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January 25th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Egypt’s military rulers are lifting the country’s decades-long state of emergency. This was one of the key demands of thousands of protesters marking the first anniversary of the uprising that toppled President Mubarak.
Emergency law will still be used by police in crimes related to mass rioting and robbery, but otherwise will become history on Wednesday, announced Egypt’s provisional head of state Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who chairs the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).
Egypt has been living under a state of emergency since 1981, when President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist fundamentalists along with 11 other high-ranking officials. The emergency, which gave much authority to the military and security forces, was expected to last as long as the investigation and crackdown on the killers required, but went on for three decades.
Earlier, SCAF said it had no legislative power to lift the law, which was due to expire in late June 2012. The dismantling of the controversial state of emergency comes as Egypt celebrates the first anniversary of the revolution, which ousted President Hosni Mubarak.
Festivities in the famous Tahrir Square and all around the country are being held with a great degree of mourning. The latest report says 699 people were killed during the revolution and 3,551 were wounded. Many of the tents set up in the square are black, to commemorate the victims.
A year on, the country has a new lower chamber of parliament dominated by relatively moderate Islamists the Muslim Brotherhood, banned under Mubarak, and more radical Salafi MPs. The parliament gathered for its first session on Monday, with a public execution of the former president and stripping the SCAF of power in favor of the parliament speaker on top of the agenda.
Economically the perils, which fueled the public uprising against the former regime, have only been aggravated. Unemployment in Egypt is at a ten-year-high, as the vital tourism industry is suffering from a loss of clients scared off the country’s beaches by the unending turmoil.
Resentment among the population remains high, with demonstrations a regular sight in Cairo and elsewhere, reports RT’s Maria Finoshina. Protesters blame SCAF generals, who served Mubarak when he was in power, for what they call hijacking the revolution, as well as for a series of bloody crackdowns on demonstrators over the last year.
The military maintain that they will step down after a new president in elected in June, but many protesters are unconvinced. They say the generals, who maintained an important position in Egypt’s life for at least six decades, would simply stay behind the scenes.
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