Saturday, July 24, 2010

Follow Up : 23rd of July Khaled Said's silent Revolution

May be it was not a silent revolution in Cairo but it was huge silent revolution indeed in Alexandria.

As agreed activists across the country held the usual weekend silent stands for Khaled Said ; of course this weekend was very special as it was the 58th anniversary of the 23rd of July revolution/coup/movement "you name it as you see it" with all what it holds from political meaning.

Cairo silence :

There was a silent stand at the Nile Corniche at Shubra as agreed , of course I went there to cover the stand , I found a group of activists at Arcadia mall /NBE HQ/ WTC Cairo area ; due to important urgent sudden family obligations I could not stay too long , in fact I only stayed few minutes to take some shots and I did not ask or chat with the participants in the stand why they were there as I wanted. I was lucky to arrive in time in the first place to be honest.

Here are couple of photos I took while my very short stay.

As soon as I left the action started and I began to receive contradicting tweets ,first I discovered there was a march heading from Rod El-Farg street to Maspero st. then I found the number of the NBE stand was getting large ; some were saying 150 and others were saying that they were not more than 50 then came the big confusion : the security cracked down both the silent stand and the march/protest. Some said that there was nothing and nobody harassed anyone but on the other hand we got 35 activists attacked and detained from the NBE silent stand for some time before being released.

Of course the harassments of the security shows its true metal.

How to crack a protest by activists

Now I believe we should be careful with our tweets because it could not be misleading to us as bloggers and activists but also to foreign reporters and non-activist Egyptians who could be scared. I think the silent stand was enough , there was no need to the march especially we know in advance how the security forces will deal with such marches in one of Cairo's busiest streets. Also it was better to hold not only one stand but different stands in different locations at the same time like in the past.

For the record there was a huge security presence at the 6th of October bridge which witnessed silent stand in the past weeks if I am not mistaken.

Alexandrian revolution

What happened in Alexandria was a real silent revolution , what had started as hundreds standing silently for one hour in front of San Stefano hotel Corniche ended with a march of 3,000 protesters moving from San Stefano to Stanley bridge and from Stanley bridge to Cleopatra where Khaled Said used to live.

To Khaled's house by activists

To understand what happened in Alex yesterday , the video is enough ; here are thousands of Egyptian youth singing our national anthem in a scene that made me cry.

Singing our national anthem at Khaled Said's house by activists
At Khaled's place , chants by activists "including down by Mubarak"

No wonder Khaled Said's mother broke down to tears when she had seen this great magnificent scene.

You can see more videos here from Alexandria. Here are also more photos from Alexandria taken by different people.

A real silence across the country

In other governorates across the country there were also successful silent stands.

Here is a collection of photos from different governorates taken by different people

Today later  insh Allah there will be a protest organized by Egyptians in New York in front of the UN from 1 PM to 3 PM EST.  

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