Egypt's Continuing Revolution: Month 14, Week 4, Day 2.

Today Egypt's interim Prime Minister Hazem El-Bablawi (a civilian and former under-secretary general to the UN)  addressed the nation following a week of violence. The main headline message of his speech is that Egypt's power sharing government is studying all legal options to dissolve the Muslim Brotherhood who have been operating as and NGO/charity since the fall of Mubarak. Essentially this would allow the government to seize or sequester the Brotherhoods property and assets making it very difficult for the organisation to operate.

This would be a big step though because it is likely that certain factions of the Brotherhood will respond by going underground and start to operate like a conventional terrorist organisation like the Jihadist groups that are currently operating in the Sinai. In a strange way this could actually be a good thing because the occasional car bombing would actually cause less disruption to everyday life then large protest marches paralysing the capital accompanied by sporadic outbreaks of violent rioting. The problem is that to ensure that the Brotherhood's attacks are limited to the occasional bombing Egypt will have to return to the repressive security measures of the Mubarak era which to my mind is equivalent to letting the Brotherhood win. Also having been forced to make very public statements in support of the Egyptian governments handling of the camp clearances I suspect the Gulf Monarchies particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar will now be looking for a behind the scenes way of making life difficult for the Egyptian government. Providing newly formed Muslim Brotherhood terrorist cells with weapons, training and cash would be the classic way of going about it. Therefore I think any decision to dissolve the Muslim Brotherhood needs very careful consideration. After all even with Brotherhood being a legal organisation the Egyptian police can certainly put its members under surveillance and search buildings owned and used by them and arrests and seizures can be made where it's found crimes are being committed.

Overnight and while El-Bablawi was making his address to the nation a downright bizarre situation has been developing in Ramses Square in Cairo which rather demonstrates the current political situation in Egypt in microcosm. When the overnight curfew began yesterday evening Muslim Brotherhood supporters who had been fighting with the security forces and members of the public in the streets around Ramses Square decided to hole up on the Al-Fateh Mosque on the square. Local residents decided that this was an attempt by the Brotherhood to set up another camp in Ramses Square and surrounded the Mosque on mass threatening to burn it to the ground unless the vastly outnumbered Brotherhood supporters left. Fortunately at this point the police and military arrived on the scene and managed to keep the angry crowd from attacking the Mosque. The police and military then set about trying to evacuate the Brotherhood supporters from the scene for their own safety. Initially the Brotherhood supporters refused to leave and then started making demands of the police and military such as they wouldn't be searched as they left and their weapons wouldn't be confiscated. In places like the UK this sort of behaviour would normally lead to the Brotherhood supporters in the Mosque being locked up under the mental health act because they're clearly so delusional that they pose a danger to themselves.

If I was in charge of this negotiation after about 10 hours I would have given up, pulled the soldiers and police back and let the local residents get on with it. Fortunately the Egyptian commanders on the ground are clearly far more patient then I am and waited for around 14 hours before firing tear gas into the Mosque in a effort to encourage the Muslim Brotherhood supporters to leave. The Brotherhood supporters responded to this by opening fire on the police and soldiers with automatic weapons and positioning snipers in the Mosque's Minarets so they can open fire on the crowds gathered in the surrounding streets. This has led to the police and military being forced to mount a slow moving hostage rescue style operation in the Mosque in which the hostages they're trying to rescue are the same people who are trying to kill them.

15:10 on 17/8/13.