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February 4, 2011

ANTI-MUBARAK demonstrators gathered in the hundreds of thousands on Friday, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in Alexandria and in cities and towns across the country for a new day of mass protest against the regime.

In my estimation, the Tahrir Square demonstration was even bigger today than it was last Tuesday, when across Egypt, between 6 million and 8 million people protested, according to estimates. As the hour for curfew came and went tonight, thousands of people were still arriving to demonstrate. In Alexandria, an estimated 1 million people also turned out.

Everywhere, people were united around the slogan that Mubarak must go now. In Tahrir Square, there was an echo of the old civil rights slogan in the U.S. “We shall not be moved”—hundreds of thousands of people were chanting, “He should go! We will not move.” Then there was my favorite slogan of the day: “Ya Mubarak, sahi el noum, inaharda akher youm!” It sounds better in Arabic because it rhymes, but it translates roughly into English as: “Wakey, wakey, Mubarak, today is the last day!”

To understand the importance of today’s massive turnout, you only have to remember what happened on Wednesday and Thursday, which can only be described as the unleashing of the hounds of hell—thugs of the regime sent out in a coordinated assault on the demonstrators at Tahrir Square and the whole of the pro-democracy movement.

The scale of violence was seen by millions of people around the world. They threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, and they wielded knives and all kinds of other weapons in an attempt to intimidate, injure and drive out the demonstrators from Tahrir Square.

They also made a particular point to beat up journalists and drive them out of the square, and they raided hotels where news organizations like Al Jazeera and CNN were headquartered, trashing their operations. They also attempted to incite fear against foreigners—anything that would drive a wedge among the demonstrators and that would intimidate people from coming out on Friday.

The violence was so bad that Omar Suleiman—the newly appointed vice president, whose previous position was head of the army intelligence services, someone who must have overseen the arrest and torture of thousands in that post—came on television last night to deny any involvement on the part of the National Democratic Party, Mubarak’s ruling party.

Suleiman claimed that no one had any idea who organized the onslaught—despite the fact that several of the thugs were captured, and their police or government employment IDs were shown in the media. So the hollowness of his claims weren’t lost on the Egyptian people.

There was even a moment of bizarre other-worldliness when Suleiman—this organizer of repression and torture—appealed for prisoners, who according to many reports had been released from jail by the regime’s thugs to help in the violence, to show up at the prisons again and turn themselves in.

That’s the context of today’s demonstrations—after two days of systematic violence against the anti-Mubarak protestors, people turned out in the hundreds of thousands today, and it turned the balance back again in the favor of the demonstrators.

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AS IN every revolutionary situation, there has been a dramatic ebb and flow to the events in Egypt.

The demonstrations began on January 25—ironically, on “Police Day,” which was previously a celebration of the regime’s strength. On that first day, the movement broke through a kind of psychological barrier by moving into the streets in huge numbers, something that didn’t happen under the Egyptian police state.

The demonstrations continued through last Friday, when there were huge battles with the police that pushed the security forces off the streets. The government’s response was to deploy the army, which is seen as “above politics”—but to allow Cairo to descend into a kind of chaos, with gangs of thugs roaming through neighborhoods, many of them organized by the regime. The mass of Egyptians responded to this by organizing neighborhood defense committees to protect the people.

Last Tuesday, the demonstrations were the biggest yet. Mubarak spoke on television that night, declaring that he wouldn’t run for re-election, but had no intention of stepping down. The thugs were unleashed the next day to show what Mubarak had in mind as a transition.

But Friday represents a new stage following the two days of violence that came before it. In the preceding two days, not only was the anti-Mubarak demonstration in Tahrir maintained—that is, the heart of the uprising and its best-known expression was defended from forces determined to drive the protesters out—but the manner of its defense produced a response in support of it that could be seen throughout the day today.

Early on Friday morning, there were literally thousands of people lined up to go into the square. The army had taken up positions after the two days of sustained violence, not wanting to appear helpless, but what was phenomenal was that it wasn’t the army guarding the entrances, but lines and lines of stewards from the demonstration. They searched people as they came in, making sure no one had the kind of weapons that the pro-government gangs had used against them. I’ve never been frisked so often, and with as many apologies for being frisked.

The army is continuing to maintain its role as a force supposedly above politics. Unlike the last two days of uncontrolled violence against the protesters, which the army didn’t intervene decisively to stop, today, it helped create a buffer zone around Tahrir Square. So once the attack on Tahrir Square failed, there was barbed wire and tanks in all the pivotal positions around Cairo.

I got to Tahrir in the morning, before the end of prayers, when even larger numbers came to the demonstration. But already, the crowd numbered half a million, if not more, by my estimate.

Once inside Tahrir, you could see a level of organization and solidarity unlike anything I’ve seen before.

The first thing that struck me was the makeshift clinics set up all over the place, with dozens and dozens of nurses and doctors—many of whom said they were unemployed—stitching up people’s legs or arms or faces. These injuries were the result of the pro-government thugs—there were dozens of people walking around who had been patched up.

In addition to that, people had brought medical supplies with them. Others were circulating through the square with bags of bread, with water, with candy.

One of the aims of the pro-Mubarak forces had been to drive out all journalists—they focused in particular on foreign journalists to try to raise anger at a supposed foreign plot against Egypt. So it was good to see that journalists were operating freely and quite welcome in the crowd.

Probably the most significant sign of the health of the protest was the continued political discussion and debate within the square. I also saw dozens and dozens of people who were calling friends and relatives, and encouraging them to come to the square—trying to convince them of the fallacy of the government’s claims about chaos and violence.

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ACCORDING TO press reports, the U.S. government is lobbying hard to get officials around Mubarak to pressure him to step down.

The U.S. maneuvers around this question must, as always, be taken with a grain of salt. No one will say it in the mainstream media, but Obama could have held a press conference in which he simply declared that aid to Egypt is cut off, that this kind of violence will not be tolerated, and that the U.S. now stands squarely with the protesters.

But of course, he won’t say that because that’s not how diplomacy works. And the reason it doesn’t work that way is you can’t send that signal about a dictator the U.S. has been supporting for 30 years. Not because Mubarak isn’t finished, but because of how his downfall on those terms would affect other relationships and the whole Middle East.

So the U.S. is scrambling to find an alternative, and there are plenty of options. Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, showed up to the demonstration today to be among the protesters. He’s clearly thrown his hat in the ring to be the next president. There’s also Mohamed ElBaradai. There’s the Muslim Brotherhood. Even the current defense minister, Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, made the rounds through Tahrir Square today, under protection of soldiers, without much opposition to him.

But there are still plenty of difficulties and contradictions for the U.S. and for the rulers in Egypt, because there are significant problems from trying to gently step back from a military dictatorship.

Egypt is still that, in many respects. I should add that a couple offices of human rights and labor organizations were raided yesterday and closed down. It’s still very gingerly that people produce any public literature that’s against the regime. So it was quite an exercise, for example, to get leaflets into Tahrir Square today.

One problem for the U.S. is that Omar Suleiman figures prominently in their plans for a post-Mubarak transition. Many of the demonstrators were dismayed by Suleiman’s speech last night. But of course, most know the history of the man—that he was involved integrally in the repression that took place under Mubarak’s regime.

In general, most demonstrators still agree that their central demand is for the removal of Mubarak. That’s not to say that the rest of the regime should get off scot-free. But Mubarak’s downfall is what the movement has focused on so far, and when that’s accomplished, that significant victory will then open the process.

My own view is that it’s virtually impossible to imagine the departure of Mubarak without the cabinet and the government he’s put into place then becoming the central question for the movement. That’s the underlying dynamic.

Mubarak is the lightning rod that has brought all the forces together. Those forces don’t necessarily agree on the same outcome, but they’re at least agreed on the central necessity of seeing him go, and that will become the practical measure of what’s been accomplished.

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ONE OF the most interesting conversations I heard was one man trying to explain on the phone to someone the profoundly democratic thrust of the protests.

He said to the person he was talking to that people see demonstrators chanting “Allah Akbar,” and they conclude these protests must be organized by the Muslim Brotherhood. Then they see many famous actors and musicians showing up to Tahrir Square today, and they think it’s just a middle-class protest of the intelligentsia.

But it’s not the Muslim Brotherhood behind all this. It’s not the middle class. It’s not, as this man went on to say, only socialists and Marxists talking about workers’ rights, and it’s not people talking about just women’s rights. This is really a protest of all Egypt united in a profound movement for democracy.

I think that’s the first thing that has to be grasped about the uprising—that this is a movement that seeks fundamental democratic rights. As a friend of mine put it a few days ago, it’s the 1789 of Egypt—similar to the opening of the French Revolution in that way.

I think the second aspect that became certain today is that this is no longer the Egypt that existed prior to January 25—and there’s no turning back, however much violence the regime tries to organize. A tipping point has been reached in terms of the willingness of masses of people to put themselves on the line and defy the existing order, and that’s a genie that will be very difficult to put back in the bottle.

The third aspect apparent today was, as I described earlier, the enormous self-organization of the movement in the face of horrendous violence and repression—most especially, the attacks that took place over the past few days.

The fourth point is broader—about what happens next. You now have a movement that has emerged in a most explosive fashion and is present in every Egyptian town and city, which is the product of many, many years of injustice, including around economic questions of unemployment and dispossession. But it’s also an expression of the rise of a number of social struggles in Egypt, including the strikes of the last few years and the riots over rising food prices.

Right now, the movement is united around the political aim of getting rid of Hosni Mubarak. But hopefully, once Mubarak is unseated, the political questions will then mesh with social questions that still remain unresolved.

If that happens, there will be a really explosive mix of political and social issues that represents the possibility of political and social revolution.

I think that’s the key to understanding why Mubarak hasn’t left yet. It’s not just a question of his own stubbornness, but how the regime can continue and the status quo can be maintained, not just for the Egyptian elite, but for Israel, the U.S., its European allies and so on.

Their interest is in preventing this process from triggering an even greater change. That’s what these demonstrations are heralding, and we hope it’s a process that will continue.

One last story from today: When Mubarak spoke on television on Tuesday night and said that he wouldn’t run for re-election, he vowed that he was going to die on Egypt’s soil. One Socialist Worker reporter quipped at the time, “We should tell him that the soil is ready for him.” I translated that today at Tahrir Square, and I can report that it was greeted with wild applause and cheers—it’s another part of the ongoing Egyptian revolution.

Ahmed Shawki

Transcription by Matthew Beamesderfer

* http://socialistworker.org/2011/02/04/the-struggle-surges-ahead

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 The regime lashes back

Ahmed Shawki reports from Cairo on a day when Hosni Mubarak and his regime struck back with savage violence directed at protesters demanding that he go.

February 3, 2011

FORCES LOYAL to Hosni Mubarak counter-attacked on Wednesday in a highly coordinated attempt to intimidate the mass movement that has taken over the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities in a struggle against the dictatorship.

At least 600 people were injured and several killed by mobs of Mubarak supporters who converged on Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the struggle in the center of Cairo, and attacked protesters. People fought back with determination and tenacity throughout the day—as this article was being written at 9 p.m. in Egypt, the clashes were continuing.

The counter-attack followed Tuesday’s massive demonstrations against Mubarak, numbering somewhere between 6 million and 8 million around the country, according to estimates. Those demonstrations had an almost festive atmosphere, giving people confidence that the end of the dictatorship was near.

The picture is very different 24 hours later. To understand what happened in a single day, it’s important to go back to the speech that Mubarak gave on Wednesday night, in which he announced that he would not run for re-election this coming September, but that he intended to serve out his term and preside over the “transition” to a new regime. This was exactly what Barack Obama apparently signaled to Mubarak in both direct conversation and through visits to the presidential palace by U.S. diplomats yesterday.

Today, we found out what kind of transition Mubarak has in mind.

Mubarak’s regime is finished—I’m still convinced of that. But Mubarak and the U.S. want to maintain the regime with as little change to the fundamentals as possible. Mubarak is playing the one card left to him in order to survive, and it was one that shocked people with its viciousness. But what has happened in the previous eight days hasn’t been lost for the majority of Egyptians—their sense of their ability to mobilize, the first taste of freedom.

Mubarak talked in his speech about how he’s sacrificed for 30 years. My response was that he ought to make the ultimate sacrifice and take himself out. That’s obviously not what he’s doing now. But I also think there will be a massive counter-reaction tomorrow and in the days to come. People will be furious about the violence unleashed by the regime, and there are calls for big demonstrations again on Friday, the first day of the weekend in Egypt.

People were jubilant at the character of the demonstrations on Tuesday—their peacefulness, their sense of purpose, their unified demands. Today, they were taken aback by the crackdown. This will make people have to think about their own resolve and their organization—how it is that they confront the challenge from the regime from now on.

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IN HIS speech, Mubarak insisted that that he recognized the legitimate concerns of the Egyptians who were protesting, but he also suggested that the protesters at Tahrir Square were manipulated tools of unknown enemies of the Egyptian state. He repeated the line from a speech the week before that he wouldn’t allow chaos.

Exactly what he meant was made clear today. Beginning in the morning, large numbers of state security and police forces were mobilized around Cairo, as were people who are employed in state-owned companies, along with others who accepted the message of Mubarak that there would be a six-month transition before he left.

The counter-attack was highly organized. It had an ideological component, and there was also the use of physical force on the streets. Both aspects were part of an intense attempt to try to weaken the resolve of the occupiers and protesters at Tahrir Square.

There are three main bridges that lead into the central part of Cairo around Tahrir Square. In the morning today, I noticed one of these bridges was filled with people—they were supporters of Mubarak, who carried signs with messages like “Yes sir, Mubarak,” “Get out of town,” “Go back where you came from” and the like.

In addition, there were demonstrations in several different neighborhoods. In Mohandiseen, a middle-class neighborhood in Cairo where there had actually been a pro-Mubarak demonstration of 1,000 or 2,000 on Tuesday, these numbers were joined by several thousand more today.

In other parts of the city, a number of taxi drivers who participated in a government-sponsored program to trade in their old taxis for new ones and who have benefited from state subsidies as part of an attempt to build up the tourist industry were mobilized in force. They honked their horns and posted pre-printed signs in support of Mubarak in their windows.

In other parts of the town, there were caravans of cars honking their horns, and as the day developed, it became clear that many of these people were state functionaries who had been given the day off, and were instructed to participate in rallies in support of the president.

All this was picked up by the media as proof that there was support for the president after all. That’s part of the ideological component of the counter-attack, which tries to blame protesters for the problems of the country—that is, to turn the situation on its head. The goal is to say that it’s time now to unite as a country, it’s time to go back to work, it’s time for calm to prevail.

Of course, this could have been accomplished by Mubarak’s departure. Instead, the regime is trying to use the demonstrations against Mubarak as the explanation for continued disorder.

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MOST FRIGHTENING were the mobilizations of organized groups of thugs in and around central Cairo, demonstrating up and down the side streets leading toward Tahrir Square. There are about a dozen access points to Tahrir, or Liberation, Square. The thugs marched through the side streets to these access points to try to create an imposing presence that would intimidate the demonstrators—and to then penetrate into the square.

Early in the day, state security people were allowed into the square by the army—there was a report on television of a car filled with weapons stopped as it was attempting to get into Tahrir Square. As the day went on, the demonstrators were able to expel the thugs.

But as evening fell, there was a concerted attack started from several access points into Tahrir Square—in particular, coming off the Sixth of October bridge over the Nile, where there’s a construction site. The Mubarak supporters started throwing large projectiles and rocks into the crowd. I saw Molotov cocktails thrown directly into the crowd—later, there were press reports saying the pro-Mubarak thugs seemed to have an endless supply that they were throwing through the night.

A number of people were badly beaten, including journalists—Anderson Cooper of CNN was one of them. The attacks caused hundreds of injuries, but according to the report of a doctor outside Tahrir Square, the thugs were especially targeting medical staff who attempted to go into the square to help people who were injured.

There was also a bizarre scene where several thugs on horses crashed into the crowd, and a couple of the riders were tackled. They were carrying their police IDs, and those were held up to the crowd. That’s now been reported on the BBC and Al Jazeera—so it’s obvious to everyone who was behind this mobilization. This was an attempt to use violence against what had been an extremely peaceful and effective mass demonstration.

The intentions of the regime are now clearer than before. For one thing, in appointing Omar Suleiman, the former head of internal security, as his vice president, Mubarak was attempting to bolster the resolve of the sections of the state that rely on him.

He also intended with the violence today to send the message that Egypt is not Tunisia. There’s the obvious difference in terms of Egypt’s importance to the U.S. and Israel as a pillar of regional stability. But there’s also a difference in the regime—in terms of the number of people whose position within the security forces, the bureaucracy, the state-employed sector and so forth that depend on the current set-up. Those forces are being mobilized very consciously to come out in support of the regime.

I think that the way to understand these events is that the transition Mubarak has proposed isn’t really about transition at all. It’s about maintaining the essence of the regime. And in this regard, we need to see that the U.S. government is complicit in what’s taken place today.

I think the decision has been made that the stakes are too high to have the dictator Ben Ali go in Tunisia, and then have Mubarak go within a week or two. That would change the face and shape of everything in the Middle East, and it threatens American power in a way that’s unacceptable, whatever the public wording of Obama’s speeches about “democracy” and “supporting freedom.”

So the fate of the movement is at stake. Today’s events show us that if anybody expected a revolution against a 30-year dictator to go as easily as we’ve seen up until now, we now see what those in power are willing to resort to in order to protect their order.

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THE PLAN for the regime going forward isn’t hard to decipher. They’ll want to make difficult for people to make it back to Tahrir Square, where the demonstrations have been centered. And if they can keep the crowds thinned out, they could attempt an all-out assault, as the Chinese government did against the protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

One big question now is about the army. It’s clear that the army was introduced last week because the police force could no longer maintain order, and throughout the last week, there were some examples of fraternization between demonstrators and the soldiers.

But now, the police have reappeared. Officially, they’ve returned not in Tahrir Square, but mainly in middle-class neighborhoods like Mohandiseen, where they joined the community cordons that patrol the areas. And there’s no doubt whatsoever from any media source that many of the people who were assaulting demonstrators were agents of the state—police in plain clothes.

And in this context, the army determined that it would stay “above the fray.” At one stage today, I saw soldiers shoot in the air to push back some of the pro-Mubarak supporters from the square, because there was an outcry beginning to build against the attack on what was such a united and peaceful demonstration. But there’s also no doubt that the army allowed the violence to take place against the demonstrators.

Spokespeople for the army have been saying for several days now that the time for demonstrating is over, and that message was accentuated on Wednesday. The same phrase gets repeated over and over—that the army is “above the fray” and “above politics.” But that’s obviously not the case. In the history of Egypt, the army plays a very important role.

People are in shock at the degree of violence that’s been unleashed, and so there’s a kind of context where the army can be brought in to save the day. But it will be a complicated question, because everyone knows that the call for demonstrations on Friday will probably produce a bigger turnout than ever.

The situation is harder to read outside of Cairo. For example, from the reports I heard, Alexandria—where the anti-government demonstration on Tuesday also numbered in the millions, like Cairo—was virtually free of any pro-Mubarak support on Wednesday. Alexandria is more political place in some ways, in part because there was a yearlong movement against police repression that saw very large mobilizations. The anti-Mubarak sentiment has a harder edge in Alexandria.

There were also reports of big mobilizations against the regime on Tuesday in many towns across the country, as well as several strikes and occupations—thought that’s been subsumed to some extent by the fact that nobody’s going to work.

I think it’s important to point out as well that the regime may have overstepped itself in this latest bid to stay in power. As powerful as the images of Tuesday’s massive demonstration were in projecting the movement for change in Egypt, the images of the attacks on that peaceful demonstration will not be forgotten by anyone—certainly not by anyone who was in Tahrir Square today.

I think the key question is going to be the ability of the movement to continue to mobilize—to defend Tahrir Square, which has now become an important symbol, and also to understand that the regime has made a move, and the movement will have respond in kind.

The demonstrations are going to continue, but people are beginning to think through other questions, like how you get rid of a dictator who doesn’t want to go and who has an armed force at his disposal. These were the things that activists and socialists I spoke to today were preparing for—to expose the truth of the situation, to maintain the pressure on the regime by mobilizing to defend Tahrir Square, and to organize for a huge turnout on Friday for a showdown with the forces being used against them.

Ahmed Shawki

Transcription by Matthew Beamesderfer and Karen Domínguez Burke

* http://socialistworker.org/2011/02/03/the-regime-lashes-back

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 Millions against Mubarak

International Socialist Review editor Ahmed Shawki reports from Cairo on the latest mass protests against Hosni Mubarak—and what the future holds for Egypt’s uprising.

February 2, 2011

ASSIVE DEMONSTRATIONS across Egypt Tuesday were followed by a televised speech by President Hosni Mubarak, but his declaration that he wouldn’t run for re-election later this year after 30 years in power—apparently at the urging of U.S. government officials—won’t satisfy anyone.

Essentially, Mubarak has agreed not to run in an election where no one would have voted for him anyway. The only effect this can have on the uprising will be to sharpen people’s sense of determination still further.

The demonstrations today, on the eighth day of Egypt’s popular uprising, were a confirmation of the unanimity that Mubarak must go. As one sign in Tahrir Square in Cairo said, “Game over, next player.” That sentiment was dominant in all the crowds. But Mubarak continues to hang on, ignoring the volcano that’s now erupted beneath him.

According to the media, the sizes of the protests were bigger than any of the previous days. The estimate is that some 2 million Egyptians took to the streets in Tahrir Square and the surrounding areas in Cairo. The square was just a sea of people. In the port city of Alexandria, an estimated 1.5 million marched. In another port city, Port Said, 100,000 to 120,000 people marched. In the city of Suez, by the Suez Canal, an estimated 40,000 marched—and that list doesn’t include dozens and dozens of other protests all over the country.

As this article was being written, around 9 p.m. in Egypt, some 1 million people are still in Tahrir Square, or Liberation Square—several hours after the curfew, which no one is really abiding by anyway.

This is an outpouring of the pent-up frustration that millions of Egyptians feel at the rule of Hosni Mubarak. But the demonstrations have a festive feeling—an almost carnival-like atmosphere, with whole families of several generations showing up at the square during the day today.

It was a gathering of people from all walks of life—as broad a cross-section of Egyptian society as you could imagine, in terms of class, in terms of race, in terms of gender. One of the most important features was the fact that Muslims and Copts—who are Egyptian Christians—were raising the need for unity across religious lines. That’s especially important after a series of anti-Coptic attacks, including a deadly attack on a Coptic church in Alexandria on January 1.

Another thing I thought was interesting at the demonstration was the association people made between Mubarak and the U.S. government. That was more muted in the first days of the protests, from reports I saw, but not today—people, for example, chanted the slogan: “Mubarak, you coward, you’re a slave of the U.S.”

There was also a real sense of people having taken charge of things for themselves. For example, everyone who came to Tahrir Square today was searched going in—by agreement between the organizers of the demonstration and the army, to make sure that no provocateurs with weapons were let in. So people were asked to show their national identity card, and were frisked and searched if they had any bags.

If you can imagine this taking place with so many hundreds of thousands of people who got to the square, you get an idea of the atmosphere of calm order prevailing in spite of the incredible numbers of people.

The longer the uprising goes on, the more people begin to feel a sense of their own power—of their capacity to change and control their destiny. That, of course, is an intoxicating feeling, and you see it everywhere in the streets.

A lot hangs in the balance now. Egypt will never be the same—nor will the rest of the Middle East, nor the rest of the world.

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YESTERDAY, MUBARAK swore in a new cabinet after firing the whole government last week. It was the absurd act of a ruler whose time is done.

Everybody agrees that there’s no future for the regime. All the players—those at the top of Egyptian society, the United States and its European allies—are now concerned with how to get Mubarak out. But of course, each of the different forces has different solutions and different interests in mind.

Sections of the Egyptian ruling class, as well as the army, indicated more clearly today that they think Mubarak should step down. For example, a well-known and extremely wealthy Egyptian capitalist named Naguib Sawiris, the owner of the mobile phone company Mobinil, today hinted that Mubarak should go.

Yesterday, the army chiefs came on television and announced that the army wouldn’t fire on protesters, or block the demonstrators today from exercising their right to peacefully assemble.

And today, state-controlled television showed scenes from Tahrir Square—to the cheers of people in the offices of left-wing activists who I was visiting at the time. It’s an unheard-of event that a protest in Egypt is actually reported about in Egypt. And there were reports tonight that at Tahrir Square, state television actually showed up to interview people on the street for the first time since the events began to unfold.

All of which shows that even the country’s elite understand what everyone on the street already knows—that the Mubarak regime is finished.

But what comes between being finished and Mubarak actually leaving office is the big question, and that’s where the speech tonight comes in.

Mubarak promised that he wouldn’t run for re-election in the vote scheduled for September—still more than half a year away. The people in Tahrir Square booed and jeered Mubarak’s words as they were broadcast. They listened to him say, in effect, “I know how you feel, but you’ve been infiltrated, and you’re being manipulated.” That will satisfy no one.

So the question is: Why was this proposed? Before the speech, word leaked out that Barack Obama had called on Mubarak not to run for re-election, but nothing more. Why did the U.S. go along with something that so clearly wouldn’t be accepted by the demonstrators? To save face for Mubarak? Is he really worth it to them?

Of course, one thing that’s gained is that Mubarak and the U.S. show they won’t give in to popular demand—they won’t allow the example of the U.S. and its allies being dictated to by mass protest.

Another possibility is that this is an attempt to separate moderates—to create a cleavage among opponents of Mubarak. If they were able to get an agreement from a moderate leader like Mohamed ElBaradai to say that Mubarak’s speech wasn’t everything we wanted, but now it’s time for orderly constitutional change, and we should wait until September, that might begin the process of isolating more radical elements.

That’s a possibility. But so far, all the commentators responding to the speech have said it’s not enough. If Mubarak offered this five days ago, it might have worked. But now the situation has gone beyond that.

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FROM THE point of view of those who supported Mubarak for 30 years and who now understand this support can no longer be maintained—most obviously, the U.S. government—the chief concern is how to ensure a “stable transition.”

They need a transition that satisfies the mass demonstrations and demobilizes them, but that ensures a status quo without Mubarak, where the broader questions of democratization and inequality—of how Egypt is run, and who by—are avoided, while somebody is brought in as a transitional figure. Even a couple days ago, that was obviously Hillary Clinton’s view already, and the push to get Mubarak out of the way has continued to grow.

So why hasn’t Mubarak stepped down?

There are many possible explanations. One is his basic mental sanity. Another is that he’s been the ruler of Egypt for 30 years, and like Louis XIV in France, he thinks “L’état, c’est moi”—that Egypt is him, and without him, the country itself wouldn’t hold together.

But there are other questions. He may also be worrying about what happened to his cohort from Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled last month after 23 years in power, went to Saudi Arabia, and discovered he was going to be pursued for the crimes he committed while ruling Tunisia—which is why Ben Ali has reportedly left Saudi Arabia and taken up a new home in Libya.

The situation is contradictory. Everybody knows that Mubarak and his immediate allies are finished. Yet they continue to exert some influence, and even seem to be digging in. For example, one of the few places where the Internet was still functioning in Egypt was a luxury hotel downtown called the Semiramis—but that was turned off today. The offices of Al Jazeera were shut down. These are all signs of Mubarak’s attempt to maintain a foothold.

There are also rumors that members of the hated police are reappearing and attempting to act as provocateurs in certain areas, after being driven off the streets in the opening days of the demonstrations. The strategy is to let the country descend into chaos. That’s helped along by a number of gangs that have marauded around neighborhoods—it’s meant to create a sense of crisis, to which the government and presumably the army can step in and justify both a crackdown and a cleanup.

The problem for the regime is that the attempts at creating chaos appear, in the main, to have been thwarted so far by popularly mobilized neighborhood committees—which, in the absence of any police at all, began to take up the defense of people’s homes, small businesses and so on.

There are now checkpoints all over Egypt, but unlike previous checkpoints run by police, these checkpoints are run by local popular committees. Driving anywhere in the city after curfew, you’re bound to meet one or another checkpoint. But you’re let through, if there’s a reason for you to be in that neighborhood.

It’s not clear exactly what’s happening in every neighborhood. But the reports that I’ve managed to get are that in a great number of working class areas, it’s much more of a festive atmosphere. People have essentially set up popular militia committees, which are armed with whatever people can get, from pipes to baseball bats to knives, so they can defend themselves from the police and any threat by gangs of looters and the like.

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OVERALL, THE transformation is amazing. Two weeks ago, I was in Cairo for family reasons. The regime in Tunisia had just been overthrown, and I overheard an American tourist talking on her cell phone and saying, “No, don’t worry, I think this one is more stable.”

I actually tended to agree with that opinion. I left a few days before the protests began on January 25, and following events from the U.S., I couldn’t believe the rapidity of the change.

It’s even more obvious now that I’m back in Cairo—the enthusiasm and sense of spirits lifted is obvious, just in the way people comport themselves. After I returned from Tahrir Square today, I saw one of the television commentators remark on how there was hardly a fight or an act of violence at the demonstration, despite the massive numbers and the very, very tightly packed crowds. That was definitely true—it was another sign of the carnival atmosphere.

It’s difficult to predict where this will end. There could still be a deal cooked up by the U.S.—which sent a diplomat, Frank Wisner, to meet with Mubarak today—to have him step aside, in spite of the speech tonight. But I still don’t rule out the possibility of an attempt by the Mubarak regime to reestablish itself by force.

If it attempts to do so using the army, however, there are big questions. The army presence is very strong in Cairo, but its forces have been on the streets for five or six days, and it’s not acting as a hostile force—at least in terms of rank-and-file soldiers. That’s not to say that the army isn’t a hostile force—just that there’s been considerable fraternization going on.

I think movement toward an arrangement that pushes Mubarak aside is more likely, if only because as the protests continue, they have a spillover effect. Also today, Jordan’s King Abdullah fired his government and appointed a new prime minister after weeks of protests—which is exactly what Mubarak did in the early days of the demonstrations here, to no effect whatsoever. And already, according to reports, there are demonstrations in Jordan demanding further change.

These are momentous events, and we’ve only seen the start. We’re just at the beginning of what are likely to be even bigger transformations. Imagine, for example, the impact of Mubarak finally stepping aside—and yet there are still the underlying questions of unemployment that affects 40 percent of youth in Egypt, of Palestinian self-determination, of the domination of the Middle East by the U.S. and the West, of the control of Middle East oil.

All that hangs in the balance, and it’s forcing everyone involved to think through new strategies. For those of us who have wanted to see the end of the Mubarak regime for many years, our first step is to celebrate the uprising and continue to push as hard as we can—in Egypt and everywhere else—for the downfall of the dictatorship. But we also know that we’re just beginning this new struggle of the 21^st century.

Ahmed Shawki

Transcription by Christine Darosa and Karen Domínguez Burke

* http://socialistworker.org/2011/02/02/millions-against-mubarak

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