Mubarak deploys army as Cairo chaos grows

EGYPT’S military deployed on the streets of Cairo to enforce a night-time curfew as the sun set yesterday on a day of rioting and chaos that amounted to the biggest challenge ever to authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year regime.

Flames rose up across a number of cities from burning tires and police cars. Even the ruling party headquarters in Cairo was ablaze in the outpouring of rage, bitterness and utter frustration with a regime seen as corrupt, heavy-handed and neglectful of grinding poverty that afflicts nearly half of the 80 million Egyptians.

“I can’t believe our own police, our own government would keep beating up on us like this,” said Cairo protester Ahmad Salah, 26. “I’ve been here for hours... they keep gassing us, and I will keep going forward. This is a cowardly government and it has to fall. We’re going to make sure of it.”

After nightfall, some of the protesters defied the curfew and were praying on the streets of Cairo.

In one of many astonishing scenes yesterday, thousands of anti-government protesters wielding rocks, glass and sticks chased hundreds of riot police away from the main square in downtown Cairo and several of the policemen stripped off their uniforms and badges and joined the demonstrators.

Witnesses saw protesters cheering the police who joined them and hoisting them on their shoulders in one of the many dramatic and chaotic scenes across Egypt yesterday.

After chasing the police, thousands of protesters were able to flood into the huge Tahrir Square downtown after being kept out most of the day by a very heavy police presence.

Few police could be seen around the square after the confrontation.

In the capital Cairo, protesters poured out of mosques after Friday prayers and ran rampant through the streets, throwing stones and torching two police stations as police chased them with batons, firing tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.

The nationwide demonstrations, inspired by the “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia, have swelled into the largest uprising in three decades, sending shockwaves across the region.

Eight people have been killed, hundreds injured and some 1,000 arrested.

But in a hint that authorities might heed the rising tide of popular anger, a senior lawmaker and member of the ruling party called for “unprecedented reforms” in order to stave off a revolution.

As the violence raged, Mustafa al-Fekki, National Democratic Party (NDP) member and chairman of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said security forces alone could not prevent revolution in Egypt, that reform was necessary.

“Nowhere in the world can the security forces put an end to revolution,” he said in remarks to Al-Jazeera television.

Tunisia protest

ISLAMISTS marched through central Tunis, demanding religious freedom, while police fired tear gas at anti-government protesters who have camped out around the prime minister’s office.

The march by about 200 people was the first significant Islamist protest since the fall of president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who ran a strictly secular state in which Islamists were often jailed or exiled.

Since Ben Ali was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia on January 14 in the face of violent unrest over poverty and political repression, protesters have been gathering in Tunis to demand the new interim government be purged of Ben Ali loyalists.

Yesterday police stormed the camp where they have been holding a round-the clock sit-in for the past five days. Protesters threw stones at police, who fired tear gas to disperse them.