Egyptian protesters wave their shoes in defiance after Hosni Mubarak announces he won't resign. In Arab culture, the gesture basically translates as "fuck you." Photo by Mahmoud Lattouf
A lot has happened in Egypt since I last posted here, with no small number of lessons for the way upheaval works.
Basically, for about a week the situation was a stalemate: Mubarak obviously lacked the rank-and-file military support for a full crackdown, and his hired thugs failed to disperse the protests. However, while the protests weren't going away, they weren't really moving forward towards their main goal of ousting the regime.
The protesters began imposing ad-hoc organization on the space in Tahrir. Despite this being a human response manifested in almost every crisis, it sent some into anarchistic vapors, desperate to see this revolution (and every other protest on the planet) as their ideal come to pass. Reality, always a more interesting picture, revealed debate and paranoia in the protesters' micro-state.
Yesterday, strikes broke out, opening up an economic "front" in the struggle. As these spread, by all appearances the armed forces (which owns a staggering amount of Egypt's economy) seemed to split. Signals from the military's ruling junta looked like they were pressing Mubarak out.
But, in a turn worthy of the most concrete-faced Soviet thug, Mubarak told the country he wasn't going anywhere.
When people fill the streets, shut down the economy and demand their rights, it's far too late to talk about committees.
But because rambling, clueless speeches by hated dictators are a great way to quel unrest, the regime made the excellent call to have the equally despised VP Omar Suleiman address the country. He promptly told the public to stop watching satellite television and go back home.
It's a 21st-century "let them eat cake"
Needless to say, the massive crowds gathered throughout Egypt got really, really angry. The regime's behavior is a reminder of how isolated tyrannies are ineffective as well as wrong: Mubarak's inner circle clearly has no idea how to handle this. Its intelligent services, reliant on torture, can extract confessions but not information. Its army and police, fed by conscripts, are split, or forced to use aging, pudgy apparatchiks to fight (and lose) against young workers.
There's speculation now of storming the various ministries still under state control. It's hard to know at this point how things will play out. The speech could have been an attempt to disperse the protesters into enraged mobs, easier to massacre. It might still work, though that seems increasingly doubtful. More likely is that Mubarak and Suleiman just got a whole lot of Egyptians off the fence and into the streets. Two weeks ago, a nasty, quick crackdown might have saved Mubarak's position. Now, it would likely take a civil war to put down the protests. When crowds in Cairo are chanting "liberty or death" things are not going back.
Historically, (relatively) leaderless revolts are downright brilliant in fighting a central obstacle, and terrible at finer maneuvers like negotiation or long-term governance. If Mubarak and his cronies are ousted, factional split is a real danger as Egyptians face off over what exactly their newly freed country will look like (this is, I must note, still a far better situation than tyranny).
Realistically, the best case scenario right now is something similar to Portugal's Carnation Revolution. Basically; the military decides that its position is better assured by easing a transition to democracy than by shackling itself to an increasingly unstable tyranny. A generation of young Egyptians, cutting their teeth in protest, can turn their experience into solid political organizing, creating the groundwork for a functional civil society.
Let's hope that's the result, and remember these events the next time a politician talks about a dictator as our "ally."
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