Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  What a mismatch. Just as in the run-up to the constitutional referendum, the youth had waited too long to concentrate on their message. Only now had it dawned on them that the public image of their campaign was integral to its success; that the revolution needed a bigger public. So some dozens, maybe hundreds, of articulate young revolutionaries were ready to talk to Egypt at large. They wanted to wrestle the narrative away from the mendacious machinery of Maspero’s official media.

  The state understood the power of narrative focus, singling out a handful of activists for special vilification. Generals ranted on television about Asmaa Mahfouz, a telegenic and articulate young woman who was at best a bit player in revolutionary circles. They accused her of anchoring a plot against the nation, of taking orders from abroad, and of slandering the military and other symbols of Egyptian unity. SCAF understood that the facts didn’t matter. The generals wanted to deter other activists by persecuting a single target, and they calculated the effect would be all the more chilling if they harassed people like Asmaa and Alaa Abdel Fattah, who weren’t instrumental in hard power gambits such as political parties and community groups. Asmaa was arrested for tweeting disrespectfully about Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, and then released on bail.

  It was not an accident that when the Free Officers staged their coup in 1952, the state media building was one of their first targets. It’s an old formula for taking over a state: secure the barracks, arrest the president, and take over the official media. If that’s in hand, all else will follow. The revolutionaries hadn’t taken Maspero during the original uprising, and in the six months since January 25 the generals had freely and strategically written their own story of the revolution. In the SCAF narrative, artfully peddled on every channel of state television and in every newspaper, the generals were revolutionary patriots who rescued Egypt from Mubarak’s predatory circle. The dirty and entitled kids in Tahrir had no vision and no constructive aims. They had jammed a stick in the nation’s wheel of production and had rendered Cairo unlivable. Traffic, crime, garbage piles: all could be traced to the slothful ethos of the demonstrators.

  While Mubarak still held on to the presidency, regime lackeys alleged that foreign diplomats were handing cash to demonstrators from their limousines. What else but a foreign conspiracy could explain all these new activists? That fantastical claim had blossomed over the summer with state media reports that the CIA, the Mossad, and perhaps others too had paid and trained the revolutionaries. The military was successfully pushing the line that American money and meddling were entirely to blame for an artificial wave of protests, but that the military itself was immune to any untoward influence from Washington, despite $40 billion in assistance during more than three decades of tight collaboration with the United States and Israel on security matters.

  Just before Ramadan, the SCAF granted the revolutionaries their most heartfelt wish: it would put the old tyrant on trial, at last. Hosni Mubarak and his interior minister, Habib el-Adly, the two most hated men in Egypt, appeared in court on August 3, two days into Ramadan. For many Egyptians, Mubarak was the symbol of what went wrong, and the great travesty of the revolution was that he had yet to face justice. The revolutionaries, however, understood by now that Mubarak was but one in a den of vipers, and that his trial was a necessary but insufficient condition for system change in Egypt. The courts and the SCAF had delayed the trial as long as possible, but they had understood from the protests of July that a great many Egyptians were on the verge of exploding over this one matter; in fact, it appeared to be the only remaining issue that could unify the full spectrum of people power. So in quick succession, like a theater director bringing a performance to its dramatic climax, the SCAF cleared Tahrir and announced that justice would be served. Hosni Mubarak was wheeled into a courtroom in his hospital bed and placed in the cage where all Egyptian defendants are tried. The arrogant Pharaoh lay there picking his nose. He was flanked by his sons Gamal and Alaa, and his long-serving interior minister el-Adly. These venal courtiers flashed with anger at their jailers and behaved as if all Egyptians were still their subjects.

  This was the spectacle the people had desired. The outcome felt almost immaterial. The fallen tyrant had been humiliated, forced to face the law like any Egyptian. So what if he was living in comfort? So what if his trial, before a civilian judge, seemed rigged to give him light treatment, while, since the revolution, thousands upon thousands of Egyptians had been summarily sentenced to years in prison by military courts, usually without regard for procedure or evidence, and with no protections for the accused? That was the kind of detail that kept legal activists busy for days on end. It didn’t enter the grand narrative: that was the Supreme Council’s production. Now the SCAF had the headline it wanted: “Mubarak On Trial, Revolution Wins.” Satisfied, many Egyptians turned off their televisions on August 3. With Mubarak on trial, they could stop worrying and learn to love the SCAF.

  The Revolutionary Youth Coalition met again with the prime minister. They complained about voter registration rolls, which were still crammed with dead people. They raised their concerns with old regime holdovers still in the cabinet, with military trials, and with the lack of a concrete timetable for a handover to civilian power. Every night during Ramadan the activists would collect at their favorite cafés along Boursa. There were tensions. One night, some unknown belligerents picked fights in a way that felt staged, like a State Security provocation.

  Moaz and the other Islamists on the Revolutionary Youth Coalition had fought off a move to expand the group. There were many new activists who weren’t represented, and many of the most important independents, including Sally, had joined political parties. Even though Sally was conflicted about whether to support more staid electoral politics or more radical street action, it was difficult to present herself as an independent when she was a founding member of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party. The other original independents were in similar positions, all of them having joined organized movements or parties. Moaz liked the idea of a more inclusive coalition, but he feared the swamping of the Islamist voices, especially now that the official Brotherhood had no relationship with the revolutionary youth. “The coalition is like the critical mass in the nuclear bomb,” Moaz said. “The balance is what produces the good work.” Between the iftars and the meetings and the plans and the disrupted sleep schedules of Ramadan, the helmsmen of the revolution appeared to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. The SCAF might be stumbling along with a blunt strategy, but it had a great machine in its hands. The revolutionaries, for the moment, were scattered. Everyone seemed to need a break at a time when no one could afford to lose focus.

  The revolutionary youth disagreed on most everything beyond their common contempt for Mubarak. The most driven of the secular activists rose from the left and retained an unhealthy regard for the most doctrinaire readings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. In the view of this hypervigilant rank and file, anyone who aspired to lead or run for elections was a poseur. They were waiting for a worker’s revolution that would wipe away the entire structure of the old regime. “We can negotiate with them after they’re all dead,” one such activist told me glibly. He was saving up for a gun, although he didn’t know how to shoot. This doctrinaire thinking seemed dangerously naïve and out of step with the historical moment. It was one thing to argue that Egypt’s well-behaved revolutionaries needed to assert more radical demands. It was another altogether to explain Egypt through Lenin’s analysis of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. These rigid leftists mattered because they formed one of the most dedicated phalanxes of labor organizers and street fighters. They showed up for the long, earnest political meetings, for the protests, for the workers’ strikes, and they didn’t flee when the police came. Their voices counted disproportionately to their size, and their ideological purity won them a lot of credibility. They were the secular answer to the fervent, young Muslim Brothers.

  Now they had the Revolutionary Youth Coaliti
on in their sights. They found repugnant the very notion that someone would purport to lead the youth or the revolution. They oozed with disdain for the coalition’s bourgeois style. Many of the angriest critics operated under the banner of the Revolutionary Socialists, so named long before January 25. Writers and organizers such as Hossam el-Hamalawy and Kamal Khalil never stopped agitating for a full-on workers’ uprising. Meanwhile Sally, Zyad, Basem, Moaz, and the rest of the coalition members were pushing for change and reform through any path they could see. They took a radical line on what Egypt needed, but they were willing to meet with most people in power to communicate their demands. They had stopped meeting with the SCAF after it became clear to them that the SCAF wasn’t interested in consulting outsiders, only in dictating to them. But they met with ministers, influential notables, friends of the army, and, in late September, Egypt’s top spy, Murad Muwafi.

  For these hardheaded revolutionary pragmatists, it wasn’t such a hard decision. Muwafi controlled the General Intelligence Directorate, which for decades under Mubarak controlled most of Egypt; he had taken over during the revolution, but he was an old regime holdover, with copious assets and files in his hands. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition took a vote whether to accept the invitation to meet with the intelligence chief, and agreed overwhelmingly. Who better to hear the youth’s demands for the continually deferred overhaul of the intelligence and security apparatus that strangled Egyptian life? Probably Muwafi wouldn’t do what the youth asked, but at least he had the power to fix things if he could be swayed. The only dissenters after two days of arguments were the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom, perhaps the most leftist and secular of groups in the coalition. “We need to have political relationships with the authorities of the state,” Moaz said. “We don’t have to always resort to a million-man march to have our voices heard.”

  So, on September 22, delegates from the coalition found themselves in a secret briefing room with Muwafi. In keeping with regime tradition, Muwafi wanted the entire meeting off the record. The youth refused. In Mubarak’s time, opposition activists and politicians had always met discreetly with intelligence operatives, and were all tarnished by the suspicion that they had cut some kind of deal with the regime. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition leaders believed that such contacts would shed their stigma if discussed openly. They thought it should be normal business for political activists to meet with government officials, including the powerful intelligence chief, without sacrificing their reputation. So the revolutionaries announced their rendezvous with Muwafi in advance and planned a detailed public briefing afterward. It was a huge break with tradition, but it did them no favors.

  They talked for nearly four hours. Muwafi tried to argue that Egypt faced so many major threats from nefarious entities, such as the jihadis in the Sinai, that it was hard to deal with mundane security matters. In response, Moaz and the others ripped into Muwafi. They ticked off all the problems with the security forces, of which Muwafi’s intelligence service was the most important: abuses of power and popular trust, thugs and bandits rampaging in poor areas all over the country, civilians shunted into military courts, police refusing to do their jobs, military police disappearing mysteriously at key moments. “What are you waiting for to stop these people?” Moaz asked the intelligence chief. “Use the law and the authority of the state. Stop military trials immediately. Police have to return to the streets and do their job well.”

  In the strident halls of youth opinion, the revolutionaries who met with Muwafi immediately were pilloried as sellouts who chased any opportunity to cuddle with power. They were suspected of trying to engineer a secret agreement with Egyptian intelligence in exchange for seats in parliament. Reporters phoned Moaz, who had been designated the coalition’s spokesman on this question, perhaps because his Brotherhood background afforded him extra credibility.

  “People are attacking the coalition as if we sat with the Mossad!” he complained a few days after the meeting with Muwafi as he fielded calls from derisive Egyptian journalists on his cell phone at a café in Boursa. He looked more stressed than I’d ever seen him. The brouhaha over this relatively inconsequential conversation with an intelligence official was drowning out the most important revolutionary project afoot.

  Moaz, along with Sally and a few dozen of the most idealistic activists yet, had just unveiled a parliamentary slate called the “Revolution Continues.” They were determined to resuscitate the spirit of the square in a unified, nonpartisan political campaign that would be dedicated to the original aspirations of the revolution: better economic conditions for the poor, less corruption, and an end to torture. But no one, it seemed, wanted to talk about this underfunded revolutionary campaign. Many small, poor parties joined the Revolution Continues, but even stalwarts such as Basem and Zyad preferred the advantages of an alliance richer and more powerful than the revolutionary firmament from which they had sprung. The Revolution Continues campaign received threats continually. Thugs often disrupted its public gatherings, swinging sticks and fists. The revolutionary youth were nervous, because thugs usually had the blessing of the police or intelligence. They were worried enough that they didn’t publicize the identity of the six people leading the elections campaign. “It would be very easy for someone to kidnap or kill those six,” Moaz pointed out. He was trying to focus on the elections, but the accusations swirling after the intelligence meeting had distracted and depressed him. Tonight there was no laughing and joking. “That’s a filthy habit,” he snapped when sweetened tobacco smoke from my waterpipe blew his way.

  The coalition had refused to sit with generals from the SCAF since April 8, when military police attacked a demonstration in Tahrir and arrested a group of dissenting soldiers who had joined the revolutionaries. This, too, disturbed Moaz. It shouldn’t matter whom you talk to, he reasoned; what should matter is what you say. “Even if we are in a war, we must have political communication channels,” he said. “You want to boycott Israel? Fine. But SCAF is part of our state. Boycotting the SCAF won’t harm the SCAF, but it will hurt the Egyptian people.”

  In early September 2011, the SCAF faxed a censorship directive to all the Egyptian media. No one could write about the military or the SCAF without prior permission. This was a tighter restriction than Mubarak had ever imposed. The state of emergency was set to expire that month, for the first time since 1967, but the generals announced that they would extend it another year because of “circumstances.” Finally, they published the full new election law, which gave the old ruling party an enormous advantage. An arcane system split the parliament between party seats and “independent” seats, which members of any political parties were barred from contesting. These were the seats that always went to powerful, corrupt families with local patronage networks; who had always been stalwarts of the regime in all but official party membership. The new law appeared designed to maximize their performance.

  State television aired long specials about Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi visiting factories, extolling Great Mother Egypt. Prosecutors advanced an investigation of “illegal nongovernment organizations” accused of taking foreign money. In a December raid, police arrested forty-three NGO workers, including sixteen Americans, from organizations that had been operating openly in Egypt for years. The targets included some of the most important Egyptian monitoring groups, along with the US-based Freedom House, National Democratic Institute, and International Republican Institute, all apparently selected because they documented the SCAF’s abuses of power. These organizations were continuing the work they had done under previous regimes: counting, tracking, and defending the detained; verifying torture; advocating at home and abroad against criminal governance; and organizing counterweights to the state in realms from election monitoring to filmmaking. The junta appeared willing to try an absolute power grab, testing to find out how much the public would squirm. Perhaps the SCAF could take a level of authority that had eluded even Mubarak and give Egypt the tough patern
al love that Tantawi and his generals thought it deserved.

  One could imagine Egypt gathered like an extended family in its mansion the day after the patriarch’s death. Everyone scheming, chaos coursing below the surface, but open conflict still just over the horizon. In September the SCAF was focused on the established quantities: in private meetings, generals sought understandings with leaders from the Muslim Brotherhood and from all the known liberal parties. Bolder forces were beginning to assert themselves: on the left, new labor, tired of impossibly low wages and the sycophantic leadership of their state-selected unions; and on the right, the Salafi Islamists, charismatic theocrats with dreams of a literal faith imposed on a wayward society.

  Workers on strike all over the country had prosaic concerns. They were lucky to be employed but were forced to support families on $100 or $200 a month. They didn’t disparage the revolutionary youth and their preoccupation with deracinating the nidham, or the system, but they wanted a “Revolution of the Hungry,” not a political one. “The workers aren’t afraid of being dragged before military courts,” Kamal Khalil told me. He led the Workers Democratic Party and all along had argued that without mass strikes, Egypt’s oppressive martial system would remain intact. “If the strikes are strong, the military won’t be able to stop them.”

  Teachers across the country were on strike, threatening not to begin the school year. They wanted an end to the feudal system that paid them $100 a month and encouraged them to supplement their income by withholding instruction in the classroom and charging extra for it in private after-school tutorials. In Mahalla, where years before Tahrir Square the textile workers had scaled the wall of fear, independent unions now demanded regime change. Outside the defunct parliament, hundreds of striking bus drivers demanded better wages, showing every passerby the pay stubs in their hands that chronicled their subsistence. Even more than the habitual Tahrir protesters, these workers were aware that the SCAF had formally criminalized all strikes and demonstrations with a rarely enforced March 2011 decree. The workers knew that they, more than the students and the political activists, faced the risk of arrest or loss of livelihood. They wanted more money, and they also wanted more dignity, symbolized by their demand for uniforms. A young driver showed me his monthly haul: $60, significantly lower than the average Egyptian monthly income of $270. A veteran nearly twice his age teased him: “Work another nineteen years like me, and you’ll get up to a hundred twenty dollars.” “Wages and prices are out of balance in Egypt,” said Adel Mahmoud, a driver with a missing front tooth and a soft, diffident voice. “We’re just demanding our bread.”