Democratic Palestine : 28 (ص 30)
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- عنوان
- Democratic Palestine : 28 (ص 30)
- المحتوى
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ae
Demonstrations at Ain Shams
in an Egyptian jail in January 1986.
The demonstrators clashed with the
police for over three hours, throwing
stones, while the police fired gas bombs
and arrested 30 people. Immediately
after this incident, Egypt’s interior
minister issued a decree prohibiting
demonstrations in all parts of Egypt.
Meanwhile, on the same day, over
200 Egyptian lawyers organized a sit-in
in their guild headquarters. The
building was surrounded by the security
forces. On Feb 10th, many lawyers
30
were arrested after holding a press
conference. On February 12th,
thousands marched from the mosque
after Friday prayers, chanting slogans
in support of the Palestinian people,
and demanding that the government
abrogate the Camp David accords.
The Egyptian authorities also
repressed a Palestinian demonstration
in Canada camp, in the Egyptian half
of Rafah. (This Palestinian town in the
Gaza Strip, on the border with Egypt,
was divided down the middle by the
provisions of the Camp David accords,
whereby the Sinai was returned to
Egypt. Rows of houses were bulldozed,
leaving a no-man’s-land, divided by
barbed wire fences.) The authorities
opened fire on the demonstrators who
were trying to cross the barbed wire to
take food to the besieged Palestinians
on the other side. Many were injured.
Moreover, the Egyptian authorities
have restricted media coverage of the
uprising. The main TV station broad-
cast short news, but without pictures, to
avoid further inciting the Egyptian
masses.
The uprising has caused the Egyptian
regime a great deal of embarrassment.
After the Amman Summit allowed
Arab countries to resume relations with
Egypt, Mubarak’s regime was attemp-
ting to play a new role, reentering the
political arena with a new settlement, in
order to regain the leading role Egypt
had lost. Then came the uprising, but
Mubarak did not even withdraw the
Egyptian ambassador from ‘Israel’ in
protest of Zionist brutality. Instead,
Mubarak forwarded a new initiative
calling upon all parties to halt «acts of
violence» for six months, and a
moratorium on settlement-building in
the same period, in order to begin the
search for a solution to the Palestinian
problem. The worst part of this in-
itiative, reminiscent of the role of the
Arab rulers in aborting the 1936 revolt
in Palestine, was that it equated the
mass revolt with the occupiers’
brutality.
Mubarak flew to Washington to
present his peace plan to the US
government. In an _ interview on
American television, Mubarak ex-
plained his plan. He did not mention an
independent Palestinian state, but said
that he wanted to «restore the pre-1967
situation in the occupied territories
under the Jordanian administration...
Other details will be discussed later
on...» at an international conference.
While trying to convince the US ad-
ministration to accept his plan,
Mubarak called for discarding the
words Camp David accords, because
these are not accepted by the Arabs.
For «psychological» reasons, he sug-
gest to use another title for the same
formula. There is no doubt that his in-
itiative was stillborn. It was rejected by - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 28
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