![]() ![]() In another universe this might constitute damning evidence but here, capturing the truth of something means holding truth hostage, making it disappear. There were other images, too - of a woman in her late fifties surrounded and hit, old men caught and bashed, bleeding children being dragged away by soldiers twice their size, photographs of a smiling Al-Azhar sheikh and a student of medicine, both shot and killed. The whole world has seen the image of the soldier stomping on the breasts of the prostrate woman in the blue bra while next to her six soldiers vigorously set upon a man like a pack of feral dogs. It threw Al Jazeera’s equipment off a balcony. On Saturday, gangs of soldiers raided flats and hotels overlooking Tahrir Square in order to confiscate and destroy the cameras filming the brutality below. It has adopted a similar approach in its dealings with that other public space, the media. The threat of death and injury has not been enough to keep them away, and the army has resorted to this most crude of devices to control them, erecting monuments to its own failure. The protesters returned to Tahrir, and then to parliament. The army has been trying to find a successful formula to control public space for 10 months and has tried everything from threats of the law to attempts to co-opt political players to physical brutality and incitement of the general public against protesters. Old hands stood their ground in the middle and shouted “esbet, esbet”(stand your ground). False alarms of an army advance produced panicked surges back every so often. Protesters cheered and advanced at each security retreat, and were met with the sound of ammunition of some kind. The flying missiles filled the sky like locusts. The protesters’ front line was a wriggling mess of men and women in constant motion made up of three rows of stone throwers and spectators and people ferrying rocks to the front line. Above them a young man clambered on top of the cubes and stretched out his arms to the side, fingers in a victory sign.Īround the corner the battle raged, with perhaps ten meters separating the two sides. Two young boys stood next to the wall and made obscene gestures at soldiers on the building behind the wall. Tens of silhouetted army soldiers stood sentry behind the cubes, visible through the gaps between them. Hours after its construction, the Qasr al-Aini wall was almost completely covered in graffiti on the protesters’ side. ![]() Huge cubes of round-edged cement are clumsily stacked on top of each other, as if by a child. ![]() There are now not one, but four walls in downtown Cairo. ![]()
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