The Mask and the Flag by Gerbaudo Paolo;

Author:Gerbaudo, Paolo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

THE CAMP AND THE AGORA

Toma la plaza [Take the square].

Indignados slogan

Lost a job, found an occupation.

Occupy Wall Street sign

Everywhere is Taksim, Everywhere is Resistance.

Turkish protest slogan

Tens of thousands of people are assembled in Tahrir Square. Six months have gone by since the revolution of 25 January 2011 that forced Mubarak to step down, and three since the last occupation of the square in April. The atmosphere is something between a popular festival and an insurrection, the beginning of a new mobilisation and a social reunion of veterans. At the entrances to the square unmarked stewards check people’s IDs and search them swiftly to make sure nobody is carrying weapons. Past the controls, inside the square it feels safe and welcoming, a convivial space, full of families, old people, and workers, beside the masses of the Egyptian youth, the shabab el-thawra [youth of the Revolution]: students, football hooligans, young workers, and street children. The centre of the square is occupied by a protest camp, similar to that set up during the days of the revolution. A complex of white marquees hangs in the breeze, held by twenty ten-metre-high wooden poles, to protect people from the scorching Egyptian summer sun. Below them is a series of tents, big and small, housing activists and families, political groups, and various protester necessities—medics, food, and electronics.

The small topiary trees that have miraculously survived the many battles waged in the square have been turned into popular billboards on which to stick revolutionary messages: “Bread, freedom, and end to military rule”, “Freedom for the prisoners”, “Work, health, education”. On the concrete perimeter of the roundabout sit groups of people and individuals, holding home-made propaganda: caricatures of Mubarak, Assad, and Qaddafi as infants, a maquette of Field Marshal Tantawi (the military president), and various posters celebrating the revolution. Small groups of friends are chatting, or listening to the people speaking and the music coming from the different stages set up around the square. People stream out of the adjoining underground station, many dressed in national colours. Street sellers push their carts selling popcorn, roasted potatoes and koshari (an Egyptian favourite consisting of rice, pasta, and lentils with a tomato sauce). Others sell revolutionary souvenirs, Egyptian flags, 25-January–themed T-shirts, Arabic copies of The Prince, and other political books. From a loudspeaker comes a song by the revolutionary singer Ramy Essam. Ahmed, a 24-year-old 6 April Youth Movement activist who has come back to the square for the first time since 25 January, reads out the leaflet with all the demands raised by the occupation, which ends by saying, “We will stay until our demands are met.”

Since the occupation of Tahrir Square in January 2011, the tactic of “all out” or “no end date” protest camps—also called “protest encampments” or “acampadas” in Spanish, to avoid the military connotations of the term “camp”—located in central public squares became the signature practice of the new protest wave, hence the name “movement of the squares”. From the Kasbah camp organised by Tunisian activists

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