Saturday, Jul 09, 2011
(From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)
By Matt Bradley
CAIRO -- Tens of thousands of Egyptians on Friday mounted one of the country's largest demonstrations since protesters overthrew President Hosni Mubarak in February, as anger began to crystallize against what had been long been the unreproachable guarantor of the revolution -- the country's military.
Protesters endured soaring temperatures to converge on Tahrir Square, the focal point of demonstrations that ousted President Mubarak, and in other major cities, to press a wide set of demands for political and economic reform.
The demonstrations marked the first clear expression of diminished public esteem for the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, five months after military leaders assumed interim power. The crowds also appeared to include a broader cross-section of Egyptian society than in previous postuprising rallies.
Protesters who gathered under the slogan "Revolution First" expressed increasing frustration over their view that the military leadership has stalled on crucial reform measures -- citing lack of progress in abolishing military trials for civilians, prosecuting those accused of abuses in the former regime, increasing the minimum wage and reforming Egypt's hated police forces.
"Of course not everything can be done in five months," Gigi Ibrahim, an independent activist, said Thursday. "But nothing has been done in five months."
The SCAF, which typically communicates through press briefings or its Facebook page, didn't comment Friday.
A continuation of such displays against the Supreme Council risks diverting Egypt's sensitive military-led transition to democracy, said analysts and political observers. Egypt's political stability and economic recovery have so far relied on a high level of public trust that the conservative, opaque military leadership will guide the country through sweeping institutional reforms and toward elections this fall.
"At some point, there's going to be a collision" between the Egyptian people and the military leadership, said Joshua Stacher, an Egypt expert and professor of political science at Kent State University. "The fact that people think they need to keep mobilizing in order to get concessions is a sign of SCAF's failure to continue the transition in a way that meets the aims of the revolutionaries," said Mr. Stacher, who attended Friday's protests.
While Tahrir Square has hosted regular protests since February, Friday's march stood apart for its particularly wide spectrum of political parties and ideologies. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups that have lately eschewed continuing demonstrations called out their numbers to press for a disparate set of economic and political reforms.
"Ninety percent of the people just united together today," said Ayman Zaki, a print-store owner who said he is a Brotherhood member. Mr. Zaki said he is particularly vexed by the slow pace of prosecutions against ex-officials and police officers accused of killing protesters.
"In the beginning, the people loved the army and we're still giving them a chance," he said. "But we want to separate the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces from the army: The Supreme Council are Mubarak's men, but the army is the Egyptian army and they're with the Egyptian people."
Activists erected a large white tent across the grassy central portion of the square Thursday night. Politicians made speeches from sound stages that had been set up overnight.
In an indication of the wide range of demands, some youthful protesters passed out a survey sheet asking demonstrators to evaluate the performance of the military leadership. On the opposite side of the square, adherents to the ultraconservative Salafi school of Islamic thought passed out draft copies of a proposed Islamist constitution.
Large banners mocked Mr. Mubarak, who is in police custody at a hospital in the resort city of Sharm El Sheikh while awaiting a trial set for early August.
Another banner demanded that the families of the revolutionary "martyrs," as Egyptians refer to those who were killed during the revolution, be adequately compensated.
Supporting the families of the dead has emerged as a unifying populist cause for Egypt's bickering political parties. Police used tear gas and pellet rifles last week in clashes in Tahrir Square against some family members who were demanding harsher justice for police officers facing trials for killing protesters.
Police and military officers were largely absent from Tahrir Square on Friday.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
09-07-11 0700GMT
