Once Upon a Revolution (19 page)

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 those 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
iftar
s 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
iftar
s 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.

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.