. . . Beijing on June the 4th, specifically. Right now I'm listening to Jim Naughtie of BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme questioning the Egyptian ambassador's about the apparent mass killings in Cairo yesterday, and expressing disbelief of the Egyptian government's claims about what happened. The figures for the numbers who died being bandied around, the claims of self-defence by the government forces being made, sound very similar to those that came from the Chinese Communist Party leadership after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Unfortunately the example of what happened after the Tiananmen Square massacre shows that governments can carry out a massacre of their largely peacefully-protesting rivals and not only survive, but flourish. Regardless of this, sanctions against the Egyptian government at least the equal of those brought against the People's Republic of China should be implemented to display disapproval of these acts - it may well be that the Egyptian military government, which depends to a large extent on military aid from the United States and other countries, may be easier to influence through a cutting off of such aid.
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One can argue that leaders who need to resort to killings on this scale must not be allowed to rule a country. The problem with Egypt (as is with Syria) is that the elites - that has always been the military, from Nasser or Sadat and Mubarak to the current rulers - never tried to reconcile the different camps among the people of their country, and only tried to cope when it was too late. Upper classes who see themselves as "ships" and the people as "the sea" are bound to kill.
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