Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  Khaled Said’s killing provided the catalyst to unify. When the news spread that police had publicly murdered this apolitical computer gamer, outraged Egyptians gathered in front of the Interior Ministry. No one organized the protest, and it drew people from across the spectrum. Basem once again defied his family, coming down with friends from ElBaradei’s campaign. Moaz once again defied the orders of his superiors, alongside dozens of Muslim Brotherhood youth leaders. The veteran activists from Kifaya and Ayman Nour’s campaign showed up, along with youth groups from every political party. As usual, the police broke it up, but these youth had all seen each other on the street and realized that disparate strands were coming together. Afterward, Moaz and the other Brothers went to their leaders with a formal proposal to collaborate with all the other disenchanted Egyptians.

  “We should work to topple Mubarak,” Moaz insisted.

  The leaders refused. “We must be careful now,” they said.

  The year ended with the wholesale fraud of the fall 2010 parliamentary elections. “Honorable citizens” materialized to attack voters with clubs and swords. Moaz filmed some of the worst abuses as part of a Brotherhood effort to document the fraud. The Brotherhood went from eighty-eight seats in parliament to zero. Mubarak’s last election erased even the token representation previously achieved by the Brotherhood and the small faction of neutered but symbolically important secular opposition parties.

  For more than a year, Moaz and his friends had chafed at the caution of crusty Brotherhood leaders and their refusal to boycott the sham elections. After the voting, the most dynamic among the Muslim Brotherhood youth joined young activists from secular movements at their marches and confrontations with police. Together they were lashed with canes, sprayed with tear gas, and beaten in paddy wagons and jail cells; this shared experience pointed in a direct line toward Tahrir. On Facebook they continued the conversations that began on the street and in detention. To their mutual surprise, they found an extensive common set of ideals centered on rights, economic justice, political reform, and a distinctly Egyptian freedom agenda: freedom of speech, freedom from police brutality, freedom of worship, and freedom from abject poverty. Longtime activists had already found new comrades through ElBaradei’s campaign. Islamists such as Moaz found that they shared more with ElBaradei campaigners like Basem and with other secular activists than they did with their own rigid leadership. An agenda was gathering force, and, for now, it was transcending Egypt’s old ideological divisions.

  The dam broke all at once. Moaz and Basem, like all the rest of the agitators, expected very little on January 25, 2011. All they knew was that they were fed up and that plenty of Egyptians felt the same way. They had no idea how many others there were, or how committed, but they had caught hints at the meetings and demonstrations, at family gatherings and funerals, and in editorials, Facebook comments, tweets, and blog posts. Tunisians had risen up in December 2010 and within weeks had driven their dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, out of the country. If eleven million Tunisians could depose a regime, couldn’t ninety million Egyptians do the same?

  In what turned out to be its final days, Egypt’s regime was smug and confident. Mubarak’s state had grown so remote, so casually violent, that its mechanisms of perception no longer functioned. Anger was swelling, but the regime didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. It had no plans to punish the policemen who killed Khaled Said. It had no intention of placating the population with some token gesture simply because Arabs in a nearby country had overthrown their leader. Instead, it went on with the same tricks, dispatching dollar-a-day goons to beat demonstrators. On New Year’s Day a bomb ripped through a church in Alexandria, killing twenty-three. The government had failed once again to protect a vulnerable minority. Young activists from all backgrounds took to the streets in solidarity with the Christians. Several protest leaders were arrested. The police blamed a Salafi named Sayed Bilal and tortured him to death. He turned out to have no connection to the bombing. Little demonstrations flared up around the country. The Journalists Syndicate had a tall building downtown used as a meeting space and conference hall; the syndicate’s leadership allowed anti-regime protests on the front steps. Moaz was among a small group attacked by police there. When he returned home, his mother said nothing, but his father fumed. “This is not a smart investment,” he told his son. “This is no way to lead a good life.”

  “If we can’t change our life in 2011, then I will emigrate to Canada or find a new country,” Moaz said. “If I don’t speak against this regime, one day they will kill me, and nobody left will speak out.”

  Alexandria had now contributed a trinity of martyrs: first Khaled Said, the secular Muslim everyman; and then the Christians, for years the victims of state-sanctioned sectarian discrimination, blown up in their church; and finally Sayed Bilal, the pious Salafi, innocent of any offense but in thrall to a rigid and suspect faith. The state had targeted almost every kind of Egyptian. Now, in response to those crimes, a current of anger had united Egyptians across their many dividing lines in January 2011, after a decade or more of orchestrated cruelty.

  Obtusely, the government elevated Police Day, scheduled for January 25, into an official national holiday. This was Mubarak’s last insult. No institution was more universally detested in Egypt than the police. At a moment when the president needed to placate his enraged populace, he inflamed them. Youth of all backgrounds collaborated in the call for a national “Day of Rage,” scheduled to coincide with the ludicrous new holiday: Muslim Brothers, Salafists, labor activists from the April 6 Movement, canvassers for ElBaradei, and the administrators of the Khaled Said Facebook page, which by now had 365,000 members.

  It was during this final surge of planning that Moaz and Basem met, like so many other activists who until then had been agitating in lonesome obscurity. An underground cell convened at an apartment on the west bank of the Nile. It belonged to a middle-aged communist who had taken part in the Bread Riots of 1977, when angry Egyptians demonstrated against a government move to eliminate wheat subsidies. It was perhaps the last time before 2011 that a popular outcry had managed to unnerve the regime. Her son was a thirty-year-old secular lawyer named Zyad el-Elaimy, a bear of a man who had relished fighting the police since his days at university. Zyad had maintained close friendships with the Muslim Brotherhood leaders from his student union days, and he had become a top aide to ElBaradei. Now, using methods borrowed from his mother’s days as an active communist, Zyad brought together the full array of activists, who had never before worked together in a coordinated fashion.

  Basem and a few others represented ElBaradei’s supporters. Moaz and two others came from the Brotherhood. There were independent leftists, Islamists, and labor activists. They removed their cell phone batteries and arrived at Zyad’s mother’s apartment one by one so as not to attract police attention. There was much to plan and little time to socialize. Basem had met very few Muslim Brothers, and he was struck by Moaz’s singularity of focus. Moaz at first mistook Basem for a foreigner, maybe an Algerian, because of his wan complexion and light eyes, and noticed that he was much older than the other activists. He found Basem temperate and professional, and effective at keeping his colleagues on task. The activists labored to keep their expectations low, but they wanted the January 25 protest to be big. At their most unrealistic, they hoped that they could force the resignation of the hated interior minister, responsible for so much incompetence and so many deaths over his thirteen years in power. Their first challenge was summoning a crowd large enough to combat the riot police, who were well versed at dispersing gatherings before they reached a critical mass. The question was whether there were enough angry Egyptians to confront the regime in a way that would shock Mubarak and his operators.

  They hit on a simple plan. They would advertise twenty protest locations all over the city, at mosques and popular meeting places. Police would gather at those spots, which would serve as decoys. Meanwhile, Basem an
d Moaz’s cell, which included dozens of the most seasoned activists and street demonstrators, the most charismatic chant leaders, and the toughest fighters, would meet at an unannounced and most unlikely location: El Hayiss Pastries, an industrial shop in a fringe working-class neighborhood, where the streets were too narrow for police trucks and water cannons, and where no demonstration had ever taken place previously. The ploy would work only if the denizens of the neighborhood joined the call to protest. If they did, then the organizers could muster a thousand people by the time they reached the main boulevard and drew the attention of the Central Security Forces. If the residents of Bulaq Dakrour ignored the chants of Basem, Moaz, and their friends, then January 25’s Day of Rage would be just one more in a long line of protests that fizzled.

  4.

  THE REPUBLIC OF TAHRIR

  The revolutionaries labored under twin fears as they converged on El Hayiss Pastries on the morning of January 25, 2011. The first was simply that they would fail, that the uprising they had announced with such fanfare would amount to nothing, and Egyptians would prove as docile as the regime said they were. The second was more vague and complex. They worried that if the public’s anger were aroused, no one would be able to harness it for constructive ends. The fourteen activists who had planned the secret march out of Bulaq Dakrour represented some but not all of the activists laboring in Egypt. Basem had come to politics only recently, but others had been thinking about how to unseat Mubarak’s regime for a decade or more. They included Islamists, labor activists, communists, socialists, and liberals. They weren’t sure they could raise a revolution, but they were planning ahead just in case they succeeded.

  This small group, almost alone among Egyptians, didn’t consider politics a dirty word; they had formed a coalition with a goal of intimidating the regime and perhaps forcing the resignation of its top police official. They hoped they might prompt as many as ten thousand people to march to the city center, enough perhaps to demand Hosni Mubarak’s attention. They had studied the politics of their own country and, even more assiduously, they had followed the lightning revolution in Tunisia, which had begun when a fruit peddler named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his scales by a corrupt police officer.

  Mubarak’s minions were watching too, but they were unconcerned. “Egypt is a different case than Tunisia,” an Egyptian cabinet member told the press. The regime was glib, but there was some truth to its claim. Tunisia was a tiny middle-class country. Egypt had ninety million inhabitants, most of them poor and many illiterate. Egypt’s government had more people on its payroll than Tunisia had citizens. Perhaps Egypt’s regime was blind to the threat against it, or perhaps it knew that deep foundations supported the tyrant at its head.

  Basem was nervous. The organizers were afraid they’d be arrested, so they had gone into hiding for a week. On the last night, Basem called his sister. “Kiss your daughter Noor for me,” he told her, a code that meant he would sneak into her guest room that night. Basem hadn’t seen his own kids all week. In the morning, he followed the protocol they all had agreed on in their final meeting at Zyad’s mother’s flat. He removed the battery and SIM card from his cell phone to make himself hard to track, and then took a series of taxis and minibuses toward Bulaq Dakrour. He finally found his way to the potholed lane, hidden beneath a cloverleaf intersection, that led into the dense flank of the neighborhood. It was an area that until this day had never attracted the notice of authorities or activists. The smell of roasting butter and caramelized sugar wafted from the bakery. Trays of baklava lined the glass counters, which opened to a little tiled plaza about the size of a garage. There were no police in sight. By twos and threes, the activists drifted into the plaza, until they numbered a few dozen. Zyad arrived and pulled a bullhorn from his bag.

  If Moaz represented the typical Muslim Brother and Basem the freshly politicized citizen, Zyad represented the small but boisterous clan of career leftists. In 1977 Zyad’s communist mother had faced off with riot police in the Egyptian Bread Riots. His lawyer father channeled his dissent into articulate writings. Unlike most of the activists whose families pressured them to avoid politics, Zyad’s family pushed him into a life of civic engagement. He studied law and led the leftist contingent on the student council. He discovered during the 2003 anti–Iraq War protests that the toughest demonstrators and the best organizers were communists, revolutionary socialists, and Islamists. He was surrounded by baying law students that year when a pair of cops lit into him, breaking his arm. Zyad wore the cast with pride. The dissident lawyers, secular and Islamist, became his closest friends. He read Marx and Lenin, and in addition to practicing law, he established a charity to tutor children in his neighborhood. The more that Zyad thought about the inequities of Mubarak’s law, the less appeal he found in doctrinaire communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat was just another dictatorship, and he became convinced that Egyptians needed to be freed from oppression as well as from poverty. He drifted toward the pragmatic center, pursuing any tactic that might work against the regime. When ElBaradei returned to Egypt, Zyad quickly became one of his most important organizers and aides. In the planning for January 25, he was the center of a group of activists from across the ideological spectrum whom he trusted and considered effective.

  “Bread! Freedom! Social justice!” they chanted. (It rhymes in Arabic.) And: “Al-shaab yurid isqat al-nidham.” “The people demand the fall of the regime.” These were unprecedented, seditious calls; saying out loud that you wanted the fall of the regime on the morning of January 25 could quickly lead to prison. A few onlookers joined, and gradually more materialized. Within an hour, still no police had appeared, but to the pleasure of Basem, Moaz, and Zyad, about five hundred people were chanting in front of the pastry shop. At a signal from Zyad, the organizers spread up the congested lane while others took their place along the perimeter to maintain the march’s cohesion and energy. “Inzil! Inzil!” they chanted, waving at the apartments around them. “Come down! Come down!” To their surprise, people did. They came out of their houses or up from the side streets, and they joined the march. All who saw knew it was subversion. By joining this march, they were joining a revolt.

  “Come down! Come down!” they chanted, and the march swelled in size. By the time it poured out of Bulaq Dakrour and into the fancier neighborhood of Dokki, the shuddering, angry, focused mass was no longer connected directly to the fourteen men and women who had catalyzed it.

  These enraged Egyptians filled the main boulevards of Giza, the half of Cairo that lay on the west bank of the Nile. In harmony, the soccer hooligans, the unemployed, the college graduates, and the activists finally met the riot police who were still puffed up with a bully’s confidence. In sixty years, they hadn’t met a crowd that they couldn’t dispatch easily with clubs, tear gas, and occasional assistance from paid thugs armed with guns, swords, and knives. The riot police formed neat, straight lines, blocking the avenues and bridges. Their black uniforms made them look tall, and their Plexiglas shields shimmered in the sun. Behind them, drivers eagerly revved armored paddy wagons and water cannons. From a distance, the defenses had a serene beauty, like a sentry wall snaking across the streetscape. The rulers of Egypt believed that they ruled not simply because they had power but also because they were just. The army and police conscripts reflected this misplaced moral confidence. Those who disagreed simply didn’t know better, the regime believed, and they were destined to fail in any challenge to the state; the people’s weakness and stupidity fed each other in a vicious circle. The state couldn’t imagine a serious challenge because the state didn’t believe there were any errors or defects in its ways.

  The police were ready for these protesters, expecting to apply the usual deep state formula and be done in a few hours. What the conscripts couldn’t see, and what their masters in the regime had yet to recognize, was the lengths to which Egyptians’ frustration had soared. Moaz was not alone in his conviction that
if the country didn’t change now, he would have to emigrate. Basem was not the only petit bourgeois citizen to conclude reluctantly that Egypt’s politics were the cause of Egypt’s misery. The ultras were not the only teenagers to recognize from previous fights that one didn’t need sophisticated equipment to fight back. An entire generation of electrified citizens had nothing to lose.

  The serpent of marching people met the line of riot police. An extravaganza of violence followed. But history didn’t repeat itself. On this day, when the police hit people, the people hit back. They were fearless and also prepared. They covered their faces with scarves soaked in vinegar to dampen the effect of the tear gas, and they tossed smoking canisters back at the police. The police fired water cannons and brandished truncheons. Protesters answered with stones. They broke through the police cordon and spray painted the windshields of the paddy wagons and cannons so that the drivers couldn’t see. Each time the police repulsed the marchers, they regrouped and surged again. Egyptians watched electrified on the pan-Arabic satellite news network Al Jazeera, since state television ignored the spectacle. As the fight continued, tens of thousands joined. The demonstrators broke through line after line of cops, making their way closer to Tahrir Square. They fought one final climactic battle at the last choke point before Tahrir: the antique two-lane Qasr el-Nil bridge, guarded by a pair of enormous granite lions left from the royal era. On the bridge, the riot police drove their trucks into the crowd, running people over. In vain, conscripts fired tear gas point-blank while others swung their sticks wildly. A group of demonstrators dropped in neat lines to the ground mid-melee to pray. The police sacrilegiously trained the water cannon on them. The demonstrators rose and kneeled, completing the full prayer. When they were done, they rushed the police and cleared them off the bridge, almost as an afterthought. This was the moment that Egypt’s dictators had feared since 1952. The math was not on the side of Mubarak or his generals. If one million people convinced of their righteousness stand against your police, the only way to stop them is to kill and kill and kill until everyone dies or goes home. Not every dictator is that merciless.