Today belongs to Egypt's youth.
Using Twitter and Facebook and who knows what else, tens of thousands young men and women took to the streets to protest the Mubarak regime. Twenty thousand filled Cairo's Tahrir square. They protested in Suez, Fayoum, Ismailia, Kafr el Sheikh, Bultim, Mahallah, Mansour; cities from Alexandria in the North to Aswan in the South.
Nothing of this magnitude this has happened in Egypt since its independence in 1952. And the rebellion doesn't look like it's about to cool off soon.
The government warned the leaders of Egypt's few political parties to stay away. Leaders obeyed but their people turned out. The Mufti (highest Islamic authority) issued a fatwa forbidding participation but Muslims turned out. The Church forbade its members from participating; Christians turned out too.
The Muslim Brotherhood refused to back the demonstrations—less than 150 of them came. Still, the government, using the tired and dishonest technique to scare the Western power into supporting it, claims the Brotherhood incited the protests and admits to jailing 212.
Despite the warnings, huge crowds of young people demanded change not as party loyalists, not as members of NGOs, and certainly not as Muslims or Christians, but as Egyptians.
This is not an ideologically driven event. It is certainly not religiously inspired. It is populist and nationalist.
While organized by those with access to the Internet, youth of all social classes met in the streets; students from the elite American, German and British Universities of Cairo and the 20-year-old peddler near my building. The 3 men buying cigarettes at his kiosk had been in the Tahrir Square demonstrations and planned on returning. One, a gardener in the small park across the street said, "I can't live on 240 pounds (40 US$) a month."
The government was blindsided. It permitted the ‘standing’ demonstration thinking, as did the rest of the country, only the usual 200 activists would show. Local media coverage was virtually non-existent; a function of surprise and self-censorship. I first heard of the demonstrations from my daughter in the States. Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, was probably the first to air the news here but most of us followed on YouTube because of a ‘functional’ blackout in the news.
The most immediate impetus for the revolt is likely a soaring cost of living and grinding poverty. But people don’t need a political science education to know that dictatorships support the corruption of their cohorts who siphon off public coffers. People know they can’t survive on dregs.
They chanted "Change. Liberty. Social Justice.” “No to dictatorship.""Mubarak must leave." "This government must fall.” Some carried pictures of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1952 revolution.)
They demand:
- President Hosni Mubarak must resign.
- His son Gamal must not inherit the presidency.
- Parliament and councils elected in the country's most fraudulent election must be dissolved
- New free and fair elections must be held.The constitution must berevised
With echoes of the violence in Tunisia in their ears, protesters remain peaceful to a fault and, at first, the police were reasonably restrained.
By afternoon, everything changed. They set upon people with batons. They shot water cannons, tear-gas and rubber-tipped bullets; they poked with cattle prods. They killed four in Suez and bloodied hundreds in Cairo and other cities.
By evening, the situation took an even greater turn for the worse. At Tahrir Square, they closed off the routes of escape, blanketed it with teargas and shot into the crowd. They jammed the airwaves and blocked cell-phone reception. Armed vehicles, sirens wailing, sped across the bridge near me. Despite Ministry of Interior guarantee, they arrested hundreds and hundreds of people, including 80 journalists, one from the Guardian newspaper. You can hear his moving report from a police van.
The protestors pledged to stay the course. No one quite knows what this means but everyone I’ve met is cheering them on. And, true to the Egyptian sense of humor, they say, “When we win this round, we’ll have a [football] rematch with Tunisia!”
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Posted by: Angelique | 07/31/2011 at 09:53 PM