<http://rain.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8c08f97b142bb05db019d489b&id=
fcb282e3a9&e=b0842707b4>
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/in-tahrir-square-the-
anger-is-growing-again-where-is-the-revolution-the-crowds-fought-for-2312125
.html
In Tahrir Square the anger is growing again. Where is the revolution the
crowds fought for?
Mubarak may be gone, but the new order is floundering. In Cairo, Robert Fisk
finds fury returning as people still demand change
By Robert Fisk
The Independent Tuesday, 12 July 2011
Something has gone badly wrong with the Egyptian revolution. The ruling
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces just what the "Supreme" bit means is
anyone's guess is toadying up to middle-aged Muslim Brothers and
Salafists, the generals chatting to the pseudo-Islamists while the young,
the liberal, poor and wealthy who brought down Hosni Mubarak are being
ignored. The economy is collapsing. Anarchy creeps through the streets of
Egyptian cities each night. Sectarianism flourishes in the darkness. The
cops are going back to their dirty ways.
It really is that bad. You only have to walk the streets of Cairo to
understand what's gone wrong, to wander again across Tahrir Square and
listen to those insisting on democracy and freedom as the old men of the
Mubarak regime cling on as Prime Minister, under-ministers, in the very
figure of Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the head of that "supreme" council,
childhood friend and Mubarak loyalist even though he did force the old man
to go. Tantawi's equally elderly head is now framed in posters around Tahrir
and the old January-February cry is back: "We want the end of the regime."
On the traffic island, the groupuscules of the revolution now have their
individual tents with tiny carpets and plastic chairs on the dust, debating
Nasserism, secularism, the Christian civil rights union ("The Mass Bureau
Youth Movement"). The Muslim Brotherhood are, of course, absent, along with
the Salafists.
"We've got sick of the Military Council which is using the same tools as
Mubarak," Fahdi Philip, 26, a veterinary student from Cairo University,
tells me as we sit amid the summer heat. "The judgements on the guilty are
slow in coming. The state of insecurity is still with us."
Too true. Almost 900 civilians were killed by Egypt's state security police
and snipers during the revolution and only one policeman has been tried in
absentia for killing demonstrators. When a mass protest by the families of
the martyrs poured into the streets last month, the cops reverted to form.
In front of television cameras, they threw stones at the protesters, beat
them with sticks and in one extraordinary incident danced towards them
waving swords. A so-called "National Council for Human Rights" has blamed
both sides demonstrators, they said, threw Molotov cocktails, the police
replied with tear gas while truckloads of stones were brought to Tahrir
Square on 28 June, to be thrown by young men in identical T-shirts.
More than 1,100 civilians, soldiers and policemen were injured. Fearful of
further violence , Tantawi's "supreme" council announced the establishment
of a new fund with capital of £10.5m to compensate the families of those
killed or wounded during the revolution.
But no sooner do I open my morning newspapers in Cairo free-spoken, they
are at last, unfettered, largely bankrupt that I espy a colour photograph
of Field Marshal Tantawi appointing a new "Minister of Information", a
former opposition politician but information minister just the same only
months after the same Tantawi had announced the total scrapping of the
information ministry.
No problem, the authorities said, this was only to help the press fulfil
its "democratic" duties before the ministry would again be shut down. Just
as the young Coptic Christian vet see how we now note the religion of
Egyptians again? had said, Tantawi was using Mubarak's old tools.
Yet what can the Egyptian papers report but the collapse of the law which
the revolution was sworn to uphold? I go to the Qasr el-Aini hospital,
serving just a small sector of the capital close to the old American
University campus, only to find that their emergency register shows that on
an average day in just this narrow district 30 men and women arrive with
gunshot and stab wounds.
Each Thursday/Friday weekend, the figures go up to an average of 50
victims. Among the young in Tahrir Square, this looks like a conspiracy;
empty the streets of police and give the people a taste of the chaos they
brought
upon themselves and soon they'll want the state security men again. The
country is safe for tourists, the ministers tell the travel agencies.
Really? Egyptair, the state airline boldly advertising the "new Egypt"
with movie shots of the Tahrir Square demonstrations of early February has
just posted a four-month loss of £104m.
The Marriott hotel on Gezira the old palace on the Nile with its marble
lions and stuccoed roofs has 1,040 rooms and only 24 tourists. "The
revolution used to be good," a shopkeeper friend tells me when I put my head
in the door of his shirt shop. "Now the revolution isn't good."
Just over a week ago, protesters planning the start of Friday's
demonstration were attacked by street vendors with knives and stones. The
usual stories were heard: it was all planned by the powers-that-be. At not
one of the recent protests over the revolution's "martyrs" has there been an
Islamist group present.
I meet up with an old Egyptian journalist friend. The staff of the coffee
shop come to greet him, to introduce themselves as his fans, to tell him not
to stop exposing the corruption of Egyptian life. He is worried. There is
talk of a "civil mutiny", he says. Of people who want to burn the police
stations again, take over the government or take the law into their own
hands by killing specific policemen. There are widespread stories I heard
them myself in Tahrir Square that youth groups will try to close the Suez
Canal unless the security authorities who killed the innocent in January and
February are brought to trial. The unkindest voices now call for the death
penalty for Mubarak.
Weirdly, there's also a conviction, according to my journalist friend, that
the "supreme" Egyptian military council cannot get on with the work of
government and start the trials unless Mubarak dies. "They would like him to
die. They want him out of the way to give them a breathing space before they
deal with his sons. Tantawi is worried that the mobs will come for him. But
he knows that if Mubarak dies, the Egyptians are a kind people and will
largely forgive him because he was a soldier and he was so old, and there
will be a period of calm."
There are reports that Mubarak has at least once since his house arrest in
Sharm el-Sheikh been taken to Saudi Arabia for secret medical treatment, and
there are many revelations now of how he was dethroned. One, from the highly
respected Egyptian writer Abdul Qader Choheib, says that Mubarak agreed to
resign after being confronted by Tantawi, his vice-president Omar Sulieman
the former intelligence boss and a friend of Israel and General Ahmed
Chafiq.
Mubarak apparently pleaded with them not to release his resignation
statement until his sons, Gamal and Alaa, were on their way to Sharm
el-Sheikh not to save them from imprisonment (which anyway failed) but
because he feared that Gamal would do something "unreasonable" since he had
already objected when Mubarak appointed Sulieman as vice-president during
the last days of the revolution.
The advantage of the revolution, it seems, was that it had no leaders, no
one to arrest. But its disadvantage, too, was that it had no leaders, no one
to
<http://rain.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8c08f97b142bb05db019d489b&id=
fcb282e3a9&e=b0842707b4>
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/in-tahrir-square-the-
anger-is-growing-again-where-is-the-revolution-the-crowds-fought-for-2312125
.html
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________
********************************************************************
RESEARCH AND INFORMATION NETWORK (RAIN)
Director : Abie Dawjee
P O Box 37670, Overport City, Durban, South Africa 4067.
tel: 0027 31 2072276. fax: 0866893206.
mobile: 082 352 352 6 e-mail : <mailto:a...@iafrica.com>
a...@iafrica.com
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
laamn-dig...@yahoogroups.com
laamn-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
laamn-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
