Once Upon a Revolution (28 page)

On Election Day, November 28, the Muslim Brotherhood erected tents at every polling station, in direct violation of the law. Liberals complained, and some were dismantled. Basem awoke early to vote in Helwan and then head to his district. He phoned me to ask how people were voting in Moqattam, the hilltop district where Zyad lived.

“Everybody I talked to in the line told me they're voting Brotherhood.”

“That's not good,” Basem said.

“Maybe the liberals come out in the afternoon?” I offered.

“We can hope.”

Basem lived in Zyad's district and was voting for him. Both of them were voting for their own party rather than for the Revolution Continues list, which theoretically represented their origins. For Basem, the Revolution Continues candidates seemed out of touch with reality. “Khaled el-Sayyed is too crazy, too young,” he said. “I don't trust him to represent me.”

We met a few hours later at Basem's Shoubra office. Three Social Democratic Party lawyers were collecting reports of fraud from around the district and preparing official complaints. Most were for minor violations, such as the Brotherhood tents and banners. Basem rushed in. He had just inspected polling stations at the Shoubra Engineering College, where judges were using ballots that had not been stamped properly. “We shook a lot of hands before today,” he said. “Now our only role is to monitor.”

His Bluetooth earpiece lit up. “Move, move, move!” he cried. “Some women were caught trying to smuggle ballots into a polling station.”

“It's an incredible year, 2011,” Basem said as he rushed down the street with his aides a few minutes later. “For me, for all of Egypt.”

He pushed past the military police into the polling station at the Shoubra campus of the University of Banha Faculty of Engineering. He made a big show of standing by the judges in each classroom, but he knew he had little power here.

“They told me there were problems here, but I did not find anything,” he said after a quarter hour. “What can we do? Earlier I saw an old woman ask for help, and a volunteer pointed to his party and said, ‘Sign here.' If I tell a judge, what will he say?”

Back at his office, Basem sat at a desk surrounded by friends. A pile of posters of his face, printed on high-end plastic, lay crumpled on the floor. They never had been used. “At first we didn't have any posters,” Basem said with flat amusement. “Then we didn't have any rope to hang them up with. Then we got rope, but we didn't have enough guys to hang them.”

He turned to his team. “Tonight we will meet, see our mistakes and good points, and make a plan for tomorrow,” he said. “After the elections, I will turn off my phone and sleep until Friday.”

“Congratulations on your campaign,” I said.

“It's bad luck,” Basem scowled. “It is still early.”

With nothing left to do, the candidate fidgeted. He didn't like to wait passively. He turned to his friends.

“If I win,” he joked, “I will get in parliament, and I will forget all about the revolution. I will tell the people in Tahrir to go home.”

“Seriously,” I asked, “how will you avoid changing?”

“You cannot!” Basem retorted, his expression a little more serious. “It happens to everybody.”

The country would vote in three waves. This was just round one. The first results surprised almost everyone. The Muslim Brotherhood was winning about 40 percent, a little more than expected. The Salafis were winning 25 percent, a lot more than expected. The Wafd, the old, corrupted, and officially sanctioned opposition, was polling about 10 percent. The remaining quarter of the votes were split among the other secular movements. The
felool
parties that wanted to resuscitate the old regime won barely 5 percent. The results wouldn't be official until just before the seating of parliament at the end of January, but Basem and Zyad appeared to have won comfortably.

In the second round of voting on December 15, the Islamists cruised forward. This was also Moaz's round, but his campaign had never recovered after November. He paraded through his neighborhood with about fifty volunteers, chanting, “Revolution in the square! Revolution in parliament!” but didn't shake people's hands. It wasn't even clear that he was a candidate. When polls opened, Moaz couldn't find his ID card. He was too disorganized even to vote for himself.

The army had erected a stone wall across Mohamed Mahmoud Street to shut down the fight there. Immediately after the second round of voting, soldiers violently cleared a small group of revolutionaries from a sit-in beside the parliament building. Impervious to the rolling news cameras, security men threw furniture from the parliament roof onto the unarmed revolutionaries five floors below. One soldier unzipped his fly and urinated languorously on them, his piss stream tracing a line across the slogan affixed to the side of the building: “Democracy proves that authority rests with the people.” Indifferent that Zyad was a member of parliament–elect, soldiers punched and clubbed him. “To hell with your parliament!” they said.

Their disregard was a hint of the future relations between the military and Egypt's elected politicians. A young woman was thrown to the ground, and soldiers tore off her
abaya
, revealing a neon-blue bra. In
what became an iconic image, a soldier leapt energetically in the air and landed a foot in her rib cage. An older woman who tried to intervene was clubbed over the head until she collapsed. The entire assault was videotaped and viewed widely.

The generals were sending a blunt message that, elections notwithstanding, the military was the final arbiter. Every time the military murdered or humiliated civilian demonstrators, the state media and the ruling generals lambasted the victims, and each time they were met with more public approval. They were weakening the revolutionaries and discrediting them in the eyes of much of the public.

Whatever its motives, the SCAF had created a Pavlovian cycle. The generals changed course only in response to huge crowds or violent clashes at Tahrir. They taught the revolutionaries that protest was the only tool that worked, and therefore the revolutionaries returned to Tahrir in response to every crisis. At the heart of the revolutionary movement was a tiny number of extraordinarily motivated individuals, a few thousand at most, who organized the rest. Each time the state opened the spigot of force, it sent some tens to the cemetery, some hundreds to the hospital, and some hundreds more to detention. Each casualty required inordinate attention from the activists: the prosecutions must be resisted, the torture documented, the wounded healed, the dead mourned. Four days of clashes might exhaust the following month's energy. All that time spent cleaning up the aftermath was time
not
spent appealing to everyday Egyptians. Whether that was the SCAF's plan or merely a collateral benefit, it was in any case to the SCAF's advantage.

There was some talk about whether the revolution had been lost. Basem believed it would take a generation to change national attitudes, and that the best way was through sustained, grinding work in parliament, state institutions, and political parties. Success would take years. Moaz dreamed of a more radical transformation for the country but had no idea how to bring it about. Like so many revolutionaries, he suffered from a kind of political attention deficit disorder, always juggling too many ideas to concentrate fully on one.

“We've got to leave the square and make many Tahrir Squares all around Egypt,” Sally Moore told anyone who would listen. “We've been talking about this idea for a long time, getting to the neighborhoods and breaking the isolation of Tahrir Square. We need to do it.” She'd had a breakthrough after the assault on the woman in the
abaya
. Now that she was choosing to work away from the party and outside the square, she felt rejuvenated.

Sally wasn't alone in the sentiment. Revolutionaries had ghettoized themselves geographically and culturally, encouraging one another in isolation from the mainstream. Now they had an idea: Why not campaign against the SCAF's lies block by block, village by village? They borrowed the name for their new citizen's movement from a newspaper headline about the blue bra beating: Askar Kazeboon! (“the Military Lies!”). Activists and filmmakers assembled many short videos that juxtaposed lying SCAF members with footage of the military crimes they were denying. It was powerful and simple, with an important, easy-to-understand message: at last, a distillation of a revolutionary idea that could reach a wide audience.

Sally and her friends held Kazeboon! screenings all over Cairo, even projecting films onto the wall of Maspero above the heads of the soldiers guarding it. The idea was designed to go viral. Activists anywhere in Egypt could download the clips or make their own and get out into the neighborhoods to declare: The military lies! Emotionally, the campaign marked an almost Oedipal breakthrough. For a year, revolutionaries had chanted, “The army and the people are one hand!” even when the army was standing by indifferently while police officers murdered civilian demonstrators. The revolutionaries had avoided blaming the military directly for its abuses because of the hallowed place the military held in Egyptian life, even long after it was clear that the military was all too willing to kill or suppress the people it pretended to protect. Finally, the young revolutionaries were abandoning their false pose of national unity and calling out the army and its leaders on the SCAF for their tyranny.

The new parliament would be seated on January 23, 2012. The week that followed was scheduled as a national holiday to commemorate the previous year's uprising. No matter how incomplete the revolution
seemed, the election was a tangible accomplishment. Egyptians had voted, and despite widespread instances of small-scale fraud, all the parties involved had endorsed the results. Egypt would have a parliament with a diversity of voices that roughly approximated the people's actual choices. The old system remained intact, but it had not been able to shut down entirely the mechanisms of protest and dissent. Egyptians still were able to exercise the rights of free speech and assembly that they had won a year before. Though they might be killed for demonstrating, now their deaths would be reported in Egyptian media, in some cases even accurately. All this fell short of a revolution, but it was more movement toward freedom and dignity than Egypt had ever seen.

Two days before parliament was to take the oath of office, the government finally published the election results. The most heartening number was the tally of ballots: twenty-seven million, the most votes ever cast in an Egyptian election. The high turnout was a sign of faith in the democratic process. Most depressing was the number of revolutionary youth who made it into parliament: three. Zyad, Basem, and Mostafa el-Naggar, a former Muslim Brotherhood and ElBaradei activist who'd founded his own Justice Party and won an independent seat in Cairo. (There were dozens of parties with indistinguishable names blending the words “justice,” “freedom,” “revolution,” and “democracy.”) After a year and a thousand or more deaths, after a tyrant had been tried and an entire system of governance cast into doubt, the revolutionaries had managed to capture only three seats in a parliament of 508. Just half of 1 percent. Moaz wasn't elected, and neither were any of the other young activists; the only victories for the Revolution Continues came from a batch of seasoned older socialist politicians who ran as coalition partners.

Even before the official results were posted, Moaz figured that his compatriots had been shut out. He already had moved on. He was organizing
salasel
, or human chains, in which supporters of the revolution silently lined streets, holding signs with slogans. Anyone who wanted to engage them in conversation could, but there was no chanting or disrupting traffic. This was an attempt to reach the Egypt left behind by the revolution.

One Sunday night along Abou el-Ezz Street, a commercial boulevard
in Mohandiseen, about fifty people showed up for one of Moaz's
salasel
gatherings, most of them women. Everyone dressed in his or her best. They held up signs that said things like “I am not a thug” and “Our battle is with corruption, poverty, ignorance, and injustice.” The links in the human chain stood about arm's length apart alongside the slow-moving traffic.