By Salama A Salama The revolution was fun, and now we have to get down to work. The government has to put the country back on its feet, and it will have to do it while leading an unprecedented process of democratisation, and while being hindered every step of the way by the remnants of the old regime and entrenched modes of corruption and oppression -- the sad legacy that we're left with today. Take heart. Other countries have done it before. They stumbled and fell and got bruised quite often while doing it, but in the end they had the democracies they aspired for. We know the routine and we're ready to walk around the potholes and avoid the pitfalls to the best of our abilities. And, like other countries, we'll use everything we have. And we'll get better at party politics as time goes by. We'll make pluralism work, and our parties will make us proud. The learning curve is steep, but no hill is too hard to climb. Our new cabinet is facing a hard task, for it has to work on consolidating democracy while answering the pent-up needs of a long-suppressed nation. And we've already committed our first mistake. We allowed the State Security Intelligence (SSI) agency to run roughshod at the very time it was supposed to close down, hand over its documents, and be subject to a major purge. For far too long, Egypt's answer to the Stasi was allowed to go on arresting people, torturing them, and taking them to places of detention that even the army had trouble finding. In Alexandria, SSI snipers shot at demonstrators from rooftops, while their colleagues burned tons of documents to hide their trail. The horrors of that Bloody Wednesday prompted the crowds to storm the building, to save whatever evidence was left. The minute it took the interior minister into custody, the army should have seized the SSI's documents and ordered an investigation into its actions. This is what happened in East Germany, where the documents seized from the Stasi showed the extent of its undercover operations. We can only guess about our own SSI, but in East Germany, the Stasi had every second citizen spying for it. The documents were a stunning insight into the workings of a police state. A similar picture may soon emerge regarding the SSI. In organisations such as the SSI one needs to start by removing the top echelon and investigating them thoroughly. Then the mandate of the entire organisation should be rewritten. From then onwards, the outfit must be placed under the surveillance of an independent civilian body, such as parliament or the National Council for Human Rights. The East Germans have done it, and it is our turn. In this country, we've had a great revolution and ousted a much-hated regime. But this is just the beginning. Some people in this country want to turn the clock back. Some people want to restore the old regime. And many would love to keep the SSI in place, brutal and unaccountable as ever. Therefore, it is important to be firm from now on. We have a new cabinet in place, and it will lead us through a difficult period of transition. We also have a new interior minister who, I am sure, will be looking long and hard into the excesses of the SSI and reviewing its mandate and modalities. From now on it must be clear that in this country we cannot have prisoners of conscience anymore. We cannot have emergency laws. And we cannot have the old mandate of the SSI resuscitated in any form.
