Written by: Associated Press
3 min readCairoDec 18, 2011 01:04 AM IST
First published on: Dec 18, 2011 at 01:04 AM IST
Hundreds of Egyptian soldiers swept into Cairos Tahrir Square on Saturday,chasing protesters and beating them to the ground with sticks and tossing journalists TV cameras off of balconies in the second day of a violent crackdown on antimilitary protesters that has left nine dead and hundreds injured.
The violent,chaotic scenes suggested that the military fresh after the first rounds of parliament elections that it claimed bolstered its status as the countrys rulers was now determined to stamp out protests by activists demanding it transfer power immediately to civilians.
TV footage,pictures and eyewitnesses accounts showed a new level of force being used by the military against pro-democracy activists the past two days. Military police openly beat women protesters in the street. Witnesses said they beat and gave electric shocks to men and women dragged into detention,many of them held in the nearby parliament building,witnesses said.
Mona Seif,an activist who was briefly detained during violence Friday,said she saw an officer repeatedly slapping a detained old woman in the face,telling her to apologise for joining the protests.
It was a humiliating scene, Seif told the private TV network Al-Tahrir. I have never seen this in my life.
With Egypt in the midst of multistage parliamentary elections,the violence threatens to spark a new cycle of fighting after deadly clashes between youth revolutionaries and security forces in November that lasted for days and left more than 40 dead. The clashes in November involved the widely disliked police force. But in a key difference,this time the police have stayed away and the crackdown is being led entirely by the military. That could indicate a new confidence among the military that it has backing of the broader public after elections held under its watch that saw heavy turnout,were largely peaceful and the fairest and freest in living memory.
But the heavy-handed crackdown is likely to rally its opponents. Among those killed Friday was an eminent 52-year-old Muslim cleric from Al-Azhar,Egypts most respected religious institution. At the funeral Saturday of Sheik Emad Effat,who was shot in the chest,hundreds chanted Retribution,retribution, and began to march from the cemetery to Tahrir.
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