Circling the Square by Wendell Steavenson

Author:Wendell Steavenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

EVERY FRIDAY

EVERY FRIDAY PEOPLE RETURNED TO TAHRIR. THE FRIDAY OF DEMAND, the Friday of the Popular Committees, the Friday of Cleansing, the Friday of the Martyrs. Hassan and I would go to the square after prayer time, walk and talk and bump into people. Some Fridays were quiet, some were full of knots of people debating whether there was any point in standing on the square anymore, some were riots.

Here is an extract from my notes:

April 8th 2011.

And so I return to my earlier theme of unpredictability. Just when it seemed the Tahrir fervor was over and the army had taken over road mapping the country’s future, just when it looked like politics were polarizing between liberals and Islamists: today was an even bigger Friday protest than last week. It was called ostensibly, the “Day of Purge” and called to demand the trials of Mubarak and other leading corrupt former regimists, but I have a feeling that many were on the square to demonstrate that they could still demonstrate.

Among the square that day was a group of army officers in uniform who had joined the protesters. I thought their presence might indicate a crack in the army, younger officers frustrated with the old generals. The field marshal, Tantawi, who was head of SCAF and de facto ruler of the country, was over seventy, yellow with rumored hepatitis, slow-footed, old guard. He had never addressed the nation, and the revolution was beginning to chafe at SCAF’s Facebook declarations and the thousands of protesters in military detention.

“After all,” I said to Dr. Hussein, sitting in Café Riche with the din of demo outside, “remember how Nasser came to power. He was a lieutenant colonel. The Free Officers were the young officers, angry at being let down in Palestine in ’forty-eight, fed up with their superiors.”

A few hundred protesters had stayed on Tahrir overnight on April 8, for a sit-in. In the early hours the army came and beat everyone off the square, smashed down the tents and arrested two hundred or more. I went to see the aftermath the following day. The late-afternoon light fell into alternate stripes of gold and gray ash. Burned cars smoldered and set an acrid tang in the air. The ground was littered with the detritus of fighting—rubble and cartridge casings—and the square was full of angry young men, slum kids, skinny toughs, bruised, defiant, hands clenched in fists, kicking at the rubble. There were no police or soldiers to be seen. A stuffed military uniform was paraded around the square on a stick and I heard anti-SCAF chanting for the first time. In the middle of the dusty traffic circle, among the rags of torn tents, I found a blond woman weeping. She had a small photograph in her hands, the headshot of a man in military uniform, and she was holding it out, imploring someone to help her. The photograph was of her fiancé, a first lieutenant in the special forces who had been on the square the day before.

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