Violent Crackdown Fails to End Protest.

[elleng]

The Egyptian government struck back at its opponents on Wednesday, unleashing waves of pro-government provocateurs armed with clubs, stones, rocks and knives in and around Tahrir Square in a concerted effort to rout the protesters who have called for an end to President Hosni Mubarak’s near-30-year rule. . .

As the two sides exchanged volleys, the military restricted itself mostly to guarding the Egyptian Museum and using water cannons to extinguish flames stoked by the firebombs. And on Wednesday night, state media broadcast an order from the government for all protesters to leave the square.

Signs that the pro-Mubarak forces were organized and possibly professional were abundant. When the melee broke out, a group of them tried to corner a couple of journalists in an alley to halt their reporting. Their assaults on the protesters seemed to come in well timed waves.

Some protesters reported that they had been approached with offers of 50 Egyptian pounds, about $8.50, to carry pro-Mubarak placards. “Fifty pounds for my country?” one woman said, in apparent disbelief.

The counterattack was undertaken in the face of calls from leaders in Washington and Europe for peaceful and rapid political change, with the Foreign Ministry releasing a defiant statement in state news media saying that such calls from “foreign parties” had been “rejected and aimed to incite the internal situation in Egypt.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/world/middleeast/03egypt.html?hp

[thereismore]

1. Looks like Mubarak chose the Romanian way, not the Czechoslovakian way.

Ceaucescu and his wife were executed without a trial, essentially. Just saying.

[texshelters]

2. It's important that the NYT reported about

the paid protesters for Mubarak. All I heard this morning was that "pro-Mubarak" forces were entering Tariq square. Many of these people aren't pro anything, they are mercenaries like the Pinkertons.

Peace,
Tex Shelters

[elleng]

3. I agree, tex.