Egyptian activists, joined by a small international contingent, never made it to Rafah. Lina Mahmoud takes an interrupted bus ride At 6am last Friday about 200 activists boarded buses parked in front of downtown's Bar Association headquarters. Wearing Palestinian kuffiyas and holding Palestinian flags, they were headed for Rafah to provide the Palestinians across the border with relief assistance in the form of food-stuffs and blankets. The convoy, which was timed to coincide with 10 December's International Human Rights Day, was organised by the Egyptian Popular Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada, and included Egyptian, European and Arab activists. Participants also included representatives of different Egyptian political forces -- Islamists, Nasserists, socialists, communists, and liberals, along with intellectuals, political figures, writers and academics. Egyptian authorities stopped the group at the entrance to North Sinai. An hour of negotiations ended in failure. The activists then left the buses and began marching along the desert road, chanting pro-Palestinian slogans as they walked. Dozens of central security forces soon surrounded them, preventing further progress. For more than three hours, arguments between the protesters and security forces ensued. The demonstrators' slogans soon shifted tone from purely pro-Palestinian to anti- government chants like, "Freedom, where are you? Camp David is in the way" and "You sold our country for nothing." By 3pm, the demonstrators were exhausted. It had become very clear that they had no hope of getting anywhere near to the Egyptian-Israeli border. Six students sat on the street and announced they were going on a hunger strike. The rest of the group ignored them, having made a nearly unanimous decision to head back to Cairo. The students were in tears and refused to get up. "We come back without doing anything every single time. We always lose our struggle. We can't even get to Sinai. We are so helpless." They were eventually convinced to get on the bus. French political activist Alima Boumedien Tery said, "now Israel can rest because the Arab governments are doing their job, and keeping the American and Israeli order." Some, like Ahmed Sabri, a researcher at the Egyptian Al-Fajr Islamic Research Centre, found fault with the group itself. "People came all the way here to chant; there was no Plan B when authorities didn't let us through," he said. Other political activists were not surprised -- in light of all the recent normalisation activities that had taken place between Egypt and Israel -- by the authorities' decision to not let the convoy through. "The decision by the government to prevent the convoy's passage is not a surprise; it is one more incident indicating the Egyptian government's lack of tolerance for basic human rights," said Joe Stork, the head of the Middle East and North Africa Division at Human Rights Watch. Stork said that "the fact that this confrontation happened weeks after mass arrests and torture in Sinai makes it a sad human rights day in Egypt." According to Egyptian human rights groups, security forces in Sinai detained some 5,000 people following the Taba blasts in October. The buses eventually made it back to Cairo.
