Marching through Dokki

I just got back from another Kifaya protest, this one aimed at the problem of political prisoners in Egypt. Like Ayman Nour's campaign, Kifaya notifies media and others of their events through telephone text messages, or SMSs. This time my phone beeped with the following:

Mubarak rosy promises excluded stopping tortue. "End torture in Egypt" is our call. If you agree, join us in Dokki Square Wed.@ 6 p.m.

The protest started just after 6. Like the other recent protests--the one in central Midan Tahrir on Election Day, and a large protest in Talat Harb downtown on Saturday, the police hung back and watched, but did not interfere with the protesters (at least during the hour or so I was there). Again there were white uniformed officers and plenty of intelligence officers in suits. But they let the protesters gather--even though they were blocking traffic in a very busy intersection--and let them go where they wished.

The core crowd of protesters numbered about 100-200. But many people on the street joined to walk with the crowd, till it numbered some 400-500 or so. It was hard to tell how many people joined in out of curiousity, because political protests are so novel, and how many were moved by the cause. But its fair to say there was considerable interest in the issue of torture in prisoners and unfair detentions. A young man handing out photocopied information sheets about the cause was swamped with people.

Along with the young, long haired student activist and artist-type young men leading the chants as the protests started, there were other types: There was a man whose body seemed pained and twisted in a wheelchair held up by the chanting crowd. There was a group of some 20-25 heavily veiled women--most of them middle aged or old-- holding up black and white photos of their imprisioned sons, brothers and fathers, arrested for their alleged involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. One woman said her husband has been in prison for 40 years. There was one young man prominently holding up a Koran--quite a contrast from the leftists in Kifaya I've spent some time with in the last few weeks.

During the 7 p.m. call to prayer, a Kifaya protester gestured to the crowd to quiet down. They did, stopping their chants (Down, Down Hosni Mubarak!) as long as the muazzin's prayer rang through the streets. Some 20 or 30 protesters then switched from anti-Mubarak cries to 10 or 20 rounds of Allah Akbar (God is the Greatest) and then into political slogans: "Security for Egypt, not for Israel."

Unity of purpose, not uniformity of belief, definitely seemed the name of the game.

Apparently there was a much larger protest last Saturday, with some 5,000 people. I did not go to that one, but will hopefully hit the next.

NOTE: Final results in the election, for the record, were 88.6 ercent for Mubarak, 7.6 percent for Nour and his al-Ghad (Tomorrow) Party, and 2.9 percent for Gomaa and the Wafd Party. The most interesting thing about the results? Only 23 percent of Egypt's 32 million registered voters actually turned out. Either this was a dramatic effort at honesty from a regime known for inflating turnout figures by two or three times, or the real turn out was much lower. Mubarak knows that the low turnout gives him less legitimacy--but perhaps what is most interesting about that is Mubarak has to worry less about legitimacy than an truly elected leader. There are many other essential ingredient that keep his party in power; the large security presence, entrenched bureaucracy, corruption, apathy, inertia, and an actual affection for Mubarak as leader (things could be worse!)...the list goes on and on...

Four polling places

The preliminary results are in....it's Mubarak in a landslide, with some 80 percent. Nour is the second-place finisher, with between 10 percent and 12 percent of the vote. Nour's showing was stronger than some people expected, but less than half of what he believed he would get in a fair poll. He has already sought to have the election results invalidated for reasons of fraud; the election commission (controlled by Mubarak's people) rejected the request. My sense is that there is no way they would ever dismiss the results of this poll--which took place under the ground rules set by Mubarak, and by those rules, went quite as you would think.

By now, you've likely seen the stories alleging all kinds of fraud and undue influence by Mubarak's NDP in the presidential election are well known: the NDP paid voters, bused them en masse to polling stations, offered them entrance into a lottery for cash and trips for voting, threatened to fine NDP members 100 L.E. (about $17) if they didn’t vote. In addition, the pink phosphorescent ink that was supposed to mark the fingers of people who had voted was quite easily removed. One man I spoke with late in the day said he had voted but then removed the ink with gasoline.

The visits I made to polling stations confirmed the general impression that the NDP dominated the voting process. We saw buses festooned with Mubarak banners that certainly looked as though they were taking voters to the polls (of course, U.S. political parties do a similar get-out the-vote move in the States). More disturbingly, we saw polling places overseen and staffed by NDP officials, who were open about their affiliation. In one case, men holding Mubarak signs were standing in the doorway of the school where people were voting. There were no representatives from members of other political parties: though apparently they were permitted to be there (perhaps they just didn’t have enough representatives to go around.) I saw some chaos and confusion about who was registered and whether people’s names could be found on lists.

My general impression was that few people in the society at large seemed to be voting. At 3:30 p.m., and then again at 6 p.m., I couldn’t spot a single pink finger in the crowded Metro I took back and forth from Shubra El Kheima, a very poor district at the end of the Metro line to the north of Cairo. Outside of the polling areas, I didn’t see a single pink finger on the streets. The few people I spoke to late in evening about their apparent lack of interest in voting said that, of course, they would like to vote (for Mubarak) but they had to work all day and were unable.

I would tend to think that except for the party faithful and people with government jobs, who were given time off to vote, most people did not turn out. In Shubra, based on a glance and the voting list at 4:30 p.m. or so, I guessed some 5% of voters had been to the station. Early reports from the government indicated that there was about 30% turnout in the election--but I would be shocked if those official figures did not rise: in the past, the government has always inflated the turnout figures.

Why so little interest? Mostly because there’s no real need to vote when you feel there is no contest and you know who will win. The campaign period was only three weeks, and what we heard from voters again and again is that people didn’t “know” the other candidates; how could they trust giving someone unknown so much power? What if the new president broke with America, started a war, or instigated enmity between Muslims and Christians in Egypt? In fact, this argument is logical. The presidency is so powerful here that giving it to an untested candidate would be a very scary and bold proposition. How would that person function within a bureaucracy completely dominated by the NDP? Would all those party members even listen to the dictates of the presidency? No, in fact, you could argue that it only made sense to vote for opposition candidates if you knew for sure they wouldn’t win. Unless you were a very, very brave person.

Another important factor is how divided the opposition is here. Many of the small opposition parties, especially on the left, decided not to run candidates in the election and encouraged their followers to boycott it. This was true of the Kifaya movement as well. The Muslim Brotherhood leadership, on the other hand, told its followers to vote, but not whom to vote for. The oblique insinuation was that people shouldn’t vote for leaders who were corrupt, a statement that implied, but did not directly command, a vote against Mubarak.

Ayman Nour likely attracted some protest votes, and people in the neighborhood where he is an MP and provides social services apparently turned out for him. Other voters who wanted a change likely felt more comfortable casting their vote for the Wafd Party, Egypt’s oldest national political party active since the 1920s. Nour promised that he would open up the system, making the president more accountable, if he were elected. But the people had little to go on as to whether they could trust him.

My general impression was that this election was an excuse to celebrate Mubarak. In that sense, it remained a yes/no referendum on his rule. It did not have the beautiful and moving solemnity of the 2000 election in Kosovo. There, people who had only known repression and felt like they were someone becoming more human by voting would have waited in line all day to vote. In Iraq, the cameras showed the same feeling; the solemn sight of people risking their lives to make their voices heard for the first time. This election was certainly not a transition in the same sense.

What follows is a general account of my experience at four polls on Election Day:


10 a.m.
Zamalek is a rich districts with lots of embassies and foreigners--including lots of journalists. I'm living here. Two friends and I--one is originally from Egypt and translated--stopped by the voting at the School of the Arts to get a general idea the voting process.

We had no problem getting into the polling station. I said I was a journalist, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered much either way. There were a few uniformed policemen outside the polling place: we didn’t see any uniformed security at the other stations.

The mood was calm and tranquil. It was a beautiful morning, and there was a garden in the courtyard of the school. The walls of the vestibule of the voting area were covered with neat voters lists taped to the wall. Almost no one had yet voted.

And yet, there were at least 20 or so men around the polling area. Who were they? Mostly NDP officials. A man who spoke English and wore a formal suit stood in the vestibule directing voter traffic: he was an NDP official. Men (only men were voting at this station, women at a separate station) brought NDP posters into the polling place with them. People were happy to talk to us about how Mubarak was the best choice for Egypt.

“Off all the other times I can remember, this is probably the best organized election, and everything that’s been promised has been kept and done that way,” said NDP member Mohammed Kamel Wagdi, 45, a principal of a local elementary school.

In past elections, before voting he would just make a check mark next to his name. This time, they checked two forms of ID: his drivers’ license or other personal ID and his voter card. He also had to sign his name twice, once before he voted, and once after he voted.

The actual process is as follows: find your name of the list of people registered, take the ballot and mark it behind a curtain, place the ballot in the box, sign that you voted. “Its very, very fair,” Wagdi said. “They’ve made these changes and this is the first time there’s been a real election here.”

Then he repeated something we heard many times: that a vote for Mubarak was a vote for change. “Everybody who feels they really want a solution for the political problems here will vote for Hosni Mubarak,” he said.

A drastic change is not good for the role of the president, who leads the whole country, he added. An unknown leader could take the country into war, or create tensions with America. “It’s not in Egypt’s interest to be an enemy to anybody.”

The NDP official in the suit directing traffic in the polling station was even more enthusiastic for Mubarak. There will be a high voter turnout, he said. “Today there is a big tendency for people to come since they can feel real democracy is going on and their voice will count.”

“Evaluate what Mubarak has accomplished compared to the other candidates for president. I personally feel that the fact that Mubarak has been 24 years in power is not something negative, it is positive. He has gained a lot of experience. He is a very deliberative, very aware person.”

Our next stop was Bulaq, a much poorer neighborhood about a 15 minute drive from Zamalek. Here, the apartment buildings are rough and unfinished--not much more than stacks of red bricks upon concrete stages. These buildings can go up and up--in Bulaq, however, they are all about six stories or less. The narrow streets (a bit more than one car’s width) are filled with people walking and donkeys carting vegetables, with laundry and blankets hanging from the windows. Stacks of fruits and vegetables filled the local souk, an open area shaded by plastic tarps on poles.

A significant number of Christian Copts lived in the neighborhood. The priests were out walking toward the polling place, men in long black robes, small caps and scruffy beards, with beautiful black and white crosses around their necks. The archbishop of the Copts in Egypt had endorsed Mubarak, and the priests were taking their congregations to the local school to vote.

The school yard, at the corner of two alleyways, was festooned with Mubarak banners and bustling with activity. The local MP--an NDP delegate--was there, getting out the vote. There was an Arab television journalist out interviewing the priests and local authorities and creating a lot of interest. When we went to talk to the MP, we were ringed by maybe 50 people listening in…next to him, burly men in suits, but mostly, what looked like the working-class men from the neighborhood.

“Things will change for the better after this election,” the MP, Amar Zayed, said.

“I want the whole world to know that Egypt is living in the best of times. People are moving and there is action going on. It is very apparent that there will be change.”

We spoke to some of the Copt women, who had come with the rest of their congregation. They were wearing a different style of headscarf--black--or none at all, but looked neither richer nor poorer than their Muslim neighbors.

They were overwhelmingly, rapturously in support of Mubarak and crowded in to tell me so. “He’s making Egypt better for us,” one woman carrying an infant said. "He is providing medical benefits for all their children. He’s brought down the price of staple foods. And most importantly," she said, "he supports peace between Christians and Muslims.”

“We feel this is the first time there has ever been elections in our lives,” another woman said. “We just hope Mubarak wins,” another woman interrupted. “We want him to be our president forever!”

“Mubarak, Mubarak, that’s it!” another woman kept shouting.

Late in the afternoon, after I’d watched the protest of Kifaya in the central Tahrir Square (I will post on this later) we went to another polling station, in Shubra. It was about 4:30 p.m. and things were very quiet. A glance at the register indicated only about 5 % of the voters had as of yet shown up. Again, mostly Mubarak supporters, but one black-swathed widow stopped us in the street to say the polling stations were filled with undercover security men. She was voting for Nour, and felt pushed to vote for Mubarak, or not at all.

As we went from one school to another around the corner, we were followed by a burly guy in a suit from the first school. I didn't notice, but Mohammed, a lawyer and Kifaya activist who was with us at this point, did. As we got into the car to drive away, one of us said “Shukran” (Thank You) to the man that had been tailing us. “He wasn’t very happy to be discovered,” he said.

All for Mubarak

On the evening of September 3, my Egyptian journalist friend Khalid and I headed to the square in front of Abdeen Palace for the last major political rally of the campaign for Mubarak. Most of the city’s security forces, it seemed, were already there. The 500-room 19th century palace served as the royal residence until Egypt’s monarchy was abolished in 1952. The royal location seemed fitting, because I felt as though much of the crowd was waiting to see their king.

Now, admittedly, I’ve never been to a major campaign rally for President Bush or any other seated U.S. president, which would of course entail a large security presence and attract thousands of cheering, loyal followers. What made this feel so different? Well, the type and level of security presence, for one. They were everywhere: masses of riot police in bullet proof vests and face shields, rows of regular police officers in white uniforms, Republican guard troops and regular army. Security forces in suits and ties controlled the crowd, and many more were probably in street attire blending in. I didn’t see any tanks, but there was at least one piece of major artillery mounted on the back of an open truck.

There was almost no hardened security on the roads leading up to the gathering, in fact, just a few portable metal gates that could be lifted to allow dignitaries in. The rows of riot police instead were posted by the small entrance where all non-VIP Egyptians who wanted to join the rally would enter. Getting into the rally, we soon found, required pushing single file past the phalanx of forces, getting looked over by plain clothed security men and uniformed officers--some of them carrying mimeographed lists of invited guests--handing over all cell phones and cameras, passing through a metal detector, and finally entering the open area. The men who were pushing through, determined to show their support for Mubarak, were generally young (under 25), and rough, for lack of a better word. Khalid said it was his distinct impression that many of these men were actually in the Egyptian army.

Around the back of the square, where the dignitaries and journalists were supposed to enter (and we ultimately ended up), things were much calmer. There were only Republican Guard troops and plain clothed security. Once my name was found on the appropriate list, a call went out--I had just gone from a nobody/bothersome intruder to someone entitled to enter. I was ushered into the square, past the large stage where the president would speak, threaded through rows of seats, helped up onto a chair to climb over a low fence, and then dropped into a thicket of empty chairs reserved for foreign journalists and told to stay there.

I couldn’t see the bulk of the rally from where I sat. But my section was not calm or contained. The crowd was just next to me--almost all men, waving signs and chanting. “With our souls and our blood we sacrifice for you O Mubarak” “We love you Mubarak” Many were wearing new Mubarak t-shirts. At one point, someone got into a tussle and a chair was thrown. The crowd responded by chanting louder for Mubarak. The security forces remained calm, in all, they seemed very comfortable with the crowd’s enthusiasm.

The campaign then projected onto huge screens a slickly produced video featuring Mubarak, his wife, Suzanne, testimonials from religious and other leaders, and scenes from Mubarak’s last 24 years in power. Tall banners hung around the rally showed different varieties of healthy looking working men--a waiter, a construction worker in his helmet--endorsing Mubarak. On stage were an array of “regular looking” Egyptians--women in veils, young men--town-hall style. But they never, as far as I could tell, said anything.

In fact the entire event consisted of an introduction for Mubarak, Mubarak’s entrance amid much cheering, and an hour long (I’m guessing here) speech in which Mubarak laid out his program for the future. Every few minutes the crowd returned to chanting and shouting for Mubarak (Gamal, tell your father we love him!) so that he was quite hard to hear. An amateur body builder in a cut off t-shirt emblazoned with the word "Fussball" leaned in to help translate the speech for me and a Finnish journalist. (My Egyptian friend had been denied entry.) A cameraman fell or fainted, causing another brief ruckus. The speech went on and on-- I hoped it would end soon.

When Mubarak was done, he left the stage, and the event immediately came to an end. The 400 or so party faithful in front of the dias quickly got up, and within a few minutes I was back over the fence and out of the rally area. “What did you think?” an Egyptian man in a suit asked me once we were out. “Chaotic,” I said. “You couldn’t even hear what he was saying.” “That is the Egyptian way,” he told me. “You cannot stop them from expressing their support.” I bummed a cigarette from him and he gave me his card--he was a member of the central NDP committee.

As the crowd dispersed and I found Khalid, I noticed that many of the women who had been in the rally were collecting empty water bottles and putting them into boxes they carried under their arms. A row of buses lined up to collect the rally’s participants. “It shows you how poor they are, that they are collecting bottles,” Khalid said. Khalid, who had gotten into the rally along with the other Egyptians after he leaving his camera at a nearby sweets shop, said he had heard many Mubarak supporters worrying about how they were going find the correct bus to take them home to their neighborhoods on the outskirts of Cairo. It was Khalid’s impression that most of them had been paid to come.

On the way home, Khalid and I stopped at the sweets shop to retrieve his camera. He had bought three bags worth of a sweet pastry, kind of like an Egyptian elephant’s ear, in exchange for asking the store to hold his camera. It occurred to me that the pastry--fried dough covered in powdered sugar--reminded me a little of the rally we had just seen. The fried dough was the single-party, autocratic security state of the NDP. The powdered sugar was the coating of democracy, just lightly sprinkled over it.

Kifaya and Mubarak

Yesterday I went to two very different events: a press conference by Kifaya, the small movement that is challenging Mubarak to step down by staging illegal street protests; and the massive Mubarak rally that ended the nation's first campaign season. I went without a translator, just by contacting the campaigns, so unfortunately my observations had to be somewhat general. I went anyway because my goal was to gather impressions and contacts as I plan my work in the year ahead.

It took a while to find the Kifaya (Enough!) press conference, which was on the second floor of an old building off of Sharia Sherif, one of Cairo's busiest downtown streets. The press conference itself was in a very small room with maybe two dozen chairs, and a large table at the front where George Ishak, one of the founders of the movement, and four or five other people sat and spoke. The room was hot and noisy, with an open window and no air-conditioning, packed to the gills with mostly Arab journalists and TV cameras. The only decoration was five yellow stickers with the word Kifaya in red letters hapzardly stuck on the wall behind the speakers. The press conference was disorganized and rambing, yet in the end it felt more like a meeting of revolutionaries than a coordinated media appearance, with everyone in the audience encouraged to ask a question or make a statement, and the event running until everyone was done. There was an guy from the state TV ministry who took to the front table to decry corruption in his ministry and complain that local TV covers primarily Mubarak and his family, and a young woman and mother in the back row who complained that Kifaya was disorganized and still an elite movement. She worried that group's members don't even know eachother--she just comes to rallies when she sees them posted in the newspaper--so what will happen if she gets arrested? Will Kifaya as an organization even be there to help? She complained that the organization does not yet have a way to reach out to the masses. She got a lot of nods when she spoke, but no real answers from the leaders at the desk in front.

George Ishak is a grey haired man, about 60, with an expressive face-large lips and bulbous nose. Flanked by a sweaty, owl-eyed lawyer in a full dark suit, and another man in a white short-sleeved shirt working hard on his aqua colored worry beads, Ishak looked calm and intellectual, the leader of the assembled speakers. He explained that people didn't have the freedom to be candidates, so there is no fairness in the election process. "We are adopting the stance of boycotting because this is not an election as generally understood," he said. Kifaya will set up a shadow government after the election and a committee to draft a new constitution.

There are some reports, he said, that there could be a crackdown against the group after the election. But he was defiant:

"Anybody who wants freedom has to be ready to pay the price. We are ready."

Ishak is predicting that there could be a popular uprising aftter the election to topple the regime, because nothing will change and the frustration of the people will rise. "We are against this despotic regime. We will continue," Ishak told me after the conference.

The meeting felt revolutionary, and yet strange, because this was not happening in secret, but in the open, under a government that in the past has reacted harshly to dissent and challenges. Ishak himself has a Marxist background, and it did feel somewhat like the meeting of a leftist cell.

What will happen if Kifaya gets its way? The group has not defined a positive program, or a leader. But its goal now--and if it accomplishes this, it might well be ''Enough''-- is to encourage Egyptians of all creeds and believes to overcome the culture of fear in Egypt that hems people in and prevents them from defining a government for themselves.

The movement seeks not to articulate a goal, but instead to attract discussion and frustration from all groups, Islamist or Marxist, or otherwise. If people of all stripes stand up and say Enough!, they feel that will be enough to create a movement. It is the lack of a program, in fact, that makes the group feel so edgy and perhaps, powerful.

After the meeting, another journalist and I went to have tea with Mohammed, a young man involved in Kifaya. We walked around the corner behind the central bank to a cafe where the group's members often gather. Mohammed said he was working to get over the culture of fear, but that he was still a bit afraid. He quivered slightly as he sat, sweating, in his olive colored suit and maize tie.

more later...

First Impressions

Cairo, a dusty, polluted, traffic-filled but charming city. Charming? Yes...and here's why. The people in the vast government ministry building smile when they take your passport and say it will be back to you on Sunday, 'inshallah', realizing why that sounds funny to a Westerner; everyone at your three star hotel, including the "maids"--rough looking guys with missing teeth or a punched-in eye--greet you enthusiastically each morning with a "sabah al-heir" and praise your improving Arabic, your ''official'' press credential is a flimsy business-card like document to which they have stapled your picture which was cut crooked with scissors; when your taxi driver asks a fellow Egyptian for directions, a guy jumps in the taxi to help him find his way to your destination, taxi drivers captianing rolling junk piles hurriedly throw a useless seat belt over their shoulder when they see a police officer; no one actually runs you over as you cross through five-lanes of traffic without a light; walking alone at night feels fun, even exciting.

My body is not reacting that well, I am having trouble eating, and the pollution from the cars makes me nauseaous. And I am nervous about how to use my time--to study, to research, to write, especially as this presidential election looms. But I am OK. This is going to be an adventure.