generalspeaking

Egypt In Turmoil

The feared and despised Egyptian police just can't get a break. They're on strike, hoping for a better working agreement for their forces, at the very time when Egypt is digging itself deeper into the throes of civil estrangement, violence and hyperbolic dissent aimed at the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt's military has no wish to be dispatched to do the work of the police. National security is what they do, not national policing duties. It is simply beneath them.

Besides which, they have no intention whatever of posing as the police and risking the loss of their reputation among the people of Egypt as one of them, their protectors, not their security oppressors. So, just as during the Arab Spring protests that led to the Islamist Springboard, the police have withdrawn their services, allowing already-rampant crime to ramp up its presence ensuring chaos grew disproportionate to their temporary absence.

Crime has never since been obliterated, and because of the civil unrest and ongoing protests, the criminal class have not taken steps to avoid any opportunities that arise, to inflict more misery on the population and by that process to enrich themselves while employment has dropped and poverty is becoming endemic among the more well-behaved members of society hoping to be able to eke out a living in the miserable conditions afflicting their country.

With the police nowhere to be seen, Egyptians were encouraged by the Attorney General's Office, to undertake civic vigilante action. As good citizens of Egypt, to become ex officio security members; should a crime be seen to be taking place, vigilantes could secure the offender and offer him into the hands of the authorities. Except, that's not quite what took place in a small Nile Delta town yesterday.

Claiming that two men were seen to be stealing a rickshaw, a crowd of those claiming to be authorized as vigilantes stripped the man half-naked, beat them, hung them from a tree in a bus station, where both men died. Those who attempted to come to the aid of the men were brushed aside. There were cheers from the watching crowd that had assembled, and shouted incitement to "Kill them!" from the crowd of three thousand observers.

Security officials, commenting on the incident, said they were preparing for increased incidents of this kind, where blood feuds between residents of Samanod and the nearby village of Mahallahit Ziyad where the two men were from, would be certain to result in bloodshed. Responding police had been delayed from reaching the hanging site as residents had cut off the roads in protest of a diesel fuel shortage.

Dozens of journalists on the same day protested outside their Cairo syndicate against assaults on their colleagues by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Brotherhood guards had attacked them with sticks and chains after activists had sprayed anti-Brotherhood graffiti outside the Brotherhood headquarters.

The Brotherhood spokesman on the other hand, claimed guards outside the building had been provoked by the activists and journalists. Pay-back for the proliferation of attacks across the country over the drafting of the new constitution, on Muslim Brotherhood offices. So much for the new, Islamist-led Egypt, the very picture of stark dysfunction.

Labels: Conflict, Egypt, Human Relations, Muslim Brotherhood, Societal Failures

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, March 19, 2013