, he knew an attack would not happen. “We just felt that if anything would happen, it would be around dawn prayers,” he explained.

That is why the post-dawn attack caught him off guard.

When the sit-in was showered with tear gas and live fire—both at the same time, contrary to MOI’s promises to use gradual dispersal tactics—Ahmed said he and others rushed to reinforce the sit-in’s barricades with cars and metal fences.

“But they came in and bulldozed everything, set tents on fire,” he said.

Ahmed said he was taking a break before going back into the fight. His wife had just called from Monufiya, asking him to stay strong. “The solution for us is to remain peaceful. Every minute we remain here is a victory.”

Asked whether death was a concern for him, he did not take long to respond, and fate was his answer. “I can step out of the sit-in now and be hit by a car and die,” he said.

As he spoke, rapid gunfire suddenly returned to the area. We spotted movement on an adjacent rooftop, where the shots were clearly coming from, but could not confirm whether it was protesters or police.

Somoud, ” (persistence), is the word Omar Fahmy used inside the field hospital, which we managed to enter despite the intensive gunfire around its entrance. The hospital was situated alongside the stage that that kept the sit-in cohesive for days through enthusiastic addresses by Brotherhood leaders.

Fahmy, son of former Shura Council head Ahmed Fahmy, was treating people injured by live ammunition. He insisted, despite the horrors of the day, that the group was strong and persistent: “We have no other options.”

The hospital was mostly catering to live ammunition injuries. Those hit by birdshot had to either live without treatment or get preliminary help in tents set up just outside the hospital. From the alternative entrance to the hospital, which overlooked what remained of the sit-in, we saw an ever-shrinking gathering of people.

In the hospital basement, the medical center supervisor Ahmed Kamel held a stack of about thirty-five ID cards taken from the thirty-five dead bodies at the hospital at that point. He was responding to endless queries from people asking if their missing relatives were among the deceased. Around him, relatives of the victims gathered, waiting for him to open the fridges storing the bodies to say a final good bye.

Kamel finally opened one of them, revealing ten bodies lying one next to the other, wounds in their heads, necks and chests. As one weeping mother recognized her son, she bent over him and started washing his face with water. As her white veil approached his shirt, his blood slowly diffused into it, staining it all over.

There was not much more to report.

We went back up to the upper floor to find an exit out of the hospital, walking through omnipresent bloodstains. The gunfire outside had intensified, and doctors barred anyone from coming in or going out. We realized that we could be trapped in the hospital for a long time if we did not risk leaving, so we asked the doctors to let us go. 

This could be one of those moments where everything could suddenly end, we thought as we set out to leave. But our fear was greater than anything else. We held hands and ran for our lives through a storm of gunfire. We left behind dozens trapped in the hospital, which only an hour later would be attacked by police and set on fire. 

[This article originally appeared on Mada Masr.] 

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]