Protesters remain wary of police, security forces

Reporting from Cairo —  In the din of frantic phoning and texting that has characterized these tense days in Cairo, unusual messages arrived this week that left many Egyptians squinting at their cellphones:

“Police have returned to streets to protect citizens and their security. Please cooperate with them.”

Another said: “The police will be nothing but at the service of the people and their protection.”

For the most part, these communiques from the police state have been greeted with puzzlement, if not derision. Events Thursday, which included President Hosni Mubarak’s televised address to the nation, cast uncertainty on the future of Egypt’s security services, especially on the role the army will play in domestic security.

Sayed Awadi, a family physician who lives in central Cairo, was standing next to a crowd that marched against the government in the capital.

“The government has been lying for 40 years, so why should we believe them?” Awadi said, referring to the pledges of police protection.

In Tahrir Square, where for nearly three weeks protesters have been rattling the cage of one of the most entrenched military regimes in the world, the question of whether to accept the pledge of a gentler approach by Egypt’s massive police establishment, notorious for its vigilance and cruelty, is crucial.

Many in the relatively secure square remained convinced that any outcome short of Mubarak’s departure and the fall of the nation’s repressive police apparatus would doom protest leaders to harsh, possibly violent, reprisals.

“The situation is critical. It’s life or death. Because if they get their hands on us, they will have no mercy,” said Mohammed Taman, a spokesman for the coalition of youth organizations that has been organizing the protests.

Civilian police dramatically vacated the streets in the early days of the protests, opening the door to looting and prompting citizens to set up volunteer neighborhood watches.

In the days since, traffic police have taken up their old positions, maintaining a low-key, relatively friendly presence. At the same time, non-uniformed police and a relatively new player on the scene, the Egyptian army, slipped quietly into many quarters of the capital.

For the last few weeks, tanks have been positioned around the radio and television building and the Cairo airport road, and sporadically around key bridges and roads in the city center. Soldiers, not police officers, have been positioned at some key intersections and guard posts.

“They seem to be distributing the army guys around,” said Ellis Goldberg, a Middle East expert at the University of Washington who is a guest professor at the American University of Cairo.

“The balance of forces in the regime has swung away from the police and the Interior Ministry and back to the Defense Ministry and the army,” Goldberg said. “The army is smaller than the police, overall, but it’s a heck of a lot better trained and better disciplined and more reliable.”

Protesters in Tahrir Square on Thursday night were sometimes jubilantly shaking hands with soldiers. But in a signal of what expanded military control in Egypt might ultimately look like for activists who have taken on the regime, Human Rights Watch investigators this week said they had documented at least 119 cases of arbitrary detention made not by civilian police, as would normally be the case, but by army officers and military police.

At least 20 of those arrests involved people who were coming to or leaving protests in Tahrir Square, their report said.

Last week, hours after meeting with opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei at his home in suburban Cairo, nine young protest leaders dining nearby were confronted by military intelligence officers, handcuffed, blindfolded, and held for three days.

“I was blindfolded the whole time I was in jail, and forced to lie on the floor,” said Yasser Hawary, 34. “It was very frightening. I didn’t know what would happen.”

Soldiers and military police officers last week raided the office of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, where lawyers were preparing to represent those detained in the demonstrations. They arrested 30 lawyers, volunteers, foreign journalists and human rights workers, seized the center’s cash, computer hard drives and some files and left the rest strewn across the floor.

“They forced all the employees to sit down on the ground. No one was even allowed to go to the bathroom,” said Dalia Zakhary, a lawyer who volunteers at the center. “They seized the laptops, the passports and mobile phones. For some reason, they considered all of these things as tangible evidence that we are spies.”

Ominously, say human rights workers, some of the army’s security measures have included late-night visits and searches of protesters’ homes.

Yasmine Ibrahim, a children’s rights researcher who has been joining the protesters in Tahrir Square each day, said that this week, she and her roommate had returned from the square to their apartment after a late dinner when several soldiers knocked at the door of at 1:30 a.m.

An army lieutenant asked for their IDs, Ibrahim said. “He wanted to know what we are doing now. He said the neighbors informed them that we were practicing politics,” she said.

Two soldiers proceeded to search the apartment, and the lieutenant asked to examine her cellphone.

“He wanted to see the photos. He asked if I had taken pictures of the demonstrations,” Ibrahim said. “My friend started talking to him, and in this moment, I opened the phone and took the flash memory out, and I stepped on it.”

Once she handed over the cellphone, Ibrahim said, the soldiers apologized and left.

“It’s become quite different. The first day the army went to the streets, they were friendly with people. But it’s too strange now,” she said. “Their attitude is different. And they are the guys that are running the country now.”

kim.murphy@latimes.com