The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (30 page)

Maher had said that they were working under the “wrong theory.” It was wrong because, although the revolution might look spontaneous, it would take much more than a march to bring change. The challenge for the April 6 movement—or any group of activists working in a repressive environment—is to maintain the momentum for the change it is trying to achieve. It is not easy, Maher admitted to me. The small success they achieved on that day in April 2008 had been the unexpected result of pairing a technological tool (Facebook) with a
tactic of nonviolent resistance (a general strike). Not surprisingly, the April 6 movement struggled to find the next creative combination that would cause the government to stumble.

A little more than a month after Mubarak was ousted from power, I sat with Mohamed Adel in a street café in Cairo. It was shortly before 11:00 p.m., and he looked exhausted. The pace of events had barely slowed since the eighteen days of revolution that had forced Mubarak to flee. Adel, who was now serving as the April 6 movement’s information officer, said the group was in constant talks with the Egyptian military, the political parties, and other activists and youth groups. After decades of no political change, each week now felt like a year. I asked Adel why they had succeeded when they did. The poverty, the repression, the abuses, the lack of genuine rights—it had all been true for years. What had made this moment different from others?

Adel saw many factors. He pointed first to the case of Khaled Said, a young man who had been brutally murdered by two police officers outside an Internet café seven months earlier. The campaign surrounding his death—especially the Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said”—had served as an enormous wake-up call, galvanizing public opinion and, in the days before the revolution, helping to spread the message to come out to demonstrate. But he then admitted that there had been many “Khaled Saids” over the years, that many people had known someone who had been abused, tortured, or worse while in the hands of the police. He then pointed to the November 2010 parliamentary elections, which had been a farce. Of course, it was hardly the first election to be rigged by Mubarak’s cronies. And then he settled on another factor: Tunisia. “After the Tunisian revolution, we said that we must start,” says Adel. “Because Tunisia allowed public opinion to finally be convinced that protests can actually achieve something.”

Tunisia provided the moment, and Egypt’s youth, especially a core of veteran, battle-scarred activists, seized it. The example of Tunisians rising up against Ben Ali changed the conditions in which the country’s youth activists operated. This time, when they went into the poor neighborhoods of Cairo to rally support, people came outside their homes, joining their neighbors as their numbers swelled. The collective fear that had kept everyday Egyptians from raising their voices had begun to melt. If Tunisians could rid themselves of a tyrant, why
couldn’t they do the same? Instead of protests of hundreds, their numbers quickly rose to the thousands, and then the tens of thousands, as Egyptians made their way to Tahrir Square. Everyone looked for a way to lend a hand. “Whatever small things that people could do to help, they would do,” recalls Adel. “When they started firing tear gas at us, the women knew that the thing that would help us the most was vinegar. So they started throwing bottles of vinegar to us from their balconies.”

But it was more than a thousand small acts of courage. Years of learning, years of trial and error, went into decisions that now had the opportunity to make a difference. In the past, protests were usually held in the center of Cairo, in front of government buildings or the Journalists Syndicate. On January 25, 2011, the demonstrations followed a different path. Activists targeted more than a dozen locations around the city, zeroing in on many poor neighborhoods and calling on residents there to come out and join the protest. “
The idea was to try to create many hot spots where protests could start,” recalls Salah. Besides beginning the demonstrations where people lived, this strategy had one other important advantage: it would compel the regime’s security forces to disperse to many locations, rather than amassing at one central point. Small teams of activists had targeted specific streets in specific neighborhoods where they would begin. “Their job was to try to go up and down the back streets, shouting and getting people to join,” says Salah. “Once they built a sufficient mass, they’d move to a bigger street and so on. Until they had a huge mass, and then they would go to the central areas we were targeting.”

Kamel Arafa, a twenty-five-year-old member of the April 6 movement, belonged to one of the advance teams sent to rally people. He spent days scouting Arab League Street, in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Mohandessin. Arafa knew the neighborhood well, it was where he lived, but his preparation had a particular focus. He spent days monitoring the area for the central security trucks the regime used to shuttle its antiriot police. As January 25 approached, he wanted to know what routes they took and where their trucks parked. Arafa planned to begin along the neighborhood’s tightest back alleys, streets that were too narrow for security trucks to navigate. He also marked routes that would provide protesters with a quick exit,
if they were forced to beat a hasty retreat. When the day arrived, Arafa was amazed at how quickly their crowds grew. He gives credit to the tactics. The preparation was essential. But, like others, he believed it was more than just solid planning. The timing was also crucial. “
The Tunisian revolution gave faith to people that things can change,” says Arafa.

One can only imagine the shock inside Egypt’s Interior Ministry as the regime’s riot police were overwhelmed by crowds in the street. But the interior minister, Habib el-Adly, may have recognized the fingerprints of one of his former adversaries in the plans that sent his units struggling to regain their balance. Omar Afifi—the same Egyptian police officer who had been forced to flee the country several years earlier and had clashed with Adly as far back as 1995, when Adly served as Cairo’s chief of police—had been one of the architects of the strategy the youth deployed against the police.
It was Afifi who had recommended beginning in the city’s smallest lanes and byways. He also drew on his knowledge of police tactics to help put together an instruction manual on how the protesters could be effective against Egyptian security forces. The twenty-six-page document was chock-full of practical advice.
It instructed demonstrators to wear hooded jackets, scarves, or goggles to protect themselves from tear gas. It offered diagrams on how to fashion household items like cardboard or plastic bottles into body armor. It demonstrated how garbage can lids could be shields against police batons. It advised protesters to shout positive slogans—like “Long live Egypt”—and befriend security officers at every turn. “We distributed [the manual] and lots of other people distributed it, too,” says Adel. “I gave it to protesters, and it helped because people needed that. It told you how to protect yourself from rubber bullets.”

After Tahrir Square was occupied, others stepped forward. Many volunteered to provide food or medical supplies or dispose of garbage. As the days wore on, the division of labor in the square became more organized. At first, people just yelled if they needed a doctor. Soon, people with medical training were wearing stickers that indicated they were doctors. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood, long familiar with the trials of leading a banned movement, helped set up a perimeter to keep the regime’s troublemakers at bay. Some of their tips were
as practical as showing demonstrators how to dig up sidewalk tiles to unloose the rocks they needed to defend themselves from thugs. Months after the revolution, stretches of Tahrir Square were no more than sand where the pavement tiles had been lifted. “There was a time when all we were hoping for was to have a protest in Talaat Harb Square. Maybe no more than five hundred people would have been our dream,” says Kamel Arafa. “When you stand in Tahrir, and you are surrounded by a million people—there was no greater feeling.”

* * *

In that first meeting with Ahmed Maher, he was quiet, precise in his answers, and utterly serious. Over nearly three hours, he never smiled; he never laughed. He sat, leaning forward in his chair, his shoulders hunched, his hands in his lap. Occasionally, he would look at the tables of the people sitting closest to us or turn to glance at the doorway to the restaurant. He did not strike me as nervous, just hyperaware of his environment, like an animal alert for his natural predator, his muscles taut and ready to spring. The last thing he said to me was this: “It’s cutting the relationship between the regime and its tools that is difficult. Cutting the channels between the army and the state is of course difficult. Almost impossible. But we hope with enough numbers and enough will for change that when the moment comes, they will step aside or join us, like what happened in Serbia.”

That moment came. On Friday, February 11, 2011, after eighteen days of protests and countless Egyptians taking to the street, the army chose to abandon Mubarak.

I saw Ahmed Maher once more, after the revolution. I had not planned on seeing him. I simply walked around a corner and there he was, sitting outside a café. It was nearly midnight in Cairo, and he was surrounded by a dozen or more friends. They had pulled up several small tables to be closer. A group of young friends together late on a Friday night, laughing and shouting over each other as they told stories. Nothing could be more natural. If I hadn’t recognized his face, I wouldn’t have looked twice.

S
amira Ibrahim, a sales manager at a cosmetics company in Upper Egypt, traveled for eight hours to get to Tahrir Square. The protests had already started. Although only twenty-five years old, she had been attending demonstrations and marches since she was a girl. Once she arrived in Cairo, she didn’t leave. For days, she camped out among the crowds. She was there when President Hosni Mubarak stepped down on February 11 and for the raucous celebration that followed. But even after Mubarak was gone and most people had returned home, Samira stayed. She was among a group of roughly one thousand demonstrators who believed they must camp out in the square as a reminder to Egypt’s generals, who had now assumed control of the country, of the promises that remained unfulfilled. The revolution, in her mind, was incomplete. So, on the afternoon of March 9, nearly a month after Mubarak fled Cairo,
Samira was still there.

The violence began a little after three o’clock. A large group of thugs gathered near the roundabout in Tahrir. They were shouting at the demonstrators, peaceful protesters like Samira, yelling, “The people want the square cleared! Evict them from the square!” These thugs, many of whom carried wooden sticks and metal pipes, began to circle the roundabout. When they came close to the entrance of the metro station, they started throwing stones and pavers from the street at the protesters. They charged the demonstrators’ encampment in the middle of the square, tearing down tents and beating up those
who stood in their way. “
We started sending SOS messages over Facebook, trying to get others to come and help us,” recalls Ahmed Amer, a twenty-four-year-old activist who was in the square at the time. “Our numbers started to grow, and [the newcomers] were helping to defend our tents. [The thugs] attacked us using blades, and we defended ourselves with stones.”

When the demonstrators first saw military units arrive, they thought they were coming to their defense. After all, the Egyptian military had been their liberators during the revolution. Army officers had kept watch over the square, and when the hour finally came, the military had sided with the people, not Mubarak. It was when the soldiers entered the square that Samira realized something was wrong. The soldiers were not arresting the thugs; they were arresting the demonstrators and looking on as the armed attackers chased people out of the square.

Samira, however, couldn’t get away. A soldier grabbed her, ripped the head scarf from her head, and threw her to the ground. The soldiers beat and kicked her. And then she, and nearly two hundred other demonstrators, were dragged to the Egyptian Museum on the north side of the square to be tortured. For many who risked everything to oust a dictator and set Egypt on a democratic course, Wednesday, March 9, was a turning point: the moment when it became unambiguously clear that the Egyptian military was not the guardian of the revolution they hoped it would be.

Once inside the museum complex, Samira was handcuffed to a wall with electrical cables. For nearly seven hours—almost every five minutes, she told me—a soldier sent jolts of electricity coursing through her body with a cattle prod. The soldiers would splash water on her and others to make the shocks more painful. The electrical jolts were applied to her legs, shoulders, and stomach. The tormentors kept repeating, “You think you are better than Hosni Mubarak? Say you love Mubarak!” She pleaded with the soldier to stop. Echoing what the demonstrators had first chanted in Tahrir Square during the revolution, she said, “You are my brothers. The army and the people are one hand.” The soldier scoffed at her and replied, “No, the military is above the nation. And you deserve this.”