CAIRO: Three months after toppling Hosni Mubarak, activists behind Egypt’s revolt have grown increasingly frustrated with the new military rulers, accusing them of the very same practices the uprising sought to abolish.
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took charge after Mubarak ceded power in the face of 18 days of anti-government protests, has repeatedly maintained it is the guardian of the revolt, committed to protecting its goals.
But its status as revolt hero began to fade with allegations of human rights abuses, crackdowns against protesters and attempts to silence critics.
While the uprising achieved its main goal of ousting Mubarak, the unelected military council maintains its absolute power in the Arab world’s most populous nation.
Social networking sites have been awash with a laundry list of grievances against the military council, including the pace of democratic change and more specifically accusations of alleged torture, jailing of critics and arrest of activists.
Activists and human rights groups have insisted on keeping up the pressure against the military rulers for democratic change.
"Once again we reiterate that the Egyptian revolution had broken out against the oppression, suppression and violation of freedom expression and the sovereignty of the law means evidently that nobody is above criticism," said the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in a statement.
"No more human rights violations will be ignored in Egypt after the January 25 revolution," the group said.
On Tuesday, more than 20 pro-democracy youth groups said they would boycott a meeting organized by the ruling military council, accusing the army of returning to the autocratic measures of the Mubarak era.
In a statement, the groups said they would reject any dialogue while military trials of civilians carry on.
They said the army had failed to investigate claims of violations by military police and denounced a new set of laws criminalizing protests and sit-ins.
On Wednesday, the military council said it would continue to invite youth groups for talks, citing "the importance of maintaining dialogue with the great Egyptian people and the youth of the revolution."
But its promise of continued dialogue was drowned out by an outcry over allegations that female protesters were forced to undergo virginity tests in March, after an apparent admission by an army general to CNN.
Amnesty International said on Tuesday that authorities must bring to justice those responsible for the tests.
The general, speaking to CNN on condition of anonymity, had defended the practice.
"We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place," he told the US broadcaster.
Amnesty — which had previously collected testimonies of women following the March 9 protest — condemned the admission as "an utterly perverse justification of a degrading form of abuse.
"The women were subjected to nothing less than torture," it said.
But a senior military official denied to AFP that such tests had taken place, saying the allegations were "baseless" and that the army would take legal action over what was published.
Activists and youth groups were further infuriated by news of the questioning of two journalists and a prominent blogger over criticism of the army on live talk shows.
Reem Maged and Nabil Sharaf El-Din, the two reporters, and prominent blogger and activist Hossam El-Hamalawy were questioned by Adel Morsi, who heads the military justice authority.
Last month, an Egyptian military court sentenced a blogger to three years in prison, in what Human Rights Watch described as a "serious setback to freedom of expression" in post-Mubarak Egypt.
