by Lin Noueihed
Rapid economic growth was also failing to create enough jobs for the rising number of young people entering the labour market each year, and was not creating enough of the skilled jobs that educated young Egyptians sought. Of the 2.4 million unemployed people in Egypt in 2009, some 35 per cent had university-level education or better, and in the capital, Cairo, the figure was 54 per cent.19 And many of those unable to find government jobs were forced to work in the vast informal economy, meaning they were unable to obtain mortgages or car loans and lacked proper health coverage, while an increasing proportion of family income went on private lessons to compensate for the poor state of public schools. With incomes low and youth unemployment stubbornly high, the rising cost of living hit Egyptians particularly hard. Inflation was running at 16.2 per cent in 2009, falling to a still eye-watering 11.7 per cent on the eve of the uprising,20 with the cost of foodstuffs rising particularly sharply as a global spike in grain, sugar and fuel prices hit home. While basics such as bread and fuel were state-subsidized, loaves had shrunk and scuffles broke out in bread queues at the height of the commodities boom in 2008.
Even more striking was the statistic that more than 34 per cent of Egyptians were illiterate in 2006.21 Literacy rates had improved over the previous three decades, with less than a fifth of 15–24-year-olds unable to read or write in the years leading up to the 2011 revolt, but a gulf remained between the middle-class or wealthy young Egyptians, who campaigned for political freedoms on Twitter and Facebook, and the women of Upper Egypt, illiterate, poor and confined largely to the home in a patriarchal and tribal region. It had been a steady decline for Egypt, considered in the 1950s to be one of the world's fast-industrializing economies and emerging powers, but long since left behind by what were once its Asian and Latin American peers.
The privatization policies that were so lauded by the IMF were perceived by Egyptians as no more than a ploy by Mubarak and his cronies to line their pockets at the expense of the people and their national economy. Big state industries were sold off to businessmen close to the regime for what many Egyptians believed to be knock-down prices, exposing what had been safe state jobs to new bosses motivated by profit. Despair at the economic situation was exacerbated not just by the disturbingly regular high-level scandals that found their way into the press, but also by the corruption that was eating away at the entire system. When a ferry sank in 2006, killing about 1,000 people, a parliamentary investigation found that the operator had forged safety certificates and conspired with the authorities to overlook its lack of lifeboats and firefighting equipment. Yet the owner, a wealthy businessman close to senior officials, was able to flee the country, and his eventual seven-year sentence was little more than a Pyrrhic victory for families of the victims.22, 23
Egyptians were not just appalled at these economic challenges but at the political stagnation that seemed to have frozen their country in time, making it unable to adapt to new challenges and aspirations. Forty-seven per cent of Egyptians expressed satisfaction with their freedom in life on the eve of the uprising, down from 77 per cent in 2005. A devastating 28 per cent said in 2010 that they had confidence in the honesty of elections. Some 88 per cent believed democracy would help their country to progress, the highest level of democratic enthusiasm in a pool of twenty-three majority-Muslim countries polled.24 Of the 1,000 Egyptian adults polled, 97 per cent said any new constitution should allow freedom of speech and three-quarters said it should allow freedom of religion, suggesting both were sorely missed in Egypt, a cradle of ancient civilizations whose proud moniker ‘Umm al-Dunia’ or ‘Mother of the World’ sat more and more uneasily with the overcrowded, chaotic and polluted country it had become.
The half-hearted pretence at multi-party democracy was wearing dangerously thin. Under US pressure, Mubarak had allowed multi-candidate presidential elections for the first time in 2005, a change from the old polls in which he was the only candidate. Despite this ostensible step towards democracy, Mubarak was clearly not prepared to entertain any challenge and had arrested opposition leader Ayman Nour, who was seen as a potential rival. Nour declared his candidacy from jail and was released following international pressure, going on to win 7 per cent of the vote before being rearrested over allegations that he falsified documents in his application to set up the Ghad, or Tomorrow, party.25 He spent four years in prison, a clear signal to any other politician who thought of challenging Mubarak.26 Over the next two years, the Egyptian leader oversaw a series of constitutional amendments that ostensibly legislated for multi-candidate presidential elections, but set so many conditions it seemed to some activists that only his younger son Gamal could realistically expect to qualify, run and win.
A former investment banker, Gamal returned to Egypt in the mid–1990s, quickly rising through the ranks of the ruling NDP to become head of the powerful new Policies Committee, focused on economic reforms.27 Surrounding himself by a coterie of influential businessmen who formed the NDP's ‘new guard’, Gamal became a driving force behind free-market reforms. Several names had been mooted as potential successors to Mubarak in the decade that preceded the uprising. Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief so trusted by the United States, had long been considered a potential candidate, but the longer Mubarak refrained from naming him deputy, the more his star faded. Tantawi had come up as a potential military candidate, but one few felt had the charisma or inclination for the job. Received Cairene wisdom also saw former Arab League chief Amr Moussa as a potential civilian candidate. By 2010, however, it was clear to Egyptians that Gamal was being groomed for the top job and that the ground was being smoothed for his rise at the ballot box. Indeed, to some activists, it appeared Mubarak had only opened up the presidential race so he could rig it with his son in mind.28 For many Egyptians who had lived for three decades under Mubarak senior, the thought of being led by Mubarak junior, with his tycoon friends, was galling.
And it was not just the presidential race that appeared to be rigged. The NDP was not the only party in Egypt. The Wafd, Egypt's oldest political group, was among some ten licenced parties that ran in elections but could be relied upon not to put up too much of a fight in parliament. The rules made it incredibly difficult for a new political party to register in the first place and even if it did manage to clinch a licence, elections were consistently marred by allegations of vote-buying, intimidation and other irregularities. Votes were considered so meaningless that most Egyptians were no longer bothering to cast a ballot. While tolerated as a religious charitable organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, considered the single largest and most organized opposition group in Egypt, was officially banned. Its members were forced to run as independents and operated in a precarious legal grey area that left them open to sudden investigation or imprisonment if they crossed a line. The Muslim Brotherhood had suffered repeated crackdowns since its inception in 1928, with thousands of members imprisoned and tortured, and some even executed, under Gamal Abdel Nasser's military regime.
Indeed, the Mubarak regime was the direct descendent of the 1952 coup mounted by the Free Officers under Nasser. The colonel swiftly turned his coup into a revolution, throwing out the aristocratic political class that had ruled Egypt under the deposed King Farouk's constitutional monarchy and replacing them with a new political class led by military officers. Nasser instituted land reforms, nationalized private companies and embarked on an industrialization drive that expanded the middle classes, but drove much of the old business elite, a cosmopolitan mix of Christians, Jews and Muslims, as well as Greeks, Italians, Levantines and Armenians, to friendlier shores. Nasser became an Arab hero, exporting his pan-Arab nationalism around the region and cementing Egypt's position as an emerging regional power, but his repeated crackdowns against all political opponents, from Islamists to communists, saw him transform Egypt not just from a largely feudal monarchy into a socialist republic, but into the security state that it still was when the uprising of 2011 broke out.
The prestige of the armed f
orces and of Nasser suffered a heavy blow in 1967 when Israel seized Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, Syria's Golan Heights and Jordan's West Bank. Yet when he died in 1970, Nasser was succeeded by his vice president Anwar Sadat, another man who had risen through military ranks. Sadat launched the more successful 1973 war and signed a peace deal with Israel in 1979 that won back the Sinai Peninsula and earned Egypt $1.3 billion a year in US military aid. He also rolled back his predecessor's socialist policies as part of his move into Washington's sphere of influence, introducing economic infitah, or openness, that was aimed at reviving the private sector. Sadat's regime used the reforms to build its power base, handing out contracts, concessions, agencies and investment opportunities to cronies, many of whom, unsurprisingly, were former military and intelligence officers. Conflicts of interest abounded, while income inequalities widened and failed to improve the living standards of the new middle classes that relied on ever-diminishing state salaries and pensions.29 When Sadat was assassinated in 1981, he was succeeded by yet another military man, none other than Mubarak. The armed forces had now supplied all of Egypt's presidents since Nasser's coup, with the Egyptian people locked almost entirely out of genuine decision-making.
In addition to Egypt's powerful army, Mubarak had also bolstered the interior ministry forces over the years. On the eve of 2011, it was the internal security apparatus that carried out the regime's dirty work, clamping down on protesters and other activists who complained of beatings and torture. Their ranks had doubled since Sadat's day to reach an estimated 1.4 million by 2007, and Egyptians routinely expected gratuitous violence if they happened to fall foul of security officers or police for the most trivial of offences.30
For many, the surprise was not that a mass uprising had happened in Egypt, but that it had taken so long. For years, books had predicted that the country was on the brink of momentous change. From Washington to Tel Aviv, scenarios had been plotted for what would happen when Mubarak eventually died. Reams of newspaper columns had pondered whether Mubarak was grooming the younger of his two sons, Gamal, for the presidency.
National pride was ebbing to a new low. Egypt, which half a century earlier was the undisputed political leader of the Arab world, sending teachers and civil servants to the nascent Gulf monarchies, now exported its unemployed labourers to Libya, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In a book published in 2000 and bluntly entitled Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?, economist Galal Amin charted his country's social and intellectual decline.31 In his 2002 novel The Yacoubian Building, Egyptian dentist-turned-writer Alaa al-Aswany traced the decline of Cairo from the cultural and political jewel of the Arab world into an overcrowded Third World city through the changing inhabitants and fortunes of a once-elegant apartment block.32 The bestselling book, which was made into a film, cut to the heart of so much that was afflicting the country, from unemployment and overcrowding to the squeezed middle class, to the widespread corruption and sexual exploitation hidden behind a veneer of religious conservatism, to the lure of Islamic fundamentalism for disillusioned and hopeless young men. For these Egyptian intellectuals, a fin de régime stench had been lingering in Cairo's polluted air for years.
Ripples of protests demanding that Mubarak step down and rejecting his son as a successor had been a feature of life in Egypt for the best part of a decade. The so-called Kefaya movement, literally meaning ‘Enough’, had grown out of demonstrations in support of the Palestinian intifada of 2000 and against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It brought together opponents of many stripes – Nasserist, communist, liberal and Islamist – and focused on the one outcome that many Egyptians did not want: a Mubarak dynasty. Even though it never mustered more than a few hundred or thousand protesters, and had fizzled out long before the 2011 uprising, Kefaya had broken a taboo.
Wildcat strikes by workers demanding better wages and complaining about the privatization of state factories had also become widespread. Union leaders say that more than 3,000 strikes took place between 2006 and 2011, with persistent labour action and international pressure succeeding in establishing four unions that were independent of the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation.33 The momentum had been accelerating since a December 2006 strike at Al-Mahalla Al-Kobra, Egypt's largest textiles factory, when 28,000 workers succeeded in winning unpaid two-month bonuses. Mimicking their counterparts in Mahalla, real estate tax collectors came away from their own protracted strike in 2007 with a five-fold pay increase.34 ‘It exploded in 2006 with the workers of Mahalla,’ said Adel Zakaria, a spokesman for the Centre for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, an NGO that had essentially been running a parallel independent labour federation for over twenty-one years.35 ‘The workers saw this beautiful thing called the spread of protests. One workplace protests and achieves successes so the one next to it protests to get the same gains. It causes an infection. The idea of success sells.’
NGOs were becoming so outspoken that Egypt revised its association law in 2002, banning them from receiving foreign funding and requiring all 16,000 to register with the Ministry of Social Affairs, which rejected the applications of some already well-established rights groups.36 Urban, educated and young Egyptians had added their voice in the growing clamour for freedom. Powerful dissident blogs boomed, written in English or Arabic and reflecting a spectrum of political leanings. Egyptians were active on the micro-blogging site Twitter and on Facebook, providing a refreshing break from the self-censored pages of the leading newspapers. While the regime focused on crushing the Muslim Brotherhood, it was slow to recognize the danger that the new tech-savvy youths were beginning to pose.
The 6 April Youth Movement, which has emerged as one of the leading activist groups in Egypt, grew out of another Mahalla strike in 2008, which was backed and promoted by a Facebook group set up by the activists. In June 2010, when a twenty-eight-year-old graduate and activist called Khaled Said was beaten to death by police in Alexandria, he became an online martyr thanks to a Facebook page set up in his honour.37 Called ‘We are all Khaled Said’, the page became a lightning rod for public disgust with police brutality and corruption that appeared to have become routine.
When Muslim Brotherhood candidates won some 20 per cent of seats in parliament in 2005, they were reluctant to endanger their electoral gains and did not join the ongoing street protests. The opposition was fragmented, the NDP still dominated a parliament whose powers were, in any case, restricted, while legislative rules were skewed in favour of the regime, but Mubarak was alarmed by the Islamists’ performance.
By the time the November-December 2010 elections rolled around, new constitutional amendments had made it harder for Muslim Brotherhood candidates to compete.38 The amendments restricted the role of judges who had previously supervised elections and who had complained of irregularities in 2005. Claims of electoral fraud, arrests and intimidation were widespread. An NDP landslide was such a foregone conclusion that few bothered to vote – the turnout was officially 35 per cent but activists believed it to be lower and the Muslim Brotherhood candidates pulled out at the second round after failing to secure any seats.39
The net result was that in late 2010, on the eve of the uprising, the spectrum of Egypt's opposition movement had been thrown out of political institutions and onto the street.
Eighteen Days That Changed Egypt
When Facebook groups had first called for protests on 25 January, a public holiday honouring the police, the response was muted. The 25th had become an annual occasion for anti-Mubarak protests that rarely attracted more than a few hundred protesters, most of them dedicated political activists, who would be ludicrously outnumbered by walls of riot police. They would call on ordinary people to join them, those sometimes referred to as the ‘silent majority’, but few did. Their cause was perceived to be hopeless, even by many of the activists themselves. Even those Egyptians who privately complained about Mubarak, about the state of the economy and about the decline of their country, stayed off the streets. What w
as the point, after all, of being tear gassed and beaten when it would make no difference?
The departure of Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in mid-January 2011 changed all that. Here was elusive proof, not that protests were possible, but that they could succeed. Arab satellite channels played over and over again the electrifying footage of a Tunisian lawyer, standing alone at night on Bourguiba Avenue shouting ‘glory to Tunisians, Ben Ali has fled’. Interviews with elated Tunisians told the story of defenceless civilians who had rolled the dice in a dangerous gamble for freedom, dignity and jobs, and had won. The Tunisian people numbered only 10 million compared to Egypt's mighty 80 million, Egyptians reasoned. If the Tunisians could do it, then the Egyptians no longer had a choice. Amr al-Ansari, now an activist and aide to Egypt's first female presidential candidate, had never joined a protest before. ‘The Tunisian revolution happened and in the 10 days from when Ben Ali left to when 25 January came, people were boiling, saying they are fewer than us and they were able to do this,’ said the twenty-seven-year-old. ‘We had seen the model.‘40
For the first time, residents came down from their homes to join the swelling demonstrations. In the weeks leading up to 25 January, youth activists from several opposition groups had been secretly meeting to devise tactics that would outfox the police and give the demonstrations a stronger momentum. Instead of setting off from one point they named twenty meeting points, announcing them on Facebook and Twitter and stretching the police's capacity to respond. They also used traditional means of communication, distributing leaflets to the residents of Cairo's Bulaq al-Dakrour slum encouraging them to join another protest that would begin outside a bakery in that area. Most of the marches were successfully dispersed by the police but others, including the Bulaq al-Dakrour demonstration, made it through to the centre of town, swelling on the way.41 The success of the protests galvanized activists who lit up social media sites the same night with calls for another demonstration on the following Friday, the main weekend day in Egypt. The so-called ‘Friday of Rage’ was set for 28 January and the aim was to occupy Tahrir Square.
