Egypt anti-government protests grow

[elbows]

Tomorrow does indeed sounds like a pivotal day. I doubt ElBaradei would have gone back right now unless he thought there was a fair chance of being able to make something come of the present situation.

And as usual the streets only tell us part of the story, we know very little of what is going on in the corridors of power, both within Egypt and elsewhere. I think there were wikileaks which suggested Egypts military were not well impressed by plans to have Mubarak's son succeed him, but I dont remember seeing the detail of these myself.

As international players on the world stage go, AlBaradei goes down ok with me, at least compared to most others. I would think that aspects of his reform agenda are not in line with my greatest hopes for how humans may organise themselves, but its better than what the Egyptians have right now. And in the past he has said some very sensible things about Iran and Israel, on face value I would not expect him to be the USAs most pliable ally, although in many ways I would expect him to be on-side.

2011 has been quite the year so far, events overload!

 

[dylans]

I think all of this is absolutely spot on - with the rider that the worst case scenario is too fucking bleakly awful to contemplate. but no <re-doffs optimists hat>, I don't think we'll get that. They/this has gone too far now, the people are rising, genie's out of the bottle etc

Worst case scenario is a bloodbath as the army open fire. Not out of the question it must be said

 

[dylans]

Are those from today?

Not sure. They were published today but could be from yesterday. Link here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gal...-suez-in-pictures#/?picture=371113954&index=0

 

[stuff_it]

Are those from today?

The Revolution does not play pool.

 

[pk]

Anonymous/Wikileaks will take the lions share of the credit for the hitherto unimaginable grass roots uprising over these amazing few recent weeks. The beauty is that they have no agenda other than refusing the very idea of censorship and demanding full transparency from those who hold the purse strings.

No jingoistic political bollocks or flag waving or left vs right bullshit that the US has taken to its logical retarded conclusion.

There will be no turning back from this point in human history.

 

[wreckhead]

Anonymous/Wikileaks will take the lions share of the credit for the hitherto unimaginable grass roots uprising over these amazing few recent weeks. The beauty is that they have no agenda other than refusing the very idea of censorship and demanding full transparency from those who hold the purse strings.

No jingoistic political bollocks or flag waving or left vs right bullshit that the US has taken to its logical retarded conclusion.

There will be no turning back from this point in human history.

Agreed. Whilst Anon is an amusing sideshow "for teh lulz" and Wikileaks has served a very useful purpose in proving right many commonly held suspicions about world politics, giving them credit for anything other than that plays down the real risks being taken by Tunisians, Jordanians and even more so Egyptians over the past couple of weeks.

I just hope some real progress comes from this and not more of the same with a different face......

 

[teqniq]

So i was reading the comments on CIF and came across this by OneWorldGovernment:

The military will probably use the protests to push out Gamal Mubarak and preserve the regime. It is interesting that Egyptian Armed Forces Chief of Staff Sami Annan is leading an army delegation in Washington right now. Probably planning out the role the military will play in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

source

OneWorldGovernment gets asked for a source for this info but does not reply, so intrigued I google a bit and stumble on this lot:-

http://www.stratfor.com/memberships...ts-protests-and-significance-cairos-stability

I download my free sample (heh) the relevant bit of which I'll quote here:-

After Tunisia, however, it is reasonable to assume that the army has even less confidence in the ability of a post-Mubarak NDP to maintain control. The protests, therefore, give the military an opportunity to force out the NDP and shape a new system in which the military would have the upper hand. That Egyptian Armed Forces Chief of Staff Sami Annan is leading an army delegation on a trip to Washington speaks volumes about the pivotal role Egypt’s military will have in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

They do not cite their sources, but they wouldn't would they?

If anyone wants to look at the whole thing - and doesn't want to download it from their site I can email it

E2A if anyone wishes for more info on Stratfor here is the Wikki:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratfor

 

[Kaka Tim]

Anonymous/Wikileaks will take the lions share of the credit for the hitherto unimaginable grass roots uprising over these amazing few recent weeks.
There will be no turning back from this point in human history.

The people on the streets facing the bullets and beatings take the credit - to say its mostly down to Anonymous/Wikileaks is pure hyperbole and does the people doing the fighting - and dying - a diservice.
Wikileaks revelations have been one of many other factors thats created this situation, networking technology has accelerated events and facilitated protests - but deep levels of resentment and mass collective action are the engine of revolution.

 

[dylans]

The people on the streets facing the bullets and beatings take the credit - to say its mostly down to Anonymous/Wikileaks is pure hyperbole and does the people doing the fighting - and dying - a diservice.
Wikileaks revelations have been one of many other factors thats created this situation, networking technology has accelerated events and facilitated protests - but deep levels of resentment and mass collective action are the engine of revolution.

Yes. The Egyptian people are the actors in this drama. They and they alone deserve our highest respect and admiration. Everything else is a foot note.

Very moving article in the guardian today by Alaa Al Aswany, the Arab world's bestselling novelist.

Police alone can't keep rulers in power. Egypt's battle is on.
I will always be in awe of these revolutionaries. Everything they have said shows a sharp political awareness and a death-defying desire for freedom. They asked me to say a few words. Even though I've spoken hundreds of times in public, this time it was different: I was speaking to 30,000 demonstrators who were in no mood to hear of compromise and who kept interrupting with shouts of "Down with Hosni Mubarak", and "The people say, out with the regime".

I said I was proud of what they had achieved, and that they had brought about the end of the period of repression, adding that even if we get beaten up or arrested we have proved we are not afraid and are stronger than they are. They have the fiercest tools of repression in the world at their disposal, but we have something stronger: our courage and our belief in freedom. The crowd responded by shouting en masse: "We'll finish what we've begun!"

So why have Egyptians risen up? The answer lies in the nature of the regime. A tyrannical regime might deprive the people of their freedom, but in return they are offered an easy life. A democratic regime might fail to beat poverty, but the people enjoy freedom and dignity. The Egyptian regime has deprived the people of everything, including freedom and dignity, and has failed to supply them with their daily needs. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators are no more than representatives of the millions of Egyptians whose rights have been invalidated.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/27/police-power-egypt-battle-protesters

 

[stuff_it]

double post ooops! soz dylans!

Try thins instead....Bigups to the Guardian crew reallly...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/27/anonymous-internet

 

[stuff_it]

http://video.ap.org/?f=None&pid=oT7qj_wiVHTbYae3scwok4_irYjJ2R8Z

Video of protester being shot


There is now an internet backout of Egypt reported on many channels

 

[pk]

Yes. The Egyptian people are the actors in this drama. They and they alone deserve our highest respect and admiration. Everything else is a foot note.

How quick the web-commentators forget about Tunisia!

Meanwhile in the real world...

Arrest warrant issued for Zine El Abedine Ben Ali:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12286650

 

[pk]

Check this pic from Suez today... teargas cans used by Egypt cops courtesy of Uncle Sam...

 

[lizzieloo]

Check this pic from Suez today... teargas cans used by Egypt cops courtesy of Uncle Sam...

Not from today, from tuesday.

 

[pk]

Not from today, from tuesday.

Is it? - fair play, trickling in now are lots of good shots...

 

[lizzieloo]

Is it? - fair play, trickling in now are lots of good shots...

It's bloody great how much of this is being recorded. There are reports that there is a total internet blackout in Egypt tonight, which is worrying.

But, the amount of images/video there will be is huge. There is no way the government of Egypt can cover up anything, certainly not in the long run.

 

[peterkro]

Interspazz severely restricted in Egypt at the moment,possibly to hide extreme reaction to protests tomorrow.

 

[audiotech]

Before the clash with security in the Sidi Gaber.

 

[lizzieloo]

Before the clash with security in the Sidi Gaber.

When was that?

 

[dylans]

Some wild stuff coming out of twitter at the moment. Reports of hundreds of political activists detained overnight and some very ominous reports about police setting fire to cars and pouring petrol onto streets. The entire internet has been shut down and so are mobile phone networks. Reports of gangs of thugs roaming the streets and burning cars.

Tomorrow could be a bloodbath.

 

[lizzieloo]

The following is a snippit from here http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/01/28/imagining-new-egypt

Thousands of Egyptians are planning to take part in peaceful marches and sit-ins in major cities. Mohammed ElBaradei, who has offered to become an interim leader, will be attending a major demonstration after Friday morning prayers in downtown Cairo.
But already I have started getting reports from citizen journalists that government-hired thugs will make sure that nothing about tomorrow is peaceful. They say that in several low-income parts of Cairo and Alexandria, government-hired thugs were seen to be splashing petroleum over parked cars. This to prepare for protests in which they'll light vehicles on fire when the time is right for them.
They've also heard rumours that the intelligence services will release a separate group of thugs under the name Akhwan al- Haq, or* Brothers of Truth, a trumped-up extremist group, that will charge through the streets with swords and caustic acid to splash on the protesters - thus placing all the blame of a peaceful uprising gone violent on a certain kind of Islamic extremism.

 

[Weller]

US-based Internet monitoring firm Renesys said Egypt's web access was totally shut down early on Friday, an event it called "unprecedented in internet history".

"Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the internet's global routing table," it said. "The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/28/3124300.htm

interesting yet worrying times

 

[bolshiebhoy]

Good luck to them all today, so easy to cheer them on from the comfort of my sofa but they will be up against it today and it ain't gonna be pretty.

 

[dylans]

Egypt has shut down the internet.

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.
At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Bloody hell! Looks like this is on the verge of a revolution then.

 

[dylans]

It's interesting to consider Mubarak's response to these protests. While the forces of repression have been unleashed. Mubarak himself has been absolutely silent over these protests. Not a single word. Not a single comment. No address to the nation. No appeal for calm. No defiant statements or warnings. Nothing. There have been statements by the PM warning people that the protests will not be "tolerated" and there have been "official" statements from the ruling party threatening dire consequences etc but from Mubarak, not a single word. According to this article, this is a time tested strategy by the regime which intends to exhaust the protests by ignoring their political demands and treating the protests as purely a security issue to be dealt with by repression alone.

Political protests may be rocking Egypt with a new, nonideological force, but President Hosni Mubarak and his allies have not veered from a playbook they have followed through nearly three decades of one-party rule.

As always, the government has responded to the unrest primarily as a security issue, largely ignoring, or dismissing, the core demands of those who have taken to the street.

“My analysis is, the government will leave them until they reach a level of exhaustion,” said Abdel Moneim Said, a member of the president’s ruling party and the director of the government-owned newspaper and publishing house, Al Ahram.

The Egyptian leadership, long accustomed to an apolitical and largely apathetic public, remains convinced that Egypt is going through the sort of convulsion it has experienced — and survived — before.
The leaders see in the protest an experience similar to the events of 1977, when Anwar el-Sadat, then the president, announced plans to end subsidies of basic food items, setting off 36 hours of rioting across the country. They see a repeat of the threat the government faced from Islamic militants in the 1990s, which it violently suppressed. And so the leaders have fallen back on a familiar strategy, deploying security forces, blaming the Islamists and defining their critics as driven by economic, not political, concerns.

“I can’t think of anybody that I know that has any concern about the stability of the regime,” Mr. Said added. But the Egyptian playbook is not just calling for a strategy that runs on the fumes of history. Like the protesters, Mr. Mubarak and his allies appear to have learned lessons from Tunisia’s popular revolt.

The main one appears to be not to give an inch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world/middleeast/28mubarak.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

 

[dylans]

Bloody hell! Looks like this is on the verge of a revolution then.

Or a bloodbath. Following this last night and this morning. I am increasingly concerned that the regime is planning something terrible. A Tienanmen massacre perhaps?
Al Jazeera and Twitter are reporting that the government has hired armed thugs (perhaps armed with caustic acid )and intends to unleash them on the demonstrators.Cars and streets have been doused in petrol and the army have been deployed. It looks like the regime isn't planning on giving one inch.

Yes, a revolution is now the only option. The police are conscripts and many of them poor. They have family amongst the demonstrators and share the same frustrations and misery as every other Egyptian. Will they fire on demonstrators? Will some refuse? The answers to these questions will detemine how this plays out

 

[chilango]

'ckin hell.

Any London people heading down the embassy?

 

[goldenecitrone]

Mubarak's Ceaucescu moment could be coming soon. Time to topple the Pharoah.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Or a bloodbath. Following this last night and this morning. I am increasingly concerned that the regime is planning something terrible. A Tienanmen massacre perhaps?
Al Jazeera and Twitter are reporting that the government has hired armed thugs (perhaps armed with caustic acid )and intends to unleash them on the demonstrators.Cars and streets have been doused in petrol and the army have been deployed. It looks like the regime isn't planning on giving one inch.

Yes, a revolution is now the only option. The police are conscripts and many of them poor. They have family amongst the demonstrators and share the same frustrations and misery as every other Egyptian. Will they fire on demonstrators? Will some refuse? The answers to these questions will detemine how this plays out

Hate to be glib but you don't get revolution without bloodshed. And I agree turning off the net is procedural next will be mass killings that won't be easy to report online from within the country.