In Egypt, Mubarak's repression machine is still alive and well

The revolution must support the strikes by conscripts and civil servants if we are ever to dissolve the hated interior ministry

Hossam el-Hamalawy
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 May 2012

"A little over a week ago, in Obour City, hundreds of Egypt's notorious Central Security Forces (CSF) conscripts mutinied over torture received at the hands of their officers. The conscripts took to the highway, blocked the road, and even started chanting a famous anti-police song composed by the Ultras White Knights, one of the country's football fan groups. The mutiny was put down quickly by the army, together with concessions and promises offered.

This was not the first time such a mutiny has occurred since the January 2011 revolution. Several mutinies occurred on the "Friday of Anger". The following day, I met a guy in Mohamed Mahmoud Street while marching on the interior ministry who was a CSF conscript who escaped from his camp to join the protesters. Repeated mutinies were reported in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere over the course of the following months, over ill treatment by officers, long working hours and bad food.

The CSF is the interior ministry's army, and its central arm in crushing street dissent. Those conscripts are poorly paid, poorly fed, tortured, and made to do the state's dirtiest job. The last time they undertook a full-scale mutiny was in 1986. It was brutally crushed by Mubarak who sent in the army......

Even if the ruling army generals manage to crush the ongoing police protests and prevent them from spreading, the objective conditions for another 1986-style mass scale mutiny are still there. Those new waves of conscripts are not only the sons of poor peasants and workers, who have no love for their middle-class officers, but the context is one of revolution. Those new conscripts have witnessed it, and could well have participated in it prior to their conscription.

The interior ministry will not be able to restructure its CSF. There is not the political will; the current police generals who belong to Mubarak's interior minister Habib el-Adly's clique are more than happy to see the status of their army of slaves remain unchanged. The army generals too would love to see Mubarak's CSF revived and for it to take charge of putting down protests instead of having to involve the military police.

As we continue to organise and fight against the interior ministry, in an effort to dissolve it and replace it with community policing, such strikes and mutinies by the conscripts, corporals and civil servants should be supported by the revolutionary forces to create more fractures in this machine of repression."