Great article on Egypt.
It was truly a national uprising—every city and province up and down the country took part. And, believe it or not, as militant and determined as the revolutionaries were in Cairo, which got most of the media coverage in the West, the revolutionaries in other cities such as Suez and Alexandria, the second largest city in the country, were even more militant and bolder.
For example, the protesters in Cairo concentrated on Tahrir Square and bravely held it for eighteen days by fending off numerous bloody attacks by the police and Mubarak’s thugs.
But in a city like Alexandria the protesters did not adopt a Tahrir Square strategy. They did not wait for the police to attack. The protesters came out every single day in the tens and hundreds of thousands from every neighborhood and street to confront the police; they fought back against police bullets and tear gas over and over again until they defeated the police.
I listened online to an amazing tape of radio communications between the police headquarters in Alexandria and police commanders in the field trying to deal with the flood of angry protesters in the ten minutes before the city fell to the revolutionaries. In the tape police officers are begging headquarters for reinforcements to deal with what they described as massive, dangerous crowds of ten, twenty, and thirty thousand people closing in on them everywhere in the city. Headquarters is helpless because all of the officers in the field—literally all of them—are asking for reinforcements. Headquarters advises officers and units to retreat to precincts. The officers respond: “Sir, protesters are burning the precincts.” The tape dramatically ends with the commander at headquarters asking an inferior officer for an explanation for the police defeats. The officer simply told him: “Sir, it is over. The people are in the saddle.”
http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article21592
