The Thuggish Arab Regimes: Mubarak Regime's Tyranny And Demanding His Ouster
07 February 2011By Khalid Amayreh
Seeking desperately to cling to power in the face of
mounting street pressure, the Egyptian regime of Husni
Mubarak reportedly deployed thousands of paid thugs in
an effort to assault thousands of demonstrators fed up
with the Mubarak regime's tyranny and demanding his
ouster.
The thugs, known in Arabic as Baltajiya, threw rocks
at protesters, hoping to get them to flee. Others
carried daggers, swords and other sharp objects with
which they either stabbed or sought to intimidate
resilient demonstrators at the Tahrir square in the
heart of Cairo. Some of the thugs appeared mounting
horses and even camels and attempting to trample on
demonstrators. Fire bombs were heavily used by the
Baltajiya stationed at neighboring rooftops against
the protesters. Eventually, live bullets were fired
into the huge crowd, with several people getting
killed and hundreds injured.
The baltajiya (plural of Baltaji) are young,
uneducated, unemployed and violence-prone young men
recruited by the regime or the ruling National Party
for the purpose of intimidating and terrorizing
political opponents, falsifying elections and holding
"show demonstrations" in support of the regime
whenever the need arises.
The baltajiya played a pivotal role in rigging and
falsifying recent elections in Egypt which were nearly
completely "won" by Mubarak's al-Hizbel Watani.
This is the behavior of the regime which the United
States and other western powers have tended,
maintained, and cared for over 30 years in return for
safeguarding their interests in this volatile region.
We are essentially talking about 30 years of
dictatorship, repression, corruption and absence of
basic human rights and civil liberties.
It is an evil regime that goes beyond falsifying
elections and raping the people's will; it is a regime
that doesn't even flinch from killing its own people
in order to stay in power.
According to confirmed and reliable reports from
Cairo, the regime's paid thugs committed every
conceivable crime against the citizens of Cairo and
the country as a whole, all for the purpose of
intimidating protesters and blaming crimes on the
opposition to the tyrannical regime.
They broke into private homes, assaulted ordinary
people, robbed businesses and shops, and set many
buildings on fire. Even the Central Egyptian Museum,
which contains records of 6000 years of Egyptian
civilization, was not spared the savagery of the thugs
who sought to set it on fire in order to give the
security forces, especially the army, an alibi to
declare a national emergency and crush the anti-Mubarak
protests once and for all.
So what words would accurately describe such a regime
which in order to stay in power, it has resorted to
the unthinkable, namely setting Egypt itself on fire
and murdering its sons and daughters? Does a regime
change in Egypt have to be at the expense of the
destruction and burning of the country?
Muhammed Baradei, a prominent opposition leader,
rightly described the manner in which the Mubarak
regime sought to thwart the revolution in Egypt as
"criminal tactics by a criminal regime."
A western journalist who had covered the Iranian
revolution, the Romanian revolution and several other
revolutions in Eastern Europe and South America
against autocratic regimes said the following words,
describing the utter depravity of the Egyptian
regime's behavior toward protesters.
"I have covered several revolutions worldwide where
pro-regime forces employed many ugly ways and means to
intimidate the revolutionaries; but I never witnessed
this level of depravity, gangsterism and thuggishness
as we are witnessing in Egypt today."
There is no doubt that the Egyptian regime is behaving
with total disrespect and disregard for the Egyptian
people who want to transform Egypt from a dictatorship
into a democracy, and from a country that looks down
on its citizens to one that shows respect for them.
In the final analysis, the real indicator of democracy
in any country is when the government starts fearing
the people. However, when the people fear the
government and the government contemptuously overlooks
and ignores the people's concerns, it means
dictatorship and tyranny is having the day.
We don't know what kind of regime would eventually
assume power in Egypt, the strongest and most populous
Arab nation. But we are hopeful that the end game will
see the disappearance of this thuggish regime which
for the sake of pleasing and appeasing Israel and its
friends in North America and Europe is willing to
savage, persecute and even kill its own people.
The Egyptian people are really thoroughly fed-up with
this tyrannical regime and will not take it any more.
Thirty years of Mubarak's corruption, repression, and
lies have convinced nearly every Egyptian that Mubarak
must go and a new honorable Egypt must be enabled to
emerge from the ruins of the current rotten
dictatorship.
Although widely considered the navel of despotism in
the Arab world, the Egyptian regime is by no means the
main oasis of authoritarianism in the Arab region.
With the rare exception of Lebanon, nearly all other
Arab regimes are tyrannical and corrupt; with each
having a decadent rotten king or a president-for-life
presiding over the country, who may well be grooming
his son to succeed him as already happened in Morocco,
Syria, Jordan, and the Arabian Gulf Sheikhdoms and
Emirates and as was widely expected to happen, at
least until recently, in countries such as Egypt,
Libya and Yemen.
But in a certain sense, the Egyptian regime served as
the gravity center for all these tyrannical regimes,
mainly due to the traditional political and cultural
status Egypt has in the Arab region ever since the
1952 revolution when a group of Egyptian officers, the
Free Officers, headed by Gamal Abdul Nasser, overthrew
the monarchy of King Farouk.
This is why one should be hopeful that a genuine
transformation toward a regime that is more answerable
to the masses would play a certain domino effect in
the Arab region and could lead to true and lasting
democratization.
Sadly, there are manifestly racist and fascist centers
of power in the West that constantly urge governments
there to keep up backing and maintaining dictatorial
regimes in the Arab region. Their rationale is that
these regimes serve to keep the Islamists at bay. But
this is a spurious rationale and faulty argument at
the very best, since the continued backing of these
tyrannical regimes only contributes to the deepening
of hatred of the west among hundreds of millions of
Muslims around the globe. Eventually, this
short-sighted policy leads to more instability, more
extremism and more strategic losses for the west in
this vital region.
Besides, there is no evidence supporting the claim
that with Sunni Islamists in power in some Arab
countries, the Arab world will become irremediably
hostile or inimical to legitimate western interests
whether in the economic or political spheres.
This is not to say though that an Islamist or
quasi-Islamist Middle East wouldn't seek to regain its
lost honor, dignity and independence, long usurped by
western powers mainly through the installment in power
of local agents such as reigning kings, emirs, sheikhs
and presidents-for-life in the Arab world.
In any case, the Arabs, even the more feared Iranians,
are not really inherently hostile to the West.
At the end of the day, Muslims, including the
so-called Islamists only want to be treated with
respect. (end)
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