¿El ejército contra el pueblo?: informe especial de Democracy Now! desde Egipto
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The Egyptian government has apologized for a violent crackdown
that left at least two protesters dead and dozens wounded.
The violence broke out after thousands gathered
in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to call for the prosecution of the
former president, Hosni Mubarak, and other officials.
Friday’s demonstration was the largest in Tahrir
since Mubarak’s ouster two months ago.
Soldiers later attacked a group of protesters
who peacefully remained in the square overnight.
Dozens of people were also arrested and may now face military trial.
On Monday, Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf
expressed the government’s "regret" for the violence
and said he will seek a judicial probe.
The crackdown comes at a time many Egyptians
are questioning the role of Egypt’s military in the post-Mubarak era.
The ruling military council initially had wide popular support.
But with repression continuing—and Mubarak loyalists
still holding key positions—there are growing fears
the military could be used to contain the revolution it once stood beside.
Democracy Now! correspondent Anjali Kamat is in Cairo
covering the Egyptian uprising. She filed this report.
"The army and the people are one hand."
This became one of the most popular chants of Egypt’s
18-day uprising that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak.
It began when the army took over Cairo’s streets following
the collapse of the security forces and grew even louder
once Mubarak fell and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces
took control of Egypt’s transition to a civilian democracy.
But increasingly the army is beginning to lose some of its popularity.
In recent weeks, protests across the city
have raised slogans against Major General
Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the military.
While Egyptians have traditionally held the armed forces in high esteem,
many are now beginning to be frustrated with the slow pace of change
and question Tantawi’s close ties to Mubarak.
I think that the gravest danger on this revolution is the Egyptian army.
People, of course, have celebrated the position of the army,
have embraced it, have recognized it for what it is.
The army commands a huge amount of respect and affection.
That is obviously true.
But in my assessment, the army was forced to take
the position it did, not because of any genuine belief in democracy,
not because the high brass of the Egyptian army
really genuinely believe in democracy—maybe some of them do—
but I think mostly it’s because the army is very afraid
that this revolutionary spirit would exceed
the existing boundaries and reach the army itself.
Khaled Fahmy is the chair of the History Department
at the American University in Cairo.
He explained that while certain figures from the Mubarak regime
have been charged with corruption, they have been largely those
associated with the former president’s son, Gamal Mubarak,
the so-called new guard of businessmen-turned-politicians.
Only recently have we started hearing kinds of information
that maybe some of the members of the old guard,
who are friends of Tantawi—Zakaria Azmi, Ahmed Fathi Srour, Safwat El-Sherif.
Those are people who made their names back in the '60s.
It's interesting that the army is very slow in moving into that direction.
What the army has been basically saying is,
"We’re going to try big businessmen
and the businessmen associated with Gamal Mubarak.
So this is the old rivalry between the army and Gamal Mubarak
that we’ve been hearing about for the past eight, nine years.
The army is seizing the opportunity of the revolution
to get rid of that wing once and for all.
And—but beyond that, we have seen very little.
On Friday, tens of thousands of people poured into Tahrir Square
calling for Mubarak and his family to be prosecuted
and accusing the military of colluding with Mubarak.
They were emboldened by the presence of some two dozen military officers,
who said they were fed up with the corruption within the military.
We believe the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces
is colluding with the old regime.
We see no serious steps toward bringing corrupt officials to justice.
But the protest was brutally crushed by the army,
who stormed into the square along with riot police early Saturday morning
to disperse the peaceful protesters.
The army is misbehaving in a number of ways.
If we give it the benefit of the doubt, we say, at best,
that they are ill-equipped, they don’t have experience running a country
as complicated and sophisticated as Egypt,
with as many problems as those of Egypt, and at worst,
that the army is actually continuing the same old politics of the Mubarak regime,
that in that, in a true sense, that the Mubarak regime has not collapsed,
only its civilian wing has.
But the military wing, which was, you know, the core of the army
—of the regime, has not effectively collapsed yet.
And the last thing that these generals would like to see is,
let’s say, for a civilian minister of defense or for civilian oversight
over the military budget or, let alone, of revolutionary demands
for accountability and justice
and transparency to be applied to the army itself.
At least two people were killed in the violence this weekend,
and the army arrested 42 others, who will receive military trials.
But this is not the first time the military has cracked down
on peaceful protesters or resorted to some of the same tactics
as Mubarak’s hated security apparatus.
Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch
has been closely following this issue.
The military was deployed on the streets of
Egypt’s major cities on January 29th.
Throughout the period of Tahrir, we received reports
and documented cases of protesters who were arbitrarily arrested
and detained by the military, either in the vicinity
of Tahrir Square or taken to military camps.
And all of the detentions were in fact enforced disappearances.
The military would detain people without allowing them
any communication to their families or lawyers,
and the military would not make public the detention of the people they took in.
The detentions ranged from 12 or 14 hours to,
in the longest case, to 18 days.
And then, from February 11th onwards,
after the Tahrir protest, the big Tahrir protest, ended,
there were a number of occasions when the military moved
in to clear the square of protesters.
The evening of February 25th, March 6th
and March 9th were the biggest roundups.
And on those occasions, again the military used force and beat protesters,
just in the process of clearing the square.
It arrested a number of peaceful protesters and beat and tortured
dozens of them at the Egyptian Museum and at other places of detention.
And then it brought them before military tribunals,
and over—and hundreds of them were then sentenced to
—by military courts to sentences ranging from one year to five years.
Salwa al-Husseini is a 20-year-old from a small town
in the Delta who’s been an active part of the protests in Tahrir since the beginning.
She was an enthusiastic supporter of the Egyptian army until a month ago.
On March 9th, Salwa was among dozens of peaceful protesters
who were detained by the military after their sit-in
at Tahrir Square was forcibly cleared.
She says the 18 women who were arrested were strip-searched.
Those who were unmarried were subjected to what the military called
a “virginity test” and threatened with prostitution charges.
I was terrified. I was scared, because a man was examining me.
No one has the right, not even a doctor, to do that without our consent.
Why did they do this to us? We weren’t doing anything wrong.
We were defending our country.
Aly Sobhy is a 28-year-old actor from Cairo.
He was also detained and tortured on March 9th.
While the army was dispersing the sit-in at Tahrir,
I was on the phone with lawyers, journalists and human rights workers,
relaying the names of those being detained.
As I was doing that, a soldier arrested me, confiscated my phone,
and took me inside the museum.
There, an officer charged into my chest and knocked me down.
Then the beatings began, with sticks and electric shocks.
My hair used to be long.
They tied my hair to a pole and beat me
on my back with an electric cord.
They filmed us with knives and Molotov cocktails
in front of us and showed this on television.
In the morning, they took us to the general military prison,
and that night prosecutors interrogated us
and told us we were accused of being thugs,
possessing lethal weapons, explosives, and defying the curfew.
The army has accused many of those they arrested of being thugs or baltaguia,
who the army blames for continued instability across Egypt.
There are legitimate concerns about an increase in
criminal activity out on the streets.
What the army has done, however, is to present
its mass arrests and its reliance on military tribunals
as part of their attempt to clamp down on this criminal activity,
and they’ve ascribed all of this to the existence of thugs, baltaguia,
which has become the military’s new favorite word.
They were being accused of trying to disrupt public order,
trying to slow down the path of progress that the military set out.
So there’s very much this perception that anyone who stands in the way
of the plan set up by the military could be considered a thug.
Hundreds and possibly thousands of civilians remain in detention
today after being sentenced by military tribunals over the past two months.
Their sentences haven’t been ratified yet,
so there is still a possibility that they may not be ratified
and that there may be an order to reduce them.
I think this is where the role of civil society becomes extremely important,
because all of these people need to be released immediately
under international law. None of them should have been brought before military tribunals.
But thus far, abuses by the military have received little attention in Egyptian media.
We know from journalists at some of the independent newspapers,
who have come to press conferences, who have spoken to victims of torture,
that they’ve tried to write about this,
that they’ve tried to report on the cases, and that this has been blocked.
We know that the military—criticizing the military
is one of the red lines for the media and that last week
newspapers and some lawyers received letters from the military
saying that any—any publication of information about the military itself
needs to receive prior authorization from the military.
One blogger who openly criticized the military is now facing
a military tribunal for his comments on Facebook and on his blog.
Maikel Nabil was arrested on March 28th for insulting the military.
His friend Sahar Maher explained the charges against him.
Maikel was charged with insulting the military establishment,
publishing lies about it, and threatening public security.
They were most concerned about his last blog post,
entitled “The Army and the People Are Not One.”
This was the main source of the accusations.
Maikel saw that the army had committed violations,
tortured people, beat people in Tahrir,
and detained protesters without clear reason.
Maikel was outspoken in the past, so the military already had him on their radar.
He had previously created a Facebook page called “No to Forced Conscription.”
He was once arrested on February 28th, and another time before that,
for refusing to join the army as a conscientious objector.
Maikel Nabil’s family and friends are outraged that he’s being tried
in a military tribunal simply for expressing his point of view.
Nobody should be subjected to a military trial for expressing their opinion.
We’ve just had a revolution. What may have been acceptable
before the revolution should not be acceptable anymore.
In the new Egypt we are building, people should not be
tried and imprisoned for their opinions. And on top of that,
this was a military trial. That didn’t used to happen before.
A month after her ordeal with the military, Salwa al-Husseini
hasn’t got any satisfactory answers from the military.
She wonders why she and so many others have been abused
by the very institution claiming to protect the revolution.
To the army, the Supreme Military Council and Mubarak,
Egypt is just a business, nothing more. This country
is not the army or the government; it’s the people.
As popular dissatisfaction with the military grows,
many are beginning to question how it can guide a transition
to a civilian democracy without compromising its own powers.
The quicker the army gets out of the picture,
the better it is for its own cohesion and for the revolution itself.
They know that this is dangerous. They know that
—dangerous for itself. They know that getting out of the picture
might mean true civilian control over the army itself.
And I think this is exactly the kind of negotiation
that they are trying to find—to chart now.
In other words, they want out, but they want out in a way
that would preserve their privileges—economic and political and military
—and some kind of an overall blanket possible amnesty
for abuses and corruption that are endemic within the army itself.