A few days after the revolutionary climax of the 2011 protest against the government in Cairo, demanding the resignation of then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the mood changed.
Pro-government thugs were unleashed in the crowd. They began to focus on protesters, journalists and the Westerners. Some of them entered our hotel.
We were told to pack our things, drive in cars and drive from the Hilton, which overlooks Tahrir Square, to a relatively safer hotel a few miles away.
I shared a car with cameraman Joe Duran, who was sitting in the passenger seat, and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper in the back seat.
On the 6th of October bridge a crowd forced our taxi to stop and surrounded us. They smashed the windows. They threw stones at the car. The driver, surrounded by the violent attackers, apparently froze.
In Arabic, I remember saying, “I’ll give you $ 500 for the windows if you keep going.” I plucked that figure out of the air. I still do not know why the number came up to me in particular. When he drove away, I thought we were safe.
We drove in with our wrecked car at the entrance to the Marriott. Stunned, we entered the foyer and registered at the reception.
Shortly afterwards, Nick Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, told me that some journalists changed the names they used to book so that thugs entering the hotel and listing guests would not know in which rooms the foreign press was.
My name is Arabic anyway, I thought, so I have to go well. “Is CNN in your shape?” I remember how Kristof asked me. I was not sure, but I decided to take a risk. No point in staying too long at the front desk.
That night, we aired CNN’s special coverage of a hotel room floor. I remember thinking it looked like a hostage video. We will have many more such nights, including a very tense night locked up in the CNN office in Cairo, a bank that unlocks the door.
I anchored hours of direct coverage with our then-office manager, the legendary Ben Wedeman, and Cooper. We sat huddled on camera equipment cabinets, illuminated with as dim light on our faces as possible, as the offices from outside had to look uninhabited.
Hope for democracy
The government’s setback against the uprising lasted several days.
The regime and its supporters tried to defeat the popular movement, but the army did not align itself with Mubarak. As has been the case in Egypt for decades, it was ultimately the generals who held the reins of power. When they abandoned Mubarak, we all knew he would not last long.
On February 11, 2011, 17 days after the start of the protests, it was over: Hosni Mubarak resigned. This would be the beginning of a new era; the hope was that decades of nepotism, corruption, police brutality and oppression would make way for something like democracy.
A few years later, I covered the Egyptian presidential election in 2013, which led to the victory of a Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi.
But eventually a reviving army would crush the Islamists in 2013 and bring the army back to power. They were there all the time and had patience that was only a brief experiment with democracy.
Lost – even crushed – in this tragic story are the original protesters who dreamed of a democracy that would represent them.
Optimism crushes
In the first few weeks of the uprising, journalists like us share their optimism: could it really be the moment that the Arab world, slowly and painfully, would evolve into a system that serves its own people, rather than the unelected autocrats who drain has? their lands have been drying up for decades?
Ten years ago we allowed ourselves to believe it.
Today, many of those who were on the front lines of the protests are banned, locked up or worse.
Elsewhere in the region, there were many more tragic outcomes.
In Syria, the regime has crushed the cries of its own citizens for democracy with such cruelty that peaceful protesters were quickly replaced by extremist rebels, and they are fighting against a government backed by external forces for control of a shattered country.
Those of us who dealt with Egypt in 2011 today still feel deeply the intense emotion of those early days.
There were some scary moments, but the historical significance of the events we documented served as a rocket fuel as we ran away from the crowd and sank into hotel rooms.
But for the revolutionaries in Egypt and beyond, it was not meant to be.
The Arab world, in many ways worse off than before the Arab Spring, will have to wait for another generation to demand freedom from their leaders. And one can only hope that this time they will achieve the victory, even if only the sacrifices of those who came before them were not in vain.