A few days after the 2011 revolutionary high of the anti-regime protests in Cairo, demanding the resignation of then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the mood changed.
Pro-government thugs were launched against the crowd. They began to target protesters, journalists covering events and Westerners. Some of them had entered our hotel.
We were told to pack our things, get in the cars and drive from the Hilton, overlooking Tahrir Square, to a relatively safe hotel a few miles away.
I shared a car with cameraman Joe Duran, who was sitting in the passenger seat, and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper in the back seat.
On the 6th of October bridge, a crowd forced our taxi to stop and surrounded us. They broke the windows. They threw stones at the car. The driver, surrounded by the violent attackers, seemed to freeze.
In Arabic, I remember saying, “I’ll give you $ 500 for the windows if I keep walking.” I pulled that figure out of nowhere. I still don’t know why that particular number came to mind. When he left, I thought we were safe.
We entered the entrance to the Marriott in our wrecked car. Stunned, we entered the lobby and checked in at reception.
Soon after, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof told me that some journalists were changing the names with which they registered, so that any crook who entered the hotel demanding guest lists would not know which rooms the foreign press was in.
My name is Arabic anyway, I thought, so I’ll be fine. “Is CNN written anywhere on your form?” I remember Kristof asking me. I wasn’t sure, but I decided to take a chance. It was no use staying at the reception for a long time.
That night, we broadcast CNN’s special coverage of a hotel room floor. I remember thinking it looked like a hostage video. We would have many more nights like this, including a particularly tense night barricaded by the CNN Cairo agency, a sofa closing the door.
I anchored hours of live coverage with our then bureau chief, the legendary Ben Wedeman, and Cooper. We sat huddled in boxes of photographic equipment, lit with the weakest light possible on our faces, since the offices needed to look unoccupied outside.
Democracy hopes
The government’s reaction against the uprising lasted for several days.
The regime and its supporters tried to overthrow the popular movement, but the army was not on Mubarak’s side. As it had been for decades in Egypt, it was ultimately the generals who controlled the reins of power. When they left Mubarak, we all knew he wouldn’t last long.
On February 11, 2011, 17 days after the protests began, it was over: Hosni Mubarak stepped down. This would mark the beginning of a new era; the hope was that decades of nepotism, corruption, police brutality and repression would give way to something similar to democracy.
A few years later, I covered the 2013 Egyptian presidential election, which led to the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi.
But ultimately, a revived army would crush the Islamists in 2013 and bring the army back to power. They have been there all along, tolerating what turned out to be just a brief experiment with democracy.
Lost – crushed even – in this tragic story are the original protesters, who dreamed of a democracy that represented them.
Crushed optimism
In the first weeks of the uprising, journalists like us shared their optimism: Could this really be the moment when the Arab world, slowly and painfully, would evolve into a system that serves its own people, instead of the unelected autocrats who had drained it? do your countries dry for decades?
Ten years ago, we allowed ourselves to believe.
Today, many of those who were on the front lines of the protests are in exile, imprisoned or worse.
In other parts of the region, there have been far more tragic results.
In Syria, the regime crushed its own citizens’ cry for democracy with such brutality that peaceful protesters were quickly replaced by extremist rebels, fighting against a government supported by outside forces for control of a destroyed land.
Today, those of us who covered Egypt in 2011 still deeply feel the intense emotion of those early days.
There were some scary moments, but the historical significance of the events we were documenting worked like rocket fuel as we ran out of crowds and settled into hotel rooms.
But for revolutionaries in Egypt and beyond, it was not meant to be.
The Arab world, in many ways worse than before the Arab Spring, will have to wait for another generation to demand the freedom of its leaders. And we can only hope that this time they will be victorious, at least so that the sacrifices of those who came before them were not in vain.