By Donald Macintyre
The Independent
".......One of the many consequences of the past nine days is, or should be, a much wider understanding that the "street" is a much more complex human organism than that. As Western politicians have wrung their hands and worried that the "stability" afforded by President Hosni Mubarak's autocracy could give way to the rise of a new and dangerously Islamist Egypt, the hundreds of thousands who have marched and stood in Cairo's Tahrir Square and in central Alexandria have started to tell the world a story that conspicuously fails to fit neatly into this binary model. One part of this is the price paid domestically over the past 30 years for that stability: a brutally thuggish police, a fawning and utterly controlled state television network, the concentration of absolute power in the hands of a dictator who rigs elections and is chief, not only of the government, but of the judiciary, the army, the non-military security forces, even the journalists' association. Indeed, the widespread public understanding by Egyptians of just how concentrated is this power is why the protests are focused so personally on the President, and why his appointment of a new deputy or a new cabinet cuts so little ice with the protesters......"
The Independent
".......One of the many consequences of the past nine days is, or should be, a much wider understanding that the "street" is a much more complex human organism than that. As Western politicians have wrung their hands and worried that the "stability" afforded by President Hosni Mubarak's autocracy could give way to the rise of a new and dangerously Islamist Egypt, the hundreds of thousands who have marched and stood in Cairo's Tahrir Square and in central Alexandria have started to tell the world a story that conspicuously fails to fit neatly into this binary model. One part of this is the price paid domestically over the past 30 years for that stability: a brutally thuggish police, a fawning and utterly controlled state television network, the concentration of absolute power in the hands of a dictator who rigs elections and is chief, not only of the government, but of the judiciary, the army, the non-military security forces, even the journalists' association. Indeed, the widespread public understanding by Egyptians of just how concentrated is this power is why the protests are focused so personally on the President, and why his appointment of a new deputy or a new cabinet cuts so little ice with the protesters......"
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