Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  The military had been tightening the screws of censorship already, and after Maspero, it continued to peddle a brew of lies, delusion, paranoia, and justification. General Adel Emara said it simply wasn’t military doctrine to run over people, even though Egyptian police had been known to do so as a crowd-control technique. At a briefing intended to exculpate the army, Emara and another general showed the video of the predator-APC chasing down and crushing people to death. General Emara claimed that the driver was trying to escape the frightening crowd, not to kill. Of course, the general added, it was possible that a Christian fanatic had hijacked the APC and then killed his fellow marchers in order to incite anger against the SCAF. Among such claims, the military also sprinkled dark accusations of a “hidden hand” at work, a favored rhetorical trope of Mubarak’s time.

  “We are not circulating conspiracy theories, but there is no doubt that there are enemies of the revolution,” General Mahmoud Hegazy said. Incredibly, the SCAF persuaded much of the public that the army and the revolution were one and the same, and that the events at Maspero somehow represented an attack by dirty hidden interests against the noble aspirations of a revolution safely prospering in the military’s care. A false narrative instantaneously subsumed the truth: a parallel history written and accepted in real time while almost everybody ignored the obvious.

  The massacre had unleashed something dark in public opinion. It also had unhinged many of the revolutionaries. Some members of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition blamed the CIA for the massacre. Others wondered whether it was time to plan an armed insurrection against the junta. Mina Daniel’s own Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom was wracked by baying calls for violence from some members. They were so persistent that some of the revolutionary leaders thought they were plants from State Security, trying to divide the group. “The military is leading us toward fascism by manipulating minorities,” one of the few women leaders among the revolutionaries, Ola Shabha, told her fellow activists. “We can’t take our eyes off the bigger issue.”

  Barely anyone showed up for the vigils. Nothing came of the cry for a Second Revolution. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition had carefully assembled documentary evidence to rebut the SCAF’s false narrative and expose its appalling crimes at Maspero. But only a tiny number of Egyptians exhibited any interest at that crucial point in either truth or justice. The revolution was right, but there seemed no practical way to carry its ideas forward. Maybe there never had been. Maybe the only thing that Tahrir had going for it was a naïve ideal, a cosmic long shot that had worked once, in January, kind of. Reason offered no evidence that it could work again; that belief required a leap of faith.

  8.

  UPSTAIRS FROM THE DEAD COW

  The revolutionary zeitgeist swung on a wild pendulum between elation and despair, but Basem Kamel was a study in steadiness. He was older and less radical than most of his fellow activists, more mainstream and well-to-do. He had risked a lot for the revolt, but his concerns were broader than the revolution alone. He cared as much about preserving Egypt as a secular state and blocking the rise of the Islamists as he did about the dream of social justice for all. He thought it shamefully naïve to ignore the political threats to freedom. Islamists and the SCAF could just as readily kill the revolution’s dreams as the bullets and blades of thugs. Basem was a self-made businessman, and he brought a can-do pragmatism to his newfound career in politics. He had chosen elections as his preferred path to democracy, and he didn’t intend to let anything, even the horrific massacre at Maspero, distract him from the mission.

  One Friday afternoon in September, Basem gathered his family for lunch in their Helwan apartment. They saw him now only in passing, usually on Friday mornings or the rare evening he wasn’t at a demonstration, a meeting, or a party event. “I’m thinking that I will run for parliament,” he said. “What is your opinion?”

  His wife grimaced. “Is it necessary?”

  His son, Mohammed, who was nine, whooped with joy. “I’ll take your posters to school,” he said.

  “Don’t do it,” said Sarah, the twelve-year-old. “I don’t want you to be a public figure. I don’t want to hear all the lies they’ll say about you.” She stormed off to her room.

  “I asked you your opinion,” Basem said, following behind her, “but I insist on reasonable reasons.”

  Ultimately, he did what he wanted, and his firstborn daughter grudgingly forgave him. Basem held his first campaign team meeting just a few days after the Maspero massacre, while most of his fellows from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition were still paralyzed by depression. The Egyptian Social Democratic Party decided to run Basem in the downtown district, where it was confident about winning, although the party would move him elsewhere if it made him more likely to get into parliament. Basem didn’t mind the uncertainty. He was willing to start there and shift his operation wherever he was assigned. “Our office is on Parliament Street, just upstairs from the dead cow,” he told me. Some Social Democratic Party member had donated an office above a butcher’s shop.

  While the revolutionary youth were still trying to figure out the basic anatomy of a campaign, Basem was able to draw on the liberal elite’s reservoir of funds, connections, and white-collar professionals willing to donate their time to electoral politics. Basem’s brother, an engineer, would serve as his chief of staff. A successful marketing executive, Maha Abdel Nasser was already crunching the district’s demographic data on her laptop. Mohamed Khalil, a businessman, was raising money, making a budget, and designing possible advertising strategies. It was almost a shock to walk into such a high-caliber campaign strategy session after all the despair among the other revolutionary youth. Basem and Maha and Mohamed Khalil considered themselves revolutionary youth, but they were twice as old as most activists, far more wealthy, and, for the most part, employed in decently paying jobs. They belonged to an entirely different stratum from Moaz, Sally, and the other leaders of the street demonstrations.

  Maspero had upset them all. “Sunday was the worst day since the revolution,” Basem said as he opened his first staff meeting. “I don’t know what to say. It was so dangerous to ask the Muslims to go to the streets.”

  He wasn’t going to let Maspero derail his campaign, however. “We’re in a crunch time,” he said. “What’s my plan for the next forty-five days?”

  Over the next hour, they mapped it out, to the day: where Basem would pray on Fridays, which heads of families he had to visit, what phone calls needed to be made, which neighborhoods were worth evening door-to-door campaigning. They ate peanuts from paper bags, sipped coffee, and parsed the merits of advertising Basem’s campaign on car air fresheners, napkins, or candy wrappers.

  “If I fail, I’m going to hang you all!” Basem joked.

  The mood was jovial, confident. I felt like I was witnessing a real operation. It was hard to imagine how he could lose. There were enough secular Egyptians in Cairo to guarantee some seats to all the major non-Islamist groupings, and Basem, as one of the only candidates with Tahrir credentials, was likely to win one of them. His campaign was just as much a rehearsal for serving in parliament, which would be an uphill battle to fend off the Brotherhood and the Salafis while trying to force the junta back to its barracks.

  Maha was already worried about the difficulties of getting anything useful done with a seat in parliament. “Basem’s a good politician,” she said. “He’s stable. He’s got charisma. The problem is not the race; the problem is the winning.”

  Basem’s campaign meeting was the most hopeful thing I had seen in months. In a functioning democracy, it might have seemed unremarkable, but this was Egypt in 2011. In this small room in an unfinished concrete building, upstairs from four cow carcasses hanging from hooks over the sidewalk, Basem and these volunteers were flexing the idea that they would share in the power that had forever been reserved for the imperious seigneur but which was rightfully theirs. Their talk and schemes didn’t have the tenor of Moaz’s and Sally’s
morally pure revolution, or the angry second coming so desired by Mina Daniel’s survivors in the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom. They were in control, they were having a bit of fun, and they expected to win more power and responsibility at every stage to come. On this day, it seemed to me, Basem had stepped onto a different track from that of his Tahrir comrades: still stoking the same flame, perhaps, but entirely at ease with the machinery of politics. Unless every single gain of the year were erased, a part of the revolution would find its way to the center of Egypt’s labyrinth of power. No one could say who spoke most truthfully for Tahrir, but Basem’s voice was likely to carry farthest from the square.

  Basem still showed up at Tahrir when the Revolutionary Youth Coalition backed this or that Friday protest, but he preferred to work on his political party’s business, especially the pressing parliamentary campaign. By now, he said, he spent 90 percent of his time on party politics and 10 percent on the Revolutionary Youth Coalition. “The coalition is a brand,” he said matter-of-factly. The casualness of the remark surprised me. He was right, of course; Tahrir was a brand too. Basem wasn’t sentimental. He had his convictions and felt no need to dress them up in mystical mumbo jumbo. Yet it felt almost sacrilegious to use the language of marketing to describe Egypt’s historical pivot.

  As the Islamists were coalescing, the liberals were fracturing into a bickering field of competitors. Even within the Social Democratic Party, disagreements flared over how much selling out was permissible in the pursuit of power. Zyad el-Elaimy sympathized with the moral activists who wanted to boycott the elections or refuse contributions from rich, unsavory donors. But he argued that without tangible power, every single one of the revolution’s ambitions would be stillborn. “It’s all about politics,” he said. “Revolution is politics. It is silly to try to separate them.” Winning elections in Egypt would require enough campaign money for expensive radio and television ads, and that money was to be found in the hands of the old elite. The billionaire Christian mogul Naguib Sawiris had founded his own Free Egyptians Party, which appealed to Christians and to classical liberals: people who supported free markets but weren’t progressive. The party had plenty of felool, corrupt businessmen, and old ruling party members in its ranks. Basem and Zyad pushed for an alliance with Sawiris. They knew he needed the support of revolutionaries so that his party wouldn’t be pigeonholed as reactionary and sectarian; Sawiris knew the revolutionaries needed his cash. Ultimately, Basem and Zyad prevailed in the internal vote, and the Social Democratic Party formed an electoral alliance with the Free Egyptians. Without it, Basem and his fellow socialists wouldn’t have been able to afford any of the expensive radio and television ads considered indispensable for reaching a largely illiterate electorate. Many revolutionaries quit the party in disgust, while others, such as Sally, grudgingly remained but refused to help with the campaign. It was an uncomfortable compromise that created a rift between those who emphasized their liberal identity and those who valued the revolution above all.

  The union, called the Egyptian Bloc, came with lots of funding. Secular liberals had hoped to assemble a grand coalition to challenge the Islamists, but it fell apart over the question of felool. Moaz and the Revolutionary Youth Coalition wanted a total ban that would exclude several million National Democratic Party members from politics. Basem and Zyad were willing to settle for a coalition that excluded only former members of parliament and National Democratic Party members under criminal investigation. Personal vanity and sincere ideological differences between left, center, and right also came into play. Most of the secular or liberal party activists wanted to be king and had no instinct for sharing a podium, much less political power. As a result, most of the liberal parties fell apart, leaving only the Social Democrats and the Free Egyptians. Even they could not agree on a unified slate of candidates, finally deciding to split up the country, with each party running alone in half the districts. By the time they had figured out how to coordinate, the campaign was halfway finished. Basem had to move to a new district, yielding his Parliament Street district to a Sawiris candidate.

  The Egyptian Bloc formally debuted two weeks before voting began in the first round of parliamentary elections, which were to take place in three stages from November to January. Under a bland corporate logo of two hands and a stylized Egyptian flag, the bloc’s motto urged somewhat generically, “Together we will get our rights.”

  Sawiris’s fortune made him the single most important bankroller of secular liberal politics. He made an unfortunate symbol. He was a hard partyer known for boozy nights at Cairo hot spots and lavish cruises around the Mediterranean. He already had enraged Islamists by tweeting a cartoon that mocked the face-covering niqab, or full veil, worn by some Muslim women. Sawiris had alienated revolutionaries with his brazenly plutocratic lifestyle and lack of concern for the poor. He was articulate but off-color and clearly out of step with the pious lifestyles of most Egyptians, Muslim or Christian. He had made his billions during the old regime, which made him suspect even though he hadn’t been a favored Mubarak crony. This was the best hope of the liberals: a partnership between a tone-deaf mogul and a group of earnest, secular, well-to-do socialist professionals. The Free Egyptians traded on fear, recruiting Christians by harping on the threat of Islamist domination. Their money felt dirty and their politics divisive. That could be what it would take to win.

  Sawiris launched the Egyptian Bloc ostentatiously from the Shepheard Hotel’s tenth-floor ballroom overlooking the Nile. Slabs of marble cake towered on crystal platters. A few hundred men and women in formal business attire celebrated on Naguib Sawiris’s dime. Zyad was in full swing, seeking to frighten and then inspire his listeners. “On Kandahar Friday,” he told the fancy crowd in the ballroom, “I went to Tahrir Square because I felt it was our square, and I didn’t want to let them take it over from us. But I felt like I was not in my own country. If we don’t want our country to turn into Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian Bloc is our only choice. We don’t want Kandahar Friday to happen again.” Zyad strode off the stage and headed to a television studio for an interview.

  Basem skipped the big show at the Shepheard Hotel. He didn’t want to waste any energy on activities that didn’t translate directly into votes. Every night in November, Basem dedicated the two hours after sunset to neighborhood stumping. His team picked a street in his new district, the jam-packed and heavily Christian enclave of Shoubra, and Basem shook as many hands as he could. He wanted people in his district to see his face and learn his name. If a voter appeared receptive but ambivalent, he would engage in a five-minute debate. For two-thirds of the seats in their district, voters would select a party from a list of more than a hundred. For the remaining seats, voters would choose individual candidates from an equally long list. The first struggle for any candidate, or party, was simply to get voters to remember his name and the symbol by which he would be identified on the ballot for the illiterate.

  Basem’s opponents, the Muslim Brotherhood, had been campaigning nonstop since Ramadan: four months of constant barnstorming. The Salafis, whose cash-rich clerics preached to ready audiences, were finding remarkable success with their ultraconservative message. They campaigned on a platform of rigid enforcement of sharia. Their female candidates were represented by a sketch of a rose because women ought not to be seen in public. A devout, Koranic Egypt could overcome all its problems, the Salafis said.

  Meanwhile, the secular Egyptian Bloc, the rump end of a fragmentary and elitist liberal coalition, was hitting the streets at the last minute with a vague message. Most of their candidates looked visibly uncomfortable on a sidewalk, and even more so in the company of a shaabi, or lower-class Egyptian. Basem, however, loved it. It brought him back to his days at construction sites. His new district stretched north and east from downtown. He was now operating out of a first-floor apartment at 138 Shoubra Street, across a wide boulevard from the police station. He’d been interviewed by all the major television hosts. On the stree
t, many people recognized him, even if they weren’t always sure why. “We have no idea how well we are doing,” Basem said as he set out for his nightly meet and greet. “We have no money for polls.” Two young boys from the neighborhood fanned out ahead, distributing orange pamphlets with a photo of Basem, the Social Democratic Party platform, and the slogan “Egyptians deserve a real choice. Together we will get our rights.”

  Two of Basem’s brothers, Ahmed and Sameh, walked with him that night. The Kamel family operated as a unit. All four brothers still lived in the same building as their parents, and their sister, Ines, lived nearby. Basem’s kids routinely spent the night with their aunt or uncles. Three of the brothers worked at ABC Architecture and Design, the family business. Basem’s campaign was a family operation as well. The brothers went to the office during the day and helped Basem run for office in the evening. “How to feed the kids?” Basem said. “We don’t have the luxury not to work.”