Egypt: 'The army only stopped the worst extremes'

Published on Wednesday 2 February 2011 17:41

IT WAS an organised assault. What the regime of President Hosni Mubarak hoped would look to the world like a spontaneous uprising in favour of the beleaguered leader was no such thing.

As the thousands massed in the early part of the day around all sides of Cairo's Tahrir Square, they carried the same image; an A4 poster of a young Hosni Mubarak, ubiquitous Egyptian flags, and sang a unified chant. The pro-government crowd then moved forward shouting "Yes, yes, yes Mubarak."

The violence began with those outside the square showering anti-government protesters in it with stones, but quickly deteriorated into violent bludgeoning, the launching of petrol bombs, and the use of machetes. All the time, the army looked on, with only the occasional intervention to stop the very worst of extremes, doing nothing to stop the street battle and only reinforcing the confusion surrounding their role in the unrest.

"The army isn't doing anything," says Ahmed Saleh, 23. "The other day they were only guarding the important places, now they are guarding the people that are with Mubarak. Because the army are with Mubarak, of course". Some protesters wept and prayed in the square where about 10,000 had massed on Wednesday morning and where only a day before they had held a joyous, peaceful rally of up to a million, the largest yet in more than a week of demonstrations demanding Mubarak quits.

I asked a protester with close connections to the police force if, as claimed, there were plain-clothes police there in the pro-government crowds. "They are everywhere," he said. "They infiltrated our demonstrations and pretended to be one of us. Now many of the key faces of the opposition movement have disappeared from here. I saw men being dragged away."

Some protesters showed police ID badges they said were wrested off undercover agents. Others, they said, were paid by the regime to assault them - a tactic that security forces have used in the past.

"After our revolution, they want to send people here to ruin it for us," said Ahmed Abdullah, a 47-year-old lawyer. "Why do they want us to be at each other's throats, with the whole world watching us."

Another man shrieked through a loudspeaker: "Hosni has opened the door for these thugs to attack us."

Doctors at the makeshift medical clinic in the mosque beside the flashpoint central square were overwhelmed. "If you have any way of sending ambulances - please please. There are hundreds down," said Dr Sharif Omar.

An incident while returning to my hotel felt staged; burly men in jackets came smiling forwards, targeting my group of journalists with pro-Mubarak messages. Banners were pushed in our faces until they were photographed.

"He is a good man, he has ruled this country well and created security. Now things must get back to normal," said a man in a red kuffiyeh.Another clue that strongly suggests the orchestration of violence lies in the fact that yesterday's trouble was centred almost solely on Tahrir Square - in the past week, the demonstrations in the capital have been mirrored in Suez and Alexandria, and across Egypt. No such pro-government violence erupted elsewhere yesterday.