A Balcony Over Jerusalem

by John Lyons

  But having safely crossed the Sinai, we drove along a stretch of the Suez Canal. For me, this place had an aura about it: the Suez Crisis of 1956, when British Prime Minister Anthony Eden publicly battled Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, has become one of the great landmarks of modern history. Before that the 150-kilometre canal had been a lifeline for the British Empire, carrying Britain’s oil from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. For an area that had played such a role in history, through the window of our bus it looked so bland; Egyptian soldiers stood every few hundred metres along the cement wall, against a backdrop of palm trees and desert.

  After our arrival in Cairo, an old friend, Cheryl Porter, introduced us to Abbas Abbas Mahmoud, a leading Egyptian engineer. He invited us to join him for dinner at Café Riche, a historic establishment just off the famous Tahrir Square, which over the decades had been a meeting point for Egyptian writers, journalists, actors, politicians, spies and activists. Gamal Abdel Nasser would meet there in the early 1950s with his officers as they planned the downfall of King Farouk, which eventually led to Nasser becoming in 1956 Egyptian President.

  During the day, Sylvie would go sightseeing with Jack and I’d break away to do research and meet people, catching up with professors or politicians. In the evenings, I would often sit with the owner of Café Riche, Magdi Abdel-Malak, and talk about Egypt. He offered me useful insights into how the nonreligious sector of Egypt was feeling. He told me Egypt had become much more Islamically observant. ‘Look out there,’ he said, pointing to veiled women walking by. ‘Thirty years ago you’d hardly see any women covered like that. I am losing my country.’

  I saw his hostility when a religious couple – the woman was wearing a hijab – opened the café door. ‘We serve beer here, go away!’ he shouted.

  ‘You were pretty strong with them,’ I said.

  ‘I have to be strong,’ he replied. ‘If the Muslim Brotherhood ever get power they are going to want me to live under sharia law.’

  At the café Sylvie and I also met an investigative journalist who told us about the large number of women who wear the full hijab, not for religious reasons, but to protect their identities while they begged or worked in prostitution as poverty worsened.

  On Fridays, Abdel-Malak hosted a lunch to which Sylvie and I were often invited when we visited Cairo. These events proved to be a boon in terms of contacts: we met Egyptian journalists, writers, diplomats, government officials and lawyers who felt alienated from the Mubarak regime but also wanted to stop the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Their fear of this group would turn out to be amply justified.

  One night, Sylvie, Jack and I were walking near Tahrir Square. It was a typically hot Cairo evening, when families went out into the streets for relief from the heat of their apartments. Down a side street we saw a police vehicle, with about 10 policemen standing around it. This didn’t look like normal crowd control. The police were looking anxiously up at the surrounding buildings. We would see this scene repeated around Cairo.

  Back in Jerusalem, we met with two friends, a UN official and a French official. They began arguing about stability in Egypt. The UN official insisted that everything was fine. The French diplomat disagreed: ‘I think Egypt is going to blow,’ he said.

  Fast-forward eighteen months and the diplomat’s words looked prophetic. Egypt had become the next possible ‘domino’ in the line of governments falling in the Arab Spring. By travelling to Egypt to report on its protests, I would have my own personal encounter with one of the crumbling Arab dictatorships. My horror stretch in Cairo began on 30 January 2011 – less than two weeks before the fall of Mubarak. That night, the streets rang with the most extraordinary sound I’ve ever heard: the roar of anarchy. In the space of 24 hours, one of the world’s great cities had become lawless.

  Gangs roamed the city, looking for places to loot. Each street was only as strong as the force it could muster; neighbourhood groups armed with machetes, baseball bats and guns were hastily formed to keep the thugs away. In a final act of desperation, Mubarak ordered the release of psychiatric prisoners, in the hope that they would cause so much chaos that the iron fist with which he ruled would be appreciated.

  One of the great allies of the United States and Israel was teetering – they had supported Mubarak in the past because he offered stability. He was a pillar of the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel that had ensured the two countries hadn’t fired at each other since 1973. But tonight Cairo was imploding.

  The previous night in Jerusalem, a Friday, I’d heard that Mubarak was in real trouble. Protesters were gathering across Egypt and I decided I should get down there quickly. Sylvie was away at the time and Jack had two friends sleeping over. At midnight I had to drive them back to their homes and find somewhere for Jack to stay.

  Then I drove down to the border. It was a terribly wet night, and at one point, travelling beside the Dead Sea, I skidded across the road and slammed into the barrier at the side. Because it was so late on the evening of Shabbat, luckily there were no other vehicles around. It probably saved me. I’d knocked the headlights out and there was damage to the side of the car, but I could still drive it, so I kept going and then stayed the night with some Israeli friends right on the border.

  The next morning, I caught a taxi van across the Sinai. By mid-afternoon, the road into Cairo was chaotic. The army was starting to panic and had set up roadblocks. I said to the driver, ‘Let’s find a back road into Cairo.’ As a foreign journalist with a foreign passport, if I’d come to a checkpoint in that atmosphere I was likely to be detained and questioned.

  Entering the city, I asked the driver to take me to my regular hotel, the Semiramis, right on Tahrir Square. I knew the hotel staff and there were always journalists staying there.

  The driver said, ‘I can’t get you to the Semiramis. It’s too dangerous.’ There was shooting on the bridges we would normally cross and the crowds were refusing to leave Tahrir Square. The reality of Egyptian politics is that whoever controls Tahrir Square controls the city. It’s a focal point that connects roads in all directions. I could feel my driver was feeling nervous. He said: ‘The best I can do is get us to a small hotel where I know people.’

  Cairo is a city of 21 million people and I didn’t have any idea where we were. Because I’d left Israel in a hurry, I hadn’t had time to get an Egyptian SIM card, and the hotel switchboard wasn’t working. As evening fell, I was completely uncontactable. This was just the beginning of the worst night I’ve ever spent. At about 8pm I went to reception and discovered staff rolling up the carpets, taking the furniture and valuables away and barricading the doors. I asked: ‘What’s happening?’

  They said, ‘We think there could be trouble tonight.’

  By now it was dark and I went up onto the rooftop to get an idea of what was going on. I came across an Egyptian tour guide. We stood looking over Cairo, listening to the shouting, horns honking and occasional gunfire in the distance. That growl of anger and chaos is something I’ll never forget. The guide said he wanted to get his group to the airport; he told me his room number and said if things got ‘really dangerous’ and they evacuated I could join them.

  I went back downstairs and all the staff were arming themselves with baseball bats, machetes and iron rods. Many were carrying knives and metal poles. They told me there were gangs at the end of the street wanting to loot the hotel.

  I started thinking, what do I do if the gangs storm the hotel? I went down the back way through the kitchen. Staff there were brandishing weapons in case someone came in that way. ‘Don’t worry,’ one said. ‘We are here to protect the guests.’

  Most guests were in their rooms, regarded as the safest place. The city’s electricity had crashed and Cairo was in darkness, but I could hear all sorts of noises. I returned to my room on the first floor and from my balcony I could see the red glow of cigarettes. A group of staff from the hotel had taken up positions outside under a tree to try to deter looters. There were pe
ople at both ends of our street, I was told, who were going to try to stop the mobs from coming in. In one way the darkness was good. The gangs couldn’t tell how many people were standing ready to defend our hotel.

  I started to panic, thinking, what is my plan? I’m totally by myself, I have no phone communication.

  Exhausted, I lay on my bed but heard gunshots. My mind began playing tricks on me.

  Around midnight I decided to look for the tour guide. I ran up several flights and knocked on the guide’s door. I shouted his name but there was no answer. I realised he and his group must have left.

  I couldn’t see a single person in the hotel. I become convinced that everyone but me had left. What if the staff had felt they were outnumbered and they, too, had fled?

  I ran back down to my room and closed the door. I felt completely and utterly alone.

  Because I couldn’t contact anyone I had to rely on my wits. I could tell I was in adrenalin mode and somehow I needed to calm down. The only way I could think of to settle myself was to come up with a plan so that I felt at least that I had some control over what was going to happen, so that I didn’t feel completely at the mercy of outside events.

  As I listened to the anger on the streets, I decided my only chance of surviving if a gang entered the hotel was to hide in the room. I needed to make up the room as if no one was staying in it, in the hope that any mob would believe it was empty.

  I put down the toilet seat and placed toilet paper across it – imitating the way many hotels present their bathrooms. I hid my toothbrush. I dried the washbasin. I made the bed as if no one had slept in it. In retrospect it seems like bizarre behaviour, but I was simply following my instincts.

  I hid my bag behind the curtain. If they charged in, I’d hide myself behind the curtain too. I undid the chain across the door. A chain across the door would only confirm that there was someone in the room. Anyway, tonight that chain looked useless against the anger of Cairo.

  With all these measures in place, I lay on the bed, ready to activate my survival plan. The gunfire continued outside. I wouldn’t describe the next few hours as sleep, but I was so tired I dozed enough to forget my situation.

  Dawn finally arrived. I ventured downstairs, to find staff still on alert in front of the hotel. They told me every time a mob had tried to move towards the hotel during the night, they’d fired at them.

  By now I just wanted to get out of there – I knew no one in this neighbourhood. To my relief, I found my driver from the night before. ‘Can you drive me to the Semiramis?’ I asked him.

  It was disconcerting to see the vibrant city I had known in chaos. As we drove across Cairo the streets were full of burning bins. There were army checkpoints everywhere. There had been riots along the bridges over the Nile River. We finally found our way to the Semiramis.

  I caught up with a few of the other foreign correspondents, and heard plenty of reports of journalists and activists being taken away, and someone tortured at the Interior Ministry. Mark Corcoran from the ABC had been punched and kicked by pro-government supporters, and Peter Stefanovic from Channel Nine had been detained.

  Because I was by myself and had no security people, I tended to work with a network of colleagues and friends. I would go with them into Tahrir Square. They had a fixer who was walking around the perimeter, keeping an eye on them and on one occasion when it was getting dangerous he came over to us and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ One American female reporter from CBS was sexually abused in Tahrir Square around this time.

  It had previously been a time of hope and optimism – the first time people felt change was possible. Egyptians who were 40 or 50 had known nothing but dictatorial, authoritarian regimes. This had created a sense of paralysis, a feeling of powerlessness, numbness. But suddenly the youth had a voice, a confidence, dreams and optimism. Even though the Arab Spring had not led to change, this was a movement that would probably percolate underground, almost certainly rising to the surface again in the future. But on this occasion, as quickly as it had appeared, it crashed.

  Earlier in the uprising, the square had been a welcoming place where people would bring their children after work. The anti-Mubarak people at that point tended to be the students and the professionals, and they tended not to be intimidating or violent. But as the days went on it got nastier and nastier, to the point where the media became targets.

  Two or three days after my night at the small hotel, there was a knock on my door at the Semiramis. I opened it to see five or six men in leather jackets. I didn’t want to let them in so I said, ‘Can you wait a moment?’ I needed to think what to do next.

  But they pushed the door in and said, ‘No, now!’ They didn’t identify themselves but they went all over my room and bathroom and out onto the balcony – looking, as I found out later, for cameras and broadcasting equipment, because some media, such as Britain’s Sky News, were broadcasting from the balconies, looking straight down onto Tahrir Square.

  This was the Mubarak security apparatus trying to shut down the media. They had disabled the internet and confiscated a large amount of equipment. In fact, one of the men who came into my room was carrying several cameras he had seized.

  The men left quickly. But because the internet had crashed, the only way I could file stories was by going to friends in the media, particularly Sky News, who had portable BGAN machines that hook up to a satellite; I subsequently got one of these for myself.

  One night soon after, I went out to dinner at another hotel where a lot of the media were staying, with Jason Koutsoukis of Fairfax Media and two German journalists. Like me, Jason was based in Jerusalem and we’d become good friends. The two Germans, a man and a woman, were friends of his.

  Mubarak had established an 8pm curfew when everyone was meant to be off the streets. The high state of tension was evident from the number of tanks and soldiers with machine guns.

  At about 10pm, on our way home, many roads were blocked off, so our taxi driver was taking back roads to get us to our hotel. We came across a roadblock, where four plain-clothes policemen stopped the taxi and asked for our passports, which we handed to them. Sensing we had a problem, I rang Sylvie in Jerusalem and told her that if she didn’t hear from me within an hour to call an official I knew in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, whose number I gave her. She did this and was told by him that there was nothing he could do to help. She then rang Stephanie Schwabsky, the Australian Ambassador to Egypt, who began making efforts to find out what was happening to us. One of the German journalists also telephoned the security officer of the German Embassy in Cairo and told him the situation.

  Meanwhile, we were made to get out of the taxi. While we were waiting, we saw a group of foreigners put in the back of an army vehicle about 100 metres up the street. In this atmosphere, foreigners had become easy targets.

  We were driven to a police station, where an officer told us we would be taken for questioning by State security. He brought out blindfolds and asked another foreigner who had been detained to blindfold us. When it came to my turn, I had a physical reaction to the blindfold. I felt a violent urge to be sick. Until that moment, I’d never appreciated how much we rely on our eyes. They are our early warning system, and I was about to have mine disabled. The police then took thin electrical wire and tied our hands together. Then we were handed over to some soldiers.

  The soldiers walked us out. We were taken into a vehicle; we found out later it was a bus. There were eight of us now: seven foreigners and one Egyptian. There were two Australians – me and Koutsoukis – two Germans, two French and a Belgian. After about 10 minutes, one of the German journalists who was sitting next to me and who knew Cairo well, whispered: ‘It’s good we’re still driving – it means we’re not going to the Interior Ministry.’ The Interior Ministry was the place where many journalists and protesters were being tortured.

  After about half an hour we reached our destination: an army base, I later discovered. Throughout the next tw
o hours of interrogation, the engine of the bus was left running, perhaps to keep up a level of tension. Although we wore blindfolds, lights were shining into the bus. Out the corner of my eye I could see high, wide walls and our captors’ army uniforms. All the bus’s windows seemed to have been smashed. Interrogators walked around it shouting questions at us one by one.

  ‘What are you doing in Cairo?’

  ‘Who do you support in this situation?’

  ‘Do you take photographs?’

  ‘Have you been to demonstrations?’

  It was hard to judge how the others were feeling because we all had to be quiet. But earlier on, when we were being detained, we four journalists had decided to admit to our occupation. We thought that would be much smarter than trying to bluff or lie and then being caught out. The only thing I didn’t mention was that I lived in Israel: despite Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel, it’s not a smart thing to admit to in Egypt at one in the morning while wearing a blindfold and being held by the army.

  I’d written about the brutality of the Mubarak regime, of its poor human rights record, the imprisonment of one editor for questioning Mubarak’s health. I’d written about the men who had come into my hotel room. I’d written about how Mubarak’s son, Gamal, had been given control of much of the tourism industry around the Red Sea. And once you start writing about the families of dictators it becomes a whole different thing.

  My fear was that they would separate us. While we were in a group, I felt some comfort, but if we had been taken off one by one there would be no accountability and it might be the last we were heard of. Until an hour ago, Jason Koutsoukis and I had been competitors, but now we would share whatever fate these soldiers dealt us. This experience would bond us for life.