Walls come down
Demonstrators stand atop a partially dismantled concrete barrier across downtown Cairo’s Mohammed Mahmoud Street. However, with new walls being erected around the nearby Ministry of Interior, the title of this post might better be …and more walls go up.
Tahrir Square cleared
These photos are from August 1, but better late than never, right? It was quite difficult to photograph on this day, with foreigners particularly singled out for confiscation of cameras/memory cards. In fact, I myself nearly had my camera taken from me by soldiers—fortunately, a decade of violin lessons left me with an unusually strong grip, so let it never be said that music is a waste of time.
The conditions left me shooting on the fly or from the hip, so none of these photos are great. But for the sake of posterity, they can be found here.
Sinai
I returned to Cairo Tuesday night, after a few days rest on the beach in Sinai. I won’t even pretend to have the background necessary to comment usefully on the recent attacks along the Israeli border. One observation though: during my brief visit, I was struck by both how heavily militarized the region is, and by how completely ineffective that militarization appeared to me to be.
Taking the bus from Cairo to the Red Sea and back, one passes through numerous military checkpoints. However, the only object of these checkpoints, at least that I could discern, was to single out all non-Arab passengers for a passport check. (Which, in my case, consisted of thumbing ineptly through my documents for a minute or two, finding an Egyptian visa from three years ago, and then tossing them back.) I was tempted to ask what they were actually looking for: Dangerous visa-overstayers? Israeli operatives too unsophisticated to travel on false documents?
Like so many things (the US’s TSA, for example, or the fake metal detectors in my Jakarta office), this strikes me as typical security-state mentality—A big show of weaponry and personnel, a flexing of muscles, but no discernible strategy.
Casualties
A protestor injured in Abbaseya gets an IV in a makeshift clinic in the Tahrir Square tent city, on the night of July 23–24.
Another injured protestor convalesces in Tahrir Square. Throughout the night, more and more injured people were carried into the tent city.
Talaat Harb Street Brawl
This happened simultaneously with the attack on protestors in Abbaseya, but as far as I know was just a disagreement among street vendors that got out of hand.
All in all, a hot night in Cairo.
If I get the chance, I will upload more, and with better resolution, but it’s a slow and painful process.
