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  1. World
  2. Middle East
19 November 2013updated 19 Feb 2014 5:31am

What happened when Egypt’s government unveiled a monument to Tahrir Square protestors?

If the army was hoping that a hulking great monument would, literally and metaphorically, set their version of history in stone, they were wrong.

By Sophie McBain

Yesterday morning, Egypt’s military interim government unveiled a memorial in Tahrir Square commemorating those who died during the 2011 protests against Egypt’s longstanding dictator Hosni Mubarak, and during the 2013 demonstrations against its Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi. By nightfall, the memorial had been vandalised – it was sprayed with graffiti and the stone inscriptions were picked off. So why has this memorial to Egypt’s dead caused such offence?

The problem is that the memorial was constructed by the very same people, namely the army and security forces, who killed the protestors being remembered. The army may see itself as the guardians of Egypt’s revolution, and many welcomed its removal of Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, but that doesn’t mean they have forgiven its heavy-handedness. If the army was hoping that a hulking great monument would, literally and metaphorically, set their version of history in stone, they were wrong.

Meanwhile, today in Cairo, competing demonstrations have been organised by supporters of the military, Morsi supporters and secular revolutionaries to commemorate the anniversary of some of the most deadly 2011 clashes between protestors and security forces. The army has promised to react strongly against any group threatening violence. As Alastair Beach reports in the Daily Beast, Egypt’s military government is also due to sign a series of laws to force street protestors to seek government permission and to limit their protests to designated areas. It also wants to introduce jail sentences for those caught writing political graffiti.

Commemorating the dead can be an important step to promoting national reconciliation, but Egypt can’t reconcile itself with the past while there is still no little agreement on who “owns” the revolution, and where power should lie in the new Egypt.
 

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