CAIRO - Students at Egypt's biggest public university, Thursday said they would suspend a massive sit-in until this Tuesday to see what is the final decision of Minister of Higher Education Amr Ezzat Salama on meeting their demands. "Until Tuesday, we have decided to let the lectures of the second academic semster to go on, but we will still have a token two-hour sit-in every day, between 12:00 and 2:00pm on the main campus of the university," Belal el-Diab, a Faculty of Arts student at Cairo University told The Egyptian Gazette. He added that the aim of the daily sit-in was "to remind officials that we are pursuing our demands until they are achieved". "Their main demand is to remove the current university president, all his deputies and deans of affiliated institutions.” Opposing Belal, a Faculty of Law student named Ahmed Rushdi, said: "I am against protest now. We should all co-operate for this country's supreme interests. Rushdi told The Gazette: "We should wait until the Supreme Council of Armed Forces can handle the important challenges that face the country in the coming period and then, we can ask for our demands." At the Faculty of Mass Communications, however, between 75 and 100 students were holding a sit-in asking for the departure of their dean. Students bearing banners outlining their objections to the current administrative system are roaming around the university campus and its surrounding sites, while the Ministry of the Interior campus police are being replaced with civilian security guards as ordered last October, by the Higher Administrative Court. "We also want to change the structure of the university regulations on the student unions," Ali Saleh, a law student, told this newspaper. The Supreme Council for Universities, which oversees higher education in Egypt, has disbanded the student unions at all Egyptian universities and ordered elections to be held within 60 days of the start of the second term. "The new elections should be fair, allowing all students to take part in them, with no restrictions” commented Saleh.
