Torture tales ruin friendly image of Egyptian army

Reports that the Egyptian army is arresting and even torturing pro-democracy protestors suggest that the earlier Western perception of the military as a benign force was at best misleading, and at worst plain wrong.Human Rights Watch have recorded 119 instances of arbitrary detention since the army was deployed on the streets of Cairo and other cities on the night of January 28. There are at least five recorded cases of torture, including beatings, threats of rape, and electrocution.One protestor told the human rights organisation that when soldiers who searched him in the street found that he was carrying pictures of the protests and flyers, he was beaten on the spot with rubber batons and Tasered. They then took him to a cell and gave him a "welcome beating" which lasted half an hour."When the interrogator came," he told HRW, "he took me to a room and told me to undress. Then he started whipping me with an electric cable, and brought out an electric shock machine. He shocked me all over my body, leaving no place untouched... He tortured me twice like this on Friday, and one more time on Saturday."Another protester, Ashraf, told the Guardian of a similar experience when he was arrested. "They got a bayonet and threatened to rape me with it. Then they waved it between my legs. They said I could die there or I could disappear into prison and no one would ever know. The torture was painful but the idea of disappearing in a military prison was really frightening."Such accounts fly in the face of television footage and still photographs beamed around the world in recent days of smiling soldiers sitting on tanks and appearing to cooperate with anti-Mubarak demonstrators.But while individual conscripts may have been sympathetic to the protesters, it now appears the attitude of the army as an institution could be quite a different matter.President Hosni Mubarak, who was Commander of the Air Force and Egyptian Deputy Minister of Defence in the 1970s, is also the official head of the army. David Williams, a Human Rights Watch researcher detained during an army raid on the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, was told by an interrogator that the uprising "must stop because the army will not accept this kind of end for one of its leaders."It appears the Egyptian people have been misled as much as Westerners by the initial impression of the army as a benign force. As in Britain, soldiers are a rarity on the streets of Egyptian cities, and until recent events, people hardly ever came face to face with the army."This is a completely new thing," Heba Fatma Morayef, a Middle East researcher for HRW told The First Post today. "The army has never performed this role before."Initially protestors saw them as protection from abusive police. They idealised them and saw them as defender, but the Egyptian people don't know the army."Whatever happens next, the military will be instrumental. As Morayef points out, "Right now the army is making political decisions, they are clearly in control."Today, the army issued a communique on state television pledging "its commitment to protect the people and its keenness to protect the nation". It followed a meeting of the Supreme Council of Egyptian Armed Forces but came before President Mubarak's televised address tonight, when against all expectations, he refused to stand aside. Whatever happens next, if the army and the people are to move forward together, the military will need to show that the reported instances of violent arrests and torture are an aberration and not systemic. ·