| I was walking between two men near the Mohammad Naguib Metro station in downtown Cairo. One of the men, Ahmed, was carrying a crowbar. He told me that Egyptians have to be careful around foreigners: Hezbollah and Hamas were stirring up trouble and trying to force the collapse of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime to open up a new front against Israel. By Glen JohnsonI was walking between two men near the Mohammad Naguib Metro station in downtown Cairo. One of the men, Ahmed, was carrying a crowbar. He told me that Egyptians have to be careful around foreigners: Hezbollah and Hamas were stirring up trouble and trying to force the collapse of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime to open up a new front against Israel. Accusations that foreigners were instigating the Egyptian revolution had been floating about for days. Certainly, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini’s remarks that Egypt’s anti-government protests were inspired by Iran had done little to dispel the rumors, but the implication that I worked for Hezbollah had no basis in fact. Indeed, if Ahmed had not been carrying a giant crowbar while escorting me to a military checkpoint, I probably would have joked that I worked for Israeli intelligence. It is impossible to tell where these rumors originated — in Yemen, some Political Security Office agents do little more than attend afternoon qat-chewing sessions, spreading pro-government propaganda. Then again, over the past two years — from Istanbul to Aden — I had been eyed suspiciously time and again, with taxi drivers accusing me of working for the mukhabarat (central intelligence) and one Yemeni friend becoming convinced that I was a Mossad agent. (For the record, I’m not.) However, the rumors circulating on Cairo’s back streets were taking on a malignant edge. I was handed in to military checkpoints time and again by mobs of well-armed men, possessed by the crazed notion that I was some covert Iranian operative. These rumors, which spread quickly, had a very specific function: to shift the domain of discourse away from the actual problems facing Egypt, while generating an environment of mistrust that would undermine any further potential for persons to join the protest movement. As I listened to Ahmed, his crowbar swinging beside his knees, it became apparent that the probable causes of Egypt’s anti-government protests — government corruption, a sham democratic process, decrepit health system, lack of job opportunities, disempowered youth, strong-arm dictatorial rule and widespread poverty — were not being discussed among a large part of the community. Meaningful dialogue about the legitimate grievances of the protest movement were being fire-walled by conspiracy theories and wild speculation, engendering an environment of mistrust and paranoia in which the protest movement was, to an extent, defamed. As a Westerner, I became the object of the Cairo street’s paranoia. Movement became virtually impossible. Everywhere I went, I felt threatened. I could not walk 100 meters without being accosted by a mob of men. By February 4, day 11 of the protests, the most visible Westerners remaining in Cairo were journalists. The rumors, coupled with accusations that the foreign media was stirring up anti-government sentiment, served to shut us down, create an environment of intimidation, limit the likelihood of our conducting interviews outside of Tahrir Square and mute us while back-room conversations between the regime and its allies continued. Carrying a camera was enough to imply espionage. Men would pull my camera from my bag, half-shout “camera, camera” and instantly march me off. My neighbors stopped talking to me, the local shopkeeper would hurriedly hand my groceries to me, his eyes skipping nervously around the store. At one point, a taxi driver drove me to a military checkpoint — in the opposite direction of my actual destination — calling to the officers who subsequently detained me, along with three British journalists. We promised the intelligence officer that we would not visit Tahrir Square that day. The intelligence officer, who one of the soldiers described to us as “mad” and a man “not to make angry,” repeatedly told us that he was “afraid of us [Western journalists].” He let us go, while warning that, if he saw us again, there would be “a big problem.” Fifteen minutes after being released, I was standing before him again. A mob had picked me up buying two cans of Pepsi. They had asked me why I needed two cans. I had explained that I would drink one can now and one can later, a perfectly reasonable explanation. Heads shook from side to side, they took my passport and I was escorted back to the military checkpoint I had just left. At a time when real dialogue between Egyptians was essential, the paranoia sweeping Cairo’s streets served to buttress a regime facing the most cohesive challenge to its legitimacy in 30 years. |
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