But demonstrators surprised the regime. They did not come out in the morning or noon or afternoon. Subscribe to our Youtube channel for all latest in-depth, on the ground reporting from around the world. News Magazine Why are anti-Sisi protests growing in Egypt? What would you like to learn more about? Morsi's family beset by tragedy and tormented by Sisi and his allies. Did Sisi release ex-army chief to please Egyptian generals? Saudi coalition: Air strikes kill scores more of Yemen's Houthis near Marib.
China-US climate deal boosts Glasgow talks. Sudan's army chief appoints new ruling council, headed by himself. Paying the price for seeking freedom in Egypt Egypt country profile. What happened on Friday? The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. View original tweet on Twitter. Image source, AFP. Hundreds of protesters filled Tahrir Square, a key site in Egypt's revolution. In a video on Friday that was published as protests were gaining momentum, Ali encouraged people to stand strong and continue demanding their rights.
I miss Egypt and my people. A pro-government TV anchor said only a small group of protesters had gathered in central Cairo to take videos and selfies before leaving the scene. Another pro-government channel said the situation around Tahrir Square was quiet. Since el-Sisi came to power, economic austerity measures have been introduced, helping to reboot an economy battered by the Arab Spring.
As Neil points out below, we are already observing a different state form as the regime eschews ruling through a dominant party, akin to the Mubarak-era National Democratic Party NDP. Their parents can be heard mumbling too, as they have lost one mega-project tender after another to the military and its affiliate companies. It is not unreasonable to think that the shift to vernacular in presidential speeches is about creating new publics. So there are certainly new cleavages in the making.
But what of old cleavages? The revolution undoubtedly exacerbated, and the agents of counterrevolution willfully inflated, an intractable divide between the Muslim Brotherhood MB on the one hand and all other stripes of opposition—whether Salafist or leftist—on the other.
Neil Ketchley: The government of President el-Sisi has clearly diverged from the Mubarak template of rule in several important ways. The enhanced role of the military in the economy and the reluctance to build a political wing to the regime comparable to the National Democratic Party are but two obvious examples. During the first days of the January 25 Revolution, police forces primarily relied on tear gas and batons, rather than live ammunition and birdshot. Following the removal of President Morsi in a coup, protestors taking to the streets have had to reckon with armed security forces who opened fire with impunity.
The Interior Ministry has become particularly proficient at cracking down on the modalities of protest pioneered in early Police tactics were honed in the year following the coup, when the Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Morsi supporters launched thousands of street protests. The apogee of this repression was the Rabaa Massacre on August 14, , when over 1, protestors occupying a square in northwest Cairo were killed in just a few hours.
That violent episode forms part of a pattern in which security forces have used any means necessary to deny space and visibility to anti-regime protestors. There has also been an unprecedented wave of arrests. To give a sense of the scale of the crackdown that has followed the coup, a forthcoming version of the WikiThawra dataset contains information for over , political arrests in Egypt over the past seven years.
This is likely an underestimate. Those detained often recount instances of torture. Female protestors and activists have also been targeted with calibrated sexual violence. In the post-coup period, however, sexual assault by security forces became commonplace. A large number of the victims were pro-Morsi supporters, often female university students detained for joining anti-coup protests. Building on what Hannah notes above, as with much of the harshest repression under the current Egyptian government, the political affiliations of these protestors and the cleavages that have come to pattern Egyptian politics has meant that those victims have received little support or attention from human rights groups.
Hannah Elsisi: For many who took part, it is quite difficult to talk about the January 25 Revolution and its legacy. Certainly, that is the case for me. It is not a function of their participation but rather of the continuous cannibalization and erasure by the state of any evidence that a revolution happened at all. Cultural production—films, exhibitions, art, TV soap operas, literature, poetry, historical accounts and archives—is typically how people come together to talk about collective experiences of joy and trauma, of loss and failure, and of shared aspirations for the future.
But this production and its attendant spaces has been greatly proscribed, diminished, and at times disfigured by censorship and the threat or fact of incarceration. It is to the credit of those—perhaps more prominent in exile, but more numerous in Egypt—who are still managing to think creatively through these years.
At the individual level, there have been significant ruptures in patriarchal gender mores and norms in cities beyond the capital and in social milieus beyond politicized middle-class leftists and liberals. Having lived through the liminal euphoria of a revolutionary situation, more participants have taken a starkly different approach to their bodies, their intimate and familial relationships, their living and working arrangements, sex and sexuality than—in my view—at any other moment in modern Egyptian history.
This is a movement that is in many ways more radical and progressive in its demands, forms of homosocial solidarity, and cross-class mode of organization than its Global North counterparts. So I think the revolution will come to be viewed as a watershed moment for new emergent standards of gender difference, conformity, and intelligibility—in the same way, say, as National Liberation Front resistance or Kemalism constituted watersheds in Algerian and Turkish gender history, respectively.
Still, it is important to recognize that incarceration and exile have been the most common and the most impactful consequences of participation in mass protests for many Egyptians and their loved ones. Youssef El Chazli: I want to echo what Hannah mentioned regarding a difficulty in reflecting on these anniversaries.
It is not just something one can talk about, from a distance, professionally. But anniversaries do tend to produce evaluative moments, a balance sheet of sorts.
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