Reuters Eight months ago, Egypt's military ruler was a hero to the masses for taking their side in the revolt that toppled Hosni Mubarak. Today he is vilified as a new autocrat, wielding military might against the people just like Mubarak himself. “Get out, get out, field marshal,” protesters chanted as they buried their dead after troops raced armored vehicles into a crowd on Sunday to disperse a protest. The clashes killed 25 people. Some were crushed. The field marshal is Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, 75, Mubarak's defence minister for two decades and now the leader of the military council that took power in Egypt after Mubarak was driven out by February's popular uprising. To Muslim and Christians alike, the army's reaction during Sunday's demonstration was as brutal as the police tactics used against anti-Mubarak protests. The clashes pose one of the military ruler's sternest challenges, as public anger has boiled over. Politicians gathered to criticize the army's actions. The Internet, used to devastating effect against Mubarak, has been filled with condemnation. “Egypt's Arab Spring has led not to democracy but to another cruel dictatorship,” blogger Kareem Amer wrote. It has added to growing impatience with Tantawi, a decorated veteran of the 1956 Suez crisis and the 1967 and 1973 wars against Israel, whose role was hailed when generals took charge in February with pledges to steer the nation toward democracy. Since those early days, activists have fumed at newspaper photos of Tantawi opening a road and other projects, images that bear a striking resemblance to events attended by Mubarak. When Tantawi exchanged his army uniform for a civilian suit and chatted with citizens during a stroll in downtown Cairo, he was lampooned by Web activists who said it was a stunt to quell anger over his testimony to a court trying Mubarak for killing protesters. Despite a news blackout on publishing his testimony, lawyers said Tantawi's remarks backed Mubarak. But what is irking activists and politicians is the slow pace of the transition that they see as a calculated bid by Tantawi and his generals to prepare for a transfer of day-to-day government without relinquishing power or submitting to civilian rule. The army denies any such intention. Voting in a parliamentary election starts on Nov. 28 but no date has been set for a presidential poll, leaving executive power with the military as long as the post remains empty. “The revolution that happened on Jan. 25 got rid of one person, one general, but the regime is still there, and is still operating,” said Khalil Al-Anani, an Egyptian political analyst at Britain's Durham University. “It was a half-revolution and half-coup.” Yet even as frustration mounts, the factor that may be keeping Tantawi and the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces in place is that Egypt's fragmented political landscape offers few alternatives for steering the nation through the transition. __
