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Chaos, yes, but a chaos Egyptians wanted

On February 11, 2011, as beaten Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak found his comeuppance from one of modern history’s most tumultous people’s uprisings, chaos broke out within minutes on the streets of Cairo.

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For once, Hosni Mubarak was dead right about the Egyptian people, his children, as he always called them. “If I leave,” Mubarak had told an American TV network nine days before he was ousted, “there will be chaos.”

On February 11, 2011, as the beaten Egyptian dictator found his comeuppance from one of modern history’s most tumultous people’s uprisings, chaos broke out within minutes on the streets of Cairo.

People were running as if they wanted to lynch Egypt’s previously notorious police; men, women and children were perched dangerously on their cars’ windows waving the Egyptian tricolour; those cars themselves being driven dangerously, palm pressing the horn, the foot the accelerator; boys turning amateur gymnasts on motorcycles that vroomed zigzagging through Cairo’s narrow alleys; and, closer to Tahrir Square — the stage where Egypt’s several million people performed their dramatic 18-day Revolution — the three bridges across the Nile chock-a-block with people, cars, flags, screams, slogans, drumbeat, dreams, hopes, ecstasy, catharsis.

Yes, you’ve seen it all on TV since Friday night, this latest redoubtable effort by the meek and the submissive inheriting their land. But then, you will never quite know how deep this passion stirs if you weren’t last night in Cairo.    

If you didn’t walk hours in and around Tahrir Square in these almost Biblical days, if you didn’t sleep in the tents of the farm and factory workers — now freedom fighters — overlooking the giant banner, “The People Want The Removal Of The Regime”; if you didn’t meet the man whose son fell to a bullet from Mubarak’s milita and who told you he, too, would die for the Revolution.

“We’re free, brother!” Imane, a 38-year-old Egyptian who teaches French, nearly choked me in her bear hug, and as Egypt’s lameduck vice-president, Omar Suleiman, appointed by Mubarak during the Revolution, announced that his boss and mentor had gone forever. In 18 days, Imane has barely slept two hours a day.

She rarely ever went home. Over the five days that I had known her, as I gravitated everyday to the makeshift doctors’ corner she has helped manage outside a locked KFC, she reflected not a shadow of doubt that the brutal dictator would be gone before long. “When this is over, I will bring you home to Alexandria,” she had said to me two nights earlier, speaking of the historic city where her parents live. “I want you to meet my family.”

Hany, 26, a doctor who made Imane his “sister” when he met her the first time on the first day of the Revolution, January 25, on the Qas al Neel bridge — which is guarded by two huge lion statues on either side — hugged me and started crying. As my cameraman, Raju, shot our video, I was glad I was facing away from the camera. “Uncle!” Hany kissed my cheeks, “you can find me a bride now.” That had been the running joke between us for days. I said I would get him an Indian bride because he was too busy serving the Revolution to find one for himself. On Thursday night, after Mubarak stunned the nation by refusing to step down in his much-awaited televised speech, I feebly joked with Hany: “Hey, this can’t get over so soon. I haven’t yet found you a bride.” Imane had winced: “Please no! We can’t wait that long!”

I love Hany. I love Imane. And I love the millions whose unflagging determination, nothing short of Gandhi’s Satyagraha, has created the biggest human rights spectacle in decades to prove that nonviolence is beyond doubt the most courageous and effective weapon to beat back the worst authoritarianism such as the one that Egyptian State nakedly practiced as the United States’ pet bulldog in the Middle East. (It is not just the imperialists who need to beware. Isn’t it obvious that the Egyptian people’s success would be such a dampener for the appeal of the armed militant Islamists, from al Qaeda to the Taliban to the Lashkar-e-Taiba?)

“Make no mistakes,” Ahmed Tatter, a US-returned engineer, also from Alexandria, told me on Friday afternoon, hours before Mubarak’s departure was announced: “We’ve made history not just for Egypt but for the entire world.” New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman, camping here told me: “From now on, the world will be known as BE and AE. Before Egypt and After Egypt.” Everyone who is here in Cairo knows this is a watershed in human history.

That is why, it is imperative that the rest of the world that isn’t here understands what has just happened in Egypt. There is much television and newspaper commentary being devoted to speculation if at all the Egyptian military, although much respected around the country, would actually shephard the building of a democratic system of governance, complete with political freedom to manifest in the creation of independent political parties, free and fair elections, a multi-party parliamentary system, and a fixed tenure for the presidency.

Essam El-Erian, a widely respected opposition leader who hails from the banned Islamist political unit, the Muslim Brotherhood, told me on Saturday that the military leadership is entirely committed to transferring power to a civilian political system, that will no doubt be built from scratch.

“We will have to amend the Constitution and lift the state of emergency,” he added. For those who think that the Muslim Brotherhood — known by its Arabic name, Ikhwan, here — is a dangerous right-wing closet Islamist, it will do well to know that El-Erian is actually being more conservative than the freedom fighters. “We want a brand new Constitution,” Asma Afifi, 25, a media executive, told me at Tahrir Square.

Actually, it is very simple to understand what has happened: the people of Egypt have lost fear. Forever. On the night of February 2, when Mubarak’s militia crept up on the camping protestors who were then only a few thousands, many of them present thought that they would all be killed by the bullets and that the uprising — still not fully a Revolution — would be defeated. Lena is an Italian journalist who lives in Lebanon and who landed at Tahrir from Beirut on January 30, five days after the Revolution had begun.

She was there when the militia had attacked. On Friday night, as Lena and I walked for two hours around Cairo, she told me that she saw scenes that she did not even see in the Second Intifada in Palestine.

“Women were breaking stones to hand them to the men. The men would move forward in a line towards the bridge from where the militia were firing away. Those who caught bullets, and fell down, would be immediately brought back to the makeshift doctors’ area.

Almost immediately, another group of men, unarmed except for the stones in their hands, would take their place, to directly face the bullets.”

Lena turned and smiled at me: “The stench of blood is still blocking my nose.” She did not believe it to be true when people ran to her around 3am after the dark night of pitched battle to announce that not only the protestors had driven the militia back and taken the bridge, they had also secured the roads around.

This is the fear that the Egyptians have conquered, day after day, at Tahrir Square. Remember: these people have never, ever spoken up in nearly 60 years, which is how long dictatorial rule has lasted in this country, decreasingly becoming benign.

For decades, they have gone around like automatons. Mubarak’s regime has been so totalitarian that the emergency he placed on the country upon seizing power in 1981 has never been withdrawn. In fact, the Egyptian police — which was roundly attacked by the protestors across Cairo — has long had powers to arrest people without any reason. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared over the decades, a story that will only now begin to unfold.

Four years ago, I had spent 11 days in Cairo to attend an international UN conference. I was struck at how apolitical everyone seemed. “We don’t talk politics because we don’t know anything about it,” a 19-year-old college girl Maha Mekkaway had told me during our group boat ride on the Nile. Last night, Maha — who is my Facebook friend since — has been screaming delightfully on Facebook. “Today WE made history! WE got the whole world to know what we’re capable of ... VIVA EGYPTIANS!!”

This feeling - of conquering fear - is already making the Egyptian people unstoppable. I had met Lena, the Italian journalist, on the night of February 10 when she was freelancing in the Tahrir Square as a painter of the Egyptian flag’s tricolor on people’s faces. As she painted my cheeks, we exchanged numbers.

A short while later, she wasn’t there. Last night, as she and I walked around, she told me that Mubarak’s speech and refusal to step down on Thursday night had so angered people that about 1,000 of them decided to walk to the Presidential Palace, which is heavily guarded by a special police, on their own. She decided to tag along. “I was the only woman,” she laughed. “We were all convinced that we were going to die, that we will all be shot dead.” But the people didn’t care. They had had enough.

And it was not just protests that the people did. Within days of the uprising, the Egyptian people organised themselves to take care of different aspects of maintaining civil order and urban life — remarkable because to this day, the Revolution does not have a single leader or chain of command. I met hundreds of college students who on their own cleaned the streets and took out the garbage. Last night, after Mubarak’s departure, a group of boys held a human chain around a dirty area as some others cleaned it up. “Why are you doing this?” Lena asked. “Because,” one of them laughed, “Egypt is my country.”

For my money, the Egyptian people’s unparalleled Revolution is going to galvanise a million people’s movements across the world, across the continents. And certainly, as US President Barack Obama — although caught between a stone and a hard place because he has just lost a big toehold in the Middle East — himself noted, Egypt is the moral force that has bent the arc of history towards justice. “Egypt will never be the same,” said Obama. Being here, in the middle of it in Cairo, I couldn’t agree more.

(Ajit Sahi is Editor-at-large with UNI TV)

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