Despite talk of concessions, Egyptian military cracking down

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Mostafa al Hassan, a human rights lawyer, was detained by the Egyptian military during anti-government protests. On Sunday Hassan, shown in the offices of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center in Cairo, said the roundup of dissidents and journalists shows that the Egyptian army is following President Hosni Mubarak's longstanding practice of extrajudicial detentions.


Despite talk of concessions, Egyptian military cracking down
By Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Sunday, February 6, 2011

CAIRO — Besieged by two weeks of protests, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's regime has offered once-unthinkable political concessions and started negotiations with its fiercest adversaries.

Some things in Egypt, however, don't change so quickly.

The Egyptian military has rounded up scores of human rights activists, protest organizers and journalists in recent days without formal charges, according to watchdog groups and accounts by the detainees. While most arrests have been brief — lasting fewer than 24 hours — experts say they're a sign that the regime's notorious tradition of extrajudicial detentions is continuing even as Mubarak appears to be on his way out of power.

Arbitrary arrests by police forces are among Egyptians' bitterest and longest running complaints against their government, which gives security services sweeping powers under a state of emergency that's been in place almost nonstop since 1967.

The perpetrators of the latest arrests, however, are Egyptian army soldiers, deployed on the streets for the first time in more than two decades after the police all but disappeared following clashes with protesters on Jan. 25. The man most likely to lead the transition to a post-Mubarak era, Vice President Omar Suleiman, is Mubarak's longtime intelligence chief.