As Military Cracks Down, Students React
Water cannons are fired on female Islamist students during a protest at Al-Azhar University in Cairo on December 11, 2013. (Hamada Elrasam/VOA)
Last week Egypt’s secular military dictatorship continued its increasingly brutal campaign to suppress dissent. In the span of just a few days it formally accused the deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood associates of participating in a far-fetched terrorist plot and sent security agents to raid the office of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social rights, a prominent human rights organization.
The New York Times
reports that these most recent activities have not gone unnoticed. Protests at universities, already ongoing for several weeks, are intensifying. Though originally headed by various Islamist student factions, the protests have now grown to include various other political groups, protesting broader political repression rather than just the persecution of Islamist activists. Confrontations have become more and more violent, with students throwing stones at police officers and police officers responding with tear gas and occasionally more violent firepower. Already one student has been killed in late November during
student protests against the police.
As the military dictatorship continues to reverse the effects of Egypt’s Arab Spring, it is clear that in using force to suppress student protesters it risks creating the very same conditions that precipitated that Arab Spring in the first place.
