I started today the Giza side of the river, across the Nile from Tahrir Square. Started from Moustafa Mahmoud mosque, a major landmark in the district of Mohandessin.
The protest was large from the beginning — at least 5,000 people, and probably more. The chants started as soon as prayers ended, around 1:30pm. Protesters marched through Mohandessin, completely shutting down a major road. The crowd seemed to grow steadily as the march continued.
Thanks to the blanket communications shutdown, the protests today took place in an information vacuum. On Tuesday, even during the demonstration, everybody was checking twitter both to coordinate and for news on what was happening across the country. This time nobody knew what was happening anywhere else — not even on the other side of the river in Tahrir Square.
Security forces were present in small numbers, but didn’t attempt to hinder the marchers. They marched unmolested for close to an hour until they arrived at Galaa Square, where the Galaa bridge is the first of two bridges that cross the Nile and lead to Tahrir Square.
The mood was defiant, and even a little festive. People could tell right away that they had achieved a major turnout and presumed that the same was happening elsewhere around the city. They felt like they had the advantage and the momentum. People watching from balconies cheered and waved Egyptian flags. I saw one elderly woman flashing them the V for victory sign.
Security forces had set up their cordon at the mouth of the Bridge, parking four large green police vans side by side, so that they blocked the entire bridge.
That area became the sight of an hour long battle. Security forces used lots of tear gas, indiscriminately. Some of it enveloped the Giza Sheraton, which overlooks the square. The firing was indiscriminate. One tear gas canister landed on the balcony of a nearby apartment, starting a fire; another landed in the passenger seat of a security forces van parked off to the side, starting another fire.
After the first couple volleys of tear gas, a debate broke out on a side street where people had fled on whether to abandon peaceful tactics. One angry young guy with streaming eyes was furious. People were trying to calm him down. He shouted: “Peaceful? Are you serious? After this?”
The young man, who would only identify himself as “an Egyptian citizen” told me:
I expect the government to fall today. There will be bodies in the streets, but it will fall.
I have a degree in information technology and for the last three years I’m sitting at home without a job.
Some of the crowd came well prepared. Swimming goggles and surgical masks soaked in vinegar, pieces of onion to hold under their noses to reduce the effect of the gas. And bottles of Pepsi — which I discovered today magically reduces the burning in your eyes.
Several times the crowd fell back from the tear gas. Several people were overcome by it. But they always regrouped and charged back. A local supermarket refused to open its doors to protesters but the manager agreed to pass out supplies of vinegar, water and onions. One lady, in response of protester appeals, dropped a huge bag of onions down to them.
An angry veiled woman in her 50s told me:
We don’t have an agenda. We only want the fall of the regime and all of its symbols. We’re not the Brotherhood and not the Wafd Party. We’re simply against oppression and corruption. This is a failed regime
Just before 3pm, the Central Security ranks guarding the mouth of the Galaa Bridge gave up and fell back — leaving their four huge trucks in the hand of the protesters. Gleeful youth crawled all over the vehicles, two of them holding up an Egyptian flag from the roof and others spray-painting “down with Hosni Mubarak” on the side. There was a bizarre scene for a while on the bridge where a few remaining Central Security guards were kind of lingering around their trucks looking bewildered and being completely ignored by the protesters. The police officers looked confused and depressed.
Some of the crowd decided to stay in Galaa Square and make sure they held it so that security couldn’t close ranks behind them.
An older man shouted: “It’s better if we control multiple places than just gather in Tahrir where they can bottle us up.”
Lots of others did move on toward Tahrir, crossing the island of Zamalek.
On the other side a major battle was already taking place half way across the Kasr El Nil Bridge — which is the final gateway into the square.
This was a much more violent scene, on both sides. About 2,000 protesters threw rocks and security forces, fired rubber bullets — a spray of little pellets that dig under your skin. I saw several protesters coming back with blood streaming from their faces.
One shouted: “Throw more rocks. Two more hours of this and they’ll collapse.”
A massive volley of tear gas and rubber bullets drove the crowd off of the bridge and back to Zamalek. People fled and eventually regrouped back in Galaa Square, 10 minutes away. There, right around 5 pm, something amazing happened. About 3,000 protesters were still holding the square. Suddenly huge crowds of marchers appeared from two different directions. Reinforcements. Each stream of marchers looked to be about 5,000 strong.
One of them told me they had come from Giza Square and had been fighting their own running battles and had finally broken through the security lines. Their arrival was a huge morale boost. As I was leaving a new cry was going up: “To Tahrir!”
One protester said:
It’s over, finished. This is the beginning of the end [for Mubarak]
Will the return of Tunisia’s Islamists help or hinder the national democratic project? An-Nahda’s return will test its leader’s commitment to free expression and free association. Rohan Jayasekera reports (more…)
The government has banned Terry Jones from entering the UK. Jones is the fundamentalist US pastor who threatened to burn a copy of the Koran outside his Florida church on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Before he found fame through “International burn a Koran Day” his Dove World Outreach Centre had just 50 members. Jones is certainly a racist and homophobic Islamophobe — his website sells T-shirts, cups and baseball hats carrying the slogan “Islam is of the devil” — but he is not just anti-Muslim, he is an equal opportunities bigot who also believes Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism are the devil’s work.
It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that the decision to ban Jones comes on the same day as Baroness Warsi’s speech claiming that anti-Muslim bias is now the social norm and calling for tolerance. But the government cannot have it both ways: banning a pastor for extremist views and “unnacceptable behaviour” (to use the Home Office’s phrase) is not the action of a tolerant society.
The government claims that “[T]he use of exclusion powers is very serious and no decision is taken lightly or as a method of stopping open debate”, but it has a worryingly broad basis for denying entry to the country that clearly limits freedom of expression.
Jones was originally due to come to the UK to speak at an English Defence League (EDL) rally in March before he was “disinvited” for being homophonic and racist. Prior to his EDL rejection a smaller group called England Is Ours had invited him to speak to its members.
The England Is Ours website provide links to links to the BNP, the National Front and StormFront. When I spoke to England Is Ours secretary Barry Taylor he said he has “no idea” if Jones is racist but he thought not because Jones has an “Egyptian chap as a pastor and some African–American chaps”. Taylor happily admitted Jones is anti-gay “but that’s a Christian thing.” Jones’s itinerary with the group –– a loosely organised collective of some 30 individuals –– involved two meetings “debating political issues” and an outdoor church service, not exactly the birth of a new political movement.
Surely, a pastor from Nowheresville representing just 50 people invited to speak to an organisation with only 30 members should not be the kind of “threat” that keeps the Home Office up at night as a threat to “community harmony”? The government should think twice before turning cranks into free speech martyrs.
Terry Jones in action below. More on exclusion orders here, here, and here
I’m in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Shiekh covering the 2nd Arab Economic Summit — a chance for Arab ministers and business magnates to gather and discuss the economic future of the region. But the elephant in the room this week is Tunisia, where a failure to create economic opportunities for the people has resulted in a shocking outbreak of civil unrest that drove a heavily entrenched Arab dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, into exile in just one month.
For Arab governments, Tunisia serves as a chilling example that economics IS politics. The protests that swept Bin Ali from power weren’t sparked by a desire for greater political freedom; that certainly became the main issue, but it all started when a humble 26-year-old street vendor publicly set himself on fire in mid-December to protest his inability to earn a living wage despite holding a university degree.
The delegates here aren’t going out of their way to mention Tunisia, but they can hardly help talking about it since every journalist they meet makes a point of asking. I managed to get two minutes with Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa, and immediately asked him what the lessons were from the Tunisian example. His response was surprisingly direct for a career Arab diplomat. “It’s an obvious lesson. The people will no longer accept to be marginalised and pressurised like this.”
Egyptian Minister of Trade Rachid Mohamed Rachid, speaking at the summit’s opening, said the Tunisian example serves as a warning that Arab governments need to accelerate economic reforms and that those reforms needed to be matched by simultaneous political reforms.
Already the Tunisian uprising has sparked a macabre series of copycat self-immolations that Arab governments must be closely watching. On Monday, less than an hour before Rachid and Moussa held a joint press conference, an Egyptian man set himself on fire in front of the country’s parliament. While the press conference was happening, I received an email that a man in Mauritania had done the same thing.
The situation is particularly nervous in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has ruled for longer than Bin Ali, and where the economic situation for many is dire and public frustration levels run high. Despite macroeconomic policy changes that have made Egypt the one of the models of international economic reform, nearly 20 per cent of Egypt’s 80m citizens live on less than USD 2 per day, the standard poverty line set by the UN.
Many Egyptian activists, inspired by the Tunisian revolution, are openly calling for a repetition of the scenario that ended Bin Ali’s reign. At an anti-government protest over the weekend in Cairo, demonstrators chanted “Congratulations to the Tunisians, we hope we join you soon” and “O Bin Ali tell Mubarak, ‘Your plane is waiting for you!’ ”
Egypt’s economic architects are mindful of the widespread public frustration, and say they are working to control spiraling costs of living while ensuring that more Egyptians feel the benefits of the country’s economic growth.
But Rachid, the trade minister, also stated that he didn’t believe Egypt was in danger of the same sort of widespread civil unrest, due to a comprehensive public subsidies package that ensures affordable fuel and basic food staples.
“Egypt is a different case than Tunisia. It’s not likely that a crisis like what’s happening in Tunisia will happen in Egypt,” he said. “Tunisia like many other Arab countries stopped subsidising food and petroleum items many years ago…It became very volatile to any changes in world prices, that’s why consumers were directly hit and consequently frustration escalated.”
