Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  The deep state seeped to the surface on June 28, in a rare display of its surviving powers. Families of some January 25 martyrs staged a commemoration, which was broken up by hecklers. Many believed they were provocateurs sent by State Security. The families went to Tahrir, where, to everyone’s shock, they met the riot police, unseen since January 28. With batons whirling and shields raised, the uniformed men charged elderly men and women who were already grieving children killed six months earlier. Tear gas wafted over downtown, and dozens were wounded. Fighting raged for a day. A policeman removed his shirt and danced through the melee, twirling two swords. He was clearly taunting the victims, but no one could make sense of the whole affair. Why had the riot police returned suddenly? Who was in charge? Was this part of the deep state’s comeback? Or was it a feint in some power struggle between the army and the police, a message to the SCAF that it would have to bring its Interior Ministry colleagues aboard?

  The Revolutionary Youth Coalition had to respond to the riot police’s attack but had no idea how. Its leaders were all the more confounded because many people had applauded the police; at least, they said, the government was restoring order. Prime Minister Essam Sharaf invited the Revolutionary Youth Coalition to his house for dinner and asked what he should do. Moaz, Zyad, and Sally joined a delegation of seven, and they offered the prime minister a blueprint: He had to stop military trials for civilians, get the Mubarak trial started immediately, and pay compensation to the families of the January 25 martyrs. He had to fire the leaders of the police and purge the lower ranks, and get rid of all the Mubarak-era holdovers in his cabinet. If the military junta blocked any of these moves, he could simply resign, his honor intact.

  The leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition knew they had to regain the initiative, and they understood that they weren’t going to get anywhere through a sympathetic but weak prime minister. Only one thing had worked for them in the past: big crowds in the street. Even though they recognized that this had fast become a limited, even counterproductive, tactic, it was to Tahrir that they turned again. July 8 would be the “Friday of Determination,” and if they wanted it to be big, they’d need a simple agenda. For hours they argued in a tiny, smoky borrowed office downtown.

  Most of the leaders around the table were men who talked out of turn and rarely took their eyes off their smartphones. Sally chaired the discussion, struggling to keep it moving. She desperately wanted a plan that would bring the disparate revolutionary groups back into harmony: a massive protest on July 8, followed by a serious conference to unite everyone around a lowest-common-denominator demand for justice and a transition to civilian rule.

  “What will our titles be?” someone asked.

  “Which party gets to host the conference?” added someone else.

  Zyad was scrolling through Facebook on his BlackBerry. He had decided he most definitely would run for parliament, and he was already figuring out a campaign team. He looked up only when he couldn’t find a lighter. He was clearly annoyed by the petty interests of his colleagues, although he himself was barely paying attention to the crisis at hand.

  “We need an agenda,” he said.

  “We need to sound like we’re all on the same page,” Sally said. “We should talk in public only if it’s about things we’ve agreed on.”

  “If it gets out that we’re having problems working together, it will look like the revolutionary forces are fighting with each other,” Zyad said. “Let’s concentrate on making this Friday go well, and afterward we can think about the long term.”

  The revolution’s internal bickering had long been public knowledge; most of the personal feuds spilled quickly onto Facebook and the pages of liberal newspapers and websites. The state exacerbated the divisions by establishing a barrage of ersatz youth fronts that confused the public and irritated the revolutionaries. The fake groups had unknown numbers and intentionally similar names, like the Revolution Coalition, the Union of Revolutionary Youth, the Front for Youth of the Revolution, and so on. Revolutionaries also suffered from continuing slander in the state media. Activists were still depicted as drug users, foreign agents, sexually promiscuous, or gay. Anti-Christian sentiment and xenophobia were rising; I had been arrested one afternoon downtown by passing citizens convinced that I was an Israeli spy. Sally was constantly under suspicion because of her mixed parentage. During Tahrir, she had spoken on television as Sally Moore, the Irish-Egyptian. Now she was Sally Toma, Egyptian, and she avoided speaking English in public.

  Although its leaders seemed to focus on the coalition less and less by the week, its success mattered to all the youth groups. Tahrir Square, where the coalition had been formed, was the one place where they all came together, the one place that was home for Islamist and secular revolutionaries alike. The coalition’s loyalty to revolution was unquestionable. In practice, however, the revolutionary leaders behaved like teenage boyfriends with noble intentions and truncated attention spans. Sally was the one who stitched together the group, ushering the meetings along, emailing around the minutes, wringing consensus out of their brains. “You are like little boys,” Sally complained. “Every six hours, we accomplish five minutes of productivity.”

  After many hours of meetings, the coalition finally settled on a protest agenda, and it drafted a public apology entitled “Revolution First.”

  “We apologize to the Egyptian Revolution, the revolution’s martyrs, and the Egyptian people for engaging in debate between Constitution First and Elections First that divided the political scene in Egypt, when we should have paid attention to the security issue,” their statement read. “We support a sit-in at Tahrir Square, but only if there is a consensus among the political groups and parties.”

  The solution was elegant, if facile: Forget about the ideological divisions and political mess and focus on something everybody wanted to see: Hosni Mubarak on trial. The Brotherhood agreed to join the revolutionaries for one day in Tahrir, but for its own interests; the organization wanted to make sure the military didn’t postpone the elections that the Brotherhood intended to win. Sure, the whole point of a revolution was to install a new kind of government and to reinvent the relationship between ruler and subject. But that was complicated. Hanging Mubarak would be simple.

  An angry crowd filled Tahrir on July 8. The mood veered between jubilant and bloodthirsty. Orderly Muslim Brothers milled about the square, but in unison at sunset, they all filed out. The square remained half full, and Basem glared darkly at the retreating Brothers. “The Islamists are no longer interested in revolutionary unity, but we will keep trying,” he said. People were in the square because they didn’t have any idea what else to do. Lost, without a sense of purpose, thousands simply lay down to sleep that night in Tahrir. The next morning, they were still there. They declared a popular occupation of the square and swore to stay put until the government relented to their revolutionary demands. They numbered just a few thousand, but they were enough to close Cairo’s central square to traffic. They erected tents with hand-lettered signs and swore to stay put until their demands were met. Tahrir looked like a squatters’ camp. No one wanted to look like a coward, so the leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition got their own tents too. At a crucial moment, not a single one of them was willing to voice the opinion that a summertime Tahrir sit-in was a bad idea.

  Almost instantly, the little remaining public sympathy for the revolution dissipated. The revolutionaries were snarling city traffic. To make matters worse, they had blockaded the Mogamma, an imposing hive of government offices that dominated the southern end of Tahrir, where citizens went for most of their paperwork. The revolutionaries were trying to attract attention but instead irritated fellow citizens who were no less victims of the Egyptian state than the people in the square. Zyad knew from the start that the revolutionaries were wasting precious goodwill, but he was powerless to convince the Tahrir hard-liners to go home. The pragmatists from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition had little influence
over the activists occupying the square, who sank deeper into a state of revolutionary fervor and paranoia about threats from the deep state. It never crossed their minds that the SCAF would bottle up the revolutionaries in Tahrir and ignore them, leaving the activists themselves to alienate the Egyptian public without any help from the authorities.

  Basem Kamel and the Social Democratic Party were trying to do the complicated thing, building their organization in an office a few blocks away from Tahrir on Mahmoud Bassiouni Street. The Social Democrats had wealthy backers, a Machiavellian alliance with Naguib Sawiris’s felool-packed party, and air-conditioning. Basem didn’t hide the fact that he was having fun. He was on his party’s presumptive list of candidates for parliament. He regretted that he had hardly seen his family in the last year and a half, but he was sure that his work now would reap real dividends. Everyone agreed that the revolution’s paramount task was to communicate with the “street” and the provinces. Few, however, were eager to bounce over the crappy roads of the delta or Upper Egypt for six-hour trips. Basem was more willing, and thus had spent much of the last month establishing Social Democratic Party branches in far-flung cities. The party had fifty thousand members already and had absorbed a raft of energetic volunteers who had worked for Mohamed ElBaradei. Organizationally, they were leagues ahead of al-Tayyar and the other revolutionary groups but completely outmatched by the legacy movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the establishment Wafd Party, which was the boisterous home of liberal politics in the 1920s but had long devolved into playing the role of the regime’s loyal opposition.

  In Cairo, many people had tired of the revolution, complaining about the Tahrir sit-in and cheering when the military talked tough. General el-Fengary, the same SCAF member who had eulogized the revolution’s martyrs, issued a threat in July: “No one can take away the authority that the revolution has bestowed upon the army,” the general said. “We will not budge in the face of threats. We will punish those who try to harm the public interest.” In the provinces, things weren’t much better. Near the Mediterranean coast, Basem had established an active chapter of the Social Democratic Party in the town of Kafr el-Sheikh. They held their first public meeting on the same day as General el-Fengary’s threat. Even though they were the first non-Islamist party to seek recruits, they drew at best 150 people. The café outside was more crowded. The local chapter head explained it to me simply: people were looking for cues from local notables. New parties like the Social Democrats would have trouble signing up members unless they first attracted the rich, the big employers, and the famous local fixers and power brokers. Another party activist I knew well complained that urbane liberals didn’t know how to connect with poor people on the stump. Basem was an exception. He spoke engagingly, warming up the crowd with a joke about how they were using an old ruling party clubhouse for their prodemocracy gathering. He ended on a rousing note about equal citizenship for Egyptians of all classes and religions. Families lined up to take their pictures with him. Basem presented well as a candidate. But while his party was leagues ahead of the other new revolutionary movements, it was nowhere near ready for prime time.

  Still wearing his blazer and dress shirt, Basem drove across the country and straight back to Tahrir after the meeting. He felt that the Revolutionary Youth Coalition had to do something to try to gain control of the square, ending the sit-in before Egypt turned against the very idea of revolution. That night, a few minutes after three o’clock, the coalition finished a meeting. “Tomorrow we will keep the Mogamma open,” Zyad announced. This meant persuading the more radical protesters to clear the way to the bureaucratic building, and clearing by force those who wouldn’t agree. This was the kind of tough choice that politics demanded—and that the consensus-hungry revolutionaries had mostly avoided until now. The coalition painted its political demands on a twenty-foot-tall wood-and-canvas obelisk erected on the Mogamma lawn: trials for the old regime, an end to military trials for civilians, police purges to fight corruption, a stronger prime minister, and a cabinet reshuffling. The revolutionaries in the square had so lost their bearings that someone had felt it necessary to write down the core values of the uprising as a list called the “Tahrir Code” on the other side of the monument. In a sign of how low discourse had sunk, the “spirit of the square” instructed demonstrators, “Don’t call other people traitor or spy.”

  While Basem continued the groundwork for his party’s national political campaign, the theater of protest in Tahrir had frozen the rest of the revolutionaries’ work. Moaz’s Egyptian Current Party had cancelled its membership drive. “We have put everything on hold while we’re in Tahrir,” said Abdelrahman Fares, Moaz’s friend and fellow al-Tayyar al-Masry Party founder. “Everyone keeps asking about party activities. We have no activities while we’re here.” Gone for now was the sense of urgency.

  The Revolutionary Youth Coalition leaders usually gathered beside the statue of Omar Makram, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad who had led resistance against France’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 under General Napoléon Bonaparte. Omar Makram had helped elevate Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s first modernizing king, to the throne; he symbolized the nationalist partnership between secular and religious Egyptians, united in resistance. It was a symbol that the coalition should have adopted but, sadly, never did.

  “I think we need to stop the sit-in,” Zyad said one afternoon after waking from a midday nap in the statue’s shade. “I think it is hurting us. There are some people who won’t leave. There’s a lot of silly kids.” He knew that each day fewer and fewer people in the square listened to him. Every bit of credibility that he and Basem and others acquired with Egyptians outside Tahrir seemed to deplete an equal amount of credibility inside the square.

  The revolution was collapsing upon itself in a vortex of paranoia and self-importance. Talk of violence percolated among the few thousand left in Tahrir. A father whose son had gone missing in January swore to me that he would kill the sons of the government officials responsible. Discussion circles mulled over whether the revolution would achieve more if vigilantes began murdering police officers. Alaa Abdel Fattah, the blogger and labor activist who had returned from South Africa, tried to confront the idea head-on. “Our best protection is that we are unarmed. We only defend ourselves,” he said. “If we take up arms, it becomes a civil war.” Quietly, though, some protesters began saving money for guns.

  Finally, Tahrir’s interminable sit-in burst its seams. The dwindling number of protesters couldn’t stand it anymore, enraged by the lack of justice for the martyrs and the utter indifference of Egypt to their rage. They would do something bold, and people would pay attention: they would march on the Ministry of Defense in the city’s Abbasiya section. From within their bubble, the demonstrators thought this move would clarify matters, convincing the public that the military was aggressive and the revolutionaries were innocent victims. However, the military was still popular with most Egyptians, and it was currently the only functional Egyptian institution. Marching on its headquarters would look to most Egyptians like a gratuitous provocation, an attack on a national symbol. To make matters worse, the neighborhood was rabidly pro-regime. There were few roads in and out. If fighting broke out, people could easily get trapped. It was a risky idea on many levels, but the hard-core revolutionaries, like Sally, felt they had to go along with it. Once again, instead of walking away from a bad idea that percolated up from the grassroots, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition played along.

  On the day of the march, the situation quickly soured. The people of Abbasiya welcomed the marchers with bottles, rocks, sticks, and knives, while residents, thugs, and security men chased them without restraint or mercy. They pursued the protesters into the Noor Mosque even as the imam shouted over the speakers for peace. They beat them in the streets, they beat them in the alleys, they pelted them with Molotov cocktails. The military police stood by, protecting the thugs but not the demonstrators. It took nearly twenty-four hours for thos
e in the march to fight their way back to Tahrir. At least three hundred were wounded. The SCAF had shown its ugliest face so far, gambling on the public’s distaste for the revolutionaries and deploying plainclothes henchmen to attack unarmed demonstrators. The utopian stage of Revolutionary Tahrir, for all intents and purposes, was over.

  Ramadan offered a chance to regroup. For Muslim families, the month was a time for togetherness, reflection, and camaraderie. Every evening, families would gather for iftar to break their dawn-to-dusk fast. They would often gather with friends for a second meal, the suhoor, a few hours after midnight. The revolutionaries, considering the whole of Egypt their family, hoped that they could stage iftars everywhere to talk and break bread with their countrymen. In reality, such a gesture required more money and organization than they had, but they did what they could. After the violence during the ill-considered march to the Defense Ministry, they understood that their relationship with the Egyptian people needed repair. “We realized we weren’t doing a good job explaining ourselves,” Sally said when I ran into her downtown. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition organized street iftars or conferences anywhere it had a toehold: Mahalla, Kafr el-Sheikh, popular quarters of Cairo and Alexandria. The revolutionaries wanted to explain to the people what had happened since January 25. They wanted to explain that the revolution was not over, that the old system was still in place, and that the military weren’t saviors but were, in fact, worse in many ways than Mubarak. They wanted to explain that the failing economy, lost security, and other disasters befalling Egypt were the responsibility of the nation’s rulers. So far the only problem for which the thousands in Tahrir were solely at fault was the gnarled traffic downtown.