Region | Egypt
Life goes on in the shadow of protests a year after Mubarak
Country badly needs work and stability, not stoppage — worker
- By Ramadan Al Sherbini, Correspondent
- Published: 00:00 February 12, 2012
- Image Credit: AFP
- Egyptian students hold placards calling for the removal of military rule during a demonstration in Cairo on Saturday. Activists called for a day of strikes to mark exactly a year since they toppled Hosni Mubarak, leaving an increasingly unpopular and defiant military in charge.
Cairo: Egyptians went about their daily lives on Saturday despite calls by protest groups for a general strike to pressure the country's military rulers to expedite the transfer of power to a civilian government.
The underground train system, which scoops more than 2.5 million people a day off Cairo's streets, operated normally, commuters and officials said.
"The situation is already bad without the general strike. What the country badly needs now is work and stability, not stoppage," said Sadek Al Sayyed, an employee at a restaurant in central Cairo. Al Sayyed, a father-of-four, rides the underground system daily to travel between his house in the Cairo suburban district of Shubra Al Kheima and his workplace. "[Yesterday] the train was crowded but punctual as usual," he added.
Several political groups, independent trade unions and university student unions have called for a gradual strike to escalate to nationwide civil disobedience to ratchet up pressure on the military who have said they will not leave power before July.
The junta has been ruling Egypt since last February after a popular revolt forced long-standing president Hosni Mubarak to step down. The opposition has become critical of and sceptical about the junta's agenda after a series of deadly violence that the ruling military council blamed on an unspecified ‘third party'.
The council on Friday night warned against what it called "conspiracies to spread chaos across Egypt… and to drive a wedge between the people and the army".
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The traffic in the Suez Canal, a major waterway, went smoothly on Saturday, Egyptian television quoted officials as saying.
Strike instances
"Flights land and take off as scheduled," said Brigadier Ahmad Saleh, the chief of the public relations department at Cairo airport. He added that employees of the airport had volunteered to work an extra hour for free.
Many businesses were seen open around Cairo. Those with closed shutters did not indicate their shutdown was in response to the strike calls.
No private or state institution across the nation reported instances of strikes by their employees yesterday, the first anniversary of Mubarak's removal.
Egypt has suffered in the past year with political and economic upheavals, which sent tourism, a key foreign currency earner for the country, into a sharp decline. Egypt's revenues from tourism dropped by 30 per cent in 2011 compared to the previous year, tourism officials said last month.
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