Selmia, Selmia: The Lethal Weapon of "Peaceful, Peaceful"

News from the Egyptian Street and Media Translated Without Comment from Arabic into English As a Public Service
***************************************

When the January 25, 2011 Revolution broke out in Egypt, its demands were rather modest. Its central demand was for jobs and the elimination of emergency laws. The crowds came out seeking dignity. But they were met with the brutal force of the Mubarak security forces which turned their cries of "Selmia, Selmia" into cries of death and pain. More than 850 were killed in various parts of that beautiful country. Thousands more were injured. The more people were felled by bullets, the more thousands, came out to form a human avalanche which numbered nearly 8 millions.  Only then were the demands upon Mubarak of "IRHAL" - Leave, and "The People Want the Regime to Fall."

The Egyptian armed forces, numbering in all its branches including reservists a million kept their powder dry. The false accusations by the Mubarak media that the throngs were foreign agents who were bent up on chaos and who were destabilizing Egypt sounded very hollow. The armed forces, being made up of conscripted soldiers, represented a true spectrum of the people in Tahrir and elsewhere.

Thus the banners of the "Selmia" throngs were raised proclaiming that "the people and the army are one." The slogans reflected the reality. The tanks went to Tahrir to give credence to those slogans. Flowers were offered to tank crews; children were helped by soldiers atop of those tanks; and tanks, when it rained, which is an infrequent event in Egypt, sheltered the demonstrators from getting wet. And the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces quietly told Mubarak "go away."

So when February 11 came about, there was nowhere for the 83 year old dictator to go but out. The shout of a young Egyptian woman, issuing from Tahrir, upon hearing the news, summed up the feelings of ecstasy of the millions: "No More Fear!! (Mafeesh Khofe Tani!!)."

The wall of fear which came down crashing in Egypt, the most populous Arab nation, was a signal to the whole region, indeed to the whole world, that non-violence has become the weapon of mass reconstruction for the millions of Arab masses everywhere.

In its methods of non-violence, "Selmia, Selmia" was a true vindication of the principles articulated by the scholar Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston in his "From Dictatorship to Democracy - A Conceptual Framework for Liberation." That 76-page booklet was translated into 30 languages including Arabic.  The throngs in Tahrir and in the rest of the Arab world had read it.