Friday calmest of eleven days of anti-government unrest in Egypt

CAIRO, February 5 (By Itar-Tass correspondent Dina Pyanykh) -- Friday,
which many had expected would become the last day of President Mubarak's
rule, proved the calmest in Egypt since the beginning of massive
anti-government protests on January 25. Friday's "day of anger" saw no big
disturbances, except for some minor incidents - no clashes between
supporters of different trends, no gunfights, no hunts for journalists.
Throughout the day hundreds of thousands of protesters stood peacefully in
Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. Sporadic calls for marching towards the
presidential palace did not receive support.
The day would have ended like many other ones, without anything
special to remember, but for the emergence of several important figures
before the crowd. Shortly after the midday prayer Defense Minister Hussein
al-Tantawi, accompanied by high-ranking military commanders, went to talk
to the people. Among the protesters in Tahrir Square there stood shoulder
to shoulder representatives of the intellectuals - well-known actors and
singers, college and university professors, academics, lawyers, authors -
and the poor, workers, garbage men and jobless. They all were demanding
one thing - the immediate resignation of the president.
Then in the square there appeared a man who in the future may play a
significant role in the presidential race - the secretary-general of the
Arab League, Amr Moussa. The office of this major inter-Arab organization
is just a hundred meters from the center of events. The day before Mousa
first publicly announced his intentions to run in the presidential
election.
Friday was marked by and another seminal event - the emergence of the
"council of wise men", which included prominent and most respected
independent representatives of the Egyptian public, first and foremost,
mass media magnate Naguib Sawiris, writer and editor-in-chief of Al-Shuruk
Salama Ahmed Salama, lawyer and expert in human rights Kamal Ahmad Abd
al-Magid, journalist and writer Mohammad Saad, analyst with the center for
strategic and political studies Al-Ahram, Dia Rashuan, and political
analyst Amr Hamzawi. This "council of wise men" came up with a road map
for overcoming the political crisis in the country. Among their proposals
are the nominal leadership of Hosni Mubarak until September, provided that
the country will actually be lead by the vice-president, Omar Suleiman,
and the establishment of a transitional government of technocrats and
independent politicians. A meeting of the "council of wise men" with
Suleiman is due later on Saturday.
Meanwhile, on the Internet in recent days there appeared videos filmed
by witness of the tragic events in Egypt. So far the world has seen only
what was happening in Tahrir Square, but much still remains behind the
scenes. And now, with the return of the Internet, users have begun to
publish in the network many terrible things they have chanced to see. On
Friday, the public was shocked by footage showing a police van running
people down in the center of Cairo at full speed. By a happy coincidence,
by that time the crowd had almost dissolved, and the racing vehicle
literally knocked down only one person, while several others miraculously
managed to jump aside.
In the first hours of Saturday Arab television stations broadcasted
footage posted on the Internet back on 28 January, the last Friday of
January, the "day of anger," after which the country plunged into chaos
against a background of complete inaction by the security forces. That
video shows a street of Cairo and a crowd of demonstrators moving along.
At a distance there stands a white Chevrolet minivan with diplomatic
license plates, apparently waiting for the people to pass by. Suddenly,
next to it there falls and breaks an incendiary bottle. The vehicle darts
forward, gains speed and crashes into the crowd of peacefully walking
people, running over many of them. The number of casualties in that
incident was several dozen. According to some reports, it was a vehicle of
the US embassy.
According to official statistics available from the Ministry of
Health, in the center of Cairo one week of confrontation between
supporters and opponents of the regime left eleven people dead and five
thousand injured. On Friday, the death toll grew, when a correspondent for
Al-Ahram, injured while covering the events on January 29, died of wounds.
He was the first media worker to have lost his life in the violence. How
many people exactly were killed in the unrest the erupted in Egypt after
the January 25 events will become clear much later. And how many more
pieces of video evidence of the Egyptian tragedies of these days will
appear on the Internet is anyone's guess.