Activists To Try Occupy Mubarak Palace Tuesday

by Fintan Dunne – Monday 31st Jan, 2011 – 11:30pm Cairo time

Street activists in Cairo have upped the ante on the Mubarak regime with a plan to march on the presidential home Tuesday to take possession of it for the people.

Speaking live on AlJazeera in Cairo late Monday Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian socialist activist and blogger said that protest groups who have occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo decided to march on Mubarak’s
presidential palace tomorrow and occupy it.

The move raises the stakes on the army’s guarantee today that it will not use force on protesters pursuing their rights lawfully.

It also sets the scene for a potential bloody clash between the protesters and the regime’s regular and irregular security forces.

This decision by street activists may also be designed to retake the initiative by the grassroots groups who have fought the regime –vying for power with existing political groups who are reportedly gathering around the leadership of Mohamed ElBaradei.

Yesterday, ElBaradei visited the protests in Tahrir Square and media reported the emergence of an ad-hoc committee of political and grassrotts groups to negotiate with the army and form a potential interim administration.

Yesterday, activist el-Hamalawy responded to these reports by rejecting the notion that ElBaradei in any way represented the activists and by denouncing the involvement of the army in any political resolution.

As I reported on Sunday, the western establishment and their allies in Egypt are trying to exercise top-down control via the committee, while at the same time there is a corresponding revolutionary pressure coming
from the bottom up.

The stakes have just been raised in that political tussle.

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