It was a Monday night, January 24, and the next day was Police Day, the annual holiday that commemorated the massacre of fifty policemen who had resisted the British army in 1952. The same clique of yuppies had used the same day every year to demonstrate against police abuse, always in Tahrir Square—Liberation Square, in English. Almost no one else showed up. The police chased them away in about fifteen minutes. But there seemed a small chance that this year might be different.
My first official day on the job as an international correspondent was January 9, and I had flown that day to Tunis. A young street peddler had burned himself to death about three weeks earlier after an encounter with a bullying police officer in an interior town. His self-immolation had inspired a rash of imitators, including a few in Egypt. I imagined an article about the psychology of suicide.
Tunisia, a former French colony, was once the most benign example of Arab autocracy. Unlike Abdel Nasser, the father of Tunisia’s independence had been a lawyer, Habib Bourguiba. Even while he plotted to overthrow colonial rule, he was also scheming to expand commercial ties with France and Europe. Tunisia broke away in 1965, and he invested in education and literacy. He championed women’s rights, encouraged birth control, and ended polygamy, successfully lowering birth rates and expanding the middle class. (Tunisia was the only Arab state to outlaw polygamy.)
But even the best autocracy had limits. Bourguiba jailed his opponents, bowed to no court, and never contemplated any possible successor. In 1987, his security chief, Zine al Abidine Ben Ali, seized power through a medical coup, enlisting doctors to declare the president no longer fit for office.
In contrast to his predecessor, Ben Ali had no education except military training in France and the United States. Five years after he took power at the age of fifty-three, he left his first wife for a woman two decades younger—Leila Trabelsi, a hairdresser. By 2010, a sprawling clan of Ben Alis and Trabelsis was sucking up so much of the economy that Tunisians described them as a ruling mafia: the Family. The Family had muscled its way into control of banks, telecommunication companies, an airline, hotels, car distributorships, radio stations, a newspaper, prime real estate, a property developer, and much more. The first license to provide internet service had gone to Ben Ali’s daughter. The Assabah newspaper belonged to his son-in-law, Sakher el-Materi, who was considered a potential successor. Two younger Trabelsis, on a lark, had once stolen a yacht from Bruno Rogers, the chairman of Lazard Frères, and the Ben Ali side of the Family included a noted drug dealer.
“Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage,” reported a cable from the U.S. embassy that was disclosed by WikiLeaks. “Contacts tell us they are afraid to invest for fear that the family will suddenly want a cut.” The diplomats summarized: “There are no checks in the system.”
Other journalists told me not to bother visiting. The Tunisian police state put Egypt’s to shame. Mukhabarat would follow me from the airport, bug my hotel room, and scare everyone away from me. Tunisians had even less experience than Egyptians with civic debate or competitive politics.
But the chain of events set off by the fruit peddler’s suicide on December 17 had led in unexpected directions. The funeral erupted in chants against Ben Ali. Police fired into the crowd. Grainy mobile phone footage spread over Facebook and Al Jazeera. Within days a widening spiral of martyrs, funerals, protests, and more martyrs was spreading from town to town, toward the capital. Police gunfire had killed more than thirty civilians by the time I landed in Tunis. Ben Ali had denounced the demonstrators as foreign spies and Islamist terrorists—the perennial bogeymen—and he vowed to crush them.
Using Skype to avoid telephone surveillance, an activist I knew in Cairo sent me the contact information of a Tunisian human rights lawyer, Radhia Nasraoui. When I reached her apartment that Wednesday, I saw that its front door had been torn off its hinges. A child’s toys were strewn around the floor. Nasraoui, with a deeply creased face and short curly hair, was sitting in a housedress weeping on the couch.
A group of armed men in plain clothes had broken in and dragged off her husband, Hamma Hammami, who led Tunisia’s outlawed Communist Party. (Arab politics had been in such a deep freeze that there were still Communist parties.) He had given interviews on French television commending the rural protests. “So we were waiting for his arrest,” Nasraoui told me. Her ten-year-old daughter had shrieked in terror when the police broke down the door, and Nasraoui had sent all three of her daughters away for fear the assailants might come back for their mother.
Nasraoui ran a Tunisian rights group that opposed the use of torture, and the police had jailed and beaten both her and her husband many times before. But this time the security forces were jittery and unpredictable. Would I please write about her husband’s disappearance? she asked. The abduction of another Tunisian dissident was hardly newsworthy, but I said I would try.
As I left her, a taxi driver checking Facebook on his mobile device had tipped me off about an upcoming protest. It materialized an hour later outside the French embassy, and I was introduced to tear gas. So the next day I checked Facebook first thing in the morning. I saw calls for a protest in Hammamet, the East Hampton of Tunis, where Ben Ali’s family kept their summer homes, and I made it there by the early afternoon.
A police car and garbage piles were burning in the streets. Rioters had already set fire to every bank in town, including one next to the police station. Most police had fled. The handful remaining—all from local families—stood in front of the station asking the mob for mercy. Leave us alone and go sack the mansions of the Ben Ali family. The police pointed the way.
At the beachfront mansion of Sofiane Ben Ali, the president’s uncle, looters were carrying coffee tables and color televisions out through a broken picture window. Others set fire to a pair of all-terrain buggies on the lawn. Motorcyclists did wheelies around them. Someone “liberated” a sailboat. A chestnut-colored horse ran loose on the beach while a Tunisian coast guard boat observed from the water.
“Look, the people of Tunisia, the people of Tunisia,” rioters told me, showing me mobile phone videos of themselves in action. They were giving me their names, without fear of reprisal. “Now, we can say what we want,” said Cheadi Mohamed, a thirty-two-year-old airport worker. “It has started to change.”
On the road back into Tunis, I saw tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) heading the other way. I wondered what other protest they intended to crush.
Ben Ali declared a curfew and delivered a third speech. But this time he no longer called the demonstrators terrorists or vowed to restore order. His hands shook at his podium. He jostled the microphone. He had dyed his hair black but he was seventy-four years old and it showed in his eyes. “I am telling you I understand you, yes, I understand you,” he tried to assure Tunisians. Even with my amateur Arabic, I could hear the fear in his voice.
He pledged not to run for reelection. He promised to open up the media. Blocked websites were back online by the end of his speech. From now on, he said, the police would no longer shoot demonstrators.
Outside my hotel, drivers were ignoring the curfew, honking horns and waving placards in celebration. But all the cars were the same, and so were the placards. They were government cars, in a staged demonstration. Tunisians were not fooled.
But they had heard Ben Ali’s promises. Early the next morning, on Friday, Radhia Nasraoui made for the headquarters of the Interior Ministry, on Avenue Habib Bourguiba. She had learned that her husband had been held there since Wednesday, and she wanted to bring him a change of clothes.
She arrived with a handful of Tunisian journalists, and the police guards seemed more anxious than ever. At around 9:00 A.M., about two hours after she arrived, they invited her inside to meet the ministry’s political director, and he offered to let
her see her husband—if only she would send away the journalists.
She refused and kept waiting. The journalists were joined by a growing crowd outside, and the numbers swelled further when midday prayers ended. “See what you have done with these demonstrations?” a plainclothes policeman told her accusingly, as though she and her husband were responsible. “Now are you happy?”
As the throng grew, a lawyer called her with a message from the interior minister. Then a Ben Ali crony called with a message from the president. She could take her husband home, they both said, if she sent away the crowds.
“I am not the leader of ten thousand people,” she told them angrily, “and I can do nothing for Ben Ali!”
Hamma Hammami could hear the chants from his cell. This was his third day spent in solitary confinement, much of the time with his arms bound behind him. Around noon, a senior ministry official walked in and told him, “I am bringing you good news. You will leave, you will leave! If you say a word to the people, things may calm down, and we will let you leave.”
The noise outside rose suddenly, and police started running in the halls. The ministry is under attack, they shouted.
I was outside, and by early afternoon a crowd in the tens of thousands stretched for several blocks of the broad boulevard, as far as the old French cathedral. A sign in English read YES WE CAN, mimicking Obama’s campaign slogan. “What happened here is going to affect the whole Arab world,” Zied Mhirsi, the thirty-three-year-old doctor who held the sign told me. Maybe someday, I thought.
By then the protest felt more like a celebration. Ben Ali was still in his palace but his authority had already fled. Political power is like fairy-tale magic: it works only if you believe in it.
Some time after 3:00 P.M., a group of men made their way in front of the Interior Ministry with a coffin on their shoulders. A rumor spread that they carried the body of another victim killed by the police, and the ministry lost patience. Hundreds, maybe thousands of police in riot gear stormed into the throngs.
Almost blinded by their tear gas and doubled over from coughing, I stumbled around a corner. A middle-aged man in an overcoat and with a small mustache grabbed me by the shoulder. I panicked, taking him for a policeman, but he pulled me into the bottom of a stairwell with a half dozen others. There he handed me half of a lemon. Rub it on your face, he told me. A home remedy for the tear gas.
My editors were in a fright, too, I later learned. I had never covered anything grittier than Congress, books, or business—not even a house fire. It was too late to fly in a more experienced hand. Tunisia had closed its airports.
By the time the gas cleared and I’d hiked to my hotel, Ben Ali had fled to Saudi Arabia. The police gave Hammami a ride home to his wife. On January 14, 2011, a popular uprising had removed an Arab ruler.
Experienced Egyptian activists used to send encouragement in online messages to the novices in Tunis. Now Tunisians were writing back with “advice to the youth of Egypt”: “Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.” Apolitical Egyptians were trading jokes online: “Mubarak, your plane is waiting!”
I wanted to head back to Cairo for Police Day, eleven days later, but my editors told me to stay in Tunis. The transition there was the big story. “Nothing is going to happen in Egypt.”
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Ninety thousand Egyptians had clicked a link on the six-month-old “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page to say that they would join this year’s Police Day demonstration—a number that would exceed any organized rally in the four decades since Abdel Nasser died. The friends in the law office planning for Police Day hoped that if the crowds were large enough, they might demand the resignation of the interior minister.
With Tunisia in the news, though, someone suggested that this year they try a new twist. They had always reached out to their friends in Cairo’s small middle class. This year, they thought, why not the poor? “We always start from the elite, with the same faces,” one later recalled. “So this time we thought, let’s try.”
Many Westerners would come to see these worldly, middle-class yuppies as more like us than they were like other Egyptians. They were harnessing the technologies of Silicon Valley to the nonviolent tactics of Martin Luther King Jr. And we Western journalists in Egypt naturally accentuated the details that resonated with Westerners. I am sure I had a hand in fostering the feeling that these charming organizers had more in common with readers of the New York Times than they did with their compatriots. But that Police Day their clique galvanized something much broader. The shakedowns and self-dealing, the broken bargains of the Nasserite social contract, the shamelessness of the police, the rollback of rights, the rigging of the vote—the Tunisian revolt had brought it all into focus in a moment of common cause among Egyptians of all ages, classes, and creeds.
The organizers fanned out across poor and working-class neighborhoods on the morning of Police Day, January 25, 2011. They chanted old standbys, like the one mocking the paramilitary state security police, “Amn el-Dawla—Amn fein? Dawla fein?” “Where is security? Where is the state?” The Mubarak government had failed to provide any of the public services or accountability that citizens expect of a modern state, least of all security. Egyptian police were a menace. But this Police Day the organizers also hit bread-and-butter issues, like grocery prices and the minimum wage.
“They are eating pigeon and chicken, and we are eating beans all the time.”
“Oh my, ten pounds can only buy us cucumbers now, what a shame, what a shame.”
“Come down, Egyptians! Come down,” marchers called to the balconies. And down they came. Contingents of a few dozen in each neighborhood swelled into thousands. The tributaries merged into rivers, and all converged toward the central traffic circle at Tahrir Square. “We entered Nahyan street with two hundred and we came out with ten thousand,” one of the organizers told me later. Rich and poor, young and old: this was no yuppie revolt.
The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood kept their distance, mainly to protect themselves. They knew that they made a big, easy target. Because of their numbers, their members would overwhelm any march that the organization joined. Mubarak’s propagandists would easily dismiss all the marchers as Islamist extremists, and Mubarak’s police would hit the Brotherhood. Besides, compared with Abdel Nasser or Sadat, Mubarak was gentle toward the Brothers. There was no need to risk what they had won.
But some younger Muslim Brothers in their twenties and thirties were among the core organizers who met in the law office and planned Police Day. Thousands of other members joined the marches as individuals, without waiting for a go-ahead from their leaders. And hundreds more gathered at a parallel Police Day demonstration led by former Brotherhood lawmakers at a Cairo courthouse. One of them, Mohamed Beltagy, brought the police a bouquet of flowers, to say thank you for all the abuse and incarceration. A female Brotherhood lawmaker led a contingent of Islamist women who pushed through police lines all the way to Tahrir Square. Islamist women may have been the first to make it.
My friend and Times colleague Kareem Fahim was in Cairo to cover the marches. “Bedlam,” he emailed at midday. But that was just the beginning. “This shit is nuts,” he wrote back that night. “The battle is spreading.”
Amn el-Dawla met the marchers with tear gas, clubs, rubber bullets, and eventually live ammunition; a handful or more were killed by police gunshots. It took the security forces until late at night to expel the demonstrators from the square. Some turned then to Zyad el-Elaimy, who had convened the planning meeting in his law office. What happens now? they asked.
“We are going to jail,” he told them assuredly.
The White House seemed to concur. “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable,” Secretary of State Clinton told journalists in Washington. Vice President Joe Biden, who said he knew Mubarak “fairly well,” told a television int
erviewer not to call him “a dictator.”
What did Washington know? The American intelligence agencies, I later learned, knew the top generals well and eavesdropped on them, too. But the U.S. government knew very little about what was going on inside the police force, among left-leaning activists, or within the Muslim Brotherhood. Washington more or less depended on Egypt’s own intelligence services. “The leadership we were relying on was isolated and unaware of the tidal wave that was about to hit them,” Michael Morrell, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, later acknowledged.
The embassy had ordered its personnel off the streets that day, and the intelligence agencies were thin on the ground. Steven A. Cook, an American political scientist who happened to be in Cairo, posted an observation on Twitter and a few moments later he got a call from the White House.
“You are my eyes and ears,” Daniel Shapiro, senior director for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council, told Cook. “Can you tell me what is happening?”
I called Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt’s great liberal hope. He had been working on his memoirs in his office in Vienna. “Frankly, I did not think the people were ready,” he told me. Now we were both racing back to Cairo.
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We awoke on Friday, January 28, to discover that the government had shut down all internet and mobile phone service. The Police Day organizers had told me to attend noon prayers at a mosque near Giza, and as a few thousand of us were leaving the prayer hall, some started chanting for bread and freedom. The police hit us all with tear gas and water cannons. Our driver had parked our Mitsubishi SUV nearby. A tear gas canister broke through the rear window, destroying the toddler car seat Laura and I had hauled all the way from Washington.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 4