IIn the middle of the place where it started, Mansour Mohammed manned a tarpaulin-covered stall on the only green grass between kilometers of concrete and asphalt. For ten days he ate and slept with strangers, bound with fury and revolt. Enormous crowds shook and increased – their demands for change roared in a call that resounded through Tahrir Square in Cairo. “I will never forget the sound,” he said. “It was the most powerful sound I’ve ever heard. It was harder than ten jumbo jets. It was the release of six decades of fear. ”
A decade later, the starting point of the Egyptian revolution – an important part of the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring – is a very different place, just like the country. The strip of grass is covered and on it stands a newly erected obelisk that points to the sky in a swaying reminder of times of weakened certainty. Traffic moves calmly around a roundabout that is now free of protesters or defiance attempts. Secret police are located, not so secretly, close by. There is little talk of revolution, and attempts to stir up the ghosts of Tahrir Square are met with the heavy hand of the fortified military state that entrenched itself in the aftermath of the revolution.
It started very differently for Moaz Abdulkarim. On January 25, 2011, he and a group of young Egyptians gathered in apartments on the other side of the Nile and went to a confectionery where they were ready to change history.
The location was out of reach of police trucks and outside the network of security chiefs searching the city for subordinates aroused by the uprising in Tunisia, which had forced dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali into exile weeks earlier.
The narrow paths in the neighborhood gave them time to organize and build numbers before riot police could storm them. And they jumped on their followers in a different, more important way: by mobilizing supporters on social media platforms, the extraordinary reach of which would quickly break the illusion that President Hosni Mubarak’s forces were too powerful to confront.
Early in the morning, the group met at the El Hayiss pastry shop and set their plan in motion. “The meeting in the bakery was just one step away from the plan,” said Abdulkarim, who now lives in exile in Europe. ‘There were many different groups [to co-ordinate with] and our group’s mission was to stay in the bakery in Mustafa Mahmoud Square. We watched the police to see if they would attack the protesters.
‘We thought if we could succeed, we would have a better Egypt and if we failed, we would die or spend our whole lives in prison. In my lifetime, only Mubarak was president, so I always had a dream of seeing another president from a different family.
“Our job was to bring all the protesters together so that the police could not control them. If there were only a few protesters, the police could simply arrest them and it would fail. There were soon about 2,000 people and the police could not control the situation. At that moment, I realized that we had succeeded, because I saw people of all kinds; different economic levels, rich and poor, old and young all stand together in one voice. ”
By that time, unstoppable momentum had called for social media to gather crowds in areas of Cairo and merge into public spaces. “Social media was the most important tool in the revolution,” Abdelkarim said. “People could communicate very easily and express themselves without any censorship.” Mubarak’s police state was run by dissidents with smartphones and Facebook accounts.
By January 28, Tahrir – or Liberation Square – had become the crucible of relentless demands for a new Egypt. And within two weeks, it had sown the seeds for Mubarak’s death. The then US President Barack Obama withdrew Washington’s long support for the Egyptian leader, who ruled for 30 years, and endorsed Egypt’s revolutionary. “Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than true democracy will carry the day,” Obama said.
Then came a challenge to Egypt’s army, which sided with the revolutionaries as their demands intensified. “The military has served patriotically and responsibly as a state overseer,” Obama said. “And will now have to ensure a transition that is credible in the eyes of the Egyptian people.”
“He did not know it at the time, but his words were a tombstone,” said Salwa Jamal, a proponent of the 2014 uprising that forced him to flee Egypt. “From that moment on, the army was planning to take over. ”
Nancy Okail, an Egyptian activist and scholar, said the day of Mubarak’s resignation, February 11, revealed that the coming months would be anything but a seamless transition to democracy. “It was the worst moment for me,” she said. “I saw the tanks and knew the army was taking over. I saw people giving the military flowers, cleaning the streets and wiping the graffiti. This was the beginning of erasing traces of the revolution.
“People throughout the world have said no, no, the army is on our side. But we knew them and knew how to manage them. ”
In 2012, democratic ballot boxes were held and the first democratically elected president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, a member of the powerful Islamic group the Muslim Brotherhood, took office. He soon made statements to give himself more power and dissatisfaction with his government grew rapidly.
Less than a year later, Morsi was removed in a coup led by then-Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, which dissolved parliament and banned the Muslim Brotherhood. A fierce suppression of disagreement, which continues today, was launched and Sisi was elected president in two elections.
Since then, Egypt’s new leader has tried to wipe out all remnants of the revolution using overwhelming repression to destroy calls for change. The civil society in Egypt was destroyed, the artists, intellectuals, journalists and academics were largely forced into silence, or taken into exile – or imprisoned. Political opposition has also been hampered, or summed up, and international condemnation has long been muted. In early December, French President Emmanuel Macron handed over the Legion of Honor, the highest civilian award in France, to Sisi, with a view to a human rights record that global NGOs describe as demons.
Sisi’s claims to help stop migration to Europe and to be a bulwark against security threats received tacit support and its routine suppression of disagreement and expression led to minimal consequences and impunity. Human Rights Watch said that in 2019 there were 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt.
Despite the repression, Khaled Mansour, a former executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said many who supported the revolution would do so again. “It was definitely another turning point,” he said. “But we do not always turn to a comfortable position or in a good direction.”
He added: ‘The only thing they have that enables them to stay in power is violence. Social cohesion, being an economic savior, terrorism, national security threats; it enables everyone to say ‘we are the last doubt’ and to postpone any talk of change.
‘What we need is not a united Egypt, but a place where different factions can talk to each other and engage in political dialogue without existential fears dominating things. Can we heal? It’s going to take a long period of self-criticism and introspection, and it’s extremely difficult to happen now. ”