Tag: Egypt
My Tahrir experience last night
I spent yesterday evening in Tahrir square, which meant that I missed the attack on the Israeli embassy that has dominated the news from Cairo. Colleagues on their way back from the pyramids got caught in a pitched battle betweeen rock-throwers and riot police in front of the Saudi embassy, down the street from the Israelis. They got a good scare, but were uninjured.
My own contact with the would-be rock throwers was limited to their recruiting marches through Tahrir, where most people were ignoring the chants of “to the embassy!” sung out by fist-pumping small groups of young men. But they apparently managed to assemble thousands at the embassy, some of whom were surely what would be termed football hooligans in Europe. The arrival of Ahli and Zamalek (the two Cairo teams) fans in Tahrir was greeted earlier in the evening with a roar of approval.
The predominant themes in Tahrir however had little to do with Israel. A big sign denounced the media cronies of the Mubarak regime, all still in their jobs. Another called for justice for those who had resisted the revolution, noting that they are not even arrested but pro-democracy demonstrators are still being processed in military courts.
Anti-military sentiment tinged the speeches, which called on Egyptians to be like one hand, a civilian one. The crowd wanted the army to fulfill its promise to turn over power to civilians. “Liberty, social justice and bread” was a popular chant–it sounds a lot more rhythmic in Arabic. The atmosphere is a bit like Hyde Park: anyone with a microphone stands on a soap box, quickly assembles a crowd and holds forth, to the amusement and banter of the listeners, who denounce him for hogging the mic. The Communist Party was handing out leaflets that denounced human rights violations by the military and called for liberation from everything, including bachelorhood.
Women were less than a quarter of Tahrir’s population last night, many but not all covering at least their hair. “The one who governs shoud be bigger in wisdom than beard” was a popular, I am told Koranic, quotation. But neither religion nor secularism was on serious display so far I could tell.
If there was any link between the general sentiment of the crowd and the violence at the Israeli embassy, it may lay in the idea of humiliation. “Keep your head up, you are Egyptian” was a strong current in the speeches. Egyptians regard the Israeli killing of several Egyptian policemen in Sinai in the aftermath of a terrorist attack inside Israel as humiliating and want a more fulsome apology for it. As Rob Satloff suggests, “a more generous statement on the unfortunate killing of Egyptian security forces might have been
both appropriate and helpful.”
That would not likely have carried much weight with last night’s rioters, who destroyed a security wall built recently in front of the embassy and injured a lot of people. But it is only by making the “cold peace” between Israel and Egypt a warmer one that politicians on both sides of the Sinai border will be able to convince their electorates that the Camp David accords are worth defending.
This is the real meaning of the Arab spring to Israel, as Satloff also notes: peace is no longer an issue that can be settled president to prime minister, or even government to government. It will have to be society to society, which is much harder, especially if your ambassador has fled from Cairo and the Egyptian one has been withdrawn from Tel Aviv as well.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Stand up Egyptian!
Today’s demonstration in Cairo promises to be important. Dubbed “correcting the path,” it aims to convince the army to schedule elections (most demonstrators might prefer after the constitution is written) and to revise the proposed electoral law, which favors the better organized National Democratic Party (Mubarak’s party) and the Muslim Brotherhood. These are concerns the more conservative Islamists do not share, so it will be interesting to see what turnout will be. Tuesday’s confrontation between police and football fans does not bode well. Nor do clashes outside the police academy where Hosni Mubarak is being tried.
Lower ranking officers having recanted their previous depositions to the effect that live ammunition was used on demonstrators, the prosecutors have called the top generals, including Supreme Council of the Armed Forces chair Tantawi. He is expected to appear in court Sunday.
I’ll be trying to join the demonstrators this afternoon and will report on the event. In the meanwhile, here is a take from Mohamed el Deeb, “Stand Up Egyptian”:
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Land of civilization
That’s what the signs say on the way to Saqqara, where the step pyramid and the artefacts found within, now well-housed and displayed in the nearby museum, suggest that it was true 4500 years ago. But was it really true then, and is it true now?
The children working in the nearby carpet-making “schools” suggest that reality is far from today’s notion of a civilized ideal. Ditto the sad sack villages on the way to and from the ancient glories, where women cover, though full burkha is rare. Egypt is poor and its countryside traditional. It likely was not a lot different in ancient times. Who knows how badly the peasants (modern thinking seems to be that they were not slaves) who built the step pyramid lived? Certainly the ancient Egyptians did not live long: 40 years seems to have been the life expectancy in ancient Egypt, compared to 70 or so today.
Listening to the current (post-revolutionary, appointed) governors of Cairo and its Giza and Kalyoubia suburbs, modern Egypt seems to be facing sharply increased challenges–especially with poverty, jobs, water and sanitation–while resources are declining. Expectations, they said, are high, and needs expanding. The governor of Kalyoubia suggested that the only solution is to be found in captitalizing the intellectual capacity of the population, but the Wharton school graduate didn’t say how he would do it. The governor of Cairo, an engineer with a good degree and distinguished background, sounded less confident.
Laila Takla, a member of the commission preparing the new Egyptian constitution, offered a more upbeat perspective. People to people contacts of the sort promoted by Sister Cities International (the organization whose meeting I am attending in Cairo) promote mutual knowledge, understanding and respect, leading to a culture of peace and justice. This is what is needed, she said: acknowledgement of differences but recognition of equality. Her focus, as in her recent book, was on Christian/Muslim relations. A Christian herself, Takla noted the Muslim misunderstanding of the trinity as referring to more than one God, and Christian misunderstanding of jihad as referring to physical violence rather than inner struggle.
Takla counts herself an activist for citizen-to-citizen diplomacy. The question is whether people like her and those they inspire can help draw on that intellectual capital and contribute to solving the problems the governors face. We’d best hope the answer is yes, because that really would make for a land of civilization.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
“Get up stand up for your rights…
…don’t give up the fight.” That’s what Bob Marley was singing as my cab circled Tahrir square this afternoon to deposit me at the Egyptian Museum.
I’d just come from a conversation with a leader of the revolutionary opposition. He opened by warning me sternly that the West was exaggerating the importance of the Islamists in Egypt. They would gain no more than 3-5 million votes out of 25-30 million, which is the number that can be expected to vote this fall. The revolutionary opposition, trying hard to form a broad coalition to include moderate Islamists, hopes to win a majority, or at least a plurality.
The big challenge is the proposed electoral law, which divides Egypt into large constituencies in a system that is 50/50 open and closed list. This will favor larger, better known and better organized forces, like Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The revolutionary opposition favors a closed list system (with smaller constituencies or a proportional system–which or both wasn’t clear to me), with people allowed to vote from abroad. This would mean party lists fixed by party leaders with no voting for individuals. If they don’t get it, the opposition may boycott the elections, which my interlocutor thought would deny legitimacy to the results.
But most of all the revolutionary opposition wants the constitution written before elections. The September 9 demonstration is its remaining best opportunity to force this issue. It was a mistake to allow the army the role it has in the transition process, and now the opposition will have to live with its mistake. But it can still try to get the army to listen to the people–the only way to force it to do that is by returning to Tahrir.
Tahrir seemed to me mostly a construction site these days, which I guess is an apt metaphor for the situation the country is in. I prefer that to the metaphoric museum, whose extraordinary collection of treasures is so shabbily housed, labeled and cared for behind its pretty pink facade that it is hard not to wonder what their eventual fate will be.
I also had to wonder about the fate of the Camp David accords, which aren’t nearly as old and dusty as the artefacts from King Tut’s tomb. My interlocutor thought Camp David unfairly limited the development of Sinai, where Hamas is enjoying free rein and blowing up the gas pipeline that takes Egyptian gas to Israel. Islamist domination of the Sinai would be harmful. The opposition wants to know what secret agreements were made at Camp David and to exert full Egyptian sovereignty in Sinai.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Egypt reading
I’m heading for Cairo today. Here are some of the more recent short pieces I’ve thought worth reading on the current situation:
1. Chatham House on the political process and how to keep it moving in a democratic direction.
2. RAND on the military’s efforts to maintain its status and power.
3. Sahar Aziz suggesting that the Egyptian military’s attacks on civil society are evidence of heightened civil society effectiveness.
4. Vali Nasr on the sharp decline in Egypt’s economy and what needs to be done about it in light of high unemployment, slow growth and a dramatic youth bulge.
5. Eric Trager on the Muslim Brotherhood’s discipline and unity.
6. Eric Trager and Dina Guirguis, “Egypt’s Revolution Brought to a Halt?” (http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3390).
In the books category:
1. Max Rodenbeck, The City Victorious
2. Alaa al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building
3. Rosemary Mahoney, Down the Nile, which a friend just brought by
Her husband has also recommended The Egyptologist.
I’ll be glad to get other recommendations. There’s definitely a Western, secularist tilt to this list so far–I trust I’ll pick up more Egyptian perspective, including Islamist and military views, in Cairo. Starting to make appointments now. Recommendations for that are also welcome!
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
What was it like 48 years ago?
Credit for this post, if credit is due, goes to Zaheer Ali, a New York City historian who asked in response to a tweet saying that I was at the March on Washington if I had ever written anything about it. No, I haven’t, until just now, when I should be working on a book proposal.
I remember as much about the circumstances as I do about the event. My aunt tried to convince my mother she shouldn’t let me go. I was 18, age of the immortals. Just graduated from high school, working in a factory for the summer before starting at Haverford. I was determined to march despite rumors of violence. I certainly did not want to take advice from my rascist aunt, who went livid. Fortunately a more liberal uncle weighed in on my side. Defiance proved unnecessary–my mother was a liberal and thought it natural that I wanted to go.
It’s all about witness, wanting to testify to your beliefs by moving your body to the right place at the right time. I’d been to Washington before, as a child and tourist. It was still a segregated city then, though as best I understand it more by tradition than by law. My parents would only eat in chain restaurants that had integrated. Returning by bus that August day of 1963 was a right of passage for me: a first opportunity to witness on my own.
What has become known as Martin Luther King’s greatest moment I thought of at the time as Bayard Rustin’s. No, I did not know he was gay, or even what gay was, but I knew he was the great organizer. He proved it that day, assembling an enormous mass of people, whites as well as people who then mostly still called themselves Negro. There was a long list of speakers. Martin Luther King was the climax, but I can assure you that many of the others stirred the crowd as well. I particularly remember being moved by A. Philip Randolph, but don’t ask me any longer what he said. And the music! Dylan, Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary: mostly white, but “radical” as it was known then.
I had to leave New Rochelle, where my family lived, early in the morning, around 4 am. I grabbed the brown bag from the fridge with what I thought was my lunch in it, only to discover as we arrived in DC that the smell of raw fish was coming from my brown bag in the overhead rack. I had to borrow a couple of dollars from a cousin to get a hot dog or two for lunch.
We marched from somewhere not too far–maybe Thomas Circle. Memory confuses this occasion with the several later occasions I joined antiwar marches in DC. The spirit was good, really good. Everyone singing, chatting, laughing. I don’t remember a moment of tension all day. I guess the segregationists decided the crowd was too big and stayed home. Certainly it was nothing like the venomous atmosphere I endured two years later demonstrating in Cambridge, Maryland, where the national guard fixed bayonets and gas masks to confront us in the main street.
The message of the day was integration. Those who cite MLK’s “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers” have got it right. It is hard to appreciate today how much imagination was needed then to picture integration of blacks and whites in the United States. None of us were sure though at the time that MLK had quite risen to the occasion. Was his speech really eloquent enough? Did it rise to the occasion? Would anything make a real difference in a country that seemed hopelessly attached to segregation and racism?
We all think we know the answers to those question now, but at the time nothing was clear, except the day and the overwhelming power of that crowd of witnesses. These were people who really could sing “we shall overcome.” And they were determined to do it, though they had no idea how long it would take.
What does this have to do with peace and war? Everything: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria have all trod the path of nonviolent witness, some more successfully than others. Even Libya did it briefly. Hesitatingly, sometimes inadequately but increasingly the United States has come out on the right side, witnessing for the world to see that it supports human dignity. There really is no other choice. Bashar al Assad and King Khalifa of Bahrain should take notice. Washington may hesitate, it may equivocate, but it will not fail in the end to support the radical proposition that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights.
RSS - Posts
