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

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foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • 18 days Introduction There’s a joke that’s been making the rounds in Egypt lately, and it goes something like this: Hosni Mubarak meets Anwar Sadat and Gamal Abdel Nasser, two fellow Egyptian presidents, in the afterlife. Mubarak asks Nasser how he ended up there. “Poison,” Nasser says. Mubarak then turns to Sadat. “How did you end up here” he asks. “An assassin’s bullet,” Sadat says. “What about you” To which Mubarak replies: “Facebook.” While Mubarak may be the first world leader to be ousted by a call for protests on social-networking sites, his downfall—just 18 days from improbable beginning to ignominious end—was years in the making. It was the product of decades of pent-up rage and frustration at the corruption and abuse of power that had become the hallmarks of the Egyptian regime—a system whose bankruptcy was laid bare in its panicked reaction to the Jan. 25 demonstrations that launched the revolt: its unprecedented shutoff of the Internet, its hiring of thugs to attack peaceful protesters, its state propaganda against foreign journalists, and its failure to offer any meaningful alternative path to change. Journalist Amil Khan, who covered dozens of protests and instances of state brutality that went ignored by the outside world, writes: “As time went on, it became harder to hide Egypt’s social and economic stagnation as well as its decreasing weight on the world stage from its citizens. And the more the regime used force to suppress dissent, the more it alienated itself from its people.” Mubarak provided the grievances, Tunisia gave the inspiration, Facebook set the date, and the Egyptian people did the rest. 72
foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • 18 days January 25: Tear Gas on the Day of Rage BY ASHRAF KHALIL Egypt’s “Day of Rage” dedicated to driving Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from office has already moved the Arab world’s most populous nation into uncharted waters, proving that nothing in the Middle East may be the same again after the waves of civil unrest that drove Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali from power in one breathtaking month. For starters, there was the sheer size of the turnout, which was larger than anything I’ve seen in 13 years of covering Egyptian protests. Jan. 25 was the first time I’ve ever been in a situation where the protesters potentially outnumbered riot police on the ground. The Egyptian government’s standard operating procedure is to overwhelm any public protest with a massively disproportionate wave of blackclad police. As a result, most protests tend to boil down to the same 500 noisy hard-core activists hopelessly penned in by thousands of riot cops. But today those numbers were reversed, and the police, at times, seemed completely confused and struggling to keep up. In one confrontation outside the Supreme Court building in downtown Cairo, the riot police attempted to lock arms in a human chain to block the protesters. Their effort, however, proved hopelessly ineffective—waves of marchers simply overwhelmed them. When all else failed, the police turned to tear gas in an attempt to control the swelling crowds. At one point, I was caught up in an acrid cloud of gas as protesters fled, doused their heads with water, and tended to those who had 73
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