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Оглавление‘Now There Is Freedom’: Why Egypt’s Revolution Is Not Over
Cairo, May 2011
The ground floor of Musa Zekry’s house is head-high with garbage and thick with flies. The floor above is home to the widow of his brother, shot dead during the revolution. Musa will live in the top floor, above her, when it is finished—but for now it’s a shell, choked with rubble, dust, more garbage and more flies.
A dead brother, several fear-filled days in Tahrir Square, weeks of danger and distrust: that’s the balance sheet of Musa Zekry’s revolution. All he’s got to show for it is a banner slung across the street outside, hailing his brother as a martyr, alongside a portrait of Jesus Christ. Plus freedom.
And it is this freedom, so unexpected and so viscerally felt, that lights his face and energizes his five-foot frame as he steers me through streets filled with shisha smoke, donkey crap and a blizzard of flies:
The Central Security forces now are non-existent—because we have freedom! Now everybody has a voice and wants to speak. Before, under Mubarak, if you raised your voice they would kill you in the street. Now there is freedom.
Cairo’s Moqattam slum, in the south-east of this vast metropolis, is home to 65,000 zabbaleen or ‘garbage people’. The young men and children collect the garbage in the twilit streets of downtown Cairo. The women sort it into separate sacks: bone, metal, cloth and plastic in all their subsets: water bottles, oil containers. A whole family just down the street from Musa specializes in smashing plastic knives and forks into a crisp white rubble. The zabbaleen’s world is one of rank alleyways, face-stinging heat, cheap bread eaten fresh out of grubby fingers.
The zabbaleen are mainly Coptic Christians: the face of Jesus gazes down on every workshop and rubbish pile. But in the street, as Musa leads me to a makeshift factory where they are using vats and blowers to turn plastic bottle shreds into translucent snow, two men embrace each other, gesturing at the religious symbols tattooed on their wrists: ‘I Christian, I Muslim,’ they chime. ‘We together.’
The Egyptian revolution may have begun on Facebook, but when it reached these alleyways, mobilizing men whose whole lives are stratified by religion, family and caste—well, that was the point that things got serious for Hosni Mubarak.
‘Two men came to us and said, let’s go down to Tahrir, to ask for change,’ says Musa. He’s reluctant to name them even now, but he clasps his palms together above his head to demonstrate what they did. ‘They told us: let’s make a demonstration with the people in Tahrir Square. One was Muslim, one Christian. One hand! We went by car: ten or twenty cars. When we got there I realized that our goal was right: to make a revolution and get freedom.’
Some of the bottle shredders did not go: ‘We have our own square here,’ laughs one, pointing to a patch of dust and dog-dirt. ‘We waited for Tahrir to come to the zabbaleen!’
It did, but not in the way they had expected. On 7 March 2011, less than a month after Mubarak had fallen, and the garbage people had symbolically cleansed Tahrir, thugs from the old regime organized a Muslim mob to attack the slum. These hired gangs are known as the baltagiya:
My brother ran to tell my Dad—he works in a garage in the place the baltagiya were marching to. But my Dad had already run away. Then we got a phone call: your brother is in the hospital, he is dead. He was shot but nobody knows who did it.
Relations between the Copts and the Muslim slums nearby were always fraught, but, despite his brother’s death, Musa is not scared to go there. It’s the city centre, where law and order has been minimal since the revolution, that frightens him: ‘I can walk through the Muslim slum, no problem. The problem is, now, if I go downtown I am worried somebody’s gonna shoot me; somebody is gonna wave a pass—I don’t know whether it’s fake or real—and tell me to give money, or kill me.’
For Musa, as for millions of others from the slums and tenements of Cairo, this has been no ‘social media revolution’. It’s been a chaotic, frightening implosion of order. Policing, he says, is lax; security is ‘just decorative’:
Economically nothing has changed. We went to Tahrir to make a change, but so far, nothing’s improved. What we need is for Egypt to be like America—so that if you have an idea, if you want to start a business, you can do it freely. We need social justice. That was what we chanted for.
To see how far from social justice Mubarak’s Egypt was before 25 January 2011, the Moqattam slum is a good place to start. It’s crammed into a sloping gully beneath a sandstone cliff. If you stand at the top, near one of the caves they use for churches, you’re confronted by a landscape of wooden shacks, twisted metal rods, crumbling concrete and hundreds of rusted satellite dishes. But this is just the unfinished roofscape, the top layer of misery. Plunge down into the alleyways and it becomes dark. The zabbaleen build their shanty-dwellings five or six floors high; each new son or marriage adds another layer of brick and concrete to create a warren of urban canyons—like a miniature New York, with donkeys for traffic.
And there is intense noise: machines shredding and crushing plastic; blacksmiths hammering old metal into something new. Coptic ballads of death and resurrection wailing out of tinny radios mingle with the braying of donkeys and goats. When the garbage arrives—in 1970s-model Datsun trucks whose windshields and brakes are long gone—they tip it into the alleyways, right next to where people live. The women come out, accompanied by any children old enough to walk, squat down in the middle of the garbage and start picking through it. They rummage deftly, looking for valuable stuff amid the refuse. The women’s hands and faces are grey with grime, but they’re swathed in acid-coloured scarves and headbands, while their ears are weighed down with yellow gold.
And then there are the flies. If you painted the Moqattam slum you would have to fill the canvas with small dots of brown light, like pointillisme done with flying dirt. But no picture, not even a video, could capture the intensity of the insect life which swarms across your gaze, inhibiting your inward breath.
Like all modern slums, Moqattam is really a giant informal factory: its micro-economy is both essential to global capitalism and in the process of being destroyed by it.
For sixty years, the zabbaleen had run Cairo’s trash collection system. They picked up the waste door to door, fed their pigs with the rotting organic matter and recycled the rest for cash, trading with a traditional caste of middlemen. But in 2003, as part of a privatization programme overseen by Mubarak’s son Gamal, three sanitation companies—two Spanish and one Italian—were brought in to ‘modernize’ the city’s waste collection.
These outside firms were given cleaning contracts valued at US$50 million a year. Instead of door-to-door collection, they placed big plastic bins on street corners. Instead of recycling 80 per cent of solid waste—as the zabbaleen had managed to do—their contracts required that only 20 per cent be recycled, with the rest tipped into landfill. The transformation of Cairo’s refuse system was to be crowned by the eviction of the zabbaleen, whose slum was adjacent to a new residential property development planned by friends of Gamal Mubarak.
‘The old system worked. The recycling process was one of the most efficient in the world,’ says Ezzat Guindi, born and raised in the slum, where he now runs an NGO. ‘And’, he goes on, ‘people could live. There was no sub-dollar-a-day poverty among the zabbaleen until the multinationals came. Now, about 30 per cent are destitute; and it’s those who’ve been displaced and made redundant by the sanitation companies who are the poorest.’
But the new system wasn’t working. Cairo’s residents refused to use the bins; in fact, many of the high-grade plastic containers were stolen and, with poetic justice, ended up being shredded and recycled by the zabbaleen. People began to dump their rubbish onto the streets or into the disused and abandoned buildings that scar Cairo’s streetscape.
So, the new system needed an extra push. When the global swine flu epidemic broke, in 2009, the Mubaraks spotted an opportunity. The Egyptian parliament, circumventing its own health ministry and in defiance of UN advice, ordered all the zabbaleen’s pigs to be slaughtered. There had been no recorded transmission of swine flu from pigs to humans. No other country in the world had ordered the mass eradication of domestic pigs. But that did not deter Hosni Mubarak.
Across Egypt, an estimated 300,000 swine belonging to zabbaleen households were slaughtered; the government paid between $15 and $50 per pig in compensation, compared to the $80 to $300 they’d been selling for on the market. Soon, two things happened. With no pigs to eat the rotting food, the zabbaleen stopped collecting it, leaving it to pile up on the streets. Then malnutrition appeared among their children. For, says Guindi, though the multinational companies were getting $10 a tonne for waste, and the middlemen $2 out of that, the zabbaleen received nothing from the contract—only what they could make from the sale of recycled waste, and their pigs.
Now something else happened, equally novel: the zabbaleen rioted. They hurled rocks, bottles and manure (there was plenty of that to hand) at the pig-slaughtering teams. In response, Mubarak deployed riot squads into the slums—followed, as always, by Central Security and its torturers.
That is how a mixture of repression, greed, corruption and neoliberal economic doctrine managed to turn the zabbaleen into latent revolutionaries. All it needed was a spark, and that came on 25 January 2011.
Cairo, 25 January 2011
‘Something’s going to happen in Egypt,’ Hossam el-Hamalawy had told me when we talked in a Bloomsbury café two years before. ‘Mubarak will try to hand over to his son, Gamal, but Gamal might lose the next election.’
Hamalawy spoke softly. He’d been detained and tortured by Mubarak’s secret police for selling socialist literature and was active around the uprising on 6 April 2008 in the Delta city of Mahalla. Then, like a tremor that should have warned of the earthquake to come, a city of 400,000 people rioted for three days in response to the suppression of a textile strike and the rocketing price of food.
It was around the Mahalla strike, too, that the April 6th Youth Movement was formed, by mostly young activists, liaising by Facebook, email and Flickr. They were drawn from Egypt’s fragmented opposition: secularist youth from the left, the liberal opposition parties, the human rights community.
When I met Hamalawy in 2009, screwing up Gamal’s election campaign was the limit of his ambition. But in January 2011, once the revolution in Tunisia was under way, the horizon for Egypt’s opposition groups broadened rapidly. Hamalawy (who tweets as @3arabawy) was among those that initiated the call for a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 25 January, again made through a Facebook page.
Meanwhile, the downtrodden and the desperate had begun to react to Ben Ali’s overthrow in more direct ways. On 17 January, three days after the Tunisian president’s fall, a fifty-two-year-old lawyer in central Cairo shouted slogans about food price rises, then set himself on fire. A man in Alexandria did the same. A third man—a restaurant owner—immolated himself outside the Egyptian parliament after quarrelling with officials about the cost of bread. The next day, a twenty-five-year-old business graduate named Asmaa Mahfouz (@AsmaaMahfouz) posted a video blog on YouTube. ‘Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire’, she announced,
to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and the degradation they’ve had to live with for thirty years, thinking that we could have a revolution like in Tunisia. Today one of them has died … People, have some shame! I, a girl, posted that I will go down to Tahrir Square, to stand alone, and I’ll hold a banner. All that came were three guys. Three guys, three armoured cars of riot police and tens of baltagiya … I’m making this video to give you a simple message: we’re going to Tahrir on 25 January.1
During the following days, activists frantically refreshed the Facebook page advertising the 25 January demo, as news spread it was gaining thousands of followers per second. Many had also joined the ‘We are all Khaled Said’ page, dedicated to a youth beaten to death by police in Alexandria for posting evidence of police corruption on YouTube.
The veteran activists knew the stakes. They knew the Central Security would crack down hard on any attempts at demonstration. They had no idea whether the tens of thousands of names on Facebook would translate into anything more than the usual forlorn and harassed protests. That they did was thanks, in the first place, to a new generation of young people—many of whom had previously been active only in student politics, and who simply decided they’d had enough.
Sarah Abdelrahman (@sarrahsworld), a twenty-two-year-old drama student at the American University of Cairo, had never been on a demonstration and had never been politically active beyond the student union. On the 25th itself, knowing that the advertised start-points on Facebook would be mere ‘camouflage’ to fool the police, she hooked up with a friend more experienced in political organization and headed for the slum settlement of Naheya, just outside downtown Cairo.
We had to walk in twos at first—this was my first protest and I didn’t know why, but they said it’s because of the Emergency Law: more than two is illegal. Then someone gave me a paper with lawyers’ numbers ‘in case you get detained’—and I am going: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’
Her eyes whiten as she relives it. She speaks perfect American English, dresses like any student in London or New York, and has that confident tone of voice you hear in the Starbucks of the world:
We were roaming around; people started hiding in alleys, walking in twos and you could look at another two people, the other side of the street and know they don’t belong here. And I’m thinking, ‘I know why you are here’—there’s a moment of eye contact. Someone started chanting and then all of a sudden people came from the alleys and we were about 200 people, in this tiny street. And people came onto the balconies to see what was happening.
Among the crowd she spotted Abd El Rahman Hennawy (@Hennawy89). The twenty-five-year-old is hard to miss: he sports a large beard, a red Bedouin scarf and a t-shirt bearing the word ‘socialism’. He seemed surprised to see her: ‘Before then, whenever Hennawy called us out to protest, in the university, I’d be like, sorry, man, I can’t. He saw me and said, what are you doing here? This is my stuff, it’s what I do!’ Hennawy was part of the core of protesters who knew what was going to happen. On the night before, 24 January, he had attended a packed meeting in a private flat. Then, like all the activists there, he’d organized a cell of six people to sleep on the floor of his own apartment and to wait there for information.
They’d been working like this since Mahalla in 2008: misdirecting the police by planning spoof marches openly on their cellphones and then failing to turn up, or launching flash demos out of the radical coffee shops in the alleyways around Tahrir. Recently they’d switched from demonstrating in the centre to demonstrating in the slums and suburbs. ‘On 25 January,’ Hennawy recalls,
we put three things together for the first time: the surprise demonstration, plus going to the slums instead of downtown, plus the chants. We chanted about economics, not politics. If you are shouting ‘Down with Mubarak!’ in the slums, nobody cares. They care about food and shelter. So we chanted: ‘How expensive is bread; how expensive is sugar; why do we have to sell our furniture?’ And people joined in. We had no idea it was going to be a revolution, though. I thought it would be just a demonstration.
Hennawy estimates that the 200 activists who went to Naheya were able to mobilize up to 20,000 people on the day. The urban poor responded to two issues in particular: police brutality and the price of bread.
As this crowd, and others, marched to Tahrir Square, a pattern developed: they would hit a wall of riot police, and the wall would break. The scenes would be posted on YouTube later, but if you track back through the Twitter feeds of the leading activists (in English, because the world was watching), you can see it happen:
13:21:56: @Sandmonkey: Huge demo going to Tahrir #jan25 shit just got real
13:42:45: @norashalaby: Fuck got kettled almost suffocated till they broke cordon
14:08:55: @Ghonim: Everyone come to Dar El Hekma security police allow people to join us and we are few hundreds2
When they got to Tahrir, the fighting started. Sarah says: ‘I was getting hit with water cannons, tear gas and bricks, and getting very close to being detained, and that’s the moment’—she snaps her fingers—‘when it hit me.’
Someone who knows nothing about history, the opposition, nothing about freedom in Egypt and how it’s been suppressed—because I’ve been so disconnected—you see all these people around you chanting the same thing and it triggers something in your mind … You see people running towards the police, hurling bricks at them—and wow: the normal scenario would be to run away. I went home and I told my mother—I am not myself. I am somebody new that was born today.
The demonstrators took Tahrir Square. They fought the police, held impromptu meetings, gave sound bites to the world’s media and, by nightfall, the Egyptian Revolution had begun. Twitter was blocked by the Egyptian government around 5 p.m., but the main activists were back on via a proxy (hidemyass.com) around 9 p.m. It was—as some of the activists proclaimed—a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube. The global news channels, above all Al Jazeera, became a massive amplifier for the amateur reports and videos, spreading the revolution’s impact across the world.
The farther away you stood, the more it looked like this was an uprising of secular youth with perfect teeth, speaking the kind of English you hear at Princeton or Berkeley. Even the Mubarak regime convinced itself that the revolt was something imposed from outside: tales of ‘foreign agents with an agenda’ were spread via the state-run rumour networks. On the night of 27 January, the government switched off the Internet. It was then that the world found out the revolution was neither digital nor alien.
Day of Rage, 28 May 2011
Next day, Friday the 28th, the Muslim day of prayer, tens of thousands streamed out of the mosques and headed for Tahrir Square. This was the ‘Day of Rage’: the day the Mubarak clique effectively lost control, though it would take two more weeks to oust the man from power. The moment was captured on mobile phones and posted on YouTube.
In one video, a crowd of around three thousand pushes the riot police back over the Qasr al-Nil bridge—the main route from Zamalek Island, in western Cairo, into Tahrir Square.3 Arcing over their heads are white plumes of tear-gas canisters. Two water-cannon trucks speed forward and swerve into the crowd, doing U-turns and jerks to flatten as many demonstrators as possible, but the security forces are unable to stop the crowd, now so big it fills the bridge.
The water cannons fire. The crowd halts. An imam appears, clad in white. The men at the front form a row and now, soaked through and shielding their eyes, just yards from the police, they kneel and pray. Those behind them do the same. Everybody is clawing at their faces as the water concentrates the tear gas, spraying a burning cocktail onto their skin.
Now, police trucks drive directly into the crowd; the praying ends, the crowds scatter. Police shoot a man in the face with a tear-gas grenade, point-blank (later, video footage of him on the operating table shows up on YouTube, smashed teeth protruding from a hole where his mouth had been). The crowd panics, pursued by four trucks and the far end of the bridge is engulfed in smoke, and now flames, as somebody has torched a car.
It seems like game over, but it’s not. Soon the police are in full retreat, back across the bridge: the crowd has armed itself with traffic barriers and a tube-shaped metal kiosk, which they roll before them on its side like a tank. A water-cannon truck has been captured and the rioters turn this, too, into a moving barricade. The police beat a headlong, terrified retreat. If the crowd pursuing them look like football fans, that’s because many of them are: the ‘ultras’ of Zamalek Sporting Club.
Mahmoud, who I met in Tahrir Square a few weeks later, draped in the flag of Zamalek SC, was among them. ‘There was me and about four thousand others at Qasr al-Nil bridge,’ he recalled. ‘It was a beautiful feeling: to know that Egypt is finally free of all the corruption, the rule of the iron fist.’
The ‘ultras’—named after the notorious Italian football hooligan gangs—had organized for years in the face of police repression, at all big soccer clubs. The police accused the ultras of fostering terrorism and organized crime, and they, in turn, found ways of getting their banners, flares and weapons into the stadiums. They would meet up at pre-arranged venues, ready to fight each other and the cops. On 28 January they were initially summoned to go and smash the demonstration, says Mahmoud, in response to rumours that it was organized by foreign agents:
We came down to see what was the truth behind what the media had been telling us, and found it was all wrong. The club HQ kept telling us the protesters were traitors, foreigners, and urging the ultras to go down there and do something about it. But when we got there, to Tahrir, we formed our own opinion: we bonded with the protesters and became part of them.
Ultras from rival club al-Ahly also joined in the fighting. By the end of the day numerous police cars had been torched, the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was on fire, and protesters controlled Tahrir Square.
He’s thin, Mahmoud, with a cheeky smile poking out from beneath his red-and-white Zamalek scarf. He says: ‘Why don’t you ask me about football?’ So I throw him some inane question about Zamalek’s position in the league. He chuckles: ‘Since the revolution I’ve been neglecting football hooliganism for a bigger cause: the revolution. I can speak for both myself and every ultra. We all have.’
A soft coup
On 29 January, with several hundred protesters killed across Egypt, the demonstrators forced the riot cops of the Central Security to vacate the streets; the ordinary police force withdrew too, in a calculated tactic to promote lawlessness. Army units were positioned at strategic points, but having refused an order from the interior ministry to use live ammo on the demonstrators, they took no part in the maintenance of law and order. All across Cairo, neighbourhoods responded by creating vigilante squads armed with clubs and small firearms. The main aim of these groups was to fend off the baltagiya—essentially a network of civilian thugs paid and organized by the police to carry out such beatings, rapes and tortures as are necessary to pacify a city of 22 million people without rights or decent livelihoods.
The moment was essentially a soft coup by the army against the parts of the regime loyal to Mubarak, but at the same time it created ‘fragmented power’ on the streets: not so much the ‘dual power’ of Marxist theory, but the kind of deconstructed power we saw taking shape in the vacuum left by Hurricane Katrina and would see, at isolated moments, in Greece and London later in 2011.
Though the precise details of how the military then seized power remain shrouded, there can be few clearer examples of an economics-driven split within a ruling class. Gamal Mubarak’s neoliberal programme of privatizations and corporate land grabs had been actively championed by the IMF and by leading European politicians: from Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson to French industry minister Eric Besson and, of course, Silvio Berlusconi, as well as many of the business leaders who gather annually at Davos.
Gamal and his brother Alaa had built a personal fortune for the family, estimated at around $70 billion, by extracting stakes in the newly privatized enterprises. Like many of the morally dubious enterprises that have collapsed in chaos since 2008, it was run from a business address in London.
But decades before the Mubaraks created their neoliberal fiefdom, the army had created its own economic empire: factories, tourist resorts and service businesses, replete with a supply chain of privately held companies dependent on army patronage. The politicians and media types aligned with this section of Egyptian capital saw the state, not global capitalism, as their meal ticket. The generals, together with this ‘national’ faction of Egyptian capital, had material reasons to resent the Mubarak clique—above all the impending stitch-up of the presidential succession—and they saw their moment.
While the masses were on the streets, these two factions fought a Shakespearean death-tragedy behind closed doors, and the army won. First, they forced Mubarak to concede the appointment of a vice president; next, the sacking of his cabinet and its replacement with army-aligned politicians. On 1 February, with a million people in Tahrir, they forced Mubarak to announce he would no longer seek re-election. The next day, Mubarak-loyal politicians paid camel drivers to gallop into Tahrir Square to attack protesters: the aim was to present to the world the illusion of a mass backlash, an ‘enough reform and lawlessness’ movement.
When, after two days and nights of hand-to-hand fighting, the camel-backed counter-revolution failed, Tahrir began to fill with a much wider demographic of protesters who, day by day, rejected the various compromises and reshuffles offered by Mubarak. Who can forget the old man holding up a placard that read: ‘Mubarak: Go! My arms are tired’?
Finally, on 10 February, at the demand of the first meeting in decades of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), Mubarak recorded a speech announcing he would step down. But Gamal stormed into the presidential palace and forced his father to scrap the recording and make a new one. This promised only elections by September.
It was to be the final straw for the masses, who were flooding into Tahrir in their hundreds of thousands, and for the army, which was now beginning to split openly under pressure of demands from Tahrir and because of its fraternization with the protesters. The generals forced Mubarak’s departure—without further ado or speeches—on 11 February, to be replaced in power by General Tantawi and the SCAF itself.
But by now a new force was making itself heard: the working class.
The collapse of invisible walls
The Egyptian working class bears the birthmarks of its creation, first under British rule and then during the state capitalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser: it is concentrated in the public sector, in army-owned factories and in recently privatized enterprises. On the eve of the revolution, 28 per cent of the workforce was employed by the state and just 10 per cent in the ‘modern’ sector—that is, in textiles, construction, energy, transport and services. More than a third of workers were ‘informal’, and the rest worked on the land.4
Though shrunk by twenty years of privatization, and further diminished by job losses after 2008, the Egyptian working class had a clear demographic identity under Mubarak. You could see it on the picket lines that formed in early February.
At the gates of the Suez Canal Port Authority, it was middle-aged men and their sons in orange overalls. Big-chested guys who’d had to fight for these jobs—and defy the state-run union to go on strike and occupy the port. Among the Real Estate Tax Authority Workers in their blue baseball caps, who marched into Tahrir calling for Mubarak to go, there were more women: but that same confident, educated culture was evident. They’d been the first to break from Mubarak’s state-run union federation in 2008.
This is a class with status: the men seem physically larger than the urban poor, and the demographic is discernibly centred on the age group 35–55. And they have a culture of solidarity. For Mubarak, the price of maintaining the state-run union as an organ of control within the workplace had been to hold congresses, maintain the NDP’s membership of the Socialist International, to keep the ILO onside, and to deliver material concessions. In 2008, 5.9 million government workers won a 30 per cent pay rise in 2008, while Mubarak was forced to double food, health and education subsidies, from LE64 billion to LE128 billion ($22 billion).5
By 9 February the pattern of action was clear: workers were beginning to form unions separate from the state-run union, often seizing the workplace and kicking out the boss. At a textile factory in Daqahliya they sacked the CEO and began self-management. At a printing house in Cairo, they did the same. In Suez, where there had been heavy repression, the steel mill and the fertilizer factory had declared all-out strikes until the fall of the regime.6
Egyptian activists are split over the significance of this late-stage strike wave: some think it was a second-order effect of the mass unrest, others believe it was decisive in beginning to split the army—and thus forcing the SCAF to depose Mubarak. What is not in doubt is that, after 11 February, worker unrest took off.
Mohammed Shafiq, a psychiatrist at the Manshiyet el Bakri hospital in Cairo, had been in Tahrir Square as a volunteer medic from day one, treating the injured in one of the makeshift clinics:
I had been in Tahrir for about ten days. I’m tired, I’m hungry, so I decided to go to my own hospital as there was a standstill between the regime and the protesters. In the hospital there was a revolutionary mood. Even those who supported Mubarak knew the situation could not go on. I started a petition, with some of the demands I’d been hearing in Tahrir Square: all the doctors signed and then, amazingly, nurses started coming to me, saying: ‘You are demanding a cut in hours and an increase in wages—what about us?’
Shafiq describes what happened next as ‘the collapse of invisible walls’: the nurses, the technicians, the porters added their demands.
Then he returned to Tahrir: the last days of Mubarak, followed by days of chaos and celebration, were frantic for the medics. But when he went back to the hospital in mid-February, the workers asked: ‘What happened to our petition?’ By now the entire workforce of 750 people, including managers, had signed it. They formed a cross-professional trade union. The nurses staged a sit-in over unpaid wages. The doctors also joined: junior doctors in a public hospital earned just LE300 a month basic, while hospital administrators could earn LE2,000. Shafiq says:
The manager in every hospital is like a small dictator, they are a ‘Mubarak in the workplace’. But we’d just decapitated Mubarak! After four weeks we decided to sack the manager. We told him not to come to work, and told the security guards to lock him out. He went to the ministry and complained—but the union ran the hospital for two weeks until we elected a new manager. It was the height of dual power except it was not dual power, it was only one power, and it was us.
When I meet Shafiq in April, he’s hosting a delegation of British trade unionists, sweating into their souvenir Tahrir t-shirts in the garden of the Doctors’ Union. The doctors are about to launch a national strike call, but the union is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, which doesn’t want to strike. Another young doctor comes over.
‘My colleague favours an immediate all-out strike,’ Shafiq informs the British postmen and train drivers huddled under the palm trees. ‘But I favour a warning strike to start with. What would you do?’ A bloke from London Underground asks: ‘What are your plans for picketing?’ Both men look blank. There is further puzzlement among the hijab-clad young female medics who have joined us. After a few minutes back and forth in Arabic and cockney, the Brits explain the idea of blocking access to the workplace to prevent strike-breakers. ‘This had not occurred to us,’ say the Egyptians.
On May Day 2011, as Shafiq and the secular medics jostle with the Brotherhood for control of the stage at the Doctors’ Union, workers begin filling Tahrir Square. It is, says Hossam el-Hamalawy, the first real May Day since 1951. The red flag does not predominate: instead people arrive with homemade banners, always with middle-aged men in the lead, chanting and singing. One banner says: ‘Fight for social justice, not your own demands’. At the edge of the square, the top-selling items on the souvenir stands are A4 posters showing Mubarak and all his ministers in orange jumpsuits, with nooses around their necks.
A loud delegation from the Masry Shebin El-Kom textile factory surrounds me. Mahmoud el-Shaar, who’s led a thirty-five-day occupation at the plant, says:
We’re striking to remove the imperialist presence of foreign elements. Mubarak privatized the company to Indonesian owners and they’ve shut four out of seven units. We want the prosecution of the corrupt officials who ran the cotton industry, and we want to terminate the contract with the Indonesians because it’s destroying our lives. Our average wage is between LE360 and LE700 a month.
The company was the target of a classic Mubarak-era deal: the Indorama group paid LE174 million for 70 per cent of the assets, the state kept 18 per cent and the NDP-run trade union would own 12 per cent. ‘The old, Mubarak union did nothing but corrupt the situation: we’re finished with them,’ el-Shaar says.7 Rifat Abdul, in the t-shirt of the public transport union, grabs my arm. His banner demands a minimum wage of LE1200. What’s changed?
I feel free. We all feel we can say what we think without getting detained for it. At work, though, nothing has changed: wages, conditions, work hours, nothing. But there is a spirit of optimism between all workers, in every sector. During the revolution, we were here from day one. But now it’s reached the point where we look around and we recognize these other delegations from the days in Tahrir Square, people from totally different sectors: we know each other’s faces, we shake each other’s hands, we slap each other on the back.
His mate, Wasim, rips the baseball cap off his bald head. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘We’re not going anywhere. I’m 100 per cent sure the whole world is behind us. We’ll stay here in the sun and heat until it’s done.’ But it’s not done yet.
The question for Musa Zekry
Back in the Moqattam slum, Musa Zekry’s future revolves around a single type of shampoo, brand name Pert. To prevent counterfeits, Procter & Gamble pay the zabbaleen to shred every Pert bottle they collect, in return for cash. With the cash—supplemented by money from Bill Gates—they run a school. At the school the kids learn Arabic, English, computing and how to shred the Pert bottles. Zekry learned English at this school and now mentors the kids.
They are bright-eyed and cheerful, but decide to sing me a doleful Coptic song whose refrain asserts the inevitability of being poor and the certainty of salvation. One kid, aged thirteen, explains his daily routine: ‘I go rubbish collecting from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m., and at 8 a.m. I go to school.’ With free English lessons he’s one of the lucky few, so what are his ambitions? ‘To collect so much rubbish we can pay for another school.’
Will he leave the slum? He shakes his head. The combined efforts of Bill Gates, Procter & Gamble and thirty years of Mubarak’s rule never managed to raise the aspirations of the Cairo poor beyond a better kind of poverty. By contrast, twenty-one days of revolution have brought freedom.
And freedom poses questions philanthropy does not bother with. Will Musa Zekry get healthcare, a living wage, free education for his kids as of right, instead of through charity? Will the ‘Mubaraks-in-every-enterprise’ be toppled? Will Egyptian society be scarred by rampant corruption and inequality forever? Or will they get something better?
These are questions which, for twenty years, the policy elite believed were closed. The great surge of freedom that carried Musa Zekry into Tahrir Square has reopened them.
But I’m rushing ahead. We need to backtrack, to the old world, where everything was stable and imagination was dead …
