by Robin Wright
The nearby City of the Dead is a cemetery, or rather several of them that have grown together to form a virtual suburb of graves and dusty mausoleum chambers. Because of Cairo’s chronic housing shortage, the City of the Dead has also become home to more than one million of the living, mainly the destitute and people who have created jobs as grave-tenders.
Together, the two landmarks represent Egypt’s former greatness and its chronic current woes.
“I was standing there, looking around, and I kept thinking: What is happening to Egypt? And why did they go after the women?” Shahbender recalled, shaking her head.
“I went home, turned on the television, and was immediately hit with the images from the demonstration. I saw one of the women dragged down the street and clothes pulled off her and onlookers doing nothing. I saw police open barricades to allow the thugs to go in,” she said, pausing in the narrative.
“Of course, it was on al Jazeera and CNN and Fox, not Egyptian television. There are so many satellite stations—thank God for the open skies. I kept switching around and seeing the same thing,” she added, pulling her hand through shoulder-length hair.
“My children were there. I turned on the Internet to see if we could get updates, and that’s when I was slapped in the face because of my children’s reaction. My daughter said, ‘Why do you get so upset? We can’t do anything about it. People are harassed every day.’ And my son Abdelazziz said, ‘Why were the women there anyway?’”
“I was very upset, really, and I told them, ‘This is a violation of our norms, values, and beliefs—and it’s on television. The entire world is watching it. It’s unacceptable. Would you accept this being done to your sister or being in her place? We sat there arguing forever,” Shahbender continued.
“And then I found myself saying, ‘Well, I can do something about it,’” she recalled, shrugging as if she were still not sure where the thought had come from.
The next day, the government announced that the referendum passed with over eighty percent approval—of those who had turned out to vote. It claimed that just over one half of registered Egyptian voters participated, although every Egyptian voter, nonvoter, election analyst, and foreign diplomat I talked to dismissed the official numbers and said the turnout, again, was a distinct minority. There were no independent monitors.
The referendum was supposed to mark a turning point that gave Egyptians more of a stake in politics by directly electing their president. But throughout Cairo—a city where satellite dishes crowd rooftops, bringing al Jazeera and other foreign news programs even into the City of the Dead—the public buzz was instead about the attack on Egypt’s women. The abuse had crossed a threshold.
In the end, the vote set in motion a chain of events that certainly politicized Egyptians, but not in the way Mubarak’s government intended.
Among the movements born out of the May 25 confrontation were The Street Is Ours movement and the Egyptian Mothers’ Association. The new groups called for a day of public mourning on June 1, one week after the referendum. Urging women to mass at the site of the original demonstration, the mothers dubbed their event Black Wednesday and called on everyone in Egypt to wear black to mark it. They also demanded the resignation of Egypt’s powerful interior minister, the top official in charge of both elections and internal security. Their statement was unusually blunt.
On the first of June, all of Egypt will be dressed in black, for the sake of our daughters who were assaulted and had their clothes torn in the street because they dared to say ‘Enough’ instead of remaining silent. We will go out this time…to tell the interior minister whose role it was to protect us: the game is over.
…We emphasize that we…do not belong to any political force, legal or otherwise. But when the Egyptian woman pays the price of her political participation with the sanctity of her body and her honor, then every Egyptian mother and all of Egypt will go out in clothes of mourning to tell the Interior Minister: We want your resignation today, now.
We will see you all on Wednesday, the first of June, a normal day, in our black clothes, calmly, and in bitter silence, for the sake of a free future.
The day after the referendum, Shahbender also contacted friends to figure out what they could do too. They initially thought small, very small.
“All we wanted was a government apology for the brutality,” she told me. Piggybacking on the other movements, they set about making thousands of little white lapel ribbons to symbolize their demand.
“We said, ‘Wear your ribbons on Black Wednesday but also when you go to work or go shopping or take your kids to the zoo—whatever you’re doing and even if you’re not going to the demonstration,” Shahbender explained.
Shahbender smiled as she recalled the images. “On Black Wednesday, I put on my black dress and my white ribbon. I’d never been to a demonstration. It was a huge learning experience for me. I had to go through lines of security officers to join it,” she said. “I didn’t know how it was going to turn out—whether I’d get beaten up or whether it’d be quiet.”
“When I got in, an elderly woman turned to me and said she thought I was new and did I have 100 [Egyptian] pounds,” she recalled.
“‘Why 100 pounds?’ I asked her.”
“She told me: ‘That’s what you need for bail,’” Shahbender recalled.
“At times it was very scary, and at other moments it was exhilarating—just for the fact that 500 people bothered to show up. By our standards, that’s big.”
Emergency law, a sporadic feature of Egyptian life since 1967, has been in force continuously since the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. It is Egypt’s equivalent of martial law, and it requires any group of more than five people to get a government permit if they want to hold a meeting. The government sometimes looks the other way when events are aimed at regional crises—expressions of support for the Palestinians or against the invasion of Iraq. But any group of more than five who meets to discuss Egyptian politics faces arrest. For decades, emergency law has smothered political life in Egypt more than any other instrument of repression.
Although it was illegal, Black Wednesday went off without incident. But the next day, reality hit. “People who had supported us called and said, ‘So you haven’t gotten an apology. What are you going to do next?’ It was like they expected something from us,” Shahbender added, pushing her glasses up onto her head.
“Over the previous week I had met people I would never know if this hadn’t happened—women in the mothers’ association, journalists who were harassed, people in the Kefaya movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, and human-rights activists. I started talking with them about why people don’t participate in public life, about the culture of fear, and about how we could break through with Big Brother watching us.”
Somewhat ironically, no people in the Arab world have a greater sense of national identity or pride than Egyptians. Most Arab countries were created or had their borders defined by European powers in the twentieth century. Egypt dates back more than 5,000 years, however, to around 3100 B.C., when two disparate cultures that grew up along the world’s longest river—the fertile northern delta that pours into the Mediterranean and the southern desert-fringed Nile Valley—were united into one of the world’s earliest civilizations.
Yet ever since Egypt became a republic in 1952, the majority of its people have been largely passive about politics. Creating a citizenry willing to claim ownership of local politics is one of the greatest challenges facing Egypt—and the region.
“I thought it was very important to start by letting the government know, for a change, that we’re watching them and everything they’re doing,” Shahbender recalled. “And, after all the brainstorming and concepts and theories we considered, we decided it boiled down to something that simple: ‘We’re watching you.’ And that’s what we became.”
Two months after the Referendum Day demonstration, on August 4, 2005, Shahbender and her friends formally launched a new m
ovement called We’re Watching You to monitor Egypt’s government. The phrase in Arabic is Shayfeencom. In a play on the language, they dubbed their new website—to publicize government misdeeds and provide Egyptians a mechanism to file complaints—www.shayfeen.com.
“We put the government on notice that we are going to identify wrongs and then pressure them to set it right,” she said. “Monitoring is our tool, and reporting our findings on a Web site and through the media is our weapon.”
After starting small, the new group ambitiously decided to make the presidential election—then only one month away—its first project. Mubarak was seeking his fifth consecutive six-year term, against nine other candidates, and there was a critical vacuum: International monitors were not allowed at the election, so there would be no recognized nongovernment arbiter of whether the poll was free and fair.
Shahbender admitted that the group had virtually no idea what to do, especially with thousands of polling stations involved. It had no legal status, no government license, no resources, no database, no office, and no official role in the polling. We’re Watching You had no choice but to rely on voters to report what happened.
“We came up with violation checklists, which we put on the Web and sent to the 500 people who joined us in the first month,” Shahbender said. “Our only instructions were that we needed people to report by Internet or by phone if they saw anything. We bought two mobile numbers. We set up an operations room in an advertising agency that was willing to host us for the day.”
She shook her head, smiling. “Frankly, when we first announced our group, we got more attention than we deserved—from the media, the public, and State Security. And the day before the election, we were all asking: ‘Are we really going to get reports? Will people phone us? Will there be any movement, or will we just sit there all day? Will we be able to pull it off? We had no idea if we amounted to anything or not.”
But on Election Day, September 7, 2005, the telephones began ringing early and did not stop all day; the group’s Internet site was also inundated. By midnight, Shayfeencom had received reports of more than 1,000 alleged violations.
“We had an extraordinary wealth of information—and so much participation that we didn’t know what to do with all of it,” Shahbender recalled. “It was unbelievable, really.” As information poured in, task forces scrambled to figure out how to collate complaints—by voting district, violation, or according to the group’s own checklist. Maybe they should make charts, a volunteer wondered.
One of the earliest issues was the ink. To prevent multiple balloting, voters were required to dip their finger in a dark ink that takes several days to wear off. “Around 10:30 in the morning we got a report that there was no ink at one station, and at another station the ink came off if you rubbed it with nail polish remover or chlorine,” Shahbender told me.
“When we started announcing complaints, Egyptian television called and said we were spreading rumors. Then an Interior Ministry official called to complain, so I sent him a list of places where the ink was coming off and the one place where there was no ink at all.”
Shahbender laughed as she told me the government official called her back later to say he had been personally assured that ink was now at the polling station.
“We knew we were having an impact. But we were also terrified after Egyptian television said we were spreading rumors—you can go to prison for that in this country.” The allegation was not merely a comment; Egyptian television is state-owned and tightly state-controlled.
Reports of violations came from an array of sources. A university professor in Alexandria phoned on the hour, every hour, each time from a different polling station, to report what was happening. A young man from Port Said reported serious violations carried out by members of parliament from the ruling National Democratic Party. “That was the violation that concerned us the most,” Shahbender said.
Lawmakers—who faced their own elections within weeks—were offering money or meals, voters reported. Party representatives sat inside some polling rooms filling in ballot papers or demanding to see who voters selected, Egyptians complained to Shayfeencom.1
In Port Said, the young volunteer reported, local workers in government-owned factories had been rounded up and transported in buses to polling stations. The volunteer recorded all the bus numbers. He also talked with workers who said they had been promised a bonus after the vote—based on the percentage that went for Mubarak. Others told him local legislators helped arrange for distribution of workers’ pink voting cards.
“He called us all the time,” Shahbender recalled. “He was using a mobile phone with prepaid cards. It was a huge expense for him, but he wanted to do it. And he was quite brave.”
Other reports cited threats to café owners: Their government licenses could be in jeopardy if they didn’t support Mubarak’s reelection effort. Egypt is a café society; Egyptians use the cozy, often overcrowded neighborhood hangouts to debate, court, smoke hubble-bubble pipes, watch videos, and drink round after round of coffee or tea.
“There is an omnipotent power structure in Egypt that does not allow for diversity,” Shahbender reflected. “If local councils and parliament and the national government are all one and the same, there is no way out. It affects every aspect of life. And the system is quite resistant to change.
“But,” she added, “There are also quite a few who are beginning to act. This young man spends a whole day and a lot of money because he won’t stand for it any more.”
The day after the vote, We’re Watching You released its findings—and blasted the government. “Such habits were customary during the old parliament elections; repeating them in this historical election is not only illegal, but led some of the voters to doubt if their vote will ever make a difference,” Shayfeencom charged.2
The group was besieged for comment by the local, regional, and international media. Egypt’s State Security, Shahbender noted, wanted a copy of its report too.
Besides the array of problems at polling stations, the group uncovered a discrepancy between the new law, passed in the referendum, and the instructions from the Interior Ministry to the judiciary that officially supervised the polling.
“When we uncovered it, we at first thought we were wrong. All we did was put the law next to the instructions—and there were important differences that could have been an opening for fraud,” Shahbender said.
The law said the counting and announcement of results would happen in each constituency. But the government’s instructions to Egypt’s judges said votes would be tallied in each district—then given to the government to total up and announce forty-eight hours later.
“The law meant that anyone with a calculator could keep track and say Mubarak got this many and other candidates got that many,” Shahbender explained. “But the instructions given to the judges would allow a gap of forty-eight hours where there would be no transparency. We made an issue of that.”
To no one’s surprise, Mubarak won with eighty-eight percent of the vote—from those who turned out. The second highest candidate, Ayman Nour of the new Tomorrow Party, scored just over seven percent.
No other candidate really had much of a chance. Mubarak carried the weight of the state, the influence of the state-controlled media, and the resources of a party whose membership dominated the private sector. The most popular opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, was outlawed. And the official campaign was less than three weeks long—in a country with almost thirty percent illiteracy.3
Egypt’s political history in the lifetime of most voters has also hardly been conducive to democracy. Egypt became a republic after the 1952 revolution, when the Free Officers’ Movement ousted flamboyant King Farouq. Farouq was nicknamed “the thief of Cairo” because of his lavish palaces, hundreds of cars, playboy lifestyle, and spending sprees abroad at a time of chronic poverty among his people. Lore has it that the king had a penchant for pickpocketing and pilfering, even during state vi
sits; his purloined treasures allegedly included a pocket watch belonging to Winston Churchill and a ceremonial sword owned by the Shah of Iran.
Over the next half century, Egypt’s new republic had only four presidents—Mohammed Naguib, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. All four came to power as military men. The first was forced to step down, and the next two died in office. Mubarak was a little-known and politically untested Air Force commander when he inherited power in 1981, after Sadat was gunned down by Islamic extremists as he reviewed a military parade. By the 2005 election, however, Mubarak had served almost as long as all his predecessors combined. Most Egyptians had known little else politically.
Mubarak’s reelection was, as a result, a virtual given. Yet We’re Watching You was still pleased with its inaugural venture into democracy. It empowered ordinary Egyptians. It held the government to account. And its impact reached beyond Egypt’s borders, inspiring the birth of similar groups in Jordan and Lebanon.
In the United States’ annual human rights report for 2005, the State Department cited widespread violations in Egypt’s presidential election—voters lists with the names of people long dead, termination of voter registration eight months before the election, and ruling-party control over polling stations.4 Part of the report was based on the data collected and made public by Shayfeencom’s volunteers.5 Shahbender “typifies a new generation of activists,” wrote Democracy Digest, a publication of the Transatlantic Democracy Network.6
Buoyed by the initial reaction, We’re Watching You scrambled to get ready for the parliamentary election just two months later. This time, some 7,000 candidates were running in 222 constituencies. The election would play out in three phases around the country from early November to early December. This time, Shayfeencom mobilized task forces to inspect polling sites. It organized training on how to monitor elections. And it found a cameraman.
