Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (18 page)

The twelve-person leadership then decided Kefaya was ready to take its campaign to the streets in defiance of martial law.

“Before, talking about change was like talking to a comatose person, because the Egyptian people were basically dead,” Ishak told me, sitting behind an old desk with nothing on it. “They hadn’t talked about political issues, real issues, in more than fifty years, since the days before the republic. All they cared about was how to feed their babies and stay with their families in a safe way.

“So, we had to start a political revival—on the streets,” he said, smiling broadly. “I loved this idea. I
needed
to go to the streets. We
all
needed to go to the streets.”

The first demonstration, on December 12, 2004, was held in total silence. Over their mouths, Egyptian protesters taped yellow stickers with Kefaya, or “Enough,” written in red.

Over the next year, Kefaya’s protests expanded the political boundaries wider than at any time since the 1952 revolution. Its demonstration on May 25, 2005, to coincide with the referendum, spawned new waves of participation and new activists. Even the Muslim Brotherhood scrambled to keep up with what initially looked like a popular movement that might rival or even surpass it. For the first time, the Brotherhood also began mobilizing followers for its own demonstrations.

“We opened the doors,” Ishak said. “The barrier of fear no longer seemed so high anymore.”

Egypt’s leading blogger, Baheyya, credited Kefaya as a catalyst.

Yet unlike the Brotherhood, Kefaya did not come up with a concrete program of action or candidates for either the presidential or parliamentary elections. Internal divisions were too deep. The movement instead urged supporters to boycott both elections in 2005—a decision that backfired.

Kefaya was unable to take the critical step from a protest movement to a political alternative or even a strong lobbying group, whether legal or not.

The movement inspired a host of offshoots: Youth for Change. Journalists for Change. Teachers for Change. Doctors for Change. Artists for Change. Lawyers for Change. And several others for change. But Kefaya itself remained something of a shell and a loose umbrella.

Kefaya reflected the core problem for nascent democratic movements throughout the region. It did not have a professional political elite. Its members were well intentioned but untrained. It had limited infrastructure—no office manager, no communications chief or equipment, no real staff. Ishak took all calls on his own cell phone. Funding depended on scanty donations. Protests relied on people who could afford—or dared—to get off work or go to jail, which was why the demonstrations usually involved the same group of people meeting up at diverse venues. And many of its most enthusiastic members were the idealistic young, who had limited clout.

“You call the Muslim Brotherhood at seven
A.M.
, and someone answers the phone,” Ishak admitted. “You talk to the younger generation in our organization, and they don’t answer the telephone until one in the afternoon because they don’t go to sleep until after the first prayers of the day. They talk to the girls all night.”

Wael Khalil, a forty-year-old information technology specialist with short curly hair and big round eyes, was among the early Kefaya activists. He went to its first protest. I met up with him at the annual conference of Egyptian socialists, where he was an organizer. He was wearing jeans and a deep-red polo shirt.

Khalil was candid about Kefaya’s impact. “The movement is still an infant,” he told me. “We have to be patient.”

But he conceded that Kefaya was stuck. “The success of that first year is gone. Kefaya has to reinvent itself. It has to be able to say, ‘OK, Mubarak won reelection and is still in power. What role can this network of forces play now?’ If someone wants to join Kefaya, the movement has to be able to tell him what he can do.

“The problem,” Khalil said, pulling his hand through his curls,

“is that Kefaya doesn’t have an answer. Kefaya hasn’t had more success because people who are unemployed don’t see it as their beacon.”

During parliamentary elections, Khalil ended up voting for a Muslim Brotherhood candidate—partly as a protest but also because Egyptian politics offered limited alternatives.

Most of the region’s traditional opposition groups are spent forces or are losing constituents.

Egypt’s oldest opposition group is the Wafd Party. But it, too, had begun to implode politically. Its presidential candidate, Noman Gomaa, received less than three percent of the vote when he ran against Mubarak in 2005. And Wafd won only six seats in parliament.

Wafd means “delegation.” The party emerged in 1919 among liberal activists who challenged both British colonial rule and Egypt’s monarchy. It was widely popular until it was forced to disband, along with other parties, after the 1952 revolution. The New Wafd was revived in the late 1970s and, again, became the main legal opposition party. Its power brokers were merchants, middle-class professionals, landowners, and the bourgeoisie marginalized after the revolution. But it never regained its earlier standing.

In a political soap opera, the party dumped Gomaa after his humiliating defeat in the 2005 elections. Gomaa, a former dean of Cairo University’s Faculty of Law then in his seventies, refused to go quietly, however. Backed by some fifty well-armed thugs, he stormed the party headquarters in an elegant old Cairo villa to reassert his control in April 2006. The group welded the front gates shut and overwhelmed staff and journalists putting out the party newspaper. Gomaa locked himself in his old office.

For the next ten hours, the two wings of Wafd had it out. The new leadership mobilized some 500 party faithful to confront Gomaa and retake the building. His thugs responded with gunfire and Molotov cocktails, according to local press accounts. In the end, Gomaa and his accomplices surrendered. They were charged with attempted murder, possession of firearms, instigating a riot, and a host of minor offenses.
²³

Wafd had never sunk so low.

One new democrat did emerge from Cairo’s turbulent elections in 2005, however. Ayman Nour is a baby-faced lawyer with a full head of dark hair and oversize glasses. He first made a name as a student activist in the 1980s. He won a seat in parliament in 1995, as the youngest member in the opposition, and again in 2000, both times for the Wafd Party.

Nour had a reputation as a feisty politician with a flair for showmanship. A champion of political prisoners, he often harangued the government about their treatment and demanded their release. During one of Egypt’s periodic bread shortages, he challenged the prime minister publicly to sample the rock-hard bread doled out to the poor.
²⁴
He regularly lambasted Mubarak as an old man, isolated from voters, and ineffective in office.

But after a falling-out with Gomaa, Nour broke away and founded al Ghad, or the Tomorrow Party. After a three-year battle, Tomorrow was finally allowed to register as a legal party in 2004. Nour then began a meteoric rise as the most prominent liberal democrat in Egypt.

I did not get to see him, however. He was in prison when I was in Cairo. It was his second stint in jail. He was first picked up in January 2005 and charged with forging names on petitions required to register a political party. He recounted what happened in a column he wrote for
Newsweek
entitled “Letter from Prison: Did I Take Democracy Too Seriously?”

Nour’s arrest came shortly before President Mubarak proposed a constitutional amendment allowing multiparty elections for president. Nour’s wife, Gameela Ismail, remembered the day of the announcement—and Nour’s reaction.

“Ayman was on a hunger strike, and I went to visit him, to try to convince him to stop, when he heard on the radio about the proposed amendment,” she told me. “So he immediately wrote a letter and said, ‘Give this to the party and have them approve it, and then give it to the media.’”

Nour had decided to run for president.

“I thought he was really going crazy,” she told me. “He was in prison!”

Under mounting pressure both at home and abroad, the government soon released Nour on bail—shortly after Condoleezza Rice canceled her first trip to Egypt as secretary of state to signal displeasure over the arrest.

Nour ran a quixotic campaign under the slogan “hope and change.” His platform offered Egyptians a two-year transition period. It would include an end to emergency law, release of political detainees, press freedom, an anticorruption campaign, education reform, and new laws to convert Egypt into a parliamentary republic.

Nour often spoke emotionally, occasionally breaking down from a combination of exhaustion, excitement, and behind-the-scenes harassment. Crass stories were leaked to the press, including one that his father had falsified Nour’s birth certificate to cover an illegitimate birth, a sensitive issue in Egypt. Another widespread rumor alleged that his two teenage sons played “satanic” music in a band, another sensitive issue in a deeply religious society.

“At the heart of frustration is oppression and the loss of hope,” Nour said on the day he opened his campaign. “The worst thing they stole from us is hope.”
²⁶

Nour came in second out of ten candidates, at a distance, with almost eight percent of the vote.

Defiant and still facing charges, Nour then ran again for parliament. This time, he lost the seat he had held for a decade in his stronghold. His supporters charged fraud.

A month later, in December 2005, Nour was convicted on the charges of forging names on his petition to register the party. He was sentenced to five years in prison. The verdict was condemned by governments and human rights groups worldwide. The White House said it was “deeply troubled” by the trial and called on Mubarak’s government to act “in the spirit of its professed desire for increased political openness and dialogue” and release Nour.

As usual on human rights issues, Cairo had no public reply.

Nour had been in prison again two months when I arrived in Egypt, so I called on his wife. A few hours beforehand, however, I received an urgent text message from her to go instead to a Cairo district court. Ismail had just been informed that her husband was being brought from prison to face seventeen new charges.

When she arrived, however, Ismail was also told she was going to be charged with two offenses.

The court proceedings were over by the time I got there. Getting anywhere in Cairo takes a long time. But Ismail, the family lawyers, and a small crowd of supporters were standing out on the curb of the courthouse with banners. She had a bullhorn in her hand and she was shouting as loud as she could, “Down, down Hosni Mubarak. Shame on the regime! End tyranny. Freedom for all!”

Police milled around on the outskirts, and I saw a line of young thugs with truncheons walk by single-file and deploy beyond the police. Ismail continued her one-woman protest until she was almost hoarse, and then it broke up.

Nour and Ismail met when she was an editorial assistant for
Newsweek
in Cairo. It was a love marriage. Her first assignment for the magazine had been to profile a young opposition figure under fire. He had recently launched a campaign against torture in prison and then been roughed up. During the interview, she asked his marital status—for the article. He took it as a sign she was interested and later asked her out. They were married two years later.

Since then, they have had an unusual political partnership.

Nour and Ismail live in a large apartment in the trendy Cairo suburb of Zamalek. The living room wall has an enormous picture, in oils, at least ten feet long, of Nour talking with a handful of colleagues in the courtyard of Egypt’s parliament. There is a pool on the large rooftop terrace and, as we talked, a large fluffy cat kept circling it.

Ismail has dark hair that falls in wavy curls. She has a creamy-soft face; she once was a television presenter on a government-controlled station. But she was also edgy and drained from the courthouse experience. Suddenly she was dealing with her own legal crisis.

“You know,” she said, “I remember one of the incidents they’re now charging me with. It was two months ago, and I was beaten on the head by a policeman at a demonstration. I told Ayman I wanted to file a report, but the policeman asked Ayman not to do it. Ayman told me this man is too poor, so we didn’t do anything. And then he files a report against us!