The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (28 page)

Likewise, it is equally important that the regime do nothing to inadvertently motivate or radicalize an otherwise apathetic generation more interested in rubles than revolution. “
If you would directly ask, ‘Do you need human rights in Russia?’ most [young] people would answer no,” says Ivan Ninenko, the deputy director of Transparency International’s Moscow office. “People don’t trust the human rights movement; most of them wouldn’t even understand what you are asking them.” But Ninenko, who is twenty-seven years old and has been active in political protests, believes that it isn’t because young Russians aren’t capable of mobilizing. Rather, he gives the government credit for never pointlessly making enemies with the country’s younger citizens. “If tomorrow the government decides for some stupid reason to forbid free Internet access,” says Ninenko, “you would have lots of young people in the streets, because for them this is a basic value.”

A rare instance when authorities took a misstep that stirred the passions of Russian youth came in September 2008. Early that month, a prosecutor’s office in Moscow filed a complaint against a television station called 2×2. The complaint against the station, which is akin to the Cartoon Network, came under the broad charge of engaging in “extremist activity.” Prosecutors, acting on behalf of a religious group,
had been offended by an episode of
South Park
called “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics.” Besides the usual ensemble of Kenny, Cartman, Kyle, and Stan, this episode featured special appearances from Satan, Adolf Hitler, and Mr. Hankey, a piece of human feces who sings and performs at the children’s Christmas show. The authorities claimed that the episode could inflame “ethnic conflict and inter-religious hatred.” They also cited a number of other cartoons carried by 2×2, including
The Simpsons
and
Family Guy
, for containing material detrimental to children. Duma representatives suggested that 2×2’s broadcast license should be revoked and handed over to a government-run station that would highlight patriotic values.

The authorities had gone too far. Young people in Moscow and St. Petersburg began to stage rallies and protests in defense of 2×2. They held a free rock concert to publicize the issue and started a petition drive to keep the station on the air. “Those young people who never go to demonstrations went to the streets. They were the most creative demonstrations you have ever seen in Moscow,” recalls Ninenko, laughing. “They carried signs like, ‘Putin Kills Kenny.’ They were protecting freedom of speech, but they wouldn’t say it that way. They would say they were protecting Kenny and Cartman. So, on the one hand, they would not stand up for human rights, but on the other hand they are ready to stand up for the right of freedom of speech.”

The government quickly realized its mistake. Within days, the campaign against 2×2 was dropped, and the station’s broadcasting license was renewed. The station did, however, make a concession. It agreed not to re-air “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics.” It was a small price to pay to let Kenny live.

But young people are nothing if not fickle. When tens of thousands of Russians rallied in Moscow in the wake of rigged parliamentary elections in December 2011, Russian youth were among those chanting “Russia without Putin!” They too had been offended by Putin’s brazen methods. Some observers believed the Kremlin would manufacture a new party to attempt to absorb these discontented middle-class youth. Any response from the regime could be backed by Nashi, which might finally be called upon to fulfill its purpose. Either way, going forward the battle for Russia’s young people would be about far more than cartoons.

Mostafa el-Naggar, a thirty-year-old dentist, laughs when he tells me about
his most recent arrest. It had happened two months earlier in January 2010; it was the first time he had ever been detained for being a blogger. Previously, he had only been arrested for his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, which was officially banned. As we sat in a coffee shop off Tahrir Square, he told me he fully expected that he would be arrested again soon. Naggar had even made arrangements with a colleague to take care of his dental practice. Friends had already constructed solidarity banners demanding his release. He didn’t know if it would be because he was volunteering for Mohamed ElBaradei’s campaign, because of his blogging, because of his membership in the Brotherhood, or some combination of all three. But he could tell Mubarak’s regime was nervous. “It’s these street movements that scare them,” he said.

Naggar, a husband and father of two, with a kind face and gentle demeanor, remained lighthearted, even as he talked about terrifying things. He smiled as he discussed being targeted and harassed by the police. He joked when he talked about receiving threatening phone calls from state security. I thought it might come from growing up in a family with a history of activism. Gamal Abdel Nasser imprisoned his grandfather for ten years for being a member of the Brotherhood; his uncle served seven years, also under Nasser, for being a Marxist. I asked him why he was so affable, even in the face of possible jail time, and he told me he had no choice. “I have to be optimistic, there is no alternative. The only alternative is despair,” says Naggar. “We laugh from bitterness.”

But there was also something else. He was convinced that something was about to change. People are in a constant state of crisis, he told me. They are growing tired of their fear. “I have researched all the causes of social movements and revolutions. I have looked at the reasons behind them, and I find them [here]. Check, check, check, check,” says Naggar, raising his hand as if he were marking the ingredients for revolution off a list. “Some people say we are a very patient people. But the new generations don’t have this patience. People are really suffocated. The last five years have been particularly suffocating.
I don’t think Egypt is going to wait much longer. There has to be a change.”

Ten months and ten days after Naggar said these words in a tiny café in Tahrir Square, Egypt’s revolution began, with its youth leading the way. Indeed, after decades of political and economic stasis, much of North Africa and the Middle East erupted in a matter of weeks, led in almost every instance by a young generation that had lost its patience. In retrospect, the region had all the makings of a tinderbox.
Sixty percent of the population was under the age of thirty, the highest percentage in the world. In the past twenty years,
the youth population in the Middle East had boomed, with a 50 percent increase in Tunisia and Libya, a 65 percent increase in Egypt, and a 125 percent increase in Yemen. They were not only young; they were often jobless. Youth unemployment was 23 percent across the region, twice the global average. Ironically, rates of unemployment soared even higher for the millions who had college degrees. The region’s corrupt and stunted economies were better at producing jobs for illiterates than for engineers. In Egypt,
college graduates were ten times more likely to be unemployed than those with only a few years of grade school. As they spent their days looking for jobs that either were not there or paid too little, their anger, humiliation, and resentment burned. Many had put their lives on hold, waiting for a decade or more, to scrounge together enough money to move out of their parents’ home, get an apartment, and start a family. One young man I met in Cairo named Khalid told me he simply couldn’t afford to marry. “
I have fallen in love, but I haven’t asked for her hand in marriage,” he said. “You can’t even save 10,000 pounds.” He, like 60 percent of Egyptians, had lived his entire life under Mubarak. “Everyone you think is apathetic knows more about politics than you or me,” says Khalid. “They have seen the abuses with their own eyes. They walk down the street and don’t feel like a human being. We have reached the edge of what we can accept.”

But someone had to go first.
No one would have predicted that it would be a twenty-six-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor. On December 17, 2010, the humiliation, insults, and desperate daily struggle became too much for Mohamed Bouazizi. On that morning, as he pulled his cart to the market in the town of Sidi Bouzid, a female police officer stopped him. When she began to take baskets of the young man’s
apples for herself—police officers frequently harassed vendors and merchants with impunity—Bouazizi objected. His mother and siblings depended on the money he made selling fruits from his cart. The policewoman struck him with her baton and then slapped him in the face. Two other officers pushed him to the ground and took his scale. Bouazizi was left, a crumpled heap on the ground, pleading with his tormentors. People who were there said that he wept, repeatedly crying out, “Why are you doing this to me?” Later that day, Bouazizi stood in front of city hall. In a final, hopeless act, he doused himself in paint thinner and lit a match. He died in the burn unit eighteen days later. Tunisia’s dictatorship did not last much longer.

Tunisia was supposed to be one of the most stable of dictatorships, a modern authoritarian duchy on the banks of the Mediterranean. President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had kept Tunisian society in a stranglehold for more than two decades. Among Middle Eastern dictatorships, it was one of the most repressive, with tight control of the media, heavy surveillance of human rights defenders, and imprisonment of regime critics. The government had refused to legally recognize any independent human rights organizations for more than a decade. (Egyptian activists often told me how lucky they felt not to live in a country as repressive as Tunisia.) Although thoroughly corrupt, the tiny country of ten million prospered relative to its neighbors. Literacy rates are at nearly 80 percent. It has the highest percentage of Internet users of any Arab country. But when word of Bouazizi’s desperate act began to spread on Facebook, Tunisia’s modernity—in particular, its young, educated, and wired population—accelerated the regime’s demise.

The regime’s effort to quell a rising tide of protests with its own crackdown only fueled public anger, as more of the country’s educated youth took to the streets. Al Jazeera quickly picked up the footage of Tunisian demonstrators and beamed it across the Arab world. Each crackdown led to more first-person accounts and video footage of Tunisian police firing on citizens, alienating the general public from the regime and adding to the protesters’ ranks. Ben Ali’s henchmen were always one step behind, unable to predict where the next protest or riot would take place.

Even as the number of young Tunisians in the streets swelled and
their protests drew closer to the capital, few believed the regime would fall. By the second week of January, a nervous Ben Ali addressed the nation, promising to hand over power at the end of his term. But after twenty-three years of rule, the dictator’s promises no longer had meaning. Sensing that he might become the next Nicolae Ceauşescu—the Romanian tyrant who was summarily executed with the collapse of communism—Ben Ali fled the country with his family. For the first time, a modern Arab dictator had been deposed by his people. Across the region, talk of a “Tunisia scenario” infecting other Middle Eastern autocracies became rampant.

Revolutions are never entirely organic. They require leaders, people at the vanguard to plot, push, and prod others to take risks they had always sought to avoid. Egypt’s revolution had many authors; one is Ahmed Maher. He had been politically active for about five years. His activism actually grew inside him from, of all things, thinking about roads and concrete. “
It started when I was at university as a student of [civil] engineering,” he told me when we met at an outdoor café in Cairo in March 2010. As anyone who has driven through Cairo’s twisted traffic patterns and congested roads can attest, it is hard to imagine that the city ever employed civil engineers. And this was the root of Maher’s epiphany. “There are rules to building roads and building tunnels and building bridges. We studied these rules, but it’s not implemented, and there is chaos. We have studied all this, we understand it, but it is not applied,” he continued. “I realized that the system itself is corrupt. The local council and the municipality and everyone in that chain is corrupt. I found the problem is systemic.”

He quickly got a new education in street protests. After a short stint, he became disenchanted with the internal politics and bureaucracy of Ayman Nour’s El Ghad Party. He left to join the youth wing of Kefaya (Enough), a loose collection of anti-Mubarak political activists. There he organized protests, leaflet drops, and street theater with a decidedly political message. One of the group’s favorite tactics was what it called “sudden demonstrations.” Teams of five or six young people would target a popular neighborhood. A scout would first make sure the area was clear. Then two girls, one on the left and one on the right of the street, would hand out political leaflets. Two boys who trailed behind the girls provided security, and a supervisor who oversaw
the whole operation, in turn, followed them. Each action would be planned to last no more than twenty minutes—the usual amount of time it took state security to react. At the first sign of trouble, the girls would drop the leaflets and run, the boys would make a scene, and the supervisor would distract the security officers by shouting like a normal passerby on the street. “It was an optimistic time, a hopeful time,” says Maher. “There was pressure on Egypt to democratize. That gave us freedom of movement on the street.”

It didn’t last. In late 2005, eighty-eight candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood won seats in the Egyptian Parliament. A little over a month later, Hamas triumphed in Palestinian elections. Maher agrees with the conventional wisdom that the triumph of Islamists at the polls, paired with the United States’ failure to make progress in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, led the Bush administration to tone down its democracy promotion in the Middle East. The Bush administration needed stable allies in the region, even if they were autocrats. Given this latitude, Mubarak’s regime struck back against those who had been pressing for greater political reforms. “They cracked down on a sit-in we had in front of the Judges Club. We were arrested and imprisoned for two months. That was a major crackdown, and a lot of people were afraid to take to the streets again,” recalls Maher. But that didn’t mean a complete end to activism for everyone. “So blogging exploded,” Maher continued. “That was the thing to do. Instead of the streets, we took to the computer screens.”