Egypt: Rage against the Mubaraks

There is one cry that stands out in Egypt: dictatorship will no longer hold us down

Editorial
The Guardian, Thursday 27 January 2011

"It has been 34 years since Egypt was shaken by mass demonstrations on the scale of Tuesday's "Day of Rage". In 1977, Anwar Sadat's decision to cut subsidies on food and fuel ignited three days of rallies until the government relented and restored them. Today, the rage is directed against not just a specific act, but a whole sclerotic regime. Mass arrests will not stem it.

Like Tunisia, the revolt is leaderless. Egypt's interior ministry's first response was to blame the Muslim Brotherhood, but the banned Islamist group has played little part in the demonstrations. Nor has the Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, around which opposition to the regime at one time coalesced.....

But as a wave of protest, sparked by self-immolation, unemployment and high food prices, sweeps the Arab world from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia, there is one cry that stands out in Egypt: dictatorship will no longer hold us down. Jack Shenker, our reporter, got a brief taste of the beating and maltreatment that Egyptians routinely receive at the hands of plain-clothed police during President Hosni Mubarak's long years of emergency rule. If nothing else happens, the idea that the Arab world needs ageing dictators as a bulwark against the rising tide of Islamism has been holed below the water line....."