From EGYPT
Steve Negus
Cairo
My neighbor, who like many Egyptians prefers not to see his name in print, asked me this morning about my nationality. "French?" he said hopefully. I told him American. He made a playful grimace. The US-led invasion of Iraq, he argued, could only be an attempt to take Arab oil-he couldn't believe the problem was really Iraq's weapons, because every day on television he saw progress in the inspections. He's upset that his government is not doing anything to stop the war, but doesn't know how to make his voice heard. "The people of Egypt are like this," he said, choking his throat with his hand.
Few Egyptians have anything good to say about Saddam Hussein. President Hosni Mubarak, though nominally opposing regime change by force, has tried to deflect popular anger onto the Iraqi leader, declaring on television that Saddam must take full responsibility for the crisis. Nonetheless, the day the campaign against Iraq began several thousand protesters took over Tahrir Square in the center of the city to demonstrate against both the US war and their own government's inaction. The rally might not have been much by global standards. In Egypt, however, martial law has been in force continuously for more than twenty years, and the usual street protest sees a few hundred activists literally surrounded by a phalanx of riot police so that they do not mix with the public.
Some of the more radical demonstrators, chanting "Burn down the embassy and throw out the ambassador," tried to break through to the mammoth US diplomatic compound a few blocks away. They got to within a block of the building before being stopped by water cannon. For the most part, however, the protests were free of violence-organizers shouting "Peacefully! Peacefully!" blocked one flurry of stone-throwing by dashing in front of the riot police. Elsewhere, Islamists, Nasserite nationalists, leftists, Egyptian and expatriate students from the nearby American University in Cairo, government employees, street children and others marched and mingled. Development worker Adam Awny remembers nothing like it in Egypt. "It was fantastic, a tremendous spirit of people power, of taking control."
Egypt's protest movements have a way of flaring and dying. The opposition, while it can occasionally play upon discontent with the regime's strategic alliance with the United States, has yet to find a way of exerting pressure to expand domestic freedoms. Nonetheless, the few Cairenes lucky enough to have been near Tahrir Square on the afternoon of March 20 got a sense of what an Egypt free of martial law could be like.
Steve Negus, who has worked as a journalist in Egypt since 1993, is the former editor of the Cairo Times. |
