Doaa El-Bey and Gamal Nkrumah write on the Port Said football massacre and the Security Council veto that gave the Syrian president a free hand to kill even more Newspapers followed the repercussions of the Port Said massacre while writers looked for a way out of what they said was the present conspiracy being laid for the state. Al-Ahram on Tuesday had 'Parliament warns of plan to bring down the state'. Al-Shorouk on Monday quoted mothers as saying 'Stop killing our sons now'. Al-Osbou asked 'Who is burning Egypt?' Al-Tahrir blared 'Departure [of the ruling military council] or civil disobedience'. Al-Akhbar on Sunday headlined 'Two previous MPs, a police officer and a friend of Gamal Mubarak involved in Port Said' and Al-Wafd on Tuesday described on its front page the situation around the Ministry of Interior as 'Tense calm around the ministry and human shields between police and protesters'. Mustafa Sami noted that Port Said, where 74 people were killed in a football match last week, is the victim of a conspiracy to destroy Egypt. He hoped that "we would not heap blame on the people of Port Said who stood for the Tripartite Aggression in 1956 with courage and genuine patriotism." Those who committed the Port Said massacre, Sami wrote, are the enemies of Egypt who killed its people with cold blood at the end of a football match which usually ends with a winner and a loser. "The Port Said massacre ended with the defeat of the Egyptian people. The massacre is the bleakest episode in a series of acts of conspiracy to bring down the state. We should not look at it independently of the Battle of the Camel, Maspero and Mohamed Mahmoud confrontations and other incidents," Sami wrote in the official daily Al-Ahram. The ruling military council and the government should firmly confront the conspiracy which threatens to destroy Egypt and kill its youth, Sami added. "For the first time, Egypt is not a safe place." He summed up by praying that Egypt, which he said was abducted by the "invisible third party" would soon return to its people. Gamal Fahmi noted that the country was facing a comprehensive crisis. However, the ruling military council, the parliament and the government look disabled and paralysed in a vast arena filled with all kinds of disorder and organised crime. "Frankly, there is no way out of the crisis except through decisions that should start by getting rid of the military council and the government and working with the parliament," Fahmi wrote in the independent daily Al-Tahrir. To get rid of the military council, he explained, we need new and urgent legislation that imposes a clear and intensive plan which ends with the election of a president for one term. During that term, the president will be responsible for identifying clear and objective criteria for choosing the constitutional committee that would draft the constitution. The only way to get rid of the government, Fahmi added, is to let the majority in parliament form a national salvation government. However, getting rid of the government and ruling military council should coincide with taking urgent step towards restructuring the police and state security bodies together with a drastic change in how the trial of the deposed president and his gang is handled. Mohamed Ali Kheir agreed with Fahmi that the performance of the military council, parliament and government were below standard. He pointed to a repeatedly poor performance in dealing with any confrontation between protesters and security forces as an indication of the absence of a political vision or will. The military council, Kheir noted, dealt with the Port Said crisis by declaring three days of mourning and a few statements. The council should have asked some of its members to travel to Port Said for, instance, or form a crisis management chamber in Port Said to monitor the investigations and disclose results and decisions taken. Meanwhile, he added, Prime Minister Kamal El-Ganzouri who had initially declared that he possessed the authorities of the president, did not appear on the scene after the Port Said crisis. He simply went to parliament and read out a statement that did not meet the expectations of the people. "It did not occur to El-Ganzouri that the crisis requires different treatment, such as declaring a plan to restructure the Ministry of Interior or to travel to Port Said to prove to all Egyptians that his government is different from pre-revolution governments," Kheir wrote in the official daily Al-Akhbar. As for parliament, he elaborated, it held a heated session that produced a fact-finding committee that would visit Port Said. We expected that parliament would force the government to restructure the Ministry of Interior and purge it from the followers of the previous interior minister Habib El-Adli. Osama Afifi called on wiser men to stop the haemorrhage in Egypt. In his description of the state, he wrote that bloody scenes had become bloodier; the country is on the brink of a civil war; and everybody is accusing everybody else of treason. "The revolution that astonished the world is destroying itself. It looks as if we are holding a mass suicide party shown on all satellite channels," Afifi wrote in the independent weekly Al-Osbou . Thus, he emphasised, "we are in need of the urgent efforts of wise men to hold a national salvation conference." Afifi also called on them to agree on certain issues, namely stopping all protests and sit-ins to give the conference the chance to work; forming an unbiased committee of senior judges to investigate the violence from Maspero to the Port Said massacres, pushing the government to pay compensation for the martyrs of the revolution and drawing up a clear programme for drafting the constitution and holding early presidential elections. Mahmoud Ghallab described the decision to put inmates of the previous regime in Tora prison in five prisons instead of one as a brave step taken by the Minister of Interior Mohamed Ibrahim. Many people called for such a step a year ago, Ghallab wrote in Al-Wafd, the mouthpiece of the opposition Wafd Party. However, the two previous ministers, Mahmoud Wagdi and Mansour Eissawi were not able to take the step because they were under pressure from one of the inmates, former interior minister El-Adli. While the writer hailed the measure, he called on Ibrahim to take more steps to thwart all attempts by the previous regime to abort the revolution. The second step, Ghallab suggested, was to treat Hosni Mubarak as a convict not as a president who is spending his time in hospital. That is, he should be transferred to a prison like any other convict. "Would putting the Tora inmates in separate cells uproot the 'third party' or will they play the same role from other prisons?"
