Brazil Street blues

The number of soldiers on my street has actually increased tonight. I hadn’t checked the news in several hours, but made sure to look immediately to see if there was a cause for the new tensions. All I could find is that PRESIDENT MUBARAK WEIGHED IN on the issue, saying that Egypt would not tolerate the humiliation of its nationals abroad. The reference is to reported attacks on Egyptians leaving the stadium in Khartoum by knife-wielding Algerians.

Those are the reports that triggered all of the past few days. And I can definitely say that people here are taking it very seriously (though Sudan is now angered at the Egyptian media, saying they blew it out of proportion). I’ve seen anger on the streets here about Iraq, multiple times about Palestine, about the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, about George W. Bush, and also about the actions of the government in Cairo. But I’ve never seen anger of this sort about a non-political issue (there were bread riots, but that was ultimately a political issue about governmental legitimacy). Egyptians are temperamentally quite mild and likable, but large crowds are a different story and can become heated in a hurry.