13

Laila Soueif

Egypt

LAILA HAD BEEN involved with Egyptian politics for far too long to believe all the talk about the protest being held in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011. “It’s not going to be a demonstration,” one young activist told her. “It’s going to be a revolution.” She understood the man’s excitement. Only days earlier, street protests after the self-immolation of the fruit-and-vegetable vendor in Tunisia had forced the longtime Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from power. Throughout the Arab world, rebellion was in the air. But this was Egypt. Laila expected news conferences and solidarity committee meetings, perhaps some paper reforms, certainly not insurrection. She even joked about it. She was attending an educational conference the day before the demonstration, and when an organizer asked if she would be returning the next day, she replied, “Well, tomorrow we’re having a revolution, but if the revolution ends early, yes, I’ll be here.”

The following day, as Laila approached Tahrir Square, she realized this indeed was something altogether different from the toothless Egyptian protests of the past. Until now, the Cairene activist community had considered a protest successful if it drew several hundred demonstrators, with any topping a thousand participants regarded as exceptional. In Tahrir Square on January 25, the crowd was at least fifteen thousand, and Laila soon heard about the many thousands more who had converged on different rallying points around Cairo and in other towns and cities across Egypt. In Tahrir, as elsewhere around the nation, the stunned security forces simply gave way before the onslaught, stood impotently by as the emboldened crowds’ calls for reform gave way to open demands for Hosni Mubarak’s fall.

Demonstrator at Tahrir Square, Egypt, 2011

It wasn’t merely the numbers that convinced Laila this was a radical departure from past protests. “In Tahrir, I met people who’d come in from all over northern Egypt. Some had traveled hundreds of kilometers, and they were determined that they weren’t going home until they’d toppled Mubarak.”

Demonstrators at Tahrir Square, Egypt, 2011

The protests continued over the next two days, until, on January 28, Laila concluded that they truly did have a revolution on their hands. That morning, she and some friends traveled to the Imbaba neighborhood in northwest Cairo to join a group intending to march on Tahrir, only to be met by a wall of soldiers in riot gear. After dispersing the protesters, the soldiers pursued them into Imbaba’s narrow alleyways, firing tear gas as they went.

“That was a very stupid mistake,” Laila explained. “These are small alleys where people are practically living in the street, so that just brought down Imbaba. It became a fixed battle between the troops and the residents, and there was absolutely no moving those people. They were going to break down these soldiers and torch the police stations, or die trying.”

The battle for Imbaba continued late into the afternoon. Laila, having become separated from her friends, decided to walk to downtown alone. It was an eerie journey. The streets were deserted, but everywhere in the growing dusk things were burning: cars, barricades, police stations. Echoing off the surrounding buildings came the sound of gunfire, some single shots, others the sustained bursts of assault rifles. With darkness falling, Laila finally emerged onto Ramses Street, a major thoroughfare in central Cairo.

“And suddenly, this huge crowd of demonstrators appeared,” she recalled, “running down Ramses. They had just broken through the police cordons, and they were running to get to Tahrir. One young man saw me standing there, and he came over and hugged me—he’d obviously seen me before, in Tahrir—and said, ‘I told you we would have a revolution!’ And that was the moment when I knew it was true, and that we would be victorious.”

Over the next week, both the size and the militancy of the demonstrations grew, but so did the harshness of the government’s response, with soldiers and the police increasingly trading tear gas for live ammunition. On February 1, a defiant Mubarak took to the airwaves vowing never to leave Egypt—“On its soil I will die”—and the following day there came the bizarre spectacle, dubbed the Battle of the Camel, when scores of state-sponsored thugs astride horses and camels attacked those encamped in Tahrir Square with riding crops and whips.

The following day, Ahmed Seif’s law center was raided by the military police, and he and dozens of others were hauled off for questioning at the headquarters of military intelligence. For two days, Ahmed was interrogated by a variety of officers, but he would have reason to recall one encounter in particular. It came on the morning of February 5, when the chief of military intelligence, a colorless general named Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, going about other business, happened to stride past Ahmed and several other prisoners. In an impromptu lecture, Sisi warned his captive audience that they should all respect Mubarak and Egypt’s military leadership and that, once released, they should go home and forget Tahrir Square. When Ahmed, forgoing respectful silence, retorted that Mubarak was corrupt, the general’s haughty manner swiftly changed. “He became angry; his face became red,” Ahmed recalled a few years later to The Guardian. “He acted as if every citizen would accept his point and no one would reject it in public. When he was rejected in public, he lost it.”

Upon his release that day, Ahmed stopped by his home for a change of clothes and then immediately returned to Tahrir Square.

The sense that the regime was coming apart became increasingly palpable. Across Egypt came reports of army units refusing orders to fire on demonstrators, and in Tahrir Square, television cameras captured images of soldiers embracing the protesters and sharing cigarettes with them.

On February 11, the clock finally ran out on Hosni Mubarak. After submitting his resignation, the president and his immediate family boarded a plane and fled to their palatial retreat in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el Sheikh. At the news, all of Egypt erupted in celebration, and nowhere more so than in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

But among a small handful of Egyptians, joy was already tinged with a note of disquiet, especially when it was announced that a group of senior military officers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, would serve as an interim government until elections were held. One of those who worried was Laila Soueif.

“In the last few days of Mubarak,” she said, “when we could see what was coming, I and some of the other independents, we tried to talk to all the different political factions. ‘Seize power. Don’t wait for permission. Just seize power now before the military steps in.’ And everyone said, ‘Yes, of course, that’s a good idea. We’ll organize a meeting to talk about it in a couple of days.’ ” Laila shook her head, gave a bitter little laugh. “But maybe it was asking too much. Maybe we simply couldn’t do it at that point. People needed to feel they had won. Not us, the politicos, but all these millions of people who had come down to the street. They needed a time to feel victorious.” She sighed and then fell silent for a moment. “I don’t know. To this day, I don’t know. But I think that was our critical moment, and we lost.”