CRACKDOWN IN EGYPT

Sandmonkey wrote me about the latest frightening development in the continuing  crackdown in Egypt. His post here is most disturbing.  Pathetic that this would be happening as dhimmi Condi was visiting Mubarak. That woman must go, she has done more to hurt the fight for freedom than any two bit dictator.

Sandmonkey mentions towards the end of his post that when he reached hom two  things happened: his phone suddenly died, which has all his numbers. The funny thing is when I tried to SKYPE him yesterday and the day before, it said USER HAS EXPLICITLY DENIED ACCESS.

I won't forget Sandmonkey's parting words the last time we spoke (click here) about the crushing crackdown on bloggers in Egypt, "thank the Democrats for me."

Here is his eyewitness account. Go here and read it all.

I just came back from the demonstrations…No, that's a lie.

I've been back almost an hour and a half now, and it took me this long to get myself together, shake myself out of the shock I am feeling, and actually sit down and write this. Here is what happend.

Around 5:15 pm today I was in Talaat Harb square with my friend M. when I called Hosam and asked him his whereabouts. He informed me that he is at 7amadah cafe next to the AUC. So I went there with M. and sat with him, while waiting for the people to gather up. On the road over we counted about 40 state security cars and we saw the delpoyment of SS troops everywhere. We joked about what awaits us during this demonstration and how if we get beat up we will just start beating up Hosam and pretend to be part of the plainclothed SS thugs, and how it's not a good sign that Rice is meeting up with Mubarak today and how the US doesn't give a damn anymore what happens to us. Slowly more people came and joined us, including M's friend H., Bassem  and gemyhood (Mohamed Gamal) and his girlfriend R. Bassem and Hosam started arguing back and forth over which strategy to use: Bassem in favor of small group infiltration, while Hosam for big group formation. I couldn't care less either way. I just wanted to move. And we finally did.

We got out on Tahrir square and were trying to figure out which is the best strategy to get to the square itself, which was surrounded by SS soldiers. While walking you couldn;t help noticing the redicilous amount of plainclothed SS agents just standing around and holding walkie-talkies. Whenever someone would stop they would tell them they couldn't stand where they were standing and that they had to move along. While walking with the group, I got a phonecall from Alia, who was one street behind us with two more friends, one of them is Salma. I met up with them and we started to walk together towards the bigger group which was now surrounded with police officers and plainclothed thugs. When we tried to cross the street towards them the police wouldn;t let us, and then they did allow us to cross the street but not get on the otherside of the pavement, forcing us to go back and cross the street again. I was holding M's hand from one side and Alia's from the other, when I heard Salma say: "Fuck this" and started running across the street towards the square with the other girl, who pulled Alia with her. Alia tried to pull me with them but M. held my hand and said "Don't you leave us!" so I had to let them go. And right before they reached the square they were tackled by the police who swarmed on them from every direction. Some of the guys from the bigger group went directly to their rescue and pandamonium broke out for about 2 minutes, all the whole the police officers were pushing us to move forward. I could see the girls back in the bigger group, but the bigger group wasn't moving because it was trapped. And then I saw someone break free and run, and recognized him as Jimmyhood, and also saw 5 plainclothed police thugs run after him and hold him and started to pull him towards the Paddywagon. One of his friends triued to come to his rescue and was grabbed as well and thrown in the same car with him, and then the car started moving taking them to an unknown destination. That break, however, allowed the other demosntartors to break free and start walking towards Talaat Harb sqaure, while chanting Anti-Mubarak slogans. As people were walking, you could see the police walking behind them, as well as you can see the police lining up on the sidewalk in order to entrap them.

picture by Amr Abdallah

Comments

[sultan_knish]

dot.coms have shown themselves all too willing to cooperate with local governments, wouldn't suppose skype is any different than yahoo or google in that regard