A choking mix of police tear gas and smoke from tyres set alight by demonstrators forced me to leave Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Sunday evening. It was the third day of sporadic clashes between less than 3,000 demonstrators and the riot police, sometimes reinforced by military police. Yet very few of us there in Cairo suspected what was to come just one day later: the toppling of the second government since former President Mubarak was ousted last February.

The atmosphere changed after Sunday. Emotions ran high, anger was no longer just in support of the few hundred protestors who were demanding compensation for those were killed and injured during the revolution. People were provoked by the brutality of the anti-riot police; particularly inflammatory was the grotesque media footage of a police officer dragging a young female protester across the road by her hair.

That Sunday evening, the demonstration suddenly started to move towards the street leading from Tahrir Square to the Ministry of the Interior. Standing next to me was Fikry, a young lawyer with a long beard. He was calm until I asked him where they were going, then he began to yell at me “they are going to the nest of evil. Why are the police so cruel to peaceful demonstrators and so useless against the bandits and gangs looting and frightening people everywhere?”

And that, in a nutshell, is the question puzzling Cairo and discrediting both the government and the ruling Military Council. No one understands why more than thirty people were killed in what seemed to be a peaceful protest by a few thousand demonstrators.

Tahrir Square’s potent symbolic status reflects the tension gripping the nation. It is the place where the revolution flowered, where freedom found its voice and where a nation could express both its anger and its hope. But for the government and the Military Council, a Tahrir Square clean and neat and circled by an orderly flow of traffic represents control and stability and a way forward.

The police force emerged from the revolution defeated, humiliated and demoralized. It’s not so strange that they reacted nervously and brutally against those who tried to reach their “nest”, the Ministry of the Interior, located just a few meters from Tahrir. Faced with a relatively small group of protestors, the police grasped what seemed to be a chance to reassert some of their heavy-handed control. 

And the consequence of that short-sightedness is a mass rally of thousands of angry demonstrators in Cairo today. Mostly young, and a mix of Islamists and secularists, they are demanding that the resignation of the government be followed by the Military Council immediately handing over power to civilians.

The big issue no-one yet dares openly to discuss is postponing the parliamentary elections due to begin next Monday. Already there is speculation that the police deliberately escalated events at Tahrir Square as a way of hampering the elections. But on the other hand, the likelihood of a free and fair vote diminishes as instability and unrest increases in Cairo and spreads to other Egyptian cities.

Returning to Amsterdam, eyes and nose irritated, I can still scent the anger on the streets of Cairo. Anger that seems about to set the Egyptian revolution on a new course, of whose direction nobody can be certain.

(ld/rk)