Index Eyewitness: Cairo
Despite the information shutdown in Egypt, Index on Censorship’s Egypt regional editor Ashraf Khalil has filed this exclusive report from today’s anti-government protests in Cairo
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Eyewitness: Cairo
I started today the Giza side of the river, across the Nile from Tahrir Square. Started from Moustafa Mahmoud mosque, a major landmark in the district of Mohandessin.
The protest was large from the beginning — at least 5,000 people, and probably more. The chants started as soon as prayers ended, around 1:30pm. Protesters marched through Mohandessin, completely shutting down a major road. The crowd seemed to grow steadily as the march continued.
Thanks to the blanket communications shutdown, the protests today took place in an information vacuum. On Tuesday, even during the demonstration, everybody was checking twitter both to coordinate and for news on what was happening across the country. This time nobody knew what was happening anywhere else — not even on the other side of the river in Tahrir Square.
Security forces were present in small numbers, but didn’t attempt to hinder the marchers. They marched unmolested for close to an hour until they arrived at Galaa Square, where the Galaa bridge is the first of two bridges that cross the Nile and lead to Tahrir Square.
The mood was defiant, and even a little festive. People could tell right away that they had achieved a major turnout and presumed that the same was happening elsewhere around the city. They felt like they had the advantage and the momentum. People watching from balconies cheered and waved Egyptian flags. I saw one elderly woman flashing them the V for victory sign.
Security forces had set up their cordon at the mouth of the Bridge, parking four large green police vans side by side, so that they blocked the entire bridge.
That area became the sight of an hour long battle. Security forces used lots of tear gas, indiscriminately. Some of it enveloped the Giza Sheraton, which overlooks the square. The firing was indiscriminate. One tear gas canister landed on the balcony of a nearby apartment, starting a fire; another landed in the passenger seat of a security forces van parked off to the side, starting another fire.
After the first couple volleys of tear gas, a debate broke out on a side street where people had fled on whether to abandon peaceful tactics. One angry young guy with streaming eyes was furious. People were trying to calm him down. He shouted: “Peaceful? Are you serious? After this?”
The young man, who would only identify himself as “an Egyptian citizen” told me:
I expect the government to fall today. There will be bodies in the streets, but it will fall.
I have a degree in information technology and for the last three years I’m sitting at home without a job.
Some of the crowd came well prepared. Swimming goggles and surgical masks soaked in vinegar, pieces of onion to hold under their noses to reduce the effect of the gas. And bottles of Pepsi — which I discovered today magically reduces the burning in your eyes.
Several times the crowd fell back from the tear gas. Several people were overcome by it. But they always regrouped and charged back. A local supermarket refused to open its doors to protesters but the manager agreed to pass out supplies of vinegar, water and onions. One lady, in response of protester appeals, dropped a huge bag of onions down to them.
An angry veiled woman in her 50s told me:
We don’t have an agenda. We only want the fall of the regime and all of its symbols. We’re not the Brotherhood and not the Wafd Party. We’re simply against oppression and corruption. This is a failed regime
Just before 3pm, the Central Security ranks guarding the mouth of the Galaa Bridge gave up and fell back — leaving their four huge trucks in the hand of the protesters. Gleeful youth crawled all over the vehicles, two of them holding up an Egyptian flag from the roof and others spray-painting “down with Hosni Mubarak” on the side. There was a bizarre scene for a while on the bridge where a few remaining Central Security guards were kind of lingering around their trucks looking bewildered and being completely ignored by the protesters. The police officers looked confused and depressed.
Some of the crowd decided to stay in Galaa Square and make sure they held it so that security couldn’t close ranks behind them.
An older man shouted: “It’s better if we control multiple places than just gather in Tahrir where they can bottle us up.”
Lots of others did move on toward Tahrir, crossing the island of Zamalek.
On the other side a major battle was already taking place half way across the Kasr El Nil Bridge — which is the final gateway into the square.
This was a much more violent scene, on both sides. About 2,000 protesters threw rocks and security forces, fired rubber bullets — a spray of little pellets that dig under your skin. I saw several protesters coming back with blood streaming from their faces.
One shouted: “Throw more rocks. Two more hours of this and they’ll collapse.”
A massive volley of tear gas and rubber bullets drove the crowd off of the bridge and back to Zamalek. People fled and eventually regrouped back in Galaa Square, 10 minutes away. There, right around 5 pm, something amazing happened. About 3,000 protesters were still holding the square. Suddenly huge crowds of marchers appeared from two different directions. Reinforcements. Each stream of marchers looked to be about 5,000 strong.
One of them told me they had come from Giza Square and had been fighting their own running battles and had finally broken through the security lines. Their arrival was a huge morale boost. As I was leaving a new cry was going up: “To Tahrir!”
One protester said:
It’s over, finished. This is the beginning of the end [for Mubarak]
Egyptian protesters hope to follow Tunisia’s example
A few memorable snapshots from today’s “Day of Rage” protests in Egypt:
• A group of about 100 protesters is marching along the Nile corniche chanting anti-government slogans. From the other direction comes a much larger group of demonstrators. The two sides embraced in the street amid raucous cheering and began marching together.
• About 1000 protesters march through the lower class district of Boulaq Aboul Ela. Many of the protesters appeal to sidewalk gawkers and local merchants to join them. I spot a matronly woman in her 40s holding a young girl and enthusiastically giving the marchers a thumbs up. Next to her, an elderly woman with about four teeth beams with pleasure and happily chants anti-government slogans as the demonstrators march past.
• With more than 1000 protesters jostling with riot police outside the Supreme Court downtown, I take a walk away from the war zone to look for side protests. On a deserted stretch of 26 July street, a young family — middle aged man and woman with a boy who looks about nine years old — walk arm-in-arm down the middle of the street chanting “down with Hosni Mubarak!”
Today was a day for witnessing scenes that most Egyptians never imagined would be possible. But with the echoes of the Tunisian uprising still rippling through the region, the Arab World’s most populous country is entering into uncharted waters. Inspired by the waves of civil unrest that drove Tunisian dictator Zine al Abideen Bin Ali from power earlier this month, Egyptians produced a public response unprecedented in at least 30 years.
Thousands of protesters took control of downtown Cairo’s central Tahrir square this afternoon as a series of nationwide demonstrations demanded an end to President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign. A massive deployment of black-clad riot police used water cannons, tear gas and batons to repel the protesters, who pushed through police cordons and established dominance over the entire square, just one block away from the Egyptian Parliament.
As of late afternoon, the situation downtown was tense and uncertain, with the police alternatively advancing behind a hail of tear gas canisters, then giving ground once the crowd regrouped. The air in Tahrir square was thick with the acrid stench of tear gas as police struggled to cope with the sheer size of the demonstration. Only time will tell if today’s events will produce something long-lasting that builds into an actual threat to President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign. But at the very least, this was the first time in 13 years of covering protests in Egypt that the protesters potentially outnumbered the police.
At one point, more than a thousand people stood outside a building on along the Nile belonging to Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party and chanted “illegitimate” and “Oh Mubarak, your plane is waiting for you” — a reference to Bin Ali’s abrupt flight into exile 10 days ago. Independent estimates on crowd size were sketchy, but the protest I witnessed in Tahrir Square numbered at least 5,000 strong, with reports of similarly sized crowds of demonstrators marching toward the city center to join the main protest.
Today’s events — timed to coincide with the National Police Day holiday — started as a series of scattered protests in at least six different parts of Cairo. Organizers had originally announced they would gather outside the Interior Ministry near Tahrir Square. But that proved to be a bluff, as word went out via Twitter and Facebook about a series of alternate gathering points. Throughout the day Twitter proved to be a crucial platform for both organisation and real-time reports from the street. But the service abruptly stopped working for most people around 4:30 pm, prompting speculation that it had been blocked.
By nightfall, calls were going out on Twitter for anyone living in the downtown area to bring supplies in preparation for an all-night sit-in. There was also a call for local residents to remove the password protection from their wireless networks so that protesters could use them to get online.
The real Belarus
A shorter version of this letter is published in this week’s New Statesman
I wish I could take Neil Clark on a trip around Belarus, to show him the country he failed to see. After that, I am sure, he could not bring himself to write that “Lukashenko wins elections not through fear, but because he has delivered social protection and rising standards of living.”
Either blinded by the longing to find the triumph of socialism in as many places as possible or simply having a very superficial knowledge of the country, Neil Clark, unfortunately, presents quite misleading view of Belarus as a stable, and even booming, economy in his article Immaterial pearl from the 10 January 2011 issue of New Statesman.
Many foreign journalists hop up on a plane for a few days’ trip to Minsk, and at the most make a quick tour around major regional centres, if they can be bothered to dig deeper into local opposition circles. Neil Clark, on the other hand, shies away from shocking scenes of police beating protesters, flashing in the headlines of other foreign media, and instead offers to weigh the government’s contribution to the life of common people.
Rather than interviewing political outcasts, the author chooses to attend a press conference at the “wonderfully retro ministry of economy” and a showcase of the country’s major plant, Belarusian Autoworks.
I am a native Belarusian, so it is hard for me to judge how much one could learn about my country during a short visit. But if I were to introduce Neil Clark to it, I would have taken him to Belarus via Poland on a midnight train through the border packed with Belarusian smugglers.
The smugglers are mostly women aged between 40 and 60 — unemployed or pensioners, many of them former schoolteachers, medical assistants, and bookkeepers, unable to sustain their families on state income. Some are working full time in their state jobs and make extra cash on weekends smuggling cigarettes and spirits into Poland and bringing back meat, clothes and household appliances — all of which, if they are available in Belarusian stores, are cheaper in Polish supermarkets.
And then, instead of checking into something like Minsk’s Inturist hotel, a network of hotels specifically designed in the former Soviet Union for international tourists, which I am sure brings a lot of sentimental feelings to those missing the high life of nomenklatura, I think Neil Clark should head to a kolkhoz, where “the old collectivist flame is kept alive”, to put it in his own words.
I would invite him to my native village Vasilishki, in the western part of Belarus — a typical settlement neither better nor worse than any other in the country, where a large part of the population is employed by a local collective farm. There is an alcoholic in every house there, and sometimes whole families are hooked on cheap wine-like drinks produced by state liquor plants, which in fact are more like coloured ethanol with psychotropic additives.
Alcohol is the only affordable form of entertainment for millions of Belarusians, because having a hundred dollar monthly salary can save you from starvation but does not offer much more than that. So they drink — to forget their miserable jobs and boring lives, to gain courage to face daily insults from local chiefs and abuses from police authorities, to kill the shame for not giving a better life to their children and not being able to provide care for their elderly parents. They drink to die — the sooner the happier.
On 20 December, a day after the presidential elections, I talked to my mom on the phone. And she cried. A shy provincial woman, who has never been actively engaged into politics, she cried because the opposition lost! She cried because she is tired of being scared to lose her modest income, tired of her helplessness at the hands of local bureaucrats, tired of lies fed to Belarusians from the state TV.
She is tired of unhappiness and this one time she hoped her life could change.
Your Immaterial pearl, Mr Clark, is a cruel mockery of millions of ordinary Belarusians, of whose well being you care, I hope, so much…