Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

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foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • 18 days hotel (“for your safety”). They bid me farewell, and I piled into a silver four-door sedan with three MPs. We drove through deserted streets, passing through checkpoints set up by local legnaat shaabiyya—people’s committees (the MPs didn’t seem to have any better intelligence on the unfolding situation than I did). They briefly stopped at a downtown military police headquarters to consult with local officers about the safest path to my hotel on the corniche. As we drove, the young captain sitting next to me grinned as he told me of his training in the United States. “I love Maryland,” he said. “I stayed at the Marriott and had seafood every night for two months. Oh, my God.” And then, three hours after my friendly visit with the army began, I was back at the hotel, where tired European journalists sat drinking Stella, the not-so-stellar local beer, and trading stories about the day. Five or six had also been detained for being out after curfew. But I don’t think they enjoyed the experience quite as much as I did. The Republic of Tahrir Earlier in the day, around 12:30 p.m., I made it into Tahrir Square just in time for Friday prayers, pushing through the main Qasr el-Nil checkpoint as hundreds of Muslim men knelt on the garbage-strewn street, guided by a megaphone-wielding imam. Inside the square, a bulging crowd of thousands was milling around. Near a makeshift hospital on the way to the Egyptian Museum, I found Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a well-known computer programmer-cum-activist whose father had just been arrested the day before in a raid on the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, a hub of efforts to document human rights abuses against protesters and provide legal aid to those arrested. “We don’t know why,” Fattah said, before assuring me that the raid didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. “These activists do not lead this crowd. Tahrir is in control.” Nearby, various Islamist leaders held court, including Montasser al-Za- 94
foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • 18 days yyat, who famously represented Ayman al-Zawahiri before the latter became al Qaeda’s No. 2 man. Several hundred yards away, at the southern end of the square, a group of politicians congregated near the megaphone that serves as the most visible sign of the emerging attempts to channel the crowd’s energy into a political program. Wael Nawara, the secretary-general of the liberal (and illegal) Ghad Party, told me that Egyptians “know how to take care of ourselves” after years of building a parallel state “in every field—education, health care, everything.” “We can get organization within hours of chaos,” he said. Behind him, a giant yellow banner outlined the protesters’ demands: the resignation of the president, free and fair elections, a new constitution. What about Vice President Omar Suleiman, who claims to be offering dialogue “These people,” Nawara said, “have stepped on the law and the Constitution. They have pissed on it in fact.” Suleiman’s strategy seems to be to hold talks with the legal opposition—a motley collection of hapless political parties that have virtually no representation or respect among the protesters in Tahrir Square. “It’s more like a monologue than a dialogue,” Nawara said. “It’s irrelevant to the main event,” said Hisham Kassem, the dapper former publisher of independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm. “You have the regime trying to put out the message that they are open to dialogue.… It can’t happen. Nobody can assume leadership, and there is nobody to negotiate with. There is only one way to defuse this: for Mubarak to leave.” “If they try to play tricks on us, we’ll come back here,” Nawara said. “If they want real dialogue, they know where to find us.” 95
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