The amber streetlights standing sentry over the Nile Cornice running in front of the communications building in the Maspero complex in downtown Cairo do something odd to peoples’ coloration at night, flattening and softening bright colors, turning the assemblages of people into a chiaroscuro – here and there a green laser lacing through the smoke and smog to mark out one of the snipers perched in the windows of the hulking rotunda.
The building is studded with huge communications antennae on top. It is from there that the government puts out its propaganda, and for that reason it has been targeted by protesters, who started a sit-in there on January 26. I spent the evenings of the 26th and the 27th there.
Tahrir is vast, central, telegenic, and symbolically important. But it has also taken on too festive an air, activists tell me. There have been mild clashes between revolutionaries and activists, insistent that the fight for freedom in Egypt has scarcely begun, and those who are eager to settle into the parliament and institutionalize their electoral gains: the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Nour, the Salafi Party.
They both did well, far better than activists expected in the last election. But their strength is overstated, and will be evanescent. They have no social program except their welfare networks, and for Egypt’s teeming poor, that won’t be enough. The question isn’t political Islam. It’s political economy. I spoke for a while with one man during the sit-in about this. After telling me about regime propaganda against the panoply of ideologically hard-left protesters – the Revolutionary Socialists, with their yellow first clenched in the midst of a red flag, the anarchists, the libertarian socialists, and others – I asked him if he was affiliated with any of those tendencies. No, he told me, he just liked some of their ideas, and it was too bad that the regime was so intent on demonizing them through the information blitz from the Maspero. Then I asked him if he had participated in the last round of elections. Yes, he told me, he had voted for the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi.
“But they are terrible, I voted for them, but now I oppose them.” This puzzled me, so I asked him to expand. He said: “FJP and Al Nour fielded the best candidates in my neighborhood, so I voted for them, but now I oppose them, and the struggle continues.” The left did not have a unified position on boycotting the elections in Egypt, and amidst strategic disarray and the welter of choices, many simply did as he did: voted for the best candidate and moved on to the street and the struggle. I also asked him why he chose not to work with any of the leftist tendencies. He responded speaking specifically about the Revolutionary Socialists that “they sometimes speak in a very complex way, which is difficult for even educated people to understand.” He added that everywhere, the revolt was the same, different kinds of protests against the same system. “In New York, in Europe, in Israel.” That surprised me a bit. I had not been aware of how news of the summer social justice protests in Israel had diffused to the ground in the Arab countries, except through the interpretations of their interlocutors.
Anyway, at Maspero, the energy was infectious. The activists were united on the call: “End of military rule!” There were also other additions: “Tantawi is a Zionist” (Tantawi is the Field Marshall of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces). This one is amusing to consider in light of those who either dishonestly or hallucinogenically hold that the revolutionaries have no foreign policy goals. Domestic reconstruction will be the first step, but everyone knows the simple truth that if radical populism or democracy begin to take root in Egypt, the détente with Israel, the collaboration in the encaging of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip – that will all end. Later someone brought a mock-up of a gallows. I am sure that they are quite serious about it, another reason that the SCAF is clinging so tightly to power.
For a while, people allowed a single lane of traffic to pass, but eventually some group made the decision to stud the roadway with large rocks, blocking traffic. Then they started directing cars in various other directions – during moments of mobilization in the square and elsewhere the popular committees take control of traffic flows. At that point people promptly sat down in the middle of the roadway. There were probably at least 7000 there when I left. Amazing in comparison to the Egypt of 24 months ago, when normal numbers at a protest were 70, but an order of magnitude short of what it would take to effectively besiege Maspero, which has metal grates over the windows of the first two stories, and where every office is guarded by a member of the military with a .50 caliber turret-mounted rifle, another activist told me. I saw one of those rifles in the press office when I was in there over the summer. With the right ammunition, such rifles can put holes in tanks. I don’t know what they can do to people, but if enough people keep up the pressure on Maspero long enough, I do not doubt that the military won’t be worried about finding out.