Calm Has Broken Out in Cairo

Thursday was as peaceful as the day before it: Crowds milled around the stalls in Tahrir, making way for a car here and there. The places where the most intense fighting took place over the winter are now walled off from the square. After all, is there any political conflict that cannot be solved effectively and definitively by building a concrete wall in the middle of it?

This guy was hanging out in front of one of these walls, sagely watching younger kids fight with sticks. The scrap metal is from the building on the left, which was burned down in December.

The calm atmosphere gave us time to reflect on a crucial question. Namely, just what the fuck is the army up to? Why are they trying to hang on to power, even though they know that they're probably going to have to give it up sooner or later (officially, anyway)?

The important thing to realize is that while Egypt's army hasn't fought a war since 1973, they have used the four decades since then to build their own network of industrial and commercial concerns that comprise anywhere between 15 and 40 percent of the economy. Why such vague figures? Because their budget is secret: There is no way for civilians to monitor the army's operations, and the army wants to keep it that way. They make steel, olive oil, laptops, and armaments. They manufacture a brand of bottled water named Safi, after the daughter of the former head of the Ministry of Military Production. Many conscripts work without wages in army businesses. The cousin of a friend of a friend apparently spent his national service building an army-owned wedding reception center. Military officers themselves enjoy a network of exclusive private clubs and leisure facilities. Seen in this light, the army isn't so much the armed wing of the state apparatus, but a socio-commercial conglomerate with tanks.

Come the evening, we joined a march of several thousand from Tahrir square to Maspero, the state TV building. Maspero was the site of a massacre in October, which occurred when soldiers attacked a sit-in by Coptic Christians protesting against religious persecution (they make up about 10 percent of the Egyptian population).

Maspero, the state TV building.

Maspero isn't like the BBC's Television Center. It has machine gun placements around its outer walls and, according to one witness, military vehicles inside it. It may have been a “Twitter revolution” so far, but if revolutionaries get their own TV station, it's a whole new ball game.

I saw a friend of mine sat opposite the barbed wire surrounding the building, and asked her about the army.

“They're really stupid,” she said. “All they would have had to do is make some reforms to the Ministry of the Interior [which oversees the hated national security and police forces] and the people would have loved them." Then, she said, one of the more popular generals could have resigned from his military post, and offered himself as a national unity candidate, while holding his army interests close. Eleven months ago, this is the scenario many wary revolutionaries were expecting.

Instead, the generals made few concessions, renewed repressive laws, and sporadically killed large numbers of civilians. They allowed their soldiers to rape women under the disgusting guise of "virginity tests." The soldiers say that if the women aren't virgins, they can't later complain about the rape, because they have "lax morals." To wonder what happens to those women who are virgins sort of misses the point, I guess.

The generals, of course, use the state media to project the idea that they're gallantly doing their best to defend the people against hordes of mindless thugs. That's why activists here have a campaign of film showings, to take the truth out onto the streets. Once we reached Maspero, they projected a film first onto the building opposite, and then onto the state TV building itself.

Today and tomorrow is the weekend here. Protesters are planning to march to the Ministry of Defense this evening, and tomorrow is the anniversary of the most intense day of fighting last year, when revolutionaries managed to take the square and hold it for good.

@tom_d_

@Henry_Langston