CAIRO – When soldiers stormed Tahrir Square on Monday, Mahmoud Radwan was chatting with a group of his friends about the changes that had happened in Egypt since he and hundreds of other activists started their sit-in. After he received the first slap on the face seconds later, Mahmoud, 45, realised that everything had gone back to square one. “We used to believe that by kicking Mubarak out of power, Egypt has already got rid of its legacy of despotism,” Radwan told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. “But when this happened, I felt certain that the Mubarak mindset is still here and very strongly at that.” Like hundreds of other activists, Mahmoud was infuriated by the forceful and violent evacuation of Tahrir Square, the symbolic centre of the people's empowerment, after it had served as a main point for anger and protest against the former regime of Hosni Mubarak in January and February. He camped out in the square for three weeks before the Armed Forces used what he and others called “brutal force” to put an end to the sit-in. To this embattled revolutionary, who has been part of the popular uprising against Mubarak since it started on January 25, the evacuation of the square in this manner quashed all illusions about people-army amity, which had been bolstered by the measures the army took to protect the revolution. He looked with pain at his tent being removed by army soldiers from the square. He looked at the sticks and the clubs in the hands of the soldiers, who had used them to hit strongly at whoever showed any resistance to them. Mahmoud believed that the state of fear was back in Egypt, a country that had more than its fill of fear during Mubarak's 30 years of rule. His feelings were not, however, shared by everybody on the square, not even the motorists. Happy to be driving again across the Egyptian capital's most important centre, they kept beeping their car-horns and also saluting the Army offices who had facilitated their access into the square, which had been blocked for the past three weeks by the sit-in. “We can do whatever we want to oppose our government except for blocking traffic or causing harm to our country,” stated Khalid Fawzi, a civil servant in his late thirties. “I pass by the square everyday. The sit-in caused real problems to me and the tens of thousands of people who work in its vicinity.” But the demonstrators and the activists, who spent the last three weeks camped-out on the square, are not talking about traffic, nor about the problems they might have caused to office workers in the square's vicinity. They, however, link the forcible evacuation of the square with the trial of the former president, which will start today. They say the Army has prepared the ground for crushing opposition and giving a chance for Mubarak to get out of the trial unscathed. “If this is the planned scenario, it will set the whole of Egypt on fire,” said Ramadan Abdel-Aziz, a square demonstrator. “The Army needs to understand that it should work for the people, not for a man who humiliated this people for 30 years.”
