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As events unfolded in Tunisia and Egypt in January 2011 and mass protests spread to the Arabian Peninsula. Slowly people started finding their voice. Although in early February, anti-government protests had been ongoing for several days, there was a feeling of safety in numbers and solidarity amongst the attendees of mass demonstrations.

But in those early weeks, I watched a youth protester become embroiled in a furious debate on a public bus in Sana’a. The youth sparred with an elderly man who had lived through Yemen’s civil war of the 1960s and witnessed the fall of the Imamate, and many moved away from the young student as he raged over the heads of passengers about Yemen’s long standing leader. Others looked on nervously before the driver demanded the youth’s silence. He refused, deciding instead to disembark rather than submit. The brief but vociferous exchange left the remaining occupants in stunned silence. From these small beginnings and expression of years of frustration, Yemen’s revolution and a year of political unrest grew.

Compared to its regional neighbours, pre-2011 Yemenis enjoyed relative freedom. Multiple political opposition parties existed, a small but unwavering independent press operated in contrast to the state media and the multiple government aligned newspapers. Despite this apparent tolerance, when the protest movement took off after the fall of Egypt’s President Mubarak on February 11, Yemeni journalists covering demonstrations calling for the end of Saleh’s 33-year rule, were amongst the first victims of a campaign of intimidation and attacks. Six journalists were killed during last year’s violence, more than any other country caught up in the Arab Spring, according to International Press Institute figures. Between 1994 and 2008, nine Yemeni journalists were killed in mysterious car accidents or other questionable accidental deaths .

But since a new unity government — including new heads of the Ministry of Information and Ministry for Human Rights — formed last month, following Saleh’s signing of a Gulf and UN-brokered transfer of power deal in November, Yemen’s media has experienced a significant shift. The staunch support for Saleh and his General People’s Congress party across the state media has changed dramatically. For the first time pictures of anti-government demonstrations were run on the front page of government aligned newspapers, whilst the Ministry of defence weekly newspaper, 26 September, printed accusations of corruption against its own editor, marking a new phase in protests across the country.

In December, separate to, but emboldened by 12 months of anti-government demonstrations, civil servants and workers at government institutions began their own small but in several cases effective demonstrations , civil servants and workers at government institutions began their own small but in several cases effective demonstrations – anti-corruption rallies. Labelled Yemen’s “parallel revolution” from Sana’a police headquarters to the coast guard in Aden workers have gone out on strike demanding the removal of corrupt bosses. The latest ongoing walkout by members of Yemen’s air force began on January 22, disrupting flights at Sana’a airport, which also acts as Yemen’s main air force base, as protesting airmen demanded the removal of the air force chief, also President Saleh’s half-brother, Mohammed Saleh al-Ahmer. The mutiny has reportedly spread to three more airbases across the country. The Yemeni people have found their voice and the power of peaceful protest as a way of expressing not only their dissatisfaction against the outgoing president Saleh — who left the country on 22 January for medical treatment in the US — but are having a real impact in the removal of several officials.

The Gulf and UN-brokered deal, which is now being implemented, falls short of most people’s expectations, in particular the immunity law passed by parliament last weekend that gives protection from prosecution to Saleh for “politically motivated crimes” and all those acting for him “in their official capacity.” The bill was described by Human Rights Watch as unlawful and “an affront to victims and a blow to justice.” Next month’s election should be an historic moment in a country where nearly two generations have only known one leader. But the election of Vice-President Abdrabbu Mansour Hadi is a formality rather than a diplomatic process to finally remove Mr Saleh from office.  After a year of political unrest and with the military and air force still under the control of Saleh’s sons, nephews and extended family members , his influence has yet to end, and Yemen’s future remains uncertain.

Crucially the transition initiative excludes three isolated groups: the pre-existing Southern Movement and their demand for secession, the northern Houthi rebels, calling for autonomy, who have fought six wars against the government since 2004, in addition to the 2011 protest movement.

2011 in Yemen will not only be remembered as a year of blood shed and turmoil and the year a Yemeni activist , Tawakkol Karman, became the first female from the Arab world to win a Nobel Peace Prize, but also for a notable and seemingly irreversible shift: Yemenis are no longer willing to accept years of endemic corruption throughout the state system. As the country moves into a two year period of transition, ahead of parliamentary elections in 2014, it will be up Yemenis external to the political process to maintain pressure on the unity government and politicians in order for any real change to take place.

Iona Craig is a freelance journalist based in Sana’a

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In post-revolution Egypt, street art has become one of the symbols of ongoing resistance. Yasmine El Rashidi reports on the graffiti artists of Cairo

Ayman handed himself in at noon on 27 April 2009. The police had been searching for him for three days, and his name had made headlines in the local press. He was the criminal still at large – his two accomplices had already been caught. They were held in an unknown location, under investigation. We all knew they were being interrogated, maybe even tortured.

The phone call had come the night before. “We need your help. I’m not sure what to do. Nobody wants to touch this case. I need you on this one, can you go with him?”

Ayman was a friend and I had worked with him on projects in the past. Maybe the presence of a woman would lessen the brutality he might face.

The police seemed surprised when we showed up the following day. In Mubarak’s Egypt, the police and state security were known for their heinous torture methods and arbitrary detentions. Nobody voluntarily handed themselves in, and we weren’t sure what they would do. Ayman admitted he was sick from fear. That morning, his face was drawn and he was gnawing at his nails.

At the downtown police station — a decrepit villa that had long ago been seized from a family who was forced to flee — we were escorted up worn stairs to a pre-fab top floor. There, in a cramped, smoky room, we were left to wait. I was offered a chair, Ayman the floor. He chose to stand.

Over the hours as we waited, mid-ranking officers came to ask who we were, what our case was.

“I’m an artist,” Ayman would say. “I make art.”

“She helps me come up with ideas.”

We had rehearsed our narrative: I was the ideas person — the one who came up with the project. He just executed — made the art. We had prepared a paper — the “project proposal” to give our story legitimacy, to try to break down the project in a language the police could understand. Our document began (in Arabic): “Inspired by the rise of street art around the world, and the growing emphasis being placed globally on the artist as community activist, Cairo-based artist Ayman took to the streets of Cairo last month in an effort to use his art to contribute to the city.”

The officers trailed in over the course of four hours. Each asked a question or two before nodding their heads and leaving. They seemed ill-equipped to deal with our case, and eventually, we were told that we would have to wait for the top-ranking officer — the head of the police station –– to arrive. He didn’t come in to work before late afternoon, but we could go in there. They pointed to another room with a rusty iron bed and flattened sponge mattress.

“There’s a TV on,” an officer told us.

“Enjoy,” he added, as he walked out laughing at the screaming blaring from the TV –– a torture scene in an underground Egyptian jail. An Egyptian thriller and drama.

Mixed messages?

Ayman was formally detained later that night. Over 14 hours, we had been subjected to endless rounds of questioning by police, a trip to a nearby court, and three interrogations by high-ranking officers; they already seemed to know everything about us, but each quizzically took us in, unsure what to conclude.

At 2am, they told me I could leave. Ayman, they said, would have to wait. He would spend the night in the police station jail. The charges were yet unknown. The police were unsure how to classify his act: what it meant, how great a danger he may be.

“It looks like it could be the eagle on the Egyptian flag with its wing broken,” we had heard one officer say in the hours as we waited. “Maybe that means, destroy the government.”

“It is a communist movement,” another offered.

“They want to overthrow the regime,” an informant said.

That night in the police station, Ayman stayed up, pacing. He was to be transferred to the state security headquarters early the following morning for further interrogation. At 7am the prison truck would arrive, the officer had told me before I left. “You can wait for him outside,” he said. “But we don’t know how long it will take. You might be there for days.”

In the next 48 hours, waiting for Ayman’s release, I learnt the police side of the story. They woke up one morning, one of them told me, and found five streets surrounding Tahrir Square filled with a “strange looking” figure painted on the walls. “It looked like it might have been a cult,” one officer told me. “Definitely a threat to the government.”

“One young officer ignored the first of these paintings, but then, the next morning, there were so many more of them. We couldn’t ignore it. We weren’t really sure what it was. The idea of writing on walls being art makes no sense to us.”

The graffiti on the streets downtown for which Ayman had been arrested depicted a street sweeper. A thin stencil outline of a man holding a broom. “Keep your city clean” was the thought behind his abstract art, “Love your country.”

One of them admitted: “None of the officers want to sign off on his case. No one is really sure how many followers he has and what this is really about. What does this symbol really mean? What is the message? We can’t take the risk. No one wants to lose their jobs.”

I met up with Ayman again on 28 June 2011, on a sidestreet near Tahrir Square, just minutes from where his street art had once been and around the corner from the state security headquarters where he had been blindfolded and interrogated. Clashes between protesters and riot police had begun late the night before, and by the morning, the street was the site of a pitched battle. Protestors chanted against the military, some of them threw rocks. The riot police responded with rounds of tear gas.

For hours this battle went on — the protesters moving forward, the police firing back. Young men and women were being carried out of the crowds, hit by tear-gas canisters or faint from the gas. A young boy went up in flames. There were informants in our midst, and soldiers in the distance, but the crowd relentlessly pushed on — not willing to yield.

During the 18 days of the Egyptian revolution, when the police were symbolically defeated and the army took control of the streets and the state, our fears of the notorious state security apparatus had been broken, and the streets of our cities had become, in many ways, our own.

“I feel I can do whatever I want now,” a friend had told me soon after Mubarak stepped down. “I want to spray the streets with paint.”

In the weeks that followed, my friend, other friends, artists, non-artists, took to the streets to do just that: fill the walls of the streets of Cairo with murals and art. “Freedom = Responsibility”, paintings of the martyrs, “VIVA EGYPT”, abstract collages of the Egyptian flag, pastiches of symbols of liberation. The self-censorship that we had all long subjected ourselves to was slowly lifting. The signs of it were everywhere.

Our fears had beenLast week, on that sidestreet of Tahrir, by a graffiti scrawl that said “F*** the Police”, Ayman and I talked about how things had changed.

“We’re free now,” he said as he snapped pictures on his phone. “We can do whatever we want.”

Taking back the streets

Some weeks ago, a friend and artist, MoFa, also known as Ganzeer, organised a “mad graffiti weekend” intended to “take back” the streets of the city. For many days he and a group of activists, artists, friends and volunteers gathered in his rooftop studio to discuss their plans.

By the time they hit the streets mid-May, they had stencils ready, vast supplies of paint, walls identified, and friends to photograph and film them. Their graffiti largely mocked and criticised the ruling military council, which had risen to power since Mubarak stepped down on 11 February. It depicted the underwear of the ruling Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, “freedom masks”, or muzzles, that spoke of the reality of military rule, and murals of army helicopters and life-size tanks.

MoFa, along with some friends, made posters of one of the works — the Freedom Muzzle, criticising Field Marshall Tantawi. On 25 May, as they were plastering the poster downtown ahead of a big protest planned for that weekend, MoFa and two friends were detained –– to be released, quite swiftly, several hours later after straightforward questioning.

I received an email the next day when the news hit the local press.

“I’m sure you’ve seen this,” my friend Bruce –– an international critic, a dean at the American University in Cairo, and big supporter of street art — wrote, referencing a link to an article about the arrests.

I wrote back: “I do. But I’m not sure how much sympathy I have. Around the world street art is considered vandalism, so content aside, this should come as no surprise. When Ayman was arrested a few years ago, no one was willing to support him. Of course now all these guys are raging about how bad the army is. Yes, the army is problematic, but, in the military council’s mind, it’s these same youth who were burning the Israeli flag and threatening to storm the embassy last week. That was one of the most destructive acts to the legacy of this revolution — to its peaceful nature, to its spirit. Why not use street art to raise awareness, to subtly provoke thought, to reach out to the masses? Are direct political statements art? Is provoking animosity towards the army art?”

Some weeks later, on the one-year anniversary of the death of Khaled Said, the 28-year-old man who was beaten to death at the hands of police last year, activists and citizens at large took to the streets in his memory. Many of them held up pictures of him. Others hoisted the Egyptian flag. Some had stencils and cans of paint — portraits of Khaled that were plastered on downtown streets: on random buildings, on the walls of the Ministry of Interior, on shop windows and shutters. One of the portraits was sprayed over the marble plaque of the American University’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library, which stands a few blocks from Tahrir. A friend took a picture of it. I sent it to Bruce. “Art or vandalism?” I wrote in the subject line.

This article appears in the new edition of Index on Censorship. Click on The Art Issue for subscription options and more.

Yasmine El Rashidi is a writer based in Cairo. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the author of the Battle for Egypt: Dispatches from the Revolution (New York Review of Books)

This issue is nominated for an Amnesty Award

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