Tear Gas in Tahrir Square
A pall of tear gas hangs over Tahrir Square. The two-dollar gas masks being hawked by entrepreneurial vendors work quite well, but many people can’t afford them and use paper surgical masks or simply wrap scarves over their faces. Everywhere there are volunteers spraying saline into protesters’ red and streaming eyes, or handing out tissues. A million-man march was called for this afternoon and, as I write, thousands are streaming into the square, forming a crowd as dense as I have seen it since the final days of the revolution in February. The crowd is thickest near the entrance to Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which runs from between the landmarks of the American University in Cairo and a Hardees restaurant to the Interior Ministry two or three blocks away. Protesters have been battling state-security police there for four days.
From time to time, the thump of tear-gas canisters being fired goes up and the crowd shifts, running, stumbling back as a freshly stinging cloud comes over. I got gassed there this morning, and retreated, half blind, back to the square. I walked through the downtown side streets, circling closer to try and get a sense of the epicenter and got gassed a couple of times again. I circled wider and then doubled backed through the district of Abdeen, on the other side of the Interior Ministry. Here business continued almost as usual, cafés were open, cars were on the streets, women were out shopping. A convoy of ten or so big Army armored personnel carriers drove past, with officers sitting on top. People on the street called up, “Where are you going?” It wasn’t clear what the redeployment signified.
I went to see a friend who has an apartment only a block away from the Interior Ministry. He lives next to an intersection where black-clad state-security police milled with plainclothes agents next to several parked state-security vans. An unconscious protester was being hauled into a van. I asked one policeman, standing nearby, how things were going. He shrugged, and mentioned the march. I told him that he didn’t look very happy about it.
“Who can be happy with what’s happening in Egypt now?” he said.