Noticing my distress, the other detainee whispered: ‘I’m sorry. This is not Egypt. This is Mubarak’
In which an Arab American discovers what it’s like to be detained by Mubarak’s police:
Ahmed Moor wrote this article on Thursday in Cairo. It appears here for the first time.
I didn’t know where to go for today’s round of anti-regime protests. There wasn’t any question of whether they’d happen; Tuesday invigorated people. I spent some time in the morning trying to identify where demonstrators were likely going to congregate, but reports were confused so I set out for Tahrir square. That’s where the previous day’s largest protest had been.
The area was teeming with people when I got there, but they weren’t demonstrators. Tuesday had been a national holiday – Police day – and on Wednesday everyone was back at work. Looking around I wasn’t sure how the pedestrian crush and roundabout traffic congestion was going to impact things. The cars, busses, motorcycles and trucks would make it impossible for the riot police to create their human cordon in the streets. And the numbers of passersby made it difficult to identify who was there to protest and who was just there for regular life. I figured that the demonstrators would have the upper hand at the outset.
A crowd started to form near one of the subway stops on the square and I made my way over. The station had been shut down to make it difficult for people to travel to the area – it was about 2 pm now, about the same time the protest began on Tuesday. Commuters were confused about what to do and began to vent their frustration. That was how the protest began. Ironically, the first chant was, “Let us go home!”
The riot police quickly surrounded us – I was pretty close to the people chanting by then – and began to tighten the cordon. I was filming everything, and I wasn’t too concerned about being inside the circle of riot guards. They just didn’t seem that threatening after the events of the previous day.
Things began to get nasty very quickly. The riot police had been passive for the first few minutes, only holding the cordon and tightening it. But then their commanders appeared with mad eyes and preset viciousness. They snarled orders: “Hit him! Harder!” and, “Give them shit to eat!”
And they did.