When democracy is a double-edged sword
By Zan Azlee

NOV 23 — Sometimes democracy works in very funny ways. I recently observed this first hand in Cairo, Egypt, where a revolution recently ousted a dictatorship. Everyone is familiar with the Arab Spring and one of the countries that played a big role in it is Egypt, where I currently am shooting a documentary for Astro Awani.

Tahrir Square, in the heart of Cairo, was where the entire Egypt gathered after they were all tired of the dictator Hosni Mubarak and decided to bring him down. A country that was suppressed for years suddenly took matters into their own hands and turned themselves into a democracy. Now they have a new government that they chose themselves through democratic elections. A government led by a Muslim Brotherhood-backed Mohammed Morsi.

And so on the first day that I arrived in the city, I immediately headed to the iconic square (which I surprisingly find out isn’t square at all… it’s really a roundabout!). A crowd of about 300 people had gathered on a street off the square and were obviously demonstrating against something. They started to get quite violent, throwing rocks and what looked liked Molotov cocktails into a school that had been taken over by the police. [Click to read the full article at The Malaysian Insider]