Egypt: A facebook response to Mubarak’s actions in Tahrir square today

Rob Khan is a teacher at a school in Cairo. He is responding to a suggestion that Mubarak’s supporters who attacked the demonstrators were neither paid nor thugs… 

We are not talking about the Presidential palace, we are talking about Tahrir last night, we are talking about people who came in on horses and camels and charged people who up to that point were protesting peacefully. We are talking about all the people who were caught and had police ID on them. We are talking about an Army that was not given the order to separate the two groups. Who has the authority to order the Army to separate the two groups regardless of who paid who.

 

Why did they not do it? Why did the President or Vice president not give the order last night to send the Police or Army in to separate the two groups? maybe that answers the question. Surely if pro-government protestors had been paid by someone else to go and ‘blacken’ the good name of the government they should have sent in the troops to stop it. How can one man achieve a popularity of 90+ % and have so many people opposed to him. How many leaders in the world that have had what are referred to ‘free elections’ been in power for thirty years.

The people I was with, breathed a sigh of relief and thought “OK he will not run again so we can move on”. Last night the same people were saying he is showing his true colours and that he could not be trusted.

Let the people continue to protest in Tahrir, how is that stopping people from going back to normal in the rest of Cairo. if the government is really committed to what it says, it should be allowing the protests to continue in Tahrir and protecting the protestors and doing the same for pro-government protestors in separate locations, whilst it speaks to the opposition to transfer power. That way everybody else can get on with normal life, and small-scale protests in a dedicated area can continue.