Josh Stacher was at the latest Egyptian Kifaya demonstration:
The Popular Campaign for Change, aka Kifaya (or Enough), gathered at Cairo U’s main gate a little before 1pm. Several journalist friends and I decided that a fair estimate of protesters to be in the neighborhood of 200 people. Hence, this is considerably smaller than Kifaya hoped would turn out today. It is also smaller than the previous two demonstrations.
As my colleague mentioned, “this is not even big enough to close down traffic” as we snapped photos and compared it to other protests we had previously witnessed.
...Overall, the CSF were calm and visibly on orders not to start trouble. They just stood there in the sun in their helmets with their bamboo sticks watching almost half-bored and unaware of what exactly they were doing. Naturally, they know it was about crowd-control but it was not clear they were even clued into why this crowd needed encircled. Perhaps, they were acting.
Away from the center of the demo, I saw different things. As I stood off to the side, one Cairo U student asked another, “What is this noise all about?” The other one said, “They don’t want Hosni.” In a shocked voice, the first one responded, “All my Goodness!” (ya Khabir Abeyod). It was when I was off to the side that a lot of the plain-clothes security types were respectfully moving the gathered onlookers further away from the demo’s epicenter. They were saying “Ya Basha, yella. Itfadilu” as they shooed us away. It was pretty pointless though as we were out of earshot of the slogans anyways. My sense was that most of the onlookers were looking out of curiosity rather than sympathy.
Read the rest. Al Jazeera covered the demonstration, and this time al Arabiya did too, after largely ignoring previous Kifaya demonstrations. I didn't notice any particular differences in their stories, other than that al Jazeera said "hundreds" of protestors, while al Arabiya said "more than 500". In general, though, in most of the Arab media the demonstration probably couldn't get traction against the Lebanon-Syria issue which dominates most commentary right now.
UPDATE: more from Josh on the attendance at the protest (short version: there may have been two different protests, one much bigger than the one he saw) and on the Egyptian press coverage of the protest (short version: disappointing.)
Just wondering. I notice a certain correspondence among the slogans--Belgrade (Otpor::Resistance), Tbilisi (Kmara::Enough) and Kiev (Pora::Now). Now Lebanon's "Enough" and Egypt's "Kifaya"?
Le Monde Diplomatique suggests involvement of Madeleine Albright’s National Democratic Institute, Senator John McCain’s International Republican Institute, George Soros’ Open Society and James Woolsey’s Freedom House in launching a popular movement with the appropriate levels of stagecraft, press and public relations. Any thoughts?
Posted by: nur al-cubicle | February 21, 2005 at 07:59 PM
Nur, I checked your website for *your* thoughts about. Great work. Please keep blogging the Lebanese situation.
Posted by: Leila Abu-Saba | February 23, 2005 at 01:06 AM