My colleague, Noha Radwan, a professor of comparative literature at UC, Davis wrote this guest piece for this blog:
"Dear Field Marshal Tantawi
"Dear Field Marshal Tantawi
October 9, 2011 has become a day
of shame for the Egyptian Armed Forces. The Supreme Council must be held
directly responsible. An investigation into the circumstances of the massacre
that took place on that afternoon cannot change these two facts. Whatever its
findings will be, whether it finds that shooting the Egyptian civilians and
running them over with army vehicles was upon orders or by accident is
irrelevant. After all, this is the military.
That having been said, I want to
add a personal testimony, which may prove relevant. This testimony goes back to
February 2nd , the day when hundreds of the demonstrators in Tahrir
Square were the target of a spectacular attack in which mobs were hurling
rocks, and Molotov cocktails into the square. To make the spectacle even more
dramatic, some of the attackers came on horse and camel back, wielding swords
and cracking whips in a fashion reminiscent of a whole slew of Egyptian films
about the seventh century or of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia”. Yet on that
afternoon and into the evening, there were very few spectators to reminisce on
any of this. The city was under curfew, the foreign correspondents had been
chased away, and the local state television was turning a blind eye to the
whole scene, Only later would spectators be able to view the events, recorded
on hundreds of hand held cameras and smart phones .The demonstrators themselves
documented the attacks while fending for their lives. This is not to say that
there were no spectators to the live spectacle. For, indeed they were there,
and they had excellent vantage points to boot. On February 2nd in
Cairo, the spectators were members of the Egyptian army who were stationed atop
their tanks and armored vehicles around the square. They watched it all, and
they did not lift a finger.
I was there that afternoon. I was
attacked and brutally beaten right in front of an armored vehicle stationed
near the Egyptian museum. I have told this story before but I only return to it
now to make a point about army personnel as I encountered them that afternoon,
sheltered inside an army tank with five army soldiers and their chief
supervising officer, a young man who looked like he was in his early thirties,
and who had the rank of captain. Two facts became crystal clear to me. The
first was that none of these army personnel were ambivalent about what they
were witnessing. They were not unsure about the nature of the attacks. They
knew that they were looking at thugs, and undercover policemen whaling on
non-violent demonstrators. They must have been there for part or all of the few
days between January 28th and February 2nd, when the
demonstrators were chanting about the unity of the army and the people and tossing
flowers, water bottles and chocolate bars at those stationed on the army
vehicles around the square. Their sympathies were wholly with the demonstrators
who were being brutalized right in front of their eyes, and yet they did not
lift a finger. Not even a blank shot was fired. The second fact that I
ascertained for myself that afternoon was that there was only one reason for
the lack of military action, which was that the rank and file of the military
never act of their own volition. They follow orders. When I almost lost my life
in front of their vehicles and was directly calling upon them for help, the
captain needed to call his superior before he could allow me onto his vehicle.
And even then, he could not take any action against the mob that continued to
hurl the rocks onto it. He only asked me to go inside for shelter, and
eventually called an ambulance to take me to the hospital. Not a single blank
was shot, if only to disperse the crowd that was trying to flip the ambulance
van over, complete with the medics and the casualties inside.
Dear Filed Marshal Tantawi
Military personnel inside armored vehicles cannot be
victimized by a mob carrying knives and sticks or hurling rocks. If they were,
then it was your fault. Military personnel cannot be intimidated or provoked by
a mob of any sort. If they were, then it was also your fault. There are no two
ways about it. You and your highly distinguished SCAF officers have brought
shame upon an army that three days earlier was celebrating the anniversary of
one of its glorious moments. Who knows if October 6th can or should
be celebrated again without a thought of this Black Sunday, October 9th?"
