By Dillan Ducar ’13
THE ROUNDUP
The uprisings and riots in Egypt reached an all-time high recently calling in more people of all beliefs and ethnicities to do their part in the fight for justice.
Former president Hosni Mubarak was pressured into stepping down after 30 years of ruling with martial law.
The revolts also took the streets because of the low wages, high price of food, a 25 percent unemployment rate and a 35 percent illiteracy rate, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Looking at the protests in Egypt, the question is not whether people are being oppressed but rather do the people believe they are being suppressed?
The protesters obviously believed they have been lied to, cheated and abandoned by their government and in this situation they had the right to protest with such ferocity.
“There were people in the protests going around naming books they didn’t like, movies they didn’t like, laws they didn’t like; all because they weren’t allowed to do that before,” said Mr. Lane McShane ’82.
Egypt’s government is listed as a republic on the CIA World Factbook, defined as a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them.
When the citizens no longer have a say in the republic, it has effectively become corrupt. But there are also other hints the government is corrupt from bribes taken by government officials and the president himself using his title to acquire an estimated $70 billion, according to journalist Susanna Kim.
The protesters were being heavily suppressed from the Republic of Egypt, and with the power that the president had over the police and his loyalists, nothing would had ever gotten done with a peaceful protest.
The Republic of Egypt was officially destroyed as of Feb. 11 when its military dissolved the parliament and suspended the constitution, displaying the protests were a complete success.
The plan is for the army to control the country for six months or until democratic elections are held to elect a new president and government, but many had mixed feelings about this plan.
Many of the protesters did not like this idea because it required putting the country in yet another state of martial law in which no real government was in power, otherwise known as anarchy.
These protests, as it seems, where not just a success for the people of Egypt but for the rest of the world too.
The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have sparked protests in Algeria, Jordan and Yemen and minor protests in more than 10 other countries in a chain of unrest that one can only hope will spread throughout the world to secure just rights for all.
