by Sean Mallen
It was a conflicted note: I was torn by the journalistic instinct that pushed me into running to where the big story was unfolding, despite the risks, but did not want to terrify my family, or myself.
In any case, the producers concurred and we decided to hold off. I exhaled, but did not feel great. Stories like this came with the job. I sent a note to Isabella reassuring her that we were not going — yet.
Within minutes, though, it was clear that Tantawi’s speech had had little effect. AP reported that protestors were saying it was not nearly good enough, that the generals needed to step aside. An articulate dissident did a live interview on Sky News: “They have no legitimacy. They need to go now!”
Back at the flat, Isabella was relatively calm, a better response than I expected. But Julia met me at the door and declared, “I don’t want you to go to Egypt.” She was a determined six-year-old.
“It is still a possibility,” I told them. In fact, I knew it was almost certain.
As occasionally happened, Isabella fell asleep beside Julia and stayed there all night. I got up early to go to the gym, leaving my iPhone beside them with an alarm set so that they would wake up in time to start getting Julia ready for school.
When I returned, they were up. Isabella handed me my phone.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to look at your emails,” she said. A note had arrived overnight advising that Egypt was likely a go.
By midmorning it was confirmed. We would be on a flight the next day.
“Oh boy,” said Isabella’s email when I informed her. “Tell them you have an event at Julia’s school next Monday and I’ll be really mad if you don’t make it.”
“Their elections start next Monday,” I responded. “We’ll certainly be staying.”
Now the preparations got frantic. Through Stu’s contacts, we found a fixer named Reem, a young woman who worked as an English teacher. I rushed out to the post office to get a wad of American cash and however many Egyptian pounds they had on hand, then stopped at the Marks and Spencer to buy a load of groceries for my family.
We would be leaving our big news camera in the bureau, instead taking a compact video recorder and a DSLR camera. We were told that customs officers had been seizing TV news gear at the airport, so we would be posing as tourists, buying visas when we arrived — a calculated risk.
Back at the flat, Julia once again met me at the door.
“I don’t want you to go to Egypt!”
“She saw some video on TV of people lying down on the street in Cairo and it scared her,” said Isabella. “You need to talk to her.”
I took my daughter’s hand and led her over to the sofa. She climbed into my lap, rested her head against my chest, and let out a tiny whimper. Despite the tension, it was a moment of closeness to be treasured, one of the finest, warmest feelings in the world.
“What if you get shot?” she asked.
“I’m not going anywhere close to where that kind of stuff is happening.”
“But what is happening in Egypt?”
I was proud that she asked such perceptive questions. I explained that people were protesting because they wanted the generals who were running the country to step aside so that there could be proper elections.
Isabella sat opposite and asked calmly, but directly, “What do I do if you die?”
“I’m not going to die.”
“But what if you do? I’m in England with a six-year-old. She’ll cry and miss you. What do I do?”
Here were questions I probably should have anticipated when I took the job, but I never did, or if I did I pushed them aside. It was profoundly uncomfortable to discuss the plans for my death in front of our daughter. We went back and forth with the same question and same answer a couple of times, before I finally advised that she would need to call the Global National producers and they would help her. It was not a very satisfactory answer.
I took Julia to bed that night, reading her Roald Dahl’s Matilda. We lay side by side in her lower bunk, warm and close. Usually I would demand that she try to read a bit as well, but on this night I let it go.
As I turned out the light, I told her that I would be leaving early, before she woke up.
“Daddy, I don’t want you to go to Egypt.”
“I know, sweetie. But I need to go. I’ll be back before you know it.”
A clichéd and forced answer that she was too sharp to buy.
“Will you say goodbye?”
“I don’t want to wake you up.”
“I want you to wake me up to say goodbye.”
“Suppose I just whisper softly, ‘I’m going now’?”
“Okay. Say it just like that.”
I stayed beside her, as I usually did, until she fell asleep. It did not take long before she was in dreamland.
As I crept out of her bedroom, my phone vibrated. Vancouver, our assignment editor.
“You all set?” she asked
“Yup.”
“This is the first time I’m deploying you to a place that might be dangerous,” she said. “So … be careful. Tell your wife she can call me anytime she wants.”
“Thanks. I’ll pass that along.”
“I won’t be calling her first. A cameraman once told me that if I called his wife while he was in a danger zone, she would assume that it was to tell her that he’s dead.”
“Understood.”
I passed the message along to Isabella.
“Why would I want to talk to her?” she asked.
“It’s just a courtesy,” I said, avoiding the anecdote about the cameraman’s wife.
I slept soundly, if only for four hours. Isabella woke only briefly to say goodbye. She had arranged a weekend of activities for her and Julia, including skating at Hyde Park — designed to distract our daughter from her father’s assignment.
I crept into Julia’s room, gently kissed her head, and whispered, “See you later, sweetie.” She did not wake up.
Chapter Sixteen
Going to Egypt was both invigorating and unnerving. We were hearing that the tear gas used on protestors was causing victims to convulse and cough up blood. I sent several emails to our fixer, telling her that a top priority upon arrival was to buy gas masks. She replied that we need not worry; they were for sale everywhere around the square.
Upon arrival, Dan and I split up to go through customs separately — the better to carry off the tourist ruse. We worried that they might open up his huge backpack and ask pointed questions about his video camera — smaller than typical TV news gear, but still a large step up from that of the average tourist.
But we both sailed through with no questions. Our fixer, Reem, was holding up a sign with my name at arrivals. Still fearing we could be busted, we said little until we got outside the terminal and into her car.
Reem was impossibly young, only twenty-four — born two years after I started work at Global TV. She was a teacher of English and drama, the daughter of a prominent writer of books and newspaper columns.
As she pulled out into the creeping stream of traffic she told us that things had cooled while we were in the air. The army set up concrete barriers around the principal trouble spot: Mohammed Mahmoud Street, a principal artery leading from Tahrir Square to the Interior Ministry building. Dozens of demonstrators had already died on the street that week as the army attempted to crush their protests against military rule. Walling off Mohammed Mahmoud put concrete between the uprising and the guys with guns and poison tear gas. The violence appeared to be ebbing.
Reem told us she had been going to the square every night.
“Do you feel safe?” I asked, knowing how many had died and how many women had been sexually assaulted.
“Oh yes. Very safe,” she said with the confidence of youth.
“But you must stay away from the part of the square near Mohammed Mahmoud.”
Pro-military provocateurs were rumoured to be blending in with the crowds, stirring up trouble. Reem was passion
ate about the revolution and disdainful of the military, known popularly as SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces).
The generals had posted notes of apology on Facebook for the deaths of protestors, a nod to the torrent of social media that fed the energy of Tahrir. But she was not buying SCAF’s regrets.
“Nobody believes them or trusts them,” she said.
The Cairene sky was greyish rouge in the early evening as she navigated her way downtown — coloured by all the pollution that seven million inhabitants can generate, seventeen million people if you count the broader metropolitan area. As it was November, we were spared the summer temperatures that regularly top forty degrees Celsius.
The buildings became taller as we approached the centre; most were tarnished by the soot of the smog. Broad boulevards met at chaotic intersections unencumbered by Western innovations such as traffic lights. Drivers edged their way through the stream, honking as they went in an improvised form of inter-auto communication.
“There are a few traffic lights in the city,” Reem explained. “But if I stop at a red and there are no cars coming on the cross street, drivers behind me will honk and call me the worst possible names.”
Finally, the fabled Nile came into sight as we pulled up at the Hilton. Earlier that year, Dan and Stu had been barricaded in the same hotel for a time at the height of the troubles that brought down Mubarak. But now all was calm and we were met with smiles in a lobby that could have been in Toronto or Tampa, except for the Arabic heard in the background.
We quickly checked in and, recognizing the new necessities of filing, checked the speed of our internet connection and updated ourselves on the latest. SCAF had just held another televised news conference, promising that the elections would begin on schedule the following Monday.
However, few believed that SCAF were much interested in abiding by the rules. In one of the more chilling episodes from earlier in the week, a prominent writer, tweeter, and profane critic of the regime, Mona Eltahawy, had been summarily arrested. The new, kinder, gentler SCAF allowed her to go free, but both her arms were in casts — she said she had been both beaten and sexually abused. Rape and all manner of groping were epidemic around the square.
After a woman reporting for a French television service was sexually assaulted, Reporters Without Borders issued an advisory for female journalists to stay away for their own safety, which in turn sparked a furious response from the many fearless women on the front lines. The advisory was quickly withdrawn.
Three American students had also been locked up, accused of throwing firebombs. They were now freed, however — a prudent move given that Washington was still pumping more than a billion dollars in aid to the Egyptians. The U.S. media naturally made the students key characters in their coverage. I wanted to ignore them in my story, reasoning that dozens of dead Egyptians were more important, but Vancouver insisted I give them a mention.
We started to hike over to Tahrir Square, just a couple of blocks away, to see what the protestors had to say. Walking to the rear of the Hilton brought us into a different world — from the elegance of a luxury international hotel to the grime of a big city in North Africa. We came to a multi-lane road passing beneath a greying, crumbling expressway cloverleaf. No traffic lights, naturally.
“Are you okay to go across?” asked Reem with a look of concern, likely fearful that her Western client would end up splattered on the windshield of a battered taxi.
“Oh sure,” I answered, as my heart started beating rapidly.
With Cairene expertise, she spotted a minor break in the traffic and started navigating her way through what appeared to be somewhere between five or eight lanes, depending on the interpretation of the drivers. Dan and I stuck close as rusty, dented Toyotas whizzed past, millimetres away.
Without asking, Reem grabbed my hand.
“Okay, run,” she advised, pulling me ahead past the final lanes, ensuring I survived the first life-or-death adventure of my first Middle East assignment as a foreign correspondent.
As we approached Tahrir Square, there was an unofficial security checkpoint, manned by young men bearing smartphones and self-appointed authority. Once we showed our passports and they determined we were North American journalists, they flashed broad smiles and said, “Welcome, brother.”
Tahrir felt like a teeming carnival midway, with vendors selling popcorn, cigarettes, water, and gas masks (Reem had already acquired ours — flimsy things with goggles). My lungs started to feel clogged up, not from tear gas, because there had been none that day, but from the open-air roasters that were charring potatoes and any other edible that benefitted from smoke and heat.
A siren announced an ambulance that was edging its way through the crowd, but the medical emergencies had diminished with the violence. There was an open-air clinic where volunteer doctors had been feverishly treating the wounded at the height of the trouble. Now they sat resting, grateful for the lack of work.
I spotted a group of young men who appeared to have friendly faces and asked if any spoke English and would like to talk to Canadian television. They all did.
The one who stepped forward first told me of his outrage at how the police were gassing them, shooting at their eyes, he claimed. A crowd gathered as we spoke, hands tugging at my arms for attention, Arabic voices joining in a cacophony that made it hard to hear my interviewees.
A man who said he had been hit with some of the notoriously toxic tear gas suggested SCAF was guilty of war crimes.
What did they think of the parliamentary elections that were due to start Monday? Yes, they need to happen, said one man, a necessary step toward establishing a true democracy. Absolutely not, said another, impossible after so much bloodshed. The no side seemed to prevail in our conversations, with much talk of boycotting.
After thousands of years of autocrats, from pharaohs, through kings, and ending with Mubarak, Egypt was finally to get a chance to vote. And it did not know if it wanted to do it.
Even Reem told us she was uncertain, wondering whether it was right to proceed given the death and chaos.
A young man named Adam got my attention, claiming to be a “colleague” because he wrote scripts for Egyptian talk shows. SCAF’s news conference promising early elections was weak, he said, and the Facebook posting expressing regret for the deaths avoided the real issue and took no responsibility.
“It was a contradiction — a paradox speech,” he said. “They said they apologized, but still support the police that’s doing all these things.”
We had no shortage of Tahrir voices to build our story, so we headed back to the Hilton, stopping en route at the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis hotel, which was closer and had balconies with a clear view of the square. They had rooms available, so we decided to make a move in the morning, thus sparing us any more death-defying sprints through traffic and giving us the option of shooting spectacular stand-ups overlooking the drama unfolding in Tahrir.
The debut story from Egypt was straightforward: the violence had abated, SCAF had sort of apologized, the protestors were not mollified, and the elections were in doubt. With more potential fireworks tomorrow.
But as Dan and I ate in the hotel restaurant with a view of the Nile, there was a more compelling personal headline that blared in my brain: I WAS IN FUCKING EGYPT COVERING TAHRIR SQUARE!
In Muslim countries, the period after Friday prayers often sees protests. In Cairo, on this Friday, the plan was to stage a “Last Chance Million-Man” rally in Tahrir. Last chance, I supposed, for SCAF to do the right thing and step aside in favour of a democratic, or at least non-military, government. Given the bloodshed of earlier in the week, trouble was a real possibility.
The generals delivered another nod to conciliation, hauling out another interim prime minister. But seventy-eight-year-old Kamal Ganzouri, who had been PM under Mubarak in the nineties, was not going to be the answer.
As we joined the throngs streaming into the square, I saw with alarm that th
ere were many parents bringing young children.
I stopped one father to speak.
“It’s basically solidarity with the cause,” said Mohammed Omar.
I asked whether he feared for the safety of his children.
“It’s okay. As long as you don’t go over there,” he responded, pointing in the direction of Mohammed Mahmoud Street.
The rally was staged in honour of the “martyrs,” the victims of the clashes with soldiers and police earlier in the week. The wounded were given places of prominent honour.
Banners were paraded with pictures both of the dead and of some of the military leaders blamed for the violence. I shot a show-and-tell stand-up, pointing out the faces on display and the people who were holding up some grim souvenirs from the earlier clashes: expired shells from rubber bullets and tear gas canisters.
I noted one large photograph of a young man who looked at best twenty years old and figured he must have been among the dead. But when I asked Reem to translate the Arabic captions, she told me that he was a cop, reputedly a sniper who had been targeting the eyes of protestors. Now he was himself a marked man.
There was no single stage from which speeches were being delivered. Instead, there were mini rallies forming throughout the square: an impromptu festival of democracy in a nation where guys with guns and tanks still ran things. Pamphlets were being held out, polling people on who they would like to lead the country. The idealist goal was to have the square decide on the best candidates.
A huge picture was rolled out of Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency — a moderate that the West would have certainly liked to see in charge. Everyone in Egypt knew he had little chance. The Muslim Brotherhood was best organized and most likely to win any election. It had played little role in the Tahrir rallies, having been suppressed by the military for decades, and it was cagily awaiting the chance to run candidates in an election.
The crowds grew throughout the day, reaching a peak of about one hundred thousand by nightfall, and despite the fears it all remained peaceful. A few kilometres away, there was a counter-demonstration by supporters of the military. It was dwarfed by the Tahrir rally.
