47 Years on January Uprising When Egyptians Revolted

By: Gamal Eid

It is the most significant social and popular event to have occurred in roughly 60 years, from Egypt’s liberation in 1952 to the January 25 Revolution in 2011.

It is the January Uprising transpired on January 18 and 19, 1977. While the proponents of social justice, leftist parties, Nasserists, and the working-class masses called it the Bread Uprising, the Sadat regime, and then Mubarak, the right-wing currents and pro-regime writers and journalists called it the Thieves Uprising.

Of course, during the 60 years, Egypt saw a number of significant events, including the political union between Egypt and Syria in 1958, student protests following the 1967 defeat, working-class strikes and demonstrations in 1975, and events involving Egyptian conscripts in 1986. However, until the January 25 Revolution, the January 1977 Uprising remained the country’s largest and most significant social and political event. Some even think of it as a warm-up for the great 2011 January Revolution.

Background

Just after the Egyptian people started to recover from the agony and joy of the October 1973 war, they were surprised by Sadat’s new decisions and laws enacted in 1974 that heralded a new era of “Infitah” (open-door policy) so as to bring in more money and hard currency, whereas he headed towards the west to the US and Europe, turning his back on the then Soviet Union-led camp in the east. Additionally, he broadly opened the door to the oil-producing countries, especially the Gulf countries, to invest in the majority of projects, as well as to the export of Egyptian labor to these countries.

Aside from the intentions, declarations, and aspirations that Sadat and his government were promoting, inflation started to wreak havoc on the Egyptian economy, rising to around 13% in 1977 from roughly 4% in 1973 and 1974.

During this time, it was normal practice to ignore industrialization and productive projects in favor of consumer ones. This devoured not only many of the basic resources that Egypt relied on, such as tourism, the Suez Canal, and foreign aid, but also the consumerist pattern that prevailed and became widespread at the beginning of this era and during it devoured the new resource, which was the remittances of Egyptians working abroad, especially in oil-producing countries.

This open-door policy led to the emergence of a new consumer class and “opportunists” in Egypt. In this regard, the renowned economist Galal Amin described the era, saying: “Open-door policy and inflation brought with them a bunch of officials of a new type because they possessed two characteristics that were not typical of officials in the 1950s and 1960s: a susceptibility to corruption on the one hand and an indifference to the demands of development on the other.” The two characteristics are interconnected, whereas development is harmed by corruption, and corruption obsession makes it difficult to see what is needed for development. Since slow development breeds corruption, the only way to rapidly enrich oneself in the face of stagnating income is to violate the rights of others.

This description is mostly consistent with that of the late writer Ahmed Sadiq Saad, who in his significant study of the January Uprising depicted the regime’s figures and the new class that the open-door policy created, saying: “This new class, convinced that their comfortable condition would not continue long, poured itself into the pleasures of easy wealth and wanted more of it, without considering the initial moral manifestations. In this matter, the owners of oil wealth have emerged; many of them travel to Egypt for entertainment and tourism, and they spend large sums of money on noxious sins. Working there, hundreds of thousands of immigrants learned about the social secrets of the oil-producing countries. By these acts, the wealthy class was erasing from the public’s perception any last vestiges of respect for obscene wealth. And Cairo was teeming with stories about fortunes amassed by criminal acts and spending them on more illegal activity among those in the regime’s closest circles.”

However, in a reversal of events, the public sector and its employees started to degrade, both in terms of their living standards and the services that were offered to them, after the celebration of the private, investment, and consumer sectors came at the expense of the working class and the small bourgeoisie of craftsmen, small traders, and small entrepreneurs, which are widespread groups in Egypt.

The impoverished segments, as well as the communist and Nasserist currents that persisted at the time, denounced these new situations and conditions. The Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs, Abdul Moneim Al-Qaisoni, therefore signaled the beginning of the explosion of the situation and the wrath of the most conscious segments of the poor, whether workers or students, when he announced on the afternoon of January 17 that the prices of many basic commodities, including bread, sugar, rice, gasoline, and cigarettes, would go up.

Facts Behind the Incidents

These decisions were the subject of discussions between the workers of the second and third shifts of Misr Helwan Spinning and Weaving on the evening of January 17, in addition to a few workers from other Helwan factories.

As a result, news of the Misr Helwan workers’ demonstration that began early on January 18 spread to numerous factories and other companies in the same industrial zone. Soon after, the demonstrations spread to the Helwan neighborhood and Ain Shams University, where Ain Shams engineering students started the demonstrations in Abdo Pasha Square, close to Abbasiya, and then proceeded to their colleagues at the university’s Abbasiya headquarters. After workers and students learned of the Alexandria Shipyard workers’ movement, the protests became more irate. The majority of Egyptian cities and governorates, particularly the impoverished laborers, were incensed and encouraged by their counterparts in the busiest cities, even though the uprising did not end on January 18.

The demonstrations in Cairo Governorate, which turned into a battlefield, were making their way to the People’s Assembly headquarters to announce rage and disapproval and to Haram Street, which had turned into a hub for entertainment and the new rich in this era.

The passage of demonstrations in popular neighborhoods such as Sayyida Zainab, Al-Waili, Misr Al-Qadima, and Shubra led to the joining of tens of thousands of poor people, chanting behind some left-wing activists and Nasserists chants denouncing poverty and high prices and comparing it to the wealth of the new class.

In addition, these demonstrations gained organization and strength from the participation of labor leaders, students, and intellectuals who were aware of class issues. But the violence used by the Interior Ministry to disperse the protests had an effect and turned many of them violent, affecting more than a dozen police stations nationwide as well as casinos, high-end stores, cars, and a few hotels.

The study by the late writer Ahmed Sadiq Saad, to which we referred, states that the police and central security forces were unable to contain the irate demonstrations, particularly in Cairo and Alexandria. As a result, army forces, including the military police and commandos, were called upon, particularly on the second day of the large protests on January 19, even after Al-Qaysouni announced that he retracted his decision to raise prices rather than implement it.

After stressing the withdrawal from the decisions that sparked the protests, the demonstrations were eased that same day in the evening. However, over 70 people lost their lives, and approximately 2,000 were taken into custody, with roughly 25% of those arrested belonging to the socialist left and the Nasserist movement.

As was customary, the arrest campaigns continued throughout the week that followed the protests, drawing more and more politicians to the issue each day in an attempt to exact revenge or use them as scapegoats. Fabrication was evident in the film “The Wife of an Important Man” by director Muhammad Khan and the novels “Clouds over Alexandria” and “Cairo is Here” by novelist Ibrahim Abdul Mageed, which both mentioned the involvement of activists who were overseas in this case.

Results of the Revolutionary Rehearsal

Following roughly four years of litigation, the court issued the following ruling:

“The court, no doubt, is convinced—and its conscience concurs—that the sole cause of these grave events on January 18 and 19, 1977, was the issuance of economic decisions aimed at raising prices. They have an impact on these choices. If these decisions are not the reason these events occur, then reason cannot be applied. They were issued unexpectedly by anyone, and all people were surprised by them, including security men. If one can anticipate them, create a scheme to take advantage of them, and then search the streets for those who agitate and irritate them, how can that be rational?”

The January Uprising succeeded and failed at the same time!

 Poverty alone does not create an uprising or revolution. The uprising was successful in stopping the decision to raise prices, but it was unable to stop violence, consumer openness, or poverty from spreading.

These were the most significant results of the January 1977 Uprising, as it still requires thoughtful, well-organized leadership to channel rage toward either changing the challenging circumstances or, at the very least, fixing them, rather than chaos and violence.

The January 1977 Uprising also emphasized that, however severe the repression, it does not totally eradicate popular action; rather, it only delays it. It is hard for the regime to seize control and bring about stability if the causes of anger are not investigated and avoided, if forums for discussion are not established, and if there are not political and legal channels for rejection and criticism, then the stability that is brought about is brittle and transient and will not endure.