Editorials & Other Articles

CJCRANE

(18,184 posts) Sat Aug 24, 2013, 12:14 PM Aug 2013

Egypt after the revolution: curfew nights and blood-stained days

For several nights after the curfew was declared on 14 August, the streets of Cairo were quieter and darker than I'd ever seen them. As quiet as the morgue, the saying goes, except that our morgue, in Zeinhom, was the busiest place in the city: the dead arriving in scores; giant, refrigerated meat trucks parked in the narrow road to hold the corpses the morgue could not accommodate; relatives and friends, distraught, trying to access bodies; residents burning incense on the street to try to mitigate the smell … The morgue is the point to which our reality keeps returning.

On the streets where the living live, the streets of the City That Never Sleeps, it has been as though we're waiting for an air raid: the lights are switched off, and there are no lights either in windows or balconies. Darkness and silence.

Across the country, though, in tens of locations, there has been light, vivid blazing light, leaping out of windows and licking at walls, catching at the nearby trees. Forty-two churches have been torched, and so have many other buildings: the beautiful 19th-century villa that housed the Giza governorate office on the Pyramids road, the Franciscan girls' school in Beni Sweif south of Cairo, the library of veteran journalist Mohamed Heikal on the Qanater road, and more.

This conflagration was the response to the police breakup of the Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo, a violent attack that left hundreds dead. Brotherhood spokesmen denied responsibility for the fires, but the local people everywhere say that it was groups of Brothers who attacked the buildings and set them alight. We had all watched the non-stop incitement against Christians, the threats on television. In the runup to 30 June, and after president Mohamed Morsi's deposal, the Brotherhood leadership had one by one taken to the air: "Mohamed Morsi is a red line: if you spray Morsi with water, we'll spray you with blood," they said. "We will blow Egypt apart." I though these were metaphors. But then came more prosaic, detailed descriptions: "There will be blood, there will be booby-trapped cars, there will be remote-control explosions." "This (violence) that's happening in Sinai will stop the second Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declares the reversal of the coup."

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/23/egypt-after-revolution-curfew-days

It's worth reading the whole article as it gives some insight into the Morsi era.

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