Revolution, counterrevolution and the trial of Mubarak: Youssef Rakha gives testimony It took blood for paradise to happen. It happened very fitfully and incompletely, paradise. It lasted no longer than three weeks within a cordoned off area around the busiest traffic circle in all of Cairo, including the circle itself. It happened sponateously and uncertainly, like a dream or a transparent sheet of glass. It was very brittle, I mean. But it happened. By the end of 28 January, while millions of people were recovering from tear gas, I was convinced that God had appeared in Cairo. He was to leave again within the space of a month. *** It had been six weeks since I returned from France. By coincidence, my month-long stay there was to start after the "end" of the Egyptian revolution on 11 February. I left on 8 March, still charged. I returned on 9 April to a Cairo just as complacent as the Cairo I had known before the revolution "started" on 25 January. I still believe very strongly in what happened during those three weeks (25 Jan-11 Feb); I would have liked it to keep happening or happen to the end. Now that it is over, my intellect tells me it is wrong to think of something so clearly bracketed in time and so limited in social impact as a revolution. That is why --start� and --end� are placed in quotation marks. Something has to be. One question that had dogged me since 2005 at least, notwithstanding what nominally democratic practises were being introduced under pressure from the West, was how far the corruption and incompetence of the regime had permeated society. This spring I ended up missing what many take to be the defining moment in the aftermath of the revolution (and I to be its defeat): the referendum on constitutional amendments proposed by the Higher Military Council, in charge since Mubarak stepped down, and supported by the forces of political Islam as well as conservatives everywhere. Those who had participated in the revolution and those who saw it as a chance for true change were against the constitutional amendments. By speeding up parliamentary elections and still granting the president too much power, the amended constitution would work towards maintaining the duoploy on politicts of non-ideological, business-crazed dictatorship on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalism on the other; hence the ironic alliance between Islamists, National Democratic Party (NDP) politicans and a Council at best eager to eliminate uncertainty, at worst working systematically to re-establish the political status quo as fast as possible -- a Council whose role as a surrogate for the regime many refused to see. The referendum was held on 19 March; I remember weeping quietly in my room overlooking the Chateau de la Napoule on the Azure Coast after finding out that the overwhelming majority had voted yes. In the period after Mubarak stepped down (11 Feb-19 Mar), there was much talk of the counterrevolution. That discourse is less pervasive now, but for a while it defined the way the revolution saw itself and its hard-won triumph (over 800 dead and nearly 6,500 injured,): the long- term fight against clandestine efforts to undermine the achievements of the protesters or reverse the results of the protests. No doubt this had been going on since the outbreak of the revolution; no doubt it had instantly identifiable agents in the security apparatus, the upper echelons of the business sector, the government and the NDP. The army, led by the Council and (until he handed over authority to it) the President of the Republic, was said to stand apart: a dispassionate observer and keeper of the peace, and eventually also, with a little self- delusion on the part of the protesters, a wielder of power on behalf of the revolution. However, while counterrevolution as described did happen, there was a different, far deeper and more widespread reactionary current underway -- part of which, mad as this sounds, emanated from within the revolution itself: Islamist and (to a lesser extent) socialist-nationalist- Nasserist ideological strains, while automatically pandering to the status quo of which they had been a repressed or a marginal part, upheld exactly the totalitarian, sectarian and patriarchal values that the protests, instigated by young liberals keen on human rights and democratic process, seemed to be rising up agaist in the first place. After the disappearance of the police on 28 January, when the protesters took over Tahrir Square, apart from the bumbling brutality of an ancient, decadent and phenomanlly smug regime taken by surprise, little could unify the revolution beyond the common objective that the president should step down -- something that was further complicated by the absence of leadership -- and once the president did step down, handing over his powers to the army, the vast majority of the protesters were willing to let the army take charge. What more or less cosmetic change happened after 11 February, happened through the Council responding to daytime Friday demonstrations that have never since turned into a round-the-clock strike like the one constituting "the revolution". For the longest time I had not even asked myself what it was that the revolution wanted: bringing down the regime, as in the main slogan, seemed self-explanatory; and I wilfully forgot much of what I had thought (and written) prior to 25 January: that the regime's most horrendous crime was the way it had managed to graft itself onto society, turn society not only into its arena but, more disastrously, its mirror image, with all the patriarchally rooted structures of nepotism, greed, ignorance, identity bias, policing, disorganisation and impunity replicated again and again from the top down. The reason I forgot to ask myself what the revolution was about, and the reason it seemed like paradise, was the fact that these structures ceased to function. They were in suspension, and the greater cause made it seem as if they (like the president, like his deputy, like the new prime minister he appointed) could really disappear overnight. On my return from France the most painful disillusionment had to do with this fact: what the regime stood for, what the revolution was against -- notwithstanding either the increasingly imaginary counterrevolution of revolutionary discourse or the increasingly in-your-face counterrevolution of the Higher Military Council, the Islamists (who had played an indispensable role in the revolution itself), and the many and various patriarchally inclined quarters of the Egyptian constituency as a whole -- it was all still there, on the streets and at work, in government offices, in the way people drove, in what people said about what was going on. Bribery, stupidity, conspiracy theory were as active as they had ever been -- and with sectarian clashes at the time of writing, it is not clear that they are going anywhere. Paradise had broken -- glass everywhere! *** Late February. "Some day soon," I wrote, referring to festive demonstrations in Tahrir Square after Mubarak finally stepped down, "people taking to the streets spontaneously to celebrate (a thousands- or hundreds of thousands-strong, heterogeneous group of people exercising the right to use their own public space without being subjected to tear gas bought with their own money) will be the norm in Egypt." In a strange sort of way, the counterrevolution now seems to me to have been contained in the revolution itself. The more I think about this the more mind-boggling it gets, but maybe what it means is simply that, rather than an outside force toppling the regime and all that it stood for, what actually happened was an implosion within that regime, a necessary climax of dysfunction allowing society to adjust -- or readjust. There will be time for that. I am not optimistic. I am simply grateful that I lived to see paradise. 5 August. On the way to Bab al Louq, my taxi passes a throng of Central Security officers at the site of "the Revolution", their unassuming black caps spattered with the bright red berets of Military Police. Facing the stalling cars, soldiers line the edge of the main traffic island, the kernel of the by now dreaded Sit-In. Like well-fed orks from two different clans of Arda -- army conscripts, all -- both Central Security in black and Military Police in desert camouflage are shielded, armed and ready to strike. In and around the sickly myrtle trucks parked everywhere -- those evilmobiles forever associated with the violent appropriation of public space, now bolstered up by army deployments -- there are many, many more of them: why this desperation to deprive the young, the socially and politically conscious and the ethically inclined of using public space they are entitled to by birth? Craning his neck dramatically the way taxi drivers do, to look at nothing in particular, my driver suddenly remarks, "Something's up" -- no kidding! Later that night, I will find out about the needlessly vicious disbanding of an open-air iftar outside Omar Makram Mosque; earlier in the day a symbolic funerary march in honour of the Martyr of Abbassiya was likewise violently blocked from entering the square: and a good portion of the public have wholeheartedly supported the use of force: "Hit hard with 'the electric' to scare the enemy," one participant in the iftar testified to hearing Military Police personnel bark urgently at each other as they charged. As it is, I am thinking, the business of collective self-expression is left to that all-male adolescent mob leisurely crammed, for lack of anything better to do on a Ramadan evening, behind the rails of the pavement, shrieking and running idiotically while they fawn over the soldiers from afar. Individual rights are not an issue, not even for the revolutionaries of a few months ago themselves. Grunting an expression of sympathy to the driver, I listen to him vent his impatience: "They should calm down, for God's sake. The army took Mubarak to court to please them -- what more do they want? Can't they let the country get on?" He is referring to protesters; it strikes me that it is they, not the menacing usurpers now literally overrunning Revolution, that bother him. "Who would have dreamed of seeing Mubarak and his sons behind bars," he says, echoing a huge majority of Egyptians. "The army has been good, they should let justice take its course." I too have seen justice, I am thinking: the Historical Moment everyone is so excited about. I have seen the grotesque spectacle of an octogenarian, seemingly drugged, brought into a court room lying down (no doubt only to be acquitted in due course). It was a patently unnecessary pose, as it seemed to me, which served to strip Mubarak of what rags of dignity he might still have on. With the faux patriarch were his two prodigal sons, once scourges of the economy and democratic process simply by virtue of being the strongman's progeny. In this Society the head of state is idolized regardless of his credentials, and his sons have absolute impunity: Society gives it to them voluntarily, as it voluntarily cleans religion not only out of spiritual but also out of moral substance, marginalises or casts out its best human assets, turns political opposition and intellectual activity -- culture, into CV- building exercises, morally and materially liquidates difference, and relinquishes people's basic birthrights. They are standing at attention in white prison garments invented solely for cronies of the official mafia, the two prodigal sons, surround by some of the top brigands in the torture-reliant extortion gang known as the Ministry of Interior. Between a distinctly unimposing judge bumbling his Arabic grammar and Mubarak's singularly eloquent lawyer, scores of more or less ridiculous ambulance chasers jockeying for a few minutes of rhetoric. One of them holds a Quran. Looking impassive as ever, his hair freshly dyed, Mubarak desultorily picks his nose. For this, while no one is allowed to loiter in Tahrir Square, the martyrs died. I too have seen the patriarch and the prodigal sons, the brigands and those who protect them, and I have seen the so called revolutionaries shedding tears of joy over the Historical Moment. But it is the iftar, ending with electroshock batons and "the enemy" running on the asphalt, that I keep thinking about. I think about the iftar and the significance of the trial, the capacity of even the most highly educated and politically conscious people to say that they are grateful to have lived to see it happen, adding -- in the same breath -- that events reflect a vendetta between Mubarak and powerful figures in the army (not, it is to be surmised, the will of either the revolution or the people). The motherland, then, remains unchanged: Emotional response is one thing, political analysis another. Moral responsibility is lost somewhere in between. I think about the iftar and I think about those who died, how we will always have their blood on our hands -- the Optimists especially -- and how the grotesque spectacle of the unnecessarily prostate octogenarian is the lie by which we convince ourselves that we have avenged their deaths; vengeance, of course, being the object, not the rights they died standing up for.
