Jan28 Part IV

We decided to head toward Tahrir Square again to see if the crowd could break through to it. It looked like the police were again holding ground at Qasr El Nil bridge. We were tired and getting hungry. I suggested we look for a restaurant, buy as many sandwiches as we could afford to hand out to protesters, and call it a day. Then we ran into a friend, Bakry. He asked if we had seen his girlfriend and a group of friends. He looked worn out. Tear gas had earlier rendered him unconscious. Some people took him in, and nursed him back to health with some sandwiches and tea. I asked him to tell me what happened on camera. He said he didn’t want to do anything for the media at the moment. Tired and dejected, he sat on the middle of the road. A stranger asked if he was ok. He was angry and fed up with his country. I asked him if in his dream he ever imagined it would be like this. He said, no he didn’t.

We told him our plan about the sandwiches and he asked if we were hungry. We said yes, we were. He pulled out cheese sandwiches from his pocket. I devoured one. He seemed to have energy all of a sudden, as if helping someone else gave him strength. We walked to the bridge. It was open and now covered with water from cannons of the riot police trucks. We walked to the end and the police pushed us back again with tear gas. Bakry was keen not to lose us. He grabbed my hand and Simon’s hand and we went back toward the police again. This went on several times, until we came very close to Tahrir Square. I sat down on the ground. I pointed the camera at my watch to note the time. A tear gas canister landed a few feet next to me without me even realizing it. I jumped up and ran back. People around me were coughing. I couldn’t see.

We stood on the bridge, feet wet from stepping in puddles. Simon and I were ready to give up. Bakry insisted we move on and try one last time. It was dark. We walked into Tahrir Square, Liberation Square, to the sound of rhythmic banging on the metal poles holding up the handrails of the sidewalk. The police had been pushed to the other side. It looked like a war zone. A large fire burned and I saw the most amount of smoke of the whole day. People were walking into it.

I climbed up on a stone block with a metal grate above the underground metro line. I turned to a guy beside me, and told him that they had taken Tahrir Square. It was over. He said it wasn’t over, many other cities had to follow. But what they would do next, he said, he didn’t know.

It was over for me. I had reached Tahrir, or liberation, so to speak.

I walked back toward the car after about six hours in the protests, wondering if my friend Nermine was waiting. I managed to find a taxi by the grace of God. I landed back where I started, in front of Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque. I walked toward the street where Nermine’s car was. A friend of a friend stopped me to chat. I asked him how he felt. He was happy and amazed. Originally he didn’t want to join the “Facebook revolution,” but changed his mind after seeing a video on Youtube of an Egyptian who stood in front of a riot police truck that was firing from its water cannon.

I arrived at Nermine’s car just as she left. She had found a ride with a friend after waiting for an hour for me. It was dark and the streets were becoming unsafe without any police. I ran after the car, shouting her name, but it was too late. She left the key to her car with a boweb, or doorman, named Awwad and instructed him to give me my bag. I sat on the stoop next to them. I had nowhere to sleep. The only friend I knew with a place was on the other side of the city. After seeing the chaos in Tahrir Square, I knew I couldn’t make it to his apartment safely, even if I could walk for at least an hour to get there. I somehow had the feeling earlier that Nermine wouldn’t be there, and that I would end up where the bowebs were sleeping. Indeed, with typical Egyptian hospitality, they offered me a place to stay.

We descended into the garage and they made me a cup of tea. Within five minutes they called me their brother. We talked about what was happening. They insisted the protest was largely economic. They were tired of no work, lousy pay and a bunch of corrupt politicians and businessmen who robbed the country. Awwad told me of a friend who studied formal Arabic and could only find a job as a boweb. We chatted for some time, but they understood I was tired, so they set me up in a small room off to the side. I was prepared to sleep in the beds where we were drinking tea, but they insisted I sleep in the room because it was protected from the draft coming in from the garage entrance. The room was only a bed with metal walls around it–no floor. It smelled of insecticide, which was unpleasant, but relieving because I wouldn’t have to deal with cockroaches. They put my bag with me to protect from thieves. I was exhausted, but the day’s events swirled in my head. I slept on and off, at points hearing banging sounds from the street from what could have been gunshots. I wasn’t sure. I learned then that liberation does not come in a day.

Jan28 Part III

Large plumes of tear gas billowed in the distance as I walked toward the square in front of the gates to the opera. Exactly one year earlier I had passed through those gates wearing a suit and tie, thrilled to watch the Cairo symphony perform. This day I wore cargo pants and a green military jacket, believing for the first time in five years that Egyptians were taking their destiny into their own hands.

As I looked around nothing made sense. Riot police had blocked the Qasr El Neel Bridge, or the Palace of the Nile Bridge, with a line between the iconic statues of lions atop the pillars of bridge’s entrance. On one side of the square protestors were pleading with police officers to stop what was going on. The officers ignored them and spoke on their walkie-talkies. At one point a young man pulled away another man screaming at an officer because he knew such efforts were futile.

The crowd was swelling in the square. I looked up to the base of the statue of Ibrahim Pasha, one of Egypt’s great military leaders of the 19^th century. My friend, the Paris Match correspondent Alfred de Montesquiou, was taking notes on the scene. We talked about the enormous restraint Egyptians were showing, that if this day had occurred in other countries, the crowds would have acted with mob-mentality violence. He said he was amazed that after a fight broke out between a single police officer and a group of protesters, the group had carried the injured officer over to his fellow policeman for medical care.

We jumped down off the base of the camera when we saw several men rushing through the crowd carrying a body toward an ambulance. When we reached the ambulance a man was inside yelling. Many people gathered at its door and the as the driver was trying to reverse the vehicle. When it left, a man was standing with his white shirt steeped in blood. He began crying. Someone he knew, a woman, had died. Men embraced him in consolation.

Another group carried a man into the back of car and drove off. A tall, muscular young man in a white tank-top had a long slice down his arm. A medical practitioner examined his arm and told him he would be ok, and then attended to a man on the ground. A few men shouted to make room. When the space opened up I went in front of his feet to film what was happening. He rolled over on his side. His shirt was above his waist and I saw several round holes of blood on his back. He had been shot with a shotgun from behind–shot while running away.

The bridge had opened up, so I moved onto it. When I got about three-quarters of the way across it, men started Asr prayers around 3pm. The bridge went almost completely quiet. When they finished, they stood up and started moving. The police immediately fired tear gas into the crowd. Everyone headed back. In the scariest moment of the day we were pushing forward with our heads down. I was afraid if I fell, I would be trampled.

I got off the bridge and saw someone who had been hit with too much teargas. It was Simon Hanna, a producer for Reuters. I told him not to rub his eyes because it would make it worse. He had witnessed the previous days protests and the effects of the tear gas were making him lethargic. I looked across the street and saw another journalist, Ashraf Khalil. I called out his name and met him. We hugged, and as usual he had a big smile on his face. He told me his wife was freaking out that he was there, but that he needed to report. Ashraf is tough journalist who covered the Iraq War. He was not about to miss this. We spoke briefly; he had to keep moving. I then ran into Alfred, who wanted to head back to his hotel to file a story. The battery of his camera had died and he lost the photographer. He wanted to continue reporting, but he decided the story was too important to hold. I walked back to Midan Doqqi and we parted ways.

There I found the most incredible sights. A group of people sat in a circle on the street while singing national anthems and a Shiekh Imam (a revolutionary singer of the previous generation) song together. The square was packed. In its middle people were standing in rows as if they stood on risers in a choir, and they too were singing, and chanting "Aeesh, horreya, karama insaanaya," or "Bread (life), freedom, human dignity." I walked over to a wall on top of the bridge above the street that runs perpendicular to Tahrir Street. A man below me was making the peace sign with his fingers. Beyond him, and beyond my eyesight, thousands of people were walking toward us. As they passed to my left people on the sidewalk clapped and cheered them. I found Simon and stuck a microphone in his face and asked him if the protesters could make a run at Tahrir Square. “There’s a seemingly endless stream of protestors,” he said as he pointed in the distance. “There are tens of thousands, up to a hundred thousand–if not more–continuing to march up Kobri Qasr El Nil toward Midan Tahrir where they were stopped before, but with these numbers, I think there will be no stopping them at the moment.” I asked if he was calling it a revolution. He answered, “I think there’s no stopping it now. If not today, if not tomorrow, it’s this week. His days are numbered. Previously they were calling this to be Mubarak’s last day.”

“There’s no end in sight for these people. And they’re gonna get what they want. They have to; it’s too much now. It’s gone too far.”

As he said this, the crowd was chanting, “The people want the downfall of the system.”