Egypt's March of Millions Closes GM Plant

It took the auto makers conducting their business in Egypt about a week to react to the public unrest and decide to put a halt in production in the country. After earlier this week Nissan and Daimler announced a one week freeze at its plant in Gizah, the Americans from GM followed the trend today.

As Egypt braces for what is generally called the “march of millions,” a huge anti-Mubarak rally currently in progress in Cairo, the American auto maker stated its decision to stop production at its plant near the capital. A GM team is on site, the car maker said, and is assessing when to restart operations.

"All of our employees in Egypt as well as our plant property is safe and secure,” GM said following a query from just-auto.com. "Our local team in Cairo is assessing the situation and will decide to commence normal operations once the conditions permit. We are currently not building vehicles."

Currently, confirming the news is impossible, as all Internet traffic in Egypt is down and not even the GM Egypt webpage cannot be accessed. This, along with the troops posted from place to place at key locations in Cairo is, for now, the only way the Egyptian government is fighting back is this unusually long, strange revolution.

With the violent police forces pulled from the streets a few days ago, the apparently still undecided Egyptian army is the only thing holding things together in one of the planet's largest Muslim country (80 million inhabitants in 2009).