Egypt protests: Three killed in 'day of revolt'
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Jon Leyne says the anger of protesters took police by surprise (The mobile phone footage in this video was sent to the BBC by members of the public)
At least three people are reported to have been killed during a day of rare anti-government protests in Egypt.
In Cairo, where the biggest rallies were held, state TV said a policeman had died in clashes. Two protesters died in Suez, doctors there said.
Thousands joined the protests after an internet campaign inspired by the uprising in Tunisia.
In central Cairo, police starting using tear gas early on Wednesday in an attempt to disperse the crowds.
Thousands of demonstrators remained in the city centre around Tahrir Square late into the night, vowing to camp out overnight.
There were appeals on Facebook for food and blankets for those staying put.
But police moved in at 0100 local time (2300 GMT Tuesday), using tear gas and driving protesters into nearby streets, with reports that some people were beaten by police.
As dawn neared, Tahrir Square was reported to be empty of demonstrators, with cleaners removing rocks and litters as police looked on.
Twitter blockedActivists had called for a "day of revolt" in a web message. Protests are uncommon in Egypt, which President Hosni Mubarak has ruled since 1981, tolerating little dissent.
Continue reading the main storyAt the scene
The demonstrations in Egypt were clearly inspired by what happened in Tunisia. They were bigger than anything seen here for a number of years.
What was also most striking was the boldness and anger of the protesters. Even when the police moved in with water cannon and tear gas, they stood their ground.
The police, by contrast, appeared wrong-footed. They are unused to confronting crowds as big and determined as this.
On its own, this is not going to threaten President Mubarak's hold on power. But it must be a huge shock to him. And the protesters might just begin to think that anything is possible.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said her administration supported "the fundamental right of expression and assembly" and urged all parties "to exercise restraint".
She added that Washington believed the Egyptian government was "stable" and "looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people".
The events in Cairo were co-ordinated on a Facebook page - tens of thousands of supporters clicked on the page to say they would take part.
The microblogging website, Twitter, has confirmed that its website has been blocked in Egypt.
Twitter said it believed the open exchange of information and views was a benefit to societies and helped government better connect with their people.
The Swedish-based website Bambuser, which streams video from mobile phones, said it had been blocked in Egypt. On its blog, it accused Egyptian officials of trying to control the news agenda.
The BBC's Jon Leyne in Cairo said rallies had been held in several parts of the capital, and the turnout had been more than the organisers could have hoped.
Police were taken aback by the anger of the crowd and let protesters make their way to the parliament building, he says.
There police regrouped in full riot gear with tear gas and water cannon and temporarily drove the crowd back. However, protesters threw stones and stood their ground, pushing the police back until they were on the run.
Protests also broke out in other areas, including the eastern city of Ismailiya and the northern port city of Alexandria.
In Alexandria, witnesses said thousands joined the protests, some chanting: "Revolution, revolution, like a volcano, against Mubarak the coward."
'Nothing to fear'In Cairo's Tahrir Square, demonstrators attacked a police water cannon vehicle, opening the driver's door and ordering the man out of the vehicle.
Officers beat back protesters with batons as they tried to break the police cordons to join the main demonstration.
Cairo resident Abd-Allah told the BBC that by Tuesday night some protesters were saying they wouldn't give up until President Mubarak had gone.
"People are behaving as if they are ready to die," he said.
"The atmosphere is very tense, it feels like a revolution. I see people who are determined, people who have nothing to lose, people who want a better future."
Reports said protesters had earlier gathered outside the Supreme Court holding large signs that read: "Tunisia is the solution."
A poster of Hosni Mubarak was defaced by protesters in Alexandria
Some chants referred to Mr Mubarak's son Gamal, who some analysts believe is being groomed as his father's successor. "Gamal, tell your father Egyptians hate you," they shouted.
The organisers rallied support saying the protest would focus on torture, poverty, corruption and unemployment, calling it "the beginning of the end".
DisillusionedWeeks of unrest in Tunisia eventually toppled President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali earlier this month.
Egypt has many of the same social and political problems that brought about the unrest in Tunisia - rising food prices, high unemployment and anger at official corruption.
However, the population of Egypt has a much lower level of education than Tunisia. Illiteracy is high and internet penetration is low.
There are deep frustrations in Egyptian society, our Cairo correspondent says, yet Egyptians are almost as disillusioned with the opposition as they are with the government; even the Muslim Brotherhood, the banned Islamist movement, seems rudderless.
While one opposition leader, Mohamed ElBaradei, called on Egyptians to take part in these protests, the Muslim Brotherhood has been more ambivalent.
Our correspondent adds that Egypt is widely seen to have lost power, status and prestige in the three decades of President Mubarak's rule.
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Facing Down State Machinery Of Repression
Fighting Back Against The Police
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"We Are All Khaled Said":
Will the Revolution
Come to Egypt?
Khaled Said, a small businessman in the historic Egyptian city of Alexandria, was dragged from an Internet café by police and beaten to death in the street last summer. Said wasn’t known as a political type. But according to human-rights groups, the attack was retaliation for the decision to post a video of cops divvying up drugs from a bust on his personal blog.
The murder clearly struck a nerve. Egyptian activists have waged a longstanding campaign against police brutality and torture, mostly outside the mainstream, and many were surprised by how quickly the news spread among regular folk. “The thing is, he wasn’t really a threat,” says Sherif Mansour, a senior program officer who focuses on new media in Egypt for Freedom House, a watchdog group. “His death made the connection between the advocacy and the everyday life of Egyptians. It made the point that everyone can be affected.”
Shortly after the murder, a Facebook page appeared under the name “We Are All Khaled Said.” Run by an obsessively anonymous administrator, it started with posts about Said’s case. But the page quickly spiraled into an all-out campaign against police brutality and rights abuses in Egypt—becoming a clearinghouse for information, posting often-graphic photo and video, and publishing the names of allegedly abusive cops. Mansour credits the page with turning police brutality into a popular debate. The group has organized demonstrations in honor of Said, and today its membership is approaching 380,000, which makes it the country’s largest and most active online human-rights activist group.
Now, the group has set its sights on a much bigger cause—taking on authoritarian rule in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has been in power for nearly 30 years.
“We’re hoping a lot of people turn up, and that people in the street see us, connect with our demands and join us,” said the leader of a major cyberactivist group.
After protesters in Tunisia ousted their country’s autocratic president a week ago, “We Are All Khaled Said” shifted gears to an aggressive political tone. Within days, the page began sounding the call for a large-scale demonstration in Cairo this Tuesday, January 25, with demands ranging from ending police brutality and a $180 minimum wage, to dissolving parliament. The page’s administrator, who insisted on speaking via Gmail chat and asked to be cited as ‘ElShaheeed,” tells Newsweek that events in Tunisia have made people in Egypt take note. “It just provided all of us with hope that things can change,” he says.
As of Friday morning, nearly 69,000 people had signed on to the Jan. 25 protest on the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page.
• Babak Dehghanpisheh: Tunisians Revel in ChangeTraditional opposition groups have also started to join the call for protest on Tuesday. Mohamed ElBaradei, a key opposition figure who had warned of a “Tunisia-style explosion” in Egypt, just stopped short of backing the demonstration. On Thursday night, he finally offered tacit support, if only via Twitter: “Fully support call 4 peaceful demonstrations vs. repression,” he tweeted.
And so, clues to how Tunisia’s revolution might affect the region’s other autocratic regimes might be found in Cairo next week, especially since cyberactivists and traditional ones alike seem to be joining forces. Tuesday will be the first real test of whether the revolution is contagious or not.
Opposition to Mubarak has been brewing for some time, but only disjointedly. Protests have come and gone, and plans for large-scale demonstrations often fizzle. The Egyptian police state, meanwhile, can be brutally effective at crushing dissent. And in the aftermath of Tunisia, the government is playing close attention; it has unleashed a wave of positive propaganda and released political prisoners.
But following November’s especially contentious parliamentary elections—where the ruling party won an improbable 97 percent of the seats amid accusations of massive vote-rigging—the forces for change had already been agitating, notes Steven Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who left for Cairo today. A smaller rally against police brutality had already been in the works for January 25, a national holiday in honor of police. But the events in Tunisia could give these forces a substantial push. “Tunisia is not causing these things. But it’s certainly adding momentum to the pretty significant opposition that already exists,” Cook says.
Ahmed Salah, a veteran activist in Cairo, points out that the Tunisia revolution happened spontaneously, prompted by the self-immolation of an unemployed university graduate—not at the direction of a political movement or concerted protest push. Yet Salah says the recent spate of copycats across Egypt (there have been nine so far this week) show that agitation is in the air—and crucially, they’ve been regular Egyptians, not activist types.
Activists are trying to capitalize by bringing news of the protest to regular Egyptians however they can, from passing out flyers on the street to word-of-mouth and text messages. Social media has been another tool—and a crucial one—both in coordinating among activists and in spreading the word, particularly because Egyptian media is so tightly controlled. “I don’t know how we could do without it under the current circumstances,” he says. “Before, it was so much more difficult to reach out.”
Despite all the buzz building up to the January 25 protest, however, ElShaheeed is well aware of the difficulties in translating Internet clicks to support on the ground. To that end, he has been using the page to urge people to organize by traditional means as well, even posting links to flyers to be downloaded and distributed—today, activists distributed leaflets to people coming out of Friday prayers. But he says only Tuesday will tell whether these efforts have been enough.
“We’re hoping a lot of people turn up, and that people in the street see us, connect with our demands and join us,” he says. And if the effort fails, “I’d learn from the lesson, move forward and do something else.”
Mike Giglio is a reporter at Newsweek.
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The day started with high expectations for me. But after getting shoved around Tahrir square by one riot policeman after another for hours I was beginning to lose hope. They knew we were coming, and there were hundreds of them. Later there’d be thousands – riot police and mukhabarat alike. Their strategy was to prevent anybody from standing in one place for long. Then, they closed off the entire square which was a massive undertaking. The square was literally emptied of anyone who wasn’t a member of the security apparatus.
TAHRIR SQUARE, CLOSED OFF (PHOTO: AHMED MOOR)
I have to admit that I felt a little defeated when I saw how effectively they’d sealed the area. I couldn’t walk thirty meters in any direction without being harassed by a Mubarak subordinate.
The protest began spontaneously at about two forty-five on one of the side streets. I’d been there since 10 am and was growing pretty despondent until I heard the commotion. At this point, I didn’t care how big the protest was I just wanted to vent some frustration; I am a young Arab, after all.
A group of about thirty men broke through a police cordon and about fifty of us joined them right away. That group quickly swelled to several hundred men and women. And an hour later, there were thousands of us. At various times over the course of the next four hours, I experienced a total failure in my ability to synthesize events around me. Was this really Mubarak’s Egypt? Was this really the spot where I’d been hounded by mukhabarat that morning? Right before I left, I climbed up on top of a police booth to get a better view. Someone said that I should get down, and I asked why. He didn’t have an answer for me.
We began to head towards the parliament building when the riot police began to use CS gas against us. First they shot the canisters over our heads, but then they began to lob them at us. It wasn’t a very good decision since we were able to kick the canisters right back in their direction. They were overcome by the gas and that caused their ranks to break. We rushed them and they started to beat people with their batons and that’s when the flagstone fragments began to fly.
As you can see in the video, they turned and ran and we chased after them. They got reinforcements and pushed back a few times and we ended up running. In the end, we didn’t make it to the parliament building but this is just the beginning. And the process of chasing down the tangible repression arm of the regime was explosively cathartic. I can’t really explain it.
I left the protest at about seven to write some dispatches and upload material, but from what I understand it’s still going on. I’m not very good at counting heads, but there were many thousands of people still demonstrating in Tahrir square when I left, and I think they’re still there. The intention is to keep them going all night and hopefully I’ll be heading back there soon. Tahrir means Liberation, by the way.
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