Police Break Up Cairo Protest

CAIRO —  Thousands of cane-wielding riot police Thursday beat protesters and journalists bloody, arresting hundreds as the Egyptian government clamped down on a demonstration in support of pro-reform judges.

Police toting shields and sticks and plainclothes security officers flooded the streets of the capital in the morning, sealing off roads and closing subway stations in preparation for the protest.

As bands of chanting demonstrators attempted to coalesce into a street protest, in swarmed the riot police. Men and women were dragged over the asphalt, kicked and beaten. Many were forced into police vehicles and taken away.

Journalists attempting to cover the protest also came under attack. Among those assaulted were a Reuters photographer, a cameraman for the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera and a Los Angeles Times reporter.

“I’ve never seen the level of brutality I saw today,” said Rabab Mahdi, 31, a political science lecturer at the American University in Cairo. The attack was the latest incident amid a general crackdown on Egypt’s fledgling, grass-roots democracy movement.

Despite promises of political change and the air of relative liberty that gripped the country last year, President Hosni Mubarak’s regime now appears keen to silence -- or at least quiet -- dissent.

Dozens of opposition figures, including activists from the semi-underground Muslim Brotherhood and leftist groups, have been rounded up and jailed. More than 50 pro-democracy activists are being held in the notorious Tora Prison, south of Cairo. They include prominent blogger Alaa Seif al-Islam, whose website has been publishing strident anti-Mubarak writings and photographs. About 40 of the inmates are said to be on a hunger strike to protest the prison conditions.

The Egyptian government has also postponed for two years local elections that were to be held in April. And it has renewed its controversial emergency law, imposed when Mubarak took power in 1981, which allows for arbitrary arrest and detention without charge. Lifting of the emergency law was a key promise in Mubarak’s election campaign last year.

Attempts to reach Egyptian officials for comment on Thursday’s violence were unsuccessful.

In Washington, the State Department criticized the Egyptian government’s actions.

“We are deeply concerned by reports of Egyptian government arrests and repression of demonstrators protesting election fraud and calling for an independent judiciary,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. “Particularly troubling are reports of Egyptian police tactics against demonstrators and journalists covering the event that left many injured.

“We urge the Egyptian government to permit peaceful demonstrations on behalf of reform and civil liberties by those exercising their rights to freedom of assembly and expression.”

The demonstration was planned as a show of solidarity for two key leaders among Egypt’s judges who have been pressing for judicial reform. Judges Hesham Bastawisi and Mahmoud Mekki have been accused of defaming the government after publicly alleging fraud and abuse during last fall’s parliamentary elections. The two, who serve on the Court of Cassation, the highest appellate court, were scheduled to appear before a disciplinary tribunal Thursday, but both refused to attend after their lawyers and supporters were barred from entering.

“Never has the judiciary been insulted, humiliated and stepped on in the history of Egypt before,” Bastawisi said Thursday in a telephone interview. “The government has lost all the respect it had. The Egyptian citizen is being dragged in the streets by security as if they were animals, not human beings.”

The judges represent just one facet of the antigovernment movement, a varied assemblage of critics that includes secular figures as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. The vastly popular Islamist party controls about a fifth of the Egyptian parliament despite its status as an officially banned group.

Brotherhood officials said that about 300 of their members had been detained during Thursday’s demonstration.

The judges’ battle has been one of the most public struggles in the ongoing fight for democratic changes in Egypt. Last year, hundreds of judges stood up to the regime, threatening to refuse to certify election results unless they were granted full control over the polling stations. The jurists also demanded financial independence from the Justice Ministry, which they accused of buying judicial favor in exchange for perks and cash bonuses.

Bastawisi and Mekki have resisted attempts to discipline them. The pair, along with dozens of judges who support them, have been staging a sit-in at a judges’ association in downtown Cairo to protest the government’s actions. A delegation of university professors that tried to visit the judges this week to show solidarity said its members were attacked by security personnel.

The two judges said they would not appear before the disciplinary tribunal. They are demanding the release of political detainees, as well as the removal of security troops from downtown Cairo.

“There will be no compromise with the government,” Bastawisi said. “They have to reform.”

Hamalawy is a special correspondent and Stack a Times staff writer.