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

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • revolution makers
[As for] my role, since I left the agency and since I came here last February,
immediately after I left the agency people asked me to participate in the
process of change. Obviously, there has been a process going on for at least
five years when people started.… You have seen small protests, demonstrations,
but it’s always been 50 to 100 people, you know. And the government
was tolerating that as a sign of freedom of assembly [laughs] and never really
thought that they would be a threat at any time.
I came in February. I realized that if change were to happen, it had to
come at the hands of the young people. Sixty percent of the Egyptians are 30
and below. They are the ones who have no hidden agenda.
I really had very little trust in the so-called elite. These were people—
some of them have become corrupted by the regime, have become part of
the regime. Many of the rest have become, again, sort of.… Fear has become
so ingrained in their souls, and they have families to care for, and they
have seen that the regime has continued to be extremely repressive: torture,
detentions, and so on. So there was a lot of culture of fear, at least for the
middle-aged people who have families. [People] have lost hope, also, after
60 years. They despair that no matter what they do it won’t change anything.
So between people who have been co-opted by the regime and people
have been afraid and desperate, the only people left were really the young
people and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are organized but have been subjected
to the most cruel treatment for the last 30 years. University professors
have been thrown into jail for no reason, except I think the regime
has been using them [as part of] their act of deception with the West: You
know, these are people who if they were ever to be allowed to take part in
the political process they will turn Egypt into an Iran-style religious state or
whatever form of religious extremism.
I didn’t know any of the Muslim Brothers before; I’d never met one of
them before I came here. They’re a religiously conservative group, but they
haven’t been practicing any violence, at least for the last 50 years, and even
before that, during the monarchy, it was for political reasons, not religious
reasons. And they’re not a majority. But they have credibility at least in the
street because they were the ones providing social services when government
was unable to do that: health care, food for the needy. And of course
they had political space, quite open, because there were no organized parties
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