PM Essam Sharaf had to flee Suez, in the protection of the military police, after workers and relatives of martyrs received him with protests and rocks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyCBcq6c-Os

The fact remains, the real power brokers are the generals of Hosni Mubarak.

has described his ministry’s reshuffle as “the biggest” in its history. The reshuffle covers 4,000 police officers according to the minister who stated that the ministry ended the service of 505 major-generals and brigadier-generals and 82 colonels. These include 18 major-generals and 9 brigadier-generals accused of killing protesters.
This minister of interior announced the reshuffle today in a press conference after meeting with Prime Minister Essam Sharaf earlier this morning.
El-Eissawi revealed that 18 police officers accused of killing protesters during the first days of the January 25 uprising were purged from the force. Another 54 police officers accused of killing protesters were reassigned duties that do not require interaction with the public.
During the press conference, El-Eissawi denied rumors that Alaa and Gamal Mubarak had escaped from Tora prison.
He also defended the role of the police in the revolution, claiming that the ministry does not have snipers and that as policemen were already absent from the streets from 28 January they could not have been involved in the shooting of protesters from that date.
The Ministry of Interior is accused of placing snipers on roof tops around Tahrir Square during the uprising to shoot protesters. The ministry denies the allegations.

I will not waste time in responding to the absurd lies of General Essawi re the MOI not having snipers, as Zeinobia has a well written, detailed blog post about the subject that refutes completely such claims.

But let’s go back to the reshuffle move by the MOI. Essawi basically referred to retirement generals who were already about to reach their retirement age in all cases. And most of those officers “forced to retire” will neither be tried nor investigated, which I find completely unacceptable, since the MOI under Mubarak has been the biggest criminal syndicate in this country and those generals are its leaders. Where is justice? Where is the transparency? Why don’t those generals be investigated automatically by the prosecutors publicly to find out about the roles they performed at the ministry. And who are those officers forced to retire? We don’t have all the names.

And more troubling, looking at the list of the senior officers who were kept in the service, I found some familiar names from the Piggipedia:

For example, Khaled Gharaba, the Mahalla torturer, is to head Alexandria’s Security Directorate.

From Piggipedia

General Muhammad Refaat Qomsan has been re-appointed as the Interior Minister’s First Assistant for Administrative Affairs.

From SS Officers

SS General Tarek el-Rakaybi is to replace General Hisham Abu Gheida as the Interior Minister’s First Assistant for Guards and Security Division.

From SS Officers

So what happened to Abu Gheida? I have no idea.

More ludicrously, the Alexandria police murderers including Wael el-Komy, who are undergoing trial for the murder of protesters, have been moved to better paying jobs in other police departments.

This musical chairs game isn’t going to fool the Egyptian people. Protests and sit ins continue and we are expecting a mass turn out in Tahrir today.

As the Tahrir occupation continues, PM Essam Sharaf made a public speech on Saturday evening, whereby he

…ordered the suspension of police accused of killing protesters during the uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.
Essam Sharaf also said a panel would be created to speed up court cases against them and those accused of corruption.

Earlier in the day, the prosecutor general ordered the re-arrest of head of Suez police and two secret policemen, while in Alexandria the prosecutor ordered the arrest and interrogation of 12 police officers involved in the torture and killing of Sayed Bilal, the salafi young man who was wrongly accused by the State Security Police in January of blowing up the Two Saints Church in Alexandria.

But as always, the government’s “concessions” are vague and meaningless. No names of officers were announced, no transparency, no public trials, no mention of Suzan or Omar Suleiman, and nothing said re the national minimum wage. And of course nothing re halting the military tribunals. Nothing concrete at all. And while promising one of the biggest “restructuring moves” in the history of the interior ministry by mid July, Sharaf’s interior minister, General Mansour el-Essawi, went on Al-Hayat channel, describing the use of the word “purge” as a “silly”.

[Video removed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvDEkWytVs]

Sharaf’s speech doesn’t assure anyone. The protests continue as of time of writing, and in Tahrir Square already thousands are marching demanding Sharaf’s immediate resignation.

[Video removed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1scFulTW5o]

While in Suez, tens of thousands of the city residents are now threatening to block the Suez Canal, and sit-ins continues in other provinces.

Despite repeated promises earlier to dissolve the Information Ministry (Mubarak’s Ministry of Truth), PM Essam Sharaf re-established the ministry and brought Osama Heikal, editor of Al-Wafd to head it. Heikal had written an editorial on 24 January, one day before the outbreak of the revolution, denouncing the call for protests, asserting that “not a single Egyptian loyal to the nation would wish to see the repetition of the Tunisian scenario in Egypt… and no one wants a confrontation between the people and the regime.”

More troubling, Heikal spent long years as the paper’s “military affairs correspondent.” In Egypt, according to our draconian press law, you cannot write a single word about the army without the approval of the army’s Morale Affairs Department (read: public relations). Those “military affairs” journalists and editors are hardly “journalists and editors” at the end of the day. They are ones who keep close contact with the official establishment of the army and are more than happy to repeat what they say and copy and paste their statements as “news reports.” Heikal is hardly an “opposition” or a “dissident” journalist. He’s someone who spent his career as an army mouthpiece.

It might be worth mentioning too that Osama Heikal’s Al-Wafd party boss, Sayed Badawi, owns Al-Hayat channel, one of the biggest counterrevolutionary media outlets we have in the country, which is sensationally whipping up security paranoia, glorifying the police, and denouncing labor strikes.

The military junta and Essam Sharaf‘s cabinet are continuing forward with Mubarak’s foreign policy, despite all sorts of “change” rhetoric. The Egyptian people have made it clear in Tahrir and elsewhere (and all throughout our protests and campaigns these past years) that gas supplies to the apartheid state of Israel must stop completely. The gas trade deal with Israel has not only been the target of the wrath of Egyptians, but has become also a subject almost featuring daily now in the local press, with more details coming out about the extent of corruption and bribery in that deal which involved a wide array of regime officials from the Mukhabarat to the Oil Ministry and Mubarak’s own family and circle of friends.

Still, the best thing the govt can come out with is “renegotiating the prices.” Well, if the government isn’t going to stop the gas supplies, then the people will do it. For the third time in 6 months, the pipelines have come under attack by the Sinai Bedouins, which caused temporary disruptions to the supplies heading to Israel and Jordan. The regime propagandists have been trying to depict the operation as the work of Hamas or “professional terrorists” in similar manner to what they used to do under Mubarak. So much for change. Hamas is hardly implicated in any operations outside Palestine (I know when an American sneezes, the US media is usually quick to assume it’s a Hamas-Hezbollah-Al-Qaeda operation, but I’m afraid it’s not true). And knowing what sort of compromising leaders Hamas has, they’ll be seeking warm relations with the SCAF. And we forget that the Sinai Bedouins despite the defamation campaigns against them are just as anti-Zionist as many of their fellow Egyptians are. The Bedouins have repeatedly called on the authorities, before and after the revolution, to open the Rafah crossing and stop the gas supplies. There were even news circulating during the uprising, which I did not report coz I couldn’t confirm, that the Bedouins were threatening to target US warships passing through the Suez Canal if Obama didn’t drop his support for Mubarak.

The attacks on the pipelines will continue, till the govt yields to the people’s demand of severing all sorts of economic and diplomatic ties with the Zionist state.

The relations vis a vis the Arab Gulf dictatorships are even more worrying. The money flooding in to Sharaf’s cabinet from those corrupt monarchs aim at nothing but “keep[ing] Egypt in their orbit.” And as I’m reading today’s newspapers, I’m sickened to find Sharaf “praising the wisdom of the Bahraini king” on his visit to Manama, and asserting that the Bahraini “national security” is organically linked to Egypt’s. In other words, our revolutionary prime minister stands hand in hand with the Bahraini tyrant, whose hands are soaked with his people’s blood–his people who’ve been defamed by the media (and Sheikh Qaradawi) as some sectarian Shiites whose loyalty went to Iran.

A revolutionary Egypt must have a revolutionary foreign policy, that seeks actively to export Tahrir and support the fight for freedom in the region and the world. We will not be able to build a democratic Egypt, while we are still surrounded by an ocean of Arab dictatorships, an apartheid regime and US military bases. What is regional is local and what’s local is regional.

Police is trying to smash the Bani Sweif Cement workers strike, detaining three workers and tearing down the tents set up by the strikers.

And in Cairo, the public prosecutor has ordered 10 protesters (five farmers, three auto workers and two students) to remain in police custody for 15 days, following their arrest last Wednesday during their sit ins in downtown Cairo.