Keeping Score
In a sign of how quickly assessments shift, I’m looking here at my notes from yesterday. Thirty hours ago activists in the square were on the defensive, convinced the state had reconstituted and had them on the run. By noon today they were triumphant, and Tahrir Square was so clogged with people it took an hour to walk across it at times.
Here was the grim scene from Monday, when all seemed lost (to some, for a moment).
The world outside the square intruded only sporadically. Undercover intelligence officers circulated filming people with their cell phones, and streams of newcomers walked over the bridge in the afternoon to see if the activists were as bad as they had heard on state television.
“Are they giving out free cell phones?” asked a young math teacher named Fareed, who refused to give his full name and said it was his first, and probably last, visit to the demonstration.
State television has been broadcasting various untruths about the demonstrators, including claims that they receive money and free fast food. “Where is my Kentucky Fried Chicken?” has become a rallying cry for the people staying in the square.
By late afternoon on Monday the numbers inside the square were as high as the previous day, but core activists worried that for every Egyptian attracted for the first time to Tahrir, ten more were being turned off by state propaganda.
“I spend entire nights arguing with my family and posting on Facebook. They have started to turn against the protests,” said Mona Rabie, 28, a human rights worker. Most of her family members dismiss the protesters as radical, although a few have said they would like to take part but fear government punishment. One of her cousins said she was interested in visiting Tahrir but only if Mona would escort her past the military checkpoints. By late evening though she hadn’t arrived. “She’s hesitating. She’s got cold feet,” Mona said. “I think the only way is if I physically go to her house and drag her here.”
“For a while the tide of fear had turned, but it’s started to come back,” Mona said. “The government has too much muscle. I think the people are going to turn against the protesters. They’ve already started.”
She told her uncle that at least a hundred dead had been taken to one Cairo hospital and she had spoken directly with the doctor in charge of the morgue. He didn’t believe her. “If it were true, they would have told us about it on television,” he told Mona.
Still, though, new reinforcements had joined the hard inner core of protesters, spurred on by footage of the violent clashes Wednesday night between government-orchestrated thugs and the Tahrir protesters.
Abdulrahman Mohammed, 34, came to Tahrir for the first time on Monday. “I saw these people on television, and I realized they were better than me,” he said. It was the first time he had joined a protest. “Democracy has a price, and that price is blood.”
