CAIRO - None of Egypt's cultural or political authors predicted the negative side of the recent revolution, with all the looting and pillaging, thought to have been organised by someone from the toppled regime. But one book that explores the problems with the police is Basma Abdel-Aziz's “The Ultimate Power Temptation,” which won its author the Prize for Best Research in the Ahmed Behaa Eddin Young Researchers' Competition in 2009. Basma's book features an introduction by prominent Egyptian writer Salama Ahmed Salama, who asks how the police's vital role in securing society can be safeguarded and how the police can be stopped from being so violent. The book includes a chapter entitled ‘Violence in the Relationship between the Police and the Citizen throughout History', something very topical these days, when the ordinary Egyptians have been standing in for the police, who disappeared from the streets in late January. “When I first thought of writing this book, my starting point was the fact that there was a time when the relationship between the police and the public was a normal one, without the terrible violence we have been witnessing today," recalls the author. “For many social, political and economic reasons, this relationship became one full of fear and tension on the one side and cruelty and violations on the other side,” Basma writes. The first chapter of the book looks into the history of the security agencies and the violence they have practised at critical moments. It ends with the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat in October 1981. The second chapter discusses the systematic violence of the 1980s and the 1990s and its consequences. In the following chapters, the book highlights the image of policemen in the citizens' consciousness after years of continual suppression. The book ends with a review of citizens' reactions towards this violence and suppression from which they suffer and the social contract between the citizen and the police, which used to be respected. Basma ought to write a sequel to her book, in light of the recent revolution, analysing the changing relationship between the citizen and the police after the January 28 Friday of Anger and the shameful deterioration in security in Egypt's streets. The police, who built a huge wall of injustice to hide their suppression, torture and fraud, are now trying to build new bridges of trust, especially under the Government of Prime Minister Essam Sharaf. Readers of this book, published in Arabic, will be surprised to discover that, when Egypt was ruled by the Romans, volunteers were responsible for security. Exactly the same thing happened recently, when ordinary people took responsibility for protecting their homes and those of their neighbours, by means of the popular committees. "By the time of the Khedive Ismail, the idea of volunteering had died out. Security people were now given a salary, although their jobs were still non-governmental, which meant that their salaries were independent of the State budget," she says. Basma explains that, in the era of the Second Muslim Caliph Omar Ibn el-Khattab, nightwatchmen first appeared on the scene, while in Byzantine times there was someone called ‘The Protector', whose mission it was to protect poor people from the injustice of the rich. In Ottoman times, a secret security state system was established and its employees were known as ‘The Watchers'. This was similar to the system prior to the recent revolution. In the second chapter, Basma, who gives many examples of police violence taken from newspaper reports, says that the Third Republic was launched in 1981. “By the end of 2008, this violence was no longer systematic but random, with any policeman shooting whomever he might want to shoot,” she continues. Basma also refers in her book to the way officer cadets are taught in the Police Academy. According to the Egyptian author, cadets are firstly persuaded that they are ‘better' than ordinary citizens and then insulted, so they'll find it easy to insult other people.
