As hundreds fled the advancing armored cars of riot police officers, Mohamed Mokbel ran forward.
A veteran of two years of violent street protests, he pulled on his gas mask and charred protective gloves for another long night at his current vocation: throwing tear-gas canisters back at the riot police.
“Whenever people lose hope, the clashes grow worse,” Mr. Mokbel, 30, said on a break from the fighting on Friday night outside the presidential palace. “But the people in power are still acting like there is no crisis, still firing more gas,” he said, “so I am going back in.”
Two years after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, waves of increasingly violent street protests have decimated tourism, slashed foreign investment, increased poverty and dashed hopes of a return to stability. In the last two weeks, more than 50 people have died in the clashes. Egypt’s top general raised the specter of a “collapse of the state” if civilian leaders failed to restore order. And the interior minister warned that armed militias could take over if his forces gave way.
But behind the mayhem bedeviling the new government are street activists like Mr. Mokbel, who first burst into politics around the time of the Arab Spring revolt against Mr. Mubarak and say they are still fighting for its democratic goals. Alienated from Egypt’s new Islamist leaders or their rivals in the opposition, street protesters have risen up again and again to check perceived grabs for power, whether by the interim military rulers, the elected president or his Islamist allies.
Now, while elite politicians tussle over matters of ideology or provisions of the Constitution, street protesters like Mr. Mokbel say they are carrying on the fight that kindled the original revolt, a battle against Mr. Mubarak’s abusive and unaccountable security services. Two years later, they note, the security forces are still largely intact, and reports of torture, extortion and excessive force continue.
The street war between protesters and the police presents a double-edged challenge to President Mohamed Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who had been jailed without trial under Mr. Mubarak. Brotherhood leaders close to Mr. Morsi say he does not yet fully control the Interior Ministry. Its officers make no secret of their hostility to the Islamists, and Brotherhood leaders say that the new president is struggling to win the ministry’s trust in order to tame it.
But many in the street have turned against Mr. Morsi in part because they believe that he has sided with the security forces. Activists like Mr. Mokbel say they fear that like the region’s secular dictators, Mr. Morsi may use the security police against his opponents as a tool of political power.
“They are trying to build a new regime exactly like the old one, with all its disadvantages,” said Mr. Mokbel, an artist with a small and slender frame who, between battles, studies painting in a graduate program in one of Egypt’s top art schools.
The protesters, Mr. Mokbel argued, are the ones defending the rule of law, standing up for their right to peaceful expression. With no personal gain, he said, they risk their lives for their cause, for one another, and for their many friends who have fallen. “We owe them something,” he said. “Not just a better economic situation, a government that deals with the people, that is not authoritarian or repressive.”
Mr. Mokbel may be among the more articulate protesters. In the on-again, off-again battles with the riot police near Tahrir Square, the combatants are usually teenagers or even children who appear to live much of the time in the streets. Many seem animated by the sport of it, and ill-informed about the politics.
But Mr. Mokbel, part of an older network of activists that is the backbone of the protests, praised the street children for their energy.
“The street kids are the ones who have suffered the most at the hands of the police, and their demands are much lower — some dignity, respect from the police, a little better life economically,” he said. “They are just releasing their anger.”
Although he acknowledged that some among the demonstrators inevitably provoke the riot police with stones or gas bombs, he nonetheless argued that police aggression caused all the fighting. “Police attacking protesters is what causes the chaos,” he said.
Nytimes
