The Egyptian Revolution: My Article for the Vassar Chronicle

The following is the *mostly* final draft (Edit: this is now the exact copy that I sent, so it is indeed the Final draft now) of a piece I was kindly (or foolishly) invited to write for Vassar's political journal, The Vassar Chronicle. I had already been writing something for you guys, but as things kept changing from day to day, the versions of this changed considerably from when I had started writing. In my next post I'll try to put up some of the pictures I got from the day of protests in Egypt I was there for. Anyway, here's my article. I don't know if I like the title, but it's the best of the four I've come up with so far...

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On January 26th, after five months living and studying in Egypt, I left for Damascus, the next destination in my studies, as planned, but the Egypt I left was not the same one in which I arrived.As you all know by now, on January 25th, thousands of Egyptians gathered for the first day of protests that would soon engulf the whole country. After that first day, I’ll admit I was not ready to believe that this really could be as pivotal as the protests in Tunisia had been. Stuck in an old way of thinking, bedeviled by the same complacency and lack of foresight that has frozen so many expectations about Egypt’s future for so long, I had no idea even as I stood among the protesters that millions would come forth just days later.

Jasmine on the Nile

Despite the fact that news sources--including even Al Jazeera--were remarkably silent about Egypt's protests on their first day, the details and causes of Egypt's turbulence are fairly well known to anyone with a pulse by now it seems like. Just two months after blatantly rigged parliamentary elections turned out huge results for Mubarak's party, Egyptians felt the reverberations of Tunisia's “Jasmine Revolution,” and as if woken by a splash of cold water, a group of young Egyptians sprung into action online to bring about the same kind of protests that could lead to the ousting of their own multi-decade presidential dictator. Indeed one of the signs I saw most often on that first day of protests read "In the beginning, Tunisia. Now, Egypt." Undoubtedly, that's the order it will be remembered in, but with a population almost eight-times the size of Tunisia's, Egypt will be the one that changed everything, a fact surely not lost on Egyptians.

Egyptians chose January 25th, because it was the Egyptian national holiday of "Police Day," coming forth specifically to defy that ever-present symbol of the Egyptian government's control that the day was intended to celebrate. Some news outlets reported for a while that they were protesting corruption, unemployment, bureaucratic incompetence, and the thirty-year-old emergency law allowing charge-less arrests, but really the Egyptians that came out were protesting one thing and one thing only: Hosni Mubarak.

The 82 year-old President has been serving since the Carter administration in no small part because his political party has stamped out all viable opposition and rigged the political mechanics of the country to keep it that way. Furthermore, he has systematically injected his family and himself into most of the country's major industries, enriching his family with tens of billions. And so, on January 25th, Cairenes assembled in various spots around the city and marched to the major square in downtown, Midan Tahrir ("Liberation Square"), to face water cannons, tear gas, batons, rocks, rubber bullets and the threat of arrest--a fate much worse in Egypt than in the U.S. Indeed, for political dissidents in Mubarak's Egypt, arrest can mean being driven out into the desert to be marooned, it can mean sodomy by a broomstick, or it can mean good old-fashioned torture in a solitary cell. Thanks to this merciless security apparatus, Mubarak has held onto power through a mixture of fear and complacency, and so on that first day of protests, I was still pessimistic about the protester's chances. My pessimism stemmed from seeing the resignation that fear caused on a daily basis.

The way it was…

There is an Arabic verb (and a noun in this case), istisalam, related to both the word salaam ("Peace") and islam (literally, "submission"), that would often pop into my head when pondering the state of Egyptian politics. When verbs in Arabic start with "ista-" it can imply both emphasis and a sort of personal involvement with the action, and so this word is used to signify total surrender or capitulation.

I often think of this word because, before the protests, every Egyptian you talked to could (and probably would) swiftly tally up the long list of ills afflicting their country, yet they did so largely without anger or passion. Instead, there was only depressed resignation, like it was all too far gone to even warrant their energy.

Even the smallest aspects of their lives seemed touched by this submission to their country’s problems. During one of my first full conversations in (broken) Arabic I watched as an Egyptian carelessly threw the paper that covered his sandwich onto the street just minutes after he had complained that the appalling number of trash-piles around Cairo never seem to go away. I asked him about it, and he just shrugged.

From my conversations with Egyptians, they seemed similarly resigned to their country's undemocratic government.When pressed about whether they thought Mubarak's son, Gamal, would be the next President (most believed he was being groomed for higher offices), the only answer I ever got went something like what my good Egyptian friend once said to me, "Who else would Mubarak allow?" Similarly, a cab driver once said to me when I asked him if it was ok that Gamal might effectively inherit the executive office, "[o]f course this is not Democracy, but it is just what we have in Egypt...." as if the two could not coexist in the same country.

More troubling perhaps was how this sense of surrender seemed to penetrate some Egyptians so deeply that they felt there was actually no solution. The (very) few Egyptians I ever met that actually claimed to like Mubarak exonerated him based on their belief that he could not be blamed for Egypt's problems because they are too big for anyone to handle. In conversations about their country's ills, they would often cite the statistic that Egypt has a burgeoning population of over 80 million by itself as if it alone represented too high a number to ever be dealt with. Sometimes they would say 100 million, and one even tried to convince me that this was bigger than the United States, mistakes which are not only comical but which only further seem to reflect how unmanageable they perceived this problem to be.

Another occasional misconception held that the recent deaths by shark-attack near one of Egypt's famous Red Sea beach destinations had been trained and planted by Israel's Mossad in order to damage Egyptian tourism. This somehow-not-entirely-discredited theory was not believed by the majority of Egyptians, but that it managed to persist at all is less a reflection of Egyptians' backwardness so much as it again, shows how stacked they seem to feel the odds are against them.

I even began to perceive a connection between this surrender and cynicism in the way that Egyptians think about their old-age. On a few occasions when talking with middle-aged Egyptian professionals who are nearing what we Americans would consider retirement age, they would tell me--proudly almost--of how they never bothered to save their money. As they put it, they would rather just enjoy their lives. Of course, there are many other cultural factors that play into this--not the least of which are the stronger family support systems in Egyptian culture as well as the appallingly low average daily wages for most Egyptians (about $2 a day according to the New York Times)--but I can't help but feel there is at least the shade of a connection between the pessimism engendered in politically repressive systems like Egypt and the feeling that your life is better worth enjoying in the here and now than hoping to do so in the uncertain future.

Who shall lead…

So where does that leave things in Egypt today (February 4th at the time of this writing)? I have obsessively followed Twitter (finally it seems useful to me!) and any of the major news sources writing new information about the events there, so I am just as excited and awed as anybody at how decisively Egyptians have risen up, swelling from thousands to millions in just a week. But what I fear most of all is that this movement will remain leader-less and without a unified idea for the Egypt they want post-Mubarak. Mohammad el-Baradei, though respected by many Egyptians for leading a mostly uncorrupted life and for amassing power and influence independent of Mubarak--no small feat--nonetheless elicits lukewarm support at best. One chant heard often in the streets of Egypt this week has been "Not Mubarak, Not El Baradei, Not [Muslim] Brotherhood; We want no leaders! We just want democracy." It is undoubtedly a good thing that the protesters want Democracy and furthermore that they resist the potentially extremist religious leadership (or the perception of one) associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, but they also don't want Baradei, or any leaders whatsoever. Leaders have proven corruptible, so Egyptians are understandably cynical and suspicious of outside interference. But is this nihilism? What do they believe in, besides the need for Mubarak to go? Who is crafting the plan for what happens after, and why will Egyptians be any more inclined to follow them?

From what my friends in Egypt said, Baradei did gain some credibility and praise for coming out to the front lines on Friday, and even though his confinement under house arrest may have left Egyptians feeling again he was just playing it safe, he came back to the protests a few days later with little love lost. At this point he is quite well positioned to act as a representative, especially in light of his apparent ability to draw allegiance from many of the different opposition groups, including the most organized of the groups, the Muslim Brotherhood.* But then again, unless Baradei accrues much more respect from the people very quickly—which I’m not ruling out given his positioning as the chief representative for most of the organized opposition groups—the level of popularity he has right now is hardly enough to make him a shoe-in to succeed Mubarak.

*(On a side note: despite what Glenn Beck said this week, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, probably one of the most moderate “Islamist” groups in the Middle East, are not going to be the ones who take over Egypt when this is all through. See this excellent article in the NYT pretty much explaining why the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't matter and is not a threat.)

Recently an American university professor suggested in an Al-Jazeera op-ed that today’s Egypt may be like 1989 Czechoslovakia and Poland with their hugely popular first post-soviet presidents, Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa. The truth is that Baradei is not yet their equal in stature or popular respect. I think many Americans would like it if Baradei succeeded to the leadership of Egypt, because he is a known quantity of sorts, but that’s not how he’ll get the job. This all could change, but it is not guaranteed, no matter how much I think Americans would like it to be so.

Burning history

Today though, February 2, was the consecration of Egypt’s pro-democracy protests by fire. Watching masses of Egyptians literally burning and breaking up their capital city was actually heartwrenching for me in a way that I would never have predicted.

Dirty, crowded, confused, and often a little offensive, Cairo is beset by a whole host of problems to be sure, and if you had asked me even just two months ago, I would have told you I would be happy to leave it. But somewhere, sometime, my mind changed. Amidst Cairo’s craziness, there is a rhythm to the madness that you can find yourself falling into like you fall into stride with the people walking next to you. Cairo is one of the world’s truly organic metropolises. Made up of 18 million people, they accumulated there over the centuries to be a part of its history and its energy. When you exit the city’s famous hilltop Mohammad Ali mosque and see the Great Pyramids through the haze your gaze is still drawn down past the city’s infamous “thousand” minarets to the remarkable city of colorful Egyptian lives. There is something special about Cairo—and it’s saying something that I feel this way still as I sit in the heart of Damascus, probably the world’s oldest inhabited city.

So as a result, just as I became aware of this strange love I for a city I lived in for only five months, I had to watch as it tore itself apart thanks to the paid thugs of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. What had been perhaps most amazing about the protests up to that point had been their distinctly, purposefully non-violent tactics—and then came Mubarak’s mercenaries, armed with machetes and malotovs that they would aim indiscriminately at the unarmed pro-democracy protesters camped out in Tahrir Square as well as at the famous Egyptian Museum whose priceless antiquities the “pro-government” forces had most likely helped loot just a few nights prior.

It may be impossible to prove Mubarak’s party was behind the sudden emergence of so-called pro-government supporters, but the discovery of numerous police and security force IDs on them, coupled with the ways they targeted foreign reporters, and the similarities to intimidation tactics implemented by the NDP around elections seems about as convincing as anything else. Mubarak has knowingly and willingly committed violence against his countrymen behind closed doors for years, but now he has perpetrated it for all the world to see.

For whatever stability and continuity Mubarak previously lent to American affairs in the region, it should now be completely clear that he has forfeited whatever moral right to lead Egypt he ever had, and the U.S. should completely recant any support for his regime, regardless of the political consequences we may fear from our various other allies in the region.

Consequences confused

Some have probably argued that severing ties with Mubarak might make our other Arab allies in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Jordan (and arguably Lebanon and Syria), uneasy with the apparent fickleness of our allegiance. I am not so morally-high-minded as to argue that we should avoid associating with such governments all together—for the sake of ending this piece, I’ll just say that foreign affairs are too complicated for such a blunt tact and leave it at that. But Mubarak’s actions, this open violence against his own people as they attempt to protest peacefully, has crossed a line, and we must react with more than vague statements about the need for “transition.”

Moreover, the argument that a repudiation of Mubarak’s regime might threaten our relations with the other benign-ish dictatorships at best misses the point, and at worst blatantly misleads. Frankly, I think such allies should be a little spooked that we will renege on our support for them should literally millions, representing members from every cross-section of their population, stand up in protest of their autocratic, oppressive policies.

I am totally comfortable with that being the line we draw in the sand. If that means slightly higher oil prices, so be it. Already, we have seen how Yemen, Libya, and Jordan, all suddenly feeling more accountable to their people, have promised to implement measures to help their populations (the actual merits of those measures themselves is another story, but I stand by my point). We have long claimed that this was essentially what we demand of our allies, accountability to their people, and I think abandoning Mubarak can only reinforce such a righteous message. I know the people of Egypt would have appreciated such a message long ago.

Pessimism justified?

I don’t know what’s next for Egypt and my thoughts about whether the revolutions taking place in Tunisia and Egypt will spread to other countries in the Middle East are less thought out. The events in Iran just two years ago may beg the question of whether Mubarak will even step down, though I think Egypt’s security apparatus is not so pervasive as Iran’s. If it were, I think Mubarak would have used it already to squelch this movement. Furthermore, the demographics of Egypt’s pro-democracy protesters seem far more varied than those that participated in Iran. Protests have sprung up with gusto in nearly every major city in Egypt—not just its capital. Egypt is bigger than Iran’s protests. So, in a word, I am hopeful.

Yet, the pessimism displayed by the thousands that accepted the bribes—both ideological and monetary—from Mubarak’s ringleaders to come out and attack the protesters yesterday, reminded me of how istisalam seemed to define the mindset of the Egypt I lived in, even as I fell in love with its people and its capital. I don’t think Mubarak will succeed or be able to remain in power until the Fall elections, but I do worry that the next government will become co-opted by men possessed of the same cynicism that made megalomaniacs out of NDP’s leaders who felt no accountability to any but themselves. I fear they will throw the trash out onto the streets instead of where it belongs, shrugging it off because deep down they still believe that their country is doomed anyway.

On the other hand, there is another word that is even harder to avoid when walking around Egypt, and that is the Arabic name for Cairo, al-qahira, which means “victor.” I think the Egyptian people’s dedication and devotion over the past week carries within the recipe for an Egyptian future that will hold onto that optimistic idealism that induced them to keep their protests peaceful right up until the point they were attacked. Perhaps the cynicism of life under Mubarak need not persist. Perhaps the people will emerge the uncompromised victors of this revolution.