Group items tagged

The brutal attack came during the early hours of 3 February, and with it, what Abdel Kader describes as “a wake-up call. I realized these weren’t a bunch of sissy kids, and that they weren’t just having fun. They were fighting for something, and they were putting up a brave fight.”   Abdel Kader pauses before continuing. “They were willing to die for what they believed in, and I was fighting them because I had been paid LE200. The thought of it broke my heart.”

“I am a drug dealer,” he admits. “I am not going to deny it. But I am only a drug dealer because the police bullied me into becoming one.”

“They threw me in jail to show me what it would be like, and then took me back out so I could sell their drugs for them.”

the leaders of Tahrir want to institutionalise the incredible creativity of the revolution, from musical performances and film to artwork, poetry and story-telling. These activities have sustained protesters during the darkest days of violence and have helped to attract hundreds of thousands of "ordinary Egyptians" to the Meidan during each of the occupations since January. This would constitute a permanent counterpoint to the state media and other mechanisms that the government and elite have at their disposal, through which they try to convince Egyptians that the Tahriris are little more than "thugs" who don't have their interests at heart.

one of the major problems of Tahrir today (similar to the situation during the last major occupation, in July, and different from the January-February protests), is that it has clearly been infiltrated by the security services with provocateurs. Their job is to keep the Meidan constantly on edge, and in so doing, keep the pressure on, drive people away, and encourage the degradation of life in Tahrir to the point that it either dissolves on its own, or an be "cleaned out", Zuccotti Park-style.

"People have to learn for themselves," one explained to me this morning. "And they will. In the meantime, we will produce another proposal and figure out how more forcefully to deal with the infiltrators. I know who they are, after ten months of doing this, I can smell them." I have no doubt he can, but the real question is whether Egyptians more broadly can not merely smell, but root out, the precise infiltration of their embryonic democracy by the forces of crony capitalism and corruption that have for so long dominated the country. "Power is attractive and parliament comes with a lot of money," one long-time activist put it to me in justifying the anger at the betrayal of the principles and of the revolution's martyrs by the emerging political elite.