IIn the center of the place where it all started, Mansour Mohammed ran a canvas-covered tent on the only green grass between miles of concrete and asphalt. For 10 days he ate and slept huddled with strangers joined by growing anger and revolt around him. Huge crowds rose and emerged – shouting their demands for changes in a call that resounded in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. “I will never forget that sound,” he said. “It was the most powerful noise I’ve ever heard. It was taller than 10 jumbo jets. It was the release of six decades of fear. “
A decade later, the launch pad for the Egyptian revolution – a seminal part of the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring – is a very different place, as is the country. The strip of grass has been cemented and there is a newly erected obelisk, pointing to the sky in an incisive reminder of the times of sober certainty. Traffic moves calmly around a roundabout now free of demonstrators or defiant attempts. The secret police are positioned, not so secretly, in the vicinity. Little is said about revolution, and attempts to awaken the ghosts of Tahrir Square are met with the heavy hand of the invigorated military state that has entrenched itself in the wake of the revolution.
It all started very differently for Moaz Abdulkarim. On January 25, 2011, he and a group of young Egyptians gathered in apartments on the other side of the Nile and went to a bakery, where they prepared to change history.
The site was out of reach of police trucks and out of the grid of security chiefs who were searching the city for subversives spurred by the Tunisian uprising that forced dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali into exile weeks earlier.
The neighborhood’s narrow streets gave them time to organize and increase the number before the riot police could attack them. And they leapt on their pursuers in another – more meaningful way: by mobilizing supporters on social media platforms, whose extraordinary reach would soon destroy the illusion that President Hosni Mubarak’s forces were too powerful to face.
That morning, the group met at the El Hayiss bakery and put their plan into action. “The meeting at the bakery was just one step in the plan,” said Abdulkarim, who now lives in exile in Europe. “There were many different groups [to co-ordinate with] and our group’s mission was to stay at the bakery on Mustafa Mahmoud square. We watched the police to see if they would attack the protesters.
“We were thinking: if we succeed, we will have a better Egypt and, if we fail, we will die or spend our entire lives in prison. In my life, only Mubarak was president, so I always dreamed of seeing another president from another family.
“Our job was to bring all the protesters together so that the police could not control them. If there were only a few protesters, the police could simply arrest them and that would make them fail. Soon there were about 2,000 people and the police were unable to control the situation. At that moment I realized that we were successful, because I saw people of all kinds; different economic levels, rich and poor, old and young, all together in one voice. “
At this point, calls on social media for crowds to gather in Cairo areas and converge on public spaces created an unstoppable impulse. “Social media was the most important tool in the revolution,” said Abdelkarim. “People could communicate very easily and express themselves without any censorship.” The police state of Mubarak was dominated by dissidents with smartphones and Facebook accounts.
On January 28, Tahrir – or Liberation Square – had become the melting pot of relentless demands for a new Egypt. And in two weeks, he sowed the seeds for Mubarak’s death. Then US President Barack Obama withdrew Washington’s long-standing support for the Egyptian leader, who ruled for 30 years, and endorsed Egyptian revolutionaries. “The Egyptians made it clear that nothing less than a genuine democracy will win,” said Obama.
Then came a challenge for the Egyptian military, who had supported the revolutionaries as their demands grew higher. “The military served patriotically and responsibly as caretakers for the state,” said Obama. “And now it will have to guarantee a transition that is credible in the eyes of the Egyptian people.”
“He didn’t know it at the time, but his words were an epitaph,” said Salwa Jamal, a supporter of the revolt who was forced to flee Egypt in 2014. “From that moment on, the military planned to take control. “
Nancy Okail, an Egyptian and academic activist, said Mubarak’s resignation day, February 11, revealed that the next few months would be anything but a perfect transition to democracy. “It was the worst time for me,” she said. “I saw the tanks and knew that the military was taking over. I saw people giving flowers to the military, cleaning the streets and cleaning graffiti. It was the beginning of cleaning up the vestiges of the revolution.
“Throughout all this, people said no, no, the military is on our side. But we knew them and we knew how they run things.
In 2012, democratic elections were held and Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a member of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood Islamic group, took office. He soon made statements to give himself more power and dissatisfaction with his government grew rapidly.
Less than a year later, Morsi was removed in a coup led by then Defense Minister Gen Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, which dissolved parliament and banned the Muslim Brotherhood. A crackdown on dissent, which continues today, was launched and Sisi was elected president in two elections.
Since then, Egypt’s new leader has been trying to erase all vestiges of the revolution by using overwhelming repression to crush calls for change. Civil society in Egypt has been decimated, its artists, intellectuals, journalists and academics forced to silence, or exiles – or imprisoned. Political opposition has also been harmed, or co-opted, and international condemnation has long been silenced. In early December, French President Emmanuel Macron presented Sisi with the Legion of Honor, France’s biggest civilian award, ignoring a human rights record that global NGOs described as diabolical.
Sisi’s claims to help contain migration to Europe and to be a bulwark against security threats have gained tacit support and his routine suppression of dissent and expression has led to minimal consequences and impunity. Human Rights Watch said there were 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt in 2019.
Despite the crackdown, Khaled Mansour, a former executive director of the Egyptian Personal Rights Initiative, said that many of those who supported the revolution would do it again. “It was definitely still a turning point, he said. “But we don’t always turn to a position of comfort or in a good direction.”
He added: “The only thing they have that allows them to remain in power is strength. Social cohesion, economic savior, terrorism, threats to national security; everyone allows these agencies to say ‘we are the last stronghold’ and postpone any talk of change.
“What we need is not a united Egypt, but a place where different factions can talk to each other and engage in political dialogue without existential fears overlapping things. Can we heal? It will take a long period of self-criticism and introspection, and that is extremely difficult to do now. “