CAIRO: On International Day of Peace, the streets of Cairo were anything but peaceful. Football fans rioted through the streets of the upper-class Zamalek neighborhood. Heavy security and a smattering of arrests met demonstrators near Abdeen Palace, the Presidential residence. The demonstration planned for September 21 at Abdeen Square was organized by the Socialist-based Popular Movement for Democratic Change. Meant to be a peaceful gathering, it was attended by liberals, such as Ayman Nour and the al-Ghad party, socialists and Nasserites, including Hamdeen Sabbahi and the Karama party, members of al-Wafd party, the Keffaya movement, the 6 April Youth, and others. Reports of the number of demonstrators ranged from 200, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm, to 2,000, according to some activists. Realistically, the numbers may have hovered somewhere around 1,000. The demonstration was in many ways what has become typical of Egyptian protests: massive numbers of State Security officers surrounding protestors chanting against 30-year President Hosni Mubarak and the suspected inheritance of power by his son, Gamal. Yet Tuesday's demonstrators took the protest a step farther: they burned photographs of father and son. According to a tweet by journalist Ian Lee, Ayman Nour refused to allow a photo of Gamal Mubarak to be burned in front of him. Nour is one of Egypt's most prominent opposition figures. Photographers were targeted by State Security, and according to a tweet around 6pm Al-Jazeera's photographer was detained by police. Activist Gameela Ismail speculated the reason for the detention was to ensure the photographer did not have images of protestors burning Mubarak's photo. Ismail, a well-known Egyptian activist and advocate for civil and women's rights, never reached the protest. At around 4:15pm she and a BikyaMasr reporter were stopped by State Security just outside Abdeen Square. Their path was blocked just steps from the square by a handful of plainclothes officers and three women, one in uniform and two in plainclothes. Within moments, Ismail and her companion were encircled by a ring of uniformed policemen, who along with around thirty uniformed and plainclothes officers kept an eye on the two women for the next three and a half hours. The insistence of State Security to keep Ismail from joining the protest is curious, considering Nour and Sabbahi, among others, were already present. While Ismail kept up to date with the protest via Twitter, the plainclothes officers present consistently denied that any meeting or protest was even taking place. The officers in charge were hyper-sensitive to the attention Ismail and her companion received. One high-ranking officer instructed passerby to “never look to what's behind you,” a thinly-veiled order to consciously avoid noticing the two women surrounded by a ring of black-clad police. In another instance, an officer was sent to investigate a nearby apartment when a man was spotted taking pictures of the scene with his mobile phone. Asked her opinion of the State Security's actions on Tuesday, Ismail told Bikya Masr, “I believe that this expresses their panic and their deep fear from the ghost of the first spark of a revolution that could happen the next minute, the next hour, the next month, or the next year.” State Security does not act out of support for Gamal Mubarak or disagreement with the demonstrators' fight against the inheritance of power, she continued. “They are afraid of any two getting together,” of political and social demands merging with ordinary citizens. “This is what they fear, this is what they think will result in a revolution,” she said. Considering the commotion happening in other parts of the city, the number of security officers who remained in the area of the two women is also curious. Perhaps the tight security on that particular side street was merely a coincidence. Yet, do two women really require a tight circle of fifteen police, with a dozen high-ranking officers watching from nearby? At the conclusion of the day's events, prominent blogger Zeinobia deplored the division of State Security resources. “Knives were used, Molotov bottles were used and people were injured and terrorized not to mention their cars were smashed and do not ask how on earth these thugs control that lane for 45 minutes!?” she demanded in a blog post shortly after midnight, referring to the mob of angry football fans roving through Zamalek. “Where [were] the police?” she asked. Well, nearly 100 State Security members were present in the vicinity of Ismail and the BikyaMasr reporter, who were neither within sight not hearing range of the site of the protest. One would think those resources could have been better allocated, yet they remained even after it became clear the protest was elsewhere. Is State Security really that afraid of Gameela Ismail? BM
