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Letters From |
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Cairo |
After the Fall
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| Dispatches from Egypt's revolution |
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RON HAVIV / VII |
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| Egyptians demonstrate in Tahrir Square on 31 January. Troops and military tanks surrounded the square for days, trying to keep the
protests confined, despite the swelling crowds.
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| H |
OSNI MUBARAK with donkey ears, Hosni
Mubarak with a Hitler moustache,
Hosni Mubarak as Colonel Sanders—once the protesters started heaping
on the scorn, they couldn’t stop. It had
been a long time coming. |
The only other time I had heard anyone in Egypt express
public contempt for Mubarak was in 2003, before a prosperous
and well-educated audience at the American University
in Cairo. Edward Said, the distinguished Palestinian-American literary critic, had just given a stirring lecture on
the difficulty of life under a repressive regime, namely (of
course), Israel. During the question and answer session, an
American study-abroad student took the microphone to ask
a question that sent such a frisson through the crowd that I
doubt I am the only one who remembers it more or less verbatim.
“Here in Egypt,” he said, “we’re living under a military
dictatorship, and it looks like Hosni Mubarak wants to
pass the leadership on to his son Gamal.” How, he asked,
could Egyptians fight back against repression?
The fear that passed through the crowd was audible, visible,
palpable and immediate. Someone yelped when the
name “Gamal” was mentioned, and a professor rushed to cut
off the microphone. Dissidents, including the university’s
own Saad Eddin Ibrahim, had been imprisoned for asking
such questions. After several seconds of extreme distress—followed by a round of light applause from students—Said
responded wanly, saying that all political regimes were inherently
coercive, and yes, it’s difficult, isn’t it? At this point,
the distressed yelps came from the students, who seemed to
faint a little inside when they realised that if even Edward
Said (beloved in Cairo, and with terminal leukemia, having
little to lose) was too craven to support regime change, then
no one would.
One longs to know what finally convinced Hosni Mubarak
to relinquish his office. What did he see on the afternoon
of 11 February that he had not seen before? By the
end of January, he must have known that his people were
desperate to be rid of him. By the end of the first week of
February, they showed they were prepared to fight and die.
And by the night of 10 February, after his weird and deluded
speech failed to mollify crowds and instead pumped
them full of wrath, he must have known that the movement
would metastasise beyond Tahrir Square, and that by staying
in power he was only making things worse.
One theory: He was watching his own state television network. On the day Mubarak stepped down, at around
three o’clock a crowd of about 1,000 people had the entrance
of the building blocked in an effort to send a message
that could penetrate even the waxy ears of official State
media. The crowd’s cheers were led by a girl, no older than
six, but with lungs developed far beyond her years. Riding
the shoulders of a man, probably her father, she screamed
the familiar incantations of Egyptian democracy, and the
crowd screamed with her. Five minutes after she started, I
saw her thwack her dad on the back, like she would a horse:
she wanted not to face the crowd, but instead to face the
M1 tanks and the freshly stretched razor wire that stood
between her and the state television building. If Mubarak
was looking at the live raw feed from the windows of that
building, he would have seen the glare of a child, fixed with
bravery and loathing, and leading a crowd of thousands.
How one can look at that and continue in office is beyond
me, and perhaps proved beyond him, too.
When the announcement of Mubarak’s resignation percolated
through Cairo’s alleys, car horns confirmed the news
before Twitter did. For several hours, the horns did not stop.
Not only in Tahrir Square, but also parts of Cairo so-far untouched
by rioting, the refrain was, “We are Egyptians: Hold
up your head.” This is entirely apposite for a movement that
Mubarak tried to slander as a foreign plot. But it’s also something
one heard in Tahrir for many days. A man with a bandage
told me he had applied for a visa to Canada but no longer
had any intention of using it, because of the pride he felt
in his country. Mubarak, he said, had defamed and befouled
a great civilisation. “Now I will never leave this place,” he
said. “This is my country. I finally discovered this.”
The weekend after Mubarak finally departed, men and
women from Egypt’s prosperous, educated class hit the
streets, helping to tidy up after the demonstrations and the
violence that had marred the hallowed Tahrir Square during
the preceding two and a half weeks. One of the familiar
characters of Egyptian domestic life is the zabbal, or garbage-man (usually a Coptic Christian, whose faith permits
him to feed organic waste to Cairo’s pigs). I lived in Cairo
for two years, and no zabbal of mine ever picked up the
trash in stiletto heels, or while moonlighting from his day
job as a dermatologist. But in Tahrir Square that weekend,
one saw miraculous things, and these were among them.
The Tahrir clean-up started before the party had even
ended. Cairenes from all demographics, including the
wealthy and educated, showed up in force, bearing cans
of paint and push-brooms. The task was hardly thankless; some pinned signs to themselves and grinned with self-congratulation
at stooping to filthy work for a country they
loved. It was also totally impractical; as of late Saturday, the
square still brimmed with massive crowds. Imagine trying
to tidy up a Rolling Stones concert during the third verse of
‘Satisfaction’. Two weeks earlier, the protesters had formed
human chains to prevent vandals from looting the Egyptian
Museum. Now they formed human chains because
they had just swept and painted the curb, and weren’t about
to let anyone track dust onto it.
As of Sunday, the square was nearly emptied and cars
were driving through all but a few of the streets. In the last
day or so, the military had moved in to remove the bitterenders,
the protesters who cheered Mubarak’s downfall but
refused to leave until democracy, rather than a fragile military
rule, had arrived. Their worry is sensible: the Egyptian
military never renounced Mubarak (who was, after all, one
of their own); and although it pledges elections, it hasn’t
loosened the infamous Emergency Law or, for that matter,
dismissed the government Mubarak hastily appointed after
the protests began.
There were two groups of protesters in the square: the
radicals and the tourists. The radicals shed blood and
risked everything to get rid of Mubarak, and the tourists
supported them but didn’t show up until the danger had passed. During the heady early days of the protests, none
of the radicals indicated that they would be satisfied with
anything less than democracy and the most severe justice
for Mubarak and his people. Already, we’ve witnessed the
gratifying spectacle of ex-Mubarak ministers being denied
permission to leave the country and, presumably, flee to
luxurious exile. Early in the protests, Amr Bargisi warned
in The Wall Street Journal that the protesters would commence
a reign of terror if they won. “The next step,” he said
the protesters promised, “will be to knock on the doors of
suburban villas and ask the owners: Where did you get the
money to afford these?”
Where, then, are the Arab Jacobins, and should we fear
them? The presence of elites out there, shovelling garbage
with the common man, must be met with some ambivalence,
I suppose: some among them are, for the moment,
supporters of the revolution, and others could potentially
be its victims. So far, the protesters have shown little appetite
for gore and have cleared no space for a guillotine in
Tahrir Square. Perhaps it is the military’s role to stifle and
suppress the most eager of these protesters and to allow the
villa owners, many of whom have military connections, to
prepare themselves for justice. The radical wing of protesters
has shown little flexibility about anything so far, and
eventually it will demand, in a word, satisfaction.
This article was adapted from theatlantic.com
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