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Robert Fisk: Week 3, day 16, and with every passing hour,
the regime digs in deeper
Our writer sees Cairo's protesters rally again in Tahrir
Square
Tens of thousands of anti-government supporters wave
national flags as they gather for the 15th consecutive
day to demonstrate in central Cairo's Tahrir Square on
8 February 2011, demanding the ouster of embattled
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Blood turns brown with age. Revolutions do not. Vile rags
now hang in a corner of the square, the last clothes worn
by the martyrs of Tahrir: a doctor, a lawyer among them,
a young woman, their pictures strewn above the crowds, the
fabric of the T-shirts and trousers stained the colour of
mud. But yesterday, the people honoured their dead in
their tens of thousands for the largest protest march ever
against President Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship, a sweating,
pushing, shouting, weeping, joyful people, impatient, fear-
ful that the world may forget their courage and their
sacrifice. It took three hours to force our way into the
square, two hours to plunge through a sea of human bodies
to leave. High above us, a ghastly photomontage flapped
in the wind: Hosni Mubarak's head superimposed upon the
terrible picture of Saddam Hussein with a noose round his
neck.
Uprisings don't follow timetables. And Mubarak will search
for some revenge for yesterday's renewed explosion of anger
and frustration at his 30-year rule. For two days, his new
back-to-work government had tried to portray Egypt as a
nation slipping back into its old, autocratic torpor. Gas
stations open, a series of obligatory traffic jams, banks
handing out money ? albeit in suitably small amounts ?
shops gingerly doing business, ministers sitting to
attention on state television as the man who would remain
king for another five months lectured them on the need to
bring order out of chaos ? his only stated reason for hang-
ing grimly to power.
But Issam Etman proved him wrong. Shoved and battered by
the thousands around him, he carried his five-year- old
daughter Hadiga on his shoulders. "I am here for my
daughter," he shouted above the protest. "It is for her
freedom that I want Mubarak to go. I am not poor. I run
a transport company and a gas station. Everything is shut
now and I'm suffering, but I don't care. I am paying my
staff from my own pocket. This is about freedom. Anything
is worth that." And all the while, the little girl sat on
Issam Etman's shoulders and stared at the epic crowds in
wonderment; no Harry Potter extravaganza would match this.
Many of the protesters ? so many were flocking to the
square yesterday evening that the protest site had over-
flowed onto the Nile river bridges and the other squares
of central Cairo ? had come for the first time. The
soldiers of Egypt's Third Army must have been outnumbered
40,000 to one and they sat meekly on their tanks and
armoured personnel carriers, smiling nervously as old men
and youths and young women sat around their tank tracks,
sleeping on the armour, heads on the great steel wheels;
a military force turned to impotence by an army of dissent.
Many said they had come because they were frightened;
because they feared the world was losing interest in their
struggle, because Mubarak had not yet left his palace,
because the crowds had grown smaller in recent days,
because some of the camera crews had left for other
tragedies and other dictatorships, because the smell of
betrayal was in the air. If the Republic of Tahrir dries
up, then the national awakening is over. But yesterday
proved that the revolution is alive.
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Its mistake was to underestimate the ability of the regime
to live too, to survive, to turn on its tormentors, to
switch off the cameras and harass the only voice of these
people ? the journalists ? and to persuade those old
enemies of revolution, the "moderates" whom the West
loves, to debase their only demand. What is five more
months if the old man goes in September? Even Amr Moussa,
most respected of the crowds' favourite Egyptians, turns
out to want the old boy to carry on to the end. And
woeful, in truth, is the political understanding of this
innocent but often untutored mass.
Regimes grow iron roots. When the Syrians left Lebanon in
2005, the Lebanese thought that it was enough to lop off
the head, to get the soldiers and the intelligence officers
out of their country. But I remember the astonishment with
which we all discovered the depth of Syria's talons. They
lay deep in the earth of Lebanon, to the very bedrock. The
assassinations went on. And so, too, it is in Egypt. The
Ministry of Interior thugs, the state security police,
the dictator who gives them their orders, are still in
operation ? and if one head should roll, there will be
other heads to be pasted onto the familiar portrait to
send those cruel men back into the streets.
There are some in Egypt ? I met one last night, a friend
of mine ? who are wealthy and genuinely support the
democracy movement and want Mubarak to go but are fearful
that if he steps now from his palace, the military will be
able to impose their own emergency laws before a single
reform has been discussed. "I want to get reforms in place
before the man leaves," my friend said. "If he goes now,
the new leader will be under no obligation to carry out
reforms. These should be agreed to now and done quickly ?
it's the legislature, the judiciary, the constitutional
changes, the presidential terms that matter. As soon as
Mubarak leaves, the men with brass on their shoulders will
say: 'It's over ? go home!' And then we'll have a five-
year military council. So let the old man stay till
September."
But it's easy to accuse the hundreds of thousands of
democracy protestors of naivety, of simple-mindedness,
of over-reliance on the Internet and Facebook. Indeed,
there is growing evidence that "virtual reality" became
reality for the young of Egypt, that they came to believe
in the screen rather than the street ? and that when they
took to the streets, they were deeply shocked by the state
violence and the regime's continued, brutal, physical
strength. Yet for people to taste this new freedom is
overwhelming. How can a people who have lived under
dictatorship for so long plan their revolution? We in the
West forget this. We are so institutionalized that every-
thing in our future is programmed. Egypt is a thunderstorm
without direction, an inundation of popular expression
which does not fit neatly into our revolutionary history
books or our political meteorology.
All revolutions have their "martyrs", and the faces of
Ahmed Bassiouni and young Sally Zahrani and Moahmoud
Mohamed Hassan float on billboards around the square,
along with pictures of dreadfully mutilated heads with
the one word "unidentified" printed beside them with
appalling finality. If the crowds abandon Tahrir now,
these dead will also have been betrayed. And if we really
believe the regime-or-chaos theory which still grips
Washington and London and Paris, the secular, democratic,
civilized nature of this great protest will also be
betrayed. The deadly Stalinism of the massive Mugamma
government offices, the tattered green flag of the
pathetic Arab League headquarters, the military-guarded
pile of the Egyptian Museum with the golden death mask of
Tutankhamen ? a symbol of Egypt's mighty past ? buried
deep into its halls; these are the stage props of the
Republic of Tahrir.
Week three ? day sixteen ? lacks the romance and the
promise of the Day of Rage and the great battles against
the Egyptian Ministry of Interior goons and the moment,
just over a week ago, when the army refused Mubarak's
orders to crush, quite literally, the people in the
square. Will there be a week six or a day 32? Will the
cameras still be there? Will the people? Will we? Yester-
day proved our predictions wrong again. But they will have
to remember that the iron fingernails of this regime have
long ago grown into the sand, deeper than the pyramids,
more powerful than ideology. We have not seen the last of
this particular creature. Nor of its vengeance.
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