Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (20 page)

Activists erected a statue of his fruit-vendor’s cart just down the street from city hall, two blocks from where he set himself on fire. Beneath it someone spray-painted the words “For Those Who Yearn to Be Free.”

The city government, in his view, was a corrupt and obnoxious regulatory state that made it hard—well nigh impossible, actually—for him to work and support his family. Thirty percent of the town’s population was unemployed. Enterprising people like Bouazizi who took the initiative to work for themselves were held down by the state. And for what? For not having a license to sell a banana?

Hamdi understood. She was part of the state, but she understood.

“I believe in the law,” she said, “but it’s unfortunate that my job is the suppression of somebody else’s job. I believe the law should rule, though, so I have to do it. It’s like when a police officer pulls you over for running a red light. You might think, ‘Ack, why is he doing this to me,’ but it has to be done because it’s the law. You obey the laws in your country, right? Why shouldn’t it be the same here?”

Much of the country saw her as a villain when the revolution broke out, but she insisted she had nothing to apologize for.

“It’s my job to serve citizens,” she said. “When they go into a café and it’s dirty and unhealthy for customers, it’s my job to confiscate the filthy equipment and order the café to be closed.”

Her self-image was an honorable one. She wanted to be a part of order, law and good government. And she was willing to accept an exploitatively low salary in return. How long can a decent and idealistic person serve an arbitrarily repressive regime? She managed for 10 years, but the roof still caved in.

“I spent three months and 20 days in jail,” she said, “from December 31 to April 19. I was jailed on the orders of Ben Ali. I was accused of taking bribes, but I did not break the law. He used every tool he had to make me look like a scapegoat so that people would shut up and stop protesting.”

She strained mightily to keep herself from crying and paused to collect herself. I would have handed her a Kleenex if I had any.

“I was sentenced to five years in prison for extreme violence against citizens,” she said, choking up. “Before Ben Ali left the country, no lawyer would represent me. But after the revolution a lawyer helped free me. So the revolution is a good thing even though I was the first one oppressed by it.”

Post-traumatic stress disorder came next. She couldn’t work all the following summer when she got out of jail, but she recovered. “I have my old job back,” she said, “though I no longer do field work.”

She didn’t hate Mohamed Bouazizi, nor did she blame him much for what happened.

“I didn’t know him,” she said. “I never spoke to him before that day. I knew who he was, though, because he always worked in that spot and I’d been tolerating him for a while. It’s unfortunate that he killed himself and that he was poor. He was also an orphan.”

She felt wronged by the powerful, not only by the former regime but even by the president of the United States.

“I have a grudge against your president,” she said, though I didn’t ask her about him. “Barack Obama mentioned me in a speech. He said I was a cop. He said I slapped Mohamed Bouazizi. He’s a stupid fool for not checking. Americans are great people, but you need to do a better job checking your information.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s why I’m here. That’s why I wanted to meet you.”

She smiled and nodded. The media got her wrong, but perhaps the history books will treat her more fairly.

Bashar al-Assad, the Butcher of Damascus, was in the fight of his life as an indirect result of something routine she did a year and a half earlier. Violent clashes between Sunnis and Alawites were breaking out in Lebanon as a (very) indirect result of something routine she did a year and a half earlier. The suppurating catastrophe in the Levant eventually sucked in the United States just as Libya had. History was exploding in dangerous and unpredictable ways. All these events could be traced back in a straight line to her encounter with Bouazizi on December 17, a date she’s sure not to forget.

We all change the course of events by existing in this world, but most presidents can hardly leave marks that are this big. Her own act was a small one, but it lit the fuse.

How must it feel for an ordinary person in a random little town to ignite a revolution, to be made a scapegoat by a dictatorship, to be mentioned in a speech by the president of the United States, to be arrested and jailed for what was at worst a minor infraction, to see her cynical jailer toppled in a revolt, to watch the warden of Egypt toppled in another revolt, to see the Libyan regime bombed by America, to see open war break out in Syria and spill into Lebanon and to see Mali—an African country that is not even Arab—broken in half as an aftershock of the Libyan war? All because she confiscated a fruit vendor’s scale. At least Gavrilo Princip expected something to happen when he shot Ferdinand in Bosnia on the eve of the war.

“A revolution cannot be solely the cause of one person,” she said. “Even though I didn’t really participate in it, I’m proud of the revolution and proud of my country.”

She may not have participated in it, but she sure did precipitate it. Her name is Faida Hamdi and she is Tunisian. She is also Lorenz’s butterfly, a small soul who by flapping her wings set off storms of tornadoes for thousands of miles in every direction.

Chapter Eight

Egypt’s Botched Revolution

Cairo, 2011

Egypt’s revolution against Hosni Mubarak captivated the world. It inspired an armed rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi’s hellish dungeon in Libya and, at least initially, peaceful protests against Bashar al-Assad’s Baath Party regime in Syria despite his government’s ruthless repression. But the Egyptian revolution wasn’t a real revolution. It was a coup d’état against the president by the army.

The coup had the support of the people, of course. It might not have happened had mass demonstrations not broken out, and it certainly wouldn’t have otherwise happened on the day that it did.

I returned to Cairo during the country’s chaotic transition. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) ruled the country as a military junta, though you’d hardly know it as a casual visitor. The men with guns who were everywhere on the streets of Cairo when I visited years earlier were elsewhere, perhaps in their barracks. Egypt was bereft of any portraits of a strongman in charge. I wasn’t sure who the head of state even
was
—highly unusual for an Arab country. If you pressed me, I’d say the head of state was SCAF chairman Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, but many Egyptians thought he was just a front man, that someone else in the junta was the real man in charge. No one I asked was sure one way or the other, not even official American sources who spoke to me off the record.

Tens of thousands of citizens who were snatched up during the uprising in January and February still languished in jail under snap collective sentences. The millions who took to the streets and pressured the army to oust Mubarak felt their work was incomplete, and on the second Friday of July they staged another mass demonstration downtown.

The police and the army had retreated from the capital’s center. Tahrir Square, so often a scene of anarchy and mayhem, was relatively civilized that day. Activists from every group in the country—from the liberals and the socialists on the left to the Muslim Brotherhood—teamed up and provided their own security in case anyone from the plainclothes police or the Baltageya—fellah-class thugs who beat people up for a few bucks or even some smokes—stirred up trouble.

I went down there with my American colleague Armin Rosen and our Egyptian colleague Yasmin el-Rifae. She knew her way around better than Armin and me and could translate when necessary. She said the men from internal security could be identified as such on their ID cards, so everyone who entered the square had to show identification. When I flashed my American passport and said I was journalist, I got a very warm welcome, including high-fives and handshakes.

I couldn’t accurately count the number of people in the crowd, but tens of thousands of people were down there. And I couldn’t help but compare Egypt’s revolutionaries with Lebanon’s. The massive demonstrations in Beirut in 2005 against Syria’s occupying military dictatorship that I’d covered earlier in my career looked and felt strikingly different. Far more women joined Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and fewer wore Islamic headscarves, partly because almost half of Beirut’s demonstrators were Christians, but also because Lebanon is more secular by an order of magnitude.

Lebanon’s revolution looked and felt cosmopolitan and middle class. Egypt’s was significantly more masculine and Islamic. The crowd at Tahrir was also much poorer. No one would describe this movement as a Gucci Revolution, as a handful of Occidentalist Westerners rudely dubbed Lebanon’s.

Most of the women at the square wore the headscarf. Yasmin dressed like a Westerner, and I saw other uncovered women there, too, but most dressed conservatively, even those affiliated with the liberal and socialist parties. One of the iconic images of Egypt’s revolution showed a victorious young woman wearing the hijab flashing the V-for-victory sign. The headscarves, though, did not necessarily indicate membership in the Muslim Brotherhood or adherence to any Islamist principles. Headscarves were just the standard dress code for women in Egypt regardless of politics.

Almost all the slogans I heard and saw painted on signs and walls emphasized freedom from state oppression, but there was a darker current there too. Many in that crowd were vengeance-seeking reactionaries. I saw a number of nooses on banners and even found one bearded man—who was probably with the Brotherhood or the Salafists—carrying an actual noose.

A scruffy man in an orange hat saw my camera, deduced that I was a journalist and decided that was the time to yell about Israel. “We will go to Israel next!” he said. “Israel is next!”

Yasmin grimaced, embarrassed, as the man raged incoherently. She’s Egyptian and not exactly a fan of Israel either, but she could discuss it in a rational manner without getting hysterical or wallowing in paranoia and hatred. This guy, though, was one of the crazies.

“Okay, okay,” she said and shooed him away. “That’s enough.”

An Egyptian man standing next to me also cringed.

“That’s just his opinion,” he said. “There are many opinions in Egypt. Why must Israel always be our enemy? Why? Why must the U.S. be our enemy?”

Yasmin called a famous socialist activist she knew named Hossam el-Hamalawi, and he agreed to meet us for a few minutes in front of the local KFC franchise. I saw a banner beneath the KFC showing a Muslim crescent and a Christian cross fused together, a symbol of tolerant anti-sectarianism that I first saw at liberal rallies in Lebanon.

“This won’t just be a one-day event,” Hamalawi said when we found him. “It will turn into a sit-in.” He was right about that, and it dragged on for weeks. “I have no idea how long it will last, but at the end of the day the battle is not necessarily going to be settled here in Tahrir. What brought down Mubarak wasn’t Tahrir, and it wasn’t the army. It was the mass strikes that broke out all over the country that forced the military junta to ask Mubarak to step down or else the system would collapse. The main battle for us, the people on the left, is to take the battle to the factories, to take Tahrir to the universities, to take Tahrir to the workplaces. In every single institution in Egypt we have a mini Mubarak waiting to be overthrown.”

The working-class labor strikes, he said, had been ongoing ever since the army arrested Mubarak. “The middle-class activists were happy to suspend protests here in Tahrir,” he said, “and go back to their well-paying jobs. They were happy to establish a dialogue with the military junta. But the working class has been continuing its mass strikes.”

There were strikes all over the country, it’s true, but at the same time most Egyptians tired of all this revolutionary activity. They yearned for normality and an end to the upheaval that brought the economy—an emergency-room case to begin with—to its knees.

“I used to work as an editor before the revolution,” Hamalawi said. “I could go back to my job at any time and still get paid thousands of Egyptian pounds, but the public-transport worker whose strike brought this country to a halt cannot go back to his starving family and say it’s okay for him to get 189 Egyptian pounds after 20 years of service and wait for the military to solve his problems. So the strikes are ongoing.”

Activists are by their nature optimists, especially in police states. Few will risk a beating or worse if they know they’re going to lose. So Hamalawi, like every other activist I spoke to, thought his side would win.

“People said we were crazy when we were chanting against Mubarak in 1998,” he said. “As student activists, people thought we were crazy when we started advocating general strikes before the outbreak of the strike wave. People thought toppling Mubarak, an American-backed dictatorship, could never happen.” Yet it happened.

“We’ve had 7,000 years of civilization,” he said, “and 7,000 years of oppression. And I’m optimistic that for the first time in our lives, for the first time in 7,000 years, we will be able to achieve a real democracy.”

Fat chance, I thought.

Sorry to be a downer—and I kept my thoughts to myself—but I knew better. Most revolutions end in tears, and revolutions in the Middle East are especially perilous. The region is a great teacher of pessimism. I’d already seen one revolution in the Arab world hit the rocks, and that was in Lebanon, a country that’s far more liberal and culturally democratic than Egypt. Tahrir Square was an intoxicating place in July, but it was a bubble. It wasn’t the country.

Egypt’s liberals were out in large numbers, but they were a sideshow. The army and the Islamists had far more supporters and power. Events the following Friday proved it.

Hundreds of thousands of Islamist activists from the Muslim Brotherhood and the totalitarian Salafist movement seized control of the square. They didn’t go down there just to yell at the army. They aimed to intimidate liberals, and it worked. The Islamists “told their supporters to join in the demonstrations to fight against the liberal infidels,” a caller on a state TV show said. Thirty-four revolutionary groups—and that would be almost all of them—packed up and left.