The New Middle East (16 page)

One began doing the rounds when Bill Clinton was president and a referendum was being held to grant Mubarak a third presidential term. The story went that Clinton presented Mubarak with a monkey, saying: ‘I’ll double your aid programme if you make this monkey laugh and cry.’ Soon after, the monkey laughs and cries. ‘How on earth did you do this?’ Clinton asks. ‘I told him that I am president,’ Mubarak says. ‘He laughed. Then I told him that I am trying for a third term. And he cried.’
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By the end of the first month of 2011, Khaled Said’s death, high food prices and low wages had dragged the Egyptian public to the edge of rebellion. If the 2010 elections had shown them there was no other alternative to revolt, then the uprising in Tunisia had given them the courage to consider the leap. Their fear of the regime was waning. Only a last little nudge was needed. El-Adly’s men in the police force were, as ever, ready to oblige.

On the morning of 25 January 2011, despite all that had just gone on in Tunisia, the state still thought it had the people beaten. Egypt was not Tunisia, the government said confidently. The remarkable arrogance of the regime was revealed by the reaction of the police force to a protest against police brutality. They tried to beat everyone up. They believed they could get away with it because they always had. But the protest’s organisation through social media meant that for the first time the security forces found themselves facing huge crowds in Cairo and in other cities too. The usual strategy of riot police, tear gas and water cannon didn’t scare the crowd off. That failure changed the rules. ‘It feels like a revolution,’ said Abd-Allah, one of the protesters on that day. ‘I see people who are determined, people who have nothing to lose, people who want a better future.’
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By evening the police did have the city under control, but it would not last.

Three days after the police attempted to put the first demonstration down, the people hit back. The 28th of January was declared by the young protesters to be the people’s ‘Day of Rage’. It was to be a turning point for both Egypt and the Arab world, because it was the moment when people around the region realised they too stood a chance of winning. Tiny Tunisia was one thing, but if it could be done in enormous Egypt it could be done anywhere. By now the government had switched the Internet off and largely disabled the mobile phone network, but it was too late. The demonstrations had taken on a life of their own, because for the first time it was not just young activists. Despite the police opening fire with live ammunition, a swathe of Egyptian society joined in the revolt.

More than 200 people were killed during the uprisings in Cairo, many of them during the ‘Day of Rage’ protests.
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The demonstrators around the city couldn’t communicate with one another, but they all knew where they wanted to be, Tahrir Square. Everything else just happened. The only element of organisation I saw that day was an old man sitting on a street just off the Nile with a bag of onions, which he was breaking into pieces to give to those of us retching from the effects of tear gas. The vapour released by raw onions counteracts the effects of the gas, but by nightfall even that wasn’t needed. After a series of running battles the people owned the streets, their tormentors were on the run, and I was being jostled and pushed by streams of young men running in and out of the symbol of the ruling National Democratic Party, its enormous headquarters, which sat on the banks of the Nile a few hundred metres from Tahrir Square. By day it was a towering reminder of the power of the party. By that night it was a towering inferno symbolising its end. As its upper levels were being gutted by fire, its lower levels were being looted. The men pushed through the open gates, their arms filled with tables, cabinets and obscure bits of office equipment, in fact anything they could grab before the flames got to it first.

The uniformed police had melted into the night, but most of them hadn’t just given up on their own. They were sent home by the government. I was told this by a Western diplomat in Cairo. ‘We
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that’s what happened,’ he said. The NDP hoped that their absence would provoke chaos on the streets and within forty-eight hours the population would be begging them to come back and restore order. Egyptian society thrives on rumours, so it went straight into a frenzy at reports of criminal gangs preying on the middle-class suburbs. But instead of terrifying Cairo’s society it unified opposition to President Mubarak. Everyone suddenly felt vulnerable, and so everyone got together and began to organise with neighbours they’d often barely troubled to acknowledge. Suddenly people who had never had a conversation with each other before were swapping telephone numbers, and rotas were created to allow people to go to Tahrir Square to protest while others guarded their homes.

As I walked back to my bed each night I had to stroll through a parade of vigilante checkpoints. I’d be stopped by nice polite middle-class people, who would then ask for my ID, smile, and let me through. Fifty paces later I’d do it again. A community spirit that had always been missing from this dirty sprawling city had been born. This went on night after night. On one chilly evening I saw that a checkpoint of decent law-abiding citizens had chopped up and were burning their local police post to keep warm. One of my Egyptian friends, Angy, who was spending her nights in the street outside her home armed with her best kitchen knife, told me: ‘Someone who if you see in the street you wouldn’t know, now you are trusting him to secure your family while you are protesting. This is amazing.’

Sending away the police rebounded spectacularly on the Mubarak regime, but its longer-term effects on society were profound and went on to undermine the process of creating a new democratic state. The police left work that night and they didn’t come back. ‘On January 28 my brother went home and stayed at home. He lost interest,’ said Nihad, whom I met by accident in a coffee shop in Cairo.
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Sure there was a lot of corruption, but everywhere, not only in the police, everywhere. My brother takes two thousand Egyptian pounds [US$330] after twenty years in the police. With two thousand how can you feed and educate your children? They work away from Tahrir now, away from any demonstration. They don’t want to mingle with anybody belonging to the revolution because in the end they don’t respect their orders, they don’t respect them, so what is the point?

In the first days after the ‘Day of Rage’ the prospect that Mubarak might end up behind bars still seemed preposterous. It was at this time that Tahrir Square firmly became and stayed the bastion of the revolution, and its battleground. But the humiliation of the police force generally and the cleansing of their presence from Tahrir Square in particular would have far-reaching consequences for Egypt. It caused huge problems for the Morsi-led government, because Tahrir Square and the streets around it, which contain key ministries and foreign embassies, remain even now Egypt’s wild frontier where the law has lost its writ. A broad section of the Egyptian people had defied authority to win their freedom in this arena. A much narrower group of them would return again and again to pick new fights on what had become almost hallowed ground. Not all these gatherings though were noble in cause. This little piece of Egypt is still often owned by the mob. After the revolution, along with the persistent harassment of women Tahrir was the scene of some savage sexual assaults by gangs of young men. This eventually prompted vigilante groups to form to fill the vacuum left by the state.

During the uprising though, the mob represented all the people. On the front lines defending the square were the ‘Ultras’. They were fanatical football fans who supported Cairo’s premier league football club, Al-Ahly. The hooligans among them were the one section of Egyptian society that had had the chance to perfect the art of street battles with the police. Most of the fighting during the revolt involved lobbing rocks and stones at the plain-clothes thugs from the internal security services trying to fight their way into the square. Occasionally though the Ultras would run through the barricades and the battle would take place out in the open just in front of the Egyptian Museum that holds the treasures of Tutankhamen. I watched all this in a riot hat, but the rest of the men around me had to make do with motorcycle helmets, kitchen pots or wads of cardboard wrapped together with tape. One man was photographed with bread rolls sellotaped to his head. The sky rained stones, which bounced and clattered around me. Men were holding their bleeding heads or dragging unconscious colleagues back behind the barricades. It went on like this for days. The most notorious moment was the ‘Battle of the Camels’, when Mubarak loyalists rode into the square on camels and horses to charge at the protesters.

Slowly though the protesters wore down the internal security services, which realised that the army were not going to let them draw arms. Many people believe that the police ultimately took their revenge on the Al-Ahly fans the following February when seventy-four of them died in the country’s worst-ever football violence after a match in Port Said.
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The trial that followed and the verdicts in January 2013 would present the new Egypt with one of its darkest moments.

While the Ultras made up much of the front line during the revolution, it was the thousands of people behind them who added real legitimacy to the protests. It was their numbers that convinced the world it was a popular uprising. Among them was Sondos Asem, a Muslim Brotherhood activist in her early twenties who took part in the revolution from the first day, even though the leadership had specifically told their supporters not to. The Ikhwan did not believe at the start that the uprising would be successful.

Like her forefathers in 1952, Sondos wasn’t ready to admit her membership of the Brotherhood at the time to the crowd around her. ‘No, no, no, of course not,’ she told me when we met later during the campaign period for the 2011 parliamentary elections. ‘We were there as Egyptians, not as members of any political party. We were not there to make any propaganda for ourselves.’ Sondos had helped set up, and was now running, the Brotherhood’s English-language Twitter feed. She estimated that on the first day of the revolution only around 10 per cent of the demonstrators were active members of the Brotherhood. But though their numbers grew in the following days, she said they still all kept a low profile.

The revolution, it would have failed [if we had been open] because the security crackdown would have been more fierce. They could have stopped the protests very violently and the international community support would not have been that strong and also the liberals here in Egypt and many of those who don’t know the Brotherhood very well might have changed their decisions to participate. It was important to keep it a popular uprising and it was a popular uprising.

Their numbers were not overwhelming at the beginning. Only on the 28th, on the ‘Day of Rage’, did the Brotherhood firmly take sides.

Muhammad al-Qassas led the Muslim Brotherhood youth wing into the demonstrations on 25 January. He told me that while the Ikhwan’s participation ultimately secured the revolution, taking part went against all their instincts:

Basically, the Muslim Brotherhood in their core principles do not believe in the idea of revolutions in general. On the contrary, lots of the Ikhwan’s literature and sayings affiliated to Hassan al-Banna and other leaders reject the notion of popular revolutions and uprisings as chaotic and unproductive acts. There were also internal differences among the Brotherhood about the ideas of civil disobedience and strikes, because they do not understand these notions and they don’t understand their nature. They were satisfied with the reality on the ground, which was that they were the strongest opposition in a cat-and-mouse battle with the regime and would take whatever the regime allowed them to have.

The morning after Mubarak formally stood down, the angry young men who had led the revolution had been replaced in the square by their mothers, who were now cleaning up the mess. After weeks of reeking of tear gas it now stank of disinfectant. The pavement where I had stood with the revolutionaries as they had exchanged rocks and stones with the government yobs was being busily rebuilt by dozens of schoolgirls and young women. What they didn’t know was that they were actually just putting them back for next time, because before the year was out these stones would be whistling through the air again. If the mums of the revolution had taken over the square, the grandads in the army had taken over power.

‘The last ten years, President Mubarak was not ruling, it was President Mubarak’s family who was ruling, namely his son, wife, [Mubarak’s chief of staff] Zakaria Azmi and the interior minister [Habib el-Adly]. They were in control over everything.’ I met General Abdel Moneim Kato at his home in Cairo. Though retired from the Egyptian army he still acts as an adviser to them and is close to the leadership. ‘The armed forces had long ago decided that they would not allow the rule of Egypt to be inherited under any circumstances. It had made its mind up that Gamal will not be the next president after Mubarak.’

So the octogenarian Mubarak was replaced by his equally ‘aged and change-resistant’ commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, who as chairman of the SCAF was now the de facto head of state. Though ‘charming and courtly’, the US had always seen him as someone still living in the past. Like the man he replaced, he ‘simply [did] not have the energy, inclination or world view to do anything differently’.
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