Once Upon a Revolution Read online

  There also were divisions within the revolution, which crept into conversations despite the effort to present a united front. Already some revolutionaries looked askance at their fellow activists who went on television or drafted talking points and demands. Some reflexively opposed any authority, and some were committed anarchists who subscribed to the theory that the best path to progress was to obliterate all institutions of control, inside and outside the state. Tahrir’s de facto organizers had quickly coalesced into a coherent team, communicating and plotting on an almost hourly basis, but they had yet to formally announce an organization. When Basem and his companions published statements, some demonstrators immediately condemned them as power hungry, a label that stuck to all those who engaged in the first forays into politics. Anarchists went further, viewing any attempt to lead, organize, or represent as an unacceptable grab for glory.

  There were other disagreements of substance inside the square, whose denizens could be roughly broken down into reactionaries, reformists, and revolutionaries. Tahrir’s conservative faction objected only to Mubarak; they genuinely loved the army and brooked little criticism of the state. Most typical of this group were the Nasserists, who desired a different type of authoritarian to replace Mubarak. Then there were the veteran activists who had been considering system change even before Tahrir. They had researched, detailed proposals. Among them were reformers such as Basem, who were hardly ideological. They had a centrist vision of a nationalist Egypt, its system overhauled and reformed but still recognizable: essentially the same state, but with nicer police, less corruption, and respect for the laws as written. Labor activists and leftists, meanwhile, demanded the full explosion of Egypt’s system and all the state’s institutions of repression, including the security services and extending to the framework of its capitalist economy. Some among this category hoped for a revolution so complete that it would dwarf France’s and Russia’s in the history books.

  Then there were the Islamists. Because of their late entry and the suspicion they aroused, many of them kept quiet in Tahrir, but there were plenty of conservative, older Muslim Brothers and Salafis who shared none of Moaz’s progressive open-mindedness. They were old-school organization men, and their vision was of a regimented Egypt where governance flowed directly from the Koran. These were vast, perhaps unbridgeable differences in belief. Crowds united in their call for Mubarak’s head found little other common ground.

  The exuberance in Tahrir was astounding but, at the same time, seemed fragile compared with the vast indifferent expanse outside, where Egypt went about its business as leaden as ever. For all the chastened parents who embraced their children’s revolution, an equal number did not change. At a checkpoint just a few minutes’ walk from Tahrir, a police officer in his dress uniform cornered me. “Why are you reporting from Tahrir?” he scoffed. “For every whiner there, you will find a hundred Egyptians out here who oppose them. You should be reporting from here, from Egypt!” At the fancy cafés on the island of Zamalek, rich kids groused over four-dollar coffees that, with Tahrir occupied, traffic was worse than ever. In poor neighborhoods, people worried about their livelihoods and “the wheel of production,” mouthing a line heard often on state television. According to the ruling party, it wasn’t Mubarak’s twenty-nine-year tenure that had hobbled the economy and imperiled tourism, it was the last few days of demonstrations in Tahrir and the other squares. Even at El Hayiss Pastries, where the revolution began, the manager was contemptuous; I couldn’t tell whether he had completely internalized government propaganda or if he was just parroting the required lines while he waited to see how it all turned out. “These people in Tahrir Square represent only a minority of Egyptians,” he said, leaning over a pan of sweets, speaking in a dull monotone. “We are the majority. We live here. We talk to the people. No to America, no to Israel, no to Iran.” His passionless manifesto delivered, he fell silent.

  The nation’s still-confident masters were counting on the fear they had fostered for decades. As Mubarak clung stubbornly to his office, I sat poolside with a group of retired generals at the Gezira Club, a leafy bastion of privilege on the island of Zamalek. There in the middle of Cairo, the richest and most established families escaped the traffic and congestion. Kids roamed through five playgrounds. There was ample green space to explore on horseback or on foot, and several swimming pools, including a serene one from which children were banned. The retired officers relaxed in polos and sweatpants, sheltering from the midday sun beneath umbrellas before heading to the tennis courts. At first none of them wanted to talk to me, but I had been in Tahrir every day, and they had not, so after a while their curiosity got the better of them.

  “We thought the revolution would be started by the hungry people,” said the most friendly among them, a retired air force general named Hisham. “We didn’t think it would start from these well-educated, well-fed young guys.” Hisham thought there was a graceful way out: dump Mubarak and preserve the regime. He feared that the people in power weren’t wise enough to leave unless forced. “I know Mubarak. He is a stubborn man,” Hisham said. “The regime probably won’t give up unless Egypt is burning.”

  A retired police general named Tarek began grilling me. “Who are the people out there? How many are Muslim Brothers?” he asked. I told him my impression that the Brothers made up about a third of the committed activists, and that political neophytes filled the big daytime crowds in Tahrir.

  “You are wrong,” he said, laughing. “The Brothers are behind this.” In his world, a man could know with certainty only as much as he was allowed to see in files. Possession of dossiers was the primary avenue to power in Mubarak’s system.

  “You don’t have access to enough files to understand the situation,” he told me. “Maybe your editor does, but not you.”

  He was quite sure that everybody in Egypt loved and trusted the police, the events of the past weeks notwithstanding. I asked him what other policemen thought, but he answered all my questions with questions.

  Hisham, the air force veteran, chuckled at my efforts to crack the police officer’s façade. “They have been trained to get information, not to give it,” he observed. He was taking my side, trying to probe his friend. Hisham pointed out to Tarek that Egyptians had tired of secret police meddling in their lives. The air force general’s empathy for the revolutionaries further exasperated his brother from the police. Finally, Tarek broke his irritable silence. “I think you are CIA,” he said to me, and then excused himself to pray. He returned later, tennis racket in hand; he wanted one last go at me.

  “You have information from inside the square,” he said. “Who are the leaders? Who controls the majority: ElBaradei or the Brotherhood?”

  Tired of his boorish manners, I tried to get a rise out of him.

  “How will the police regain public trust when they are so hated?” I asked.

  “People still trust the police,” he said.

  “Do you understand that Egyptians hate the police?” I goaded him.

  “The majority of people love the police,” General Tarek sputtered, his face flushed. “They will respect the police because they need the police.”

  As an assessment of popular sentiment, Tarek’s pronouncement was delusional. But as a threat, it was prescient.

  The army brass had refrained from turning Tahrir into Tiananmen Square, or Hama, or Halabja, although it was willing to let others attack. The military wasn’t going to back Mubarak, but it wasn’t going to join the revolution, either, like its counterpart in Tunisia. “The army and the people are one hand!” shouted the people in Tahrir, surrounded by immobile tanks. It was as much a supplication as a statement. A few days after the Battle of the Camel, General Hassan Ruweini, the army officer in charge of Cairo, made an ominous tour of the square. He clambered over the barricades beside the Egyptian Museum with a small detail of meaty bodyguards. This was a listening tour, Egyptian army–style: first Ruweini wanted to hear from the protesters, and then he
wanted them to shut up and listen to him. “It’s time for life to go back to normal,” he said. “You can express yourselves without interfering with others.” He told the protesters to clear the burned cars, corrugated metal sheets, and requisitioned construction material that kept Ruweini’s tanks out of Tahrir. He wanted the youth to go home.

  The crowd surged, summoned by shrill whistles and the low, thunderous banging of clubs on metal. Ruweini ranted and tugged at a barricade. His soldiers quickly pushed it over. Young men reassembled it in a few seconds, but the general was already inside their cordon. A cry rose: “We will die here!” The general pushed through. Army snipers watched from the museum roof. One of General Ruweini’s bodyguards placed his beefy hand on a demonstrator’s face and shoved it aside. General Ruweini clasped another man’s head in one hand, pulled him close, and gently slapped his cheek. The gesture was paternal, intimate, and carried a whiff of menace. “The military will remain neutral,” Ruweini said firmly, with the strain of a man not used to explaining his orders, much less needing to persuade anyone. “We will not use force against you. But we need to get things back to normal.”

  “We won’t go until he goes!” the crowd chanted in response, referring to President Mubarak. Demonstrators refused to let General Ruweini move deeper into the square, linking arms in a human chain to block his way. For the next hour, the general zigzagged among the rebels.

  “You keep bandaging up people’s heads to make it look like they’ve been wounded,” he snapped at a doctor. “Why?”

  The volunteer protested: the bandages on people’s heads were soaked with real blood. Ruweini laughed as he yanked at the gauze on a patient’s face.

  “See, this man’s not even wounded,” the general said. “His bandage is just for show.”

  The wounded man winced and his head lurched. The bandage was tightly affixed to the bloody wound underneath. Ruweini, not in the least contrite, pulled a little more and then gave up. Still smiling, the general departed. His performance had unnerved the crowd, which was perhaps its purpose. Some in Tahrir trusted the army, but others were wary; the military had controlled Egypt since 1952, and was the backbone of a repressive regime. Why should soldiers feel any solidarity with the revolutionaries?

  Lots of young people were talking in Tahrir, but no one was speaking for the youth. Basem’s group understood that in order to exercise leverage, the revolution required leaders and institutions. The foot soldiers of January 25 liked the idea of the world’s first leaderless revolution, but they wouldn’t get far without structure. In the first days, the revolt had been able to escape police because it was an organic mass; there was no single brain trust to decapitate. Once the revolution had become a train, however, someone needed to steer it. Otherwise, who would tell the generals and the sofa party what the people wanted? Who would try to translate people power into the real thing? Unfortunately, even the revolutionary public in Tahrir Square had internalized state propaganda, which since 1952 had belittled all politics as inimical to the pure ideal of the nation. Anyone who wanted to represent Tahrir to the wider public, or, God forbid, negotiate with the regime, was attacked immediately as a vain egomaniac or a reactionary agent. Despite these dangers, or perhaps because of them, the core group that had set forth from El Hayiss Pastries to Tahrir decided to organize a secretariat for the square.

  Already they had been meeting every day, usually three or four times, in the green Coleman tent, or in borrowed apartments on the outskirts of Tahrir. Normally, secular Egyptian political groups detested the Muslim Brotherhood and vice versa, but there was profound trust among these young men and women despite their varied political backgrounds. On Monday, February 7, fourteen young organizers and a few of their intimates crammed together in a small room just out of earshot of Tahrir’s din. Several of the leaders had just been released from detention by government security forces. One of the independents, Abdelrahman Fares, had been held over the weekend and then released blindfolded; one of the soldiers detaining him held a gun to his head and whispered, “Your life is worth less than one bullet.” Although people in the square chanted regularly, “The army and the people are one hand!” Fares reminded his colleagues, “The army is not our ally.”

  The same week, several ElBaradei activists were arrested on their way back to the square from dinner. Earlier, on the very Monday that the Tahrir organizers made their union official, Moaz had been arrested crossing into the square. He affected infinite patience and told his police guard a stream of jokes. “Maybe I will stay here forever,” he said. “Maybe I will die in your office.” The officer questioned Moaz about what was happening in the square. It had been the same with all the other young people who had been detained. Who was in charge? How many Brothers? Who was paying them? “I am a simple pharmacist,” Moaz repeated. Finally, the cop changed the subject. “How much money do you have on you?” Moaz emptied his pockets. For three hundred Egyptian pounds, or about fifty dollars, the officer let him go. Moaz made it to the meeting of the core activists just in time.

  That Monday night, the fourteen men and women who had converged on El Hayiss Pastries and labored together for a week and a half in Tahrir voted to band together officially. They called themselves the Revolutionary Youth Coalition. “We don’t run the square,” Basem said. “But we must try to keep it focused and organized.” The name came easily. No jargon, no melodrama, no invocation of January 25. Just a straightforward explanation of who they were: young, radical, collaborative. For the sake of their dream of change, and the millions who were shaking the old order, they wanted to keep their power and extend it. Separately, each revolutionary organization could pursue its own special causes, but when the groups spoke in unison, they would speak under the banner of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition. They would operate by consensus. The coalition would have heft because its demands would represent the most critical desires of every important group. Theirs would be the agenda that united socialist workers, bourgeois liberals, and pious Islamists.

  There were only two Islamist seats on the fourteen-member council, but like everyone else, the Islamists had veto power. They wielded special influence because of the Brotherhood’s resources. Basem mistrusted the Brotherhood as an organization even though he was personally fond of some of his Islamist colleagues. “You’re nice people, but your fundamentalist radical ideology is bad for Egypt,” he told Moaz. For now, though, Basem and Moaz had more in common than in discord. Moaz and the other Islamist youths were running a rebellion within a rebellion. In addition to their resistance against the regime, they were defying their own autocratic bosses inside the Brotherhood by joining forces with Basem, Zyad, and the rest.

  The youth of the revolution now had a name. They had a method. And they had an agenda: no negotiations until there was democracy in Egypt. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition was the first institution born of the Tahrir Revolution, and it was meant to enshrine all the values and best practices of revolutionary youth. As a collective, its founders hoped they could surpass their reach as a pastiche of motivated but narrow organizations. The crowds in Tahrir were winning, and the Revolutionary Youth Coalition was going to be the vehicle through which the crowds would transcend themselves, maturing from mob to movement. The regime was terrified. Mubarak was tottering, and so was the entire deep state that had controlled Egyptian life in every conceivable way for sixty years. These young activists were as pragmatic as they were bold. They wanted to build a new society, not simply rip the head off the old one. To do it, they’d need an organization that was nimble and representative. They’d need to be able to stake out political positions quickly, and then back those positions on the street with muscle and crowds. The coalition included five groups: the youth branch of a liberal party called the Democratic Front; a left-wing group with ties to labor called the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom; the proworker April 6 Movement; ElBaradei’s supporters; and the Muslim Brotherhood Youth. There were also four independents, including Sally Moore, t
he only woman on the leadership committee, a Coptic Christian psychiatrist with an Irish father and an Egyptian mother.

  Mubarak’s prime minister sent emissaries to the square. He invited the youth leaders to meet him. But if Mubarak stayed in power, the revolutionary leaders believed, all of them would be executed or end up in prison for life. Some people in the square said there was no harm in talking to Mubarak’s ministers, but the members of the new Revolutionary Youth Coalition voted unanimously that they should talk to the government only after Mubarak had stepped down.

  One seat on the Revolutionary Youth Coalition was reserved for Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who had managed the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page, and who had been arrested at the start of the Tahrir uprising. Wael Ghonim was a successful boy-next-door, the kind of character who made middle-class Egyptians feel safe. He had spent his life trying to avoid politics and controversy. When someone like Wael Ghonim turned to revolution, it was safe to say that the regime had lost a natural constituency. The night the coalition was formed, Ghonim was released from prison. Immediately, he appeared on a television show, condemning the regime. When confronted with photographs of people who had died in Tahrir while he was in detention, Ghonim began to weep. “I want to tell every mother and father who lost a son that it’s not our fault,” Ghonim said through his tears. “It’s the fault of everyone who held on to power and clung to it.” His endorsement of Tahrir swayed countless fence-sitters to visit the square for the first time, filling it with unprecedented numbers.