Once Upon a Revolution (30 page)

“Fuck your mother!” came the reply, chanted in unison from the crowd.

“We love you, youth,” the man said. The Brothers played the national anthem and, as a concession, covered the word “Victory” on the stage banner.

On the anniversary of its best moment, Tahrir had buried its most beguiling promise: the dream of pluralism. In the first days of the revolt, the words “revolution,” “dignity,” and “freedom” had as many meanings as there were mouths brave enough to utter them. Pluralism had been part of the explicit accord of the men and women who had marched a year before. There was to be a multiplicity of voices. No one should have a monopoly on power; no one could have a monopoly on truth. Truth and power were to be contested, negotiated. A year after that dream had burst into the open, a hail of shoes had banished it. Tahrir in its infancy embraced everyone's right to speak, even those who were wrong. Today no one cared what anyone else had to say or whether they were speaking in good faith. The white noise of shouting had drowned all voices.

Another massacre propelled the country into its second revolutionary year. This one had nothing to do with politics, at least not overtly. It happened when the country's powerhouse soccer team Al Ahly traveled from Cairo to play its rival El Masry in Port Said.

Revolution might have motivated a few Egyptians in the past year, but soccer inspired everyone. The games commanded universal attention. Obsessive youthful fan clubs called ultras fueled the rivalries. They fought with abandon after every major match. Mubarak had kept a tight grip on the ultras, instinctively grasping that their hooliganism could drift easily into political rebellion.

On February 1, as Egypt turned away from its observance of January 25, Al Ahly and El Masry clashed on the field alongside the usual scuffles in the stands. The underdog home team, El Masry, won 3–1. Then thugs stormed the Ahly visitors' stands armed with clubs and machetes. While viewers watched on live television, they hunted Ahly fans with the intent to kill. The police knew from long experience how to contain soccer violence, but on this night, inexplicably, they did something they'd never done before: they turned out the lights and locked the gates so that no one could escape. Some lucky Ahly fans took shelter in their team's locker room, but within minutes, seventy-four people had been slaughtered. One died in the star striker's arms. At a minimum, police negligence had turned a riot into a massacre. But because nothing like this had ever happened before between soccer fans, many suspected some sort of police complicity with the armed thugs.

Immediately, all the ultras suspended their feuds in solidarity. The league cancelled the rest of the season. A few angry Ahly partisans focused their ire on the Port Said fans, but a quick consensus formed among the ultras: the state was to blame. Such killing could not have taken place without either an unimaginable level of negligence or government complicity. The SCAF blamed anarchic forces and declared that the country needed tougher law and order.

Revolutionaries were shocked that the state was displaying such callousness toward salt-of-the-earth Egyptians, regular folk who tuned their TVs to the Premier League rather than to Tahrir. They expected violence against political demonstrators, not sports spectators. The SCAF was simply displaying the casual accounting practices of the ruling class. When passenger ferries sank and trains crashed and landslides buried apartments, killing hundreds, government officials would literally shrug. The country was poor and crowded, and the rulers had found they suffered no adverse consequences if a few dozen died here or a few hundred there, even if government neglect or malfeasance was the cause.

The Port Said killings shook Zyad. Over the past year, thirteen of his friends had died, but every single one of them had joined the revolution by choice and knew the risks. The people murdered in Port Said had made no such decision. They were just cheering their soccer team. Zyad believed the state had killed them, or encouraged them to be killed, in order to distract Egyptians from the revolution. He felt partly responsible; he and his friends had pushed this revolution, and now innocents were being punished for it. In parliament, the Muslim Brothers in charge had condemned the deaths but didn't want to anger the military junta by holding anyone important accountable. Zyad's rage grew. For him, the blame rested with the SCAF's leader, Mohammed Hussein Tantawi. The field marshal was the head of state, the supreme commander, the one who gave the orders that filtered down to the rank-and-file cops.

Angry voices around Egypt were calling for a blockade of Port Said to punish all the city's denizens for the deaths in the soccer stadium. But those people were not at fault. In a show of solidarity with them, Zyad organized three buses filled with revolutionaries to travel from Cairo to Port Said. They toured the site of the massacre and held a rally. Thousands
of shell-shocked Port Said residents, grateful for the moral support, cheered the visitors from Cairo.

The soldiers who had beaten Zyad in December had reminded him that being a member of parliament provided him with no special protection. He was as vulnerable as anyone else. But as he addressed the shaken denizens of Port Said, he grew livid. He wanted them, and all the Egyptians watching him on television, to feel as angry as he did and to focus that rage on Tantawi, Egypt's latest dictator.

“Why do we beat the saddle and forget the donkey?” he said, quoting an old proverb. It meant: Don't let the ill-fitting saddle distract us from the real cause of our problems, the uncooperative donkey.

“Who is the donkey?” someone in the audience shouted. Zyad repeated the adage. He was asked again.

The third time, he finally answered with a wry smile: “Field Marshal Tantawi.”

As soon as Zyad descended from the stage, he realized that Tantawi would not allow such an insult to pass. He confided his surging anxiety to a television host who had traveled with the convoy to Port Said. She squeezed Zyad's arm. “The SCAF will ask you to apologize,” she said.

“Only when they apologize for killing people,” Zyad said.

She was right. Within days, Zyad's case was a national priority. The prosecutor charged him with insulting the head of state, a crime that could easily lead to three years in prison. The other parliamentarians could talk of nothing but the effrontery of the young member who had dared compare the field marshal to a donkey. The Muslim Brotherhood lambasted Zyad in public and ordered him in private to seek forgiveness from Tantawi.

“You should not insult an old person,” a senior Muslim Brother told Zyad.

“He killed my friends, and in return I can kill his friends also,” Zyad retorted, citing another time-honored Egyptian tradition. “If he wants to insult me, I will not feel humiliated.”

During the final decade of Mubarak's rule, Zyad had collaborated with Muslim Brotherhood dissidents, defending them when they were persecuted by the state. As soon as they made progress in their pursuit
of power, however, the Muslim Brothers abandoned Zyad in order to curry favor with the military. The speaker of parliament ordered Zyad to apologize, in public.

“The only reason we don't expel you from parliament is because the revolutionary groups might set the building on fire if we do,” the speaker told Zyad privately, after the regular session had concluded.

“That is your problem,” Zyad said, “not mine.”

A year after the revolt that felled Mubarak, it was still more risky in Egypt to call a dictator a donkey than it was to shoot unarmed civilians in the face. Even Zyad's family pushed him to apologize. They were afraid. In late February, one of his uncles met with some generals and brought an offer home to Zyad: if he apologized to Tantawi in person, the charges would be dropped.

“They want to humiliate me,” Zyad told his uncle. “They want to break me, and break the revolution. I won't do it.”

Parliament had quickly devolved into a circus show. Members fell asleep during the proceedings and spoke on their cell phones in the chamber. A Salafi Noor Party member tried to drown out the speaker with the call to prayer. “Do you think you are more Muslim than the rest of us?” asked the speaker, a senior Brotherhood official pious enough to have a
zebibah
, a bump from grinding his forehead into the ground during his five daily prayers. Muslim Brothers ignored major issues, from the continuing state of emergency to the military trials of civilians, pushing only on matters that would increase their share of power, such as election rules. The once-persecuted Islamists now controlled impregnable majorities in the parliament and in the constituent assembly that was to draft the new constitution. It irked them to see young revolutionaries outside parliament protesting the Brotherhood the way they had all once protested Mubarak's National Democratic Party. The Brothers enlisted the army and the police to push critics far away from the assembly hall. The Brothers' original promise to govern by consensus vanished when they realized they could control the government as long as the Salafis were on board. Their authoritarianism quickly killed any revolutionary excitement about the people's assembly.

Fruitlessly, the Social Democrats tried to interest their colleagues in substantial legislation to address the gaping problems in Egypt. Zyad wrote one bill establishing a minimum wage and another abolishing the military code of justice. The Muslim Brotherhood killed both in committee. Basem proposed laws to reduce income inequality and alleviate the housing shortage, which suffered a similar summary death.

Never one to be deterred, Basem convened a forum outside parliament on rent control and the Egyptian housing shortage. Millions of Egyptians lived in substandard housing while hundreds of thousands of apartments sat empty because of mid-century rent control laws that kept rents at five or ten dollars a month. Basem brought together housing advocates, landlords, and economists, convinced that there was a way to free up this decaying housing stock to the benefit of the poor, the middle class, and the wealthier owners. He had a ten-year plan.

This was the kind of wonky social justice issue that really inspired Basem. He didn't want to tell a cop to fuck off. He wanted to midwife an urban planning renaissance that would help the poor and make money for Egypt. Basem wasn't trying to connect to the street, he was trying to invent policy. Eventually, Basem reasoned, the government would need to solve the real problems facing the nation, and then it would turn to anyone who had taken the time to design a workable solution with input from powerful constituencies. From the beginning, Basem mistrusted the parliament, but he thought it would be a useful place for the vulnerable liberals to sharpen their ideas and buttress their organizations. After the swearing in, Basem avoided speaking in the chamber. Instead, whenever it was his turn, he gave his time to Social Democrats from the provinces who felt detached from the party's Cairo power brokers. The move cost him little but earned him enormous trust and loyalty from the rest of his party's caucus.

A sustained bureaucratic assault was called for to preserve the Social Democrats' position in parliament, and Basem was perfect for the task. He took charge of organizing the party's provincial branches. He planned for the next election campaign, which could come at any time on the SCAF's liquid transition calendar. He set up a policy division for the party and a research bureau to serve its members of parliament. When
he wasn't in parliament, Basem was on the road: every evening, every weekend. Few others in the liberal bloc wanted to do this thankless work. Some liked making speeches and appearing on talk shows but dropped key tasks that Basem then picked up. Others were simply discouraged.

It was easy to see why. All sides agreed that the most important task of the transition was the new constitution, and it wasn't being created by the parliament. The Constituent Assembly, a special body controlled by sixty Islamists from the Brotherhood and the Salafi Noor Party, was in charge. There were forty seats on the Constituent Assembly for a pastiche of other groups whom the Islamists clearly disregarded as minority special interest factions: the Coptic Church, establishment Islamic clerics from Al-Azhar University, labor unions, secular liberals, and six women. The Islamists could force through anything they wanted, and it became clear that they would, starting with making Islamic sharia the primary source of law in the land. “It's a farce,” Basem said of the drafting process. Every single suggestion the liberals made was roundly ignored. Eventually they walked out. Soon even the more conservative delegates followed. Egypt had limped along for decades under a halfway decent but heavily abused constitution. Now elected Islamists were in the process of writing a constitution that would uphold the military's existing special privileges while also creating new mechanisms of religious authoritarianism. Egypt was losing its chance to draft a set of rules that would set a revolutionary precedent for the Arab world.