Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (2 page)

For Musa, as for millions of others from the slums and tenements of Cairo, this has been no ‘social media revolution'. It's been a chaotic, frightening implosion of order. Policing, he says, is lax; security is ‘just decorative':

Economically nothing has changed. We went to Tahrir to make a change, but so far, nothing's improved. What we need is for Egypt to be like America—so that if you have an idea, if you want to start a business, you can do it freely. We need social justice. That was what we chanted for.

To see how far from social justice Mubarak's Egypt was before 25 January 2011, the Moqattam slum is a good place to start. It's crammed into a sloping gully beneath a sandstone cliff. If you stand at the top, near one of the caves they use for churches, you're confronted by a landscape of wooden shacks, twisted metal rods, crumbling concrete and hundreds of rusted satellite dishes. But this is just the unfinished roofscape, the top layer of misery. Plunge down into the alleyways and it becomes dark. The
zabbaleen
build their shanty-dwellings five or six floors high; each new son or marriage adds another layer of brick and concrete to create a warren of urban canyons—like a miniature New York, with donkeys for traffic.

And there is intense noise: machines shredding and crushing plastic; blacksmiths hammering old metal into something new. Coptic ballads of death and resurrection wailing out of tinny radios mingle with the braying of donkeys and goats. When the garbage arrives—in 1970s-model Datsun trucks whose windshields and brakes are long gone—they tip it into the alleyways, right next to where people live. The women come out, accompanied by any children old enough to walk, squat down in the middle of the garbage and start picking through it. They rummage deftly, looking for valuable stuff amid the refuse. The women's hands and faces are grey with grime, but they're swathed in acid-coloured scarves and headbands, while their ears are weighed down with yellow gold.

And then there are the flies. If you painted the Moqattam slum you would have to fill the canvas with small dots of brown light, like
pointillisme
done with flying dirt. But no picture, not even a video, could capture the intensity of the insect life which swarms across your gaze, inhibiting your inward breath.

Like all modern slums, Moqattam is really a giant informal factory: its micro-economy is both essential to global capitalism and in the process of being destroyed by it.

For sixty years, the
zabbaleen
had run Cairo's trash collection system. They picked up the waste door to door, fed their pigs with the rotting organic matter and recycled the rest for cash, trading with a traditional caste of middlemen. But in 2003, as part of a privatization programme overseen by Mubarak's son Gamal, three sanitation companies—two Spanish and one Italian—were brought in to ‘modernize' the city's waste collection.

These outside firms were given cleaning contracts valued at US$50 million a year. Instead of door-to-door collection, they placed big plastic bins on street corners. Instead of recycling 80 per cent of solid waste—as the
zabbaleen
had managed to do—their contracts required that only 20 per cent be recycled, with the rest tipped into landfill. The transformation of Cairo's refuse system was to be crowned by the eviction of the
zabbaleen,
whose slum was adjacent to a new residential property development planned by friends of Gamal Mubarak.

‘The old system worked. The recycling process was one of the most efficient in the world,' says Ezzat Guindi, born and raised in the slum, where he now runs an NGO. ‘And', he goes on, ‘people could live. There was no sub-dollar-a-day poverty among the
zabbaleen
until the multinationals came. Now, about 30 per cent are destitute; and it's those who've been displaced and made redundant by the sanitation companies who are the poorest.'

But the new system wasn't working. Cairo's residents refused to use the bins; in fact, many of the high-grade plastic containers were stolen and, with poetic justice, ended up being shredded and recycled by the
zabbaleen.
People began to dump their rubbish onto the streets or into the disused and abandoned buildings that scar Cairo's streetscape.

So, the new system needed an extra push. When the global swine flu epidemic broke, in 2009, the Mubaraks spotted an opportunity. The Egyptian parliament, circumventing its own health ministry and in defiance of UN advice, ordered all the
zabbaleen
's pigs to be slaughtered. There had been no recorded transmission of swine flu from pigs to humans. No other country in the world had ordered the mass eradication of domestic pigs. But that did not deter Hosni Mubarak.

Across Egypt, an estimated 300,000 swine belonging to
zabbaleen
households were slaughtered; the government paid between $15 and $50 per pig in compensation, compared to the $80 to $300 they'd been selling for on the market. Soon, two things happened. With no pigs to eat the rotting food, the
zabbaleen
stopped collecting it, leaving it to pile up on the streets. Then malnutrition appeared among their children. For, says Guindi, though the multinational companies were getting $10 a tonne for waste, and the middlemen $2 out of that, the
zabbaleen
received nothing from the contract—only what they could make from the sale of recycled waste, and their pigs.

Now something else happened, equally novel: the
zabbaleen
rioted. They hurled rocks, bottles and manure (there was plenty of that to hand) at the pig-slaughtering teams. In response, Mubarak deployed riot squads into the slums—followed, as always, by Central Security and its torturers.

That is how a mixture of repression, greed, corruption and neoliberal economic doctrine managed to turn the
zabbaleen
into latent revolutionaries. All it needed was a spark, and that came on 25 January 2011.

Cairo, 25 January 2011

‘Something's going to happen in Egypt,' Hossam el-Hamalawy had told me when we talked in a Bloomsbury café two years before. ‘Mubarak will try to hand over to his son, Gamal, but Gamal might lose the next election.'

Hamalawy spoke softly. He'd been detained and tortured by Mubarak's secret police for selling socialist literature and was active around the uprising on 6 April 2008 in the Delta city of Mahalla. Then, like a tremor that should have warned of the earthquake to come, a city of 400,000 people rioted for three days in response to the suppression of a textile strike and the rocketing price of food.

It was around the Mahalla strike, too, that the April 6
^th
Youth Movement was formed, by mostly young activists, liaising by Facebook, email and Flickr. They were drawn from Egypt's fragmented opposition: secularist youth from the left, the liberal opposition parties, the human rights community.

When I met Hamalawy in 2009, screwing up Gamal's election campaign was the limit of his ambition. But in January 2011, once the revolution in Tunisia was under way, the horizon for Egypt's opposition groups broadened rapidly. Hamalawy (who tweets as @3arabawy) was among those that initiated the call for a demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square on 25 January, again made through a Facebook page.

Meanwhile, the downtrodden and the desperate had begun to react to Ben Ali's overthrow in more direct ways. On 17 January, three days after the Tunisian president's fall, a fifty-two-year-old lawyer in central Cairo shouted slogans about food price rises, then set himself on fire. A man in Alexandria did the same. A third man—a restaurant owner—immolated himself outside the Egyptian parliament after quarrelling with officials about the cost of bread. The next day, a twenty-five-year-old business graduate named Asmaa Mahfouz (@AsmaaMahfouz) posted a video blog on YouTube. ‘Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire', she announced,

to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and the degradation they've had to live with for thirty years, thinking that we could have a revolution like in Tunisia. Today one of them has died … People, have some shame! I, a girl, posted that I will go down to Tahrir Square, to stand alone, and I'll hold a banner. All that came were three guys. Three guys, three armoured cars of riot police and tens of
baltagiya …
I'm making this video to give you a simple message: we're going to Tahrir on 25 January.
¹

During the following days, activists frantically refreshed the Facebook page advertising the 25 January demo, as news spread it was gaining thousands of followers per second. Many had also joined the ‘We are all Khaled Said' page, dedicated to a youth beaten to death by police in Alexandria for posting evidence of police corruption on YouTube.

The veteran activists knew the stakes. They knew the Central Security would crack down hard on any attempts at demonstration. They had no idea whether the tens of thousands of names on Facebook would translate into anything more than the usual forlorn and harassed protests. That they did was thanks, in the first place, to a new generation of young people—many of whom had previously been active only in student politics, and who simply decided they'd had enough.

Sarah Abdelrahman (@sarrahsworld), a twenty-two-year-old drama student at the American University of Cairo, had never been on a demonstration and had never been politically active beyond the student union. On the 25th itself, knowing that the advertised start-points on Facebook would be mere ‘camouflage' to fool the police, she hooked up with a friend more experienced in political organization and headed for the slum settlement of Naheya, just outside downtown Cairo.

We had to walk in twos at first—this was my first protest and I didn't know why, but they said it's because of the Emergency Law: more than two is illegal. Then someone gave me a paper with lawyers' numbers ‘in case you get detained'—and I am going: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!'

Her eyes whiten as she relives it. She speaks perfect American English, dresses like any student in London or New York, and has that confident tone of voice you hear in the Starbucks of the world:

We were roaming around; people started hiding in alleys, walking in twos and you could look at another two people, the other side of the street and know they don't belong here. And I'm thinking, ‘I know why you are here'—there's a moment of eye contact. Someone started chanting and then all of a sudden people came from the alleys and we were about 200 people, in this tiny street. And people came onto the balconies to see what was happening.

Among the crowd she spotted Abd El Rahman Hennawy (@Hennawy89). The twenty-five-year-old is hard to miss: he sports a large beard, a red Bedouin scarf and a t-shirt bearing the word ‘socialism'. He seemed surprised to see her: ‘Before then, whenever Hennawy called us out to protest, in the university, I'd be like, sorry, man, I can't. He saw me and said, what are you doing here? This is
my
stuff, it's what I do!' Hennawy was part of the core of protesters who knew what was going to happen. On the night before, 24 January, he had attended a packed meeting in a private flat. Then, like all the activists there, he'd organized a cell of six people to sleep on the floor of his own apartment and to wait there for information.

They'd been working like this since Mahalla in 2008: misdirecting the police by planning spoof marches openly on their cellphones and then failing to turn up, or launching flash demos out of the radical coffee shops in the alleyways around Tahrir. Recently they'd switched from demonstrating in the centre to demonstrating in the slums and suburbs. ‘On 25 January,' Hennawy recalls,

we put three things together for the first time: the surprise demonstration, plus going to the slums instead of downtown, plus the chants. We chanted about economics, not politics. If you are shouting ‘Down with Mubarak!' in the slums, nobody cares. They care about food and shelter. So we chanted: ‘How expensive is bread; how expensive is sugar; why do we have to sell our furniture?' And people joined in. We had no idea it was going to be a revolution, though. I thought it would be just a demonstration.

Hennawy estimates that the 200 activists who went to Naheya were able to mobilize up to 20,000 people on the day. The urban poor responded to two issues in particular: police brutality and the price of bread.

As this crowd, and others, marched to Tahrir Square, a pattern developed: they would hit a wall of riot police, and the wall would break. The scenes would be posted on YouTube later, but if you track back through the Twitter feeds of the leading activists (in English, because the world was watching), you can see it happen:

13:21:56: @Sandmonkey: Huge demo going to Tahrir #jan25 shit just got real

13:42:45: @norashalaby: Fuck got kettled almost suffocated till they broke cordon

14:08:55: @Ghonim: Everyone come to Dar El Hekma security police allow people to join us and we are few hundreds
²

When they got to Tahrir, the fighting started. Sarah says: ‘I was getting hit with water cannons, tear gas and bricks, and getting very close to being detained, and that's the moment'—she snaps her fingers—‘when it hit me.'

Someone who knows nothing about history, the opposition, nothing about freedom in Egypt and how it's been suppressed—because I've been so disconnected—you see all these people around you chanting the same thing and it triggers something in your mind … You see people running towards the police, hurling bricks at them—and wow: the normal scenario would be to run away. I went home and I told my mother—I am not myself. I am somebody new that was born today.

The demonstrators took Tahrir Square. They fought the police, held impromptu meetings, gave sound bites to the world's media and, by nightfall, the Egyptian Revolution had begun. Twitter was blocked by the Egyptian government around 5 p.m., but the main activists were back on via a proxy (hidemyass.com) around 9 p.m. It was—as some of the activists proclaimed—a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube. The global news channels, above all Al Jazeera, became a massive amplifier for the amateur reports and videos, spreading the revolution's impact across the world.