• EGYPT
  • November 12, 2013
  • 6 minutes read

Pro-Democracy Alliance Calls ‘Freedom for Egyptian Students’ Million-Man March Tuesday

Pro-Democracy Alliance Calls ‘Freedom for Egyptian Students’ Million-Man March Tuesday

 The student movement is Egypt’s beating heart and unflinching determination. It has had an honorable presence at every dangerous turn in modern Egyptian history. And it has been the true thermometer for the Egyptian people, their pains and aspirations.



The heinous coup is striving to reduce Egypt and its people to its own private political project, represented by the "roadmap". Since that roadmap is rejected in form and content, any honest expression of the Egyptian conscience or of the people’s opinion represents to the coup commanders a danger to national security and a threat that must be repressed and terrorized.


One of the gains of the January 25 Revolution was freeing Egyptian universities from the control of security forces, and opening the doors to political expression on campus. However, the coup has demolished those gains and robbed Egyptians of their homeland. It reactivated the departments monitoring political and religious activities within the state security apparatus. It opened the school year by giving powers of arrest to university employees, allowing them to arrest student political activists. Egyptian students’ response, however, made it impossible to apply these repressive measures at universities.


Over the past two months, Egypt’s students were a prime example of heroism, strength, vitality, patriotism, and political and revolutionary maturity of which Egypt will always be proud throughout its history. On the other hand, the military coup was an example of repression and suppression of freedoms, an example of cold-blooded brutality, witnessed in attacks on the university campus – with thugs, some plain-clothed officers and armed forces storming university colleges in a most savage and shameful manner that exceeded practices of the 1950s British occupation which would attack demonstrations outside the walls of the university.


The fascist coup was not satisfied with killing students and suppressing demonstrations inside university buildings. It arrested thousands of university students, graduate students and professors, fabricating ludicrous accusations against them. Some of them have been under detention since the clearing of the Rabaa and Nahda sit-ins, in a policy of collective punishment that violates all laws and freedoms.


Absurdly, human rights organizations and other NGO’s have maintained a suspicious silence bordering on complicity in the face of flagrant violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which have been ratified and accepted by Egypt.


Equally complicit in the coup’s heinous crimes is the US – priding itself on protecting freedoms while endorsing a traitorous putsch that practices excessively brutal repression against university students, including suspensions, arbitrary arrests, assault, storming university campuses and a continuous threat of pursuit by security forces that has affected students and professors in an obvious Machiavellian mind-set.


Meanwhile, the general prosecutor’s office is clearly treading a highly politicized path, giving legal cover to the treasonous coup and its practices, and coordinating with the Ministry of Interior. While 43 Azhar University students are tried in Nasr City Misdemeanor Court Wednesday, November 13, having been arbitrarily arrested on campus, and while school and institute male and female students continue to be detained because they raised the Rabaa symbol of defiance, the football fans called ‘Ultras’ were released one day before the game, which gives us great pleasure, but is also not void of other clear indications.


The Anti-Coup Pro-Democracy National Alliance respects and salutes the noble stance of solidarity taken by students in the face of repressive measures as happened in Mansoura University. Twenty-four medical and engineering students were referred to a disciplinary board, so their fellow students showed their solidarity by refusing to attend a monthly exam despite threats by officials who sacrificed their educational authority to their political interests.


The Egyptian people have an obligation towards their heroic sons and daughters to support, in every way, this student uprising in all universities of Egypt. In this regard, the Egyptian Anti-Coup Alliance calls on all Egyptian students and all citizens to join an uprising of rage, a million-man march, on Tuesday November 12, in all corners of Egypt, under the slogan "Freedom for Egyptian Students". This is in support of the students’ revolutionary movement and to demand the release detained students, and who have missed exams while in prison under so-called precautionary detentions. This mass rally is also to express rejection of all student suspension decisions and referrals to disciplinary boards.


The Anti-Coup Pro-Legitimacy National Alliance
Cairo: November 11, 2013