Attacks lead to political accusations in Egypt

From AP, by Nadia Abou El-Magd:

CAIRO, Egypt (AP)_ An alleged mob attack on women during last week’s Islamic holiday has escalated into a political fight involving President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.
Witnesses accuse police of doing nothing to protect the women as they walked on a downtown street, and democracy activists have cited the controversy as a sign that Egypt is mismanaged and corrupt.
But the government has accused the bloggers who publicized the incident of defaming the country, and some police officials have said there is no evidence that anything happened.
A handful of Internet bloggers, who said they either witnessed or spoke with eyewitnesses in downtown Cairo the nights of Oct. 23 and 24, reported that women of all ages and styles of dress were attacked by crowds of men and boys who groped them and tore their clothes, trying to remove them. Some women wore headscarves or full Islamic veils and others were with their families, the bloggers said.
“Anything that moves and smells like a female was attacked,” said Wael Abbas, a democracy activist, blogger and eyewitness, who published photographs of the alleged attacks on his blog.
Crowds of people filled Cairo’s streets on those nights to celebrate the beginning of Eid el-Fitar, the three-day holiday that marks Ramadan’s end.
But Interior Ministry officials, quoted on condition of anonymity in the Egyptian press, said they had received no complaints of such attacks, and dismissed the controversy. “We should close the file on disparaging rumors,” said one police official quoted in Al Ahram, Egypt’s biggest government daily.
The government has given no other official comment.
But an editorial in Rose el-Youssef, the staunch pro-government daily, on Tuesday carried the headline: “To what extent are they just defaming Egyptians?” The author singled out Abbas for condemnation, accusing him of fabricating a “sexual revolution downtown.”
Opposition newspapers and activists have seized on the incident to broadly criticize Mubarak’s government for a long series of grievances. A similar outcry occurred after a ferry sank in the Red Sea in February, killing more than 1,000 mostly poor laborers.
“Nothing amazes me in Egypt lately … but what happened during Eid took me back to sad surprises,” wrote Sahar el-Mougy, a female novelist and activist, in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm on Monday.
While low-level harrasment of women is common in Cairo and other Egyptian cities, crime and assault reports are rare and police are pervasive _ usually on the streets in large numbers.
Some criticized the police for allegedly being more concerned with protecting Mubarak and his circle of allies than ordinary citizens, while others attacked Mubarak directly.
They are a political force in the service of the regime and not of the citizens,” said Aida Seif el-Dawla, an activist and the director of the Al-Nadim Center for the Management and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence.
Some activists also suggested a link between the recent alleged attack and attacks on women activists and journalists during a referendum vote last year.
“It was the security forces who introduced the culture of violating women when they tore the clothes of Kifaya (an opposition group) female activists, said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi writing Wednesday.
Security officials have said the clashes during a 2005 referendum, held to determine whether more than one candidate would be allowed to run in Egyptian presidential elections, were between Mubarak supporters and Kifaya members and that security officials were not involved.
But Associated Press reporters at the scene then saw plainclothes agents taking instructions from both uniformed and non-uniformed government security officers.
Both Kifaya, a secular opposition movement, and Islamic opposition groups have complained of frequent organized police harrasment during political protests.
But the bloggers said the latest alleged attacks seemed to break out spontaneously among men in the crowds.
Bloggers and activists speculated that a range of factors could have inspired the attacks, including possible sexual frustration among men because sex before marriage is taboo and economic difficulties often force men to wait to marry.