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Egypt’s new government has warned of a “counter-revolution” trying to sow chaos and undermine the transition to a new political order after the popular revolt that toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the former president.
The warning came as the military rulers said they had approved draft legislation stiffening punishment for “acts of thuggery” and for the use of violence to terrify others. The details of the proposed law have not been announced, but the government said violence leading to loss of life would be punished by death.
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The new measures are meant to address a security breakdown that started when the interior ministry withdrew all police on January 28 after they failed to stop anti-regime demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people.
Police have yet to return in force to many districts, leading to a rise in criminality which has spread panic. The insecurity coupled with a wave of strikes and labour protests sweeping the country has hampered a return to normal working life.
More worryingly, sectarian clashes on the edge of Cairo this week led to the death of 13 people. Hundreds of people armed with knives, guns and firebombs attacked Christians in the district of Manchiet Nasser who had been protesting against the burning down of a church in a village elsewhere in the country.
Many Egyptians now fear that remnants of the old regime and of the secret police which protected it, could be trying to sabotage the political transition by sowing chaos and stirring sectarian strife.
In recent years the Mubarak regime increasingly resorted to hired thugs to do tasks it did not want uniformed police to be seen to be doing.
“We in the council of ministers believe there is a counter revolution,” said Essam Sharaf, the new prime minister who was appointed by the army in response to demands by the young activists who led the revolution. Speaking in his first televised interview on Wednesday night, Mr Sharaf described the rise in violence as “planned” and said there were attempts to “destroy the state.”
While there is no conclusive proof of a conspiracy against the revolution, many say they detect signs that the violence is not spontaneous.
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Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, a political analyst, said it was unlikely there was one force planning a “comprehensive counter revolution” but that those who lost out during the transition such as the former ruling National Democratic party and the State Security Agency, or secret police, could have launched a “fightback”.
“The aim of the counter revolution is to create panic so that the military would decide a transition to democracy will lead to chaos and bring back some form of iron grip,” said Mr Fishere.
Magdi Tolba, a ready-made garments manufacturer, says some of the strikes in his sector have been provoked by businessmen associated with the old regime. “They are inciting the workers and distributing printed pamphlets urging them to strike. They are telling them this is the moment to have your demands met,” he said.
More perplexing to Egyptians is the behaviour of the State Security Agency. Several agency buildings around the country were invaded by demonstrators earlier this week. They found piles of shredded documents in what looked like an agency-wide attempt to destroy evidence. While they found files about the private lives of opposition figures, there was nothing about the members of the previous regime.