Egyptian masses say military regime must go

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The masses of Egypt in their millions have returned to the streets, determined to finish the revolution they began in January by ousting from power the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Every day since a police attack in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Saturday, Nov. 19, thousands of youths have braved murderous police sal­ lies into the square, each time beating them back. Em­ boldened with their success in repelling the cops—who are backed by the country’s ruling military—these same youth have mounted one offensive after another against the headquarters of the Interior Ministry, which oversees police affairs.

Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which connects Tahrir with the Ministry, has seen countless acts of heartrending self-sacrifice and inspiring courage by the shabab (youth). They consult with each other constantly, assessing when to advance and retreat, how many of the hundreds of thou­ sands gathering in the nearby square to involve, or when to ask them to wait. Those in the front lines appeal to the lines behind them not to back up but instead to stand their ground to bolster the front’s position.

Revolutionary journalist Mostafa Omar reported that “many young people unable to enter Mohamed Mahmoud to support those on the front-lines are wearing stickers distributed by a group of revolutionary socialists that read ‘A Martyr is available here’ to underscore their readiness to die for a chance to live in a democratic country not ruled by army generals.”

An Egyptian American active in building solidarity pro­ tests in New York passed along twitters from her cousin on the front line: “We throw rocks and they shoot us with rubber bullets and tear gas bombs … we are still standing and fighting … a lot of ppl died of suffocation and real bullets … injuries are like rain … but nobody surrenders. If one of us falls, more ppl show up and come … the spirit of the revolution is back and the pigs dont understand that shooting us wont let us back, but encourage us to go to­ wards them.”

Omar described uprising participants as “less middle class and more working class” than at the beginning of the year: “Most people who died at the hands of police are poor, young working-class people who have come from the shantytowns—young people who have no hope after years of neglect.” This truth was captured in a quote in The New York Times from a 23-year-old protester taking a break from battle, who declared, “This is a revolution of the hungry!”

Sometimes the unquestioning self-sacrifice of these hungry shabab makes it impossible to find words to prop­ erly honor them. Omar reports that “one of those killed was helping a young woman who was breaking stones to throw at police. He said to her, ‘I’m uneducated, I have no future. The police will kill me someday anyway. I will die here—you go. You are educated, you will help the movement.’”

Truly, the working class is uniquely giving and selfless, deserving of the fruits of victory, of a decent life—quali­ ties that it has learned and earned through hard experi­ 12 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2011 Khalil Hamra / AP ence, and by rejecting the lying lessons of its masters. The morals of those masters are seen in their encouragement of the heinous behavior of their army, whose soldiers have been seen dragging dead bodies and throwing them on piles as if they were bags of rubbish—after hitting them on the head with batons to make sure they’re dead. The uprising began after a police attack on Nov. 19 on a sit-in of no more than 100 people in Tahrir Square of those wounded in the Jan. 25 uprising who have been demanding compensation for their injuries. Police be­ gan beating the wounded, including shooting rubber bullets purposely at their faces, putting out several eyes. Thousands responded to this repression by coming to the square to reclaim it. By the next day, there were tens of thousands of people in Tahrir Square again, and they kicked the police out.

The numbers in Tahrir—and soon in every major city and town in the country—grew day after day and into the night throughout the week following the initial cop at­ tack, culminating in a million-strong “Friday of the Last Chance” on Nov. 25. This followed a week in which at least three dozen were killed and several hundred se­ verely wounded. The size and steadfastness of the mo­ bilizations make it clear that this phase of the revolution can only end either in the SCAF stepping down, or in a massacre on a scale too massive to even contemplate—an alternative that the masses in the streets are only too well aware of and which fuels their determination. On Last Chance Friday, SCAF appointed a former Mubarak flunky as prime minister—and revolutionary groups immediately organized a sit-in to block him from reaching the PM’s office. Other youth groups began circu­ lating forms for protesters to fill in to nominate their own choices for a transitional civilian council. The indepen­ dent union federation called for a workers’ feeder march, following up on its call for members to join the protests as soon as they had broken out the preceding weekend. Ahdaf Soueif, prize-winning novelist and aunt of im­ prisoned blogger Alaa abd el Fatah (detained for criticiz­ ing military tribunals), wrote movingly in the Guardian of scenes she saw in Tahrir. She described activists fol­ lowing the advice of organizers to write their names on their arms so loved ones could be informed if they were killed, advice issued after some bodies of the murdered couldn’t be identified.

Soueif reported that someone had written on a wall: “We are the Square: A Church, a Mosque and a Parliament.”

Odd Andersen / AFP / Getty Images The notion of Tahrir as a more genuine parliament (cer­ tainly more than the one to be convened by the military’s rigged elections) is a recognition that ultimately only or­ gans of mass power born from the squares of Egypt can bring real democracy to the country.

The tragedies mount, but they only further fuel protest­ ers’ steadfastness. One hero murdered by the security forces was young field doctor Rania Fouad, who entered a coma and died after an attack by tear gas canisters on her make-shift clinic in the Square. After her murder, said Soueif, “The people notched it up: the revolution had just become dearer—more impossible to abandon.” On one day motorbikes brought to such clinics 50 cases in 10 minutes. On another day, the media reported 500 brought in during a two-hour span.

On Tuesday night, Field-Marshal Hussein Tantawi, head of SCAF, made a speech that stunned all observers with “its detachment and tardiness, its formal emptiness, its moral vacuity. And then the teargas started in earnest. People stood their ground because they knew the army wanted to claim that the speech had satisfied people so they’d left.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, whose party was expected to garner the biggest vote totals in elections scheduled for Nov. 28, held a mass march of its own on Nov. 18 out of dissatisfaction with the military’s threats to remain in power. But once the masses demanded an immediate end to military rule, many of them challenging the legitimacy of military-run elections, the Brotherhood reverted to form, and its middle-class leadership called on protesters to leave Tahrir.

In a typical but incredibly cynical move, on Last Chance Friday the Muslim Brotherhood distributed leaflets ex­ pressing its support for elections, and rather than join the monster rally in Tahrir, held its own small demonstration to protest the decision of Israeli authorities to demolish the gate to al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. But the masses of Egypt know that the Brotherhood, after decades of col­ laboration with dictatorial regimes (even when its own members faced repression), is no more capable of genu­ inely resisting Zionism than its military partners. And in any case, increasing numbers of the younger, more working-class ranks of the Brotherhood are defying the leadership’s advice and joining the fighting alongside their sisters and brothers against SCAF.

The most well known bourgeois liberal candidate for president, Mohamed El-Baradei, was said to be planning to join negotiations, maybe even to be willing to accept being chosen by SCAF as prime minister. In the end he boycotted the talks, obviously afraid of being denounced by the masses.

In the weeks before the uprising, pressure was build­ ing on the military. Workers had engaged in a wave of mass strikes in late September. Meanwhile, activists in the Campaign to End Military Trials of Civilians began holding rallies against such trials, for freedom for politi­ (continued on page 11, in “UAW members approve concession-filled contracts”)

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‘A lot of ppl died of suffocation and real bullets ... but nobody surrenders ... the spirit of the revolution is back.’ — twitter message from Tahrir Square