I had been directed to that mosque because Mohamed ElBaradei had also prayed there. He was wearing a suede jacket and clip-on sunglasses, and younger men held him by each arm to steady him against the force of the fire hoses. With their help, he stood his ground for a time, drenched and sputtering, even in the fumes. It may have been his finest hour.
When we both retreated back inside the mosque, he wanted to remind the New York Times that the police had soaked and gassed a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. “This is the work of a barbaric regime,” he told me, still dripping wet and panting. “They have told the Egyptian people that they have to revolt.” Then he retired to his grand villa in a gated community in Giza.
A pudgy twenty-seven-year-old with floppy hair and a baggy sports coat pulled me to a corner of the prayer room. He said he was Waleed Rashed from the April 6 Youth Movement, best known for using the internet to rally opposition to Mubarak or to support striking workers. “Do not worry about ElBaradei,” he told me. “We are making a revolution—not a protest, a revolution.”
On his advice, I made my way back across the river to the downtown side of the Qasr el-Nil Bridge, a flat span with colonial-era stone lions at each entrance. It was midafternoon by the time I made it, and in front of me was a phalanx of more than a thousand policemen in black riot gear, armed with clubs and rifles. Five armored personnel carriers were moving with them and blasting tear gas. Two fire trucks were using their hoses as cannons. But all together they were somehow unable to repel the mass of demonstrators trying to push across the bridge from Giza.
I stood transfixed. The black mass of police surged forward, shooting and smashing, protected by helmets and flak jackets. I braced myself for a massacre. I was sure the police would break through, but they never did. The demonstrators wore motorcycle helmets and scraps of plastic under their shirts. They wrapped onions or lemons under scarves around their nose and mouth (as the Tunisians had suggested), or sprayed their faces with vinegar or cola—more home remedies for tear gas. They picked up hot, smoking canisters of tear gas and hurled them into the river; long trails of gray fumes arced majestically behind them.
As one wave faded back in exhaustion, a fresh one rotated to the front lines. The bridge was thick with marchers; they outnumbered the police. On the sidewalk around me, scrawny police conscripts fresh from the battle sat with their helmets off, panting, soaking with sweat, and shaking their heads in disbelief.
The shadows lengthened, and the battle continued. Phones were dead. The streets were in chaos. The taxis had fled. The three bridges from downtown Cairo back to Zamalek were all closed or obstructed. Worried about getting back across the Nile to my office on the island, I walked by the river to look for a passage by foot across one of the bridges.
Two policemen caught me under the overpass of the May 15 Bridge. Sahafi—journalist—I repeated. But they tore up my full notebooks and then shooed me off. Forget about getting back to Zamalek, they told me.
I set off half running into downtown, turning corners with no idea where I was going. Mubarak had decreed a 6:00 P.M. curfew and my newspaper deadline was approaching. I raised a thumb to hitchhike.
A tall, bearded man let me in his beat-up blue Fiat and introduced himself as Mohamed el-Masry—Mohamed the Egyptian, surely not his real name. I said I was a journalist for the New York Times, and without further explanation he spun his car around. He drove south until, after several tries, he found a passable bridge to Giza, on the far side of the Nile, so he could loop back to Zamalek. It was an hour-long detour on a dangerous night. Mohamed el-Masry asked only one thing: Would I take a message for Obama?
“I call on President Obama, at least in his statements, to be in solidarity with the Egyptian people and with freedom, truly, as he says,” he dictated into my audio recorder. I managed to squeeze his quote into the newspaper, which I hoped might reach the president’s desk.
Late that night the demonstrators on Qasr el-Nil Bridge finally broke through. Looters torched the ruling party headquarters and hauled out computers, televisions, briefcases, file cabinets, and assorted souvenirs with the ruling party logo. Then the crowd proceeded directly to the business headquarters of Ahmed Ezz, steel tycoon and friend of Gamal.
By midnight mobs had set fire to nearly a hundred police stations. As many as two thousand burning police cars littered the streets. I could hardly blame the rioters, but I winced each time I heard Westerners call the demonstrations “peaceful” or “nonviolent.” (I qualified my own coverage, calling the protests “largely” nonviolent.) We were projecting our own ideals onto these “Facebook youth.”
An Egyptian government inquiry later concluded that 849 civilians were killed during the uprising, almost all by police bullets and almost all on that night. (The tally from independent rights groups is roughly the same.) By midnight, though, the defeated police had vanished from the city.
Mubarak stuck to the script. The protests were “part of a bigger plot,” he said in a televised address around midnight. “A very thin line separates freedom from chaos.”
Obama, perhaps remembering the tumult he lived through as a child in Indonesia, told his advisers that day that Mubarak was doomed. “He took one look at what was happening in the streets and he thought, ‘We ought to get on the right side of this,’” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser and a longtime aide to Obama, later told me.
“He knew that the old order was rotten and the status quo was unsustainable,” Rhodes said. “Obama thought this was an opportunity that had to be tested. He wanted the future of Egypt to be the people in the square—not Mubarak.”
Virtually every senior figure on Obama’s National Security Council wanted to stand by Mubarak: Secretary of State Clinton, Vice President Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and others. They invoked the Iranian Revolution of 1979. They worried about other autocratic Arab allies across the region, like the hereditary monarchs of Jordan, Morocco, and the Persian Gulf. What if citizens marched on those royal palaces, too? The United States should not “throw them to the wolves,” as Gates later put it.
“The dynamic was established that day that the president wanted to get rid of Mubarak,” Rhodes told me, “and most of his government didn’t.”
After placing a phone call to Mubarak, Obama delivered a statement from the White House. Mubarak “pledged a better democracy,” Obama said. “I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words.” Despite what he had said inside the White House, Obama talked like Mubarak had years in office still ahead of him.
* * *
• • •
Tahrir Square was unlike a city square that you might find in New York or London. It was an unplanned urban void of dirt and pavement sprawling over several city blocks, in the shape of an elongated triangle rounded off at its two bottom corners, like a tear. A mosque and government administration building occupied one side of the lower circle, with a KFC opposite. At the northern point the Egyptian Museum stood beside a wide corridor under the overpass to the October 6 Bridge.
That Friday—remembered as the Day of Rage—demonstrators had converged on the square from all over the city. By night they had taken it over. After that the numbers never fell below a few thousand and sometimes swelled to ten times as many—or even to hundreds of thousands. After the success of Police Day, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood had come off the sidelines and told every able member to march on Tahrir Square and stay there.
With the police gone, the army had stationed hundreds of soldiers inside the iron fence of the Egyptian Museum, presumably to protect the mummies. A few tanks and personnel carriers were parked around the periphery of the square, but the soldiers did nothing. They looked down from their tank turrets with rifles across their laps, or sipped juice through straws from little plastic bags (cheaper than cups) sold by roving street vendors. Protesters—usually young Muslim
Brothers—slept at night under the tank treads, to prevent surprise movements.
Military helicopters and jets buzzed low over downtown, and the crowds cheered as though the pilots had turned against Mubarak. I never understood what all those soldiers were waiting for behind the fence of the museum. Was the army replacing the police, turning against them, or waiting to roll out and crush the demonstration? Compared with modern states—where both the army and police answer to the same civilian authority—the Arab world was confounding.
Between the tanks and soldiers a booming tent city quickly sprang up. Smiling volunteers patted me down at the entrance to the square with exaggerated apologies, advertising the contrast with the haughty and brutal Egyptian police. More tents, blankets, chairs, and loudspeakers were arriving each day (from rich donors somewhere). Street vendors hawked drinks, tea, roasted sweet potatoes, and corn on the cob. Tens of thousands surged in again on Tuesday, beginning a biweekly rhythm of larger and larger rallies each Tuesday and Friday. Even in the middle of the night the population of Tahrir Square was still at least a few thousand. The internet returned on February 3, but organizers no longer needed it to spread their messages; satellite networks carried them now.
Politicians, preachers, and pop singers took turns at the soundstage. The Muslim Brothers centered in one spot in the square, the leftist activists in another, and the rich kids from the American University in their own “Gucci corner,” near Qasr el-Nil Bridge to Zamalek. Each constituency had its place. It was a pluralistic little republic, through the looking glass from Mubarak’s Egypt.
Western journalists, myself included, struggled not to sound starry-eyed. The reality of Tahrir Square was hard to fathom even as you witnessed it. Men and women mingled freely, and safely, by day and by night, in galabiyas and suits, niqabs and V-necks. Most were under forty. But there were plenty of older people, too, both rich and poor. Coptic Christians stood guard around Muslims at prayer; Muslim Brothers guarded a Coptic Mass. Patriotic anthems sung by midcentury crooners played from giant speakers. Handsome young troubadours led sing-alongs urging Mubarak to get out already. Couples held weddings there. In the small hours, poets—some well known—held readings.
Doctors established field clinics, with central “hospitals” in the mosque and behind the KFC. Volunteers used Twitter to coordinate donations to a Tahrir “pharmacy” stocked with everything from bandages to insulin and asthma inhalers. Makeshift kitchens doled out cheese sandwiches and flat baladi bread—“country” bread. Social services were efficient and honest. The square felt more like a functioning state than the Egyptian government did.
Incandescent graffiti spread over the walls: Islamic crescents with Christian crosses, mummies screaming in rage, a black king toppled over on a red-and-white chessboard, the Statue of Liberty in an Islamic niqab, dark angels with luminous wings holding Molotov cocktails. My favorite was a sad, pudgy panda staring down a tank. One Western journalist took pictures with her iPhone and covered the walls of her Zamalek loft with 8½ x 11 prints of revolutionary graffiti. We all loved it.
I heard rumors of “revolutionary” counterpolice, vigilantes who would catch and beat suspected government infiltrators, then lock them in the closed subway station below the square. “The people’s jail,” they called it.
“We did not like to report it, but of course it happened,” my friend Ahmad Abdallah, a young engineering professor active with the April 6 Youth Movement, later told me. I tried without success to confirm those rumors at the time. Maybe if I had been less dazzled by the graffiti and poetry readings I would have tried harder.
One day a stranger with a tripod shared a taxi with me from Tahrir Square to Zamalek. He was an Egyptian about my age, and he turned out to speak not only the native dialect and formal Arabic but also fluent French and English. Before the uprising he had produced satiric online videos about police abuse, under the pseudonym Ahmed Sherif. After the police denounced the video of Emad el-Kabeer’s torture as fake, Ahmed Sherif had released an online video in which Jerry Seinfeld appeared to present a best director Oscar to the policeman who sodomized the bus driver. Kabeer took best actor. The Oscar video was a big hit on Facebook.
Now my fellow passenger was filming videos in the open—hence the tripod—under his real name, Aalam Wassef. At forty, he had already made his mark in Paris and New York as a successful publisher, software designer, photographer, and artist. He contributed a regular column about Egypt to the website of Le Monde.
Extraordinary people like Wassef seemed to pop up all the time around Tahrir Square in those days. Educated young Egyptians were as fluent in my culture as they were in their own, and more sophisticated about both than I was about either. They were easy to like, easy to root for, easy to render appealingly for remote Western readers.
Take the clique behind Police Day. One day I was helping Zyad el-Elaimy, who had hosted the planning meeting in his office, to put some folding chairs in the square. How did you end up here? I asked. Without looking at me, he told me that the Egyptian police had detained him for his socialist activism for the first time when he was sixteen. He had been imprisoned three other times after that. When he was twenty-three, the police had tortured and beaten him, broken his leg, and lacerated his back. “Amnesty International did a report—you can look it up,” he told me flatly, unfolding a chair.
Zyad was now thirty and he was running ElBaradei’s presidential campaign effort when the uprising broke out. He and the same circle of organizers who had met in his office before Police Day convened every day in his mother’s apartment downtown to orchestrate the daily demonstrations.
Zyad’s partner, thirty-two-year-old Islam Lotfy, was a rising star in the Muslim Brotherhood. But he worked by day as a lawyer for USAID (a fact he asked me not to print in the newspaper then). He was a liberal when it came to women’s equality, cultural pluralism, and freedom of expression, and he scorned the Brotherhood’s leaders for distancing themselves from the Police Day protest. “On Tuesday, they said, ‘You are making a mistake.’ On Wednesday, it was ‘We are not sure.’ And on Friday, ‘You have done a great thing and we are right behind you.’”
Lotfy and Elaimy took a businesslike approach to their organizing. After the surprise success of Police Day, they ran “field tests” the next night. At 6:00 that evening, each set out for a different neighborhood and chanted for bread and freedom, to find out what kind of crowd he could raise. “And the funny thing is, when we finished up the people refused to leave,” Lotfy told me. “They were seven thousand and they burned two police cars.” They knew Cairo was ready.
Lotfy said the organizers had imagined Mubarak meeting his predecessors, Abdel Nasser and Sadat, in the afterlife. When the dead presidents asked, “What got you? A gunshot? Or poison?” Mubarak would answer, “Facebook.”
Lotfy and Elaimy were close to Sally Toma, a thirty-two-year-old Coptic Christian psychiatrist of Irish and Egyptian parentage. (She used her Irish father’s last name, Moore, when she talked to Western journalists.) She was an outspoken leftist and feminist, and she had helped plan the Police Day demonstrations. She also set up the first Day of Rage field clinic. One day in the square I watched several young Muslim Brothers commend her for an interview she had given to the BBC.
“I like the Brotherhood, and they like me,” she told me. “They always have a hidden agenda, we know, and you never know when power comes how they will behave. But they are very good with organizing. They are calling for a civil state just like everyone else, so let them have a political party just like everyone else. They will not win more than ten percent, I think.”
I had known that trio’s mutual friend Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, also thirty-two, for about two weeks before he let slip that he was a practicing surgeon trained in London. He had been arrested at the Cairo airport for his activism in 2010, trying to fly back to take the exam for the Royal College of Physicians.
Another day I sp
otted Ahmed Maher, a thirty-year-old left-leaning civil engineer who led the April 6 Youth Movement, at the edge of a crowd in the lobby of an Egyptian newspaper building. How did you do it? I asked him. How did you break through the Qasr el-Nil Bridge? How did you overcome and shatter the Egyptian police?
“Gene Sharp,” he said immediately.
I had to look him up: Sharp was a political scientist at Harvard who studied the use of nonviolent tactics against authoritarians (overt violence plays into their me-or-chaos self-justification). Maher and his April 6 friends had traveled to Serbia to meet with a group called Otpor!—Resistance!—who had relied on the Sharp playbook to oust their own autocrat, Slobodan Milošević. April 6 had borrowed its clenched fist logo from Otpor! They learned tricks like putting scraps of plastic under your clothes to protect against rubber bullets, or jamming up the wheels and exhaust pipes of armored police vehicles. All from a Harvard professor! Of course, I put that in the New York Times as fast as I could.
Wael Ghonim, then thirty-one, became famous in the West. He was “the Google guy”: a Google executive based in Cairo with an American wife and a degree from the American University. “I worked in marketing,” he told me, “and I knew that if you build a brand you can get people to trust the brand.” He was the anonymous creator of the most popular “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page. Ghonim had used Silicon Valley salesmanship to rally opposition to Mubarak. He held online polls, solicited user content, and turned his own anonymity into a marketing gimmick: “My name is that of every Egyptian who has been tortured or humiliated in Egypt.” The Police Day organizers all corresponded online with the page’s anonymous administrator and they had no idea that they were writing to a friend they already knew, like unwitting friends of Bruce Wayne emailing Batman.
The police arrested Ghonim at the start of the uprising and held him for twelve days, often blindfolded, in solitary confinement. Why had he traveled to the United States? his interrogators demanded. Despite their own close partnership with the American intelligence agencies, Ghonim’s interrogators were sure he was an American spy. “Do you think we are idiots? You are an undercover agent to the CIA,” they told him as they beat him.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 5