CAIRO - Traffic jams in Egypt's streets are commonplace, but nowadays the chaos is manifesting itself in other ways too. It's now normal to see cars being driven the wrong way down the street and tok-toks (three wheelers) using the main streets (something forbidden in the past), and cars double-parked anywhere and everywhere. All this is now happening, despite the fact that the traffic policemen have come back though not strongly. “We can't control the street these days because of the tension between the citizens and the police,” said Mohamed el-Sayyed, one of these traffic policemen, who only spoke to The Egyptian Gazette with reluctance. In the early days of the Egyptian revolution, launched on January 25, the police suddenly disappeared from the nation's streets, prisons were opened and their inmates fled, leaving ordinary citizen feeling very insecure. Even after the Ministry of Interior started to redeploy traffic policemen in the streets in order to deal with the chaos, which is particularly frightful during the rush hour, motorists continue to flout the traffic regulations. Meanwhile, the traffic policemen have stopped noting down offences committed by many drivers, which is only making the situation worse. “This is according to the instructions of the Minister, as a temporarily measure to relieve the tense between the citizens and the police,” el-Sayyed commented. “Just across the street there is an illegally parked microbus. I told the driver but he just ignored me,” he added despairingly. When asked why he didn't listen to the traffic policemen, Shawqi Ahmed, the microbus driver, said that this was his job and that, even before the revolution, when the police were present in force, he still behaved like that. “I don't think the police will be present to the extent they were, until the Armed Forces leave off running the internal affairs of the country. People are now looking to the Armed Forces for protection, even from the police,” el-Sayyed explained. Last week, a microbus driver and a police officer clashed in el-Gazayer Street, Maadi, south of Cairo. The officer shot and injured the driver and the passengers then gave the policeman a terrible beating. This incident, especially the way the policeman treated the driver, has made people think that nothing has changed. “The police presence now is nonsense, as they do nothing about the traffic violations. They just relax and watch what is happening in the streets,” said a motorist in his thirties.
