Tahrir Square is back

Posted By Blake Hounshell Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - 7:52 AM Share

If it hadn't been clear already, it should now be obvious that the military junta running Egypt -- the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces -- is doing a terrible job.

Once again, thousands of angry protesters have taken over the area in and around Tahrir Square, amid the worst scenes of violence in Cairo since the events of Jan. 25 and Jan. 28. Intense battles involving rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and massive amounts of tear gas are ongoing even now, nearly 24 hours after they began.

The details are sketchy, but from what I can piece together from online accounts, what happened was this: For the past few days, families of those killed during the revolution have been camped out in front of the state television building, demanding justice and accountablity for the deaths. Yesterday, some of them heard about a commemoration that was happening a few blocks south for families of martyrs, and wanted to attend. As it turned out, the event was to commemorate members of the police killed during the uprising, and the protesters weren't admitted. An ugly scuffle broke out, which you can see here:

 

Things quickly devolved from there, as the families and their supporters took their protest over to the Interior Ministry. Cairo's famous thugs -- some accounts say from the neighborhood' others suggest they were plainclothes police -- suddenly made an appearance, fighting broke out, and then the black-clad Central Security Forces drove the demonstrators back to Tahrir Square. A few thousand protesters arrived to bolster the protesters, and a nasty street battle has raged ever since (you can listen to the Guardian's Jack Shenker's account here) -- creeping ever closer back toward the hated Interior Ministry. This was what the scene looked like last night:

 

If the riot's origins are murky, so are its aims. What's clear is that the anger is mounting. Alaa Abd El Fattah, a well-known Egyptian activist, probably spoke for many when he tweeted, "dont ask me how it started, Ive no idea, most of us don't care, there is police and there is us, there is tear gas and there is rocks." The clashes have become a contest of wills between the street and the police, with neither side willing to back down. Dozens, if not hundreds, have been injured, ad hoc medical clinics have been set up, and the April 6 protest movement has called for a sit-in.

Here we go again?

EXPLORE:THUMBS, ARAB WORLD, EGYPT
 

GREBOWSK

1:33 PM ET

June 29, 2011

Making sense of Tahrir

I second your last paragraph. I think the most important thing to recognize here is that before long, the battle was no longer about families of the martyrs, Habib El Adly, the pace of Egypt's democratic transition, or anything else. It was a struggle for both sides to reassert themselves. For protestors, it was a bid to preserve the legacy of the revolution. For security forces, it was a poorly orchestrated attempt at intimidating those who continue to push with revolutionary demands. This is a losing battle for the SCAF and the Ministry of Interior.

http://grebowski.blogspot.com/2011/06/making-sense-of-tahrir.html

 

ASHLEYRMS22

12:54 AM ET

June 30, 2011

The Egyptian military has run

The Egyptian military has run the country since Nasser took over in 1956. And, before that, it was run for a couple thousands years by foreign powers. My guess is that the military will continue running Egypt for a long time to come. Dog

 

KUNINO

3:51 PM ET

June 30, 2011

Pretending to understand

It could be that somewhere in the government or news media there is somebody who really really understands what is happening in the middle east, but little evidence supports this proposition.

The number of American troops killed in Iraq this June seems to be a record for recent years, and this in a place where there was an invasion eight years back to change the regime* -- presumably to improve it.

Recent reports out of Egypt suggested that all the nation needed to be as sweet as a nut was to put the Mubarak family out of business and probably in jail. Not so, it seems.

Everybody in Libya hated Gaddafi who could easily be persuaded to retire by a few nights of fireworks -- but let's not call them shock and awe.

Brave US special operators have been trying to defeat al-Qaeda in Yemen for months (at least) seemingly without success, and with the special ops targets saying hey, what's this? We're not al-Qaeda at all.

It now seems that all that energy, saber-rattling and scaremongering of the Bush years about nuclear or nukular weapons for Iran does not seem to have established that Iran ever wanted such weapons or is developing them.

The list goes on.

It's a stretch to include Afghanistan in the middle east, but such a popular one that I look there for a moment to suggest that what president Obama states as the prerequisites for agreement with the Taliban and American withdrawal are simply impossible to enforce. Let's say the Taliban agrees to respect the (foreign-designed and imposed) constitution, and NATO forces leave. Who'll step in if the Taliban later goes back on its word about that? The Obaman requirement is no more fictional than earlier Bushfolk requirements, and seems dubious because based on the Bushian idea that al-Qaeda is still an active force in Afghanistan -- which apparently few other persons believe. The president wants assurance that after the boys come home, al-Qaeda won't flare up again in Afghanistan. This is a pious hope, but there seems little reason that the US would have much heart for Afghan War II if aQ ever did come back.

Help! But from where?

* The residual claim about spending 4469 American lives in that WMD-free nation.

 

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