After his release, a television interviewer showed him photographs of young demonstrators killed in the streets. “To the mothers and fathers, it’s not our fault,” Ghonim sobbed. “It’s the fault of the people in positions of authority who don’t want to leave power.”
They were all so heroic, so ingenious, but also so familiar. Of course I fell for them. We all did, even Obama.
“What I want is for the kids on the street to win and for the Google guy to become president,” Obama told an aide, who promptly relayed the comment to my colleagues in the Washington bureau so they could put it in the paper.
We set ourselves up for disappointment. Where did it go? I was often asked later, in New York or London. What happened to the nonviolent, secular-minded, Western-friendly, Silicon Valley uprising that we cheered in Tahrir Square? Who stole that revolution? That image of the revolution was as much about Western narcissism as it was about Egypt.
* * *
• • •
Laura spent the Day of Rage with our sons at the home of a neighbor. Mubarak had declared a curfew, and she set out to walk home before dusk. One-year-old Emmett was in his Bugaboo stroller and five-year-old Thomas was standing in back. But as she pushed them out of the neighbor’s gates, she saw clusters of men in the streets. They were armed with baseball bats, crowbars, tree branches, and anything else they could find, and they had hauled rebar, sand, and garbage to build roadblocks on each corner. Was this an ambush? How would she get home?
In retrospect, I think she was safer that night than on any other night we spent in Cairo. After the police had fled, the authorities filled the airwaves with warnings of impending chaos and looting; the military sent text messages to every mobile phone. So the men in every city neighborhood had organized themselves into squads for community protection. And when the men of Maadi saw Laura with the boys, they sprang into action. At each roadblock strangers lifted up the Bugaboo and handed it over. Emmett rode inside like a Pharaoh on a litter. Laura reached our door beaming with gratitude. I shuddered to think what would have happened if the police had vanished from New York or Washington, D.C. Cairo held it together.
Still, neighborhood justice goes only so far. One morning on the way to the square I stopped at our usual supermarket, part of the French chain Carrefour. We needed breakfast cereal, and I wanted to check on rumors of a break-in. It turned out to be much worse than that: the mall around the store had been ransacked. Mannequins in dark abayas and bright headscarves lay dismembered in puddles of water from the overhead sprinklers. Shattered glass cracked under my boots. Two men working on the cleanup told me that the police who normally stood guard had invited in a gang of Bedouins in a pickup truck. Then the police abandoned their stations to let the Bedouins smash the place and take what they pleased.
I called Laura from the wreckage. How would you and the boys like to take a vacation? All the commercial flights and embassy charters were full, so a friend who worked for an oil company stowed her and the boys on the plane his employer had hired to get its staff to Dubai: her first evacuation.
Cairo felt like it was splitting into two cities. One was the sunny city of Tahrir Square and the neighborhood watches. The other was the shadowy city still shaped by the security agencies, businessmen, and news media of the Mubarak regime. The latter was the city where unidentified looters ran wild in the spaces between residential neighborhoods, such as the Carrefour strip mall, and where the state media’s warnings of chaos became self-fulfilling. Both the police and civilians who dwelled in that city were turning increasingly hostile to Westerners like me.
Every voice on the state-run television and radio stations insisted that the protests were all the handiwork of foreign spies. Call-in shows buzzed with theatrical rage at the “hidden hands” and “foreign fingers,” and in the Egyptian imagination the perfect cover for a spy was as a journalist with a notebook. State television reported that foreigners were handing out free dinners of fried chicken to bribe the indigent to demonstrate in the square. Someone called in to report that he had seen two “foreigners” order eight hundred sandwiches at an Egyptian fast-food restaurant, implying conspiratorially that the order was for distribution in the square. Police raided rights groups, arrested liberal activists, and rounded up Muslim Brothers (including a former parliamentarian by the name of Mohamed Morsi). They even detained a few Western journalists, briefly including two working for the New York Times. We all felt the xenophobia.
A distorted narrative of those days would later become a touchstone in future debates about American policy around the region. So it is worth remembering the interplay of events between Washington and Cairo.
The drama in Washington began when Obama convened an emergency meeting of his National Security Council on the morning after the protesters had broken the police and taken the square. After a heated debate, he had agreed with his advisers on a State Department plan to encourage Mubarak to hand power to his seventy-four-year-old spy chief and alter ego, Omar Suleiman.
Suleiman had been Egypt’s main liaison to both Washington and Israel. American lawmakers, diplomats, generals, and spies all knew him well. “He was very wise,” Mike Morrell of the CIA later wrote. “You could ask Suleiman a single question about any regional issue and then sit back for what might turn out to be a half-hour lecture packed with insights.”
But Suleiman was known inside Egypt primarily for his brutality and torture. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks had identified him as an avid player in the American rendition program after the invasion of Afghanistan. “He was not squeamish,” as Edward Walker, a former American ambassador to Egypt, later put it.
Obama was skeptical about the Suleiman idea. To Obama, “you were not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle,” Ben Rhodes later told me. “But he was not going to tell people, ‘Don’t try that.’ His view was, ‘Let’s try to see what we can do.’” Obama went along with the plan.
Frank G. Wisner, a seventy-two-year-old former ambassador to Egypt, had developed an unusually strong bond with Mubarak, so senior State Department staff picked Wisner as a special envoy to the Egyptian president. The White House sent him talking points on Saturday, January 29. Obama spoke for ten minutes over the phone with Wisner on Sunday morning, and he set off the next day in a military jet for the ten-hour flight to Cairo. He had been instructed to make only a few specific short-term requests of the aging autocrat: Do not use force to crush the demonstrations, and let a successor outside the Mubarak family take over the presidency after the elections in September. The White House demanded neither an immediate exit by Mubarak nor fundamental immediate change to the Egyptian regime. Its goal was to let Suleiman manage a succession, possibly to himself.
Wisner met Mubarak at his palace in Cairo on Monday, January 31, the third day that the protesters had held the square, and events in Cairo were accelerating. At 9:00 P.M. an anonymous general with a gravelly voice and hard-brimmed cap appeared on state television with an unexpected announcement from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). “Your Armed Forces have not and will not resort to the use of force against this great people,” he said, and he praised “the legitimate demands of the honorable citizens.” As far as I could tell, that could only mean Mubarak’s immediate departure.
The generals—taking the advice General Sisi had given them in 2010—had given Mubarak no warning. His irate staff called the chief of the state media’s news division demanding to know how the military’s statement reached the airwaves. Suleiman rushed to a television studio an hour later to respond with a two-minute statement. Mubarak, Suleiman announced, had named him vice president. He was deputized “to contact all the political forces” about constitutional reforms.
Mubarak spoke the next night and in effect complied with Wisner’s requests. By naming Suleiman vice president, Mubarak had taken Gamal out of the succession. And the security forces had stopped shooting. No
w Mubarak declared that he would leave office at the end of his term, after elections in September. The White House—despite Obama’s instincts—had not abandoned Mubarak, and Mubarak was doing as the White House requested.
Mubarak’s tone, though, was so defiant that he sounded as if he had conceded nothing at all. “This is my country,” he said. “I will die on its soil.” Protesters in Tahrir Square threw shoes at a television broadcasting the speech.
Obama again called Cairo. “I know you care about Egypt, I know you have given your life,” Obama told Mubarak, according to Dennis Ross, a veteran Middle East diplomat who listened to the call.
“You don’t know Egypt. I know my people. This will be over in a few days,” Mubarak insisted.
Thirty minutes in, Obama was losing patience: “Why don’t we talk again tomorrow?”
“No, we don’t need to,” Mubarak replied.
Obama hung up. “There is no hope for this guy,” he told Ross and others.
“What I indicated tonight to President Mubarak,” Obama said in another televised statement on Egypt, “is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.”
But a White House spokesman struggled the next morning to explain what Obama meant. Was the emphasis on “now” or “orderly”? The spokesman finally clarified that Obama was not seeking Mubarak’s immediate exit. The administration’s vision of “an orderly transition” was still under Suleiman.
The division between the president and his Cabinet over Egypt, though, was no secret in the region. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates—known as MBZ—complained to U.S. officials that Obama advisers like Ben Rhodes were describing one Egypt policy while Robert Gates and Joe Biden were describing another. And Gates sympathized with the complaints. He had always had a high regard for MBZ’s “insights and judgments,” Gates later wrote, and the prince “gave me an earful.”
The crown prince and the Emiratis had deep ties to Egypt and its military. MBZ surely shared his view of the discord behind Obama’s speech with Egypt’s top generals. If the Emiratis knew, then the Egyptian military knew that most of the officials around Obama hoped to preserve a version of the Mubarak regime. The White House’s messages were mixed from the outset, and players in the region could see that Obama sat at a distance from the cabinet around him.
It was late at night in Cairo when Obama finished speaking, and I had a telephone conversation with a former Egyptian diplomat, Mohamed Shokry. I knew he was close to Suleiman.
“What will happen if there is a flare-up, a few bullets shot into the young men, a Molotov cocktail?” Shokry mused aloud. “A million people in the streets. How will we keep the peace?”
* * *
• • •
Egyptian state radio and television networks reported the next morning, Wednesday, February 2, that a counterdemonstration was forming in the Giza neighborhood of Mohandiseen—a rally to thank Mubarak for his service and say “Enough!” to the Cairo of Tahrir Square. My Times colleague Liam Stack headed over.
A handful of Mubarak supporters spotted him as a Western journalist and started beating him. So Liam snuck back around from another direction.
Organizers were passing out signs that said WE ARE SORRY MR. PRESIDENT, or depicted the face of Mohamed ElBaradei under a Star of David. This crew did not let the first name “Mohamed” get in the way of its anti-Semitism. Hundreds had gathered, and a fair number seemed to Liam to be plainclothes security agents. When he picked up one of the provocative signs, a security agent snatched it away.
The pro-Mubarak crowd began moving, mostly by foot, across a bridge over the Nile to another square on the far side of the Egyptian Museum from the entrance to Tahrir Square. Liam and a photographer, Scott Nelson, took a car to catch up. Rough-looking men armed with clubs, bats, and machetes were disembarking from microbuses. Others brought jerry cans of fuel and crates of empty bottles, for gas bombs. Baltagiya. Liam compared it with The Lord of the Rings. “Like the Orcs pouring out of Mordor.”
I was strolling Tahrir Square with Mona el-Naggar, an Egyptian journalist working for the Times, and men kept stopping us, one after the other. Each one wanted to tell us the same thing: Mubarak’s speech had changed his mind. The president had conceded enough. This chaos in the square was too much. It was time to go home. We could hear the same arguments in the murmurs all around us. Time to go home, time to go home!
Suddenly the tone heated up, and we heard shouting. The clock on my phone read 2:15 P.M.
A middle-aged man with a furrowed brow grabbed my arm. “We don’t know who is with us and who is against us now—we are lost,” the man, Abdel Raouf Mohamed, said.
“I love Mubarak! I need Mubarak!” a burly stranger screamed over his shoulder, cutting him off.
A third, older man—one of the protesters against Mubarak—pulled me away. “In ten minutes, there will be a big fight here,” this man, Reda Sadak, told us. “It is an old game, the oldest game in the regime.”
He was wrong: it took less than eight minutes. He spoke at 2:22, and by 2:30, shoving and punching had broken out all over the square. The Mubarak men had evidently set their schedule in advance. Rocks and sticks rained down on the pavement near the Egyptian Museum, hurled by a phalanx of “thank you Mubarak” demonstrators. Anti-Mubarak demonstrators all over the square banged bricks against metal lampposts—a noisy alarm system improvised to warn of intrusion.
Some of the anti-Mubarak crowd tried to preserve their celebrated ethic of nonviolence, the hallmark of the sit-in. A half dozen bearded men in a tight row held up their hands and presented their chests in a display of passivity, as though ready for martyrdom. Rocks crashed around them. Mona and I saw a clean-cut young man clutching a tree branch as a weapon and rushing to fight the oncoming Mubarakites.
“Put it down,” an older man implored.
“Three of my friends are bleeding inside, and my friend lost an eye,” the young man yelled back, pointing to an apartment building. But he put down the branch, sitting down and sobbing. His name was Sameh Saber, he told Mona.
By 3:15, the last pretense of nonviolence was gone. A battle line between the opposing forces had formed perpendicular to the pink granite hulk of the Egyptian Museum, below the October 6 Bridge overpass. Anti-Mubarak demonstrators were dragging sheets of corrugated steel from a construction site on the edge of the square to build barricades against the attackers. Men and women used scraps of steel to break the pavement into rocks. Others ferried this fresh ammunition to the front line in milk crates or scarves used as slings. Hundreds of young men were crowding to the front to hurl the missiles.
The Muslim Brotherhood, with its disciplined cell structure, provided organizational backbone for the defense of Tahrir Square by the anti-Mubarak demonstrators. But the front ranks belonged to “ultras”—trash-talking soccer fans. They had made sport of clashing with the police for years before the uprising; they had sprayed walls all over Cairo with the English graffiti motto A.C.A.B., for All Cops Are Bastards. Other demonstrators volunteered as medics, carrying away the injured on cardboard stretchers. Motorcycles—“the ambulances of the people”—ferried the wounded to field clinics.
I climbed an abandoned backhoe (left near the construction site, a future Ritz-Carlton hotel) to get a better view of the action. Hundreds of soldiers were still standing inside the iron fence of the museum, but they were just watching, too. They came alive only when firebombs landed inside the fence, and only to put out the flames with fire extinguishers.
When I looked behind me, the scene was surreal. Camels! At least a pair of Mubarak men on camels and eighteen others on horseback were attacking the square. The riders had usually used their animals to sell rides around the Pyramids, and now they were quickly beaten back. But their ludicrous charge gave the day its name: the Battle of the Camel, a
fter a battle between Sunni and Shia in the early history of Islam. (No self-respecting Western journalist ever missed a chance to mention a camel in writing about the region.)
Surely the soldiers would intervene, I thought. Surely the army would crush the protests, which were now clearly violent. But the bloodshed went on—hundreds were hit by rocks, wounded or stabbed in close combat, or burned by the fire of the gas bombs. The soldiers did nothing. Darkness fell and I had to write for the next day’s newspaper before knowing who won.
I finished the edits for the last edition shortly before dawn in Cairo. I was leaving the bureau to hunt for a cheap hotel—there were no taxis home that long after curfew—when an editor called from New York. Al Jazeera was reporting gunfire in the square.
I hitched a ride from a stranger to the base of the October 6 Bridge and set out on foot over the Nile. But on the way across I realized that I had picked the wrong span: the overpass looking down on the square was controlled by the pro-Mubarak thugs. I could see dark figures with clubs milling around the bridge or looking over the railings. I was sure they would pummel me if they guessed who I was. As far as they were concerned, an American walking alone here at this hour and armed with a notebook could only be a spy. I looked at my feet and kept walking.
A stairway! I ducked off the bridge before I was noticed, and at the bottom another group of men was hauling a burned-out car frame into place to reinforce a barrier. I tapped the shoulder of a middle-aged man in a gray hooded sweatshirt. Excuse me, I asked gingerly, in my rudimentary Arabic. Are you with the president, or are you with the square?
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 6