Tag: detainees

Around 250 activists demonstrated yesterday at the Lawyers’ Syndicate against the trial of Muslim Brotherhood activists in military courts.

Ramses St looked like a scene from an occupied city, as the Central Security Forces trucks were lined on both sides from the beginning of Abdel Khaleq Tharwat’s intersection with Ramses St, all the way till one block from Abdel Moneim Riyadh Sq. over looking the Egyptian Museum.

The scene in front of the syndicate was no different. CSF conscripts were lined up, in rows after rows, accompanied by State Security agents in plainclothes, and the usual faces of Qasr el-Nil Police Station officers and corporals.

According to my sources, Kefaya and the Revolutionary Socialists were to send a representative delgation, while MB should have put out 1,000 protesters today. They didn’t. Instead they put out roughly 200. And my guess is, as what happened several times before, the MB leadership chickened out after receiving threats from State Security.

During the demo, every single speaker, be it the MB or Kefaya, started their speeches with praising the Egyptian army, before they went on to denounce the army’s involvement in trying civilian dissidents. The praise some Muslim Brotherhood speakers gave the army was very touching for me, that I wanted (as always in these situations) to get my violin out, and start playing the national anthem. But I guess they felt Talaat el-Sadat was watching. The speakers sounded as coming from la la land, where they portrayed the Egyptian army as a “neutral” institution. Eih!? And I’m not gonna waste my time in this posting to explain why the army is not a neutral institution in the current struggle against Mubarak’s (after all, in case you forgot, military) dictatorship.

I was delighted to hear Revolutionary Socialist activist Kamal Khalil, after starting his speech by affirming his support for the MB detainees, denouncing the army and recalling its role in crushing the 1977 and 1986 intifadas. “We are against the regime, and all its institutions,” Kamal said. “We do not differentiate between the police and the army. Both are there as tools of oppression in the regime’s hands. Corruption runs in this regime’s institutions from head to toe.” At the critical moment, this army will be called in again to intervene against us in the streets, Kamal added, praising the workers’ strikes which he described as the “only hope for real change in Egypt.”

Kamal also called up on the opposition groups to unite in the solidarity with the MB detainees, considering the regime’s assault against the MB, to be an assault against the Revolutionary Socialists, Kefaya, and all other opposition factions. But he was also critical of the MB leadership which decided to bend its head down, waiting for the tempest to pass, saying street mobilization was the only way to secure the detainees release.

I’ll upload more photos later, to this Flickr set.