Even some government allies and insiders have been quick to acknowledge the protesters have legitimate grievances. The protesters have demanded that Mubarak step down, that he dissolve Parliament and hold free and fair elections, and that there be an end to corruption — demands flowing from years of pent-up frustration, Egyptians said.
All that anger has been focused on Mubarak, who has been in power since October and had appeared to be positioning his son, Gamal, a businessman and political leader, to inherit power. The litany of complaints against Mubarak is well-known to anyone who has spent time in Egypt. The police are brutal. Elections are rigged. Corruption is rampant. Life gets more difficult for the masses, as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. Opposition leaders would emerge from jail traumatised and tortured.
Smothered and suffocated Egypt could not grow. Pressure for change erupted only when unrest swept east from Tunisia, the first country to topple its leader in the so called Arab Spring. A Facebook campaign about the police torture and killing of a young Egyptian, Khaled Saeed, brought crowds out in protest. But it was only when the Muslim Brotherhood joined in that the unrest became unstoppable, forcing Egypt's hated police to withdraw from the streets. The army stayed above the fray, suspecting Mubarak was beyond saving.
He was forced to step down. The new Mubarak, another military man, Abdul Fattah el Sisi, seized power in a counter coup that enjoyed considerable support, after a series of massacres carried out by his troops in Cairo. The Sisi government crushed dissent even more repressively, locking up tens of thousands simply for protesting. Thousands have disappeared in a Gulag of jails while the regime insists to Britain, the US and Europe, that it alone can guarantee the country's stability.
But Egypt's social and economic problems deepen as its population continues to grow by two million a year. Hosni Mubarak could not avoid a reckoning with his people in the end. He could only postpone it and the chaos that followed. Watch Live. The widespread protests that began against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak have spread in the last few days to encompass almost an entire people. It now includes not only the stone-throwing youths who huddled in the fog of teargas below the underpasses near the centre of Cairo, or charged police on the Nile bridges, but Egyptians from all walks of life.
Old and young, the middle classes and the urban poor. Those who didn't take to the streets waved from their balconies or threw water bottles and onions to the crowd below to be used against teargas. Others handed out paper facemasks for the same purpose. Down below the protesters carried signs that said "game over" and wrapped themselves in Egyptian flags.
Cars and motorbikes sounded their horns. In the city centre, at a tiny mosque in a side alley, before the protest started the men came for Friday prayers and heard a sermon that set the tone. In the march that began in Muhand aiming to walk to the city centre Tahrir Square, the same message was delivered.
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