In Egypt, University Campuses Emerge as the Latest Battleground
Students who support deposed president Mohamed Morsi have intensified their anti-government demonstrations in recent weeks, staging strikes and clashing with police on university campuses as security forces clamp down on dissent.
With Morsi and other top Muslim Brotherhood leaders imprisoned after a military takeover this past summer, students who opposed the coup are drawing support from universities where Islamists have deep roots.
The authorities have adopted a tough line in response, granting police the authority to enter college campuses without warrants to quell protests. On Thursday, security forces firing tear gas and water cannons broke up the latest big rally at Cairo University, setting off clashes that left one person dead, according to news agencies.
The government’s actions are raising fears of a return to an approach that prevailed before Egypt’s 2011 revolution, with security forces harassing and intimidating students and professors in the name of national security.
In a sign that the government crackdown has widened beyond the Islamist opposition, security forces arrested prominent blogger and political activist Alaa Abdel Fattah on Thursday night. He was charged with inciting an anti-government demonstration earlier this week.
“The security state has returned to the universities,” said Mahmoud Omar, a 24-year-old medical student and secretary general of the student wing of the Strong Egypt Party, which is led by Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a moderate Islamist politician who ran for president in 2012.
In 2010, under then-President Hosni Mubarak, a court barred Egypt’s powerful Interior Ministry from stationing units at public universities, where operatives had worked to thwart political activism. But now, plainclothes agents are again prowling university campuses, monitoring demonstrations and regulating entry at the schools’ gates.“If we were living under a just government, this would not be a problem,” said Omar, who is helping coordinate Cairo area student activists to oppose the police presence on campus. “But we are again living under an oppressive regime.”
Beginning in mid-November, police have used tear gas, batons and birdshot to disperse near-
daily protests against the military-appointed government at universities in Cairo, the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt in the south. One student at Cairo’s al-Azhar University was killed Nov. 21, and dozens more have been arrested.
On Nov. 13, a court in Cairo sentenced 12 students from al-Azhar, where support for the Muslim Brotherhood is strong, to 17 years in prison for inciting riots. At several demonstrations, protesters have destroyed or damaged property on university grounds. Young people, many of whom are now organizing under the banner Students Against the Coup, responded to the sentences with more protests.
At Cairo University last weekend, hundreds of student demonstrators and professors chanted against military rule on the main campus, later joining forces with an anti-coup protest on the street outside. Students at the engineering department of Cairo’s Ain Shams University have gone on strike, refusing to take midterm exams until their peers are set free.
Source: Washington Post
