Mr. Sponge and Egypt's revolution
It's not expected that Egypt will witness a revolution same to the Tunisian one that brought down president Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali, despite Egyptian Facebook activists calls for rally demonstrations on January 25.The reason is what we can call "Mr. Sponge's technique". President Mubarak (82 year old) -who rules the country since 1981- is just great in using that technique which depends on absorbing the excrescent anger to overcome a dangerous situation .
In June 2010 Al-Ahram newspaper - a leading state-owned daily - published a report says that the year 2009 witnessed about 5000 suicides and approximately 104,000 suicide attempts. In 1987 suicide statistics were nearly zero, and the trends raised from 1160 suicides in 2005 to 4000 in 2008. The government didn't take any direct action to calm this new phenomenon nor Egyptian media focused on it.
On January 17-19, 2011 about 6 men tried to burn them-selves- the same way the late Tunisian Mohammed Bouaziz did - to demonstrate their problems and may to bring the change to Egypt, one of those men died.
When suicide phenomenon became a probable threat to Mubarak's regime existence, the regime took actions to absorb the anger.
Some news reports said, burned people convulsed the government, and the citizens requests were responded immediately, even the State Security tried to solve some civilians problems, and in unusual behavior, the police leaders tried to convince 4 youth who were calling people in Tahrir square (Down Town – Cairo) to participate in January 25 demonstrations to stop, while those youth were cheering against president Hosni Mubarak.
It's not a kind of change, it's a temporary treatment to avoid people anger explosion.
The state-owned media published "good news" about free houses, economic reform, and Mubarak's attention to poor Egyptians . And when the main stream media tends to criticizes the failure, it focuses on the prime minister Ahmed Nazif and other government members. It's also notable that people debate about citizens who tried to burn them-selves, is all about whether this action is forbidden in Sharia (the Islamic law) or not.
When you see Egyptians feeds on Facebook and Twitter, you can imagine that the revolution is coming right away, while in the reality it's not: the majority of people are afraid from facing the regime, some of them can face fire and its terrible pain, but don't face the security.
From 1966- 1983 Egypt owned one institute to train the officer of Central Security Forces (CSF), these forces are dedicated to guard the regime from the folk protests. In 1997 Mr. Mubarak built another 6 institutes to train the CSF officers. He also raised the number of CSF to 1,5 million soldiers.
Absorbing people anger, publishing unreal good news, focusing on the prime minister and his cabinet and avoiding the fact that it's the 7th failure government in Mubarak's era, besides the dispersal of people's opinions about citizens who tried to burn them-selves to express their rejection to injustice that they face, and making the main debate is "if someone burned him-self, is it forbidden or not?". All those factors besides the huge number of police solders, give an impression that, January 25, 2011 will not be the start-up date of the revolution.
However the hope is existed, and people who want to change should not surrender, we have to find the defects and treat them, and try 1000 times until we smell the breeze of freedom.
