Generation Revolution by Rachel Aspden

Author:Rachel Aspden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2017-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

6

Ruqayah and Sara:

The Generals Return

Ruqayah crouched behind a sandbag wall on the petrol station forecourt, blinking away the sweat running into her eyes. The sun was directly overhead and the acrid smell of burning plastic stung the back of her throat. Shouts and screams rose thinly over gunfire, helicopter rotors and the rumble of armored bulldozers. Beside her huddled another teenage girl and a young man, pressed as close as they could to the rough burlap. Off to the side, sprawled on the concrete with blood pooling around them, lay the bodies of the two other men who had been with them. The sandbag wall wasn’t big enough to shelter them all, and they had been shot dead by police snipers.

“Don’t move until I tell you. Then, run,” the man told the two girls. Ruqayah nodded silently and waited, closing her eyes, clasping the other girl’s hand, for the brief silence that meant the shooters were reloading. She knew to bend double and run in zigzags to make herself a harder target. When she opened her eyes she saw other people, adults, teenagers and small children, crouching in the angle of walls, against cars, behind rough barricades of paving stones, anything that would protect them from the gunfire coming from the square and the snipers on the rooftops around them. Then one man, bearded and strongly built, stood up and spread his arms wide in defiance, facing the square.

“I won’t crawl,” he shouted. “Allahu Akbar!” Ruqayah squeezed her eyes shut again, but she still heard his skull shatter around the sniper’s bullet.

“Now!” the young man told them and they dashed behind him, weaving left and right, for the shelter of a side-street. Ruqayah was just fifteen, wiry and fleet, but the other girl was older and heavier. A bullet caught her in the leg and she fell as Ruqayah watched in horror from the side-street. The girl crawled the last yards to them, leaving a trail of blood.

It was the middle of August 2013, soon after the Eid feast that marked the end of Ramadan, and the security forces were clearing the pro-Morsi protest camps at Rabaa and al-Nahda squares in central Cairo. Ruqayah had been living in the larger Rabaa camp for six weeks, since joining the protest in support of the president on June 30, a counterweight to the huge Tamarod marches against him that had converged in Tahrir. They were citizens too, they had voted for Morsi in free and fair elections, she reasoned—or at least those of them who were over eighteen and didn’t have to go to school had—why shouldn’t they go out to defend their democratic rights? Street protest had worked in Tahrir in 2011, and the world had hailed it as an inspiring expression of democracy. After the revolution, the power should lie in the hands of the people. Why not in Rabaa too?

Besides, some of Ruqayah’s family and friends were members of the Brotherhood, others sympathized with them, and all were witnesses to the military state’s long years of torture, imprisonment and surveillance of Islamists.

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