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Egypt: January 25 Protests in Videos

Categories: Middle East & North Africa, Egypt, Digital Activism, Media & Journalism, Protest, Youth

This post is part of our special coverage of Egypt Protests 2011 [1].

Demonstrators took to the streets of Cairo and many other Egyptian cities on Tuesday, January 25 which coincides with a national holiday, “Police Day”, to protest against the 30-year autocratic rule of President Muhammad Hosni Mubarak. Emulating the Tunisian protests that led to the toppling of now-former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali a couple of weeks ago, protesters used social networks like Facebook and Twitter to coordinate their actions. Tonight, news networks speak of tens of thousands of Egyptians camped in the main Cairo plaza, El-Tahrir Square, and demonstrations are set to continue Wednesday.

Many observers noted the lack of coverage of the protests by mainstream news networks. Aljazeera's coverage in particular was remarkably sparse [2]. Citizen journalists have been feeding netizens with loads of videos from inside the demonstration.

People aggregated by the hundreds in several public squares and gradually amassed to form large groups of marchers who succeeded in breaking police cordons as shown by this video posted by lukasjakubicka [3]:

Protests started peacefully as demonstrated in this video (broken audio) posted by ramzyam [4] who comments:

Very Civilized and protected by the Egyptian Police Forces.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCvFVJ46P_o

This other video, posted by no2again [5], shows more protesters peacefully chanting among other slogans: “Down, down with Hosni Mubarak!”, “State security? State security? We have no state, and no security!”:

Riot police were reportedly deployed in Cairo, the capital city in an apparent attempt to intimidate protesters as shown in this video posted by motherofthetribe [6]:

Soon news of clashes with riot police started emerging. This video was posted by Midogonpapa [7]:

In the following video, posted by MFMAegy [8], a young man stands in front of a water cannon armored truck, à la the Tiananmen Square tank-man, barring it from chasing protesters:

This video, posted by MrPeopleNews [9] is reminiscent of that of Tunisian protesters tearing down portraits of their president:

The same scene is repeated in many neighborhoods in Cairo, as shown in this video posted by Ba7ary [10]:

Later in the day, protesters gathered in the main El-Tahrir Square in Cairo, surrounded by cordons of anti riot police. They chanted “The people want to bring this regime down” as captured in this video, posted by nadiaharoun [11]:

Late at night, news arrived of violent clashes between riot police and protesters who refuse to leave El-Tahrir square.

This post is part of our special coverage of Egypt Protests 2011 [1].