The old regime’s atte-mpts to have citizens choose between sec-urity and chaos turned against them and brought their rule to an end.
The Egyptian government took security away from citizens, released thousands of prisoners into the streets, and murdered 365 protesters, in hopes of scaring opponents. Instead, they helped increase their number. These are no longer rumored accusations from activists, but are supported by witnesses, YouTube videos and images. Instead of increasing fear, they increased the relationship among the Egyptian people and increased people’s commitment to end the unjust government.
Hassam Kamel is an Egyptian who participated in the Jan. 26 protests, when people started getting killed and detained. He moved to Canada six years ago, and visits Egypt twice a year. He spoke about the problems starting years ago.
“Every time I used to come I used to say it can’t stay like that much longer. Something has to happen. There were a couple of train crashes, the bread problem, the oil spillage somewhere, the garbage problem and the killing of all the pigs that made it worse. Then, last summer there was electricity and water shortage. It was all happening very fast and it was obvious that the government reached the bottom in terms of mismanagement and carelessness,” Hassan said.
He said that the movements started increasing with the upcoming presidential elections. No one was allowed to run but Hosni Mubarak or his son, Gamal Mubarak. On Jan 25 people we were asking for change, but later changed to removing Mubarak when he proved his poor judgment in dealing with it, stated Kamel. The regime’s plan to panic people was to have them turn against protestors, but it backfired and more people protested and turned against Mubarak and his regime.
American University in Cairo student, Gamal Kharma, was forced to protect his neighbor hood, along with others, when Egyptian government decided to take police officers off the streets and released around 10,000 criminals from prison.
“We spent every night patrolling the neighborhood’s streets, checking for IDs of anyone we didn’t recognize,” Kharma said.
This made Egyptian people continue to distrust the government. Despite the hardships of those days, the experience proved to Egyptians that they together could overpower injustice, Kharma said. It built their confidence in one another: poor, rich, young and old. They were all working together to protect each other.
Unaware of the situation-becoming world wide, the Egyptian government drove over protestors with police cars, fired at civilians, and sprayed teargas. Each time this would happen the officials would deny it on Egyptian television, while videos released proved otherwise. This made the number of anti-government protestors increase on Egyptian streets. If you weren’t on the street to see it, you were still able to get a hold of the proof.
As someone who was born in Egypt and has family who continued to live there, I was able to hear many stories from Egypt. Family friends were attacked in protests and some were detained. Many of the attackers were caught and found with police IDs and admitted to being bribed by the government to attack civilians.
No longer was the government’s inequitable regime secret, but it became unleashed to the Egyptians and the world.
The more the government attem-pted to stay in power, the more they encountered more opposition. One incident was when Google executive Wael Ghonib was released after being detained for 12 days and, the following day, the number of protestors massively increased, to show support to Ghonib.
Each day passed, the number of protestors increased. It wasn’t pressure by foreigners, or the Muslim Brotherhood; it was the regime’s government’s own actions that helped increase anti-Mubarak protestors and eventually destroy their rule Feb 11.
Janan Buisier is a journalism major and can be reached for comments or questionst at [email protected].
