PRESS RELEASE
Bread Riot Deaths in Egypt and Yemen
April 9, 2008 (EIRNS)—As the financial madness continues and the hyperinflationary policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank keep pouring gasoline on the fire, and the Congress keeps blocking LaRouche's Homeowners and Banking Protection Act, people in many parts of the world are dropping dead as a result. In Egypt and Yemen, as was the case in Jordan two weeks ago, people, pressed by the internationally rising basic foodstuff prices, are going to the streets by the tens of thousands. In the textile industry city Al-Mahalla in Egypt, police shot two demonstrators, and wounded dozens. Protesting workers were demanding higher wages, since their current wages are not matching the prices of mere bread and butter. The textile industry in Egypt has been ruined since the government started a massive privatization process in the 1990s going along with the "globalization" process. Speculators like George Soros became owners of these once thriving state-owned industries, pushing down wages to lower and lower levels to match cheap-labor wages in Asia.
The ever-present British element made things worse in Egypt, as the Muslim Brotherhood started riding on the demonstrators' backs for political gain. The Muslim Brotherhood, who are in the middle of an election contest with the government, are intending to destabilize the government of Hosni Mubarak, which itself is in a "succession process," as young Jamal Mubarak is being prepared to succeed his father as the leader of the ruling party and the nation. Mubarak is being pressed between the Scylla of the British Muslim Brotherhood destabilization, and the Charybdis of Cheney's demands made on Egypt to join the operation to split southwest Asia into Sunni and Shi'a fighting states, in preparation for a war against Iran.
Egypt has been a hostage to its food supply, coming mainly from the U.S. Under Kissinger's NSSM 200 policies Egypt was targetted and its policies for food self-sufficiency were stopped. Instead, Egypt was offered food aid by the U.S., turning it into a hostage. Effort and direct discussions by Lyndon LaRouche with Egyptian officials in the early 1980s for massive nuclear power and water/agriculture projects for Egypt were sabotaged by British agents in the United States.
In Yemen there are demonstrations in all of the southern cities of the country which were under a separate communist government until the reunification of south and north Yemen in 1989. The demonstrators demand to split the country again as "solution" for the problems the population is facing now, leading to confrontations between the police the demonstrators. Although there are no exact numbers of the casualties available, the scarce information coming out of the country indicates that the number of killed is between 50 and 70 so far. The government has deployed tanks around some cities there and the situation could be exploded any moment.
Governments in Southwest Asia are helpless since they have no short-term plans or means for dealing with the situation which is part of a larger global crisis.
