I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….

“انت دست على رجلي ليه!”
لم أكن رفعت قدمي. لكن المكان مزدحم، ولا بد أنه أخطأ. أجيب كطبيعتي لأنهي نقاشا مثل هذا: “لأ ماحصلش. وإن كان، فيا سيدي Ø£…

Some plain clothes police (they had a walkie-talkie) stole my camera and four or three of them dragged me from my shirt violently in the streets. They did the same to my friends. We were no directly upseting them we were just taking photos of another

Amr tells his story

Manal ’s account

Alaa account

got to write something to avoid spam filter, sheesh

Sorry to those of you that were subject to the thievery and beatings by plain-clothes MoI minions.

mostafa’s account:
http://mostafa.foolab.org/node/96

my account:
http://digressing.blogspot.com/2005/06/blog-post_27.html

i remember during the protests against the iraq war there was a lot of sympathy among the conscripts manning the barriers. they tended to agree with the protesters and moved with the crowds to a certain extent, allowing giant surges to push through the barricades every now and then. most of the actual beatings were at the hands of the regime thugs, not amin al-markazy. if you’ll recall, a running theme of these protests was as much anti-mubarak as it was anti-america, anti-war, largely because of what i percieved to be frustration with the government’s impotence in the face of american power.

now to my question. you noted repeatedly that the conscripts exhibited nervous behavior and at times seemed intimidated by the protestors. in previous photo spreads, you’ve also documented soldiers reaching out for candles, smiling in the background, etc. what do you suppose the level of identification is with the protesters? is there any? and if not identification, how aggressive are they in restraining their fellow egyptians… or is most of the actual abuse being left ot the hired thugs? i’m just curious, should things escalate, what level of resistance the CSF would actually provide… at what point would they break.

as always, thanks for being on the ground when we can’t be.

then there was the trying to squeeze us thing which naturally lead to more tension.

but what caused the big fight was how they prevented a large group of protesters from joining us, we ended up being two groups seperated by a wall of security we shoved till we managed to break the lines and join the two groups.

after the protest we had a scuffle with security and 12 of us where trapped inside another barricade for an hour or so in front of the justice ministry, they beat us up and stole two cameras.

What did y’all make of the low turnout? I was actually expecting that more people would be willing to protest against torture than attend a general Kefaya event.

Perhaps this is what caused the shoving match. Naturally though, after the first such scuffle, then some of the protesters were looking for a fight.

As for the CSF being trigger-happy, I don’t think they were. When the CSF is ordered to go, it is much more brutal and relentless than a couple scared conscripts waving their truncheons. I think they pulled their sticks out of fear rather than wanting to have a go at the protesters.