Cairo, Egypt - In a cafe along the
Nile, a young couple lingered over cups of tea, the only customers in a
venue that could seat hundreds. Bored vendors in a tourist market
lamented the lack of business. The kitchen staff from an upscale sushi
restaurant sat outside smoking cigarettes, gesturing at the empty
tables: There’s nobody to cook for.
Cairo emerged this weekend from a nighttime curfew imposed three
months ago, after security forces brutally cleared two protest camps
filled with supporters of President Mohamed Morsi, who was ousted by the
army in July. More than 1,000 people were killed in the clearing and
the days of bloody street violence that followed.
There are tanks a few streets over. How is this normal?
- Bassem Abdel Ghani
|
The curfew has been eased several times since then, but it continued
to take effect at 7pm on Fridays in an effort to prevent protests after
communal prayers.
Many people had expected this Friday would be a return to Cairo’s
usual late-night rhythms. And yet in many areas it wasn’t: Restaurants
were half-empty; shopkeepers sat alone in their brightly-lit stores.
Modest crowds trickled into cafes downtown, or at the Khan el-Khalili
market, which was a popular tourist attraction before the tourism
industry crashed. But the atmosphere was subdued.
"They come and they walk around and they look, but they don’t buy
anything," said Mustafa Farrag, a vendor hawking luggage on the market’s
main street. "Nobody has any money."
Even Cairo’s gruelling traffic was unexpectedly light. Before the
crisis, Arab League Street - the main road through the middle-class
Mohandiseen district - was often an impassable parking lot on weekend
nights. But the handful of cars driving through on this Friday zipped
along at near-highway speeds.
Everyone had their own explanation for the mood. Some joked that
Egyptians had simply forgotten how to stay up late. One man quipped that
everyone was waiting for a personal appeal from General Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi, the widely popular defence minister who led Morsi’s ouster.
But in interviews in a half-dozen Cairo neighbourhoods on Friday
night, many people simply said there was nothing to celebrate, not with
the country sharply divided and in the grips of a grinding economic
crisis.
"There are tanks a few streets over," said Bassem Abdel Ghani, eating
dinner inside his small kiosk on a dark street in the working-class
Agouza neighbourhood. "How is this normal?"
Indeed, the return to "normal" is largely a technicality: The state
of emergency ended automatically, because the constitutional declaration
issued after Morsi’s removal limited it to three months unless an
extension was approved by public referendum.
"The idea that we should celebrate when curfew ends is absurd.
There’s no achievement in that," said Khalid Abdulla, an Egyptian
activist and actor. "You celebrate when you’ve wrested your freedoms out
of someone else’s hands, not when, after three months, their hands are
forced by a constitutional declaration that they’ve written."
Restrictive new laws
The interim government, fearful of renewed protests, is moving to curtail personal freedoms.
Security forces on Friday closed Raba’a al-Adawiya and Nahda squares,
the sites of this summer’s pro-Morsi sit-ins, as well as Tahrir Square.
The interior ministry announced that it would deploy additional police,
and random checkpoints stopped traffic in several locations. Soldiers
and armoured personnel carriers could still be seen on the streets in
several locations.
 |
| Governors can create "protest-free zones" [Gregg Carlstrom/Al Jazeera] |
But Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is in disarray, with most of the
group’s leaders in jail or in hiding, and the day passed quietly: A few
thousand of his supporters marched peacefully to the Ittihadiya
presidential palace in the afternoon, but ended their rally well before
sunset. One person, a 16-year-old boy, was killed during clashes in the
northern city of Alexandria.
Still, with the curfew and state of emergency over, the cabinet is
working on a set of restrictive new laws that have been widely panned by
human rights groups.
The most-discussed piece of legislation is a "protest law", which was
sent to interim president Adly Mansour earlier this week for review.
Initial drafts of the law required Egyptians to seek approval from
police one week before holding protests, though that period was
shortened in some subsequent versions.
The law also allows police officials to cancel or postpone protests.
Governors, meanwhile, can create "protest-free zones" around state
institutions, which could even put parts of Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square
off-limits .
"The law looks at protests as a crime that's in the making, not a
healthy democratic right," said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a researcher at
the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. "As much as possible, the
government wants to control them."
Egypt’s entire political spectrum, from liberals to Salafis, have
criticised the law. Even Tamarod, the staunchly pro-army movement which
organised the massive protests that preceded Morsi’s ouster, denounced
it. Mohamed Abdel-Aziz, one of the group’s founders, said it would be
"unjust" to limit the right to peaceful protest.
‘In good faith’
If the law is approved in the next few days, an early test could come
on Tuesday, the two-year anniversary of the deadly anti-military rule
clashes on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in downtown Cairo. Several groups have
called for rallies to remember the 47 people killed and thousands
injured during the four-day battle.
Beyond protests, the interim government is also looking to
criminalise "abusive graffiti", through a proposed new law that would
impose four-year jail terms and hefty fines. A separate, broadly-written
"terrorism law" under discussion could criminalise actions which
"damage… the national economy", paving the way for prosecutions of
peaceful protesters.
A fourth measure being considered would grant senior officials
immunity from criminal prosecution if their actions were taken "in good
faith".
Amidst all of this, workers started to build an official monument in
Tahrir Square to honor those killed during the revolution. Activists
dismissed the monument as an insult, of course, because most of the dead
were killed by a government for which there has been almost no
accountability.
It was, in a sense, a fitting coda for the weekend, another attempt to simply turn the page on the tumult of the past few years.
"If you were to look at this from afar, it would not look anything
like normality," Abdulla said. "And that's what particularly hurts. This
is nothing like normal, and we're being asked to pretend that it is." |
