Egyptian protesters throw stones towards Egyptian security forces during clashes in Cairo on November 21, 2012.[/caption]
Downtown Cairo is at fever pitch again this week.What was supposed to be a commemoration of the deadly rioting that rocked the capital last year—when dozens of protesters died during clashes with Egypt’s central security forces—has turned into something resembling a rematch.
Most of the protesters who began arriving on Monday to honor the memory of last year’s victims came in a mood of reflective contemplation.
Mohamed Mahmoud Street, the road alongside the American University of Cairo where most of the rioting in 2011 took place, has become a shrine to Egypt’s revolutionary dead. With its giant murals featuring the faces of prominent protesters who died at the hands of the security services, it has been transformed into a place of pilgrimage for Egyptians wishing to honour their “martyrs”—the ubiquitous term used by activists to describe the dead.
But instead of a commemoration, this week’s memorials turned into another orgy of rioting. A hundred yards from my window as I type these words, a group of around thirty policemen are standing on top of a five-storey building in Mohamed Mahmoud Street, hurling rocks and slabs of masonry down onto protesters below. A bit further along the road—which has become a no-go zone littered with stones, broken bricks and planks of wood—youths are battling with the police, who have taken control of a school next to the American University of Cairo.
Every time they get too close for comfort, explosions echo down the street as the police unleash another volley of tear gas canisters. Such has been the order of play for the past couple of days.
It was the shabab, or youth, who started it on Monday afternoon—lobbing rocks at police who were standing behind one of the concrete walls built to protect the Ministry of the Interior. The police only inflamed matters, however, when they decided to gain access to the Lycée Français, also on that street, and started hurling slabs of concrete from the roof.
Yet to pursue such talk is to deal in bagatelles. The real question, of course, is why it is happening. Why, after two years, are the police still such an object of hatred for some Egyptians?
At this point, a caveat: over the past few days there have perhaps been, at most, three or four thousand people in and around Downtown Cairo. Those fighting the police constitute a very small minority, and many of them are themselves no doubt rioting just for kicks; however, in the minds of some of his opponents, Mohamed Morsi has not done enough to reform the Interior Ministry since taking office.
The surly officers in the provincial police stations who routinely beat and humiliate detainees are still in place; the same culture of contempt for ordinary Egyptians still pervades the Ministry. It is unfair to expect Morsi to have initiated substantial changes after so little time in the job, but revolutionaries can be a fickle bunch. If real change is not forthcoming—and suspicions that the Brotherhood has betrayed the 2011 uprising continue to grow—the president will soon find himself on the uglier side of history.
