"You'll be late for the revolution!"

Writing anthropology of and for the revolution

2012-01-30T21:07:00.006+01:00

Exactly one year after the I began writing this blog, here a more self-reflective essay about my experience of engaged anthropology, written after returning to Berlin and the academic everyday.

(Julia Elyachar and Jessica Winegar kindly motivated me to write it for a thematic section of Cultural Anthropology, where a more polished version can be read: http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/485.)

In the revolutionary year 2011, blogs and other online media have become sites where engaged researchers try to understand events as they evolve; researchers have themselves been engaged supporters of or activists in the uprisings. In my own case, engaged ethnography and analysis of events as they evolve has become a kind of anthropological theory in its own right. Throughout 2011, I have been writing a blog about the Egyptian revolution. Sometime in the spring of 2011, a colleague congratulated me for my blog and said that he was really looking forward to read my research output. I didn’t know how to answer because I then realised that the blog had become the research output. An academic article might never be able to convey what I think the blog did convey.

For me it started on January 28, 2011. On that day, still unaware of the terrible death toll that had resulted from the government’s attempt to violently suppress what probably were and still are the largest protests in the history of Egypt, I decided I had to go there. Having conducted research about the aspirations and frustrations of Egyptians for many years, and hearing friends in Egypt tell me that I really should be there, that “this day would have needed you”, I felt that going to Egypt was a kind of moral obligation. I could not remain a spectator. I was hesitant, however, knowing that the situation was unsafe. My partner Daniela Swarowsky said that if I really wanted to go, I shouldn’t do it just for myself. I should write about it, let the world know what I see. This I did, with the help of Daniela and my colleague Nazan Maksudian who regularly updated the blog during the first days. In the course of three subsequent trips to Egypt (two short ones in the spring, and a long one in the autumn), I have continued updating the blog and, thanks to the efforts of the translator Amr Khairy and the publisher Muhammad Sarhan, the part covering the first two trips was published in Arabic as a book last November (http://elshaab.org/thread.php?ID=9927).

My timing was often bad. On my first trip, I arrived in Egypt just days after 28 January. I left just days before 11 February when Mubarak stepped down. On my second trip, I returned one day before the constitutional referendum of 19 March - doing justice to the title of the blog “You’ll be late for the revolution” (I’m indebted for the phrase to the then five years old son of my friend M. who hosted me in Cairo). But covering dramatic events was never my intention in the first place. Rather, I tried to listen to different voices and look at various events that evolved in the revolutionary square as well as outside it. Most of the time, the blog follows very closely the format of my fieldwork diary, combining observations and discussions of the day with some preliminary analytical considerations. And judging by readers’ comments the blog’s value, if any, lies in this combination of ethnographic attention to detail along with the attempt to theorise events as they unfold.

What kind of theory is it, then? First of all, it is a very unsteady theory, changing from day to day. Times of revolutionary transformation are not good for high theory. In a time when one wakes up in the morning not knowing what the evening will bring, and when every day has a different mood and dynamics, one needs a situated theory that makes sense of the moment without making pretensions of explaining it all. Anything that I and other engaged academics have written during 2011 bears the mark of the historical moment - not just of the year, but of the day, even the hour - and is valuable not in spite of but because of its inherent historicity.

This also means that one shouldn’t be afraid of getting it wrong. I still think that one of the best essays in my blog is that written on 6 February, a very incoherent attempt to think through the accomplishments of the revolution while it was still happening (http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/2011/02/now-its-gonna-be-long-one-some-first.html). In that essay, I quite mistakenly assume that the then vice president Omar Suleyman was consolidating his grip on the country and that the revolutionaries were facing a long struggle. While wrong on a number of key points, that essay also conveys the sensibility of that moment, during two or three calm days in which the sit-in in Tahrir was fairly small and it was very unclear how events would evolve. Those less dramatic days were later overshadowed by the cathartic climax of 11 February, but looking back now, I think they offer more insights about the complexity of what was going on than the celebratory moment of victory. And interestingly, while I was wrong about the firm grip of Omar Suleyman on power, I was right about the long struggle ahead.

Second, it was always clear for me that I was writing not just about the revolution but for the revolution. The same writing was intended both as anthropological analysis as well as revolutionary propaganda (directed mainly at a Western readership oscillating between enthusiasm and scepticism about the events). This is a tricky thing. Scientific research is obliged to an ethos of truth, while revolutionary action requires a tactical relationship with truth. At the same time, I also believe that a revolutionary uprising is one of those situations where one cannot speak truthfully about the events without choosing sides. When people are shot dead, there is no neutral ground for disengaged analysis. My account of the Egyptian revolution is an extremely partisan one, and I would consider it a failure if it were otherwise.

Curiously, however, Egyptian readers of my blog see things differently. Amr Khairy, who translated the blog into Arabic, told me that he found it valuable exactly because of its neutrality and objectivity. I heard the same comment from others who complimented me for drawing a complex and nuanced picture of different voices and stances that they themselves would be neither willing or able to produce in the currently highly polarised political atmosphere. Perhaps this is something that anthropology in particular is good at: taking seriously and doing justice to people with whom one disagrees.

Finally, the concept of revolution itself is an engaged one. From the beginning, sceptical voices have cautioned against revolutionary euphoria, arguing that the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere only counted as such if they are successful in fundamentally changing the system of government and economy against which the uprisings originally were directed. By such measures, the Egyptian uprising hardly qualifies as a revolution so far. But there is another, more experiential and moral aspect to using the concept revolution. My friend M., who works in one of Egypt’s leading independent newspapers, tells that a few days after January 25, an editorial decision was made to use the word “revolution” in the headlines. This was a political decision, a conscious act of propaganda to push forward a sense that what was going on was not just a protest for the sake of reform, but a revolution to overthrow the system. Thus when I write about the Egyptian revolution, it is not only to say there was a revolution, but also that there needs to be one, that the uprising that began on January 25, 2011, must end in victory.

Fantasy, action and the possible in 2011

2011-12-11T23:59:00.000+01:00

This essay is about Lenin, Tahrir, Islamists, poetry, choice and destiny in an attempt to provide some sort of theoretical synthesis of a confusing experience. It is the very slightly modified transcript of a lecture I gave at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte on 6 December 2011.

First of all, thank you very much everybody for coming here. I had no way to expect if I would get an audience of two or twenty, and it turned out to be more than twenty. I’m very happy about that. Thank you very much to Joyce Dalsheim and Gregg Starrett for inviting me here. And thank you to the University of North Carolina, and the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Global, International and Area Studies. This is a wonderful occasion to try to make some general sense of something which is very confusing: anthropological fieldwork in times of political and social transition. I have been writing a blog, and in every blog entry I have been presenting a different theory that has contradicted the previous day. It is very difficult to make any general kind of theory these days, but I’ll try to take the challenge offered to me in the shape of this presentation, and do some of that.

I’ll start with a little jump to history, because I think that the question which I try to tackle, which is that of the possible - the question: What is to be done? What can one do? Can what I do make a difference? Do I have a choice, and what kind of choices do I have? - is a question that was perhaps theoretically developed in relation to the revolutions more than hundred years ago by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the to-be leader of the Russian revolution, who in 1901 wrote his very influential pamphlet What is to be done? It is an interesting book to read for various reasons, and I want to open up with it, because he really poses the revolutionary question about the possible in a sense that deals with the tactics, and the conditions one must be able to create to change the paths of action.

Lenin’s book is basically a critique of the social democratic movement, it’s all about polemics against other socialists, and as such it is not very interesting for readers of our times. But it becomes interesting when he argues why the social democratic movement needs a vanguard of professional revolutionaries - because that is Lenin’s answer to the question about hat is to be done: In order to have socialism one must be able to create a vanguard of professional revolutionaries who are able to spread propaganda to all sorts of classes, and when the breaking point of the system comes, they are there, ready to take over. But Lenin also says is that this is a dream. This is a wildly unrealistic, fantastic kind of expectation: to have an all-Russian socialist newspaper, and a secret party apparatus that is there everywhere. But he says: It is a dream, and a revolutionary movement must be able to dream. If it doesn’t, it will become the victim of its own caution.

Lenin’s pamphlet is worth reading also in 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, for various reasons. One reason is that he was successful. His plan actually worked out. And second, because his success was a terrible one. Lenin offers us a key question: What is to be done? - and a key clue, which is dreaming, fantasy. But he also offers us the historical case of a successful revolution that resulted in a devastating civil war, and, less than twenty years later, in the mass terror by Stalin that killed tens of millions of people. So it is also a very good reminder not to be too romantic about revolutions.

There are moments when revolutions are necessary, and in the Middle East it has come to this point. But even when they are necessary and justified, they are terrible. Things get destroyed, people get killed, and in the end the wrong people seize the power. This has happened in Egypt. The economy is at a standstill. At least a thousand people have been killed. And there seems to be no immediate end to the violence as long as the country is ruled by a military dictatorship that is very brutal in the ways it deals with protests. And it looks like Egypt will be governed for the next couple of years by an uneasy alliance of military rule and Islamist parties. All in all it would look like one should make a sceptical assessment of the current state of the revolution. At the same time, I must add that as a researcher I am a very decided supporter of the Egyptian uprising - so much that in my own work this year it has become very difficult to distinguish between ethnographic analysis and revolutionary propaganda. But I do not support the idea of the Egyptian revolution or the Arab uprisings for their own sake. There is nothing in revolutions that would be valuable for their own sake. They are valuable only insofar they open spaces that didn’t exist before: space to think, to say, to pursue things, to realise things that were inconceivable, or at least unlikely or frustrating just a year ago. And this has definitely changed.

This year in Egypt has been a time of transition when all kinds of people have been struggling with this question, which in Arabic is actually a proverbial question: eh il-‘amal? What is to be done? It is a vast field but I will take us through three concrete case studies which I run through quite hastily: One is revolutionary action; the other one is the dream of the Islamic state; and the third one is literary fantasy. They are all related in quite interesting ways.

Revolutionary action

Revolutionary action is the one which you probably all are better informed about, because it has been very present in the media in the shape of Tahrir Square, in the shape of witty revolutionary activists who speak good English and very capable of conveying their message to the world audience - an important role! It has now become fetishised, it has become copied by various kinds of social protest, it has become a tourist product. The American University in Cairo Press is selling not less than three different glossy coffee table books about the revolution. But it is important to remember that when it originally happened, its power was in its surprising nature. It took everybody by surprise. It took the government by surprise, it took ordinary people by surprise, it took - and this is the most interesting thing - the revolutionaries themselves by surprise.

People went out on the streets not knowing what would happen, not expecting what they could possibly accomplish (inspired and hopeful, however, by the example already set by the Tunisian revolution), but simply angry and frustrated about years and years of social experience that offered them over and over again great expectations of good life and over and over again had disappointed these expectations. People were combining an extreme sense of anger and frustration with a very simple step to occupy the streets that had not been possible in Egypt before. The moment it became possible, the entire picture changed. It required very little in material terms. It required simply the possibility of enough people to occupy streets and to hold out against the police - which had been impossible since 1977, when there was the last uprising in Egypt, which failed. This very moment created a completely new situation, so much that it has become a sort of fantastic, utopian, almost religious moment. Ever since the protesters were able to occupy Tahrir Square in Cairo and other squares across the country, this moment of standing in the square has developed into something that now is an essential part of any idea of changing the country by means of revolution.

When I talk about revolution, I refer specifically to a group of people whom I describe as radical revolutionaries, those people who expect the country to fundamentally change, the people to change, the way the country is governed to change. It is not necessarily related to a political agenda. Most people who feature as radical revolutionaries would in Egyptian terms be liberal or left, but there are also Islamists among them who believe in religious government but don’t believe in the established Islamist parties. This radical revolutionary group, which is a small minority - I think the active core is maybe tens of thousands in a country of 80 million people, and its wider supporters may be about a quarter of the population - has turned this moment of standing in the square into a dynamic continuously surprising momentum that has at the same time amazing powers and deep limits.

Its primary power lies in its spontaneous and surprising nature. We saw this in the 18 days of the revolution in January and February when this ongoing pressure from the street made any attempt to strike a nice neat deal between the government and the opposition impossible, because there was nobody to speak to. There was no revolutionary leadership that could sell the revolution. The movement could not be betrayed by its leaders because it did not have any. This has repeatedly happened, most recently in the events this November, when very brutal violence by the Military Police did not crush the revolutionary movement. Instead of running away and being scared, people flocked into the square. There was again a spontaneous reaction. This has created a form of spontaneous resistance that is able to thwart any attempt of authoritarian restauration, over and again.

However, we should be very careful not to glorify this standing on the square too much. When I speak with people there, there is sometimes this idea that this square is what it’s all about. In order to change the country we need to have revolution, we need to have more revolution. It becomes limiting. When we go back to one year ago, nobody could really even dream of this moment. Now that it has become not only possible but material, it has gained such power over the radical revolutionaries’ imagination, that it has become difficult for them to think of any other way of changing this country.

This has become very evident in the elections where the revolutionary fraction received a fraction of the vote that is actually less than their already small numbers. Most of the revolutionaries failed (or refused) to participate in any kind of election campaigning because they were distrustful of the parties, considering all the parties corrupt and interested in sharing the cake of power and not interested in what the people need - which is all true. If you distrust the Islamist parties in Egypt you should see who is running Egypt’s liberal party: Egypt’s second richest man. There is not much to be expected from that side either. But this distrust also means that there is an incapability of taking to the streets outside the square. It is related to the difficulty of organisation, it is related to lack of funds - for example, certain groups have huge amounts of money. Other groups don’t. When it comes to spreading leaflets, you need to print them and you need to pay money for that. It becomes quite a concrete problem.

Occupying the square is a very ambiguous form of social protest and of changing the country. This was very much seen in the events of the end of November when at first, a new uprising took surprised everybody. Friday 18th of November witnessed big demonstrations which were lead by Islamist parties who were using these demonstrations in order to strike a better power sharing deal with the military, in which they seemed successful. These were cautious demonstrations, and the supporters of the Islamist parties were not making any chants aimed directly against military rule, only against certain ministers. That evening, I was in Alexandria, and some of the young leftists - who had also been in the demonstration but had left it early because they found that the Salafis, the radical Islamists, were dominating it - were very pessimistic. Their sensibility was that the revolution had now really lost. Next day, one hundred and fifty people staged a sit-in in Tahrir Square. The police came to break the sit-in with force, but these one hundred and fifty people were enough to create a momentum where thousands of angry people flocked into Tahrir Square, entered a days-long fight with the police whereby more than forty, possibly one hundred protesters were killed, and forced the Military Council to change the cabinet (even if that of course means nothing). There was a huge breakup of the situation, everybody was shaking - end then the elections came.

This time, the protesters were surprised. They had surprised themselves, surprised the government, surprised the Muslim Brothers who had become very defensive. They had seized the momentum, they had once again half a million people on the square, then came election day. The revolutionaries had thought that the elections will fail, that the Military Council doesn’t want to let them go through anyway, that they will sink in a wave of violence, that the elections are pointless. The elections were successful. There was a 62% voting turnout in the first round, which in Egypt is a historical record - usually the voting turnout been more like 6,2%. It broke the neck of the new uprising because people were suddenly happy. They were happy that they could vote. And in order to have an uprising you need people to be angry.

So again, there was a new surprising moment which showed that the way to the square lacked the capacity, the imagination to go other ways. The revolutionaries standing in the square at that moment actually lacked the fantasy to realise what the elections could possibly mean for Egyptians.

Islamic state

The elections are now bringing a landslide victory of Islamic religious parties. I was just reading the results of the first round - we don’t have the final results because the elections take place in three rounds, different provinces voting at different times (the electoral law requires every polling station to be supervised by a judge and there are not enough judges in the country). One third of Egypt’s provinces have voted now. The results show that about sixty per cent of the vote of the party lists go to two Islamist party alliances, one of them the Muslim Brotherhood who are conservative, and one of them the Salafis who are badass fundamentalists. This has completely surprised some people, but anybody who has actually been following the situation in the streets has not been surprised at all. Actually the Muslim Brotherhood got less votes than one would think. With 36% of the vote, they actually did badly. They should have gotten 50%.

In a country that just had a revolutionary uprising against a corrupt system that was not an uprising in religious terms but one in terms of social justice, or freedom, or human dignity, why did people vote for Islamic parties? One of them, the Muslim Brotherhood, supported the revolution (but sided with the Army very soon afterwards), the other, the Salafis, were actually supporting Mubarak. Why did people vote for them?

The first thing to remember is of course, again, that the revolutionaries are actually a minority in Egypt. The majority of people were never quite that enthusiastic about the revolution. They were enthusiastic once it was successful, but as long as it was still happening they were rather afraid. But there is more to it than that. It is important to realise that this sort of revolutionary enthusiasm and action was not the only thing that has been going on in Egyptian society. Lots of other things have been happening.

One of the things that have been happening for decades is a sense of a moral crisis. Of course, moral crisis is nothing special. People who study morality say that they have never encountered any society that does not have a moral crisis of some sort. Describing things as being in a crisis seems to be essential to moral imagination. But I would say that there has been a serious moral crisis that has to do with the fact that traditional Egyptian conservative, very family-oriented, very much relying on patriarchal alliances, clear hierarchies of age and gender, has become more and more destabilised, first by Arab socialism in the 50's and 60's, and then in a more subtle way by consumer capitalism since the 1970's. It has made people to live more individualised lives, and it has made people’s livelihood in most cases immoral, illegal, and against Islamic principles: stealing, taking bribes, cheating, all kinds of questionable stuff. This is a society where there has emerged an enormous expectation for something that is morally sound. And Islamists can offer that promise. They offer a God-fearing government, a government that is morally sound and does not steal from its citizens.

This is another great dream, one that has not been so much the dream of the people who went out to the streets against Mubarak, but the dream of a much vaster part of the population: Can’t we just have a leadership that is good? Can’t we have a pious, decent person running this country? This is a different kind of dream as compared to the revolutionary dream of transforming the ways in which the country is governed (one focussing on the process and practice of government, the other on the characters of the people in the government), and it leads to different consequences. One of the major consequences is that Egyptians who would not be Islamist radicals in any proper sense, who would think about life in very pragmatic terms, who would be sometimes more conservative and sometimes more liberal, would nevertheless in doubt cast their vote for a religious candidate because they think: We want to give them a try.

The Islamist parties have played their cards very well. The revolutionary fraction, including also breakaway Islamists, has huge problems to compete with these large organisations that have huge amounts of money, that have social welfare projects, and that speak to the people. How do we actually struggle with this? This struggle has so far brought a very important lesson: If you don’t want to just change the government but if you actually want to change the way society works and the way people think about society, if you want to win elections, if you want to have majorities behind you, it is necessary to have something which people cannot disagree about.

This is the power of the Islamist movements in Egypt. Most people think of them as politicians. They don’t actually have full trust in them. As said, their support of an Islamic government is a conditional one. They know that politicians lie. Islamist politicians lie, too. There is no question about that. Many think that they are too extremist, too uptight, but they cannot disagree that these are pious people and that they speak the word of truth. They speak about Islam, and that is true. I don’t like you, but what you say is true. This seems to be crucial when we once again ask Lenin’s famous question: What is to be done? A crucial answers to that question is to be able to develop an ideological standpoint that stands beyond critique in a specific social setting.

The revolutionaries actually have a couple of these. One is the hatred towards all kinds of governmental oppression. This is something on which they rely all the time. One is the promise of dignity and freedom. Right now the Muslim Brotherhood has been able to rally on this promise. It depends on their ability to deliver whether the more radical fraction will be able to reclaim it from them. One in particular has tremendous power: The blood of the martyrs of the revolution is an enormously important asset for the radicals.

We have learned to think of Egypt’s revolution as a peaceful one. It was peaceful because the protesters didn’t carry weapons. But it was not peaceful in the sense that nobody would have gotten killed. A thousand people got killed, and the fact that a thousand people got killed has become the primary power and asset of any radical revolutionary action. Whatever there comes a tactical politician or a Salafi, the radicals can say: Where were you when the martyrs got killed? This is very consciously employed now by the radical fraction which last Friday staged a symbolic funeral for the people who had been killed most recently. And this is once again a reminder not to romanticise revolutions. It is easy to romanticise revolutions, and it is even easier to romanticise peaceful revolutions. But peaceful revolutions, too, need people getting killed.

The question that remains now is: Why could the Islamists in particular seize the day in the elections, and why could the radical revolutionaries not? Why could they, in turn, seize the day and surprise everybody on 20th of November but then lose the momentum? This is a question about what kind of actions are conceivable, and how one can actually change the scope of conceivable actions. What kind of actions have people learned to be good at, and how can people in such transitional state try to learn different kind of actions?

Literary Fantasy

I take quite a detour and turn to literary fantasy. The revolutionary year of 2011 is a year that constantly runs ahead of fantasy. Things happen, and people keep getting surprised, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes it’s a disaster, sometimes it’s fantastic. It is interesting to go after the issue of fantasy itself, because literature has a lot to do with this uprising.

The ground has been prepared, especially for the more educated parts of the population, by a growing wave of socially critical writing. Blogging has been studied most intensively but actually blogs are just one part of a big scene of people exchanging facebook posts, publishing books, reading poetry in cafes. I recently saw some friends of mine sitting in Tahrir square - they were protesters camping there since a week - and reading from a poetry collection by Amal Dunqul who at the moment has become one of Egypt’s most famous poets. He wasn’t quite that famous before last year. Amal Dunqul (1940–1983) was a communist poet who in the 60's and 70's wrote extremely pessimistic and critical poetry. He was against everything. He was against the Camp David Agreements two years before they were signed. He was against any kind of concession to power. He the was the personified refusal. He had one of these famous lines opening one his poems: “Glory to Satan who said no in face of those who said yes.” (Last Words of Spartacus, 1962) In a very religious society like Egypt this is a dramatic way of thinking. Now, people frequently cite this verse.

I had a meeting with a group of teachers in a poor neighbourhood of Alexandria who were writing poetry, and we started talking about this. - This is actually my new fieldwork, which is not about revolution, it’s about writing. I hop I can get rid of this revolution stuff and back to the issue of writing... - We started talking about Amal Dunqul. What did this verse (and others) by Amal Dunqul do, what did it accomplish? There emerged two competing theories. Of course, I lean for the other, but it is important to cite both theories.

One of the two theories was argued for by the poet and teacher Hamdi Musa who said: Literature changes nothing. Look, Hamdi says: Every other cafe in Egypt has Qur’an recitation running on all the time, but the people sitting in the cafe are not getting any more pious from it. If the word of God doesn’t do it, how could my writing change anything? He says that literature is only about immediate personal pleasure. If it is transformative in any way it is transformative to myself. But then others argued: No, that’s not true. Literature changes one’s outlook at the world. It offers something to think about. In the first theory, literature changes nothing, and we are now in Egypt reading Amal Dunqul because something happened and he gives a voice to something that was happening anyway. The other theory says: Because we have been reading Amal Dunqul we think about the world differently, we value protest, which we wouldn’t do if we hadn’t read Amal Dunqul.

My good friend and research assistant Mukhtar Shehata turned the second theory into a dialectical model of fantasy, dreams, and decisions. ( http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=284111558280237) Fantasy, he says, is a space of freedom, completely free from any need to realise it. It depends on what we know and our material conditions; it is not free in the sense we could imagine anything. But it is a space of freedom where we can think up something and we don’t have to worry whether it can happen or not. Fantasy, Mukhtar says, is the ground from which we develop dreams (ahlam in Arabic), in the sense of aspirations. A dream is something that calls to be realised: It is my dream to marry, it is my dream to become a university professor, it is my dream that the world will be a peaceful place - it is all something that calls for realisation. Dreams, then, become something that guide people’s actions. Because they guide people’s actions they make people find themselves in situations where they have to make decisions.

His example is private tutoring. In Egypt, private tutoring is the main income of teachers who are very badly paid. So for everybody who goes to school, the actual studying takes place in the evening in private tutoring, which costs a lot of money. He gave up private tutoring after the revolution. On one occasion, he was speaking with another teacher about it, and his point was that you first have to think, imagine that there could be something else than private tutoring. That is the first step. Second, you have to start to desire it: If only I could live without private tutoring! The third step is that of decisions, of it leading you to moments where you can actually say: No, I’m not going to do it. I do something else. - And this, then, changes the material ground of reality because you make certain choices, and these choices bring you new experiences, and these new experiences create new grounds of fantasy, and the circle goes on.

This could, of course, be easily put into the shape of a liberal or neoliberal idea where everything is about choices, decisions, character, building my capacities, etc.
This calls for caution. When we talk about decisions and choices, we also have to talk about the inevitable. You cannot study the possible without thinking about the inevitable. In Egypt, when you talk about choice, people start talking about destiny (nasib). It’s not in my hand, it’s in God’s hand: I want to marry this girl but in the end I marry somebody else and I accept it. In Egypt, the inevitable usually takes religious shape as the will of God. But no matter what theoretical shape we give to the inevitable, be it the will of God or if it is the material conditions of production in a Marxist theory, the fact is that any sort of choices and decisions have to reckon with the inevitable. We live in a world where our character is cultivated and our choices made under specific conditions that direct and encourage what we can do. But the trick is that our own fantasy is one of these material conditions. Fantasy is not something that is fundamentally different from the ground I am standing on. It is part of these conditions that direct what I can do.

This leads us back to the question about why some people could seize the day in certain moments, and not in other moments.

We are talking here about choice and freedom as limited freedom. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist philosopher argued in the 1940's that Human freedom exists only within limitations. Limits are not against freedom. Freedom is only there because there are limits against which we experience our freedom. In Egyptian Arabic this is described with the verb yitsarraf, which means to manage in circumstances that are not of your own making. This is the condition of any answer we give to the question of what is to be done.

Any specific answer, any specific trajectory relies on its own material means and possibilities - the Islamists having vastly more money, for example, and the radical revolutionaries being very well connected to the international media. You have different material advantages that make it possible to do something. But it is also fundamentally related to having learned to anticipate certain kind of situations and to master them well. In a very short time the radical revolutionaries have learned to occupy Tahrir. They have learned to do it so well that in this November they just mastered it. It is a most amazing example of self-organisation. Without any leadership, actually even prohibiting parties and speakers’ stages, they managed to make a much better organised uprising than they did in January. But at the same time, it means that they are really bad at anything else. If you look at the Muslim Brotherhood, they have for decades mastered tactical manoeuvring between an authoritarian government and citizens who want to have a good religious government and society. They have been so good at this manoeuvring that when these elections came and they seemed to win with 36% of the vote but actually lost because they should have gotten 50%, this was because of their mastery of tactical manoeuvring. For the radical revolutionaries, even of Islamist leanings, they became unelectable because they showed absolutely no backbone. A big part of people with Islamist leanings in Egypt who really wanted to have a religious government didn’t vote for the Brotherhood because they thought: We really don’t know what these guys are going to do. (This was a reason for many to vote for the more radical Salafis instead, whose stance and programme are quite clear) Their particular knowledge and imagination of what could be done got them a very strong popular support but also brought specific limitations.

The really interesting question, then, is: How and when can people adapt their knowledge and imagination? My conclusion, a very short one, is that the really revolutionary task is to accomplish a shift in the way people look at the world and understand the scope of what they can do, which leads them to act in a different way. This shift requires fantasy. It requires a kind of active fantasy: not just the kind of passive fantasy of imagining whatever one already was used to, but rather a continuous engagement of going beyond the limits. This is why the Egyptian revolution was possible in the first place: because this shift happened. But its future will very much depend on how different actors in the scene will come to develop their expectations of what is possible (and what inevitable), that is, come up with new answers to Lenin’s question about what is to be done.

Thank you.

Jakob Lindfors writing: Continuous Elections – Until Victory!

2011-11-29T18:39:00.003+01:00

The following note about the first day of parliamentary elections in Egypt was written by Jakob Lindfors who was friendly enough to allow me to publish it on this blog. This is the link to the original:

http://www.facebook.com/notes/jakob-lindfors/29-nov-am-continuous-elections-until-victory/10150425195439228

The first day of the loooong Egyptian Parliamentary vote has ended. And this long vote is only the beginning of an even longer Continuous Election season that would, according to the plan laid down by the (Transitional?) Military Council, take us through, after the Parliamentary vote (over 1 month), elections for the Shoura Council (another month), then Constitutional Referendum (again!), and eventually Presidential Elections (promised by the Militaries to be finished by those magic six months (again!) from now…

My conclusion of this first day of Election season brings some bad news. But also much good news. In fact, at the end of the day, Good seems be taking a democratic lead.

Let’s start with a piece of good:

The general voting atmosphere is positive. In the first elections after the January 28th revolutionary burning of the headquarters of Hosny Mubarak’s civil organisation – The National Democratic Party, counterpart in supporting his version of Military rule– the behaviour of the different campaigning entities, parties and individuals, has been close to exemplary!!

Yes, there are reports on infringements on behalf of several campaigners. Unlawful campaigning tactics outside and inside polling stations, providing transport for people to the places as long as they vote “right”, buying votes, and fighting in some places with white weapons and cut bottles, etc. But this is nothing!

The general voting conditions are much improved in comparison to Mubarak days: now when the campaigning entities have entered a healthier field of true and relatively transparent competition, they have proved to be pretty well behaved.

This is a victory of the Revolutionary movement. Before, when there was no real competition, the level of violence in elections was horrendous. On the one hand against opposition, they were simply not accepted. But also between the corrupt criminal elements of the System itself: “maslaha” (partisan interest) vying for a piece of the cleptocracy cake.

(Of course, the above judgement decent behaviour might be premature, and I could be proven to be terribly wrong at any time! There is still more than a month to go, and many things can either go wrong by situation. Or go wrong by intentional sabotage…Ma3 3aleina)

Actually, something I take as good news too: it seems that in the present more democratic set-up, the elements that are most guilty of infringements of regulations are the parties that have most appetite to now cut new pieces of advantages in the New Parliamentary power play. And such partisan interests behaviour will be taken a lot less lightly by big numbers of voters who feel empowered to have the right of institutional, law-based, government.

Yes. To be governed by law and by credible and efficient institutions, this IS really an issue at this point. The story that started today is the beginning of a long election season. Sure. And the week that passed before it was a very long week. As it happened, still early in it and it feels like ages ago, (on Sunday as it was, less than 24 hours into the bloody battle against the Ministry of Interior, just hours before the ferocious combined Interior Ministry forces and the Military attack on Tahrir happened, which ended in big numbers of people getting killed, injured and other arrested and subsequently abused) I had to make a trip to the deeper neighbourhoods of the Pyramids area, al-Talbiya district. I went with companion Shaker to check up on some places we had previously contacted to set up the Community Theatre Play called “Going to the Neighbours House”, which talks about the situation of Refugees from several African countries and from Iraq who live in Cairo.

During our trip in the neighbourhood of al-Talbiya – an extremely dense informal area of unpaved streets, high-rise housing built breaking all terms of urban regulations, and extreme high-piched everyday human interactions – at one point we took a run-down microbus to get out to Pyramids street (asphalted of course: after all it carries international tourists towards the Heritage site of the famous Giza Pyramids). We jumped into the microbus and found three other persons sitting in the front coach. They were all men, looking around 40 or 50 years old, but they might as likely have been just around 30. As it turned out, these men belonged to the society of the extreme poor in Egypt. They were recent immigrants from the Upper Egyptian town of al-Minya. Day-workers, which means people who sit out in the street each morning, waiting for any “patron” to come and pick them up to do a day of labour (most commonly in construction). And concerning the age that appeared reasonable from looking at their faces, I have since long given up trying make a clear guess: 45 or 30 … Real poverty carves life experience into the faces of who carries it far too quickly.

In the bus, Shaker asks me what is going on Down Town (we had coincidentally been together with other companions of that same Refugee play at the by-now-famous-Mohammed Mahmoud-street the afternoon before, Saturday 19th, as we were supposed to have a rehearsal for it in the American University campus, at the very moment (early afternoon) when all hell broke loose there, and we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in the area doing anything else but constructive theatre work). I answered that the “all hell” continued. At this point, one of the day-worker passengers turned and looked at us. “Really” he says “the fighting goes on?” I answered positively to the question, but tried to do it in a diplomatic way, not showing any particular attachment to the event in one way or the other, being conscious of the possibly “foreign” looking aspect of my face and dialect, and more conscious even, of being close to “camel” neighbourhood (yeah – this was my prejudice!)

The man turned back to his friends, and was silent for a while. Then he turned back to me and he said: “Well, but don’t you think it is our right to fight them?” Again I was non-committal in my answer. But the man was fully committed in his solidarity with the boys fighting the Police. Then my companion Shaker asked “But then why are you not there fighting with them?” They answered they would have liked to, but how, since they spend some 14 hours out working each day just looking to take care of their families.

Shaker then asks about the elections, will they go back to al-Minya to vote? The same man answers “No. Why would I go to vote? The people who present themselves to elections only do it to advance their own interests (maslaha) – I vote for this guy, and all he’ll do when he wins is to put the son of his cousin in this position, and some uncle in another… No, I don’t care for that. What I want is a government that rules by law and gives to each citizen his rights. When I feel this is what I vote for, I will vote”.

And between himself and his friends, and us, we broke into a conversation about social justice, workers rights, a social insurance system that protects families from individual accidents of providers, etc… Until we reached the paved Pyramid Street and all of us went different directions.

And this type of consciousness of what the issues are really about will not only be found among these three men in the Talbiya microbus. It is a lot more widespread than that.

Then, what is Bad News?

Well, the whole day has been bad news somehow. The absurd theatre play of the Institutions of “Security” – the Military and the Police of the Ministry of Interior – guaranteeing peaceful and orderly elections, only days after the same two institutions were responsible for the murder of over 40 young men, most under 20 years of age. It is totally absurd! It is over 40 people! It must be an issue. And the deepest absurdity and the deepest feeling of sadness arise when the whole country somehow accepts to play in this charade. What more striking image of total corruption? Not only institutional corruption, we know that one, and expect it. But the corruption of society itself…

This was a sad feeling today.

But then again, I really doubt that this “social” corruption IS that deep any more. I have felt in so many encounters lately that the past ten months of upheaval is really challenging people to question the past political experience. If people in February were only talking about 30 years of injustice, and people who tried to give another discourse were silenced, now it is a wholly new field. After a period when people were very tired of the “instability of revolution”, they are now also realising that it is a question of being ruled by an entity that does not have nor the qualification nor the legitimacy of ruling a nation. Someone – not at all a Tahrir revolutionary, but a common 14 hour/day working family father – explained to me recently, actually as recent as during the last days of intense fire in front of the Ministry of Interior: “I want the military. Sure, I want them: on our borders. I am happy if they protect us there. But if some of them are going to come also to the capital and tell us how we are going to run the country, well, then let them leave their uniforms and weapons there on the border. And they come and discuss with us here in the city, them like us, no difference. It’s been 60 years now. Naser, then Sadat, and Mubarak. Does this al-Mushir (Field Marshal (Tantawi)) want to try it too? No way.”

A companion of mine, Diana, who teaches at the University of Minya – as she frames it, after all a second rate public university combining youth from all Egypt, from Alexandria to Aswan, all from middle class or lower class backgrounds and representative of a “silent majority” – feels very clearly how the consciousness among students has changed from November a year ago until today.

And finally, in Port Saiid last night, on the eve of elections, friends I have, all over 60 years old and common people, workers in the declining harbour business of the city, were spreading the word of a “blank vote” alternative, wanting to dis-own all participating political forces, Islamic, Old-guard, or “Liberal”… Their intention to just give a revolutionary statement that nothing of what is presented in the political theatre at this point responds to their true aspirations and intentions.

People today however went to vote. And in the greater picture I think they had good reasons to. First of all, many were hoping to bring peace to the country, feeling understandably tired and fed up with the deaths of young people. Many hoped to participate for the first time, in any election at all (people in Egypt did simply NOT vote before). And many were hoping to give a vote that would count in an empowering way. Many were totally lost anyways, not having clear alternatives (here is also a failure of “new” political forces). Many have stated that they would give their votes to the Muslim Brotherhood, just because they seemed to be the only force they could recognize, more so than necessarily for a true ideological commitment to the group. And the Muslim Brotherhood – partisan interest (maslaha) apart – have to be given a big credit for the basic organisational and mobilising work they actually manage: it is a path for any serious political movement to follow (in the essential sense, discarding only the old-style election dodging ways of old-System players that they are also guilty of…) Many voters were even that lost that they were on the streets looking for their balloting place just out of worry about the 500 LE fine the Military Government has threatened to impose on anyone who does not vote (great Stalinist democratic election standards).

But now, let’s get back to some really good news again. The real “infringements” on elections. It seems these were caused by pure incompetence of the present authorities. The elections, Field Marshal Tantawi had promised, would be ensured by SCAF and the Ministry of Interior. Good. Through the day no major eruption of violence happened. But as I claim above, it is not really due to the institutional backup of military and police, but to the contrary: that the competition is done between more independent, more accountable and therefore more responsible political forces now.

The only really serious election problems today have been caused by purely institutional failure. The incompetence of these mentioned institutions to guarantee the very infrastructure of the vote is what has produced all major instances of disturbances. Some polling stations did not open in 7 hours because of one or another missing ingredient (no boxes; boxes without a lock on it; not enough ballots; unstamped ballots; no ink that voters should dip their fingers in; no presence or late arrival of supervising judges, etc.) This type of failures has led to real public order problems: angry voters invading polling stations, some cases of supervising judges being kidnapped (!).

This chaos is likely to continue. This will be contrary to the hoped for gaining of good-will of the military government. Framed in a PR stunt as the elections for “Revolution Parliament” and being elections people really had hopes in, actually it might very well happen that they contribute to an even deeper popular resentment of the situation, when people experience the continued institutional management failure of the SCAF government. This would further undermine the crumbling popular and always officially manipulated idea that “the Military is the only capable institution of the country”.

It can backfire in a situation where more and more people are realising that military training might not be the best qualification to sound state management skills.

And then, the results… Well, the Muslim Brotherhood will without doubt be the greater beneficiary of the parliamentary game. And for sure, there is no doubt that their capacity for institutional management is highly superior to the past and present military governed system. However, the only thing we can actually be sure of is that these elections will create yet another political force that has a say and a stake in the turmoil. But nothing more than that. The Brotherhood might, ideally, have capacity to really improve everyday life conditions of many citizens. But then, what practical capacity will they have when the actually ruling institution might not be supportive of such positive change, but could instead be countering it?

The struggle is unpredictable, and prone to constant change. The Revolutionaries do not change much. Nor the military. But the other forces will be swinging in and out of “Tahrir”. Depending on how well they present their cases, they will or will not be welcome to pass the checkpoints of the Square.

There will still be many developments to the ongoing Continuous Revolution – Until Victory.

Longing for the smell of teargas

2011-11-25T23:59:00.000+01:00

Today was a new day of mass protests against military rule in Egypt. While the attention of the media has focused on Tahrir Square, large protests have taken place in several cities around the country. Daniela and I travelled to Alexandria where protests have been going on in front of the regional military headquarters and the security directorate since Sunday. We arrived in the early afternoon to join the march that, as customary, was heading from al-Qa’id Ibrahim mosque to the Northern Regional Military Headquarters. The march was very large, and very different from the one dominated by Islamists one week earlier. It gathered a large following, somewhat more than last week’s march, and this time there were many more women among the protesters, and only few men sporting Salafi style beards. Also Alexandria has witnessed ongoing violence by the police force as well as civilian thugs against the protesters, mainly at the Security Directorate in Sumuha, and this violence has also contributed to discrediting the protests among a big part of the inhabitants of the city who are concerned about the destruction of property and fear chaos. It was therefore very important for the protesters to stage a large and peaceful march, and in this they were very successful. The protesters filled the streets in excellent mood, chanting against military rule, and the people we met were all happy about the large numbers and determined to continue the struggle, knowing that the Military Council is not giving in to the pressure easily (In fact, the instatement of Kamal al-Ganzouri, a veteran politician of the old system who already served as prime minister under Mubarak, is the opposite of any kind of concession towards the protests).

They have revived the spirit of action and optimism among many of those who had become increasingly frustrated, and thus passivised, in the past months. While the protests are not carried by the majority of Egyptians, their power and persistence is also a sign of a growing wider discontent with the military rule. Also those who are skeptical about the protests, are often equally skeptical about the military. As one friend put it, there is a growing consciousness that there is more that matters than the proverbial “wheel of production” that “must turn again” which opponents of protests often cite: “The people have learned not to take shit anymore.” The new uprising is also telling of a growing competence of people in organising spontaneous resistance. The field hospitals in Tahrir Square has offered probably some of the best free health care in the country for the last days, and The Military government is now acting under heavy pressure, and unlike the cabinet of Essam Sharaf which was hailed as a revolutionary cabinet when it was instated on March 8, the new cabinet of al-Ganzouri is facing wide-spread refusal from its first day. The protesters have grown extremely critical at attempts to coopt their movement (which is why party leaders are not permitted to give speeches). Most importantly perhaps, I often encounter a realistic assessment of the difficulty of the task that the protesters have taken, combined with a strong optimism born from out of the spontaneous power of the new protesters. These protests, many have told me, are only the general probe for the next uprising to come. Those involved in the revolution in the spring and this new wave of protests are learning political action by doing, and they are developing a greater degree of persistence. But while the supporters of ongoing revolution have become very good at occupying the squares and enforcing public attention, they still have to face the bigger task of turning this momentum into more permanent forms of social and political organisation.

The problem of social organization and outreach remains unsolved, but what is emerging are shapes of a formative generational experience among young participants in the protests. Also among those who have never participated in the protests, the revolution year has come up with a different experience and outlook of life, with people extremely politicized, not only speaking about freedom but also acting it out. It has also affected older people, and I have heard from some people that their parents’ way of relating to their children’s expectations of life has also changed. The experience has been especially dramatic for those have actively taken part in the protests in the last days that have been marked by a continuing violence that is comparable only to the days from 25 to 28 January.

Many of my friends in Alexandria have been participating in the protests at the Security Directorate in Sumuha where they have been teargassed, shot at with rubber bullets, and attacked by thugs in civilian clothes. Two people have died during the protests there. On Wednesday night, they were attacked with a very aggressive gas that had much more severe effects than ordinary teargas. This experience has created an enormous sense of determination among them, and they speak in very different tones than they would just a week earlier. “You don’t think about yourself and the danger in that moment,” one friend tells. In unison people say that after so many people have died across the country, they feel obliged to continue their struggle. And they enjoy it. They have grown fond of tear gas. R., a woman in her twenties, has been out in the street in Sumuha every night since Sunday and was injured by a rubber bullet. She says that when she returned home and her mother washed her clothes, she realized that she was missing the smell of the gas on her clothes. Tear gas is an extremely ineffective means to break up demonstrations. It makes people run away and immobilises them for a short moment, but it also makes them very angry, and in fact the continuing teargassing the protesters in the past days has given them a much greater degree of determination than they might have otherwise had.

Longing for the smell of tear gas is the olfactory embodiment of radical action and determination. It is an experience that may not influence the immediate course of Egypt’s politics because most of the people who share in it are young and still in the beginning of their personal, professional and political trajectories. But for better or worse, it is creating a class of people with a history of activism, many of them with high education and active cultural trajectories, who are rather different in their way of thinking about their role in the world from the apolitical generations that were socialized between 1980 and 1990. They are few but in their future careers they will be culturally and perhaps also politically influential. As such, they may well be compared with the 1968 generation in Europe and Northern America – also there a minority involved in radical political action and cultural critique gave their stamp to an entire generation. I say for better or worse, because while most among them while most will choose for constructive, peaceful, and effective paths, some may go for more destructive paths. There is a dangerous beauty and intensity to struggle.

The dangerous side of the struggle with the police in Sumuha is recognised by many protesters, and at the demonstration in front of the Northern Regional Headquarters, many were arguing that the protesters should withdraw from the Security directorate and focus on the Headquarters. They said that the ongoing confrontation was doing more damage than good, offering the government a handy pretext to accuse the protesters of being thugs and wreckers. But there were some who insisted that the confrontation must continue with the aim of occupying the Security Directorate, and after the demonstration at the Headquarters many protesters headed for Sumuha to join the sit-in there. We did not follow them, because the presence of foreigners might have been misused to further discredit the protesters. But I have been in contact with them on the phone, and new clashes have evolved, teargas has been shot at the protesters again, and thugs in civilian clothes have been attacking the protesters and destroying property. My sympathies are strongly with the protesters who are holding out in Sumuha tonight against the police and the thugs, but it is an ambiguous struggle.

This youtube video shows the protesters gathered in front of the Northern Regional Headquarters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X02-nEJRAYU

P.S.: I developed many of the thoughts in this and previous notes in conversation with Daniela Swarowsky, to whom special credit is due.

Revolution as a way of life

2011-11-24T23:57:00.002+01:00

Today afternoon, Daniela and I decided to enjoy some normality. There is plenty of it, life going on as normal in the rest of Cairo while protests continue in Tahrir Square. We walked through the districts of Sayyida Zaynab and Abdin, met on the way Sheikh N. who was recovering from a serious dose of tear gas in the middle of Tahrir when it was covered in teargas on Tuesday, which hospitalised him for two days. He is full of optimism about a new civilian government of national salvation that will take over from the military, and does not expect the elections to go through. But walking from Sayyida over Abdin to Bab al-Louq, not only did we find life entirely normal, but also the Muslim Brotherhood doing very active election campaigning. It looks like they are going to win this one. The ongoing protests add a complex layer to the events but are unlikely to change the likely election victory of the Brotherhood.

We walked down Tahrir street through the area that until yesterday was right behind the frontline of the protesters, but now calm ever since a successful truce was negotiated and enforced. Now the army stands in Muhammad Mahmoud Street, trying to enforce an impression of the army protecting the citizens and directing the blame to the police and the Ministry of Interior (which, of course, is acting under orders from the Military Council, but right now the military is busy trying to appear as a constructive and protective power). On Falaki Street that had been straight behind the lines of the protesters for several days, some shops were open again, and at a coffee roastery where we got a pack of fresh coffee, the people told that this was the first day when they were open in the evening, and that during the clashes with the police they had been open but had to close around 2 p.m. because of teargas. At the entrance of Falaki Street at Falaki Square, a committee of local residents were blocking the street and politely asking people to continue to the square but not to enter their street.

At Tahrir Square, the atmosphere has changed a lot since Monday when the mood was more one of anger and resistance, with chants against the military to be heard all over the place. Now it was more of a mixture of a youthful celebration with firecrackers on the side streets, and of countless political discussions about the elections and the shape of a civilian government with full powers that the protesters are demanding to replace the Military Council. There were also many discussions about who was to blame for the violence against the protesters. Those who had lived through it were arguing to new-comers that even if it was the police firing at the protesters, it was the Military Council that was to be held responsible.

The Military Council, after failing to suppress the protests with force, has resorted to a tactics of appeasing the protests, trying to show itself again as the protector of the people (it is amazing how many people still are willing to buy this story after all that has happened) and putting the blame on the police and the Ministry of Interior. It is likely that the Kamal al-Ganzuri who served as prime Minister under Mubarak but had to leave office become he was becoming too popular was will be named the new prime minister, and all in all the army is clearly intent at appeasing the protests without making any serious concessions. The numbers of protesters tomorrow, and the degree to which the protesters will be united or disunited about their opposition to the Military Council, may be decisive about whether the Military Council can go ahead as they are trying to or whether they will be compelled to further concessions. In any case, they seem absolutely determined to go ahead with the elections as planned, and they have the determined support of the Muslim Brotherhood which has every reason to expect an election victory. Almost all other political groups have turned to support the protests, most lately Egypt’s third most important Islamist group al-Gama‘a al-Islamiya. Tomorrow, there will be big protests, but the tactics of appeasement by the Military Council will have make them less sharp in anger, determination and unity than the demonstrations on Tuesday were.

My guess is that these protests will not change the course of the elections, nor will they have a major effect on their outcome. On the short term, they will force the Military Council to some concessions, but in all likelihood the elections will go through, an uneasy alliance of the Muslim Brothers and the army will be ruling the country. But on the longer term, these protests show that they are going to face ongoing and wide-scale resistance. A big part of Egyptians have grown used to a state of revolution, so much that after less than a year after 25 January it is hard to imagine Egypt without the condition of uproar and uprising. There are many who complain about chaos, but also many who rather enjoy the state of uprising; on the one hand they are angry and determined enough to risk their lives, on the other hand they have arranged themselves well enough with the state of uncertainty and uproar to give any future government of Egypt serious trouble. During the latest protests, popular districts have sent groups of youths to the square as a kind of competition in who are the bravest, a flourishing trade in snacks, food, cigarettes, and protective gear has developed around Tahrir Square, there is a makeshift bus station serving the protesters at the Egyptian Museum, and unlikely in January and February, the protests now rather neatly fit to the ongoing flow of life in the city. Revolution has become part of the way of life in this country. Egypt may not be on as smooth a path to democracy as Tunisia is, but it will also be rather resistant to any attempt to get things under control. It’s going to be a long one.

Greetings from Egypt in revolt!

Subverting the Uprising

2011-11-23T23:59:00.002+01:00

I'm just returning from Tahrir, where there were lots of people, but of course not as many as the last night (Tuesday was a major demonstration, while today was the continuation of the sit-in in expectation of a next big demonstration on Friday). We got a good dose of tear gas at the corner of Tahrir Street, two or three blocks away from the area where the fighting takes place. The police fired tear gas to the street, people were running away from it, and the first help station was rapidly filled by people unable to breath due to the effects of the gas. Otherwise, we spent a calm evening, meeting some friends, including a group of writer friends from Alexandria and Cairo who are camping in Tahrir ever since Saturday. The medical services are getting better organised. The entire event is better and better organised, including the medical services, food, blankets, and unlike in the past, speakers’ stages and party presences are strictly prohibited. The protesters have named a number of politicians whom they suggest as capable figures to lead a civilian presidial council to replace the Military Council - the key demand of the protests.

But while the protesters are getting more strategic, the Military Council is resorting to new tactics. But there has been a strange turn in the square tonight, a rather clever move by the government. Late in the evening, a group of young men gathered at the corner of Talaat Harb street, a little far a way from the main concentration of the demonstration, and started calling for the establishment of popular committees to protect the street. A young man standing on the fence told that they want to keep the peace, and “if anybody throws a stone, we catch him”. Somebody else fiercely opposed him, and a debate evolved. Later, just before leaving Daniela and I took a look again at the beginning of Tahrir Street where the medical service was expanding to the street and treating a continuing stream of people suffering from the effects of gas. There, we ran into a young man whom I had met the previous night while buying cigarettes in the district of Kitkat on the other side of the Nile. Back then, he had expressed his strong disapproval of the revolution and argued that under former minister of interior Habib al-‘Adli there were no thugs on the street like now. I wondered what he was doing now in Tahrir, and he explained that he was upset about Egyptians fighting Egyptians, and had come here for the sake of the peacefulness of the event. In his view (congruent with the view spread by state television), all violence was caused by radical protesters attacking the police that was only acting in self-defence. People with such views were not the majority in the square, but there were quite a few, like there also were others who did see the police as responsible for the violence but still trusted that the army would not attack the protesters. A man standing at the corner of Tahrir Street was lecturing to them: “Of course it is the army that is attacking us! Who else has the power in this country? It’s the army that is sending them.”

The ongoing clashes go back to the excessive brutality of the police force (the pile of bodies on Tahrir Square on Sunday should be a good enough reminded). But the determination of protesters to face the police all the same is employed by state media to quite some effect to depict the protesters as rioters and wreckers, glossing over the fact that tens of protesters have been killed by the security forces and the military police since Saturday, mainly through live ammunition and effects of tear gas. There have been several fires, and the state media has accounted this to the protesters. To my knowledge, based on accounts from the streets where the fighting takes place (I have not been there myself), the fires that have broken out hear and there yesterday and today have been caused by the gas grenades fired by the police. A friend showed me a mobile phone image showing protesters putting out a fire in the second floor of a building at the corner of Falaki and Muhammad Mahmoud Streets. At the same time, many of the protesters are determined to fight and do search confrontation.

Tonight, the Military Goverment appears to be making tactical use of the riot imagery in a way to subvert the protests. While a member of the Military Council offered his excuses for the violence on television, the Ministry of Interior has warned called “the youth on the square” to protect the buildings around the square from “counter-revolutionary elements” may be trying to enter the buildings to attack the protesters from above. Coming from Egypt’s most important counter-revolutionary element itself, the executive organ of a massacre against the protesters in the last days, such warning sounds questionable to say the least. But quite a few people seem to have followed this call, believing that they need to protect the square from what they believe wreckers rather than from the police - despite a flood of contrary evidence. Their presence in Tahrir tonight to is creating a complicated and potentially dangerous situation.

I have no predictions to offer. I did not expect the January 25 Revolution, and I did not expect this uprising either. When D. three weeks ago told me that he puts his hopes into a new revolutionary uprising, possibly on 25 January 2012, I told that there is not enough anger in the country for that. I was wrong, he was right. But where the paths is leading to now, neither of us can tell.

Greetings from the Egyptian revolution!

Videos from Tahrir Square

2011-11-23T18:28:00.004+01:00

I shot these scenes and interviews on Tahrir Square on Tuesday, 22/11/2011. Partly in Arabic, partly in English.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7Bn1L53H4

This short film shows effects of tear gas on protesters at Tahrir Street on the evening of 23/11/2011, as they are treated in the first aid service at the corner of Tahrir Square. The film is edited from material from two separate events around 22:00 and 00:30, respectively.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd8acPpC8EM

Strategies and surprises

2011-11-21T23:59:00.005+01:00

It has been a weird four days in Egypt to say the least. Just back from Tahrir Square, I find it impossible to describe the situation in any straightforward way. A day of demonstrations organised and dominated by the Islamists trying to push for a better power-sharing deal has been quite surprisingly followed by days of spontaneous demonstrations at Tahrir Square and in other cities and extremely brutal violence by the police and the army. A new big demonstration is announced to take place tomorrow, and I think it might offer new surprises. Lots of people have been killed, and countless injured, among them a friend of mine. It is all rather confusing, and before I can even attempt some sort of an analysis, I need to give an account of the past days.

At the outskirts of an uprising

One of the most bitter lessons learned by those who whole-heartedly support a revolutionary transition to a new, democratic Egypt in the past months, is the realisation that they are a minority in Egypt. Many more fear and suffer from chaos and hope for a quick stabilisation of the situation, and many of those who look forward to a political transition are going to favour Islamist parties whose relationship with the revolution is rather ambiguous. This has lead to a very widespread sense of frustration and disillusionment among those who demand a quick and complete political transition and oppose the ruling Military Council. In result, the more radical revolutionary forces became up extremely passive on the eve of the upcoming elections. Many people I know say that they don’t know whom to vote, find all parties corrupt and don’t trust any of them. Many expect that there will be massive vote-rigging and violence from the part of some candidates. Some are arguing to boycott the elections. The calls to boycott the elections have been coming primary from among those who either do not see their views represented by any of the candidates or who expect their point of view to be at the losing end, while in particular the Islamists who have good reason to expect a major election victory, are doing a very good job at campaigning for their candidates, and they have been able to convince a lot of people.
On Friday 18 November, the first major demonstrations since early October took place in Cairo and several cities across the country. The Friday demonstrations always have a name, and this one was called “Friday of the one single demand” - a title not void of irony, since it actually united political forces with very different demands. The main force behind the demonstration were Egypt’s three main Islamist movements: The Muslim Brotherhood, The Salafis, and the Gama‘a al-Islamiya. They have been on friendly terms with the Military Council throughout the year, refusing to participate in demonstrations against the military rule, looking forward to an election victory and hoping for a good power sharing deal with the army. In early November, however, they rose in protest against a document detailing the outline of Egypt’s future constitution. Presented by the vice prime minister al-Silmi (therefore known as the Silmi Document), the document states that Egypt will be a civil (that is, not theocratic and not military) state, outlining a constitutional assembly where only half of the seats would be made up by members of the new parliament, and giving the military almost complete autonomy regarding budget, organisation, jurisdiction, defence policy, and even a right to veto a declaration of war by the parliament. The Islamist parties, recognising that this document was an attempt to limit their ability to turn their parliamentary power into political power and to formalise indirect military rule, called for large-scale demonstrations against the Silmi Document. One part of the liberal and left-wing political forces decided to join the call for protests, congruent as it was with their opposition to military rule, while many others decided to abstain because they saw the demonstration as election tactics that would only serve the Islamists.
The demonstrations were large and successful. In Cairo, the Islamist parties transported busloads of supporters to from different parts of the country for a demonstration of strength in Tahrir square, and successfully so, filling the square to the limit. In Alexandria, Daniela and I followed a smaller protest that started at al-Qa’id Ibrahim Mosque and headed for the Northern Regional Military Headquarters some kilometres to the east from city centre - both customary sites for protests in Alexandria ever since the revolution. Also in Alexandria, the protest march was dominated by Islamists, but not the exclusion of others. The protest march, which included perhaps some ten thousand people, possibly somewhat more, was made up of three quite distinct blocks. It was lead by Salafis holding banners against the Silmi Document and chanting adapted revolutionary slogans such as “The people demand: Down with the document” (derived from “The people demand: Down with the system”. It was a weird and disconcerting performance because during the revolution the major Salafi groups had all sided with the Mubarak regime and called for people to abstain from demonstrating. Also now they did not chant against the military, but only against the vice prime minister. The Salafis were followed by a large block of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood but without any visible symbols of the movement (the Brotherhood had decided to only appear with their symbols on Tahrir Square), and this block was followed by a block of leftist and liberal protesters who, rather than opposing the Silmi document were chanting against the Military Council and against Egypt’s interim leader Field Marshall Tantawi. The three groups were approximately equal in size (the Salafis perhaps somewhat larger than the others), but very different in appearance. The Salafis had a very unified style, with few individual self-made signs or banners. The Muslim brotherhood supporters were also fairly uniform in style. The leftist revolutionary block was much more heterogenous in appearance, with many more people carrying hand-written signs, different groups (notably the 6th of April and Kifaya movements) carrying their symbols, and many more women among the protesters.
Despite heavy rain soaking the people at about half of the way, the march proceeded in good mood due to the large numbers it had been able to gather. But as it arrived at its destination in front of the Northern Military Headquarters, the Salafis who had been in the front of the march put up the centre stage, and the speakers soon shifted from criticising the Silmi Document to demanding for Egypt to be an Islamic state. At this stage, most of the leftist and liberal protesters left the demonstration. At a cafe two blocks away we ran into some people we knew, taking cover from the rain and very unhappy about the Salafi dominance. For them, it was a mixed experience, on the one hand it had been a successful demonstration, but on the other hand, it seemed to serve powers they did not want to align with. They were pessimistic, but said that they hoped that there will be new surprises. D. called me from Cairo (he goes to every Friday demonstration in Tahrir) where he had arrived at a late hour and said that he was “frightened” by the Salafis who dominated the square with slogans like “The people demand the Law of God.” He was very worried about the prospect of the Military Council falling only to be replaced by the Islamists. “What slogans can I use against them?” D. asked. “They legitimise themselves through religion, and if I chant against them they tell that I am chanting against religion.” Thus the left wing revolutionaries went to sleep on Friday with the uncomfortable feeling that the revolution might be about to result in the victory of the wrong people.
The next afternoon I ran into W and R., a man and a woman in their early twenties involved in Alexandria’s cultural scene. As we were about to sit down in a cafe in downtown Alexandria, the phones started ringing, and the news spread that the security forces of the Ministry of Interior were attacking the protesters in Tahrir (what I did not know at that moment was that a small sit-in of 200 people in Tahrir had been attacked already in the early morning hours, and that a much larger crowd of protesters had returned to the square in the noon). Spontaneously, numerous people stood up from the cafes and started walking in rapid pace towards al-Qa’id Ibrahim Square. Daniela and I followed them a little later, finding a a crowd of about fifty people were debating what to do and whether to protest at the Military Headquarters or at the Security Directorate in Sumuha, an up-market districts further away from the city centre. There were few people, much disagreement, much talk against the military, the parties, the Muslim Brotherhood, the corruption, but little sense of concerted action. R. and W. left feeling that there was no point to it, and also Daniela and I could not avoid feeling the sense of a defeated revolutionary movement, split in factions, disorganised, and too busy with matters of principle to undertake strategic action.
It was with this sentiment that I spent the rest of the evening at a lecture in an art space and at a private party, only marginally aware of what was evolving in Cairo and in other parts of the city. D. called me and told that he had arrived in Alexandria in the early evening and gone straight to the Northern Military Headquarters where a group of protesters had gathered. He was angry and looking for confrontation, showing his shoe as a way of insult and verbally confronting the army special units guarding the military area. Other protesters called him to calm down and mind his manners, he felt that they lacked courage and left. But he also said that the events in Tahrir the same day had given him back the revolutionary spirit, and he felt that also if the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis seize power, the Egyptian people will arise against them. If the demonstration would continue the next day, he said, he would go back to Cairo.
On the afternoon of the next day, Sunday 20 November, the ongoing demonstration in Tahrir Square was attacked with extreme force by the Military Police. In Alexandria, all I could do was watch the events on television. It was becoming clear that something big was going on. But I got back to work. In the evening, I returned to my fieldwork in al-‘Asafra in eastern Alexandria and spent the evening with a long an interesting discussion with poets and teachers about the reasons to choose for different styles of poetry. While protesters at Tahrir were being shot dead, and while protesters in Alexandria were facing the army and the police, life went on in very ordinary ways around the city.
These days, Everybody is speaking about the events in Tahrir Square and at the Security directorate in Alexandria, but the views go far apart. Sunday night, returning on a minibus from Asafra to Downtown Alexandria, a passenger and the driver were discussing the situation. The passenger had just received the news on the phone that the police was shooting at protesters at the Security Directorate and that the protesters had set cars in fire. He and the driver saw in the events an attempt to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from gaining power through elections. And indeed, the Islamist parties who dominated the demonstrations on Friday, have distanced themselves from the spontaneous demonstrations since Saturday, calling for restraint and insisting that the elections should take place as planned. They are the likely winners of the elections, and people have good reasons to vote them. The minibus driver was highly critical of the many independent candidates as well as those voters who still think about elections in the logic of the Mubarak era as a way to channel resources, a clientelistic business of providing jobs and services to the supporters of a candidate, rather than as a responsible business that is about finding the competent people to run the country. “Me, my wife, and children, we will all vote for the Muslim brotherhood, because they have spent years listening to us; they have patience with the people.”
Also among people who are not confident in the Muslim Brotherhoods capacity to run the country, there is a lot of doubt and worry. The cleaning lady in the hotel where Daniela and I stayed argued that “the protesters are too much in a hurry. This country needs to be transformed, but you can’t jump to the top of the ladder like that, it has to be done step by step.” But if many people are sceptical of the new protests, it does not mean that they support the Military Council. At a small bookstore, I met the owner and her circle of friends, all very worried and sceptical about the situation. One of the people was very worried of the destruction of property. He told that protesters had set a gas station in fire in Sumuha (his family owns a gas station, too, but theirs was not damaged), “the most beautiful and cleanest part of Alexandria” in his words, a place that should be cared for and not wrecked. But he also had no belief whatsoever in the Military council. Their time is over, he says, but at the same time he wonders what to do. He, and like him the owner of the bookstore want to participate the elections, they do not share the radical view of those who think of the elections as a fake bare of all legitimacy. It is a matter of having a say or not having a say, they argue, even if the elections are not fair and clean. But there is a big question mark. “What is to be done?” Asks the owner of the bookstore. She says that she really does not know. Something has to be done, but what?
For those who believe in the revolutionary momentum more than the elections, the answer to the question is a simple one: stand up and fight. The waiter in a café makes this very clear to me. He tells me that the army is using a new, more aggressive kind of tear gas against the protesters: “After February, they put us all to sleep and bought new weapons from the Americans, but now the revolution is awake again, and we will win.”

Back at Tahrir

It was in this contradictory mood that Daniela and I left from Alexandria for Cairo where we are supposed to have meetings for collaborative research and art exhibition project, well knowing that most of our appointments are likely not to take place. As we arrived in the house of a friend in Imbaba, we again saw the live footage from Tahrir, showing more and more people gathering in the square. The news reached us that the interim government has stepped down, which doesn’t make much difference because they never had any power anyway, acting merely as the executive organ of the Military Council. I called some friends and they told that the mood there is excellent, and I decided to go there.
Tahrir Square tonight was one of the weirdest things I have experienced. It was filled with people, well comparable to the days of the revolution. No speakers stages this time, however. All presidential candidates and party chairmen trying to enter the square in the past three days have been refused entry by the protesters. It is a genuinely spontaneous gathering, collecting very different kinds of people: youths from popular neighbourhoods on motorcycles, leftist activists, middle-class couples, Salafis (the Salafi organisations are against the protests, but there are individual Salafis who think otherwise), you name it. At the centre of the square, the mood was quite festive. Most people there were firm supporters of the revolution who had come to reclaim the square, revive the revolution, and to demand proper change. Groups of people chanting slogans, a poet reading out a revolutionary poem, flags, and discussions were accompanied by a very lively trade of tea, snacks, sweets, cigarettes, souvenirs, flags, and protective glasses and masks. Next to the Egyptian Museum, a temporary minibus and taxi stand had emerged serving the people coming and going. At the same time, ambulances were continuously passing through the crowd, there was a bitter taste to the air from tear gas, and as one moved closer towards Muhammad Mahmoud Street where clashes continue between the police and the protesters, one could see green sniper lasers moving on the walls of the buildings. While on one side of the square there was an almost party-like atmosphere of celebrating the revolutionary spirit, in the side streets leading to the ministry of interior, people were getting killed.
Confronting the police there, the protesters are trying to keep the police as far away from the square as possible, but also trying themselves to get closer to the Ministry of Interior, the old foe of the revolutionaries. My friends and I spoke with a man from a village in the Nile Delta who had just come to have a break from the street battle. He was wearing swimming classes, a construction helmet and a painter’s gas mask, and he told that the situation in Muhammad Mahmoud Street was terrible. They were being shot at with rubber bullets and with live ammunition, and the police was using a new kind of aggressive tear gas that could not be washed away with water like usual tear gas, but instead needs to be treated with a solution of bread yeast and water (it is US produced CR gas, classified in the United States as a chemical weapon). He had left his wife and children at home and told them that he was going to work. He said that he could not do otherwise than come here, to fight for the sake of a better future of his country.
Having at first encountered the festive side of Tahrir Square, it was frightening to realise that just a block away people were being killed. Even more frightening was to hear how big the real death toll appears to be. The official figure by the Ministry of Health is that 33 people, all of them protesters, have been killed. But a friend whom I met at Tahrir told that the doctor running one of the two field hospitals has a list of names that is close to hundred, and it only covers the bodies at his field hospital. Since Sunday I had heard nothing of D. He returned to Tahrir on Sunday and his mobile phone has been off ever since. I was already about to go searching for him in the field hospitals, but I just received a facebook message from him. He has been wounded by gunshots on his shoulder and foot, but he is alive.

On strategy and spontaneity

A big demonstration is announced to take place tomorrow. It is likely to gather a large number of people, but the situation will be very different from what it as during the revolution in January and February. If in many ways the situation appears similar to what happened last spring, with terrible violence by the security forces, angry protesters taking over Tahrir Square, and the cabinet stepping down as an attempt to calm down the people, in other respects the situation is completely different. Parliamentary elections are scheduled to begin in exactly one week (they will take quite a while, involving several rounds and different voting times in different provinces), and the revolutionary coalition of the spring is now split into those who expect their side to win the elections and look forward to push for their visions through the parliament, and those who don’t expect much from the elections and put their hopes in a continued revolutionary uprising.
Most importantly the three main Islamist parties, but also the liberal al-Wafd party expect much from the elections. (It is important to note that the political camp is not simply split into Islamists and the liberal-left. There are liberals putting their hopes in elections and appeasing the Army just as well as there are smaller Islamist groups siding with ongoing revolution). Consequently, the three main Islamist parties have been calling their supporters not to participate in the protests. However, there is good likelihood that the Muslim brotherhood and the Salafis will try to join the protest movement, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps on Friday, to push it into a different direction. This already happened in Alexandria tonight. At the Security Directorate in Sumuha, the ongoing confrontation between protesters and the police took a new turn when the Salafis entered the scene. According to W who called me from Sumuha, the Salafis entered the demonstration in great numbers at around 10 p.m. and started shouting “Silmiya” (peaceful) “Al-sha‘b wa al-shurta id wahda” (The people and the police hold together) and attempted to move the protestors away from the Security Directorate, while at the same time the police has continued to fire tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition at the protesters. Tomorrow and next Friday will show whether this scenario will be repeated in Cairo. If yes, it will complicate things even more.
But what about the radical revolutionaries? What exactly do they want? This is, in a way, the big and open question of the moment. The demands are simple clear: Removal of the military government and the installment of a civilian transitory government. The new wave of protests has a lot of spontaneous energy, anger and enthusiasm, but in contrast to the actions taken by the Islamists, it appears to have little in terms of strategy. The new uprising that began on Saturday is a spontaneous act of anger that has grown from the increasing frustration of the radical supporters of the revolution. It is what the radical revolutionaries are good at doing, and what they love doing. There is a romantic momentum to revolution that in a certain way also turns it into an end in itself. Such romanticism can be dangerous because it makes it very difficult to act strategically.
Spontaneity and lack of strategy is both a strength and a weakness of the radical revolutionary movement. It is a weakness to start with, because the way the radical revolutionaries have been good in returning to the streets over and again, but very bad at establishing more permanent and socially rooted forms of organisation. While the Muslim Brotherhood has been running a very well organised and financed election campaign, the liberals and left have split into factions, their various parties have quickly lost their credibility in the eyes of their potential supporters, and many radical supporters of the revolution lack a vision of how to change the country after the revolution. In this sense, the return to the streets is a romantic moment of celebrating the revolutionary spirit again, but as a political move it is a blind one, creating a surprising new situation but possessing no means to turn the element of surprise into a long-term advantage.
But the spontaneity and the valuation of revolution for its own sake also has given the new uprising an enormous strength. It is due to this emotional determination rather than calculation that, for better or worse, the protesters have been able to upset the formation of what was about to look like a parliamentary-military power-share deal.
The light side to this power of spontaneous determination is that it means that it will be very difficult for any authoritarian rule to establish itself in Egypt in the near future. Finding an atmosphere of revolutionary celebration in the square after great numbers of people have been killed and while fighting continues in the side streets means that there is a spirit of ongoing resistance that will be very hard to break, and that spirit is urgently needed as a corrective power in the coming years when whoever will run the affairs of Egypt will be tempted to consolidate and concentrate power and wealth.
But the dark side of the power of spontaneous determination is its ambiguous relationship with violence. The protesters are facing a well-armed military and police with stones and makeshift protective gear, and this asymmetry of violence gives them a moral advantage. There also a willingness to sacrifice lives for the sake of the revolution, and the people on the streets have paid a heavy price. But this sense that a true revolution will require a heavy price can easily turn into a celebration of death and blood, and transform the commitment to revolution for its own sake into something more sinister.
At the moment, the situation is simply too complex and confusing to offer any clear conclusion. Rather, Lenin’s famous revolutionary question arises once again: “What is to be done?” What action can one undertake to use the uncertain moment of the transitional period to one’s advantage? The answers in Egypt right now are going far apart (and none of them follows Lenin’s suggestion of a vanguard revolutionary party). The Military Council is resorting to the same tactics that already failed on 28 January. Those parties that expect to win the elections are probably right now trying to decide how to turn the momentum of the protests to their advantage. The protesters on the streets are putting their stakes on a new revolution. People not involved in the events are wondering how the chaos will ever end. But as things stand, nobody knows what will really work.

The Arab autumn?

2011-10-11T11:59:00.003+02:00

I never liked the expression “the Arab Spring” because I know too well what happened to the Prague Spring in 1968. A short time of hope in a “socialism with a human face” was crushed by Soviet tanks, and it took more than twenty years before a new revolution could gather momentum.

2011, the year of revolutions and uprisings around the Arab world, has been marked not only by an amazing spirit of change, but also by fierce resistance by the ruling elites, and a fear of instability and chaos among large parts of the ordinary people. Some uprisings, most notably that in Bahrain, were crushed with brute force at an early stage. Others, in Yemen and Syria, continue with an uncertain future. Along with Tunisia, Egypt appeared to be one of the lucky Arab nations that were able to realise a relatively peaceful and quick revolution, a turning point towards a better future of justice, freedom, and democracy. This autumn, however, the situation in Egypt raises doubts about that better future.

Returning to a different country

I returned to Egypt on October 2nd, this time not with the aim to follow the events of the revolution but to begin a new ethnographic fieldwork on writing and creativity, pursuing questions about the relationship of fantasy and social change. I found Egypt in a very different state from what it had been when I left it behind in March. Returning here, I encountered an air of freedom, a sense of relaxation and ease, and a strong presence of creativity, discussion, and interest in politics. But I also encountered a fear of economic collapse and a continued sense of turmoil, with strikes (mostly successful) continuing all over the country, a political struggle among political parties to share the cake of elections beforehand through alliances and deals, confrontation between competing sections within the Islamist spectrum (which has much more presence and popular support than the liberal and leftist camp), an increased visibility and activity of what in post-revolutionary jargon are called the fulul, or “leftovers” (literally, the dispersed units of a defeated army) of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party that was dissolved last spring, renewed confessional tensions, and last but not least a military rule tightening its grip over the country.

My revolutionary friends are without exception extremely frustrated about the situation. Some see the revolution in grave danger, others say that it has already failed, that it fact failed on 11 February when the military took over from the Mubarak family. In different variations, they argue that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has proven itself as a faithful follower of Mubarak, intent on taking over power through the manipulation of the upcoming elections, if necessary by the way of spreading chaos and terror. Also the Islamists in their different colourings, who until the summer were very supportive of the military rule (hoping to strike a good power share deal), have turned critical of the SCAF, beginning to realise that the army is deceiving them just like Gamal Abdel Nasser did back in 1954 when after a period of cooptation, the Muslim Brotherhood was prohibited and brutally suppressed. But a lot of people (probably the majority) are still trustful in the army, believing what state television says and what public sector newspapers write. And most Egyptians are first of all busy with the economic situation, which is very difficult.

It was in this mixed atmosphere of an air of freedom and a sense of frustration and anxiety about the way things are evolving that I arrived in Alexandria three days ago, after spending a week in Cairo. Alexandria is one of the power bases of Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood, and their posters and banners are visible all over the city, but not to the exclusion of others: posters of liberal or leftist parties, banners of new parties by the fulul, graffitis by the radical opposition and politicised football ultras.

The massacre at Maspiro

On Sunday 9 October, large-scale Christian demonstrations were organised in several cities around the country in protest against the burning of a church and Christian appartments in Idfu (in the south of Egypt) more than a week earler, and the very inappropriate reaction of the authorities. The governor of Aswan, rather than trying to solve the crisis, had declared that the church had been built without a licence anyway. A sit-in of Christian protesters in front of the state television headquarters at Maspiro (overlooking the Nile in Central Cairo) had been forcibly dispersed and many people had been injured. On 9 October, a large number of Christians, feeling to be under increasing pressure since quite a while, went out to streets in large numbers, and rather than just occupying one place, they took out in protest marches through the cities.

On the afternoon of that day, I was returning from downtown Alexandria to Mandara in the east of the city on a minibus when we entered a big traffic jam on the seafront Corniche road. The minibus driver diverted to the side streets, and after a while we saw that on the Corniche there was a large (a few thousands) march of Christians with lots of crosses visible from afar. Turning left and right on the narrow side streets, the driver managed to get us just ahead of the march, and stopped shortly to pick up passengers, calling them to hurry: “Get in, get in, let’s move before we get beaten up!” He didn’t specify who he expected to get beaten by - in any case, he sensed danger. In Alexandria, the march headed for the Northern Regional Military Headquarters, the standard destination of demonstration marches in Alexandria ever since the army seized power on 11 February (unlike in Cairo where demonstrations are usually stationary at Tahrir Square, in Alexandria they usually march through the city).

At the same time, a similar march was heading to Maspiro in Cairo. The events that followed and the terrible death toll are known, and there is nothing I can add to the many eyewitness reports from Cairo that tell about stones being thrown at the march on its way, the army attacking the protesters at Maspiro with live ammunition, armoured troop carriers crushing people, cars being set in fire, and riots evolving. The bits of pieces from eyewitness reports I get from Cairo tell of a chaotic situation evolving around the centre of the city, with various groups of Muslim citizens, some of them groups of (apparently hired) thugs, others people incited by the state media, going out to the streets, trying to break into Christian shops and institutions, threatening people, stealing things. Things were not everywhere simply a matter of Muslims and Christians, however. In Faggala, one witness reports on Facebook, the standoff was between poor youths and thugs on the one side, intent on looting Christian property, and Muslim inhabitants of the area who were not at all happy about the idea of stealing in the name of Islam.

In Alexandria, the night was tense, fights were reported in some parts of the city, and the protesters at the Northern Regional Headquarters were attacked by civilians, described as inhabitants of the district by news media. But to my knowledge no shots were fired in Alexandria, and nobody got killed.

More terrible than the veritable massacre committed by the army at Maspiro was its coverage by Egyptian state media that - this has become very clear in the past two days - openly called “the noble people of Egypt” to come to help the Army against Christians, reported that the protesters killed three Egyptian soldiers (to date it remains unclear whether any soldiers were killed at all), showed clearly dubbed interviews with injured soldiers. We don’t know what they really said, but the dubbed voices told of Christians seizing the weapons of the army, attacking people, stealing their money, beating soldiers to death. Also in the following days, after footage and eyewitness accounts have proven that the official version was not only skewed, but completely false, the state media and a big part of the independent media have continued to spread the version of 23 dead “from both sides,” giving the impression of an equal confrontation. Today, state-owned newspapers have began to distribute new versions of the story, one according to which the protesters stole the armed troop carriers, and another according to which protesters set a troop carrier in fire and killed a large number of soldiers inside it. At the same time, there is no official confirmation of any deaths from the ranks of the army and the police. After the direct incitement by state television in the first hours, the official tone has shifted to expressing compassion with “our Christian brothers” and commemorating “the martyrs from among the army and police.” There is a huge cover-up going on.

A lot of people continue to trust the state media, and especially when the issue becomes mixed with confessional sentiments, it becomes very compelling to believe that version of the story. D., a man from the countryside and very critical of the system since years, told me that he heard the news about the massacre at Maspiro in a cafe in Birimbal. In village cafes, people usually watch Egyptian Channel One which they still trust over other news media He tells that based on the coverage of Channel One, he really believed its account of the events, and thought that if protesters get armed and attack the army, then nobody else than the military can control the situation and that they need to be given the power to do so. Only when he got home an hour later and opened the Internet did he find out that it was the army that shot at the protesters and drove over them with armoured vehicles. No wonder then if others, who are less determined supporters of the revolution and less critical of the army and the military rule, believed - and still believe - what state television said.

Many - if not most - Muslims in Egypt do not have a sense that Christians would be in any way disadvantaged. They claim that there is national unity in Egypt, that Muslims and Christians are united and equal - a powerful fiction that makes it easy to overlook the really existing forms of discrimination. This is the ground from which the claims by state media about armed Christian protesters attacking the Egyptian army could gain their credibility: a sense that the Christians are demanding more than is their fair share anyway, now turned into a terrible union of patriotic militarism with sectarian distrust of the religious other. In the social media, this sensibility is expressed without the veil of national unity and sorrow in the official state media, with comments that range from anger to open aggression towards Christians. For those who never liked Christians anyway but had no good reason for this sentiment, the official story of Christian protesters arming themselves and attacking the Egyptian army offers a legitimate reason to hate.

Sectarian tension has a decades-long history in Egypt, and while it is evident that the army and state television did their best to incite confessional tensions, they were only able to do so because they really are widely shared by Egyptians. While Christians are at the losing end of these tensions due to their smaller number and their lack of presence in key nods of the military-media complex, it does not mean that they would be innocent of sectarian intolerance. There has been a strong turn to religion as the basis of identity and good life among Muslims and Christians alike, and part of this has been an increasing degree of closure towards the religious other. If Egypt were a 90% Christian country, we might have seen Muslim protesters massacred at Maspiro on Sunday.

The success of the media cover-up is far from total, however. It may have been aimed at tightening the army’s control over the country, but rather than creating a unified public opinion, it has deepened existing political splits. A lot of people don’t buy the army’s version of the story, and even many who are sympathetic of the army say that they don’t know what to believe.

One of the paradoxes of the Massacre at Maspiro is that it targeted people who otherwise would have been very likely to be supportive of a military rule that guarantees continuity and stability. Under Mubarak, many Christians would see in the ruling system a protector of Christians against the Islamists, even if they suffered from it as much if not more than everybody else. Last Sunday turned a big part of Christian Egyptians from hesitant supporters of the system into angry opponents of military rule.

Also among Egyptians of Muslim faith, many are putting the blame on the army, the more so after huge numbers of eyewitness accounts and horrible photographs and videos on the Internet and on some television stations have shown the extent of the violence by the army and the outright lying of the state media. The euphoric sense that “the army and the people are one hand” has been shifting more and more towards a distrust in the army’s ability (and good will) to run the country properly. Add the fact that there is not only a lot of sectarian tension in Egypt, but also quite some opposition to it by people who resist the momentum of sectarian closure. Who wants to be informed in Egypt, can be. Those who didn’t trust the military anyway, see in the events at Maspiro is a terrible proof of how much the SCAF, aided by the fulul, is intent to resorting to the tactics of chaos and terror that the Mubarak regime tried in the first days of the revolution last January.

D. sees that there is a plan that is being executed step by step. Not a clever one, and not well implemented, but a plan. The attack at the Israeli embassy in Cairo was one step, a way to exploit nationalist sentiment while inciting fear of unrest. The massacre at Maspiro was another step. The elections will be the next one, and D. expects that they will turn very violent and will be cancelled after the first round. The army intentionally lets the situation deteriorate, to let chaos prevail, the economy collapse, and the worse things get, the more people are willing to accept military rule as a guarantee of stability and security. In 2013 or 2014, D. predicts, an army candidate, most likely chief of staff Samy ‘Annan, will run for presidency, and even if the elections were fully free and fair (which they will not be), he will win.

My friend S. from Alexandria, since long frustrated about the current state of affairs since has strangely enough found new optimism in this moment. He thinks that what the country is going through now may be the birth labours of a better future. He (a Muslim by the way) is teacher at a school that has a large portion of Christian pupils and teachers, and confessional tensions have been very tangible there since long. Today, he gave the daily school opening speech. He started with telling that he saw Hosni Mubarak in a dream, the former president telling him that from his point of view, everything is going exactly as he wants. Calling the teachers and pupils to fight the Mubarak that continues to live inside them, S. concluded with an appeal to humanity and the need of people to recognise each others as humans. The speech moved people to tears, Muslims and Christians, and S. says that it made him feel a lot more optimistic.

A., calling me on the phone from the Emirates where he is working as a migrant labourer, tries to take it with humour: “The solution is that the Muslims burn the churches and Christians burn the mosques and everybody prays at home.”

Revolution as continuity

In Egypt this autumn, what in the way of a bad omen was called the Arab Spring is being crushed under the wheels of a military-media complex intent on employing sectarianism and the fear of chaos to consolidate their hold of the country. There are plenty of reasons for pessimism. Is there reason for optimism?

A few people whom I have met these days express a sense of optimism that they cannot quite explain. There is a sense that something has changed, that there is no return to the past, a sense that the events that we see these days, no matter how terrible they are, may actually be signs of the revolution’s success. Even if it may be a mistaken optimism - revolutions are very unpredictable and dangerous events, and they can go awfully wrong (think of the Russian revolution of 1917) - it is something to take seriously.

Part of this optimism is related to the sense of freedom, the wave of creativity, discussion and communication that goes on in the society. It is related to social dynamics released by the revolutionary momentum that are likely to influence the formation of the coming generation even if the political aims of the revolution may fail. This is what I would like to call the progress theory of the Egyptian revolution, a vision of the revolution creating something new, something that wasn’t there before. It has a grain of truth, but I think that by emphasising the novelty of the January 25 Revolution, it overlooks the history of revolutions in Egypt. To conclude this essay, I try to think about 2011 from the point of view of what I call the continuity theory of the Egyptian revolution. Rather than something completely unprecedented, the January 25 Revolution can also be seen as a return to a historical normality - and it’s a hard landing.

Until this year, Egypt as I knew it was that of the late Mubarak era, one of the most depoliticised times in Egypt’s contemporary history. I first arrived in Egypt in the late 1990's, a time when the de facto civil war between the regime and the Gama‘at al-Islamiya in southern Egypt was ending with a bloody defeat of the Islamist militants. From the 1990's until 2010 was a time when everybody in Egypt, including the Islamists, were compelled to yikabbar, to mind their own business and not get involved. In retrospect, however, the Mubarak era that was Egypt as I knew it, appears as an exceptional one, an interruption in a long history of revolutions and uprisings in Egypt since the 19th century.

The Egyptian book market has been flooded by a wave of books about the revolution, most of them of mediocre value at best. But there are pearls among them, and one of them is Muhammad Hafiz Diyab’s Uprisings or Revolutions in the History of Modern Egypt (Intifadat am thawrat fi tarikh Misr al-hadith, Cairo: Dar al-Shorouk, 2011). Diyab presents a history of popular uprisings, student and strike movements, riots, and full-fledged revolutions that begins in the 19th century and continues throughout the 20th century, with the 1919 revolution against British colonial rule, student protests in 1935, student and labour protests in 1946, the military coup of 1952 and the following revolutionary rearrangement of political and economic power, demonstrations in the late 1960's and early 1970's, and the so-called “bread riots” of January 1977, a wide-scale protest movement involving workers, students, and political activists of different colourings against Anwar al-Sadat’s policies of economic liberalisation. These different uprisings share a number of important features: a key role played by young people (especially students, and since the 1940's industrial workers), significant participation across political and party lines, large-scale demonstrations often focussed on Tahrir Square (formerly Isma’iliya Square) in Cairo, a visible role played by women, and an at best moderate degree of success of the protesters in realising their demands.

The fantastic moment of standing in Tahrir square in January and February 2011 was a moment that went beyond the wildest dreams of those who participated in that moment, a moment of utopia turned into material reality. For those who were there it has gained a quality that comes close to that of a religious belief. That fantastic quality has created two blind spots about the relationship of the revolution with the ordinary world. The first blind spot is a practical one. The reality of social and political change is a lot more difficult, a lot less pure and grand, and comparing it with the fantastic moment of revolution can create a sense of powerless that makes it difficult to make a realistic assessment of what is to be done next. The second blind spot is a temporal one. The fantastic moment of revolution carries an experienced singularity of a once-in-a-lifetime moment that because of its singularity exceeds the imaginable. The January 25 Revolution was not a singular event, however. It stands in a tradition, and without repeating history, it builds on its predecessors and paves the ground for struggles to come, struggles that are now becoming evident.

This, I think, is the source of the inexplicable optimism in these difficult days of what, in Egypt at least, looks like the beginning of an Arab autumn, a period of authoritarian restoration and violent confrontations. January 25th 2011 was not the opening of a new era in Egypt. It was the return to the historical normality of a nation in revolt, the continuation of a state of uprising that began in 1919, or perhaps already in 1881, and that is bound to continue.

After the revolution

2011-03-19T12:14:00.003+01:00

As I write these final notes from the Egyptian revolution on my way back to Germany, I once again curse my amazingly bad timing regarding key events of the revolution. I arrived in Egypt on my first visit three days after the Friday of Anger, the dramatic key moment that made the old system lose its balance. I left five days before Hosni Mubarak resigned. I arrived on my second visit one day after Essam Sharaf’s caretaker government took over. And I am leaving in the early morning hours of the constitutional referendum that will determine which way Egypt will be going in the coming months.

This decisive moment is just one of the many that Egypt has seen and will continue to see during this year. But as it is the moment when I leave Egypt, I seize it to offer some preliminary conclusions about the Egyptian revolution and the social and emotional dynamics it has released. I make no pretensions to neutrality. My account of the Egyptian revolution is an extremely partisan one, and I would consider it a failure if it weren’t so. There are times to look at things from a neutral distance, and there are times to take a stance. But while taking a stance, I have tried to be fair towards those whose views and actions I do not agree with. It has been difficult.

In November 2010 I spoke with the Egyptian journalist Abdalla Hassan who told me that there will be a revolution in Egypt soon. I replied him that there is no way there will be a revolution in Egypt, and in any case, I find a revolution a bad idea because in revolutions things get broken, people get killed, and in the end the wrong people seize the power. I was obviously wrong about the point as to whether there will be a revolution in Egypt or not. However, at the moment it looks like that all my three reasons to be opposed to a revolution are turning out to be true. And yet I continue to think that the revolution was a good thing, one of the best things that have happened to Egypt since a long time.

To start with, things don’t look too good to be honest. There is strong mobilisation for a “No” vote for the sake of a new democratic constitution to finish the job of the revolution. The activists of the “No” vote who for too long a while were focussed on demonstrations, the press and the Internet, have finally taken to debating and spreading leaflets in the streets. But they are facing a much stronger mobilisation by an unholy alliance of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Salafis, for a “Yes” vote, with tacit support of the army. A “Yes” vote will mean a consolidation of what remains of the old system, and it will mean early elections that are likely to be dominated by an alliance of the old system and Islamists. In Cairo the “Yes” and “No” campaigns appear to have approximately equal strength, but in Alexandria, where the Salafis are especially strong, they have been not only speaking out loudly for their point of view, they also quite reject the possibility of there being a different point of view. According to newspaper reports, they have been aggressively trying to prevent the “No” campaign from spreading its message in Alexandria. Despite the widely publicised measures to guarantee a transparent election, there are already reports of vote-rigging on the countryside and in Upper Egypt. The odds are at the moment that the “Yes” vote will prevail due to a mixture of trustful expectation of a quick return to normality among a very large part of Egyptians, the organising power of Islamist movements, the tacit “Yes”-campaign by the state media, and some fraud. But the outcome is not certain, and that in itself is a major progress in Egypt. (For more details on the arguments for and consequences involved in a “Yes” or “No” vote, see my previous post)

I spent yesterday, my last day in Egypt, from the morning until the evening meeting my friends in Cairo. They represent a very particular selection of Egyptians. They are all going to vote “No”, and they all think that Egypt needs more social and gender equality, more freedom, and a civil state ruled by a democratic government, without the Muslim Brothers if possible. But their assessment of the situation is different, each coming up with a different scenario of Egypt’s future.

My friend from southern Cairo is the most pessimistic one. She sees that the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis are about to take over, be it directly or indirectly, and that there is a grave danger that the promises of democracy and freedom will be betrayed by a conservative religious turn that will put an end to the little bit of freedom there was for different ways of life in Egypt under Mubarak. In her view, the nationalists and leftist were very naive to join the Muslim Brotherhood in the temporary alliance to overthrow Mubarak because the Muslim Brothers are the ones who will profit now due to their superior organisation. She argues that since the system was so weak that it fell after less than three weeks of demonstrations, it would have been very well possible indeed to gradually reform it. A gradual reform of the old system, she argues, would have been better because it would not have given the Islamists the chance to dominate which they are offered now. Maybe, I say, but now things are as they are. So what to do now? She does not have a plan, but she points out that whatever its political consequences, the revolution has released a longing for freedom and unsettled the logic of gender relations. This shift can substantially change Egyptian society in the coming years, but it needs to get the chance to evolve.

F.E., a long-standing socialist activist, is much more optimistic. “Whatever the outcome of the referendum, we have already gained a lot.” Many socialist and communist movements that were previously working in illegality are now working publicly. Some of them are well connected with the new free trade unions in Egypt’s industrial centres. Left wing parties and organisations are mushrooming. The crucial issue, in F.E.’s view, is to create a functioning network to facilitate their work to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood and the NDP. In F.E.’s view it is in a way good that the Muslim Brotherhood decided to join the “Yes” campaign because by doing so “they have proven to everybody what we already knew: that they are a part of the system”. In F.E.’s view, there is a likelihood that the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power in alliance of parts of the old system. But it won’t be a disaster since it will only be making official what has been unofficially going on since the 1970's. With the gradual withdrawal of the state from its role as a service provider in the course of economical liberalisation, the Islamist movements and religious actors in general were given the role of non-governmental service providers in the new neoliberal system of governance. Due to this deal, F.E. says, the Muslim Brothers have a societal advantage which the socialists and the labour movement now have to catch up with by entering the streets and the popular neighbourhoods and defeating the Islamists in their home ground. A part of the plan is to raise lawsuits against Muslim Brotherhood-dominated charities which often link their services with ideological conditions, which is against the law on charitable institutions (F.E. is lawyer by training, he knows). But the crucial point is to be there for the people, to offer services and to be socially active: “The poor people cannot afford to be ideological. If you go to them and offer them assistance, they take it. It doesn’t take much ideology to tell the difference between one loaf of bread, and two loafs.” In F.E.’s view, right now is the finest hour of the Muslim Brotherhood, but their days are counted because in the end they are a part of the corrupt old system, and will not be able to solve the problem of social inequality - the issue that took the people to the streets.

W., also a long-standing socialist and since years a cultural activist, is a little less enthusiastic about the networking capacities of the leftist movement. He, too, has been intensively involved in the revolution, and as I meet him in the evening, he is exhausted. Not only has he been participating in a number of cultural activities and a leaflet campaign on the eve of the referendum, he is also a member of the citizen’s checkpoint in the area of the cultural centre where he works. Yesterday he attended the founding meeting of yet another socialist party. He is not so worried about the splintering of leftist parties, however. What troubles him is that trade unions are at the moment so busy presenting their demands to the ministries that they have no concentration for the wider political situation. These demands, which typically involve improved pay and a change in management structures, are known in Egypt currently as “the demands of professional groups” (matalib fi’awiya), which has become something of a curse word. For activists like W, they are an ambivalent business, partly a crucial part of political action, partly detrimental to coordinating the pursuit of more general objectives.

Dr. A., a psychologist concerned with the spiritual aspect of religion as a way to help people find agency in their lives, says that he is neither a pessimist or an optimist: Pessimism and optimism, he argues, are attitudes of the time before the revolution, now is a time to work. He says that when people discuss the referendum with him, he doesn’t say what he will vote, but only encourages them to vote and take the decision in their own hands. He will vote “No”, he says, but what is more important for him is the level of political consciousness and spontaneous activity by young people who never had that experience before. “When I was at the Friday prayer today, after the prayer there were people spreading ‘Yes’ leaflets and others spreading ‘No’ leaflets, people whom I had never before seen being socially active. I went to the guy with the “No” leaflets and thanked him for just that.” We discuss what will happen to this drive of activity if the majority vote will be a “Yes”. I’m concerned that a victory of the “Yes” vote, which would be the first major setback for the revolutionaries (excepting, of course, the Muslim Brothers who go for “Yes”), will cause a major wave of frustration and make many people give up again. The question, Dr. A. replies, is about turning the spirit of revolution into experience. The revolution is an emotional state, and as such it is transient even if it leaves a strong trace on one. But it also comes with a practical experience, and that practical experience is changing a significant part of Egypt in these very days.

That change will be a contradictory one. A revolution is a sledgehammer, good for breaking the walls of oppression and frustration. It is a way of changing things that causes a lot of damage, it is risky, and there is no way to tell how things will eventually turn out. One can draw so many comparisons to the Iranian revolution 0f 1979, to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, to the revolutions of the Eastern Block in 1968 and 1989, and the youth revolution in western Europe and Northern America in 1968 - but the only thing that one learns is that revolutions are fundamentally unpredictable. Afterwards, we will be able to name the actors, the groups, the dynamics, and the decisions that determined the course of events. But beforehand, nobody knows.

What I do know is this: Egypt’s revolution of 25 January built on a number of social dynamics that were present in Egypt already years before, and which have now been partly magnified, and partly transformed.

Number one is the reintroduction of capitalism since the 1970's after a period of Arab socialism, and the enormous social impact of neoliberal governance that gave enormous wealth to a political-economical elite, some wealth to a new middle class, and an enormous gap of promises and reality to the biggest part of the population. Egypt in the age of Mubarak was a liberal dictatorship, with vast opportunities for investment, beautiful new malls and resorts, space for different lifestyles on the condition of sufficient funds, an extremely stratified class society, and a brutal and arrogant security apparatus that treated citizens like criminals and had criminals on its paycheck. As Walter Armbrust (http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/717/the-revolution-against-neoliberalism) has argued in an early and very fitting analysis, the revolution of 25 January 2011 was directed first and foremost against this conglomerate of big money, class and family privileges, and everyday oppression, and whether and to what degree this conglomerate will change in favour of ordinary Egyptians, will be the primary measure-stick on which the people who undertook the revolution will measure its success.

Number two is the wave of a very particular kind of religious conservatism that Egypt has been experiencing since thirty years. In the past decade this religious conservatism took a markedly unpolitical, primarily socially engaged shape, but it now turns out that this was very much due to the constraints of the Mubarak system that worked systematically to depoliticise social movements. Now religious conservatism has become an openly political (and so have left wing cultural projects, by the way) again, thus also creating new kinds of divisions. Some of my colleagues have argued that the revolutionary protest has offered a new language of dissent, a new logic to think about the relationship of state, society, religion, and the individual which is “asecular” in the words of Hussein Agrama (http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/03/11/asecular-revolution/), because it stands outside the contrast of the secular and the religious. This could indeed be the impression if one focusses on the utopian moment of revolutionary protest. But that was, indeed, the utopian moment of a revolutionary protest and now we are entering the period of transition. The shared spirit of protest has become impossible to hold once the common goal was reached, although it is likely to have some positive effects on Egypt’s politics in the next years. The political developments of the transitional period are providing for a spectacular comeback of that contrast in new forms, most disturbingly in the shape of the Salafis with their rejection of the very idea of democracy as un-Islamic, but also in a less destructive way in the way leftist and nationalist political actors are now rearranging their ranks to face the alliance of the old system and the Muslim brotherhood. Applying Agrama's analysis of secularism to its opponents, I argue that re-politicisation of religious conservatism is providing not so much specific norms - after all, Egypt is for the biggest part a conservative and religious society anyway - than specific questions that it obliges Egyptians to ask and answer (I am thinking for example, about the discussion about the Islamic state between R. and Y. in my note from 15 March).

But more important than who will run the country in the next four or eight years is the peculiar nature of this religious conservatism as an integral part of the neoliberal system of governance as F.E the socialist pointed out. The power of Islamist ideals of politics and society over Egypt is interlinked with the experience of an increasingly amoral society moving away from a conservative communal experience towards a competitive, fragmented social experience where morals are learned from the book. The power of the Islamist promise of good life rises and falls with the neoliberal capitalist utopia/dystopia. While I am not much of a socialist myself, I therefore think that socialists and the labour movement may have more to say in future than may seem right now.

Number three is the strained relationship of ordinary people with the state, which for a long time has been marked by seeking the patronage of the state/business authorities, and cursing the humiliation which one experienced while doing so. Burning the police stations on 28 January was a radical, impulsive reaction against this experience, and it has released highly contradictory dynamics. Until today, there is very little police on the streets of Egypt’s cities, although technically the police should have been able to return weeks ago. Partly it has made things better, as people have to suffer a lot less insults and derision than they used to. Partly it has made things more colourful, with street vendors who used to play cat and mouse with the police now working freely in Cairo’s shopping streets. But for a big part, it is a serious problem in face of the increase in crime - and in fear of crime - that followed the revolution, further aggravated by the large number of police firearms that got into private hands on 28 January. The fear of crime and violence is the strongest argument in the hands of those who want things to get back to as they were. Those who want to push for the sake of continuing revolution tend to place the blame on the police itself, seeing in the delayed return of the police to the street a continued campaign of intimidation. But I think that more is at stake. A main reason appears to be that the police officers are very hesitant to take their new role as servants of the people. There is very strong resistance in the police force against criminal investigations against police officers. In the beginning of this week, police forces in Alexandria marched out of the courts they were supposed to protect in protest against court cases against three police officers accused of killing protesters. This spirit was most arrogantly marked by the video circulating on the Internet in early March, showing a police chief telling the policemen that “we are the masters of the country.” The burning of the police stations has been a traumatic event for the police force, and an ambiguous one for the citizens who note the new politeness of the few police officers in the streets with great satisfaction, but also suffer from the new insecurity of violent crime. The relation of the citizens and the police will remain an open question for a while, and while there seems to be no return to times past, it is unclear whether a new sound base for policing will be found. The relationship will remain strained. And the weapons that moved to private hands will stay that way, and violent crime is likely to become a more permanent menace in Egyptians’ daily life.

Number four is the crisis of patriarchal authority so dramatically marked in the Oedipal father murder which the revolutionaries committed on Mubarak, the clientelistic father-godfather of the nation. I wrote more about this point back in February, at the moment I want to point out that this was by no means a shared undertaking by all Egyptians. A lot of people did not believe that Mubarak would go until he actually did, and did not dare or care to go out to the streets. These people, too, are now claiming the revolution as theirs, but for them it has a different emotional significance. And those who did believe that Mubarak would go and who put their faith into a revolution without visible leaders, had quite different ideas of what would replace the figure of the respected and feared collective father. Things are in the movement, and some are searching for new reliable sources of authority while others are claiming the freedom to speak out what is in one’s heart and yet others are experimenting with non-hierarchical organisation and pluralistic debate. This shift in authority and in the entitlement to a voice will be the biggest and bitterest struggle that Egypt will face in the next decades.

This is why I think the Egyptian revolution is a good thing although things have been broken, people have been killed, and the wrong people are likely to seize the power. Egypt of the past decade was marked by an enormous contrast of great promises and high expectations on the one hand, and a sense of humiliation, depression and frustration. The 25 January revolution opened up a different way to feel about the world, and things got into movement. Some things will get back to the way they were, some will get better, a lot of things will get worse. But they are not just happening to people. One can do something about one’s share in the world. So many people in Egypt felt that nothing can be done, and many of them now feel that something can be done after all. They will do that something now, for better or worse.

Revolution is indeed an emotional state, and it is an intense, nervous and stressful one. One cannot go on that way for very long. The turn from the state of revolution to a state of transition is also a time of exhaustion and bad nerves. R., an artist, is sick with a “post-revolutionary flu” as she calls it. Like many others whom I have met, she is emotionally exhausted, and says that the past month and a half has been the most stressful time in her life. Although I myself have spent only three weeks in Egypt since the revolution began, my nerves are wrecked, too. I have started smoking again, and I sleep very badly. And yet unlike many others, I haven’t been through any really bad experiences. But there is a constant anxiety, and it is of the same kind of the anxiety of M. who found it so wearing to find this country one’s own. Like so many Egyptians who share this feeling, I am anxious because I care. Having lived so long in a country that seemed so stalled, so doomed to face just more and more of the same, it is not a bad thing to be anxious in this way.

Greetings from Egypt in transition!

Samuli

Yes or No?

2011-03-18T01:22:00.002+01:00

(This note is from 17 March but it was posted after midnight)

Today, there is only one issue to any discussion in Cairo: whether to vote “Yes” or “No” in the constitutional referendum that will take place on 19 March. The constitutional amendments, which were proposed by a committee of constitutional experts assigned with the task by the army in the end of February, are supposed to offer a temporary solution to hold free presidential and parliamentary elections soon, and to pass a new constitution afterwards. The draft consists of amendments in laws regarding presidential and parliamentary elections and state of emergency, and it contains a new chapter that degrees that a new constitution will be passed six months after parliamentary elections. The amendments do not touch the powers of the president in any way, leaving Mubarak’s elected successor with the same near-divine powers that Mubarak had. This solution was at first received with reserved optimism by the opposition, but after conferences by constitutional and legal experts in early March, the tone of most of the opposition soon changed into a largely unified rejection of the amendments, and a demand for an altogether new constitution now, before presidential and parliamentary elections. Three major players support the amendments, however, and they have a lot of influence: The old ruling National Democratic Party, The Muslim Brotherhood, and the Salafis. They have different reasons to do so. The National Democratic Party and all the folks of the old system hope to keep any change as limited as possible. The Muslim Brotherhood seems to partly trying to prove themselves as a reliable coalition partner towards the NDP, and partly trying to have the elections as soon as possible due to their vast advantage in organisation and outreach as compared to other political movements.

These are the options: A “Yes” means presidential elections in the summer, with a new president who has the same powers which Hosni Mubarak had, followed by parliamentary elections in September, and a new constitution to be drafted by the parliament. A “No” means that the Army will issue a temporary constitutional declaration that determines key points of how the country is to be governed in the transitional period, and a constitutional committee drafts a new constitution, which will be subject to a referendum before elections. For most Egyptians, the situation is confusing, because all arguments both for a “Yes” and a “No” vote argue with the need for a democratic constitution and political and social stability, and evoke the fear of a new dictatorship.

The schedule of the referendum is hasty to say the least, and it is clearly not very well planned - it seems to me the army did not even seriously consider the option of there being a major “No” campaign in the first place. State media are officially neutral, and a lot of effort is made to make the referendum transparent (international observers are allowed, a first in Egypt). But there is a lot of tacit campaigning by state media arguing for the need of the citizens to take their decisions slowly and carefully and not hastily. And there is a television campaign with the slogan “Yes to participation in the referendum”, which without being a “Yes” campaign, features the word “Yes” in a very suggestive way.

For the past week, there has been a huge amount of arguments against the amendments in the press and on the Internet. But on the streets, the “No” camp has been slow to emerge, and the Muslim Brotherhood and others have had plenty of time to cover much of Egypt with “Yes” posters, leaflets, and meetings. Only today has the situation changed, and in Cairo there are now plenty of “No” and “Yes” leaflets alike being distributed. In Alexandria, friends of mine were also organising a big leaflet campaign for a “No” vote. In the village, my friends held a public meeting on Wednesday, and are talking to people today and tomorrow. The problem of the “No” camp is that especially in Cairo much of their campaigning is still confined to a very limited geographic area. There is a geographic blindness due to the class society that makes the intellectual and political activists focus on particular areas of the city, and ignore many of the most populous and thus most important areas in the outskirts of the city.

This noon I went to see M. whom I hadn’t met after I had left for the countryside a week and a half ago. He was in a rather depressed mood because of the dominance of Islamist factions and the old system in the popular areas (like the one where he lives) and the social isolation of the intellectuals, to whom he belongs. He says: “You know, in a way I am tired of the revolution. In the past we just lived here, and we didn’t care because it wasn’t our country. Now that this is our country, I’m all the time worried about it.”

Y. whom I also met at noon was equally concerned about the containment of the “No” camp in relatively limited circles. He was also having an ongoing debate with his fiancee who was supporting the “Yes” vote. Her arguments were that we have already realised what we wanted; that we should take it slowly and not change everything at once; and that we cannot work with all the demonstrations going on and need to get back to normality. Y’s fiancée was at one of the Tahrir demonstrations herself, but her arguments are similar to those offered by people who weren’t participating in the revolution in the first place. Y: “Those of my colleagues who were against the revolution at first, and who wanted Hosni Mubarak to stay, are now all claiming the revolution for themselves, and they want to vote Yes in the name of the revolution which they were opposed to in the first place.” Now this is, of course, an analysis coloured by Y’s own commitment to support the “No” vote. But he has a point. All arguments are now made in the name of the revolution, while lots of Egyptians were sceptical of the revolution, and Egypt’s most important counter-revolutionary instance, the National Democratic Party, is running for the “Yes” vote.

However, this doesn’t mean that people who want to vote “Yes” would automatically support the old system. Y’s fiancée doesn’t - she is just hesitant about rapid change. A Taxi driver who took me to Sayyida Zaynab, an old popular area in the south of Cairo, argued emphatically for a Yes vote in the name of realising democracy. His argument (and it is an argument that follows the argumentation of the Muslim Brotherhood) is that the military government must give way to a civil government as soon as possible so that the situation can stabilise and the army can return to the barracks, the country has a democratically elected president and government, and then there is time to draft a new constitution. Many others, too, tend to vote “Yes” because of the promise of a quick return to normality and a new democratic constitution, combined with the fear of a military dictatorship.

Sheikh N. whom I met in Sayyida Zaynab, however, was strongly for a “No” vote: “The system has fallen, and so will the constitution fall.” His view, which is quite representative of the various arguments for a “No” vote is that the old constitution is a very bad one, a cornerstone of a dictatorship by giving the president practically unlimited powers. It is a dead body for which any treatment comes too late: It can only be buried. The “No” argument is that if Egypt is to be a democratic country, and if it is to have an orderly transition with a quick return to normality, a new and democratic constitution must be the first step, and amending the old constitution opens the door to a new dictatorship.

Th., a local real estate broker from the Sayyida Zaynab district, offered a third point of view. He is not going to vote at all, and he is telling his family not to vote either. He thinks that the revolution has brought Egypt nothing except additional crime and chaos, and that Egyptians are a hopelessly selfish and corrupt bunch: “Nothing will ever change in this country. They changed the president, and who is ruling the country now? The National Democratic Party, and the army. The old system, that is. It will be just like it always was, and we will be ruled by a bunch of thieves, the elections will be a show where you can earn 200 pounds by voting for the right candidate. I know it, I have seen them rigging the last elections with my own eyes. I have been abroad, and I have seen how things are elsewhere. In Italy, they have a respectable health insurance. I just had to pay several thousands for a heart operation that was supposed to be covered by the insurance. In Lebanon, you buy bread by the kilo and don’t have to queue for a dirty loaf like here. Those countries have civilised people and respectable governments, but it will never happen in Egypt.” Few months earlier, I would have taken Th.’s bitter cynicism as entirely normal, a realistic assessment of the way things really are. Today, it stands in a striking contrast with both the optimism of wide parts of the population, as well as the anxious worry of the activist revolutionaries. Sheikh N. who spent the revolution from 25 January until 11 February demonstrating, argues to Th. that things have already become a little better, and they will become a lot better, but it will take time. Th. won’t buy it. He knows how the system works, he plays his bitter and cynical part in it, and unfortunately, he is not entirely wrong. Corruption, side-businesses, shady deals, election-rigging, and police brutality will not simply disappear. They continue to be a part of Egypt also under conditions of democracy, and the best of expectations is that they will become less. This will be a major cause of frustration in the coming months and years. It may become so already on Saturday if there is major vote-rigging or violence against voters on the referendum day (with Egypt’s long history of spectacular election fraud, it is not out of the question, and there are already first reports about bribes and intimidation:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D9%85%D9%84%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D9%88%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%84%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%B6-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%B1-%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B3-%D9%A2%D9%A0%D9%A1%D9%A1/%D8%B4%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AA/117958388280111).

From al-Sayyida Zaynab I took the metro to the Opera grounds where a public meeting on the constitutional amendments headed by the novelist Alaa El-Aswany was going on since three hours. In the metro, there were a lot of leaflets, the bigger part arguing for a “Yes”, and many arguing for a “No”. Whoever got leaflets in their hands was carefully reading them. Most people still do not quite know what exactly the meaning of a “Yes” or “No” vote is, what the amendments are about, and what consequences they would have. There is a huge thirst for information.

At the public meeting, practically everybody present was going to vote “No”, and the debate was less about Yes or No, and more about developing the arguments for a “No” vote. Y. who was covering the event was discontent, because he wanted to see the people pass on leaflets all over the city rather than sitting in the Opera grounds. But during the meeting, leaflets were distributed in order to be photocopied and spread. Y. got two different ones, one which he found unhelpful, only convincing towards those who already know that they want to say No, and another one detailing the specific problems of the amendments, and suggested solutions. He took that leaflet along with him on the way home, and later when I called him he told that he had joined another man in support of a “No”-vote and gotten a group of people involved in a debate. They were at first for a “Yes” vote, and rather than opposing them Y. offered them his analysis of what that would in practice mean. Their first reaction was confusion because they had thought that they knew what to vote, and finally they were convinced that their vote shall be a “No”. Indeed there are a lot of people around who are undecided, or will vote “Yes” just because it seems more commonsensical. In this situation where people want to make an informed decision but feel that they lack information, the argumentative strategy of analysing the situation employed by Y. makes a good impression.

In the taxi on the way back to the apartment where I’m staying, the taxi driver found the whole business with the referendum confusing. On his dashboard he had a “Yes” leaflet that had been passed on by someone on the street, and as we drove through the city, someone gave us a “No” leaflet. He had no idea what to vote. I said to him: “Well, You can read these two and make up your mind. It’s the first time they are asking your opinion.” The confusion of being asked to make a decision about such a complex matter as a constitution is not just due to a shortage of knowledge. It is an altogether new experience in a country where elections and referendums have been nothing more than a show in the past decades. For the first time, people actually are expected to make an informed decision. Right now it seems that the better informed people are the more likely they are to vote “No” (which is not to deny that there are a lot of people who are making the well informed decision to vote “Yes”, but they seem to be relatively fewer) . The referendum is on Saturday, and it is a race against the clock.

Greetings from the Egyptian revolution!

Samuli

Among the left wing, or the dark side of military rule

2011-03-17T00:10:00.007+01:00

(This note is from Wednesday 16 March but it was posted after midnight)

This was a day which I spent almost entirely with people from the intellectual left wing scene of downtown Cairo, heavily involved in the revolution, and much more worried about its success than most Egyptians.

Today was the birthday party of Aly Subhy who had been detained on Tahrir Square on 9 March and released four days later thanks to a campaign for him on the internet and by human rights lawyers. This evening his friends threw him a party in the roof terrace of a small hotel in downtown Cairo, a regular meeting place of left wing activists. He received a hero’s welcome, and everybody was very happy to see him, and yet the party was a little subdued in mood. Too many people are still detained, more were detained today, and the discussions circled around that, and the problematic role of the army. Aly himself was marked by the experience. There was a kind of sadness to him that I hadn’t seen in him before. He told that when he was arrested he was heavily beaten in a haphazard fashion - not in order to press a confession, but just as an act of brutality. It was so bad that he started to recite the Muslim creed, expecting to die in that very moment. But he lived, and he says that the experience did not break either him or any of the others who were with him. “Everybody who got out, got out stronger in heart and commitment.” Here is his full account in English translation: http://www.facebook.com/notes/wiam-el-tamami/my-testimony-by-aly-sobhy/10150167640300348

In the afternoon., before I went to Aly’s party I met E., an outspoken feminist and human rights activist. She was in a worried and pessimistic mood, especially because of the number of people who have been arrested since 9 March. Some have been released, others remain detained, and there are new detainments. Most recently today: After a press conference about the role of the military in arresting and torturing demonstrators, a small number of people went to demonstrate in front of the Egyptian Museum that not only houses Egypt’s Pharaonic antiquities, but also a detainment centre in the basements. Most people who were detained in Tahrir Square were first held there. Predictably, a number of the people demonstrating in front of this place were arrested. This development makes E. very anxious these days. A feminist activist, she has put an enormous effort into the revolution. After Mubarak was ousted, she was collecting names of women who were killed in the revolution. But she says: This time I felt that I shouldn’t care only about women, but everybody who was killed, women and men. for several weeks after 11 February, she and a group of others ran a call centre for people injured in the revolution. While doing this, they also received information about people killed, and she says that the real number of people killed is much higher than the official figure of 365. In Cairo alone - the are where they were working - they got a list of more than 600 names. Then, two weeks ago, the database was stolen. She has been unable to retrieve it, and she says that she has also encountered quite some fear among some of the people who were working with her. Also with the new age of freedom, lots of people are afraid, and not entirely without reason, as the recent wave of detainments shows. At the moment, E. is busy with two things: Running a campaign in Ismailiya where she studies to vote “No” in the referendum on constitutional amendments, and collecting information on the people detained and trying to reach people within the army. The problem with the army, she says, that it is split within. There are very respectable people in the army who support her work, and there are others who would rather like to see the Mubarak era continue, only without Mubarak. This creates strange and terrible contradictions, she says. On the one hand, military police is arresting and torturing demonstrators apparently quite randomly. On the other hand, she has met with high-ranking generals supporting her cause, to hand them documents about the detained people.

Among the human rights activists and the intellectual left, the new Egypt appears as a rather sinister place at the moment, and the grave human rights violations involved in mass arrests and military trials are the most striking case in point. Today, a press conference was held at the Press Syndicate in Cairo to discuss the human rights violations by the army. It was mostly attended by foreign press and human rights activists - the Arabic language press remains silent on the issue for contradictory reasons. (There is a strong sense among many that the alliance of the revolution with the army is a necessary and tactical one, and that the dark side of the military rule needs to remain uncovered for a while because revealing it would create a fear and distrust towards the army that would be destructive and counterproductive.) The demand of the activists at the press conference was not just that demonstrators detained by the army should be released, but that there should be an end to military tribunals on civilians altogether. Also thugs deserve a fair process in a civilian court.

My friend. is now beginning a campaign for Muhammad Ezzat Abdallah Khalifa, also known as Muhammad Israili, a street kid in his teens who was detained at the same time with Aly and whom Aly met in the prison. He has been participating in artistic activities organised by Aly and J., and everybody considers him an extraordinary person of great potential. But with his background as a street kid, he has a difficult stance. He is not a known artist or activist for whom it is easy to run a campaign, and he doesn’t come from a good family that could help him. People from poor backgrounds have the toughest time in military courts, and need most help. Right now J. is trying to trace Muhammad’s birth certificate because if he is under 18 he has the good chance of getting away with a suspended one-year sentence. But if he is over 18, things will be very difficult for him. Here is more information: http://www.facebook.com/notes/jakob-lindfors/1632011-1250-am-stories-of-detention/10150122332099228

There is much talk in downtown Cairo now about Muslim Brothers, who many in the left feel have betrayed the revolution by their “Yes” campaign. The old fear of the Islamists among the secular end of the political spectrum is emerging again, and not without a reason. Some people like E. are more worried about it, and others, like Sh., a teacher and part-time actor from a poor background, less so. He says that there is too much distrust towards the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, no matter how well organised they are. My bet is that in the coming elections, Islamic parties and candidates will dominate, not because Egyptians would necessarily have strong Islamist sympathies, but because they want an honest and God-fearing government, and the Muslim Brotherhood is most capable of offering that promise to a wide audience at the moment - unless, of course, the nationalist and leftist groups manage to mobilise enough people to vote for a God-fearing and honest government more focussed on issues of economical and social justice and less on a religious agenda. A programme focussing on economical equality and social justice has the potential of gaining a lot of support in Egypt, but it requires successful mobilisation. We shall see. But whatever the outcome will be, I think about the key demand of the demonstrators before 11 February: We don’t care who governs us, but how we are governed. My concern about the Muslim Brotherhood is not that they are fundamentalist conservatives. If the people of Egypt want a fundamentalist conservative government, it is their right in a democratic system. My concern is that the Muslim Brothers have become deeply entrenched in the system in the past years, and that they will not solve the problem of corruption and economical exploitation that originally took the people in the streets. Then the issue that matters is that Egypt will have a robust democratic system that will allow for electing a different government four years later. After all, that’s what a democracy is for: circulation of power.

E., and like her many of the left wing intellectual scene who frequent downtown Cairo, is very aware and worried about the current power of the Muslim Brotherhood and elements of the National Democratic Party to reach a wide audience in a way the downtown intellectuals who played an important role in the initial stages of the revolution do not. “When we were on Tahrir Square and we were attacked by the thugs, the people on the front line defending us were Muslim Brothers. They worked in shifts and were very organised and experienced in a way we are not.” She is hardly in downtown Cairo these days, precisely because she sees that there is much more to be done in Ismailiya. But she is aware of the unequal power of different political movements when it comes to reaching a wide audience. This shows very clearly now that the Muslim Brotherhood have declared their support for a “Yes” vote in the referendum. The Muslim Brotherhood has the activists, the money and the experience to run a big public campaign around the country, and at the moment they are campaigning big time for a “Yes” vote in an unholy alliance with the National Democratic Party which campaigns for a “Yes” as well, however with leaflets that do not reveal who stands behind them - the NDP does not have a particularly good reputation these days. This is a move by the Muslim Brothers clearly aimed at proving that they are a reliable coalition partner - a move which stands in a decades old tradition of the Muslim Brothers trying to gain power indirectly rather than directly. Among the left wing and other revolutionaries, this raises the concern that after the elections we may see a coalition of the National Democratic Party and the Brotherhood ruling the country, which would certainly be a highly problematic scenario. But probably it is also because the Brotherhood would profit from early elections as long as its competitors do not yet have the same outreach across the country.

And this is indeed a key problem which E. and many other people from the leftist intellectual scene whom I met today: Influential as it has been in the early stage of the revolution, and influential as it remains in the media, the intellectual left has little outreach in the popular districts and in the countryside, and also much less money. And there is the problem that much of the supporters of the revolution spread their views on Facebook, which is only accessible to a small percentage of Egyptians. There are way more “Yes” leaflets than there are “No” leaflets being distributed in the streets these days, and leaflets reach a lot more people than the Internet. My gut feeling is that the heavy leaflet and media campaign for a “Yes” these days from different directions is likely to make the referendum end with a majority vote for a “Yes”. But the result is still open, and my gut feeling may still turn out to be wrong. No matter what the outcome of the constitutional referendum, it is already now a lesson to the activists of a Facebook revolution: Revolutions may be mobilised partly over social media, but referendums and elections are won and lost in the popular districts, the provincial towns, and the countryside. If Egyptians will vote “No” they will do it not because of Facebook but because they simply think that a new Egypt needs a new constitution now.

E. continues to work hard for the sake of political mobilisation and for the sake of the people detained. She has decided to delay a planned trip abroad in the spring because she thinks that her place is here. But anxiety and worry are her strongest feelings at the moment. And this is the atmosphere among many of the left wing activists (most of them weren’t activists before, but they have become so in the course of the revolution), who are much more pessimistic about the situation than most Egyptians. Unlike the majority of the population, they face and know the dark side of the military government. And after the revolutionary coalition to bring down Mubarak has ended and different groups now run their own programmes, their comparable weakness becomes evident. Some are drawing the consequences and starting to work to spread their version of political consciousness across the country. It is a difficult task, but those who are seriously about pursuing it, are also the ones spreading most optimism to me (no way I could be an impartial observer these days - I certainly hope that the intellectual left’s vision of new Egypt will play a significant role in the coming months and years). The most optimistic was Sh.. He is less worried because of the positive energy he sees among the ordinary Egyptians. At the school where he works, glossy leaflets were spread for the sake of a “Yes” vote, and at first people agreed, then one female teacher started arguing against it, and eventually convinced the teachers about a “No” vote. People change their minds easily, Sh. says, but what is important that they all talk about politics, and that in itself creates an enormous political consciousness.

As so often, I end this day with this contradictory note. On the one hand, there is a serious campaign against a part of the revolutionary movement by the military government or parts of it, causing among them a serious sense of crisis and fear. On the other hand, there is an enormous degree of political consciousness and debate. In a shop to buy food, I witnessed a discussion between a customer and an owner. The customer was concerned that there was a rumour that some questionable figure of the NDP was going to run for presidency. The owner: “Why not? If there are respectable and clean elections, it doesn’t matter if whoever runs. It’s not like in the old elections for Mubarak when the dead would rise from the grave, vote for the president and go back to the grave again (the lists of people eligible to vote were full of names of people long time dead). If we have really free and respectable election, a belly dancer can run for presidency, but you can vote for the one you want and it matters. And when we get a respectable president, then we will also take care of the army, because now nobody is talking about how many millions they have been earning, and what they have been doing under Mubarak. But their time will come, too.”

Greetings from the Egyptian revolution!

Samuli

In transition, where to?

2011-03-15T16:03:00.000+01:00

The last few days in Egypt have been marked by a move from revolutionary tension to a rather contradictory normality and entirely new issues and problems. The question now is: How to change the society, and in which direction? The views go far apart.

What to write?

On Saturday 12 March I met in a little bookstore in Alexandria with a group of young literates and literature enthusiasts to discuss the motivations to write. It turned into a discussion about the shared concern of all the people present: how writing can change the world.

Next autumn, I plan to come to Egypt for a new fieldwork to do research with people who write - poetry, short stories, blogs, novels, social satire. It is a project still in the stage of early development about writing itself as a social and imaginative practice, about its significance as a daily practice and the relations young beginning writers build through their writing. One of the people with whom I have been discussing the theme previously is Z., a female schoolteacher from alexandria who also writes short prose. She offered to organise a meeting with some of her friends who are also interested in literature, and on Saturday noon we met in a small bookstore near the university. Not surprisingly, the revolution was in everybody’s mind, but rather than talking about the events of the revolution itself, we discussed at length the question how writing can change the world, and what one can write about now. There has been a flood of books critically describing the social situation in Egypt in the past years, most notably in the form of a new genre of social satire, and of best-seller novels like those by Alaa El-Aswany. These books are often written in accessible style and many literates look down at them (Aswany is not considered much of a novelist on the high standards of Arab literary critique), but they have contributed to a great increase in readership and publication. To make a long story short: social critique has been a key theme of writing in the past years, and this puts these young writes into a position where on the one hand what they do is extremely relevant, but on the other hand they have to reposition themselves.

Amr Izzeddin who has written three collections of social satire says that right now he faces the problem that he will have reorient. He has been critiquing the system in its everyday implications, but now he wants to find ways to build. Islam Musbah who has written two novels, the first one of them about a violent and bloody revolution in Egypt, says that “the revolution has stopped the market for my writing. Now I don’t know what to write.” Shamei Asaad has published a book based on a blog, with the aim of making the everyday life of Christians known to Muslims who often know very little about Christians. His focus is on the details and relations of daily life, and since the issue of Muslim-Christian relations is now more urgent than ever, he has enough stuff to write about. Husam Adil, a student who had written a collection of short stories that focus on the little interactions of daily life, tries to offer moments of constructive moral critique. Mukhtar Shehata has published one novel and has another one as a manuscript, but after the revolution began he has postponed finishing the manuscript, and is looking for entirely different media to express his concerns.

The original question of the motivations, grounds and experience of writing remains marginal in the discussion, which is about changing the world. The agreement is that any writer wants to change the world even if only to a limited extent. But a writer first of all changes her- or himself. The question is, how. What most of the people in the circle share is the look at everyday social relationships rather than the big picture or dramatic events, in Shamei’s words: “changing things from the base and not from the top.” Relate this to the way the Egyptian revolution emerged: as a popular movement with no charismatic leadership. It was a revolution directed against the top of the system, but its movement was bottom-up. Relate this to the way the change in expectations and moods precedes and is a condition of institutional change. These writers are from different angles touching upon a key moment, but at the same time their own uncertainty as to what to write now shows how open the situation is. As the revolution is turning into a period of transition, the question is, where to? Revolutions often bring forth strong transformations of literary and artistic production, and I’m curious to see what kind of answers to that question young writers will be providing in the next years.

Remembering the dead

On the evening of Saturday 12 March the good news reached me that Aly Subhy and three others held by the military had been declared innocent and released. This made my spirits rise greatly, although the destiny of a great number of others detained remains open. For the first time since a few nights I slept well.

In the past two days, I have for the first time heard detailed accounts about the events in Alexandria on the Friday of Anger on 28 January, the day when the police force tried to violently crush the protest, and hundreds were killed all around Egypt. D. tells that when he returned to his home in central Alexandria, he saw the entire waterfront marked by fires and smoke in an apocalyptic scene that looked more like war footage from Iraq than anything he had known in Egypt. S. finally comes up with his memories of the Friday of Anger. On that day he told his wife that he is going to work, but instead he joined a demonstration, lead by local Muslim Brotherhood activists, moving along the seafront and gathering more people, until they faced a row of police in Sidi Bishr, which forced them to move to the side streets where they found another row of police attacking them with tear gas and hitting them with iron rods with peaces of concrete on them taken from a nearby construction site. A young man, named Khalid, was hit on his breast by a teargas cartridge from three metres distance. S. and three others took him away from the scene and to take him into a mosque nearby. It was a Salafi mosque run by people who S. - who himself had been attracted by Salafism for some years - knew. The sheikh of the mosque refused to let the critically wounded man in, locked the door, and made clear that he was in favour of the police attacking the demonstrators. Khalid died. S. was hurt on his foot and shoulder by an iron rod, and was carried from the scene by other protesters. Only after a couple of hours did his injured foot carry him enough to return home, without telling his wife or anybody else what he had been through.

My friend R. was in Agami in western Alexandria on 28 January, and arrived on the scene of demonstrations only in the afternoon, after four people had been killed and the police station had already been set in fire. With no television in his apartment, and internet and mobile phones cut off, he had no idea of what was going on, and when he found out what was going on, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Increasing numbers of people were on the streets facing the police, four police trucks were set in fire. After a while the police retreated, R. joined the demonstrators who were waiting for the police to come back, ready to die. But the police didn’t return. R. Describes the contradictory feeling: “I felt that after we had been so long being treated like chickens, Egypt will be a paradise tomorrow. But at the same time I asked: Why burn the police station? It will be rebuilt with our money.” He, too, saw scenes of violence which he had never before seen, and which still trouble him. He saw a man’s hand get broken very badly, and says that it was as if he himself was hit.

Egyptians have every reason to be proud of their peaceful revolution, especially when compared with the terrible and brutal violence which popular uprisings face around the Arab world right now. In most Arab countries, the iron hand of what the West has gotten accustomed to calling “moderate Arab states” is crushing demonstrations without mercy (and I’m not talking about Libya but Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iraq, Bahrain). But the terrible death toll of 28 January reminds me that also the Egyptian revolution only became peaceful after an attempt by the government to turn in into a bloodbath. Along the Corniche in Alexandria there are photos of martyrs of the revolution - there are altogether 83 of them in Alexandria. In central Alexandria there is a temporary monument guarded by volunteers, with a list of the names of everybody who was killed during the revolution around Egypt. Yesterday night I read on the internet about the brother of L whom I met on the plane to Cairo on 31 January. She was travelling to Egypt to search for his brother Ziyad Bakry who was missing since 28 February. On Friday the news reached me that his body was found on 10 March in a mortuary where is body had remained unrecognised for more than a month. He had been shot twice in the head on the night of 28 February. I have a heavy heart when I think about these people, most of them very young, who had to die because of a regime that had the arrogance to shoot at its citizens because they wanted to be treated with respect and dignity.

As Egypt remembers the martyrs of the revolution these days, it is rather oblivious of other things. While the bigger part of the population is enjoying the pleasure of freedom and new hope, steps have been taken that clearly aim at silencing the most active parts of the revolutionary movement. As the military government is releasing political prisoners who were detained for years, it is at the same time detaining activists of Egypt’s peaceful revolution in downtown Cairo. Not only do many people detained earlier remain in custody, but on Friday 11 March several more people were arrested in downtown Cairo, this time in an action more evidently targeting activists. Twelve names of people detained have been confirmed, and there are others detained whose names are not known yet. There is no information about their whereabouts. A lot of people here do not want to believe that the army could be involved in detaining and torturing peaceful protesters. While some people I have met see the alliance of the revolution with the army as a purely tactical one determined by necessity, and have no illusions about the army being a morally superior instance, others hold tight to the slogan that the people and the army hold together, and do not want to consider that this may not be the whole story.

So much has been made possible, so much has been changed, but the success has been partial, and the price has been terrible.

What to build?

Revolutions are a tricky business. They take place in moments when a gradual change is made impossible, and the only way out is to overthrow the system in order to break out of the stalled situation. Because of this, revolutions initially break more than they build. That is what they are good for: breaking the “knot of fear” of the citizens towards the government, breaking the power of the system, breaking the narrow closed circle to which people’s action was limited. By breaking the narrow circle, people undertaking a revolution are able to open up a new world of possibilities, and the immediate act of going out and saying “No”, the revolution has created in those people an enormous sense of empowerment and a completely different outlook on what they can do. But what exactly can one do? What will Egypt`s future look like? Key issues these days are economy, religion, and the constitution - and from a more long-term perspective, the expectation of a deeper social change.

On Sunday I took it easy in the morning until in the afternoon S. and I took the minibus to downtown Alexandria. On the way, we looked at all the wall paintings and graffiti along the seaside, some of them spontaneous writing on the wall, some sponsored wall paitings celebrating patriotism and the revolution, some banners sponsored by local businessmen in the style of the old Mubarak age, welcoming the police back in the streets, some political slogans of different colouring. S. tells me how these streets looked like in the days of the mass protests, before the campaign to paint everything in red white and black began after 11 February. Months before the revolution somebody had sprayed a verse of poetry by Amal Dunqul all over the corniche: “Don’t dream of a better world / after every dead emperor comes a new emperor”, a verse in a striking way expressing the political sensibility of the past years. As the demonstrations began, spontaneous graffiti with slogans such as “down with the system”, “down with the tyrant”, “no to Mubarak” rapidly spread all over the city. Some were painted over by Mubarak’s supporters, some were covered by the new wall paintings that spread after the revolution. In side streets they can still be spotted. At the site of a demolished building in central Alexandria there is a large graffiti saying: “demolition order of the system by the people of Egypt, in force by 25/1/2011” There are numerous shops that have spontaneusly changed their names into “Revolution market”, “Martyrs café”, “25 January jeans”, etc., usually employing the colours of the national flag which are all over the place these days. But there is also an emerging wave of stickers that do not employ the national colours. These are stickers by the Salafis who have started a big campaign for Egypt to be an Islamic state. And as one moves out of the city centre, they get more and more numerous.

From central Alexandria I continued to Agami, an area in the far West of Alexandria where I met my friends R. and Y. Like most of Alexandria, Agami is split into a wealthy seaside and a poor inland area. The part where R and Y (they are brothers) live belongs to the poor inland side, at the border between a 1970's government housing area known as Masakin Siniya (Chinese Housing, called so because it was built as a cooperation project with China), and a hillside owned by Bedouins who are the original inhabitants of the area. R. and Y. have put together the family savings and built a small house there. Other houses are being built right now - while Egypt’s economy has otherwise come to quite a standstill due to the revolution, construction is running well. In the absence of police and government inspectors one can build for half the price because there are no bribes to be paid. I’m curious about what happens when they come back.

Half as a joke, half seriously Y. explains to me that a major contributing reason to the revolution was a severe shortage of hashish. A few months ago, a major drug dealer who until then had closely collaborated with the police got into disfavour with the ministry of interior after a police officer was shot dead by drug dealers. In result, the police who until then had covered him, closed the supply of hashish, and for a few months, it was exceedingly difficult to buy hashish. Y: You know how people live in Egypt: They get up, they go to work, they go shopping, they come home, they eat, and in the evening they get stoned. When the supply of hashish was cut, they couldn’t take it anymore.” Ever since the revolution began there has been good supply of hashish again, however.

R. and Y. were of quite different minds as to whether they should be optimistic or pessimistic these days. R. told that he had been really happy all the time until the past few days, when he had started to feel that the army wasn’t much of an expert in managing the country, and that many things will not change, that there will still be bribes to be paid and politicians stealing the people. Y., in contrast, was rather optimistic. He had just been in central Alexandria to meet a girl in the university institute where he had studied. The students were holding a demonstration demanding, among other things, that the student union should be dissolved. In Y’s view things were in movement, even though there was in his view still much too little political consciousness among the people.

R’s sense of disillusionment is related to the general shift in the situation from a revolutionary state with enormous emotional intensity and rapidly changing news to a period of consolidation and transition that is marked by less dramatic but more contradictory developments. Egypt has changed, but not in every respect. People can demonstrate freely, but demonstrations are sometimes forcibly removed and people arrested - most recently today when the army removed a week-long demonstration mainly by Christians in front of the television centre. The police returns to the streets in Alexandria in a mixture of watchful control and discussion on the one hand, and sponsored banners greeting them exactly in the way banners were used to celebrate the government in the days of Mubarak, on the other. There are huge question marks about Egypt’s future and much discussion about where to go from here. One of the most urgent ones regards the Salafi movement, that promotes an extremely rigid reading of Islam as the total way of life to solve all problems.

In the Chinese Housing, there was a public meeting organised by the Salafis who are very strong in this area. Y., R. and I went to see them but arrived too late, finding them already packing the tent where the meeting with the title “Values and Concepts” had been held. But the Salafis, most of them from the area, had left behind a huge supply of stickers which were now decorating half of the shops in the area, in glittering green, declaring: “Life is transient, everything is transient, only our Islam is solid: Don’t touch the article 2. of the constitution,” “Islam is religion and state: Don’t touch the article 2. of the constitution,” “The law of God and not the law of tyrants: Don’t touch the article 2. of the constitution.” (The article 2. of the constitution states that Islam is the religion of the state and that Islamic law is the source of positive law.) These and similar posters with slogans such as “Islamic Egypt” or “Separating religion and politics is the shortest way to unbelief” are present all over Alexandria, but in the West of Alexandria they dominate. Unlike on the Corniche, there is little in terms of any competing discourse in the posters and wall writings, except for that of the Muslim Brotherhood that uses slogans that are less divisive, calling people to build their country and overcome corruption in a common effort.

Alexandria is the most important centre of Islamist movements in Egypt, and both the Salafis and the Muslim brotherhood enjoy more support and have a stronger social base here than anywhere else in Egypt. And they are at their strongest in the eastern and western outskirts of the city. The Muslim Brotherhood is a bunch of experienced politicians cleverly searching for influence in a way that unites rather than confronts. The Salafis are pursuing a very different, much more radical and divisive path. Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood which is quite credibly committed to democracy, the Salafis want to establish an Islamic emirate, and they go for radical and wholesale demands of subjecting Egypt under a very rigid moral regime of a very strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Right now, the Salafis are emerging as the surprise player of the beginning transition. Before the revolution they presented themselves as an unpolitical piety movement exclusively concerned with disciplining oneself, one’s wife and one’s children to a dedicated life for God only. Now it turns out that they were doing this in part of an agreement with Egypt’s secret police that allowed them to spread their message (and by doing so limit the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood) on the condition of staying away from politics. They fulfilled their part of the deal very faithfully, and during the mass protests they were busy telling that protesting against the ruler is forbidden to Muslims. But after the fall of the Mubarak and the suspension of the State Security, the Salafis are developing extremely quickly from a piety movement into a political one.

In the west of Alexandria, one can thus hardly avoid discussing the issue of the Salafis and an Islamic state. R. and Y. are both very critical of the Salafis. R. was himself a Salafi for a year, and used to have a lot of respect for the Salafi interpretation of Islam, but now he is very concerned. He thinks that the Salafis have had an agenda all the time which they now publicly speak out. Y. and R. think that the Salafis will not be able to gain a political majority even in Alexandria because they are too rigid and radical. Most Muslims here respect them as religious people who know Islam (“knowledge” in the sense of textbook knowledge of facts has become the key mode of religiosity in Egypt in the past decades), but wouldn’t want to go as far as the Salafis would. But while the radicalism of the Salafis is not shared by most people, they are very successful in claiming to speak in not in the name of their particular ideology, but of religion as such. This gives them an argumentative advantage which showed in the way R. and Y. struggled with the theme of Islamic state. I. is a man of a very secularist views for Egyptian standards, and likes to draw anything in question and to play with ideas. He challenges R. to say what exactly is wrong with the call for an Islamic state: “I as a Muslim should live according to the commandments of Islam, and therefore an ideal state must be an Islamic one that applies the law of God, which He has wisely designed for our best.” R. tries to slip away from the question of saying yes or no to an Islamic state, but eventually he says: “Yes, as a Muslim I am for an Islamic State, but it cannot be forced upon us at once. It should to happen step by step, and it should come from the people themselves and not be forced upon themselves. Otherwise we will all end up walking with our finger bound to our foot (an expression of being forcibly constrained).” Critical of the Salafis and also of the Muslim brothers as they are, R. and Y. nevertheless find it hard to disagree with the idea of an Islamic state. If Islam stands for the good and for justice, how can you deny the idea of a good and just state? At the same time, Y. is a determined supporter of a secular constitution. He wants to abolish article 2 of the constitution: “If the majority of the people want it, then that’s fine, that’s democracy. But I’m against it because it forces a religion upon the people.”

On Monday, as I met D. in his office at the leftist cultural centre, I shared with him my concern about the Salafis who seem to be quite uncontested in the poorer areas of Alexandria. He is less worried because while Alexandria has a strong base of Salafis, most people dislike them because of their rigidity and also because of their collaboration with the secret police. But there is a problem of political consciousness, he agrees, and much too few people still have a proper understanding of what a constitution is about, what democracy is about, etc. Less visible than the Salafis with their stickers, a movement of intellectuals and artists is running a campaign of their own, going to cafes in groups of three and taking up discussions and getting the people involved. But at the moment, their capability of mobilisation remains limited in comparison. In any case, says D., the main issue right now is the referendum about constitutional amendments, backed mainly by elements of the old system and by the Muslim Brotherhood (clearly eager to negotiate a good position in a future government), and opposed by most of the opposition, including all presidential candidates. The referendum, D. says, will be an indication of the popular opinion regarding the parliamentary elections that are due in September. If the majority vote in the referendum is Yes, we can expect a dominance of elements of the National Democratic Party and the Muslim Brothers in the next parliament. If it is No, then we can expect a dominance of other parties and of revolutionary movements not yet organised as parties. “But anyway the issue is not who is going to govern us in the next years,” says D., “and if it is the Muslim Brothers. What matters is that we build a democratic system, and after one term we can get the Muslim Brothers out of the government again.”

As I arrived yesterday for a short visit in a village in central Nile Delta, I encountered two different ways to think about the current situation, quite marked by a generational difference in my host family. As we watch the news about new legal steps against former president Hosni Mubarak, the mother starts a discussion about all the money that was stolen from the people, how to get it back, how the people had to pay too much for food and had too little money under Mubarak. Right now the price for meat has gone down, and the story goes that it is because there is lots of gazelle and ostrich meat derived from a farm owned by Gamal Mubarak that was serving his private receptions. This is a way to talk about revolutionary transition that is highly personified: it is about catching the thieves and getting our money back. Her daughter T. shares the concern with getting the money back, but has other concerns, too. She is also busy with the question what kind of a country Egypt shall be in the future, by what kind of laws it shall be governed, and what kind of freedom will people gain. She has been talking about the constitutional referendum with her brother and asks me for my opinion. Rather than my opinion, I give her my understanding of the arguments for either a “no” or a “yes” vote. T. says: “That’s how I understood it, too. I will vote No. Since we have had a revolution and we want to change things, let’s change them properly.” T. asks me whether the article two of the constitution is also subject to the referendum, and I say no, it isn’t. She says: “Anyway, I’m against Article 2. The constitution shouldn’t force a religion on people. And the Christians must be able to feel that this is their country, too.”

But more than constitution, T.’s concern is with freedom: “With the freedom that we have gained with the revolution, are we now really free to say what is in our mind, or are our minds still chained? In our Oriental society (mugtama‘ sharqi) we keep so much to ourselves and don’t talk about it. Shortly before the revolution I was with my brother in Cairo and spoke long about it with him. Why is it that he can call a girlfriend on the phone and I can know it, but if I have a male friend, even if there is no romance in it, I have to hide it from him?” For her, more important than the change of political system is a change in the relationship between men and women, a freedom to express one’s feelings and concerns and to build social relationships without having to expect stupid comments. Hers is a point of view that is at once a conservative one, grounded on ideas of religiosity, marriage, and family which she by no means questions, and a radical one with its demand that freedom is not just political freedom, but a freedom of the heart.

Egypt’s revolution is a politically radical but a socially conservative one. There are far-reaching demands regarding the rule of law, accountability, parliamentary rule, and more. Issues of gender and family relations are discussed much less, and the prominent role of Islamist movements in the religion means also a prominence of conservative gender ideals. And yet while it is clear that the new Egypt will have quite an Islamic and socially conservative colouring, albeit a democratic one, under the surface the revolution has brought up issues of the intimate relationships between people. This will be the slow social revolution that Egypt is likely to experience in the coming twenty to thirty years. It is unlikely, however, that it will lead to western style liberalism. Egypt and other Arab societies in transition may be up to something of their own making, as T. pointed out: “Now we can build our country anew, and we don’t have to look abroad for models. We can do it the way that suits us.”

As Dr. Saad Kamel argued to me last week, patriarchal authority is in crisis. But it is kicking back hard, and we do not know what will replace it. In any case, the social transformation of intimate family and gender relations will be one of Egypt’s key social conflicts in the coming decades. But it will be inherently linked with economical developments, and neither the revolution nor what will follow after it can be understood without taking into account the neoliberal intertwinement of economy and politics. The social conservatism of the Islamic revival that marks Egypt since the 1970's is not by coincidence a contemporary of neoliberal governance in Egypt. There is a link between the two, as religion has emerged as the key site for moral certainty in a society where social relationships are turned increasingly into economical, amoral ones.

On Sunday evening I met with G., a leftist independent artist who was preparing to leave to Jordan to run a workshop where she had been also during most of the revolution. She was in a rather pessimistic mood because she felt that while there has been some real political gain, the key problem of the neo-liberal system of economy and politics is much more difficult to change: “If we have just political change but no economical change we remain turning around in the same closed circle, and the problem is that that’s what the west wants, too.” Shocked by the earthquake in Japan and the nuclear disaster that followed, she is also concerned about environmental issues which hardly anybody in Egypt is speaking about at the moment. G. was in Jordan during the revolution where she was of course very emotionally involved. But she also says that she didn’t need the revolution for herself: “I’m already free. I have liberated myself long ago. I’m a revolutionary since twenty years. To whom this revolution matters are all those people who had no sense of hope, felt that the world was closed on them and cursed that they were born.” The question, she says, is how long it will take for this revolution to turn into substantial social change. The revolution of 25 January emerged from a sense of frustration and anger about the relationship of the citizens and the state. It was not immediately directed at social relationships such as age gender relations, family, class, etc. But with the effect it has had on the young people who took part in it, G. thinks, it will bring about more fundamental changes, but it will take time, decades at least.

As I write these lines on the train to Cairo, I realise how limited the selection of people is with whom I have spoken in the past week and a half. Most of them expect a lot from the revolution, they look forward to a far-reaching political and social change. While the opinions go apart as to how to reach this change, and what its content should be, I have not heard many people who would want things to stay as they were. Almost everybody I have met in the last days is very much in favour of revolution and democracy, busy learning what that means in practice, and often also demanding Egypt to be a religiously neutral state while having strong religious convictions. I wonder if it is because I have unknowingly systematically selected rather open-minded people as friends and contacts across social and regional limits, so that I get a very partial image of what is going on? Or is it that despite the good organisation and big poster campaigns of the Muslim brothers and the Salafis, and the attempts of the old system to ride the wave of revolution in order to limit its extent, there really are a lot of Egyptians who don’t buy any of that anymore, and search for new ways?

Greetings from the Egyptian revolution!

Samuli

Consolidation, for better and for worse

2011-03-12T01:44:00.003+01:00

(This post is from Friday 11 March, but it was posted after midnight)

Today I left the village for Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city, and one of the most intense sites of demonstrations during the revolution. During the great demonstrations in late January and early February the number of demonstrators of Alexandria was as much or even more than in Cairo, which is four times larger than Alexandria. In Alexandria, things have also taken longer to calm down, there has been especially much fear of crime, and a return to normality has taken longer. Schools opened in most of Egypt this week, but in Alexandria they will remain closed for another week. But tonight the shopping streets were busy and Fathallah shopping mall in Muntazah district where I am staying was packed with people. The storefront is still covered with a temporary brick wall after the windows were broken on the night of 28 January, but the shops are all open.

As normality is returning to Alexandria and the police is returning to the streets amidst a strong sympathy campaign by state media, they receive a somewhat contradictory welcome. After a period of strong fear of crime the presence of the police is welcomed, but this welcome is conditional on humane behaviour of the police. S’s landlord whom we met in Fathallah mall showed a particularly ambiguous attitude. On the one hand he told that he himself helped a police officer to restore his authority towards minibus drivers who treated him with lack of respect that is due to the officer of law. On the other hand he was proudly showing everybody a mobile phone video showing how inhabitants of a nearby district displayed on a pickup truck the bound and heavily injured police officer involved in the killing of protesters who he had been caught three days ago by the inhabitants of a poor neighbourhood, and beaten up badly, possibly killed.

Everybody who has something to say in Alexandria these days writes it on the wall: Death penalty for armed robbery, Revolution accomplished, Revolution continues, Unity of Christians and Muslims, Make Egypt an Islamic state, We are all Egyptians, Let’s respect each others, Don’t forget the Martyrs of the revolution.... In Alexandria, a stronghold of the Salafis, there are remarkably many stickers demanding an Islamic state especially on the side streets, while the seaside Corniche road is marked by large wall paintings (made by volunteers and sponsored by the local administration and an advertisement agency) celebrating the revolution. It is a wild mixture of spontaneous expressions, political and religious movements pressing for their point of view, and the army and local administration riding the wave of the revolution to consolidate their power.

This is a moment when everybody speaks in the name of the revolution, but with very different aims. On Facebook, revolutionary activists campaign to release the people arrested the protesters who were arrested on Tahrir Square on Wednesday. The state-owned newspaper al-Gumhuriya, the most faithful voice of the Mubarak regime, reports about citizens volunteering to renew Tahrir square after the violent removal of the sit-in as an act to complete the revolution. A large hand-written poster in the outskirts of Alexandria reminds that the revolution will only be completed when State Security is permanently abolished and all political prisoners released. A banner in Alexandria’s central square clearly aiming to prepare the return of the police to the streets declares that the people, the army and the police hold together for the sake of the January 25 revolution. Critics of the constitutional amendments hold conferences and write in the press arguing that a completely new constitution is necessary both to ensure the success of the revolution and also in order for the judicial system to work properly. On Corniche road in Alexandria, leaflets were distributed in the name of an until now never heard-of group “Youth of the future” urging people to vote “yes” for the sake of a continuation of the revolution.

While the revolutionary spirit of hope is all over the place, we are now entering the process of consolidation, negotiations, constitutional debate, and political mobilisation. After a period marked by the general demands of revolution that were designed to avoid party difference, now political groups are arguing for their programmes, presidential candidates are beginning their campaigns, and different movements begin to mobilise their supporters. In Alexandria one can follow this directly on the walls of the houses, with posters, graffiti, stickers and leaflets all over the place.

Looking back to the past week it seems that the resignation of prime minister Ahmad Shafiq and his replacement by Essam Sharaf, and the suspension of the State Security and the occupation of its headquarters by protesters marked a turning point. After that moment and amidst confessional clashes and fear of criminality as people were looking forward to a consolidation of the situation, the sit-in in Tahrir with its pressure to change the entire system came under pressure and now there is a different tide, and it is a very ambiguous one.

The way in which the military government is evoking the revolution while working hard to limit its extent is seen as nothing less as a counterrevolution by the dedicated revolutionaries. This view is loudly expressed on the internet and in informal discussions. But there is strong hesitance in the independent press to name the problems involved in the role of the military - its wealth, the fact that it is a core part of the old system, the human rights violations by the military police. I ask a journalist friend of mine whether I’m paranoid or whether the press avoids certain issues, and he says that I’m not paranoid.

Demonstrations for the sake of national unity of Christians and Muslims took place today in Alexandria and Cairo in the framework of the series of Friday demonstrations that have been going on ever since the begin of the revolution. In Cairo where the confessional clashes had taken place, the demonstrations were fairly large. But in Alexandria where there have been no news of confessional clashes despite the general tension and anxiety, the demonstrations were small today. Partly this was because for most people in Alexandria were a little tired of demonstrating, but also partly because some political activists think that more important than demonstrations at this moment is political mobilisation and consciousness-raising.

The latter was the point of view of leftist friends of mine who are running a cultural centre in downtown Cairo. Their centre served today as a site for demonstrators to prepare their banners, but they themselves were more busy thinking about how to reach students at the university and people on the street in face of the coming referendums and elections. Alexandria being a stronghold of the Salafi movement and of the Muslim brothers, there are lots of stickers here calling for Egypt to be an Islamic state, and my friends at the cultural centre see their role in pushing a more secular and leftist agenda, focussing on issues of equal rights and social justice. They are right now busy planning a poster and sticker campaign.

The university term began in Cairo in the past week, and it begins in Alexandria this week. Before the revolution, universities were guarded by a special force of the Ministry of Interior which was feared and hated among the students. This force has been now dissolved and replaced by a civil security service. This has now turned the universities into sites of intense political activism. In Cairo University last week, students were demanding that the president and deans should be elected. A wave of political activism is sweeping the universities, and all political movements, old and new, are busy trying to play a role.

While attempts of consolidation by the army are evident - and greeted by many who look forward to things to calm down a bit - for most people this has not diminished the sense that one can now finally breath freely and dream. As I walk with A on the Corniche he looks at the sea and says: “Even the sea looks different after the revolution. The things themselves remain the same but the way you look at them has changed.” At the cultural centre where my friends work I meet G who despite her many worries about the future of the country is full of enthusiasm and optimism: “In the past years this country got so oppressed that one wouldn’t want to get up from bed in the morning. Now I can finally dream. I don’t want so much, I just want the Arab world to be a reasonable place. I don’t expect a utopia, just a reasonable place where I can travel throughout it freely and where people can live in peace.” The spirit of freedom in its widest sense, including the freedom to define what freedom means, is strong these days.

But I have to end with a more pessimistic note. Aly Subhy and other demonstrators detained on 9 March on Tahrir Square remain in custody (http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/7439.aspx). The last witness saw Aly being transported to military arrest in a grave physical condition showing traces of torture. Even worse, there are reports that more people have been arrested today, in an operation apparently targeting leading figures of the Tahrir Square sit-in. This throws an even darker shadow on the role of the army, and if this campaign can continue covered by the consolidation campaign of the state press and the hesitation of the independent press, there is a serious danger that much of the newly won freedom will be lost.

International pressure helps. Please pass on the news about the detained protesters, and write to the Egyptian ambassador in your country. People are being detained and tortured by a military government that claims to be in service of a democratic transition, and yet has to prove that it means it.

Greetings from the Egyptian revolution!

Samuli

An amazing success and a spectacular failure

2011-03-11T01:32:00.007+01:00

(This note is from Thursday 10 March, but it was posted after midnight)

This was a day of contradictory news. While the army is running a brutal counterrevolution on Tahrir square, in the village the spirit of democracy was running strong today. As problems have been increasing, the spirits, too, have been rising today.

I start with the bad news. Yesterday evening the army forcibly removed the sit-in on Tahrir Square after it had already been attacked by thugs earlier the same day. This seems to be rather well orchestrated, allowing the media to report that the army intervened after clashes between supporters and opponents of the sit-in. But news that reached me later the same nights and today noon give a much more sinister picture of the role of the army. As many as 170 people participating in the sit-in, including 17 women, were arrested. Many of them were released today, and some of them had been subjected to serious torture.

(For a witness account with photo of traces of torture, see
http://www.facebook.com/notes/salma-said/%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%AC%D9%84-%D8%B4%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%A9-%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%8A-%D8%B9%D8%B5%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%B9%D9%86-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%B0%D9%8A%D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89-%D9%8A%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D9%8A%D8%B4-%EF%BF%BD/10150115309683463 )

Many others are still detained, including my friend Aly Subhy who accompanied me and H through much of the time in downtown Cairo at the time of the big thug attack on the square on 2 and 3 February. Aly Sobhy is an artist and clown, and has been participating in the revolution from its beginning. He is currently detained at the Military Prosecutor’s office and may face a military court. Military courts are used at the moment to give ultra quick judgements to maintain law and order, or that is the claim. A “court hearing” typically takes five minutes, without witnesses or defence, and the sentences are typically around five years. The worst news came tonight, as Egyptian TV Channel One showed a photo with the text “a group of young violent thugs (arrested at Tahrir yesterday)” In the front line of the young men, all with hands tied on their backs, and sitting on the ground, was Aly Subhy.

Just a few days ago, the army introduced a law introducing the death penalty on “thuggery” in attempt to calm down the fear of criminality. In the worst case, Aly may face charges for thuggery in an attempt by the army to scare the demonstrators while giving the general public the impression that they are protecting them from thugs. The Egyptian army is playing a very sinister double role, and there is good reason to doubt their intentions now more than ever.

My friends are starting an internet campaign to free Aly and the other arrested demonstrators, hoping that international publicity will help to put some pressure on the army. Here a film about him in Arabic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx2v3Wkf1Z0&feature=player_embedded#at=51

But while the news from Cairo are troubling today, there is also a lot of positive energy around. In the village this was a good day, with a big public meeting with the head of the village council and afterwards a long meeting of the local revolutionaries arguing why Egypt needs an altogether new constitution.

Yesterday the village revolutionaries were frustrated, defeated by their own sense of declining enthusiasm. Lots of things were supposed to be done for the meeting today, but there was absolutely no energy around. Today morning A came by, and some friends came by and asked why there isn’t any advertisement for the meeting by leaflets and mosque loudspeakers, only on the internet. Then things slowly got back to movement, and then quite suddenly everybody was busy sending for photocopies and envelopes, and then some went to distribute the leaflets (addressed to people personally). A film edited from video footage made during the graveyard cleanup campaign on Tuesday is screened on the local cable network. Suddenly the spirits go up again.

As I went with a group of young men from the activist group to the youth centre where the meeting was to take place, there was at first a moment of worry. The centre was still closed, and the mayor announced that he will be late. People doubted that he may be trying to delay his attendance in order, and at first only few people were there. But then more and more people started arriving, and the mayor and his secretary arrived, too. Responsible people from the administration who had announced that they would come did not show up, but the mayor being there was good enough. The attendance reached more than one hundred people, all of them men (the girls from secondary school who had announced their participation didn’t show up), the more senior in the closer circle, the younger around.

It was a strange and fantastic meeting, at once an amazing success and a spectacular failure. Only at this meeting I truly realised what it means to live in a society in a state of revolution. It was a mixture of respectful recognition of authority and angry rejection of all authority, of careful argumentation and chaotic shouting, and it would have been absolutely inconceivable just one month ago.

The mayor and the preacher of the village mosque were greeted with special honours. So far, the framework of a patriarchal and authoritarian society seemed intact. But the discussion was critical from the start, and after the more senior and socially high-standing people had made expressed some more constructive remarks on the system of bread distribution in the village, a wave of angry critique emerged from every direction. The organisers actually wanted to discuss possible solutions, but there was so much suppressed anger about the thoroughly corrupt and inefficient way in which the village was run, that it was almost impossible to lead a structured debate about solution, and instead there was most of the time an angry and noisy choir of critique. The organisers from the activist group and some of the men in the first row tried over and again to get the discussion back to the topic of suggestions for improvement, and occasionally good suggestions were made, and the mayor could give his reply. After a while the discussion turned again into a chaos of angry shouting, and towards the end the meeting became more and more chaotic. In the end, the organisers barely managed to state that the village administration was expected to take notice of the suggestions that were made regarding the distribution of bread and gas and the cleaning of the streets, and that its initiatives in improving these points would be discussed in a next public meeting on the first Thursday of April, and then the meeting dissolved, with some heading home while others forming small groups of people debating and arguing loudly.

The assessment of the meeting by members of the activist group was accordingly contradictory. Some said that the chaotic nature of discussion where most people just wanted to make statements and didn’t listen to others proved that Egyptians, after living under oppression and fear so long, had not yet learned how to make responsible use of their freedom, and that they had a long learning process ahead. Everybody was discontent that they hadn’t been able to go through the list of points they wanted to discuss and because it was so difficult to have a constructive discussion. At the same time, they were very happy because so many people had shown up, because the mayor had shown up after all, and because the people had really come with their problems and demands, and spoken out freely and without fear. In S’s view, the meeting was at once a success and a failure - a failure because so many people couldn’t distinguish between democratic debate and chaos, and a success because it has never happened before that the head of the village assembly has to answer serious questions and angry critique and not just friendly greetings.

On a more practical level, it once again appears that a decent PA system is a necessary part of any revolutionary’s toolkit. The chaotic nature of the meeting was for a significant part due to the lack of a microphone and loudspeakers that would have made it easier for one person to speak at a time.

Chaotic or not, the public meeting made the spirits of the activist group dramatically rise. They had successfully organised a major event of public debate, and the sense of frustration they had felt on Tuesday was all gone.

After the meeting, twelve men crowded S’s guest room for a calmer more constructive round of debate about the proposed constitutional amendments. (In February, a commission of constitutional experts appointed by the military government came up with proposed amendments of six articles in the constitution. These amendments, which have been widely criticised by both legal experts and supporters of the revolution, are subject to a referendum on 19 March.)

In this rather left-wing crowd there was complete consensus that the proposed constitutional amendments were completely insufficient, and that Egypt needs an altogether new and significantly better constitution before the elections. They will all vote “no” in the referendum on constitutional amendments. There was a long and detailed discussion about the Egyptian constitution, its problems, about different forms of constitution both in the history of Egypt (the most democratic constitution being that of 1923) and abroad, and the improvements which the people expected. It began with a long talk by A.M., an old Marxist teacher and an extremely learned man who gave a long introduction into the general theme of constitution. A.M. argued, among other things, that not only had the constitution been de facto overthrown by the revolution - it had in fact been overthrown by the regime itself, with many of Egypt’s laws being in open contradiction to it. The most blatant example is article 1 of the constitution that states that Egypt is a socialist country, which is blatantly contradicted by its neoliberal policies and laws in the past decades. A.M.’s exposition was followed by questions and comments, especially regarding the powers of the president, which almost everybody in the room wanted to limit in favour of a parliamentary system. The extensive knowledge of A.M. combined with the critical questions and suggestions by the people present, and the laptop connected to the internet to check the exact phrasing of the proposed amendments, allowed for a very high level of debate.

The general spirit of the debate was in favour of a radically democratic Egypt ruled by a parliamentary government and a president whose power would be restricted to representative functions. The basic argument is that the current constitution was tailored to serve a system of corruption, and if the revolution is to realise its central demand, the downfall of the system, then the constitution is a part of the problem. - the central They see the proposed constitutional amendments are really a disguised continuity of the old system in the guise of the army, in itself a part of the old system and as such an ambiguous ally of the revolution at best.

This is probably not the majority opinion in Egypt, and it seems likely that the constitutional amendments will successfully pass the referendum, and after the transition to a civil government Egypt will continue to be ruled by a president equipped with almost unlimited powers. But among the village revolutionaries, there existed a strong consensus that the for the revolution to be successful, it must guarantee that power is in the hands of the people. What exactly the new constitution should contain - except for a more parliamentary system that would prevent the concentration of power in too few hands - was less of an issue. In this regard, the activists showed quite a lot of trust that Egypt has capable constitutional jurists who can draft a good constitution that serves the needs of Egypt.

I was assigned the task to record the entire debate on video, and as soon as I have finished these notes, I will edit and upload it on the internet where the activists hope to use it as means for increasing the political consciousness.

After yesterday was such a tense day marked by such frustration, today has been a day of renewed optimism and enthusiasm although the factual state of the affairs is very much the same - and while it is better than it was before Mubarak’s fall, it is still not that good, now that it becomes more and more clear that the old system has not really fallen, it is still in power in the shape of the army that plays a complex and dirty game. But a change of spirit changes the situation to a certain degree, and that is what a revolution is all about. I talked about it with S’s wife who also for quite personal reasons is very happy that yesterday’s knot of frustration has been broken. She, S. and I agree: If yesterday was a difficult emotional state, “a strange day” in A’s words, today seems much better even if the problems ahead seem bigger. Not only the revolution is an emotional state. The counterrevolution, too, is inside you.

Greetings from Egypt’s revolutionary countryside!

Samuli

What is to be done?

2011-03-09T22:00:00.004+01:00

We are living tense days in Egypt. As Egypt slowly moves from the state of revolution to that of a transitional period, things are in movement. Some of this movement is positive, and some of it is dangerous. In the village where I am staying these days, people are therefore busy asking themselves: What is to be done?

Since yesterday, a north wind from the sea, known here as nawwa, has brought cold weather, wind and rain to the village, and today most people stay home under the blankets if they can. But yesterday afternoon the weather was still sunny and not too cold, quite perfect for the announced cleanup campaign at the village cemetery. Two weeks ago there had been a wide-scale cleanup campaign where the activist group manage to win over lots of people, including the mayor and the head of the village council. But after a campaign of insults they faced from supporters of the old system, the activists were a little cautious, and not quite so enthusiastic. In result, little advertisement was made for this new round of the cleanup campaign. In the afternoon, perhaps twenty to thirty adults showed up, followed by a large group of children. Except for one woman from the neighbourhood, the adults participating were male crowd, and most of them belonged to the activist group. A truck of the communal cleaning service from the neighbouring town had been organised, and in the course of the day, it filled with garbage, sticks, and weed collected in the graveyard.

The graveyard turned to be a lot more difficult to clean than the streets, being full of weed and loose bricks. The cleanup proceeded slowly, and by sunset about one third of the graveyard was cleaned up. The activists were a little disappointed about the relative low turnout (although it was still more than the cleanup campaign in the neighbouring village was able gather), but decided to use this campaign to make advertisement for a next round on Friday, calling people to join to finish cleaning up the graveyard after the noon prayer. S. had borrowed a video camera and filmed the cleanup, and today we sat most of noon and afternoon together editing it to be screened on the local cable channel network to invite people to a public meeting with the village council on Thursday and to the next round of the cleanup on Friday.

The people who organise the cleanup understand it the first place as a way to create consciousness and to mobilise people to care about local affairs. In this village things don’t look too bad, there being a big enough activist base, enough popular sympathy, and a cooperative mayor. In the neighbouring village where I paid a short visit yesterday, things have been more difficult. I met two young men who had organised a cleanup campaign there, but only very few people had shown up, and described most of the youth in their village as being in a state of apathy. The real success of the campaign in the village I am staying in will be seen tomorrow at the public meeting with the village council and a number of people from the local administration. Everybody is invited to come with their issues and complaints, and just an hour ago a group of female secondary school pupils knocked on the door to ask whether girls can participate. The answer was yes, everybody is welcome to discuss their complaints. (This is not obvious in the village where it is very unusual for women to play a direct role in public affairs.) But we shall see whether the people from the administration will really show up tomorrow.

Tomorrow will thus be a day to discuss what is to be done regarding the administration, the bread distribution and the public utilities of the village. But in the meantime, people also look for solutions to other pressing concerns, some of them personal, others national.

One big issue is the referendum about constitutional amendments announced to take place on 19 March. In the past two days it has been a repeated issue of discussions. My revolutionary friends largely oppose the amendments and would rather like to see a completely new constitution. Others are busy getting informed. S’s mother-in-law who is illiterate but has become highly interested in politics in the course of the revolution, inquires us at length about what the amendments exactly mean, and what exactly a “yes” and a “no” vote implies.

Yesterday afternoon, I met H, a lawyer living in the village and working in the nearby town. Since a couple of years, he is member of a locally based human rights organisation that had managed to build a relationship of dialogue and trust with the regime. He argues that the success of the revolution has been vastly exaggerated. For one thing, he argues that nobody had prevented him from expressing his opinion before the revolution, since he knew how to communicate it the right way to avoid conflicts with the system. And he is not happy about what he describes as the sudden and chaotic course of the events. Unlike many others whom I know who blame the security apparatus for the chaos, he puts the blame on the majority of Egyptians themselves, and criticises their ongoing hostility towards the police apparatus. In his view, the police has committed mistakes, but it is being blamed for more than is its responsibility, because “as the immediate face of the government, the police has been made responsible for its own errors and the errors of others.”

I ask him what he as a lawyer thinks about the constitution. He is opposed to it, and will vote against it in the upcoming referendum - a point of view, by the way, shared by many of the people I know. He thinks that the entire way in which the military tries to push a quick transition is questionable. He speaks especially from the lawyer’s and judge’s point of view, demanding reliable constitutional conditions rather than an amendment coupled with the condition that next year a new constitution will be drafted. Why not draft it right away, he asks. He finds it very questionable to make few amendments to a constitution that in any case has been de fact abolished. Instead, he argues for a proper constitutional board that wouldn’t need more than two months to present a proposal for a new constitution. He also criticises the speed with which election should be held, which in his view makes it more difficult to hold free and fair elections. Finally, he also has some suspicion about the current anti-corruption campaign because in his view it focusses only on a part of the old system. What about field marshal Tantawi? Isn’t he a man of the old system, too? Nobody talks about his money and wealth. I ask H what he sees as his task in the coming period. He answers: “to do my part to get the judiciary working again.” The court in the local town is working again since Monday, but so far the judges have only delayed cases, and don’t want to run any processes until they have police protection again, and that will take at least another ten days.

H. is an interesting critic of both the revolution and of the military rule, arguing mostly from the point of view of the rule of law. This is also linked with his personal experience. On the Friday of Anger 28 January he was in the local town calming down the demonstrators who wanted to burn the court after the police had withdrawn. Compare this to the experience of S. who on the same day saw people being killed by the police in Sidi Bishr. In his view, the current sense of unrest and insecurity is allowed to continue “in order to make the people forgive the police and to ask them to come back. But after what they did to us in Sidi Bishr I cannot forgive them.”

Everybody agrees that restoring law and order is a key priority at the moment. But what exactly should be done is a different question altogether, depending on people’s assessment of what causes the sense of unsafety. Those who see the unrest caused by irresponsible behaviour by people who allow their pre-existing conflicts escalate in the current atmosphere of anxiety, look forward to an organised return of the police force to calm down the situation. Those who see the unrest caused by forces of the counterrevolution, that is, the National Democratic Party and members of the State Security, spreading rumours and inciting unrest, think that the return of the police will not solve the problem as long as the counterrevolution remains active. Many also point out to me that worse than any actual unrest is the terror effected by rumours, and that the biggest problem is the fear that is inside the people. The revolution of 25 January did break an important barrier of fear for many, but the existential fear of the safety of one’s family is of a different kind, and has a strongly destabilizing effect when out of this fear people don’t go to work and don’t send their children to school.

The sense of unrest is serious at the moment. Since two days, there is a sit-in of Christians, supported by some Muslims, in protest to the burning of a church in a village south of Cairo due to a conflict that began with a love affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman. Just as it looked like this problem was being solved after the army promised to build a new church, confessional clashes broke out in Muqattam in a neighbourhood inhabited, among others, by Christian garbage collectors. Thirteen or fourteen people were killed in clashes that lasted two days. The good news is that the peaceful sit-in in front of the television building have been successful in pressing and making public demands by the Christians in a way that can be constructive. The next round of demonstrations planned for next Friday were supposed to take place in support of the transitional government of Essam Sharaf, but their theme will no be national unity. In the village, news spread about gangster attacks and chaos in Alexandria, and also many people in the outskirts of Alexandria fear going to the city now. People in Alexandria with whom I spoke with the phone said that the situation was entirely normal and quiet except for few conflicts between families that seem to have incited the wave of rumours and fear. And indeed, the terror of rumours and fear is much worse than any of the actual trouble that happens. The biggest unrest is not in the streets but inside people and in their intimate relationships. There have been so many strong emotions in the past weeks that people have very short nerves now.

But the biggest concern here in the village right now is how to get through the year of difficult economical situation which people commonly expect. This afternoon I met D, a recently married man who has been doing various kinds of work. He has always been a man of pragmatic solutions. He expects that it will take a year for the situation to stabilise, and three years for the economy to improve, after four years he expects things to be better in the country. By then, he plans to start a business. Many young people now want to start businesses, especially after the news was released that for people over 30 there will be no government jobs anymore, but a scholarship to start a project and a temporary unemployment benefit. That’s much more to his mind than a government job anyway, and with his driver’s license he hopes to start a taxi or minibus business. But he doesn’t expect to be able to do it now, and in order to pass through the difficult times, he is going to work in Saudi Arabia. He already got a visa, and only waits for the last phone call, but things are slow at the moment. The labour agent only returned to Egypt a couple of days ago, and he didn’t get to work right away but first went to look at Tahrir Square. Many others are thinking about migrating at the moment, too. The expectation is widely shared: Things will get better in Egypt, but it will take a while, and to get over that while, one will have to work abroad.

D. stayed in the village throughout the revolution, although he did want to join at one point, he tells. He was emotionally so involved watching the news all day long that in the end he became sick and the doctor told him to turn off the television. After the attack on Tahrir Square on 2 February he wanted to join a group of people, mostly from the Muslim brothers, who wanted to join the demonstration in Cairo the following Friday (4 February). But when one villager who had been on Tahrir Square on the day of the attack returned home with his shoulder seriously injured by a bullet, D became too afraid to go. The group of people that did leave the village for Cairo to join the demonstrators were sent back by the army at the ring road. On that day, lots of people tried to come to Cairo to support the demonstrators but were sent back.

D’s story of almost participating in the revolution is shared by many who feared for themselves, felt responsible for their family, or were forbidden to go or told to come back by their parents. Many others did not even intend to go, but everybody remained glued to the television screen. Today, there is wide agreement (but no consensus) among the people that they have together accomplished something really special. For those who stayed mostly at home watching television, this sense of accomplishment is, of course, debatable to a certain extent. But S’s mother-in-law, for example, nevertheless insisted that she, too had lived through it as if she had been part of it, by the force of empathy. Since the beginning of the revolution she was glued to the television, watching the news until late at night and unable to stop. During the revolution a neighbour took advantage of the absence of the police and judiciary and took over her shop that was temporarily standing empty. For her, this became a way to relate to the much greater sacrifices others had to face:“I lost my shop, but others lost their children.” S. didn’t oppose her directly, but to me he added that he has a big problem hearing people claim the revolution as theirs when they spent it “at home wrapped in blankets” while others were risking their lives on the street. A shared friend of ours from Cairo has been out on the streets ever since 25 January, and has been participating in the sit-in in Tahrir until today, and on Facebook she is sharing angry comments about those who criticise the continuing sit-in. S. has a lot of sympathy for her anger and essentially shares her point of view.

In the course of this day and evening, more and more worrying news reach us from Tahrir square. Ever since the closure of the State Security Offices, there has been increasing fear of elements of the old regime systematically working to destabilize the situation, and Tahrir Square has been the central site of those attempts recently. Yesterday a demonstration by women’s rights activists voicing demands for full equality of women faced a very nasty reaction of attacks and derision, apparently quite organised and not just a spontaneous chauvinist reaction. Today morning there was an attack by thugs armed with sticks, knives and who threw stones and tried to drive away the sit-in, unsuccessfully. Considering that the final demand of the sit-in has been the complete abolition (and not just the suspension and reorganisation as announced) of the State Security, it is not difficult to guess what motivated the attack. But the problem is that meanwhile the sit-in had become small, and many people who participated in the demonstrations considered it better to give it a break and to see how the new government manages. This sentiment mixed with supporters of the old system claiming that the sit-in was the cause of all the unrest in the country has put those continuing the sit-in in a tricky position towards a public opinion split not just in supporters and opponents of the revolution, but also in different opinions about what is to be done to overcome the threat that continues to emanate from elements of the old system. And a big question mark has remained on the position of the Army - after all in itself a part of the old system - on all of this.

Tonight the army forcibly removed the sit-in from Tahrir Square. The Army has been trying to do away with the sit-in ever since 11 February, and this is in fact the third time the sit-in has been cleared. The most recent news is that the army has declared a curfew on Tahrir Square and the surrounding streets from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. They seem serious about putting an end to the sit-in, and the thugs of this morning seemed to be if not in their service then at least a useful pretext. This time the attempt to clear the square seems more likely to be successful because the sit-in had become small and controversial. Justified as it has been, continuing the sit-in on Tahrir after last Friday with only a small amount of people and without a strong backing may have been unwise because it has turned the sit-in into a convenient target for the counterrevolution. The clearing of the square today is a victory to those who seemed to be thoroughly defeated last Friday when interim prime minister Essam Sharaf spoke to the celebrating demonstrators.

My friends in the village take it heavily: “The revolution has been thwarted.” But from the village, there is little one can do about Tahrir Square, and the effort here is now focussed on reforming the local administration. But in Cairo, people will be making up their mind tonight and tomorrow about what is to be done, and the next two days will tell, especially next Friday when the next demonstration in Tahrir Square is announced to take place.

Greetings from revolutionary Egypt!

Samuli

The village revolutionaries

2011-03-08T00:25:00.005+01:00

The village where many of my friends live has a history of political activism, and has a lot of supporters of the left and of the Muslim brotherhood. It was no surprise, then, that it was one of the first in its region where the revolutionary dynamics took off after Mubarak was sacked. It all began with a clean-up campaign in the village that culminated in a sit-in at the city hall of the nearby town. The movement, which is gaining growing popular support, was at first initiated mainly by a group of young men of left-wing orientation. Two of them were demonstrating in Tahrir Square on the very first day, on 25 January, and others were demonstrating at different times in Cairo and Alexandria. On 10 January, the evening when Mubarak was expected by everybody to step down but didn’t, they decided to go to Cairo and stay there until Mubarak goes, but realised that they didn’t have enough money to go to Cairo. So they decided to collect their money and to send four people to Alexandria. One of them couldn’t go because his mother hid his ID card, fearing for his life. But three others went, arriving just on time at the massive demonstration in Alexandria on the evening Mubarak resigned.

After the first wave of revolution was successful on the national level, they decided to take the revolution to their village, and since then I have received a continuous stream of news about their actions. Yesterday as I arrived in my friends’ house I found the outside walls covered with anti-Mubarak slogans, and the guest room turned into a meeting point for the village revolutionaries. On a table are notes for announcements and demands, and a computer connected to the internet. A group of men of different ages gathers here, discussing and planning. S’s wife (who was also out on the streets in Alexandria with her children in one of the demonstrations against Mubarak) serves them tea, and the children play in the living room, occasionally shouting slogans against the system

I arrived here last night and sat in the guest room until the early morning hours, exchanging news and experiences with the men, some of them old friends of mine, some of them new faces. They are very proud of their action in the village (although many of the cleaned up alleys are already getting dirty again, since many people in the village have not changed their ways). They are especially proud because they were the first to start such a campaign in the area, and their example has been now followed by the surrounding villages and also the nearby town. There it was lead by the same mayor whom the villagers confronted with a sit-in on 23 February. After the fierce resistance he faced, he has clearly decided to ride the wave of the revolution. In the village, the next step of the cleanup campaign is due tomorrow on Tuesday, with a cleanup of the graveyard. I will participate in that. After that the future of the campaign is open because it has been to a significant extent carried by pupils and students who will be going back to school or university this week.

After the cleanup campaign and the sit-in, and a period of insults and accusations by supporters of the old system last week, the next major revolutionary event in the village has been a series of demonstrations in schools. It started on 2 March in the boys prep school in protest against a new director. The old headmaster moved to another school, and a senior teacher who had been directing the school before and who was quite liked by the teachers and pupils had filed a lawsuit to get his position back. Meanwhile the headmaster of a school outside the village had purchased a fake doctor’s attest that for health reasons he should work near his home, and got the director’s post, against the rules because such a transfer is not allowed there is a lawsuit filed about the position. Supported by the teachers, the pupils held a demonstration on in the schoolyard. The next day, the teacher came with relatives of his to take his position by force, but was sent back, and now the issue has been transferred to the village council and will be transferred to the ministry of education. In the meantime, the director’s post remains vacant. In the secondary school, too, there was a demonstration to get back money the pupils had to pay to the school, but not quite as successful.

One of the leading figures in the group of village revolutionaries is Hajj F, a senior school teacher around fifty. F. tells that some people have called them the 23 February Youth because of their sit-in in the town on 23 February. I ask him: Well, Hajj, how do you feel about being part of the youth? He finds it a great joke and a compliment. There is, indeed, quite some irony to the title of “youth revolution,” because the movement really combines people of different ages. And having people of different ages is crucial. While young men’s willingness to take risks was crucial in the early days, and their energy continues to carry the movement, for other tasks old men are needed. Hajj F’s task is to spread the message to the mosques so that they can use their loudspeakers to inform people about tomorrow’s next clean-up campaign. It takes a senior teacher’s authority to do that in face of potential opposition and stupid questions.

Today, a group of people from the activist group met with the village mayor. Unlike the mayor of the nearby city who had arrogantly turned them down, the village mayor (like all mayors appointed, not elected) took them seriously, and I’m told that they had a very productive meeting. Here is a list of the issues they addressed, paraphrased from the handwritten notes they shared with me:
1.:The quality and distribution of state-subsidised bread. In this issue, which has long been suffering from corrupt networks of National Democratic Party members, a major success has already been booked and a new distribution system has been introduced. The issue of quality still needs to be solved.
2: Cleanliness of the alleys: The activist group offers their participation but also requests a concrete plan from the village administration.
3: Electricity, demanding an end to the diversion of electricity of the village network power, a more predictable system of billing, and information about the causes of power cuts.
4: Drinking water, demanding more frequent cleaning of the water filters and better supervision.
5. The graveyard, requesting that a wall should be built around the graveyard to separate it from the houses adjacent to it.
6. The youth centre, asking the people who run it to be replaced, or else abolishing it altogether because the way it is currently run is useless to the youth.
7. Designating an area to be used as a bus station.

The excitement and determination of the young men working to take the revolution to their villages stands in an impressive contrast to the boredom and nihilism they expressed to me in earlier times. More than three years ago I was here to do fieldwork on boredom, and almost everybody I talked to complained about there being nothing, just waiting. At least for a moment and for some of the young men, things have quite changed, there is a sense that things are meaningful, and there is more to be done than just waiting. But there is still a lot of empty time, as meetings take time to hold when people arrive late from errands. For the empty time, the computer lent by A. (he worked for two years in one of the richt Arab Gulf states, and the money he earned was just enough to buy him a laptop and a phone) is equipped with a good selection of computer games. “Because this is the youth revolution”, comments one of the young men.

The situation in the village is in many ways different from that of the cities. Also here people express pride and happiness about the peaceful revolution in their country. There anxiety about safety and crime that I encountered in Cairo is absent here. The retreat of the police on 28 January didn’t affect the countryside where there is very little police presence anyway, and people have always taken care of their own security here. Therefore the villagers have had no reason to worry about crime and looting. There have been cases though of people taking over empty shops hoping that it will take a while before they can be sued by the lawful tenants or owners. But the situation in Libya is hitting the people hard economically, as the income of the people in the village is heavily dependent on labour migrants abroad. Many migrants are returning from Libya these days, and others are stuck in Libya in a very difficult situation. The brother-in-law of a friend of mine just came back from Libya the same night I arrived from Cairo, evacuated via Tunisia on a military transport plane. He and colleagues of him escaped from Tripolis with the help of their employer, but on the border troops loyal to Gaddafi took all their money and bags, and they found themselves empty-handed in Tunisia, but happy to be alive.

With the economical situation staying difficult, and likely to remain so, young men are more pressed than ever to think about migration, but the problem is, where to go? Now that the chain of revolutions has begun, who knows which country will be next? But while economical uncertainty prevails and puts pressure on people, a strong the sense of possibility also prevails, and the revolutionary “youth” (as said, this “youth” actually includes people in their fifties) is most importantly marked by the sense that they are finally doing something meaningful. The demands they make to improve their local politics are pragmatic and simple: They concern the distribution and quality of bread, garbage collection, drinking water, public transportation, and so on. But the sensibility of life is quite different from what I know from the past. Three and a half years ago I was here to do research about boredom and frustration, and the image I gathered was that of a nihilistic sense of “it’s all wrecked, there is no point in any of it.” Religion provided some sense of meaningful action, but also with limitations. for some, creative production and the flight of fantasy offered another path, but usually also marked by the frustration of knowing how much more limited one’s actual possibilities were. A sense of deep, existential boredom prevailed. At the moment, there is no boredom. For the young men gathering in the guest room and organising cleanup campaigns, this is a moment when things make a little bit more sense, and many young men whom I have seen wasting their talent in a state of waiting, are now able to make themselves useful, at least for a moment. Life has quite a different feeling when sitting in the café is not about killing time but about thinking how to organise the next cleanup campaign and discussing the differences of a presidial and parliamentary government while knowing that this is not a theoretical question but a practical one.

More tomorrow...

Greetings from the revolutionary countryside!

Samuli

State Security Leaks, and a theory of anxiety

2011-03-07T15:43:00.002+01:00

The discussions yesterday and today have mostly circled around the documents seized by protesters in the headquarters of State Security, Egypt’s feared secret police. This is what happened: On Friday after news about wide-scale destruction of documents spread, protesters occupied the offices of State Security in Alexandria. On Saturday, twelve more offices around the country were occupied, most importantly so the headquarters in Nasr City (Cairo) and the archives in 6th of October City. The offices were found empty, with a large part of the documents shredded and burned, but many could still be secured. And this is were things got complicated. Some of the files were handed directly to the state attorney or to the military. But protesters also took with them a lot of documents which are now in private hands and have been published online since Saturday night. A journalist friend of mine described it as a “sea of documents that flooded the internet..”

The military leadership has prohibited Egyptian newspapers from publishing the contents of the documents, and the government is trying to collect the documents back from private hands, but people have already scanned them, photocopied them, and put them on the internet. The damage has happened.

We now know a lot more details about the dirty businesses of leading government figures and businessmen. A number of informants from the public life have been identified. We now know that the ultra-fundamentalist Salafi movement which gained increasing influence in Egypt during the past decade has been closely cooperating with State Security that has tried to use them to limit the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. (This certainly explains why the Salafis sided with the government before Mubarak’s fall.) We know that the state security sent a message to Amr Musa, a potential presidential candidate, asking him to go and calm down the protesters. We also know that the mufti of the republic Ali Gum‘a, one of Egypt’s highest religious authorities, has been involved in no less than ten secret marriages. We also know that State Security has remained fully functioning until last Friday, because the documents seized in Nasr City included photos taken on Tahrir Square the previous day. Unfortunately, we still have little to no documentary evidence of the illegal practices of State Security, especially their torture practices. It seems that those documents that contained incriminating evidence against State Security were the first to be burned and shredded, and what has remained are mainly personal files of people who have been followed by the State Security.

And this is why the flood of State Security documents on the internet is seen very sceptically by many. While some of my friends rejoiced about all the information proving what they had always known - that the country has been run by a corrupt clique involved in amazingly dirty businesses, many others are rather worried. Human rights activist Saad Kamel says that the personal files contain mainly information that can be used by State Security against people - not just their political views, but to whom they owe money, their religious views, and their sexual practices. And it has all been scanned or photocopied and put online. This is not the kind of relevant information we need about the State Security, this is the private life of people who were observed by it. M. is even more sceptical. His joy about the occupation of the State Security headquarters of yesterday is gone, he sees it now as the biggest accomplishment of the counterrevolution so far. He argues that this is a terrible thing because State Security has been a key information agency for the entire state, and now also much relevant and sensitive information is lost - such as information about real terrorists - or in private hands, and because the documents will also cause a huge problem for social relationships as everybody will be busy identifying State Security informers in their surroundings.

Just a little note on the Salafis in passing. If people abroad are afraid of the Muslim Brothers, I think they have chosen the wrong people to worry about. The Muslim Brothers are playing a constructive role in the democratic process. The real problem are the Salafis. They took a pro-Mubarak stance during the protests before 11 February (and with the State Security documents becoming public it turns out that they did so because they were working for the government). Now that the situation has changed, they needed a moment to regroup and grasp what is going on. But now they are giving interviews telling that democracy is forbidden in Islam, distributing leaflets demanding that Egypt should become an Islamic emirate, and stuff like that. Their reputation has seriously suffered due to their role during the protests (and speaking out against democracy certainly doesn’t hit the right nerve with the public opinion at the moment). But they will still have their supporters and sympathisers who will not believe these news, and while they will not be able to gather majority support, they look like they are up to playing a very destructive role in the coming months.

To continue the theme of anxiety of yesterday, I yesterday spoke with three people, each with a different account and a different version of the prevailing sense of ‘ala’, Egyptian Arabic for anxiety and unrest (qalaq in classical Arabic).

A friend of mine in southern Cairo was very sceptical of the current course of the revolution. In her view, it will be a revolution when a democratic transition is accomplished. But she did not see the people of Egypt represented by the ongoing sit-in in Tahrir square. And what she saw in the events at the moment was mainly noise, chaos and an irresponsible drive to break without building. Very worried about the high level of criminality (high for Egyptian standards, where armed robberies used to be practically nonexistent) that has remained after the night of lootings in the end of January, her first and primary concern is that there must be a strong and firm police force back in place. Looking forward to the future, she hopes Egypt to become a democratic country ruled by a strong president who will have the time and powers to press through important reform projects. She is very much in favour of anti-corruption trials and democratic change, but on the condition of continuity and stability. And a revolution, of course, provides change but neither continuity nor stability. In her experience, the anxiety has become only worse. I ask how this can be, comparing the total standstill of public life in early January, and the busy and peaceful streets now. She says that the situation in early February was an acute one, but now it has become a permanent state, so that even if it has less intensity, it troubles her more.

While my friend in southern Cairo is anxious about the force of irresponsible behaviour caused by rapid change, my friend S. who spent most of the revolution in Alexandria and in his village, is upset and anxious for quite the opposite reason. He was demonstrating in Sidi Bishr in Alexandria on the Friday of Anger 28 January - the bloodiest day of the revolution - and he saw terrible things done to the demonstrators by the security forces, so terrible that he still cannot speak about them. Just thinking about it brings tears into his eyes. From that day on, he went to demonstrate every day, once with his wife and children, the other days alone, until he ran out of money and had to return to his village. There he was one of the initiators of the cleanup campaign that was the first in a series of cleanups in the villages of the area. But there he also encountered the resistance of people supporting the old system, and it was too much for him: “After what I saw in Sidi Bishr, I encountered people in the village who defended corruption and the system.” He couldn’t take it, had a nervous breakdown, and is only now getting back into good shape.

Most other people I have encountered these days share neither the general scepticism towards the revolution nor the intense indignation about what remains of the old system. They express a sense of pride and optimism that comes along with a sense of tension, worry, and anxiety. With this thought in mind I went to see Saad Kamel, a psychologist and human right activist, who offered me his theory of anxiety in Egypt after the revolution.

Dr. Saad, too, sees anxiety, or ‘ala’, as a key emotional state of the ongoing revolutionary situation. However, he distinguishes between the immediate affectionate state of the revolution, and the more long-lasting emotions that characterise daily life, and which are often expressed and enforced by songs. The revolution, Saad argues, was in becoming for a long while, and the past decade witnessed contrary developments that contributed to it. On the one hand, young people have become more and more immediately aware of the wider world around them, comparing their situation directly with what they know from the media, and asking why they cannot have what other peoples around the world have. On the other hand, the Mubarak regime became increasingly arrogant in its repression of anything that would limits its wealth and power, so that the contradiction between expectations and the actual scope of action became greater than ever.

This sentiment was expressed by a strong underground discourse, in Saad’s views best expressed in a song from three years ago titled “il-dinya kharbana” (meaning approximately: it’s all gone in pieces, there is no point in anything), and during the revolution it took a more combatant stance as expressed in the rap song “ana didd al-hukuma” (I#m against the government). Saad points out that the text and the style of rap is over the top for Egyptian taste, and this break with musical aesthetics is also a break with the emotions carried by music. This music, Saad argues, speaks out a shift in the emotional state, a move from one sense of longing to another: The old sense of longing was expressed by the emotional note of shagan (which translates approximately with melancholy), a sense of lack that is at the same time cherished. The new sense is that of ‘ala’ (which translates approximately with anxiety, but includes more noise and unrest). It is all over the place, it is the word everybody uses to describe the current state of things. Saad argues that this anxiety is not directly related to the demonstrations or the economical situation. In his neighbourhood there are lots of arguments and fights for petty reasons. People are nervous, and it is an anxiety that is due to the change in the entire way authority works.

This anxiety, Saad says, is the expression of a lack (in Lacan’s psychoanalytical sense) of authority. Lack, with Lacan, is an essential condition of the imaginary picture we make of ourselves, building it from the reaction of our surroundings, of our mirror image. It is never complete, because the subject doesn’t see himself completely, but constructs oneself through the imaginary, which always leaves a sense of lack. Traditional patriarchal authority (which in Saad’s view was often primarily exercised by women by delegating this authority to men) offered a solution of its own, providing a sense of authority that is has now been either rejected or lost. The protesters were not lead by a strong opposition leader. Instead, they wanted to do away with leaders. Now every leader’s authority is put in question, from the government down to the village school (I get back to that in tomorrow’s post). This creates a state of existential anxiety that in Dr. Saad’s view is not a passing state of revolution, but the fundamental state of modernity. And democracy, characterised by a lack and limitation of authority through elections and the separation of power, is the political system of this state of modern anxiety.

I ask Dr. Saad where this development will take us. He laughs and says: “We are here to see and find out!”

Yesterday night I left Cairo and arrived in a village in the northern Nile Delta where the revolution began a little later, and is now in full progress. Last weeks have seen a cleanup campaign, an attempt by supporters of the old system to discredit it, a sit-in at the city hall of the nearby town, two days of demonstrations in the prep school, and there is more to come. As I write these notes, a group of men is sitting in the room next door and planning the next cleanup campaign. I will keep you updated.

Greetings from the revolutionary countryside,

Samuli

Football with the Revolutionaries

2011-03-06T00:09:00.003+01:00

(This note is from 5 March, The blog gives 6 March as title because I posted it after midnight)

My first day back in Cairo was devoted to a walk in downtown, meeting friends in Giza and Dokki, and a post-Shafiq football match with a group of friends with whom I used to play football every Saturday in the past years. It is a day marked by a mixture of pride and hope, anxiety and worry, and a new crucial step in the revolution. I start with the football.

As I entered the sports grounds of Gezira youth centre I met R., a musician, and asked him how things are going. “Better”, he said but continued, “but a lot of people have been injured by the psychological war of the days before 11 February, when there was a lot of fear, and many pro-Mubarak songs were made, and that has left many of us with a strong sense of paranoia. That’s why we didn’t manage to play football until today. There were many times when we thought that we should play again, but there was too much anxiety. And there were tensions among the people on Tahrir: Should we do this, should we do that, should we stay, should we go. Only now that [the former prime minister] Ahmad Shafiq is gone, it seems like this is a good moment to relax and play football again.” I ask him if there are any other news in his life. R.: “There is nothing else than the revolution now.” R. put in words what I had sensed with others, too: being committed to a revolution includes a lot of anxiety. There is a continuous tension, a continuous fear of what the system will do, whether the demonstrators will hold together, whether there is enough popular support, on whose side exactly the army is, whether one can still be arrested... A sense of fear and anxiety has kept the revolution running, it has kept people alert and active. But it has also worn them down and created a sense of paranoia.

Gezira youth centre is a little oasis of sport utilities for the general public (entrance fee 5 LE, no membership required) in the middle of otherwise very exclusive social clubs for Egypt’s elites. The football fields are rather bumpy, but it is a pleasure to play there, in a green oasis the middle of the city, and with a marvelous view of the burned down headquarters of the National Democratic Party on the other side of the Nile. It was a good match in the afternoon sun, although the team I played in lost 5 to 4. The people in this football group are mostly left wing, many artists and musicians, but until the revolution most of them were not politically active. For the past month most of them have been busy with the revolution almost full time. This was their first match after the revolution began, and while there was a sense that things were now clearly going the right way and that one could afford to relax, the revolution was still on everybody’s minds. The small talk was all about where they had been on which important days of the revolution, especially during the first days when the police was still attacking the demonstrators. Even comments on the match always took joking reference to the revolution. A counter immediately prompted jokes about counterrevolution.

For my friends, the football was a welcome moment to relax from the tension of the revolution. And taking a break from the revolution is not easy - it comes with problems of its own. J’s girlfriend tells me that many of the people involved in the revolution are now suffering from depression, after the moment of intensive activism for the revolution is over, and they return to everyday life. Many of them have lost their job, others don’t have a job to return to in the first place, and many relationships and marriages have broken during the past weeks. I ask my friend M. what he thinks about this and he says: “Yes, it’s true. After you have been participating in the revolution, ordinary life seems so dull and meaningless. You go to work and do your job, but you don’t feel anything about it.” To participate in a revolution is a very fulfilling experience. It takes over one’s entire life, even one’s dreams. There may be a lot of fear, anxiety and disagreement, but there is a strong sense of purpose: Everything one does matters. When this moment is over, the mundane course of everyday life can be a depressing experience. (I wonder if those who continue the sit-in in Tahrir Square do it partly because it has become so difficult for them to return to the banality of daily life.)

After the match R., the only one with a car, gave us a ride, and political debate continued in the car, this time about the yet unclear voting procedure in the referendum about constitutional amendments in 19 March, and about the upcoming presidential elections. The main potential candidates at the moment are Amr Musa, secretary-general of the Arab League and former minister of foreign affairs, Muhammad ElBaradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Husam El Bashtawishi, a judge committed to the cause of independent judiciary during the bast years. None of these candidates represent clearly any particular political direction, and my football friends couldn’t really agree on any one of them yet. R. found that ElBaradei was the only one who had so far presented anything logical and rational, and who had spoked credibly about freedom of opinion and democracy from the beginning. Another one of the people disagreed and said that there were things ElBaradei had said which he didn’t agree on, but in any case, he wants to see the programmes of the candidates before he can make up his mind.

Making up one’s mind is one thing Egyptians are called for these days, and there is an enormous amount of discussion again, although not all discussions circle around the revolution anymore like they did in early February. In the metro and on the streets, more mundane topics dominate. But on Tahrir Square, it is all about the revolution.

On Tahrir square where a significant group of people continued today their sit-in to press for the remaining demands of abolition of State Security, release of all political prisoners, and an official end of the state of emergency. At the same time, Tahrir square was today also the site of an ongoing stream of proud and curious people who came to look at the site of the revolution and to buy revolution souvenirs - flags, posters, t-shirts, and “JAN 25" number plates. Many of them did not support the ongoing sit-in, however, and intense discussions and debates about whether the sit-in should continue or not were going on all around the square.

I stood quite a while on Tahrir square listening to the discussions, and at times debating with the people, too. Everybody had their own point of view, but three tendencies were most clearly present. One were people fully supportive of the ongoing demonstrations until the entire old system is abolished. Another were people who came up with arguments typical of the supporters of Mubarak in early February, claiming that the demonstrators were paid and didn’t even know why they were demonstrating. A third group were people who were supportive of the revolution, and partly had also participated in it, but felt that the continuation of the sit-in in Tahrir now that most of the demands have been realised, prevented the people from returning to work and getting the economy running again. I was especially intrigued about this point of view and asked the people who expressed it: How exactly do thousand people (the remaining sit-in is quite small) keep an entire nation from going back to work? Their answer was that the ongoing pressure on the political system that emanates from Tahrir Square keeps everybody busy in their minds, anxious and waiting for the next major turn of events. As long as the demonstration continues, even with small numbers, they argues, there is no peace of mind to get back to work. A man selling cars for work said that this was not because he wouldn’t go back to work, but because nobody will buy a car as long as there is a revolution going on. Another man said: “If the new government doesn’t fulfill its promises, I come to demonstrate here again. But now we first need to give them a chance.”

But these were not the only voices - in fact, the crowd along the edges of Tahrir square as quite evenly split in people who wanted the sit-in to continue and who wanted it to end, and all of them had something to say to each others. It was quite an impressive scene of a collective debate. The debates were heated, but never aggressive - in fact, with all the disagreement, worry and anxiety that there was, many of those debating were at the same time proudly pointing out to me the very fact that they could now debate and make up their mind freely and without fear.

The debate about the sit-in is not new - the same discussions, I heard, were already taking place on 12 February after Mubarak resigned. But the problem is evident. The sit-in in Tahrir exerts powerful pressure The tricky question that the activists of the revolution face now is how to safeguard the legitimacy of an ongoing revolutionary struggle in the eyes of people who first of all want to get the economy running again and to solve the problem of increased criminality. Different people have different answers, and while some found this a good day to play football, others found it necessary to continue to sit-in, and yet others found it necessary to go and debate with those continuing the sit-in.

The problem of crime and lawlessness causes perhaps the greatest tension at the moment. Partly it is serious crime like armed robberies, but partly it is also petty disorder, and I have been told a lot about chaotic traffic - but I must say that today I found the traffic not more chaotic than it has always been in Cairo. J.says that among the demonstrators there is the fear that this sense can turn into a popular counter-uprising against them. Getting the police back on the streets alone won’t do the job of restoring law and order because people don’t have any respect for them anymore - they have to earn this respect first, and it will be a difficult job. And the citizens’ checkpoint cannot be a long-term solution because the people will need to get to work and sleep again. This will be probably the most urgent task for Essam Sharaf’s transitional government.

With all this anxiety, at the same time there is an amazing sense of pride among the people, no matter what their specific judgement is. A group of young men in Champollion street had painted a sign at the entrance of a one-way street reminding motorists not to drive wrong way. They were guarding the spot and checking that people obliged. They were excessively proud when I took a picture of the sign. A taxi driver who took me to the football field said that Tahrir Square was “a problem”, and in the next sentence he asked me for my opinion whether Egypt will manage to rise to a better future like the countries in Asia, and about how to get back all the money stolen by Mubarak and his clique. Another Taxi driver giving a ride to me, M. and a friend of ours later same evening, was very proud of what the Egyptian people had accomplished, and very optimistic, yet he did not expect things to change quickly: “We can make our country just as good as any country in Europe, we can do that. But it will take time. Maybe things won’t get better for this generation, but the generation of our children and grandchildren will. The problem now is that there are 50% of people who understand the responsibility, but we have also a lot of people who don’t understand it yet.” During the same taxi ride, the discussion again turned to the question of the future president. Should it be an old man so that he cannot stick to his office because he won’t live that long, or should it be a young and dynamic person. It doesn’t make a difference, the taxi driver argued, because whoever the next president will be, he will have to listen to the people, “because they know the way to Tahrir Square now, and everybody can use Facebook now and get organised.” Men at a fast food restaurant where I bought liver sandwiches were outspokenly proud about the fall of Mubarak, although they didn’t think that former prime minister Ahmad Shafiq was so bad. I told them that demonstrators in Wisconsin in the US have taken Egypt and Tunisia as their examples, and they sure were happy to hear that.

I have saved the best news for the end. (Although I’m not sure whether those who just want to get the economy running again would entirely agree ) Since yesterday, there are demonstrations all over Egypt trying to occupy the offices of State Security, Egypt’s feared and hated secret police. Abolition of the State Security is one of the remaining key demands of the demonstrators, and on Friday the ministry of interior declared that the State Security would be suspended and restructured. This did not satisfy many protesters, however, especially after news spread about files being shredded and burned on large scale in State Security headquarters around the country. It all started yesterday in Alexandria, where there was especially much anger after reports had spread telling that former Minister of Interior Habib Al-Adli had ordered the terrorist attack against the Church of Martyrs in Alexandria on New Year’s eve. Yesterday there was also a demonstration at the State Sequrity in Giza, but it was sent back - not by the police, but by people’s checkpoints in there area who were more concerned with the safety of their area, wanting to prevent clashes where cars could burn and property be damaged.

Tonight, the breaking news came on Al-Jazeera as I was having a glass of tea with M. and our friend: “Demonstrators occupy the central headquarters of State Security in Nasr City (a suburb of Cairo).” Similar news come from 6th of October City, where demonstrators surrounded the State Security all day. Documents have been secured, and people held imprisoned have been released. One of them, released in Nasr City today, had been held there for 14 years. In other cities, attempts to occupy State Security offices have been unsuccessful, in yet others, the army has taken them over. In Nasr City and 6th of October City, demonstrators were able to secure files and computers, and video footage from Alexandria shows torture instruments and soundproof doors in the torture chambers. The evidence that is being secured at the moment will cause scandals in Europe, too. Computers secured in Nasr City reportedly contain a German software called Gamma to hack emails and Skype accounts. One video shows a former prisoner showing how a torture instrument was used. It contains elements made in Germany (it is stated at 0:30): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgvIhO1CI8w More news about the secured files are being published online as I am writing this. Some can be found here:
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2011/03/night-capital-of-hell-fell-down.html

Today, the most wicked and brutal part of the Mubarak regime is falling. And as it falls, a lot of people in Egypt and abroad may fall with it.

Good night from the Egyptian revolution!

Samuli

Revolution continues in local politics

2011-02-24T13:39:00.001+01:00

The revolution continues in local politics

As I’m getting prepared to get back to Egypt in two weeks, I find myself late for the revolution again. This time it’s a revolution of local politics in a small town in the Nile Delta. Yesterday afternoon got I a text message from B telling that he is in a sit-in demonstration (a technique of protest that has characterised the revolution in Egypt, Tahrir Square being the biggest and most spectacular application of it) at the city hall of Motobis in northern Egypt. I called him, and at first I only heard the loud shouts: “mish hanimshi, huwa yimshi!” (We won’t go until he goes) - the same slogan of the demonstrations to remove Mubarak, that now is the slogan of all the local movements to remove corrupt and authoritarian managements and local politicians. B. told that he and many of our shared friends were at the city hall demanding the mayor to step down.

What happened was this. Two days earlier inhabitants of the village had started a campaign to collect all the garbage that covered the alleys of the village in a big collective effort. Cleaning up the village follows the example of the spontaneous cleaning up during the demonstrations at Tahrir square, as well as the cleanup campaign initiated in Cairo and the big cities after Mubarak stepped down. Now the same technique of collective action was taken to the village level. Some political activists have been a little suspicious about these cleanup campaigns, seeing them as just cosmetic action that potentially distracts attention by making people feel good without changing anything. But I think that cleaning up actually carries a genuine and important revolutionary momentum. It is related to that sentiment so many people told me in Egypt on my last visit: “If Mubarak goes, I can finally feel that this is my country.” Cleaning up one’s street and village is a powerful way to make the place one’s own, it is a case in point of the power of action to shape expectations.

And at least in the case of this village, the cleanup certainly didn’t mean that people would stop thinking about political institutions. Yesterday, the people who had been active in the village cleanup campaign - most of them students, teachers, doctors and other rural middle class - went to the town of Motobis, administrative centre of the district, to discuss with the mayor their concerns and demands that had to do with maintenance of the streets, public utilities, and the black market trade and unfair distribution of state-subsidised bread. The mayor (who is not elected by the inhabitants but appointed by the government) strictly refused to talk to them, saying “You think you can do here what they did in Cairo, no way!” In reaction, the people organised a sit-in in front of the town hall, demanding improvements in local administration, and calling for the resignation of the mayor. The standoff continues as I’m writing this.

In Motobis, the revolution has reached the countryside. What began with the head of the state, now continues on the level of local politics, where it is most urgently needed indeed.

A newspaper report in Arabic about the events can be read here:
http://www.shorouknews.com/ContentData.aspx?ID=395578

Weapons of a peaceful revolution

2011-02-13T18:16:00.006+01:00

A photo essay about some of the "weapons" that made possible the first step of a peaceful revolution in Egypt:

http://www.samuli-schielke.de/galleries/weapons1.htm

Power, normality, revolution

2011-02-11T12:35:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, I wrote this more theoretical text about the revolutionary spirit. It won't give answers to what will happen today, but maybe some anwers to what has already happened. There is some repetition from my post of 6 February - sorry about that.

It was originally published here yesterday:
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/10/power-normality-revolution/

Power, normality, revolution

As I write this, the Egyptian revolution of January 25 continues in the streets of Egypt, and anything that is written these days will bear the characteristic traits of that moment, and will be proven wrong in one way or another by the further course of events. This is one lesson academics can take from this and other revolutions: realities change in a way that forces us to change our way of thinking much faster than we are used to, and to recognize how historically specific our theories are. In this essay, I try to offer some preliminary conclusions about how the revolutionary momentum has already changed the way Egyptians view their possibilities of action. To put it in more romantic words, I try to make some preliminary sense of the revolutionary spirit, but also of some of its limits.

Condition: normal?

I flew to Egypt on January 31, 2011, instead of going for holiday in Finland, where I had hoped to work on an article that was to be named in reference to the experience of a friend working as health inspector in northern Egypt. The inspector’s team’s work consisted of going to a state-subsidised bakery once a day, passing in front of the queue, collecting a pile of bread, and signing in the inspection book: “Condition: normal.” My friend pointed out that this doesn’t say whether the condition is good or not, only that it is the way it is. In the article, I wanted to write about this demoralizing experience: finding lofty promises of development and progress surrounded by a mash of nepotism and corruption, and high aspirations of personal advancement countered by repeated frustration. In the past couple of years, I have become rather critical of the Foucauldian approach of looking at religion, morality, government, secularity, etc. from the point of view of governmentality and subjectivation, because I have sensed that these approaches do not explain how it is to live under the conditions they describe. In the article I was going to write, I wanted to develop a more phenomenological approach to great expectations and grand schemes, looking at everyday tactics of evasion that people undertake to find a minimal degree of human dignity in a world that denies them that. This was a tragic undertaking, I wanted to argue, because it was those very tactics of evasion that, at the same time, constituted the system of corruption, nepotism, and shady businesses they tried to evade.

I was wrong. Suddenly and surprisingly—not only to foreign observers but also to Egyptians themselves—a vast part of the population has gone out to the streets and claimed their human dignity by demanding that the entire “system” (nizam) be replaced. What I had not taken into account was that the demoralzing experience of being forced to become a part of the corrupt system of relationships in order to survive its pressure, had become the breeding ground of a growing sense of anger and an urgent desire to live in a different world—a sense that only needed the successful revolution of Tunisia as an example to find that, rather than coping with the condition of normality, it is, after all, possible to change that condition.

That said, I continue to think that the Foucauldian fashion of studying power is inadequate to understand the revolutionary spirit. Revolution is certainly a matter of affect, but it cannot be understood by means of subjectivation, cultivation, governmentality, or any other approach that highlights the discursive and the strategic. As I have experienced it in Egypt, and as it has been told to me by people who participated in it, revolution is an emotional state, a sensibility of being that is marked by a peculiar shift in the relationship of imagination and action, and by a transient state of exception that stands in an open relationship with the persistence of political and social transformation. In the limited space of this essay, I will try to make some sense of these two points before I attempt a preliminary conclusion about the relationship of power, normality, and revolution.

“This is more than I could have ever dreamed of.”

People I spoke with in Egypt kept highlighting to me the way they themselves had been surprised by the events. Some told me that they had gone to demonstrate on January 25 but did not expect anybody else to show up. Several times, people have expected that the revolution would lose its momentum and that people would become tired and give up, only to be happily surprised by huge new crowds of demonstrators filling the cities’ streets. With growing trust in the possibility of changing things, the demands of the demonstrators have rapidly increased in scope: from asking Mubarak (and his son) not to run in the next elections, they have moved on to demanding his resignation, and now they want to put him on trial. The success of doing something they themselves had been utterly sceptical about just the previous day has given them an immense sense of pride, dignity, and trust in their capacity to change the world. This is the original revolutionary moment: the birth of a sense that something to date unimaginable is in the process of being realized. This stands in a striking contrast to the experience of normality, in which great expectations and promises—be they political, religious, economical, or moral—are always far ahead of a frustrating and demoralizing reality. If, in the condition of normality, reality systematically falls short of imagination, in the condition of revolution, action exceeds the imagined and creates unexpected new grounds of expectation. The revolutionary condition changes the world, not because it would change the logic of governmentality, the relationships of power, or the technologies of subject-making (although that will be necessary in the further course of the revolution), but because it in itself is a change of the subjective life-world of the people involved: an emotional reassessment of the situation, a new way of being in the world.

This is the starting point. But the question, of course, is how permanent this change will be. Right now it looks like the Egyptian revolution is going to be a long one, but one day, it will be over, for better or worse. The question, then, is what the revolutionary condition does to the condition of normality.

Transience and persistence

As an anthropologist who has long worked on festive culture, I have noticed a strikingly festive aspect to the revolutionary space of Tahrir Square. What is taking place there is not just a protest against an oppressive regime and the expression of a demand for freedom. In itself, it is freedom. It is a real, actual, lived moment of the freedom and dignity that the pro-democracy movement demands. As such, this is an ambiguous moment, because its stark sense of unity (there is a consensus as to having absolutely no party slogans on the square) and power is bound to be transient, for, even in the most successful scenario, it will be followed by a long period of political transition, tactics, negotiations, party politics—all kinds of business that will not be anything like that moment of standing together and finally daring to say “no!” But thanks to its utopian nature, it is also indestructible. Once it has been realized, it cannot be wiped out of people’s minds again. It is an experience that, with different colorings and from different perspectives, will mark an entire generation.

A revolution is not a quick business; it requires persistence. And there are different kinds of persistent effects that this moment can have. Those regarding the political system and its entrenchment with the economic system are critical, and they have not yet been realized. They will be the subject of an ongoing struggle. Others, more psychological and affective ones, are already becoming part of a new normality. A particularly interesting one, because it is currently so intensively debated among Egyptian intellectuals, has to do with the figure of the father-president. On February 4, the vice president Omar Suleyman declared that Egyptians had to show respect to the president, because “Mubarak is our father.” In other words, Suleyman took recourse to a social ideology of patriarchal rule, where the father is to be respected even in disagreement. It is a shrewd attempt to employ some deeply rooted sentiments among the people, but meanwhile the sentiments of many Egyptians have changed in a strikingly Oedipal manner. Characteristically, one of the democracy activists replied in a media interview: “My father is dead.” Many intellectuals now argue that this revolution is really a Freudian father-murder par excellence. By symbolically killing the authoritarian father of the nation, they argue, Egyptians are gaining their independence as full persons.

Preliminary conclusions

The degree of success of the Egyptian revolution is still undecided as I write these lines. The situation is critical, and Egyptians are probably facing a long struggle ahead. Whatever the shape of the new normality that will emerge from the revolution, one thing is already certain: The generation of Egyptians who participate in this revolution can never again be governed the way they once were. Their experience of acting and changing their condition, the success of going out to the streets at all on January 25, of throwing back the police on January 28, of establishing law and order in the absence of the police after the lootings of January 29, of organizing mass peaceful demonstrations and putting the entire political system under pressure, has changed the way they understand their scope of possible action. Any attempt to govern them, be it by a democratic government or by the authoritarian system consolidating itself again, has to take this into account.

This leads me to a preliminary theoretical conclusion. Michel Foucault famously argued that his way of thinking about power by no means excludes resistance, but that every form of power produces its own particular form of resistance. Both the normality of the past years and the revolution that began on January 25 compel me to turn this idea around. Before the revolution, the “system” actually consisted largely of the people’s attempts to endure it, which gave it its particularly wicked and demoralising form. As the revolution continues, the “system,” which Egyptians now want to overthrow, is being hastily adjusted by the regime in reaction to a spontaneous mass movement that keeps surprising the ruling elite. After the revolution, new ways to govern the country will emerge, for better or worse. In reversal of Foucault’s thesis, the Egyptian revolution shows that every form of resistance produces its own particular form of power.

Wednesday 9 February: "It's now cool to be a revolutionary"

2011-02-10T08:02:00.000+01:00

By European friend "H"

Yesterday I promised Samuli to contribute to this blog in a way or another. I keep my promise, but at the same time state that these are not my diaries in full. The latter would be too detailed and personal accounts of everyday trivialities, feelings and debates with old and new friends to be of anyone’s interest but mine, an aspiring anthropologist with a thesis in the pipeline, in shaa Allah. Thus I will pick each day a topic (or two) and connect it to the Egyptian revolution we are witnessing right now. Several news reports have commented on the shifting moods of the Tahrir protesters and, also, praised how well organized the everyday affairs at Tahrir square are. I just want to make a few comments on these two issues.

Liberated Area of Tahrir #1 : A note on changing character

Not only a physical space but also a mental state, the Liberated Area of Tahrir – as I like to call it – is naturally by no means static but keeps on evolving on a daily basis. When me and Samuli first got here, it had already witnessed major stages of struggle between the pro-democracy activists and the (then) paramount police state of Egypt. Especially the Friday 28 January had been a crucial victory for the protesters, albeit the hundreds of killed and injured not only on Tahrir square in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez but all over the country. That weekend, the military stepped in and the police forces went underground, and the down-town Cairo we arrived into was pretty much governed by the revolutionaries and/or their sympathizers. The One Million March on Tuesday 1 February marked the one of the most impressive pro-democracy demonstrations thus far in Cairo. Protesters talked openly about “popular revolution” and made references to the events of 1919 Revolution against the British, with the high hopes that this critical mass would have encouraged Mubarak to leave. It was a day that exceeded everyone's wildest dreams and, at the same time, full of anticipation. Mubarak’s partial concessions and otherwise disappointing speech later that day divided the protesters into two camps, those who were satisfied with the gained concessions, and those who were even more determined to stay over until Mubarak he does Ben Ali and leaves. The sinister attacks of “NDP-thugs” (a generic term for all sorts of shady groups) on pro-democracy protesters later that week largely shifted the reformists' sympathies to the side of the pro-democracy protesters. The foreign journalists and foreign-lookalikes also had their share of NDP-thuggery. At the time, several local defense committees in down-town areas like down-town, Abdeen and elsewhere in Greater Cairo area were cooperating with the Military Police (shurta al-geesh) under Umar Suleiman, bringing in activists and foreign journos for detention or, at least, unpleasant investigation procedures. Following the public remembrance of the 25 January martyrs on Friday 4 February and, at the latest, after banks, restaurants and shops gradually re-opened due to a relaxed curfew on Sunday, the Liberated Area of Tahrir has changed its character once again. Now it is a place of curiosity for all kinds of people who have kept inside for days on end, who have never yelled an anti-Mubarak slogan in their lives, who gradually realized that the state-owned print and broadcast media had lied about what’s really happening in this country.

Today at Tahrir square, I talked with a R. – a 30-year-old teacher in an exclusive language school – who had participated in the protests almost non-stop since Friday 28 January. Many of her friends had been injured, and some acquaintances killed, during the clashes with either the police forces or, later on, NPD-thugs. Her brother had also arrived to the scene for a few days, only to return home with a panic attack a week ago, following the hellish clashes with NDP-thugs rushing into the crowds on horses and camels and others sniping away protesters with a rifle and a pistol from the nearby 6 October bridge. Like many of her friends who had been through it all, she felt today somewhat frustrated by the newcomers who flooded into the square in increasing numbers during the past few days. Already two days earlier she had confessed to me that she felt like an animal in the zoo as people – curious as they are – came in to see and photograph who these “Tahrir people” really are. Yesterday’s new sight was the growing number of street-sellers all around the square with an extensive variety of goods from koshery, youghurt, cigarettes, chocolates, popcorn, and the like. She told me that the organizers had kicked most of them out today. Why? I pressed on the positive aspects of swelling numbers and continued protests, and she replied:

“Well, I suppose it is good that there are more people coming in. At the same time, I think that at least half, or maybe 20 percent, of them are undercover agents. They are not active, just watching out. People come to our tents and take photos, or just sit down and listen and try to get an idea of what’s been planned for tomorrow. And I think it’s Suleiman’s plan to make this whole protest look more like a carneval, and not like a revolution.”

As we talked, sitting in a tiny area squeezed between three different tents, a man from the protest organizers enter R. and her friends’ encampment and asks if the women and men are sleeping in separate tents “as they pretty well should”. Apparently there are rumors of mixed gender tents going around. This of course would be a moralist argument at the hands of those entities, including the remaining NDP-loyalist media, that still wish to wage new smear campaigns against the Tahrir protesters.

R.’s frustration about the current state of affairs on Tahrir square is not uncommon among the “original protesters” and the political activists themselves who were behind the original call for wide-scale public protests on 25 January 2011. In fact, and I’m not being paranoid here, it would be a rather smart move from Suleiman to let this kind of gradual change in the public character of Tahrir to happen. The revolutionary culture is giving in to a festive one which – at least in the eyes of the most committed revolutionares – empties the event of its political content. Another friend of mine observed that, at one particular part of Tahrir square, the scene equals to any public concert or shopping street in Heliopolis where the trendiest upper-class youth come to “only because it’s a cool thing to do”.

I’m still not convinced by the argument that the arrival of newcomers begets necessarily negative effects for the revolution. By all means, it is a popular revolution and the “Heliopolis scene” easily fits the other scenes where munaqqabas, unemployed, children, doctors, students, men and women, boys and girls and people from most, if not all, ladders of society seem to mingle and socialize with one another without any major difficulties. Festive for sure, and laughter and joy can be in themselves political in these circumstances but, at the same time, I do understand her fears of the revolutionary moment's gradual disintegration. But, at this point in time, I am more alarmed by the scenario of 20 or even 5 percent of them being passive undercover agents, stationed there to get gradually inside the gist of things and, as an order comes, take over the whole lot. But I don’t really see that happening either. The protesters, especially the more experienced activists, have learned to be incredibly sensitive of such intruders and infiltration from the outside. They have learned it the hard way, I must say. Now it might be, however, perhaps the most useful lesson from growing up under Mubarak and the watchful eyes of the Egyptian Intelligence Services, long headed by no other than Umar Suleiman.

Liberated Area of Tahrir #2 : Self-organization

First, it has to be said, there is no single person, body or movement coordinating the whole protest event. Secondly, such galvanization of this revolutionary momentum would be somewhat counter-productive as several of the protesters’ advances, such as going to the People’s Assembly and Shura Council yesterday, have been materialized more through spontaneous actions and reactions than well premeditated plans. Moving about hundreds or even tens of thousands of protesters to one or two directions quickly is a huge logistical and communicational effort, if not impossibility.

The political events and claims-making within the Liberated Area of Tahrir seem to involve a dynamic of three different elements. First: There is now a youth coalition called the Youth of the Revolution (shabab as-sawra) that brings together a number of youth groups from different political and ideological denominations. These are, for instance, 6 April Youth, Muslim Brotherhood youth, Freedom and Justice, HASHD, ElBaradei support campaign, Democratic Front Party youth, and We Are All Khaled Said-admins on Facebook. During the past two weeks, different coalition initiatives among the youth groups have taken place and the coordination among them have not been as seamless and systematic as was anticipated, but this is the latest and perhaps the final one of them. Second: There are the official opposition parties and movements – such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the National Association for Change, Democratic Front Party, etc. – whose seasoned opposition politicians do appear on the square and, previously, tried to engage in negotiations with Suleiman’s New Egyptian Regime. The opposition parties can hardly claim to represent the Tahrir protesters, and I don’t really see how they can build their legitimacy at this moment in time. ElBaradei’s leadership has been out of the question from the start as he doesn’t enjoy enough support among the youth groups, nor the opposition forces nor the protesters themselves. The latter, the majority of Tahrir protesters, have not involved in political movements before but got caught by the momentum and their commitment is deeply engrained in the personal. Their strength is their creativity in acting and reacting, the spontaneity. There are several close relatives and friends of those protesters who were killed and/or injured during these tragic days. Needless to say, these relatives’ and friends’ commitment to the revolutionary cause – crystallized as it is now on Mubarak’s immediate departure (as the first step) – is unyielding. The inside developments inside the Tahrir protests materialize through one, or a combination, of these different elements.

Today’s news about the 20 000 workers’ striking in different parts of Egypt will surely add new dimensions to this dynamic. A general strike at this point in time could just be it. But this might be something I write about at a later stage. I’ll just finish out by pointing out to a possible security flaw in the Liberated Area of Tahrir, especially as it comes to its widely praised form of self-organization.

The everyday affairs of the Liberated Area of Tahrir are, to a degree, organized through a voluntary organizing group called the Organization Committee (lagnat al-nizam). They set up check-points at all entrances to the square i.e. check the incomers’ IDs (for possible state security or NDP affiliations), bags and pockets (for knives or any other forms of arms). They also have appointed persons to check foreigners’ passports. Yesterday I was asked if I’ve been to Israel or Iran, indicating that at least some of them are serious about the “foreign involvement” on the square. They also form human chains around some of the military vehicles, so that people wouldn’t mingle around them. The Organization Committee does not have direct links with the political groups and, mainly, consists of friends of friends as well as volunteers who are occasionally called in through loudspeakers. And here lies the risky scenario: The Organization Committee is gradually manned by infiltrators who end up guarding one or several entrances to the square. The natural step would be then to let in those who are not wanted in.

Then again, I am pretty confident that those involved have known these risks from the outset, and I don’t need to know what their counter-strategies are. My best guess is that they have to do with the precious thing called friendship that has proven, for many, to be of crucial importance during these turbulent times.

My friends reporting from Cairo, 8 February 2011.

2011-02-08T21:29:00.001+01:00

After I returned from Egypt, I cannot report from Egypt in person, but I keep staying touch with my friends, here is what they report from Cairo today. From tomorrow, I hope to be able to publish posts by my colleague in Egypt.

The new day of demonstrations in Cairo is very successful, proving wrong reports by international media claiming that the democracy movement has “lost its momentum”. In the afternoon, Tahrir square is full. People on all entrances queue up and find it difficult to enter. Queues for both men and women over 100m on Talat Harb street. Protesters have now surrounded the buildings of both People’s Assemby (lower house) and Shura Council (upper house) in down-town Cairo. And most recently, the demonstrators are now also surrounding the television centre in Maspiro.

Today, there have been many people demonstrating in Tahrir square who had not dared go out in the past two weeks out of fear of violence. Their contribution is a sign of the continuing dynamics of the revolution, but has also caused some slight tensions with those demonstrators who have been in Tahrir for more than a week and have made often heavy sacrifices in that time.

My colleague spoke with one of the new demonstrators: “Just met an English teacher, 50, on Tahrir sq. He decided to participate in a street protest for the first time in his life, after seeing Ghoneim's televised interview last night. He and the whole family had cried watching it. He earns some 140 EUR/month (pretty well for a teacher in Egypt) but finds it impossible to make ends meet. He was 20 when Mubarak came into power and today, finally, came out to say: Enough!”

The televised interview with the activist and Google employee Wael Ghoneim who had been arrested for 12 days and was released yesterday, has given a lot of new credibility to the democracy movement. You can see it here:
http://www.enduringamerica.com/home/2011/2/8/egypt-video-the-interview-with-wael-ghonim-i-want-to-tell-fa.html
In general, there is some movement in the Egyptian media. The daily al-Ahram newspaper, until now very close to the government, has also now clearly sided with the pro-democracy movement. The editorial staff of Rose Al-Youssouf newspaper, a de fact organ of the secret police and security apparatus, is in strike against the kind of reporting they have been forced to do lately.

The revolution continues...

Entire diary of the Egyptian revolution from 30 January to 6 February as a pdf file

2011-02-07T20:41:00.001+01:00

You can find my entire diary from the Egyptian revolution from 30 January to 6 February as a pdf file at the link above. In the next days, I will start collecting image material from the demonstrations of the Friday of Anger 28 January on this page. The Friday of Anger was the most important day of the revolution, and remains largely uncovered by the media due to the internet blackout that was in force then. If you have photos or videos from that day, please send them to me.

Link:
http://www.samuli-schielke.de/latefortherevolution2011.pdf

"This is more than I could have ever dreamt of." - the diary of my first two days in the Egyptian revolution, now almost a week ago

2011-02-06T21:55:00.004+01:00

"This is more than I could have ever dreamt of."

This is the Diary of my first two days in the Egyptian revolution, peaking in the march of Millions on Tuesday 1 February. I couldn’t post it back then due to the internet blackout. See my other posts for more recent reports and analysis.

(This post concludes my diary of the Egyptian revolution. Great thanks to the many people who have been supporting me both in Egypt and abroad by updating and spreading the news, organising interviews, sheltering me, and accompanying me. Without your help none of this would have been possible. Back in Europe, I can be reached under +49 179 962 96 58 or +358 44 927 57 77, in case you need more information. I will try to get an Arabic translation of this diary online as soon as I find somebody to translate it. If you are a translator, please contact me. My entire Egyptian revolution diary is available in http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/ Feel free to pass it on!)

***

Prelude in Berlin, 25 January at midnight.

Big day of demonstrations in Egypt, on massive scale, all over the country, demanding Mubarak and his system to go. Amazing. I wish I were there. Following the news and footage uploaded by the people on the net much of the evening. Chatted with B. who just came back from the demonstration. He told that the police was very brutal, throwing bottles on the demonstrators from the roofs and attacking people in the side streets. He also said that he was very happy he was there, because this may not happen again in his lifetime. Tomorrow he is going again.

How much this changes everything. How completely a day like this can change the image I have been drawing lately of people stuck in the circle of living in a frustrating system that turns every promise into pressure and every subversion of the system into a part of the system. There is a moment when they glimpse hope, the impossible suddenly appears in a hand’s reach, a different step can be taken than could be taken just weeks and days ago, and the world changes a little.

Even if this revolution will be crushed (but I am optimistic), this glimpse of hope, this moment in which a path opens where a wall just stood, is something to hold, much like B. said when I chatted with him. Here an excerpt:

B.: “This is a joyful thing. This is a day one can rarely see.”
I ask on Police:
B.: "Really, they were brutal, but in a wicked way.”
Samuli: How?
B.: “They let the big demonstration run, and collected people in the narrow side streets. And the mobile phone networks are offline. They threw lightbulbs on the demonstrators from the roofs, and beat up people in the side streets, and arrested them.”
Samuli: But you went out anyway, and in big numbers all over the country. That didn’t happen since 1919.
B.: “Yes. The people want to do something real. Instead of letting the Police Day (25 January, a public holiday in Egypt) a day of rest to celebrate the police, the people decided that it would be a day the police never forgets. Really, I was happy that I participated in something like this. Because maybe it won’t happen again in my lifetime.”

***

Monday 31 January.

On the plane from Frankfurt to Cairo, against all odds, and most of all against my own strong scepticism whether it really is a good idea to go to Egypt now. Returning from the airport and following the news about the previous night’s looting and anarchy, and the terrible death toll of Friday night, when in many cities the security appears to have been shooting to kill at the demonstrators with live ammunition, I became very worried. But when I called M. and J. they were both telling that it is safe to come - M. says that the looting has probably been heavily exaggerated, and at least in Giza things are actually working better than ever without the police, now that the citizens have taken over control of the public order. Young boys and old men are guiding the traffic in Midan al-Mahatta. M. is entzückt. J. reports from Imbaba on a similar note: The previous night was “scary”, with thugs on the streets, but Sunday was fine. She was in the
demonstration in Tahrir square but returned home before sunset for fear of looters, but this time it was calm, she said, and children were playing football on the Corniche road because there was very little traffic. Demonstrators had cleaned up their own garbage, the streets were really clean. The police force was announced to returned to the streets, Jenny told, “but we don’t need them.” A European friend of mine flew to Cairo last night on Turkish airlines, and I had made my going or not going dependent on whether he would be able to get out of the customs. It all went fine, he told on the phone, and it was also easy to get a taxi at the airport.

Still, I was undecided, and I was undecided even when I took the train to the airport and checked whether my flight was going - it was, but half an hour earlier than had been announced the previous day, so I had to hurry. I called Daniela, she said go but be really careful, and I made my decision: I shall go but be really careful. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry I might have stayed. But my feet took me to the plane and there I was.

I am not the only foreigner on the plane, but almost everybody is Egyptian. The plane is half full - there are many more passengers than were standing at the gate yesterday, but still not that many. This is the first Lufthansa flight to Cairo in three days. I also recognise many of the people who were at the gate yesterday. A very varied crowd. Wealthy looking middle aged men, I imagine them to be perhaps businessmen, some maybe also Egyptian diplomatic service, who knows. The young folks I met yesterday are all there, including the young woman who is going to Cairo to participate in the revolution. A couple of men with recognisably trimmed Muslim brotherhood beards were hurrying for the plane along with me - I guess they, too, are going for the revolution. Right now, this an uprising for everybody who wants to join. If it ill be successful, the big question is what shape the new order shall have. Unlike at the gate yesterday, on the plane today there
are no political discussions.

On the plane, there are many business class and even first class passengers, so the rich of Egypt are not only escaping, as some did in the past days, crowding at the VIP terminal in the Cairo airport according to international news.

The rest is expectation, speculation, tense anticipation. When I arrive I will know more.

Of course, I can forget about working on my publications this week. I will do it at another time.

***

31 January 2011, in Cairo!

I can hardly believe it, and I’m very happy I came here. It is amazing, and much better than I expected. I am so happy that I see something like this in my life.

I took a taxi cab to Cairo together with L., an Egyptian artist living in Germany. She decided to go to Egypt after her brother disappeared in the demonstrations on Friday. Since then her mother has been going through mosques and hospitals looking for him, and her father has been completely broken down. She didn’t speak it out, but it seems likely that he has been killed. She was coming to Egypt partly to participate in the revolution, partly to search her brother. She had not told her parents she was coming in order not to make them worry.

The taxi which overcharged us extremely. But we were happy to get to town before the curfew would make movement slow (the curfew is not imposed in a strict sense. Instead, from 3 p.m. the army makes roadblocks where they check the ID of passengers and what the cars carry, and ask where they are going. But they commonly do let the few cars out on the street move in the evening pass.). The taxi driver was at height of the situation, but from a sarcastic distance. When L. asked him: “Did you demonstrate?”He said: “Am I stupid?” He seemed to think that while the demonstrations were legitimate, it would be foolhardy nonsense to participate in them, and he also warned her about going out in the evening, claiming that Saturday night had witnessed not only looting but also cases of rape. She wasn’t impressed.

The city as we saw it from the taxi saw much better than what I had expected from television images that had ben showing destroyed shops and streets covered with wreckage. On the way, we saw three buildings burned down - the police station in Azbakiya burned down by demonstrators, the hospital in Azbakiya burned by looters (luckily noone inside got hurt), and the National Democratic Party headquarters that stood out as a black skeleton right next to 6 October bridge, the most impressive sign of people’s hatred of the system.

The taxi left L. at her place in Muhandisin, and I continued to Giza where I walked from Corniche down the Mahatta street. Here, for the only time, I saw riot debris on the street: broken glass in different colours and tear gas shells. Otherwise the streets were mostly carefully cleaned up after the demonstration (except for burned police trucks that stand at major squares all over the city). It was in fact much cleaner than it is otherwise in Egypt, and all this due to voluntary effort. In Muhandisin, I saw from the taxi three young women with distinctly upper class looks cleaning up the street. In Muhandisin most shops were closed, but in Mahatta Street in old town Giza the shops were open and the streets full of people. I met Y. on the street, we bought me a new simcard because my Egyptian simcard is in Alexandria and walked home where I just quickly left my bags, talked shortly with Y. who told how he was covering for the newspaper he works for the
demonstration in Giza where ElBaradei was participating, he got beaten there, had to run, and filmed while running.

At 4 p.m., one hour after curfew, I hail a taxi at Mahatta Street to take me to the newspaper where M works. The driver is first hesitant because there is a military roadblock at the University. But the roadblock turns out very fine. They check papers and look into the trunks but let people pass. Most importantly, they speak to the citizens with a friendly and polite tone that Egyptians are absolutely not used to hear from their police force who routinely insult and abuse the citizens. Also later, when we return from the demonstration on foot, we are twice controlled by soldiers who say: “Excuse me, sirs” and politely check that we are not armed. Some contrast to the “son of a bitch” Egyptians are used to hearing from their police force. No wonder the military is extremely popular and has been very successful in imposing peace and order wherever they are.

There is army all over the city. At every major corner, place or junction, there is at least a tank or an armoured vehicle, sometimes two or three. The soldiers - conscripted young men who might have otherwise been demonstrating - appear very relaxed, and the people treat them in a very friendly and respectful way. Many are getting themselves photographed in front of the tanks, and in Tahrir square the tanks are covered with anti-Mubarak graffiti.

I pick up M. at his work, we drive with the taxi through almost empty streets to 6 October bridge next to the burned-down NPD headquarters. M. picks up a flattened Pepsi can and gives it to me as a souvenir. Washing your face with vinegar or cola helps against the effects of tear gas. M.: Just before they cut the internet we got really good advise from the Tunisians on Facebook how to handle tear gas and other police techniques.

We walk towards Tahrir square and find the place in a very joyful and peaceful atmosphere. On the bridge, someone is flying a kite in the colours of the Egyptian flag. As we walk past army control posts, everybody has to show their ID, in order to prevent police or state security officers from entering the demonstration to cause havoc. This is great: the Egyptian government has developed the ID card to be a perfect window to “see” the citizen. It tells not only the citizen’s name and date of birth but also her/his address, marital state, religion, and profession. And by telling the profession it makes it possible to identify plainclothes police and state security officers.

The demonstrators dominate Tahrir square ever since the army entered on Friday night, and they haven’t left since. It is an amazing atmosphere, something I have never seen in Egypt before, and would have never expected. It is very joyful and peaceful, there is no central stage for speeches but a number of spontaneous groups chanting improvised slogans, which rhyme well in Arabic, and some of them are real poetry.

There are in my estimate some 10.000 people in the square at one time, but since people are coming and going, it is likely to be more in the course of the day. The crowd is extremely mixed, but politically active people are clearly best presented. There are lots of left wing activists, smart upper middle class folks, Salafis and Muslim brothers, many with the entire family, all chanting against Mubarak: Salafi families with beards and face veils next to left wing activists and artists, old-fashioned intellectuals, and many many more. There is space for everybody in this revolution. There are also really a lot of women, young and old.

No group dominates. The religious currents are strong and visible, but at the same time there are also lots of slogans that emphasise the unity of Muslims and Christians as Egyptians. The strong presence of the Muslim brothers is something that Mirette had expressed some concern about while we talked on the plane. She was not very trusting towards the Muslim Brothers and hoped that the Egyptians could be made a little more secular. But that’s the nature of popular revolution and democracy: It comes from the people as they are, not the way they should be. There is little question that a democratic Egyptian government will be a more religious one, and a more confrontational one towards Israel. As far as I’m concerned, however, I think that it’s less the question who is going to govern Egypt, but how it is governed. And today gave me a lot of hope in this regard. The spontaneous organisation of Egyptians in demonstrations and in residential areas
alike is for me the most powerful proof that Egyptians are capable of having a democratic rule. It is really amazing, and many people I speak with are extremely proud of this. Garbage is continuously collected at the demonstration and on the main streets by volunteers in a country that until now has been full of garbage anywhere you turn. People are guarding the streets where until recently they were dependent on and subject to a brutal and inefficient police force. If this momentum can be held, and turned into a constant dynamic, it will radically change Egypt.

In Tahrir square I meet my European friend who arrived this morning on Turkish Airlines, and also J. who - like everybody else - says that he wouldn’t have expected this. He tells that even in small towns in Upper Egypt the police station has been burned and people have taken over the public order, and unlike J.’s fears this has not lead to confessional tensions but, at least for the moment, unity and cooperation. His only worry is that the system may still resort to brute force, even bruter than on Friday, when they feel cornered by the people. This is also a concern expressed by Y., although everybody is relieved and reassured by the declaration of the army that they will not use force against the demonstrators. But there is still the President’s Republican Guard.

On the square, some men who look like working class from the popular districts, show me mobile phone footage of the storming of Qasr al-Nil bridge by demonstrators on Friday (which I saw on television but from the distance of a hotel balcony where an American tourist was filming), where a man is shot into his face with live ammunition and killed immediately. M. tells that he was going with a big group of demonstrators through Zamalek where they gave a special honorary visit to the Tunisian embassy, but afterwards on the bridge they were attacked very violently by the police, and M. saw one man dying from bullets of the police, and many others wounded.

The cutoff of Egypt from the internet is a trouble - only people who can pay for accessing foreign dialup servers with a mobile phone have any connection at all - and people have difficulties to stay informed. In the absence of internet, al-Jazeera plays a key role, and after its hesitation on the first day of protests it has shifted fully to the side of the demonstrators, and has become the most important source of critical information in Egypt. Yesterday, Al-Jazeera was cut off on Nilesat, and since then Egyptians have realigned their satellite dishes to another satellite that continues to show Al-Jazeera. On Tahrir square three television sets have been set up for the people to view it, and there is a tent where some leftist activists collect digital video footage and photographs. M. laughingly tells that when Al-Jazeera was disconnected his son turned to a serious opponent of the president because Mubarak disconnected him the Cartoon Network which
could only be seen on Nilesat.

Tomorrow is the next big demonstration, named the March of Millions. As M and I leave the demonstration and walk all the way to Giza for the lack of taxis or minibusses, we join a group of people coming our way, lead by a woman wearing a colourful variant of niqab, accompanied by another woman in jeans and open hair, and shouting in very loud voice: “The people - want - the removal of the president!” We join, and M. starts chanting (I never knew he has such a loud voice): Tomorrow at nine! Million tomorrow! Million tomorrow at nine! Peaceful demonstration tomorrow!

We walk a long way through Dokki and Giza. In Dokki there are some few policemen here and there - the police force returned to Cairo last night, but in small numbers, it seems - but they are still looked at with utter suspicion. The streets are remarkably clean, but here and there stand burned police trucks, in Giza at least five or six of them in a long line.

The most amazing thing is that nobody expected this. Just two weeks ago someone asked me whether Egypt could experience a revolution like in Tunisia, and I said no, Tunisia may be followed by Yemen, but there won’t be a revolution in Egypt. I couldn’t have been more wrong. M. says that he , too, didn’t believe in it. On Tuesday, he didn’t even want to join the demonstrations, thinking there was no point. But he soon changed his mind. We walk to Giza with a young man from old Giza who is very excited about the new situation. He tells he also didn’t believe in the demonstrations of Tuesday - he went there not believing that others would go. He describes the feeling: Until few days ago I felt that I live in a nightmare, and suddenly I could dream freely. M Things became possible that I couldn’t have imagined. Suddenly we can make a difference.

This is the revolutionary moment, the same “psychological state” L. described when I talked with her on the plane to Cairo. Egyptians have so long lived in a sense of oppression, a sense of frustration and pressure, they have hated the system but felt that there is nothing you can do. They have subverted the system by being chaotic and lazy, diverting the system to their ends, but all this has in turn become the system, encapsuling them in a highly frustrating state of suffering from a corrupt system and at the same time being a part of it. Suddenly the revolution in Tunisia opens a door of possibility, rejecting the system becomes something that makes sense, there is a point to it. In one night, the country changes.

The future will show how successful and deep this change can be - not everybody shares the euphoria, and some problems Egypt suffers from are not solved by changing the government - but even the mere existence of this trust in the possibility that one can do something and it will make a difference has been enough to fill the squared with demonstrators, to burn down the police stations known for torture of prisoners, to clean the streets afterwards and to put a quick end to the looting.

But not everybody is sharing equal enthusiasm. I also meet people who are either more modest in their demands, or more sceptical about the possibility of getting rid of Mubarak and the system. The guy at the mobile phone shop where I got my phone card said: Isn’t this what we wanted - we got a new government. A customer says no, we want more, he must go. Tomorrow we all go to the March of the Millions! And at night as we stand for a while at Giza square, I talk with a man who gives the government full blame for the whole looting and chaos and hates the system, but still believes that Mubarak won’t go, he will stick no matter what we do. “It’s now worse than ever. Now we are forced to fight Egyptian against Egyptian, check each others on roadblocks, what way of living together is this?”

After a long walk, we reach old town Giza, and go to buy vegetables at the market which is still partly open at 7:30 p.m., with groups of men guarding the streets and shops with knives and sticks in their hands - the same scene that can be seen all over the city. As we are buying beans and macaroni in a shop, screaming women run past us on the alley, followed by adolescents with sticks and knives in their hands. Looters have been sighted, there is commotion, all the adolescents are about to run after them, but the older men stop them and say: Don’t all run the same way! Idiots, half of you must stay at the other end of the alley! The women return and say that one thief got away, the other was caught. But is not clear whether this really happened. A vegetable vendor says: There were looters here from the first night, but mostly it’s false alarms, people see someone running, scream “thief” and then everybody screams and runs.

We arrive at home, greeted by M’s son enthusiastically shouting “The people! want! the removal of the president”. I talk with Y. about his participation in the demonstration on Friday, his first one so far:

“This feeling of dignity was something I wanted to write about to everybody on Friday, but there was no internet. That as the first day in my life I felt that I live a natural human life. I got up, I had breakfast, I prayed, I went out to the demonstration and said “no!” even though I got beaten up, I called my sweetheart, I went home and slept. This was the first day in my life that I had nothing missing.”

In the evening, as we eat and sit with al-Jazeera running on TV, important announcements follow in rapid pace. First the army declares that they recognise the legitimate demands of the demonstrators and will not use force against peaceful demonstrators. Half an hour later Omar Sulayman makes a declaration that in effect means that the current parliament that was based on completely false elections will be dissolved and new elections will be expected, and that the president has given him the authority to negotiate with all political powers. After this news, the moderators on television 1 become really nervous, one phone call with al-Ahram is abruptly interrupted as the person at the other side of the line says that this means that the project of hereditary rule is definitely over. One can really see how the pressure is growing on the system - interestingly always late in the evening. The revolution won’t happen in Egypt while Obama is still sleeping...

***

1 February.

Late in the evening, at M.’s place, exhausted, waiting for Mubarak to speak on television shortly. Since an hour we are back from the biggest demonstration in the history of Egypt so far [note afterwards: it was only the second biggest. The biggest was the Friday of Anger on 28 January, but I didn’t know it at the time of writing]. It not only filled Tahrir Square completely - the people did not even all fill into the square, and the demonstration extended to much of downtown Cairo around it. News speak about one or two million people, how many there really were is guesswork, but they were so many more than either I or anybody else could imagine in their wildest dreams.

This day was one of the most amazing things I have ever experienced. It was perfectly peaceful, perfectly organised by spontaneous volunteers who took care of order, security, cleanliness. The people behaved in a very peaceful and reasonable way, and there was an amazing shared sense of dignity and power. Whatever will come after this will fall short of the expectations today (because the people demonstrating have completely different political views, and because reality is always trickier than the revolutionary moment), but whatever political system, whatever government Egypt will have, it will face citizens who share the experience of going out and making the unimagined reality. This is what this day has taught to me and millions of Egyptians demonstrating in Cairo and all major cities around the country - and also their families and friends to whom they are tonight telling about their experience: The moment people have the trust and the power to cross
the limits of the possible, they may get further than they ever dreamed of. This is what F. whom I met at Talaat Harb square told me: “This is more than I could have ever dreamt of.” And he is a long-standing communist activist who has had some lofty dreams. Such pride, such determination, such sense of dignity, such sense of power, and such joy prevailed today in the centre of Cairo that I cannot write about it tonight without becoming very emotional. Not a moment for detached analysis.

So, and now the events of the day:

I got up early to go along with Y. to pick up his girlfriend A. from a southern suburb where she lives. She is going to the demonstration with the hesitant agreement of her mother, against the will of her brother and without asking her father. But she has promised to come back before curfew, so Y. is responsible for picking her up and bringing her back. In the metro there are few people, most of them men past 40. Young men and women conspicuously few. Almost all of the men talk about the demonstration. There is no other topic of discussion, and spontaneous debates evolve constantly between the passengers. Their views differ: Some consider the demonstration unnecessary or dangerous, others support it, but almost everybody (with the exception of one apparent NPD member) agrees that Mubarak and his system are rotten and must go. We walk through a a residential suburb where, like all over Cairo, Citizen’s guards (in arabic ligan sha’biya, “people’s
checkpoints”) stand at every street corner, with stones and low barricades on the streets to prevent anybody from driving through without being checked first. On the way, I buy newspapers. The newspaper stand has almost only independent or opposition newspapers: Shorouk, Wafd, Al-Masri al-Youm, Al-Youm al-Sabi‘, and those are the papers people read.

We pick up A. who is equipped with an Egyptian flag and lots of elan and determination. We take the metro back, but it doesn’t stop at Tahrir, and we get out at Gamal Abd an-Nasir and walk. There is a beginning stream of people heading towards Tahrir, the sun is shining and it’s a beautiful morning. In Ramses street we see burned police trucks with graffitis like “down with the tyrant” sprayed on them. As we approach Tahrir the crowds quickly increase, and we walk down Champollion Street where cafes are open and full of demonstrators having a break.

At the entrance to Tahrir we again have to show our ID and our we are controlled for weapons. There is a separate row for women with women volunteers checking women, there are several lines of control, and everybody is very polite, they say excuse me, sorry about this, and everybody is very happy about this measure. They feel that it is a great contribution to their safety (and a necessary one, if the report by al-Jazeera is true that later this evening a car loaded with automatic weapons was stopped at one of the checkpoints). Where there is army, they do a part of the controlling, but mostly it is entirely volunteers. And as the demonstration grows in the course of the day, new checkpoints extend out to the streets, as far as beyond Talaat Harb Square, with men forming human chains to guide people to the checkpoints. Although there are possibly more than a million people (it is all guessing - nobody knows) out in downtown, these controls work well
throughout the day and the evening.

We arrive at Tahrir Square around 11 a.m., and it is already much more crowded than it was yesterday. In the course of the next three hours it becomes so full that it becomes difficult to move although it’s a big square. We stand, watch, chant with the crowd, I make many photographs, and many Egyptians ask me about my opinion, and I tell them what I think, and add that I am here to demonstrate against the European governments that support dictators while talking about democracy. Y. hopes that people would agree on chanting one slogan, but it is impossible due to the huge size of the demonstration. And at two occasions I see heated discussions between demonstrators around the issue of the slogans. Later my European friend tells me that last night there was some disagreement on the same issue. All groups have agreed to suspend the use of any slogans of particular parties or movements, but sometimes people are tempted.

(While I write this, we are tensely waiting for the announced speech by Mubarak. The expectation is that he will either say that he will not run for the next elections, which will mean the next big demonstration on Friday, or he will resign. We switch to Egyptian television where they show a small group of people with signs saying “Yes to Mubarak” and actually claim that there were two million in the streets of Alexandria demonstrating in support of Mubarak. No wonder everybody in the demonstration was calling home and telling that the situation is completely different from what is shown on television.)

For half an hour, Y. starts to collect garbage, and he does with extreme dedication and determination. Then Y. and A. leave early to take her home (but they accidentally take my sandwiches along and spend almost an hour searching for me, eventually find me on their way out but by then they have distributed the sandwiches already, and they head on so that A. can get home). I walk down the sidewalk that is separated from the square with a fence towards Talaat Harb street. The fences around the square create some difficult bottlenecks, and it gets very crowded at one moment, so crowded that I start to worry how many people the square can take. I stand for a while next to the armoured vehicle parked at the entrance of Talaat Harb street, and then walk down Talaat Harb street where shortly a rumour is spread that Mubarak has resigned, but it is quickly debunked. I meet my European friend, and we go around Tahrir Square and then walk around in downtown, have
coffee, and on the way meet many friends. Joyful encounters in an exceptional mood of hope. At last I meet M. again, he had to go to work in the morning, and he had arrived at the demonstrations in the afternoon. He was exhausted. We went together to the apartment of a friend in downtown to go to the bathroom, and stayed shortly for a drink, very welcome. M. was exhausted so we headed home, expecting that we will have to walk all the way. But luckily we got a ride by a man who was driving his car as an illegal taxi with his wife and daughters along with him. Good mood, and everybody is happy and proud about the good manners and politeness of the citizens’ guards.

Much more than a revolution of Facebook or Twitter, this is a revolution of mobile phones. All day long, people at the demonstration keep talking to their mobile phones, telling to their friends or family that the situation is completely unlike what Egyptian television tells (in the afternoon, they apparently tried to scare people with warnings about clashes and new looting), that the demonstration is huge and peaceful. The government is trying to keep the citizens in the dark at all means possible. Internet is down since Friday. Al-Jazeera has been repeatedly taken off Nilesat, and today also Arabsat. Egyptian state television is running a heavy campaign of disinformation.

While I wrote this, Mubarak spoke on television. He will not run for the next term, but otherwise he is defiant and makes no real concessions, on the contrary, he promises a change of the constitution but by the current parliament, and he says that the parliament will only be dissolved after courts have decided whether there must be new election the challenged seats (400 out of 420 - and this is the same what Omar Suleyman promised yesterday, even less). And he tells that all the people who have been resp0nsible for looting and for causing chaos will be caught by the law. M.’s interpretation: If he doesn’t go on Friday, our blood will be shed, everybody who participated in the demonstrations will be persecuted. He says: It will be Friday now - that is, that’s the next big demonstration against Mubarak. Actually what Mubarak said was pretty much exactly what John Kerry had demanded in the US senate just an hour or so earlier. He seems to act under
foreign pressure, but he is not moving one step more than he absolutely must.

M. is really angry. The sense of tense expectation gives way to anger, and he is going out to join the demonstration right now. Y. would go as well if he could but he has to stay behind to watch for the safety of M’s son and mother. Al-Jazeera shows the people in Tahrir chanting loudly against Mubarak. This will continue. And maybe it won’t wait until Friday.

M. just walked out of the door to go back to Tahrir. Y, their mother, M’s son and I stay behind, watching television. What will tomorrow bring? This is a critical moment. But I will find it out after getting some sleep.

(For what happened afterwards, see my reports posted from Wednesday 2 February on).

My entire Egyptian revolution diary is available in
http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/
Feel free to pass it on!

All the best, and long live the Egyptian revolution,

Samuli

"Now, it's gonna be a long one" - some first conclusions from the Egyptian revolution

2011-02-06T18:35:00.000+01:00

Today is my scheduled day of departure from Egypt. As I sit on Cairo airport waiting for my flight to Frankfurt, it is the first time on this trip that regret anything - I regret that I am leaving today and not staying. I have told to every Egyptian I have met today that I am not escaping, just going for my work at the university and returning soon. But perhaps it has been more to convince myself than them. My European friend who like me came here last Monday is staying for another two weeks. My American friend in Imbaba tells that for months, she has been homesick to go to America and see her parents and family again. But now when the US government would even give her a free flight, she says that she cannot go. This is her home, and she is too attached to the people, and especially to her husband. Two days ago, he was arrested on his way back from Tahrir square, held captive for four hours, interrogated, and tortured with electroshocks. He is now more determined than ever. How could she leave him behind? But today is my scheduled departure, and I only intended to come for a week and then return to do what I can to give a balanced idea of the situation in Egypt in the public debates in Germany and Finland. Tomorrow I will give a phone interview to Deutschlandradio (a German news radio), and on Tuesday I will give a talk in Helsinki in Finland. Right now, I feel that maintaining high international pressure on the Egyptian government is going to be crucial, and I will do what I can.

There remains little to be reported about the beginning day in Cairo, but maybe I can try to draw some first conclusion from this week.

The morning in Cairo today was marked by a return to normality everywhere except on Tahrir Square itself, where the demonstrations continue. Now that the streets are full with people again, the fear I felt in the past days on the streets is gone, too. If I stayed, today would be the day when I would again walk through the streets of Cairo, talk with people and feel the atmosphere.

From what I know from this morning’s short excursion in Giza and Dokki, the people remain split, but also ready to change their mind. As my Egyptian friend and I took a taxi to Dokki, the taxi driver was out on the street for the first time since 24 January, and had fully believed what the state television had told him. But as my friend, a journalist, told him what was really going on, the driver amazingly quickly shifted his opinion again, and remembered the old hatred against the oppressive system, the corruption, and the inflation that brought people to the streets last week. A big part of the people here seem impressively willing to change their mind, and if many of those who were out on the streets on 28 January - and also of those who stayed home - have changed their mind in favour of normality in the past days, they do expect things to get better now, and if they don’t, they are likely to change their minds again. This is the impression I also got from the taxi driver who took me to the airport from Dokki. He, too, had not left his house for eleven days, not out of fear for himself, but because he felt that he must stay at home to protect his family. He was very sceptical of what Egyptian television was telling, but he did expect things to get better now. What will he and others like him do if things don’t get better?

As I came to Egypt a week ago I expected that the revolution would follow one of the two courses that were marked by the events of 1989: either a successful transition to democracy by overthrowing of the old regime as happened in eastern Europe, or shooting everybody dead as happened in China. Again, my prediction was wrong (although actually the government did try the Chinese option twice, only unsuccessfully), and now something more complicated is going on.

This is really the question now: Will things get better or not? In other words: Was the revolution a success of a failure? And on what should its success be measured? If it is to be measured on the high spirits and sense of dignity of those who stood firm against the system, it was a success. If it is to be measured by the emotional switch of those who after the Friday of Anger submitted again to the mixture of fear and admiration of the president’s sweet words, it was a failure. If the immense local and international pressure on the Egyptian government will effect sustainable political change, it will be a success. But it will certainly not be an easy success, and very much continuous pressure is needed, as a friend of mine put it in words this morning: “Now, it’s gonna be a long one.”

In Dokki I visited a European-Latin American couple who are determined to stay in Egypt. He was on Tahrir Square on Wednesday night when the thugs attacked the demonstrators, and he spent all night carrying wounded people to the makeshift field hospital. He says: “What really worries me is the possibility that Mubarak goes and is replaced by Omar Suleyman who then sticks to power with American approval. He is the worst of them all.” Just in case, he is trying to get his Latin American girlfriend a visa for Schengen area, because if Omar Suleyman’s campaign against alleged “foreign elements” and “particular agendas” continues, the day may come when they are forced to leave after all.

A few words about the foreigners participating in the revolution need to be said.. Like the Spanish civil war once, so also the Egyptian revolution has moved many foreigners, mostly those living in Egypt since long, to participate in the struggle for democracy. This has been an ambiguous struggle in certain ways, because the state television has exploited the presence of foreigners on Tahrir Square in order to spread quite insane conspiracy theories about foreign agendas behind the democracy movement. The alliance against Egypt, the state television wants to make people believe, is made up of agents of Israel, Hamas, and Iran. That’s about the most insane conspiracy theory I have heard of for a long time. But unfortunately, conspiracy theories do not need to be logical to be convincing. But to step back to the ground of reality, if this revolution has taught me one thing is that the people of Egypt do not need to look up to Europe or America to imagine a better future. They have shown themselves capable of imagining a better future of their own making (with some important help from Tunisia). Compared to our governments with their lip service to democracy and appeasement of dictators, Egyptians have given the world an example in freedom and courage which we all should look up to as an example. This sense of admiration and respect is what has drawn so many foreigners to Tahrir Square in the past days, including myself.

As an anthropologist who has long worked on festive culture, I noticed a strikingly festive aspect to the revolutionary space of Tahrir Square. It is not just a protest against an oppressive regime and a demand for freedom. In itself, it is freedom. It is a real, actual, lived moment of the freedom and dignity that the pro-democracy movement demands. As such, it is an ambiguous moment, because its stark sense of unity (there is a consensus of having absolutely no party slogans on the square) and power is bound to be transient, for even in the most successful scenario it will be followed by a long period of political transition, tactics, negotiations, party politics - all kinds of business that will not be anything like that moment of standing together and finally daring to say “no!”. But thanks to its utopian nature, it is also indestructible. Once it has been realised, it cannot be wiped out of people’s minds again. It will be an experience that, with different colourings and from different perspectives, will mark an entire generation.

In a different sense, however, the relationship of transience and persistence is a critical one. A revolution is not a quick business; it requires persistence. Some have that persistence, and millions have continued demonstrating (remember that in Alexandria and all major provincial cities there are ongoing in demonstrations as well). Others, however, had the anger and energy to go out to the streets on the Friday of Anger on 28 January to say loudly “No!”, but not the persistence to withstand the lure of the president’s speech on Tuesday 1 February when Mubarak showed himself as a mortal human, an old soldier determined to die and be buried in his country. A journalist noted to me that this was the first time Mubarak has ever mentioned his own mortality - the very promise that he will die one day seems to have softened many people.

Speaking of generations, this revolution has been called a youth revolution by all sides, be it by the demonstrators themselves, the state media, or international media. Doing so has different connotations. It can mean highlighting the progressive nature of the movement, but it can also mean depicting the movement as immature. In either case, in my experience the pro-democracy movement is not really a youth movement. People of all ages support the revolution, just like there are people of all ages who oppose it or are of two minds about it. If most of the people out in the demonstrations are young, it is because most Egyptians are young.

Thinking about the way Egyptians are split about their revolution, it is interesting to see how much people offer me explicitly psychological explanations. The most simple one, regarding the switch of many of those who went out on the streets on the Friday of Anger (28 Jan) but were happy to support the president after his speech after the March of Millions (1 Feb), is that Egyptians are very emotional and prone to react emotionally, and in unpredictable ways. One of more subtle theories crystallise around the theme of Freud’s Oedipal father murder about which I wrote yesterday. Another is the Stockholm Syndrom that some have mentioned as an explanation why those who turn to support are favour of the system are often those most brutally oppressed by the same system. The Stockholm Syndrome, referring to a famous bank robbery with hostages in Stockholm, is the reaction of hostages who turn to support their abductors at whose mercy they are. There is something to it.

As Ifinish writing this, my plane is leaving for Frankfurt and I will be out of Egypt for a while. After these notes, I will upload also some notes from early last week which I couldn’t upload then due to lack of Internet in Egypt. Those are notes from the March of Millions on Tuesday 1 February. But unlike I was thinking at that moment, it was not the biggest demonstration in the history of Egypt. The biggest one was the Friday of Anger on 28 January when people in every street of every city went out to shout “Down with the system!” Due to the almost total media blockade by the Egyptian government, there is still much too little footage from that day. What I have seen so far, shows amazing crowds even in districts far from the city centre, but they also show very systematic violence by the police force, which shot to kill that day. Many were killed, and many more are still missing. I will try to collect image and film material from that day, and if you can send me any, your help is appreciated.

You can also see all my reports (one is still due to be uploaded later tonight) inhttp://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/ The content of the blog is in the public domain, so feel free to cite and circulate on the condition of giving credit to the original.

Greetings from revolutionary Egypt!

Samuli

A day of contradictory news

2011-02-05T21:15:00.004+01:00

As I am finally back in my Egyptian friend’s apartment in Giza after a day of visiting peole in different parts of Cairo, there is nothing left to do than watching the news, and the news are contradictory.

The worst news of the day just arrived, citing the US special envoy saying that Mubarak should stay in power to oversee a peaceful political transition. Knowing what Mubarak’s government has done against its people in the last days, shooting them dead, terrorising them by allowing widespread looting, and systematically deceiving them on state media, this is a fatal error that may open the door to the ruling system to establish itself again. Mubarak’s record is scandalous and criminal to say the least, and to assume that he of all people would be a suitable person to guarantee a democratic transition a delusion.

There are other, better news. The demonstration on Tahrir Street was big again today. They show no sign of going home. And the demonstrators have named a group of ten public personalities who will speak in their name, which will make it possible to make some of those tactical manoeuvres that will be so important in the following days and weeks. And unlike Egyptian television, the press - even some government papers, which surprised me - is reporting very positively about the demonstrations. The ruling National Democratic Party has removed several of its most notorious figures from the party politbureau, including Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal Mubarak. The new head of the politbureau is Husam Badrawi who is one of the few respectable people in the NDP and who failed in the last parliamentary elections due to one of the most spectacular cases of fraud in a round of elections that were all a fraud anyway. This could be read as a good sign, but more likely it is just another superficial concession to keep the ruling elite in power. The NPD, we must remember, is not a political party in the proper sense, but an organ of an autocratic government.

The weather today has been cold and overcast with occasional rainshowers, which well reflects the subdued mood of the day. Cairo is returning to normality everywhere except on Tahrir square, the streets are again full of people and cars, and shops are opening. Normality is what Mubarak has promised to Egyptians, and many Egyptians are welcoming it, also many of those who went out and withstood the brutal police force on the Friday of Anger on 28 January (which, by the way, was probably the by far biggest day of demonstrations in the history of Egypt, but because internet and mobile phones were blocked, much of the images from that day haven’t reached the media). But normality is also in favour of the demonstrators in Tahrir square and their supporters, who can now show that they are not causing any chaos.

Where the situation will go from here is unclear to say the least. What is clear is that the system has withstood the immediate challenge of the revolution through a mixture of concessions and intimidation, and is now trying to sit it out. Whether it will be successful, or whether there will be enough continued pressure for real democratic change remains to be seen. But even in the worst case of a consolidation of the old system, my friends all say, Egypt has changed forever, and its people can never again be governed the way they were governed just weeks ago.

This morning I took a taxi with my European friend and left downtown Cairo for the other side of the Nile, going to see different friends of ours. In Imbaba, I met an Egyptian-American couple who told that Mubarak’s speech on Tuesday night had successfully impressed many of the people in their area and that they were quite trustful that everything will be all right and the government will do what they promised. The Egyptian husband: “The strangest thing that those most oppressed and deprived by Mubarak are those most willing to listen to him.” He himself is one of the people who headed to Tahrir to support the demonstrators immediately as they heard of is constantly shifting between frustration and hope, depending on the kind of news he is receiving.

From Imbaba I continued to my friend in Giza where I could finally put on a fresh set of clothes. It was a tense journey, knowing that the state media has spread stories about foreign agents inciting and paying the people in Tahrir Square, and there being several cases of foreigners being arrested and deported, and foreign journalists being attacked. I did not actually face any hostility, not even stupid questions. But I was still infected by the fear of Wednesday and Thursday nights when we were sitting in the apartment in downtown, listening to gunshots, fights, and shouts, and at least once there were people searching for foreigners trying to enter our street (but the street was guarded by good and trustworthy inhabitants who left nobody in). It will take a little while for that fear to pass. But a strange thing did happen as my Egyptian friend and I walked over Giza Square today. A police officer in uniform stopped us and told that two or three men in civil had just been asking about us and wanting to follow us. The officer asked whether we need help and protection. We thanked and said that everything is fine and no help needed. I have no explanation to offer, but thank you, officer. I have no intention of being deported from Egypt - I arrived here out of my free will, and tomorrow I will be departing out of my free will.

Egyptians continue to be divided in different camps around the events, but there is much less debate on the streets than there was a couple of days earlier. One camp firmly supports the president, be it out of personal interest, out of belief in strong leaders, or out of fear of chaos. Another camp is critical of the president and the system but optimistic and ready to accept the concessions the government offered. Which way this camp turns in the next days and weeks will be decisive. And one camp, the revolutionary camp, either supports the demonstrators on Tahrir Square, or is standing there right now. A friend of mine from the countryside told me on the phone that he greatly regrets that he hasn’t been in Cairo in the last days, because "Egypt’s noblest people are now on Tahrir square."

There is an interesting psychological twist to this split. Yesterday the vice president Omar Suleyman declared that "Mubarak is out father." This is a recourse to a social ideology of patriarchal rule where the father is to be respected even in disagreement. This is a shrewd strategy that employs some deeply rooted sentiments among the people, but the sentiments of many Egyptians have changed in a strikingly Oedipal manner. My Egyptian friend says that this revolution is really a Freudian father murder par excellence: By symbolically killing the authoritarian father of the nation, they are gaining their independence as full persons.

On my way to Giza visited I visited the editorial office of one of Egypt’s main independent newspapers, whose voice has been very important in the past week and half. The offices were busy as newspaper offices are in preparation of the next day’s issue, and the journalists strongly in favour of the revolution. I spoke with some of them, asking them for their predictions (knowing that my own predictions have proven notoriously false). Like most people I have spoken with today, they expressed a mixture of subdued pessimism and proud sense of accomplishment. They said that even in the worst case (which would be Hosni Mubarak and his system staying in power) Egypt has changed for good, because people have learned to speak out, learned that they can make a difference, that they can stand up against police brutality, and that they can take responsibility for their own situation. This alone is a revolution. But it is not enough, and it is under serious threat by government media spreading conspiracy theories and fears about spies, foreign interests and chaos - all well-tested means of rule in the Arab world. The next days and weeks will show how much concrete political changes can be accomplished.

In the period of political transition and pressure that is beginning now, strong and persistent international pressure it is of crucial importance. If you read this and live in a democratic country call your MP, call your government, call your president, and tell them that the slightest degree of support to Mubarak’s regime is the same as supporting crimes against humanity. Only a democratic government elected by the people of Egypt can be an acceptable partner to the world community.

You can follow my reports from Cairo also in the following address:
http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/
(With many thanks to Nazan Maksudyan for establishing the blog)

Greetings from the Egyptian revolution, hoping that it will go all the way!

Samuli

From Cairo: A huge demonstration but uncertain outcomes

2011-02-05T12:51:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was again a day of a huge demonstration that filled Tahrir square completely with people calling Hosni Mubarak to resign. You have probably been able to follow the events on television and news better than I have, and I have very little overview of the situation, but maybe I can give some idea about the atmosphere among the demonstrations.

On Wednesday and Thursday night, Downtown Cairo had been a bad place to move around as a foreigner, with pro-Mubarak gangs moving on the streets and reports of foreigners being arrested and sent to the airport. Also at our house we at least once heard people entering the street and asking whether there are foreigners living here, but the men guarding the street said that there weren’t any foreigners and energetically told them to go. On the basis of what we had heard on the street and over the internet we decided that it is wiser to leave the apartment for Zamalek, an very fine and up-market area where there have been no clashes caused by the thugs. From there, our agreement was, some of us would continue to Tahrir and others could stay in the apartment of a friend there. But as we entered the street, it turned out that the situation was again very different from what we had been judging from sitting upstairs. Now the streets of downtown Cairo were full of people heading to Tahrir to demonstrate for democracy, and we spontaneously decided to join them. Without the slightest trouble, we found ourselves at the entrance to Tahrir square where rows of volunteers were checking people’s ID and pockets as they have been doing ever since the demonstrators took over Tahrir Square. But the sight of the street had dramatically changed since we were at this spot a day and a half earlier. Large barricades made of construction site fences now closed the entrance to the square, and in front of these barricades stood an additional line of barbed wire set there by the military. And this had not been a main site of fighting against the pro-Mubarak gangs but only a side scene. As we arrived inside the square, we found a totally different atmosphere, with a continuous stream of people arriving and bringing with them breakfast for the demonstrators who had spent the night inside, people chanting anti-Mubarak slogans, and the atmosphere optimistic due to the evidently strong response of so many people who had decided to join what the pro-democracy demonstrators called “The Friday of departure”, meaning Mubarak’s departure.

We sat down at the tents in a green traffic isle at the centre of the square, and spent a lot of time talking with the demonstrators there. A young woman from a rich family, speaking to us in very good American English before she found out that we speak Arabic, told that on Tuesday night as Mubarak gave his speech, she was willing to accept it and to go home, but after the attack of the pro-Mubarak gangs with horses and camels (those images really had a big effect), she decided to come back today, because it was clear for her that the president was trying to deceive the people. She also said hat people had been asking why she goes to demonstrate when her circumstances are good. She said that she didn’t come here for herself, but for those people who have to suffer under the system, and that the system tries to make everybody to think just about their own interests in order to prevent them from taking collective action. A middle aged woman, definitely not from the upper classes like the first one, told to a Belgian journalists who had asked me to help translate, that Mubarak’s speech last Tuesday was an attempt to manipulate the emotions of the people just like Nasser did in 1967. “It’s the same film running again, and repetition makes the lie evident”, she says. Here some background: After the humiliating defeat of Egypt against Israel in the Six-Day-War Nasser held a very emotional speech offering to resign if the people want it. The response was overwhelming support by Egyptians demanding the president to stay – a masterpiece of manipulation of the public opinion. On Wednesday after Mubarak’s speech where he said that he will not run again for presidency, a similar mood had encompassed Cairo, and might have prevailed if it hadn’t been for the attack on Tahrir. However, the attempt to continue the old policy of brutal intimidation at the same time by removing the demonstrators from Tahrir has clearly backfired, at least among those pro-democracy supporters who had been at first impressed by Mubarak’s speech. Another story are those who tend to sideline with the system anyway and are skeptical about rapid political change, for example a friend from Alexandria with whom I spoke on the phone. She hoped that everything would remain peaceful said that people should really go home so that the nation can get back to work.

People like her were certainly very likely to be impressed by the disinformation campaign by Egyptian state television yesterday. Obviously I could not follow television on the square, but what I heard over the phone calls was that they were spreading news about small numbers of people in the square and increasing factional fighting. This campaign of disinformation was not restricted to state television, but to some degree took place on the square as well. In the course of the afternoon I followed a young man who kept involving people into discussions where he was raising questions about what will happen when Mubarak resigns and whether people will be able to agree and go home safely, whether the demands are realistic, and making the impression that actually the government had already given in to major demands and that the demonstrators’ determination on the square was becoming futile. Less through his specific opinions than due to his persistence in sharing them with others, I suspected him for being a state security informer sent there to spread doubts among the demonstrators - and with some, he did seem to be successful. But most people were very defiant and determined.

The most determined was a woman from the southern Egyptian city of Sohag who gave an interview to a Belgian newspaper. Because she didn’t speak English and journalists didn’t speak Arabic I translated. She was a widowed mother of two sons whom she had brought along here last Tuesday to join the march of the millions. She had no schooling and apparently didn’t know to read and write. After her husband died she had opened a travel agency but it had been closed by the government – something that often happens if one doesn’t know the right people or pay enough bribes. She would not go until Hosni Mubarak goes, and until the system of corruption and capitalism is overthrown and the power is given to the people. She was here, she said, for the sake of freedom, for the sake of dignity, and in order to feel that this is her country. With few words, she managed to crystallise the sentiment that propels this democracy movement: The sense of dignity and power that emerges from the ability to say no and to stand to one’s rights, and the feeling that this country, so long ruled by a system of clientelist exploitation, could belong to its people again. Two men put this very clearly in words to me later the same day as we went to get water (drinking water is widely available on the square, which is crucial for the people’s ability to persist). They said: It’s not Hosni Mubarak who has oppressed us for thirty years, it has been we ourselves through our silence. Now we have learnt to speak out.

Huge crowds spoke out their demand for dignity, freedom, and for being able to call this country their own on Tahrir Square on Friday. But the government did not move, except for a statement by the vice president that Mubarak has de facto given up but cannot formally do so under the current conditions. It seemed that the the system is now determined to sit it out, to give in a little bit here and there , but to keep the old elite in charge of the country. So we left Tahrir Square back to our apartment (which was now very safe to reach because it was now only one block away from the extended area controlled by the pro-democracy demonstrators ) in a subdued mood. This morning’s newspapers, however, offer a different image. Even the pro-government al-Ahram has yesterday’s demonstration as their main news (although they say “hundreds of thousands” instead of “millions” like the independent press does), and the independent press runs extensive coverage of the Tahrir demonstrations yesterday. The impression they give is that change is taking place right now and that there is no way back to the old system. They also inform that “The Friday of Departure” will now be followed by the “Week of Insistence” by the pro-democracy movement.

The revolution has given those sharing in it an amazing spirit, but it has also taken a heavy toll, and many are mentally exhausted. One friend who walks along us as we return from Tahrir says that his girlfriend was killed on the bloody Friday (28 January) when the state violence reached its peak, and that after that he does even know what he feels. He says that he is speaking out the Muslim creed that every hour because he expects to die any moment (and he is certainly not a religious man).

Future revolution can learn a lot from the past 11 days’ events. Here some lections we think can be learned.

-A popular grassroots uprising is possible but it requires some organisational and media support. The media support has been offered by al-Jazeera. The lack of organisation hat for a long time been the main asset of the movement because it could not be stopped by arresting or shooting its leaders – there are no leaders, and many of the people in Tahrir do not want leaders. They want power to the people. They want leaders elected in free parliamentary election. This grass-roots dynamics means, however, that while the demonstrators are well able to clean the garbage, to keep order, and to defend themselves – all actions that make immediate sense – they are not capable of making tactical manoeuvres, while the government is employing various and often contradictory tactics to sustain the revolution.

-The revolutionary movement must be able to occupy the government media. That the television centre in Maspiro has remained firmly in the hands of the government has left a key instrument of power in the system’s hands. To occupy it (it is less than a kilometre away) would require a a carefully planned attack, and the pro-democracy demonstrators are at the moment both too peaceful and too spontaneous to take part in such an attack.

-The revolutionary movement needs good loudspeakers. The extremely bad quality of the PA at Tahrir Square makes it impossible to share speeches and announcements with all the people on the square. Even sitting just fifty metres away from one of the two speakers’s stages I could usually not understand what was being said.

Greetings again from the Egyptian revolution!

Samuli

Samuli's LATEST news from Cairo 04-02-2011

2011-02-04T15:30:00.000+01:00

15:20 > As people were waiting for Amr Musa to enter, a debate ensued among them. Some saw in him Egypt's next president. Some said: "we don't need politicians, this is the people's revolution!".

15:09 > All entrances to Tahrir except Abdel Munem Riyad are accessible and open a continuous stream of people entering. The square is very crowded but movement is easy (except for celebrities who are surrounded by the curious when they enter).

14:34 > Amr Musa's (former minister of foreign affairs and current secretary general of the Arab League) 2nd attempt to enter the square because curious bystanders and press block the cordon through which he is supposed to pass. He turns back again. We shall see whether he will make it to the speaker's stage.

from Henri: "People in their thousands are flooding in. Amr Moussa, former minister of foreign affairs and current secretary general of the Arab League made a brief appearance on Tahrir sq. He couldn't get in due to people rushing to greet him. Hopefully he tries another entrance and says something meaningful."

13:03 > There are a lot of people here who one day before yesterday were happy with the concessions Mubarak offered, but have turned against him after the thug attack at Tahrir before yesterday. The stystem's strategy of intimidation has backfired!

12:50 > The second prayer ends. Everybody - those praying and those not praying - stands up, shouting: "Down, down, with Hosni Mubarak!" "Go away!" "We won't go, he shall go!". The square is getting so full that many people on their way here will probably have to spread to the surrounding streets and bridges.

12:35 > Right now Friday prayer on Tahrir, followed bhy prayer in memory of the dead. The square is completely full with people. It's an amazing sight!

11:42 >I also spoke on the phone with a friend who's rather pro-Mubarak. She finds it very important that everything remains peaceful. Lots of journalists here and they all still have their cameras. Intimidation of journalists only outside the square.

11:35: I just saw a Salafi man with a long fundementalist's beard helping Nawal al-Saadawi, Egypt's most outspoken feminist, to get a comfortable place to sit down in the green traffic isle in the middle of Tahrir Square.

Via Jessica Winegar: Eyewitnesses in Tahrir Square: lots of people streaming in even though it is still hours before prayer time!...situation hopeful and spirits high. My neighborhood calm and people on the streets going about their every day business. The weather is great. Si se peude!!! Aywa mumkin!! Yes we can!!

10:47: We were about to go to Zamalik but found the streets full of people on their way to demonstrate and the streets safe. so we joined them. So I'm in Tahrir and very happy to be here. There are huge amounts of people arriving although it's still early. This will be a historical day!

A day of anxious anticipation in Cairo

2011-02-03T17:21:00.000+01:00

A tense day in Cairo

As the day turns to evening, we are again sitting in the apartment. Today morning began peaceful but tense, and many people were out in Downtown Cairo, and we could move freely and pay a visit to Tahrir Square. But in the course of afternoon, government thugs have been spreading on the streets of Downtown Cairo in small but aggressive groups, and friends of ours had to turn back as their tried to get to Tahrir in the afternoon. Many others have been able to reach Tahrir Square through other routes, and a number of people are moving through the streets here right now trying to get to Tahrir – from shouts few blocks away we guess that there are still standoffs going on. We hear occasional gunfire, probably by the army. Through phone calls I know that there are already now more people on Tahrir Square than there were yesterday.

Sitting unable to do anything and trying to guess what the situation is like out in the streets is the worst thing there is, and I feel that I should have rather stayed on Tahrir Square if there is nothing I can do here. But while I write this, BBC tells that the protesters have been able to push pro-Mubarak folks back from the streets leading to Tahrir. Friends from different parts of the city are determined to get to Tahrir Square, and many seem to be successful. Our spirits, which were down just an hour earlier, rise again. One friend says: Tahrir Square is the only place where I feel safe.

Last night was a terrible and dramatic night, and thinking back to it is amazing now that the demonstrators successfully held it out against the thugs throughout the night.

In the morning some of our friends returned from Tahrir Square, quite exhausted and in urgent need for sleep. One of them had spent all nights helping wounded people from the frontline to the hospital. His hands were covered in dried blood. While they got to sleep my European friend and I went out to see how the situation was in Tahrir Square and to buy some food. At early noon the market area of Bab el-Louq near Tahrir square was quite lively and calm, and we could buy some medicine in a pharmacy on our way to the Square, where several human chains and multiple checkpoints of volunteers, many of them carrying bandages on their heads as memories from last night’s fight. We found the people inside tense and tired, but still well organised, most of them determined to stay, some uncertain, and everybody expecting a new attack to begin this evening. A stream of new demonstrators was arriving from all directions – except from Abdel Mun’im Riyad Square
where the standoff with the pro-Mubarak thugs continued.

As we were making a quick walk around the square, suddenly I was enthusiastically greeted by an old friend of mine whom I wouldn’t have expected to see here. Sheikh N. is an Islamic mystic (Sufi) who spends most of the year setting up his tent and offering free food and lodging to the pilgrims at Muslim festivals around Egypt. But I never thought that he would have anything to do with politics. But here he was in Tahrir Square, having changed his plain white robe and turban for jeans and jacket and demonstrating against oppression since a week by now. He has built his tent in one of the green isles in the square, with some of his supporters along with him. I am delighted to see him. It gives me so much hope.

Determination mixed with anxiety was the mood of the morning and the early afternoon. But there were good signs. As we left Tahrir we saw a police officer (from the criminal or traffic police, not the central security forces who beat up the demonstrators) in uniform joining the protestors – although it did take a while before the protestors were convinced. And as we walked through the streets, most shops had satellite, not Egyptian television turned on. Intense debates continued at every corner, and the short pro-Mubarak euphoria had again given way to a more critical albeit by no means unified mood. At a café where state television was on we saw the new prime minister very apologetic and nervous on television, offering his excuses for last night’s violence.

The thug attack at Tahrir has made a lot of people very angry. First thing this morning newspaper delivery cars were all over the city, and independent newspapers showed very dramatic images of thugs on horseback riding into the pro-democracy crowd. These were images that will not be easily forgotten, and they have changed the situation again. One friend who was on Tahrir last night told that in the early morning hours he encountered a man who just arrived to protect the demonstration, telling that after Mubarak’s speech on Tuesday he had believed him and was ready to be content and go home, but after what he had seen on Wednesday, he was back on the street. This gives the people hope, and many say that Mubarak has de facto already fallen, the attack last night was no more by Mubarak, but by the system of oppression trying once more its old tactics of chaos and intimidation. Mubarak has made all concessions he can make. There is nothing left for him to
do than to resign. The question is when and how.

This is so far an interim day of anxious expectation between the rapid dramatic events of yesterday and in anticipation of tomorrow when a new big demonstration is announced countrywide. It could be decisive. But first, we will see what the night is going to bring. Maybe some food can be delivered to Tahrir again.

You are very welcome to pass these news on. You can find my notes also on a blog: http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/

With the best greetings from the Egyptian revolution

Samuli

A very bad night in Cairo

2011-02-02T22:36:00.000+01:00

I’m writing this in the apartment of a friend where we had to retreat as the pro-Mubarak thugs on the streets of downtown Cairo were becoming increasingly aggressive this afternoon. This is a report of a day that began in indecisive but optimistic mood, but turned into mob violence evidently initiated and organized by the government. Evidence follows.

As I left my friend’s apartment in Giza, I found people all over the city again discussing and debating intensely, some firmly in support of the protests or at least against Mubarak, some against the protests and for Mubarak, and also many who found that Mubarak had shown responsibility and character with his speech last night, where he promised not to run for presidency again, to make constitutional changes, and to take care of a peaceful and orderly transition. But as I got closer to Tahrir Square, I also saw that there was some real hatred in the air, as men from the car workshop area in Champollion street interrupted a family on their way to Tahrir, telling that this is not a place for women to go, and that what they were doing is a shame. One of the local guys got really upset – his shop had been looted, he said – and a heated argument, almost a fight evolved, with the accusations “thieves!” and “police informer!” being shouted. The
people in the workshop area had been hit hard by the looting and even harder by the curfew and had begun to blame the pro-democracy protesters.

As I arrived on Tahrir Square, I found a small but loud pro-Mubarak demonstration trying to enter the square but being prevented from doing so by the police. On the square, there were still (or already) lots of people, more than on Monday but of course much less than yesterday in the big demonstration. There the atmosphere was a good deal more nervous and tense than yesterday that was really like a popular street festival, but demonstrators were streaming in again bit by bit, and the square was slowly filling for a new day of peaceful demonstrations demanding Mubarak to resign.
As I left the square towards downtown Cairo, however, I encountered a different atmosphere – no pro-democracy demonstration here, instead, some shops were opening and many people walking in the streets. As I reached 26th of July Street, one of central Cairo’s major streets, I encountered more pro-Mubarak demonstrations, driving on top of trucks and chanting “mish ha yimshi!”(“He won’t go”, in contrast to the pro-democracy slogan “We won’t go until he goes!”) At first these were small groups, but bit by bit they succeed gathering spontaneous participants as well, and in the course of an hour, they developed into huge mass marches through the streets. Many cars and busses were honking their horns and people are waving Egyptian flags. Quite suddenly, an air of enthusiasm and relief overcame the people in the street. Some were there to show their support to Mubarak, but many others are more differentiated: They were happy and that
Mubarak has promised not to run for presidency and confident that there is going to be democracy and new parliamentary elections. They thought that Mubarak has heard the voice of the people, and that he shouldn’t go immediately but there should a period of well-ordered transition, and people should stop demonstrating and everybody should go back to work.
If this momentum had prevailed, if the pro-Mubarak demonstrations had developed the way the people I talked with were hoping, this might indeed have been a starting point to the ordered democratic transition many of the pro-Mubarak demonstrators were looking forward to. Unfortunately, the Egyptian government had different plans, as some of my friends had already guessed. Already in the morning my Egyptian friend said: “Now our blood will be shed.” And as I stood at the streetcorner, a man came with his young son on his way from Tahrir. I told him what was going on and said that I just fear that it may turn into violence against the pro-democracy protest. He said: “That’s what will happen”, turned around and told me that he is going back to Tahrir Square.

The Pro-Mubarak demonstration was clearly organised by the government, with trucks with loudspeakers and pictures of Mubarak riding through the streets and distributing photocopied paper sheets in handwriting saying “Yes to Mubarak, no to destruction.” But it gained genuine popular support and there were really a lot of people spontaneously joining the march for Mubarak. But the people I talked to were also positively peaceful, they were out for the return of peace, and it was clear that they had no intention to go to attack the anti-Government demonstrators. However, as I walk down Talaat Harb street down to Tahrir, the demonstrators there are much more aggressive and much more organised than the crowd who spontaneously joined the big marches towards Muhandisin and the TV centre in Maspiro where the main pro-Mubarak demonstrations. Also unlike the people on 26 July streets who willingly and happily got engaged into lively and at times heated
discussions and were also very welcoming towards me, the people who gather in the streets leading to Tahrir square are hostile towards me, especially when my friend, foreigner like me, and I tried to make photographs, to which immediately men among the crowd tell us not to make photographs unless we don’t want our camera broken.

At the corner of Bustan and Talaat Harb street we find a tense standoff between pro-democracy demonstrators who stand in a human chain, and pro-mubarak folks who moving back and forth, their mood getting more an more heated. One man among them starts to tell me that the people inside are being paid to participate there, how else could they have ID controls and food for so many day. When I say him: Please keep peace, he replies: It’s them who don’t keep peace ! A man arrives on motorcycle to bring bottles of water and juice to the pro-demonstrators inside. As he tries to enter through the human chain, pro-Mubarak demonstrators grab the boxes, and in a rush that I otherwise know from beggars at main mosques everybody runs for the water and juice, someone shouts: “This is our water!”, the people are almost fighting to get some of the loot. This stands in a dramatic tension to the determined sense of discipline shown by the pro-democracy
demonstrators. A very aggressive atmosphere is building here, and we decide to move away. We pick up a friend in Bab el-Louq and walk to the apartment of a friend amidst of loud groups walking through the streets and chanting pro-Mubarak slogans. Crazily enough, amidst all this, we find the cafes in the Bursa area full with customers in the middle of all this commotion.

Soon after we reach our friend’s apartment, things start to get worse, the shouts louder, we hear shots, and from the balcony we see a part of the mob bringing somebody they have caught and throwing him in a rude fashion to what looks like an army special unit protecting one of the foreign diplomatic sites in the city. There is a long confrontation as the pro-Mubarak people are trying to push through the army line but are not left through. We are getting rather afraid as it gets louder and more chaotic in the streets, and the caretaker of the house tells everybody to turn their lights off. Since then we sit in the dark, lights on only in the kitchen. It is out of the question to go to the street. At times, we hear loud noise of shops being broken along with pro-Mubarak slogans and gunfire. Then things get calm again, later we hear gunfire from the direction of Tahrir Square. Our friends there tell us on the phone that the situation inside the square
is much better than it looks on television – we are watching Al-Jazeera livestream on the internet. But where we are staying, the situation is very volatile, and we hear that several foreign journalists have been attacked by the pro-Mubarak thugs in the course of the day and the night. Although the people in the square would badly need medicine and food, which we have here, it seems way too dangerous for two foreigners to go out now.

There is no way to predict from here what will come today. There is no question that the government will put the blame on the pro-democracy movement. The question is whether the Egyptians will believe it. A friend from Kitkat on the other side of the Nile where the situation is calm with whom I spoke on the phone said that people in his neighbourhood who until now had been very much supportive of Mubarak, were disgusted by what was going on today. But Egyptians appear very split today, and there is no way to tell what will come. In the last two weeks, every single prediction I have made about the situation has turned out false. Just as I did not expect the protests to become so huge, I did not expect the events today to turn the way they did. The only thing that is sure about the situation now is that Mubarak and is ruling elite are not serious about the orderly transition to democracy, but are again resorting to the tactics of intimidation and chaos.
What a horrible and criminal way to rule a country.

You can follow the events in Tahrir Square on Al-Jazeera English.

Please call your government and MP and tell that to show any support to this government is the same as showing support to crimes against humanity.

All the best,

Samuli

Samuli's LATEST news from Cairo 02-02-2011

2011-02-02T08:35:00.001+01:00

DANIELA HERE - WAS TRAVELLING THE WHOLE MORNING AND JUST ARRIVED IN ROTTERDAM!

HERE SAMULI'S NEWS FROM NOON CAIRO TIME UNTIL NOW

As the situation is too tense he retrieved to a friends house near Talaat Harb and tries to get online, as the internet seems to be open today again. Stay tuned!

16:27: Because Hosni Mubarak couldn't use the army to crush the demonstrators, he now mobilises his citizens to attack their fellow citizens.

16:18: A man just tried to bring water & juice to the contra demonstration. he was stopped, his water taken, but he was let go. Big chain of people stands facing the pro demonstrators to stop them from entering. Situation very tense. Confrontation likely!

15:26: Henri Onodera reports that thugs of NDP have attacked the demonstration on Tahrir. Meanwhile pro-Mubarak demo passing through 26 July St gathers huge crowds."

14:48: The pro-Mubarak demonstration is currently heading for the TV headquaters, which hopefully means that the situation remains peaceful. If it does, that may be the seed of peaceful transition to democracy after all.

14:15: Pro demonstration is big. Spontaneous analysis of the mood in the streets in central Cairo: most Egyptians are happy with what they got - no re-election of Mubarak, new parliamentary elections, new minister of interior. It is far less than what the demonstrators asked, and ensures the continuation of the old system. But heated discussions continue in the streets. My worry now is, that the pro demonstrators will try to break the contra demonstrations.

14:00: The pro Mubarak demonstrations on 26 July St. is gaining some support from bystanders. His televison speech yesterday together with the fear of chaos has made a good part of the people to turn to spport him. So far, everything remains peaceful.

13:07: A continuous stream of people entering Tahrir Square. Today will be a big demonstration as well, though probably not as big as yesterday.

12:41: Situation today more nervous and tense. The government has effectively reached to split people apart. The coming days will show, how lasting the revolution is...

Samuli's news from Cairo 02-02-2011

2011-02-02T08:35:00.000+01:00

09:32 CT: Cairo wakes up to a busy morning. Banks & cash dispensers are open again, and people crowd to collect their salaries. Traffic police is back on the streets, unarmed. People debating everywhere, some firmly against the president, some supportive. In Manyal I see a 15 men strong pro-Mubarak demonstration. My journalist friend saw some last night. They are small and all chant the same slogan. Greetings from Cairo, Samuli.

10:32 CT: On Champollion St. a family with Egyptian flags is stopped by inhabitants of the car workshop area, saying that what they do is a shame and blaming them for looting. A heated discussion evolves, with the accusation "thief", "police informer"! If Mubarak's strategy of using chaos to split the people is successful, it will be a terrible tragedy.

11:09 CT: At the corner of Champollion St. a 50 men big pro-Mubarak demonstration (no families and women in this one) tries to enter Tahrir Square. The army prevents them from entering. On Tahrir, the big Anti-Mubarak demonstrations goes on.

Samuli's news from Cairo 01-02-2011

2011-02-01T08:34:00.000+01:00

I'm on Tahrir square. Crowds are increasing in today's demonstrations. Peaceful and well organized. Volunteers and soldiers check ID's to prevent plainclothes police from entering. Earlier in the metro all passengers talk about the demonstrations. They disagree about what to do, but there is wide consensus that Mubarak has to go. Reports about chaos completely false. Citizens and army successful in keeping order better than police ever did.

The crowds keep increasing. The most impressive thing is that Egyptians who are otherwise quite chaotic, are spontaneously disciplined: they stand patiently in queues, collect their own garbage, something they would have never made just ten days ago.

Samuli's news from Cairo 31-01-2011

2011-01-31T08:34:00.000+01:00

10 am Cairo time: Samuli has arrived in Giza. He said that the situation seen from his cab ride from the airport, through the city to his final destination showed less damage as described in some reports. He has seen 3 demolished buildings, and 4-5 demolished shops, but it's not whole blocks. People all talk about tomorrow's 1 million people demonstrat...ion, which will be joined by everybody he has talked to. No train service tomorrow! Military and vigilant committees are to be seen everywhere, as well as some police. But things are calm and cheerful. Downtown shops are closed, but in Giza they are open. He says that the atmosphere is much more positive than he expected. People discuss if the change of the government is sufficient, but many plead that by tomorrow Mubarak has to step down... He's now on his way to Tahrir!

20:22 Cairo time: Samuli says there is no chaos and anarchy to be spotted, but things are run with consideration and respect. People are cleaning the street, removing the trash, something very new to happen. He was at Tahrir, where he experienced a euphoric and very cheerful atmosphere with 10.000 coming and going. He walked with his friend M from there back to Giza some 8 km, and all was calm and under control. The military is checking everybody coming to Tahrir, so no police can infiltrate. They treat people with utmost respect, adressing them with 'Sir' when asking them for their ID's. Everybody is amazed that such a new and respectful treatment has taken over the social sphere, replacing the inhumane and violent treatment previously predominating.

People are enthusiastic and what he sees makes him very optimistic. People have realized in those few days, that they can take their lives in their own hands, something which they felt for so long as being impossible. Many, who couldn't believe that change is really happening, experience now that change is happening, also inside themselves. So it's empowerment pure, the end of agony, apathy and the feeling of impotence. A people formerly believed - also by themselves - of being chaotic is able, as soon as the repression disappears (as the police vanished) - to organize themselves and being perfectly capable of acting responsible and shaping the situation.

AMAZING!

"You'll be late for the revolution!"

2011-01-30T08:50:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Frankfurt airport.

After long hesitation, I made yesterday night the decision to fly to Cairo after M. had assured me that it is safe in Giza. The flight had been rescheduled to start 9:30 a.m. instead of noon in order to arrive in Cairo in daytime before curfew. Sophie took me to station by car and I took the early morning ICE to the airport. Everything went fine, I checked in, but the very instance I arrived at gate B25 where the plane was to depart, the announcement was made that the flight was cancelled. An airline officer of Egyptian origin explained the situation to the approximately 20 to 30 Egyptian passengers: Cairo airport was closed, there was nobody working, no technical staff, no security, no customs, and no planes would start to Cairo today. All flights to Cairo are cancelled. (Later someone who had called people on the airport told that the airport is not yet closed but it is being shut down. The officers and workers are there, but not working. Why is not
clear.) The people, of course, were very anxious and eager to get to Egypt whatever way possible, and discussed the problem and the possibilities long with the airline staff.
Heated political discussions evolved, focussing on the looting that had happened last night. Everybody was very concerned about the safety of their family, their property, and the general situation in Egypt. The opinions went far apart regarding the cause of the problem and the possible remedies. One of the passengers, arriving from the United States said that Egypt is a bunch of 80 million thugs and that if he had been in Tahrir square on Tuesday when the demonstrations began he would have fired into the crowd and killed them by hundreds, and forget about human rights, to stop the chaos at its roots. An older gentleman disagreed, and said that on the contrary Egyptians are good people (tayyibin) and should not be accused of the acts of thugs and criminals who exploited the occasion. Another man in his fifties agreed with the first one and said that the whole thing had gotten out of hand because the demonstrations hadn’t been suppressed with a hard
hand from the beginning. If the upraising had done anything to these two men, it had confirmed them in their belief that Egypt must be ruled with an iron hand. Others, however, disagreed with them strongly, or avoided getting involved into the debate. I spoke for a longer while with four younger people, one Egyptian woman living in Germany, another on her way from France back to Egypt, a man from Upper Egypt who had lived for four years in the US and was returning now because he was worried about his family, and another man, an aviation officer who had been abroad for six months. This crowd would not place the blame on the demonstrators, but on the president, most clearly so the woman living in Germany who had decided to return to Egypt in order to participate in the revolution, and who said that this chaos will only stop “when he goes”. Also the aviation officer, who lowered his voice (the people still fear there may be secret police among the
passengers) to tell that it costs 8 million pounds just to escort Hosni Mubarak from his residence in Heliopolis to Almaza military airport whenever he goes somewhere.
Everybody trying to fly was concerned, worried and anxious. Many had spent the last 48 hours in front of television screens, and many had not slept last night. Also I had only slept three hours. With their very different interpretations of the situation, they all shared a concern for the safety of their families. But when I called M. to tell that I cannot come today, I found him in excellent mood, joyful, even enthusiastic, and telling me: “You’ll be late for the revolution!” He had collected revolution souvenirs: tear gas grenades, broken bottles, and much more, and he is looking forward to see me tomorrow.
Our flights are rescheduled for tomorrow 8:30. Lufthansa will try to fly to Cairo as soon as they can to bring home the people stranded on Cairo airports - there were thousands, even tens of thousands of them, somebody told. But it won’t be today.

All the best,

Samuli

Cairo

2011-01-30T08:29:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends,

I am leaving for Egypt this morning (unless they cancel the flight after all) for one week because I feel that there I can do more than I can here. Given the very difficult situation in Egypt right now, I had to think about this long, and I only decided to give it a go after my friend who will host me told that Giza where he lives is safe thanks to a citizens' guard which he is participating in.

While in Egypt, I will try to report about what I see and hear as often I can via e-mail and facebook. At the moment, mobile phones are working again in Egypt, and I can be reached via one of the numbers below. I will be also happy to respond to any requests for interviews, comments on the situation, etc. Since internet is still down in Egypt, and may remain so, preferably call me. Should mobile phone communications be cut again, you can also try to reach me under the landline numbers beyond.

+49 179 962 96 58 (German mobile phone)
+20 10 964 7882 (Egyptian mobile phone)

+20 2 35 68 94 65 (landline number in Cairo)
+20 3 328 29 05 (landline number in Alexandria, after Wednesday)
+20 47 271 39 64 (landline number in the countryside, after Thursday)

Keep in touch and all the best

Samuli