A Beautiful Day for a Protest

Since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, I haven't put much faith in Tahrir's Friday protests as an instrument of change. I've gone to a few of the Fridays and sit-ins to gauge the pulse of the revolution and usually come away unimpressed, compared to the square's January 2011 heyday. But the January 27 protests showed small signs of change in strategies to rekindle the revolutionary flame and engage people outside the square. What started like a normal Friday festivity in Tahrir ended in a unified anti-military message. I ordinarily show up around 2pm and am usually gone by 6pm, often sooner. My impression has been that Friday in Tahrir is two parts vendors, one part sightseers and one part activists. When it is a liberal-dominated protest, people don't really start showing up until I'm leaving; if its an Islamist-dominated protest (such as July 28), people start arriving by 9am and I'm going nowhere near the place. Meanwhile, back in my humble middle-class Egyptian neighborhood, people go about their errands and their lives, largely ignoring whatever is going on just 20 minutes down the metro line. I've been watching this disconnect all year and listening to my neighbors and many other Egyptian friends dismissing the 'Tahriri' as impolite, impatient, inexperienced or just plain young. So come the one-year anniversary, I went down to Tahrir not on January 25 — which promised to be packed as much for sentimental reasons as political — but on January 27 to see if the revolution had regained momentum. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much, but Tahrir has changed its tactics.  The first clue came in my neighborhood. We had three separate protest marches — on January 20, 25 and 27 — calling for the end of military rule. Small marches, maybe 150 people max, but impressive considering the first and last protest in my neighborhood was on January 28, 2011. The message is finally leaving Tahrir, a year overdue, but it's getting out. I skipped the marches, however, and went to Tahrir via the metro. I certainly had my misgivings: Sexual harassment is getting worse, not better, in the square, and anyone armed with a fancy camera or recording device is being hassled as a “foreign spy.” When it comes to protests, I leave the reporting to Egypt Today's very capable cadre of Egyptian staff writers; I go to sense the vibe and see which way the winds of history are blowing. The first thing I noticed as I entered the square on January 27 was that there were no checkpoints in the underground entrances. On all my previous protests visits, no matter where I entered, I had to show a picture ID and have my bag checked. But not this time. There were street-level checkpoints, but none at the metro stairwells. The square at around 2:30pm was a familiar scene: Flag-waving crowds clustered around the stages near the Mugamma’, a carnival's worth of food and souvenir vendors wrapping around the traffic circle and vast swathes of empty space over toward the Egyptian Museum. This did not bode well for revolutionary momentum. The much-talked-about obelisk inscribed with the martyrs' names was not in evidence, just the candle decorated in hieroglyphs and an eye of Horus crying for the martyrs. My little digital point-and-shoot camera aroused no suspicions, as everyone else was taking “Look at me in Tahrir” pictures. On two of the three stages, speakers were haranguing about the Israelis and the Americans — not a very revolutionary, or even original, message. That said, I didn't encounter any antagonism or sexual harassment toward my obviously foreign self. In fact, the only reaction I got was from a few heavily bearded men: They made an obvious effort to give me space as I passed them in the crowd, I suspect to avoid inadvertently touching a female. In 90 minutes, I'd covered the square from Champollion Street to the Great Walls of Qasr Al-Aini and Mohammed Mahmoud streets, and I had pretty much wrote the event off as the usual sound and fury that would be ignored outside the square. I made a last-minute decision to stop by Maspero before heading home. It was a surreal experience to be amid hundreds of people screaming against military rule while meters away army officers and soldiers impassively watched from behind a hedge of barbed wire. The Maspero protest was fired up and on message — none of the divided opinions and arguments I'd just seen in Tahrir. Meanwhile, the protest marches started arriving from around the city: groups coming in a few hundred at a time, chanting against military rule and against anyone who thought this was an anniversary celebration. After roaming the streets, the message was coming back to Tahrir and getting ready to drown everyone else out. I reentered Tahrir via the sidewalk near the museum and the metro entrance, completely bypassing the ligan shaabia (people's committees) checkpoints in the street. Once again, no one stopped me at all. As the sun set, the empty swathes of Tahrir were rapidly filling up. Time for me to go. Crowd security was obviously lax, and if things heated up, it would happen after dark. Sure enough, just a few hours after I left, Twitter users reported a foreign woman was mobbed and sexually assaulted. Fights also reportedly broke out between anti-military protesters and Muslim Brotherhood members. So which way are the winds of history blowing? Well, the anti-military protesters are definitely taking a step forward with their marches, trying to connect with citizens outside the square. But if Tahrir remains unable to police itself, then it will lose its credibility as a symbol of peaceful protest – which plays into the hands of the authorities the protesters want to oust.