Two Takes on the Egyptian Awakening

By John Ballard

Here, with a few comments from me, are two articulate views on what's happening in Egypt this morning.
Robert Fisk of the Independent needs no introduction.
Jonathan Wright, formerly with Reuters, is a journalist living in Cairo and working as a translator, now blogging at the right place and the right time.

?Robert Fisk: Egypt's day of reckoning -- Mubarak regime may not survive new protests as flames of anger spread through Middle East

People talk of revolution but there is no one to replace Mubarak's men � he never appointed a vice-president � and one Egyptian journalist yesterday told me he had even found some friends who feel sorry for the isolated, lonely President. Mubarak is 82 and even hinted he would stand for president again � to the outrage of millions of Egyptians.

The barren, horrible truth, however, is that save for its brutal police force and its ominously docile army � which, by the way, does not look favourably upon Mubarak's son Gamal � the government is powerless. This is revolution by Twitter and revolution by Facebook, and technology long ago took away the dismal rules of censorship.

Mubarak's men seem to have lost all sense of initiative. Their party newspapers are filled with self-delusion, pushing the massive demonstrations to the foot of front pages as if this will keep the crowds from the streets � as if, indeed, by belittling the story, the demonstrations never happened.

But you don't need to read the papers to see what has gone wrong. The filth and the slums, the open sewers and the corruption of every government official, the bulging prisons, the laughable elections, the whole vast, sclerotic edifice of power has at last brought Egyptians on to their streets.

Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, spotted something important at the recent summit of Arab leaders at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. "Tunisia is not far from us," he said. "The Arab men are broken." But are they? One old friend told me a frightening story about a poor Egyptian who said he had no interest in moving the corrupt leadership from their desert gated communities. "At least we now know where they live," he said. There are more than 80 million people in Egypt, 30 per cent of them under 20. And they are no longer afraid.

And a kind of Egyptian nationalism � rather than Islamism � is making itself felt at the demonstrations. January 25 is National Police Day � to honour the police force who died fighting British troops in Ishmaelia � and the government clucked its tongue at the crowds, telling them they were disgracing their martyrs. No, shouted the crowds, those policemen who died at Ishmaelia were brave men, not represented by their descendants in uniform today.

This is not an unclever government, though. There is a kind of shrewdness in the gradual freeing of the press and television of this ramshackle pseudo-democracy. Egyptians had been given just enough air to breathe, to keep them quiet, to enjoy their docility in this vast farming land. Farmers are not revolutionaries, but when the millions thronged to the great cities, to the slums and collapsing houses and universities, which gave them degrees and no jobs, something must have happened.

"We are proud of the Tunisians � they have shown Egyptians how to have pride," another Egyptian colleague said yesterday. "They were inspiring but the regime here was smarter than Ben Ali in Tunisia. It provided a veneer of opposition by not arresting all the Muslim Brotherhood, then by telling the Americans that the great fear should be Islamism, that Mubarak was all that stood between them and 'terror' � a message the US has been in a mood to hear for the past 10 years."

That is a snip. Go to the link for a fuller picture. Fisk is dramatic and colorful if nothing else.

?Jonathan Wrights's Cairo slums on the edge underscores Fisk's mention in passing of the Cairo Slums.
I get the impression from these descriptions that the slums are the political equivalent of gasoline.
This population makes the events of the last several days seem like the lit end of a social/political Molotov cocktail.

I spent a fascinating few hours this afternoon and early evening watching riot police and their opponents clash on the edges of the Cairo slum known as Boulak Aboul Ela, which lies just northwest of Galaa Street.
Amazingly, for those not familiar with the topography of Cairo, this densely populated area, with narrow unpaved lanes and extreme poverty, lies only a 10-minute walk from Tahrir Square, the very heart of the modern city and the scene of the major protest on Tuesday. I ended up in the lanes because riot police were firing tear gas canisters and other unidentified projectiles along 26th July Street, apparently in response to a small group of protesters who were throwing rocks at them. The lanes gave some shelter from the gas.
The group of protesters, who numbered no more than 200 (there were other groups elsewhere in the city), were clearly outsiders, wealthier and better educated than the local inhabitants. Their main chants were political - "Al-sha3b yuriid isqaat an-nizaam" (The people ... want .. the overthrow ... of the regime - an echo of the similar chant now current in Tunisia).
But what struck me most was the evident solidarity of the local people with the protesters and the possibility that at some point the local people too might might come out on the streets. If that happened, the government would be hard-pressed to disperse them by their current methods. The riot police would be overwhelmed and many of the police conscripts (they come largely from among the poorest of the rural poor) would defect or disperse.
Without seeing these slum areas at first hand, it's hard to imagine how many tens of thousands of people live there. The population density is comparable to that in Gamalia on the northeast edge of the old city, where there are up to 80,000 people to the square kilometre. The lanes were teeming like an ants' nest and the mood was electric.
I asked a random selection of about 15 people where their sympathies lay - with the government (as they called the riot police) or the shabab (youth, as they called the protesters)? With one exception (a man who said he was neutral), everyone said they wanted President Hosni Mubarak to go. This time only handfuls of them did appear to join in, but I judged they were fairly close to the tipping point.
The confrontation took a form similar to that we saw on Tuesday. When the protesters advanced, throwing rocks, the riot police withdrew in disarray, to applause and cries of jubilation from many of the onlookers. Police trucks in the rear would then open fire with tear gas and maybe with rubber bullets, driving the protesters back to the shelter of the lanes. Two young men said they had been hit with small projectiles which they said caused intense pain on the skin, one in the hand and one on the neck. I examined both of them, but in the dark it was impossible to identify the cause.

?In another post, Unrest in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, he examines the Muslim Brotherhood. Those of us who have been watching know well that this group has deep roots in whatever passes for a political opposition in Egypt. Their politics borders on what Serious People, overlooking history, like to call terrorist. Hamas, the card-carrying terrorist group running Gaza for the last few years, is an offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
Wright's observations suggest the group may have sympathies with what's happening in the streets of Cairo, and may well be moved to jockey for some measure of influence as events unfold, but there is no way the Muslim Brotherhood can either take credit for or be blamed for what I like to call the Egyptian Awakening.

As in the case of Tunisia, a succession of commentators have remarked on the small role the Muslim Brotherhood appears to have played in the past two days of unrest in Egypt. One of the latest I have seen came from Michael Collins Dunn, the editor of the Middle East Institute yesterday. "Do you see any beards? Well, maybe a few beard-and-mustache looks of some young hipsters, but not the beard-without-mustache "uniform" we associate with the Muslim Brothers," he writes. I think Dunn is mistaken here on several counts. For a start, Muslim Brothers come in many guises, and the 'beard-without-mustache' look is hardly a Brotherhood uniform. He may be confusing Muslim Brothers with salafis, while the two groups are quite distinct, though with some overlap. From my own experience on the streets (see my earlier reports passim), I believe people are understimating the level of participation by members of the Brotherhood, though I will readily concede that they have not taken part at full strength and at a level which reflects their demographic weight. There are several possible and obvious reasons for this. Let me offer a few of them:

The Brotherhood, from long experience of confrontation with the Egyptian authorities, is always wary of commitment to street protests. It will calibrate its level of participation to its assessment of the chances of success. If it overreaches, it runs the risk of a massive crackdown. For the moment, probably rightly, it is not convinced that the protests will overthrow the regime.   [My bold JB -- Pragmatism, unfortunately, often trumps dreams.]

The Brotherhood knows that the world (especially the United States and Europe) are watching events in Egypt closely. If the protests appear to be Brotherhood-led, the government will feel free to use much more brutal methods to disperse protesters. For the moment it suits the Brotherhood's interests to give the impression that there is a broad coalition united against Hosni Mubarak, including liberals and leftists. This explains why Brotherhood members who have taken part in the protests have refrained from chanting slogans with religious connotations. The impression of a broad coalition also helps domestically -- if the Brotherhood take the lead, it would frighten off some of the other groups.

The Brotherhood, like Islamist groups in many Arab countries, has cold feet about governing. It does not feel it is ready. This is reflected in its official strategy of concentrating on a political reform agenda which it shares with many other groups - free and fair elections, rule of law, a new constitution with checks and balances and so on. What the Brotherhood wants most in the short term is the freedom to organize and promote its ideas in a democratic environment, regardless of who is in government. The Brotherhood believes that, given freedom and time, it can win over Egyptians to its long-term agenda.

The current state of sectarian (Muslim-Copt) tensions in Egypt, especially after the bombing of the church in Alexandria at the New Year, is not conducive to a protest movement in which Islamist slogans and objectives are prominent. Such slogans would be a distraction and could backfire against the Brotherhood.

I'm not going to venture a guess at the level of Muslim Brotherhood participation but, judging from my chance encounters with protesters, any assertion that the movement is absent or very thinly represented is probably wishful thinking. By the way, many Brothers are clean-shaven, wear suits and ties and are physically indistinguishable from other Egyptians of the same class.