Hundred thousand deep
First amendment said
We was allowed to speak"
They see us rollin'… they hatin'… That is to say, the Egyptian regime has done what police states always do in a crunch – they cracked skulls, rounded people up in unmarked vans, and hauled them off to secret prisons. In a modern totalitarian twist, they've also blocked Twitter. (Keep an eye on #jan25.)
Police arrested 860 people across the country after bloody confrontations with security forces using rubber bullets, batons, tear gas and water cannon.
Over two thousand people defied the curfew and marched on a major downtown Cairo boulevard along the Nile on Wednesday night. They were stormed by riot police with shields.
The social networking site Twitter, which has been used to mobilise the protesters, was blocked, though the government denied it was responsible.
Unconfirmed reports said that members of the president's family had fled, a charge that Egyptian diplomats in London denied.
The protest at Egyptian Embassy is ON for this Saturday the 29th, 12.00 - 13.30.
And next domino in the queue? Looks like it might be Yemen:
Tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets in the country’s capital and other regions on Thursday to demand a change of government, in demonstrations that organizers said were inspired by protests in Tunisia that toppled the president there.
At least 10,000 protesters led by opposition members and youths activists gathered at Sanaa University…
[Inevitably] The government responded by sending a large number of security forces into the streets…
Through the morning, the protesters chanted slogans against President Ali Abdallah Saleh, a strongman who, for more than 30 years, has ruled a fractured country.
Is this the tumbling of the Baghdad Wall – a scant five years after I (perhaps too-)intrepidly predicted it?
Twenty-two years ago, all of Eastern Europe was under the iron book of despotism; now it is all free. Dare we hope that the time for the Middle East is now?
