CAIRO – With a milestone election just five days away, Egypt showed no sign Wednesday of recovering from a spasm of violence that has wrecked the campaign period and spiraled into a rebellion that now threatens the ruling military council’s grip on the nation.
The bloodshed continued for a fifth consecutive day despite international appeals for calm and limited concessions put forth by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to address demands that it transfer power to a civilian transitional authority immediately.
The council ceded no new ground, however, and nobody could say for sure how to rescue a country whose uprising against authoritarianism had captured the world’s imagination and inspired other Arab revolts.
“We’re crying out for freedom,” said Noha Mansour, a 50-year-old pediatrician who joined the protest in Cairo. “They’re treating the Egyptian people like cows, like we don’t understand anything. So we must send a message: This is our revolution, and it’s not finished yet.”
The streets surrounding Cairo’s Tahrir Square, sacred ground for the revolutionaries who stood united there against former President Hosni Mubarak 10 months ago, were a battlefield. Thousands of protesters camped in the square Wednesday, forming a human cordon to protect a makeshift field hospital where the injured arrived around the clock from clashes in adjacent side streets.
Earlier, Muslim clerics and other community figures brokered a brief cease-fire that collapsed at sundown, when fierce fighting resumed in the street leading from the square to the Interior Ministry.
Nothing short of the resignation of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who has replaced Mubarak as Enemy No. 1 to the protesters, would be enough to clear the square, protesters said. But when pressed as to who specifically should steer Egypt’s transition should the military step aside, few could answer.
The military council seemed wedded to Tantawi’s newly announced plan for accelerated presidential elections and a full handover of power by mid-2012, even as the death toll rose and pressure mounted for a resolution.
In both Cairo and the port city of Alexandria, the nation’s second-largest city, Egyptian soldiers moved in from rear positions to act as a buffer between the demonstrators and riot police, perhaps an attempt by the military to restore its now-tarnished image as the guardian of the revolution that toppled Mubarak in February.
The soldiers typically aren’t targeted, as most protesters draw a distinction between the conscripts and their commanders, but the calm derived from their presence was short-lived.
Clashes resumed in both cities after nightfall as Egyptians across the country watched live TV showing familiar landmarks in flames or engulfed in tear gas.
The Health Ministry’s death toll from the clashes has risen to 35, including 31 in Cairo, two in Alexandria, one in Ismailia and one in Marsa Matruh. More than 2,000 people have been wounded.
At least five people were killed in unrest on Wednesday alone, including a young female field doctor, identified as Rania Fouad, who was overcome by tear gas in Cairo and slipped into a coma before she died. Some 700 were injured.
For days now, a cloud of tear gas has lingered over Tahrir, with fresh canisters fired regularly by Interior Ministry forces.
Throughout the square, it’s common to see protesters vomiting, stumbling and fainting from the thick gas.
“Even if I weren’t a revolutionary,” said medical student and field doctor Bashir Hamdi, “after all I’ve seen this week, I would’ve turned into one.”
