Thanassis Cambanis » Once Upon a Revolution

Foreign Affairs reviews OUaR

Posted April 21st, 2015 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Writing

Tags: Foreign Affairs, John Waterbury, Once Upon a Revolution, Review

Capsule review by John Waterbury in the latest Foreign Affairs

Once Upon A Revolution: An Egyptian Story
By Thanassis Cambanis
Reviewed by John Waterbury
FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE

Cambanis’ remarkable account of Egypt’s 2011 uprising and 2013 counterrevolution is built on his firsthand reporting. Cambanis was in the country during both developments and shared in the initial euphoria and in the bitter disappointment that followed. He tells the story mainly through in-depth profiles of two men: Basem, a middle-aged, secularist architect who became politically active in anger at the almost comically fraudulent 2010 parliamentary elections that confirmed President Hosni Mubarak’s grip on power, and Moaz, a young activist in the Muslim Brotherhood, impatient with the group’s leadership and willing to cooperate with people like Basem. Cambanis’ analysis is sharp, and he does not hold back when it comes to graphically depicting the Egyptian state’s violence against its own people, be they Coptic Christians or Muslim Brotherhood supporters. In his gripping account of the 2011 massacre of some two dozen Copts at a protest in front of the Maspero television building in Cairo, Cambanis squarely blames the violence on the military leadership. Likewise, Cambanis accuses the military of deliberately killing as many Brotherhood supporters as possible during a protest against the 2013 military coup that brought General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power. Cambanis claims, at one point, that the lessons of the 2011 uprising cannot be unlearned. But even though the Egyptian people pushed out one autocrat, Sisi’s regime is more authoritarian and less liberal than Mubarak’s. So it’s not altogether clear what the lessons are.

Max Strasser on Once Upon a Revolution

Posted March 30th, 2015 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Writing

Tags: Book Review, Egypt, Once Upon a Revolution

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[Review essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books]

When the Sun Falls over Tahrir

March 28th, 2015

By Max Strasser

SOMETIME IN THE SUMMER of 2011, I was sitting with a few friends at a café on the edge of a cliff overlooking Cairo. We were smoking shisha and drinking tea and beer, watching the sun set over the taupe tableau when we spotted two tall, blond men on the other side of the terrace with a digital camera, filming the sun’s descent through the smog. After a little while, I decided to make conversation. In thick Dutch accents they explained what they were doing: They wanted to film the sunrise over Cairo but, because it was too early in the morning and they only had a limited time in Egypt to shoot, they were filming the sunset instead, which they would play backward. They were making a documentary about the Egyptian revolution.

In the year after the Tahrir uprising that took place in January and February 2011, Cairo was crawling with good-natured documentarians. Having watched the inspiring 18-day “Arab Spring” revolution on television, they clamored to come see the action themselves, and maybe get a taste of the utopia and possibility that was Tahrir Square. Dutch filmmakers on shoestring budgets weren’t the only ones, of course. American anarchists, British journalists, French photographers all wanted a piece of what was going on in Egypt. Many of them left shortly after, taking with them their short films, their articles, blog posts, and think pieces, glorifying the revolution and telling the world that radical political change could be more than just a dream. Egypt had a perfect revolution: horizontal, spontaneous, inspiring. A radical’s fairy tale — or so it seemed.

Some observers stayed longer. Thanassis Cambanis watched not only the sunrise but also the sunset. The product is his book Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story, a comprehensive, straightforward — and sympathetic — accounting of the Egyptian revolution from its percolations in the anti-police brutality movement that began in Cairo and Alexandria in the summer of 2011 up through the brutal start of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s presidency, making stops along the way to various elections, constitutions, and protests.

Once Upon a Revolution provides a detailed timeline for people with a keen interest in the sequence of events in Egypt in the early years after the Tahrir uprising: the book is a methodical, unforgiving, nearly day-by-day account of mismanaged political parties, state repression, chaos, and fear. But it is more than just a primer. Whether Cambanis intended it or not, his book practically reads as a manual — a cautionary and instructive tale that should be required reading for would-be revolutionaries everywhere, Wall Street Occupiers and Hong Kong umbrella-holders alike, on the extent to which the powerful will go to prevent change and the pitfalls of decentralized revolutionary movements.

The book is loosely centered on two characters, both committed revolutionaries. Basem Kamel is a secular liberal, a middle-class architect with a family, living on the outskirts of Cairo. Moaz Abdelkarim is an idiosyncratic Islamist, a poorly dressed and perpetually tardy pharmacist who makes friends with the leftists and liberals in the tent camps in Tahrir Square during the 18-day “Arab Spring” uprising and eventually breaks with the Muslim Brotherhood over its exclusivist policies. They serve as imperfect stand-ins for the main strains of the Egyptian opposition and, over the course of the book, they become familiar if never truly deep characters. It’s the story of the revolution itself that drives Once Upon a Revolution’s narrative along.

Anyone who follows news from the Middle East knows the horrific ending (at least for now) to the story. Today, in Egypt, revolutionaries are jailed while officials from the former regime run for parliament. To understand how the country got from that to this, it helps to dwell a bit in the details, in the small missteps and sown chaos that took place between February 11, 2012, when President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, and August 14, 2013, the date when the army murdered some 600 Muslim Brotherhood supporters and began a crackdown that lasts until today. That’s precisely what Cambanis does, and the results are useful.

After the initial protests forced President Hosni Mubarak from power, a military junta known as the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) took control of Egypt. The generals vociferously claimed they were the defenders of the revolution, but they did everything in their power to stymy radical change. They fast-tracked constitutions and dissolved parliaments, they cut backroom deals and initiated prosecutions. Most of all, they sowed fear and chaos that ultimately served them perfectly.

Once Upon a Revolution devotes an entire chapter to the night of October 9, 2011, and the days afterward. That evening, a protest of Coptic Christians demanding equal rights marched from a north Cairo neighborhood to the headquarters of the state media, known as Maspero. The march was met with unexpected brutality: Armored personnel carriers barreled into unarmed protesters. Military police fired live bullets into the crowd. Twenty-eight died. Reports emerged of the army tossing bodies into the nearby Nile. That night, Egyptian state media spewed sectarian incitement against the Christian minority community. In the aftermath, the generals made pitiful attempts to spin the facts: the Copts had killed each other, the APC’s collision course was an accident.

At the time, the impact of the massacre wasn’t even completely evident to Egyptians themselves, much less outside observers. Cambanis writes, “In the weeks that followed the massacre, Egypt went about business as usual. The organized political class rallied the cadres. Maspero hardly affected the calculations of the SCAF, the Wafd Party, the Brothers, and the Salafis.” On the surface that’s true, but the effect was more subtle and more profound. The Maspero massacre — along with the police’s repeated crushing of anti-SCAF protests and even the February 2012 soccer riot in Port Said that left more than 70 people dead — became part of a patchwork of violence that created a climate of instability, fear, and paranoia. Compared with Mubarak’s resignation or the July 3, 2013 military coup, the Maspero massacre may appear a minor sideshow. And yet these events — whether they were at the behest of the SCAF or not we may never know — helped lay the groundwork for the military’s takeover.

But the military wouldn’t have been able to launch its power grab had it not been for political conditions on the ground, something on which Cambanis keeps an equally close eye. Recounting the opposition’s incompetence is just as crucial for understanding why Sisi’s retrenchment was possible. The Muslim Brotherhood deserves perhaps as much blame as the military for the revolution’s failure to achieve its goals. The group was famously Egypt’s best-organized political organization and one of the few actors with enough clout to negotiate with the military. It did so repeatedly and in the process betrayed the fundamental aims of the revolution. The Brotherhood leadership cut deals with the army to bring itself to power, as when it backed the SCAF-written constitution and helped push forward premature elections.

The Brotherhood’s politicking succeeded — for a time. Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood candidate, won the 2012 presidential election. But the Islamists’ missteps and overreaches helped turn Egyptians away from the democratic experiment and, in the end, straight back into the army’s waiting hands. Cambanis’s chapter on Morsi’s rule is titled “The Enemy Within.” It recounts exactly what the Brotherhood did to make its sometimes-allies, the revolutionaries, so completely distrustful: cutting deals with the SCAF and standing by the military and police while they cracked down on anti-government protests. By the summer of 2012, when Morsi became the president, the Brotherhood had no credibility. Morsi’s rule only undermined it further, seemingly proving everyone’s worst fears by proposing banning alcohol to issuing a radical decree in November 2012 that gave himself nearly unlimited powers as president over the judiciary and the constitution-writing process.

It was more or less inevitable that the anti-authoritarians would join forces with the anti-Islamist reactionaries to oppose Morsi. Many among the revolutionaries — including the social democrat Basem, one of Cambanis’s protagonists — backed a June 30, 2013 protest calling for Morsi’s removal. Three days later, the anti-Morsi protests culminated with a military takeover.

The revolutionaries — the leftists and liberals who formed the core of the uprising and tried to keep its goals alive amid military massacres and Brotherhood backroom dealing — do not emerge blameless from the tumultuous 2011–2013 period. Cambanis is unabashedly sympathetic to them. (I was, and am, too.) But he can’t help but point out their foibles. The revolutionaries failed to take advantage of electoral politics; they neglected political organizing in the countryside and the small cities in favor of Cairo and Alexandria (and Tahrir Square in particular); they made demands on the government that were at times unreasonable; they squandered opportunities to have their voices heard by those who held power; far too often they fought among themselves. (Something that some — such as the Revolutionary Youth Coalition, of which Moaz, one of Cambanis’s central characters, was a member — came to admit only too late.)

Nothing exemplifies the revolutionaries’ pitfalls and failures as well as the ill-fated Tahrir Square sit-in of July 2011. Amid feelings that the revolution had stalled under military rule, the revolutionary groups repaired to their favorite tactic: a tent camp in the center of Cairo. But unlike the initial uprising demanding Mubarak leave the presidency, this time the goals were diffuse and hazy. Protesters called for prosecution of members of the former regime, including hanging Mubarak, but other arguments were presented poorly. The protesters gathered under the conveniently ambiguous slogan “The Revolution First.” Once they were stuck in the square — in the sweltering weather of Cairo in July — they couldn’t back down. Each group was concerned about looking somehow less revolutionary than the others. The sit-in lacked public support and petered out. The memory of the July sit-in, like so much from that decisive year, will likely wither into oblivion. It was one of many missteps. But by focusing a chapter around it (“Stuck in the Square”), by describing the way the revolutionaries argued among themselves and aimlessly checked social media on their iPhones from the center of Tahrir, Cambanis makes clear what exactly went wrong, giving a microcosmic preview of the ways the revolution would falter. Every political organizing meeting in Cairo that devolved into pointless bickering under a cloud of cigarette smoke feels like a tragic missed connection — what if that one had only worked out?

Maybe those are lessons that can be learned for the next time around. Cambanis ends his book discussing the possibility of the revolution continuing in some form, at some point in the future. “The revolution continues,” was a common slogan during the years covered in the book, it was spray painted on walls, uttered in conversations, chanted at protests. It was even the name of a short-lived political party. It’s a hard mantra to keep alive these days. But optimism in itself can be revolutionary. President Sisi’s rule won’t last forever. And when the revolution continues — Egypt’s or any of the many uprisings that Tahrir inspired — a close reading of the history of Egypt from 2011 to 2013 could help the revolutionaries understand how to move forward.

That history shows the lengths to which entrenched elites will go to hold on to power: how they will manipulate, obfuscate, censor, and squash the opposition. At the same time, this recent history demonstrates for would-be revolutionaries the importance not just of learning how to protest and break down structures of power, but how new ones must be built from the ground up. The start of Egypt’s revolution was telegenic and inspiring; its demise, for now, at the hands of General Sisi has been hideous and demoralizing. But it’s important to know what happens between the sunrise and the sunset.

Max Strasser is an associate editor at Foreign Policy magazine.

Frontline review: Republic of Tahrir

Posted March 19th, 2015 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Writing

Tags: Once Upon a Revolution, Reviews, Vijay Prashad

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Tahrir Square, Cairo: Protests against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood government on June 29, 2013. Photo:Amr Abdallah Dalsh/REUTERS

Vijay Prashad’s Frontline review

Obituaries for the 2011 revolution are only now emerging. The general sense is of futility: What was the point of the uprising if the outcome is worse than the situation that existed?

By Vijay Prashad

FOUR YEARS HAVE ELAPSED SINCE THE people of Egypt overthrew the long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak. Millions took to the streets out of frustration. Too much had gone wrong in their country. Far too many of their friends and relatives languished in prison or hid their views for fear of imprisonment. Jobs seemed out of reach, and prices rose beyond imagination. The old “republic of bread” had ceased to function. A small clique, led by Mubarak’s son Gamal (Jimmy), hid itself away in gated communities with its ill-gotten gains. Nothing of the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution remained. Statues of Gamal Abdel Nasser were insufficient. Add to this the humiliation of a military that had turned its guns on its own population while accepting an annual “subsidy” from the United States to secure a peace agreement with Israel. A great deal drew the public to Egypt’s central squares.

Anger at Mubarak came from the youth and the workers, from the liberals and the Islamists and from the ranks of the military. The generals looked with despair at Mubarak’s desire to enthrone his son—to reverse the entire course of the 1952 revolution. The urgency with which Jimmy skimmed money from the public exchequer and doled out favours to his well-heeled friends also upset the military. The generals, perhaps more soberly than Mubarak, knew that economic inequality beside the culture of opulence would not sit well in Egypt. Mubarak and his son had to go. Tahrir gave the generals an opening. They seized it.

These four years of Egyptian history have been kaleidoscopic. Jubilation at the removal of Mubarak on February 11, 2011, was followed by despair at the coup of July 3, 2013. The death toll in the fight against Mubarak did not stop with his move to his retirement villa in Sharm al-Sheikh—it has actually intensified to the present day. Human rights groups are unable to give an accurate figure for those who are in prison under spurious charges and for those who have been killed in clashes and mass executions. The current government’s own definitions of imprisonment and murder do not allow for ease of calculation. Everyone who the government does not like, it seems, is now a terrorist. It is the term of art for dissenter.

History of the Egyptian Revolution

Obituaries for Egypt’s 2011 revolution have only now begun to emerge. The general sense is of futility: What was the point of the uprising if the outcome is worse than the situation that existed? Mass social change is rarely predictable. No people rise up with the expectation that they will fail. That is why the opening of every mass struggle is deeply inspirational. It is also the case that each mass struggle results in a new order that is not capable of its original spark. Sitting in his Turkish exile in 1930, Leon Trotsky wrote his magisterial History of the Russian Revolution. Thirteen years had elapsed since the October Revolution when he published his book. The revolution was already being derided. “Capitalism,” Trotsky wrote in conclusion, “required a hundred years to elevate science and technique to the heights and plunge humanity into the hell of war and crisis. To socialism its enemies allow only fifteen years to create and furnish a terrestrial paradise. We took no such obligation upon ourselves. We never set these dates. The process of vast transformation must be measured by an adequate scale.”

The dramatic optimism that marks Trotsky’s book cannot be mirrored in any work on the Egyptian uprising. It is not the uprising that sets the tone, but its defeat. Of all the books that are available on the recent events in Tahrir, the journalist Thanassis Cambanis’ Once Upon a Revolution (2015) provides the most compelling portrait of the urgency of the rebellion and the despondency in its loss. Cambanis, an American journalist who is based in Beirut, Lebanon, spent a great deal of time with the revolutionaries of Egypt—being swept up in particular with the more liberal sections, people who wanted the rule of law to dominate the system.

Two men anchor his narrative—Basem Kamel, an architect who becomes a social democratic politician, and Moaz Abdelkarim, a former Muslim Brotherhood member who flees into Turkish exile. Cambanis follows these two men through the streets of Cairo until they reach Tahrir Square and then outwards from the mythical square into the tumult of electioneering and political intrigue. Both Basem and Moaz form part of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition (RYC), the nerve centre of the uprising, which Cambanis says, “was meant to enshrine all the values and best practices of revolutionary youth”.

Early on, it had become clear that lack of clear leadership would imperil the revolution. Cambanis has harsh things to say about the Left and derides the Russian Revolution early in his book. Nonetheless, at several junctures, he wishes for the very vanguard activity that might have saved Tahrir’s utopianism: Cambanis suggests that matters might have gone differently if the revolutionaries had marched onto the Maspero Building early on and seized state television; this is what Nasser’s Free Officers did, and it is what allowed them to control the narrative of events. Cambanis also recognises that those whom he calls “rigid Leftists mattered because they formed one of the most dedicated phalanxes of labour organisers and street fighters”. Since the RYC, and the Left, was not strong enough to exert its will on the revolution, that task fell into the lap of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Formed in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood had patiently awaited its moment. Over the past 60 years, its members had gradually cemented themselves as a social force—with Brotherhood families integrally linked through their filial cells, their usra, and with Brotherhood members in professions that allowed them to develop positions of respect in society (as doctors, engineers and lawyers). Prison and exile were not far from the lives of their leaders, but they persevered. Although the Brotherhood came late to Tahrir, it nonetheless entered the square as part of the uprising. Calculated deals with the military allowed the Brotherhood to insinuate itself into the political process. Its deep roots in Egyptian society and use of its networks allowed the Brotherhood to take advantage of the mass uprising. Not long after the removal of Mubarak, it had become clear that on the surface the Muslim Brothers would reap the reward. But this was on the surface alone. As Cambanis notes, on February 10, 2011, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) issued Communiqué no. 1, in which the SCAF claimed the dignity of the revolt and began to set its future course. If there was a coup, it was then. Cambanis calls it a “quiet coup” and notes that the “transitional order” was going to “wear khaki”. That transitional order set aside not only the RYC but also the Muslim Brotherhood, the Constitution, the elections and Parliament—in order to reappear by 2013 as the saviour of Egypt.

The liberals simply did not have the wherewithal to hold fast. “Most of their candidates,” Cambanis writes, “looked visibly uncomfortable on a sidewalk, and even more so in the company of a shaabi, or lower-class Egyptian.” This was not their métier. They were professionals who had little political contact with the masses. Hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood’s suffocating agenda had thrown the liberals into a convoluted alliance with the SCAF by 2013. One of the most uncomfortable facts of recent Egyptian history is that more people came out onto the streets on June 30, 2013, to oppose the government of the Muslim Brotherhood (led by Mohamed Morsi) than in 2011 in Tahrir Square. All kinds of people took to the streets that day: Salafis alongside liberals, reactionaries alongside revolutionaries. The liberal stalwart Mohamed ElBaradei said that the SCAF “will just come back to stabilise. And then we will start all over again.” This was naïve. The SCAF dismissed the political process, began its campaign of imprisonment of dissent and portrayed itself as the inheritors of Nasser and stability. Tensions in the Sinai Peninsula over the rise of Islamist radicalism and the emergence of chaos in Libya provided the SCAF’s new leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, with a raison d’être. But tension in the Sinai began in 2010, predating both the Tahrir uprising and the emergence of the Brotherhood to power. If anything, the emergence of terrorist cells signals the failure of the military rather than its necessity.

In the days after Tahrir, the streets of Egypt would be greeted with the chant, yasqut, yasqut hukm al-‘askar (Down, down the military rule)! These words would rise into the apartments of Cairo’s residents. Excitement with the demonstrations also led to a measure of exhaustion with the process. What was promised was not clear, and what was asked for seemed impossible. “All power to the Soviets,” declared the subjects of the tsar in 1917. They wanted to become citizens in their own popular parliaments. The desire in 2011 was much the same. But as the “wall of fear” fell before the chants of the revolutionaries, it was as hastily rebuilt by the SCAF and its allies (which included Saudi Arabia and, then later, the West). In 1967, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani wrote: “You are the generation that will defeat defeat.” This is a consistent hope in the Arab political landscape.

Boston Globe reviews “Once Upon a Revolution”

Posted February 16th, 2015 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Writing

Tags: Book Review, Once Upon a Revolution

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Demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in February 2011 celebrate the fall of Hosni Mubarak. KHALIL HAMRA/ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE

[Read review here in The Boston Globe.]

By Bernard Vaughan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT, FEBRUARY 13, 2015

“I must be frank,” journalist Thanassis Cambanis writes very early on in his new book about the 2011 uprising in Egypt. “I fell in love with the Tahrir Revolution, but this love didn’t blind me to its faults.”

It’s a bland introductory declaration, easily forgotten by a reader eager to experience Tahrir Square. But it is one Cambanis, a regular columnist for The Boston Globe’s Ideas section, convincingly elucidates in “Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story,” which is both a warm, deeply human chronicle of the people who drove the revolution and a cool, withering analysis of why they failed — or, as Cambanis prefers, were “defeated.”

The story follows a handful of activists, especially Moaz Abdelkarim, a 26-year-old “schlumpy pharmacist,” and Basem Kamel, an architect and family man in his early 40s. Abdelkarim grew up in the Muslim Brotherhood, has a fierce independent streak, and is impulsive. Kamel had avoided politics and is punctual, pragmatic, and shrewd. Together, Cambanis writes, they represented, respectively, the revolution’s id and ego.

The first 50 pages intertwine Abdelkarim and Kamel’s personal histories with the revolution’s roots before the two activists join the same cell marching to Tahrir Square on Jan. 25, 2011. For the casual observer, the uprising could seem to have come out of nowhere or been inspired by unrest in Tunisia. Cambanis explains it had been brewing since at least 2002 and boiled over the previous summer, when police in Alexandria beat to death an apolitical young man.

This background helps us understand how Abdelkarim and Kamel behave during and after the revolution. Kamel’s knack for retail politics is logical because we remember how, as an architect, he loved managing projects while interacting with “men of every social class and background” on job sites. Abdelkarim’s difficulty thinking beyond the moment fits a pattern, such as when he nobly questioned President Hosni Mubarak’s regime on state television years earlier in a segment that was edited out and only resulted in expanding his state security file.

As the Tahrir demonstrations escalate, there are, of course, moments of elation and euphoria as Islamists and secularists unite in common cause. But they were unable to sustain a coalition, which left liberal reformers ill-equipped to challenge the old regime’s “deep state” apparatus or the Muslim Brotherhood’s political machine. And Cambanis faults the revolutionaries for not trying to seize Egypt’s state television headquarters — despite its being surrounded by tanks — thereby forfeiting the main source of information for most Egyptians.

“Even at Tahrir’s pinnacle, the seeds of future divisions had already taken root,” Cambanis writes.

As the military overtly asserts control after Mubarak’s fall and again when President Mohamed Morsi falls out of favor, the reformers prove unwilling or unable to unify around tangible political goals, further alienating themselves from the masses. In one rambling, smoke-filled meeting, they “talked out of turn and rarely took their eyes off their smartphones.”

“The coalition’s loyalty to revolution was unquestionable,” Cambanis writes. “In practice, however, the revolutionary leaders behaved like teenage boyfriends with noble intentions and truncated attention spans.”

Anecdotes like this — from beyond the square — are when “Once Upon a Revolution” is most illuminating. In one moving episode, traumatized Muslims and Christians heatedly debate, fight, and comfort each other at a morgue after a deadly military crackdown. At Tahrir’s peak, rich kids drink expensive coffee at fancy cafes while complaining about traffic; poor people worry about their livelihoods. “These people in Tahrir Square represent only a minority of Egyptians,” a pastry shop manager tells Cambanis. Cable news and social media do not easily capture such enriching details.

Egypt today has reached “an impossibly sad juncture,” led by the popular Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who in his first year of control killed and arrested more people than the ousted Mubarak had in nearly three decades, Cambanis writes. But the revolution still happened, and its true impact could take decades to assess, he says. Underlining Cambanis’s many criticisms is intense admiration for the risks revolutionaries took and their accomplishments.

“They contributed something invaluable to the moral fiber of the universe, and, less abstractly, they learned to organize and command substantial power,” he writes. “They might well find a way to change their country.”

Bernard Vaughan is a New York-based journalist.

NYT reviews “Once Upon a Revolution”

Posted February 16th, 2015 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Writing

Tags: Once Upon a Revolution, Review

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Protestors in Tahrir Square wave their shoes at the televised image of Hosni Mubarak, Feb. 1, 2011. Credit: Ed Ou for The New York Times

[Read review here in the NYT.]

By PATRICK COCKBURN, FEB. 13, 2015

Western coverage of the Arab Spring was often simple-minded, as journalists focused on the dramatic confrontations between the police and protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo or on Libyan militiamen fighting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s soldiers on the road south of Benghazi. Uprisings were reported like scenes out of “Les Misérables,” with an oppressed people battling a brutal tyranny everywhere from Tunis to Bahrain.

There was nothing culpable about this. Genuine revolutions may seem to succeed at first because they are the unexpected outcome of contradictory forces coming together almost by chance. When the first protest began in Cairo on the morning of Jan. 25, 2011, the demonstrators chanted: “Bread! Freedom! Social Justice! The people demand the fall of the regime.” Up to the last moment the organizers were uncertain that anybody would dare come out onto the streets to support them.

The most important revolution of the Arab Spring was in Egypt, whose 90 million inhabitants make it the most populous country in the Arab world. Had the revolutionaries won there, the balance of power between democracy and dictatorship would have changed across the region. Over 18 days, secular and Islamist opponents of President Hosni Mubarak fought together in and around Tahrir Square to end his 29 years in power. These were the heroic days of the revolution, and they were never to be repeated. Instead, divisions within the opposition became wider, while the partisans of the discredited old regime recovered their nerve and eventually returned to power. On July 3, 2013, a military coup with much popular support overthrew and jailed the first truly elected Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi. In May 2014 the former army field marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was elected president to replace him with 96.9 percent of the vote, a figure underlining the degree to which the authoritarian state was confidently back in business.

It is one of the many strengths of Thanassis Cambanis’s fluent, intelligent and highly informed book, “Once Upon a Revolution,” that he convincingly explains what happened in Egypt over the last four years. It should be read by anybody perplexed by how Egypt’s apparent entry into a brave new democratic world was ultimately defeated. This account has the vividness and readability of eyewitness reporting combined with an unsentimental and perceptive judgment about where the opponents of autocracy went wrong.

Cambanis, the author of “A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel,” got to know the activists who started the first demonstrations and describes developments as they appeared to him. He does not underestimate the difficulties the revolutionaries had in mobilizing people against a state that had developed so many instruments of control since the army first took power in Egypt in 1952. They had to overcome the sense of hopelessness and cynicism among the mass of Egyptians, who had come to believe that any attempt to better their lot was doomed to failure and might even leave them worse off. Egyptian leaders fostered this fear of insecurity, claiming that iron rule from the top was the only alternative to anarchy. “Egypt’s dictators had insisted that their subjects were incompetent, helpless sheep who needed a strong hand,” Cambanis writes. “Left on their own, they’d make a mess and starve to death.”

Egyptians have paid a heavy price for their centuries-long tradition of authoritarian rule and the consequent political inexperience of its opponents at all levels. It is common to blame the victory of the counterrevolution on the self-isolating mistakes of the Muslim Brotherhood after it won the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012. But in fact all opposition parties, secular and Islamist, were fighting among themselves and with one another long before they had taken over the institutions of the old regime. In the final round of the parliamentary election in January 2012 some 27 million Egyptians voted. Almost six months later the Parliament was dissolved by the Supreme Constitutional Court, which was dominated by old-regime appointees, while moderate secular parties failed to agree on running a single candidate who might have won the presidency. Many secular Egyptians applauded when more than 700 Muslim Brotherhood protesters were massacred by the police and the army in Rabaa Square on Aug. 14, 2013.

The supporters of democracy in Egypt always held a weaker hand than the outside world imagined. Mubarak fell because of pressure from below, but also because the Egyptian Army was alienated by his plan to have his son Gamal succeed him. The organizers of the street protests were naïve about taking advantage of their original astonishing successes; they never displaced their enemies from positions of power, attempting “a revolution without any of the usual political gambits. They didn’t try to take over the government’s television stations or any ministries.” Their restraint meant that they were slandered by the state media as well-off playboys and drug-takers, as sexually promiscuous or gay, and in the pay of foreign countries. The Western media exaggerated the extent to which the Internet, Facebook and YouTube circumvented government control of television, newspapers and radio. Cambanis concludes that “the Internet age hasn’t reconfigured the calculus of power.”

The weaknesses of the opposition were not all self-inflicted. It’s true that there was deep popular anger in Egypt because the ruling elite had never delivered prosperity in exchange for depriving Egyptians of their political and civil rights. Most people “found themselves in a Potemkin republic, crowded into unplanned apartments on narrow lanes, their grown children unemployable in Egypt whether they had a master’s degree or merely a strong back.” Poverty combined with miserable health and education facilities ensured plenty of dry tinder for revolutionaries. But the very backwardness of Egypt limited their ability to ignite it.

State propaganda for more than half a century had fostered delusions about military rule much to the advantage of those who benefited from the status quo. Demonstrators went on chanting “The army and the people are one hand” long after it was apparent that the army was orchestrating the murder, imprisonment and torture of protesters. Cambanis says that “even faced with overwhelming evidence of the military’s malfeasance, too many revolutionaries were willing to trust the military as an impartial referee. The revolution never sought to dispel the shibboleth that Egypt’s army was sacred.”

Somehow this army that never won a war in the 60 years it has ruled Egypt has avoided responsibility for the miserable state to which it has reduced the country. During the two years of revolutionary upsurge, it convinced Egyptians that it was the sole barrier against violence and sectarian hatreds that were fomented or manipulated by the military itself. When Copts demonstrated in front of Maspero, the state media headquarters in Cairo, they were shot down by soldiers and run over by armored cars. “Go help the army,” an announcer on state television declared. “Our soldiers are being attacked by Christians.”

Cambanis expresses uncertainty as to whether Tahrir Square was just an interlude in Egypt’s tragedy. He quotes Cairo street graffiti that ask, “Do you remember the tomorrow that never came?” His story of what happened will do much to keep that memory alive.

Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent of The Independent of London. His latest book is “The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution.”

The Broken Dream of Tahrir Square

Posted February 9th, 2015 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Writing

Tags: Alaa Abdel Fattah, Basem Kamel, Egypt, Moaz Abdelkarim, Once Upon a Revolution, Spiegel

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Basem Kamel in Cairo. Photo: Rena Effendi/Institut/DER SPIEGEL

[Der Spiegel published this update on a trio of revolutionaries four years after Tahrir Square. I extended the reporting for Once Upon a Revolution with followups in Cairo and Istanbul this winter. The story has been translated from English into German and then back again.]

On the fourth anniversary of the revolution, jailed blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah weighs 72 kilograms (159 pounds). It’s the 84th day of his hunger strike. Former Muslim Brother Moaz Abdelkarim has fled to Turkey. And architect Basem Kamel plans on running for parliament this spring.

For 18 days, the three men served as the protagonists in a grand historical drama. They wanted to reinvent their country and indeed the entire Middle East, with the world looking on enthusiastically. Without these three men — a Muslim Brother, an architect and a blogger who represent the heart, soul and brawn of the insurgency — the Egyptian revolution might never have happened.

The three activists camped out almost every day on Tahrir Square, helping the wounded and coordinating the protests. When Hosni Mubarak announced his resignation on Feb. 11, 2011, millions in Tahrir — and across the country — screamed, prayed and danced. “Never again can the regime ignore the people,” architect Basem said, barely audible over the euphoric chanting. He was confident that the generals who had seized power in Mubarak’s wake would be quickly dispatched by people power.

But four years later, there is little left of the revolution — its heroes have either fled, been jailed or receded into insignificance. Despite all this, they still haven’t given up.

Fleeting Freedom

When the Tahrir uprising began, Alaa Abdel Fattah was in South Africa, where he’d moved to take a computer programming job. He quickly returned, and when I first met him in February 2011, he was staring wistfully at the state media headquarters, the Maspero Building on the Nile River. “It’s impossible to take over this building,” he said, pointing at the row of tanks protecting it from the thousands of young unarmed demonstrators out front. “They could kill us all.”

Fattah was 29 at the time. He had a potbelly, long curly hair and a smile that pushed out his cheeks. He dressed like a programmer and brought brainy discourse to Tahrir, but he was also equally committed to the fight, standing firm in the face of regime attacks. His father was a well-known human rights lawyer and Abdel Fattah seemed to be born with the spirit of resistance in his blood.

Hosni Mubarak was still in power the first time he got sent to jail. The second came after the revolution in 2011. He got hauled in for a third time at the end of 2013. A fourth arrest occurred during the summer of 2014. On August 18, 2014, Abdel Fattah began a hunger strike in his prison cell.

At Abdel Fattah’s trial in September, the absurdity of the paranoid police state was on full display. He stood accused of crimes against the state and was sentenced to 15 years in jail. The defendant was put in a glass cage, his microphone silenced. Prosecutors, clearly unable to prove that Abdel Fattah committed any crimes against the state, showed a video illegally seized during his arrest. It showed his wife belly dancing at a private gathering. He was released on bail, but only briefly.

“My temporary release is a conspiracy like the case with my imprisonment,” Abdel Fattah wrote on Facebook after he got let out of jail. He was arrested again only a few weeks later. The conviction has since been overturned due to procedural errors, but he remains in prison awaiting retrial. Abdel Fattah’s younger sister, Sanaa Seif, is also in jail, serving out a two-year sentence for protesting her brother’s detention.

This is the situation in Egypt today, four years after the revolution, which began on Jan. 25, 2011 and ultimately forced the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, who had been the country’s president for decades. After the military unseated Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi as the country’s first elected civilian president in July 2013, the brief phase of freedom came to an abrupt end. In the time that has passed since, the Muslim Brotherhood has been outlawed. Court proceedings against Mubarak didn’t lead anywhere; and his sons, who also faced charges, have just been released from jail. Meanwhile, most of the influential revolutionary activists are either in jail or have fled into exile abroad. In Cairo, the military is ruling again with a strongman at its helm.

Today there are even fewer avenues for dissent than there were before the revolution. No public gatherings are allowed; the secret police exerts a tighter grip than ever; parliament has been disbanded; and the media cheers on President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Moaz Abdelkarim in Istanbul.

A Failed Revolution

There are also court proceedings against Moaz Abdelkarim in Cairo, but he managed to flee the country in time. The pharmacist and former Muslim Brother now lives in Istanbul and has shaved his light beard. “It doesn’t look like a revolution,” he says. “It looks like a failure.”

During the revolution, Abdelkarim was a young Muslim Brother who dressed like an old Islamist, with pleated pants and plaid shirts. He had a youthful grin and was a bit naive, but he also had an iron rebellious streak. He had grown up inside the disciplined Islamist movement as a third-generation Muslim Brother, but he chafed at its dictatorial traditions. Brotherhood leaders ordered their members to stay away from the uprising, but Abdelkarim ignored them, instead joining a group of opposition activists who met in secret apartments and later formed the seeds of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition.

After the revolution, Abdelkarim and other young Muslim Brothers formed the new Egyptian Current party. They were Islamists, but they believed passionately in a liberal, secular government and were committed to democratic principles and separation of religion and state. “I am Islamic,” he said in the spring of 2011. “But I don’t want an Islamic state. A state can’t be Islamic any more than a chair can be Islamic.” He attacked the Muslim Brotherhood in public when its members decided to found a party. The organizers responded by initiating disciplinary proceedings against Abdelkarim and expelling him.

On two different occasions, the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces invited Revolutionary Youth Coalition leaders to meetings, and Abdelkarim also attended. The bemused generals listened to what the young activists had to say, but then politely ignored all their proposals and appeals. It quickly became clear to Abdelkarim that the generals had no intention of changing anything and that the old regime was still in power.

He nevertheless still believed the revolution stood a chance right up until the point when security forces invaded the Islamist encampment at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square on August 14, 2013. Supporters of Morsi had camped out and called for the reinstatement of their president. The security forces could have dispersed the sit-in with teargas and water cannons as they had done so often. But this time, they came in with guns blazing with live ammunition, at point blank range. The massacre lasted almost a day and, in the end, at least 800 people died — perhaps as many as 2,600, according to the Muslim Brotherhood’s estimates.

On Twitter, his friend Basem Kamel placed the blame for the massacre on Muslim Brotherhood leaders for putting their followers on a path to confrontation.

Abdelkarim drove the injured to the hospital, organized clandestine meetings and joined the team that lined the bloody corpses in a mosque, including those of many of his friends. One man bled to death in the backseat of his car. Exhausted, he cried as he drove. Abdelkarim lived out of his car for five days. He saw how friends who had survived were arrested within days of the massacre. The justice system also prepared cases against him, including the charge that he allegedly plotted together with the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah.

When he returned home five days after the massacre, his mother cried. She thought he had died. He packed his things and boarded a plane to Turkey shortly thereafter.

For months, the state media covered nothing except “Islamist terror.” In November, three months after the massacre, the regime imposed severe restrictions on protests and arrested numerous critics under the pretense they represented a threat to national security. Blogger Abdel Fattah also ended up in jail again. In January 2014, el-Sisi tested the waters with a constitutional referendum that passed with 98 percent support. In May, he ran for president and won 97 percent of the vote.

Moaz Abdelkarim has since lived in Turkey, but he has to leave every 30 days in order to obtain a new tourist visa. His life is adrift in exile, and he is constantly on the go. Given that the trial against him is continuing, with charges that include terrorism, it’s possible he will never be able to return to Egypt. “They want to keep us busy with made-up cases so we have no time to fight the regime,” he says.

‘The Revolution Will End Like it Began’

These days, he’s focusing his efforts on reconciliation between secularists and Islamists that can serve as the basis for the start of the next revolution. He does this because he believes Egyptians will soon grow tired of el-Sisi’s rule. But on this wintry night, another of his mediation efforts between secularist government critics and Muslim Brothers in exile hasn’t gotten anywhere. The mistrust between them is so great that the two sides won’t even meet face to face.

“We need to start a dialogue and agree on things we can fight for,” Abdelkarim says. The only success story in the Arab spring came in Tunisia, where secular and Islamist activists had already engaged in dialogue in exile. He’s now trying to do that himself as a member of the leadership board of the small but well-known Al Ghad Al Thawra Party, one of the only secular parties to maintain cordial relations with the Muslim Brotherhood. But the party’s leaders are scattered in exile and are powerless against the regime’s propaganda. Abdelkarim studies Turkish and is toying with the idea of returning to work as a pharmacist. If he does, it’s likely he’ll be making a final break from politics.

Of the three revolutionaries, Basem Kamel is the only who is still able to participate in Egyptian political life without fear. After the revolution, he helped found the Social Democratic Party. He was one of only four Tahrir activists who got elected to parliament three years ago — a day he celebrated by changing his profession on Facebook from “architect” to “politician”.

When the newly elected parliament met shortly before the first anniversary of the uprising, Downtown Cairo looked like a war zone. The military had sealed the roads around Tahrir with concrete walls, and barbed wire marked the path to parliament. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists had secured a majority, but Kamel remained optimistic. “Revolution, finally, is politics,” he told me as he walked to the parliament.

At the same time, Moaz Abdelkarim was protesting outside against torture, arbitrary arrests and censorship that should no longer have been taking place. “The revolution will end like it began, with the same tiny group,” Abdelkarim said, standing before a wall of masked police. “A few hundred people will protest and nobody will pay attention.”

Kamel was one of the last to join the activists and he was older than most. He was 41 years old at the time — a tall, thin, balding man and father of three. His grandparents had been poor farmers, and he himself had studied architecture. During his university studies, he designed modern buildings using sustainable materials. But he earned his money with cheap cement block apartments that could cram in as many residents as possible. It helped him to rise to middle-class respectability in a tower on Cairo’s humble outskirts. But even toiling for 16 hours a day as he did, his family still had a hard time making ends meet. It angered him, and it was this anger that drove him — first to meet with Mohammed al-Baradei and soon afterwards to Tahrir.

The End of Democracy

The politicization of people like Kamel, who had studiously avoided politics for most of their lives, was one of the great achievements of the revolution at Tahrir Square. In that sense, he represents all Egyptians who otherwise would have preferred to hold back. Their support proved to be decisive in the revolution’s success. Ultimately, however, they were also the first to defect and support the military government.

“Aren’t you concerned about military rule?” I asked him after the generals toppled Muslim Brother Morsi in the summer of 2013.

“We know how to deal with the military,” Kamel said. “It’s the Islamists we’re worried about.”

Even though he had spent three years of his life fighting authoritarianism, he was buoyed by the end of democracy in Egypt. “It’s a revolution, not a coup,” he told me. “If you insist on calling it a coup, it’s a popularly legitimate coup.”

It’s still possible to meet with Kamel today at his Social Democratic Party headquarters, located in an imposing but rundown building in Downtown Cairo. It used to be teeming with people and energy, but today it is nearly empty. He says most Egyptians no longer support the party. “The problem in Egypt now is not the regimes,” he explains. “It is the people. We have to convince them.”

Even a year later, he still doesn’t regret that Morsi got ousted. What he does rue, however, is the return of a full-blown dictatorship in Egypt. “Today there is only one kind of politics allowed: Sisi’s politics,” he says. He believes el-Sisi will serve at least two terms as president. “Then we’ll be back in the game.”

Despite everything — including the fact that he lost his own position in the revolutionary parliament after it was dissolved in 2012 — he still wants to run again in parliamentary elections planned for this spring, even if 80 percent of the seats are reserved for independent individual candidates and only 20 percent are for the parties. That weakens the parties and strengthens those who are well-connected politically and can raise money for expensive campaigns.

Kamel is still convinced that Egypt can become a democracy, even if it takes decades for that to happen. He also believes it was the egomania of politicians and public apathy that doomed the revolution. He argues that the opposition parties should merge in order to increase their influence, but instead they are battling each other. All the parties founded after the revolution, he says with a sigh, are going the way of the ineffectual opposition parties that limped through the Mubarak years.

Kamel now wants to place more of a focus on his architecture business, which he neglected in recent years. He has lost his customer base and now his family is struggling to get by. “Today, my first priority is business,” he says. “Politics comes second.”

Alaa Abdel Fattah. Photo: DPA

‘We’re Fed Up’

Meanwhile, Alaa Abdel Fattah remains on a hunger strike and has just been taken to the prison hospital. Many activists have joined him in fasting. But so far, their joint action hasn’t done much to change things. It’s a last act of protest, a symbol of the dead-end road the revolution is heading in.

“What’s important now is that we organize ourselves and pressure the authorities that conspire against us,” Abdel Fattah said before he stopped eating. “I will not play the role they have written for me. We’re fed up.”

Stay Thirsty asks about Egypt

Posted January 11th, 2015 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Once Upon a Revolution

Tags: Interview, Once Upon a Revolution, Stay Thirsty

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A conversation with Stay Thirsty magazine.

STAY THIRSTY: In your new book, Once Upon A Revolution, you say that at the beginning of the 2011 Tahrir Revolution the revolutionaries spoke in bold strokes. What was it about their ideas that caught fire with the Egyptian people?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: They spoke out loud about their thirst for justice, breaking taboos that had been enforced, often with great violence, for generations. This revolution channeled an enormous current of anger and frustration, and it also tapped into a very primal simple hope for a better life. At its most elemental, Tahrir Square paired up two very powerful, if vague, sentiments: “You can’t crush me any more” and “Freedom!”

Egyptians had been told for generations that they were incapable of thinking for themselves. Only the regime was qualified to make political decisions. The police state enforced quietude through ubiquitous surveillance, and frequent torture, detention, and harassment. Rule was capricious and volatile, and it kept people off-balance. The people who filled Tahrir – to the shock of the ruling class and the secret police and their legions of thugs – said “Enough! We’re not scared of you anymore.” It was a real moment of calling out the naked emperor. Once people stopped being afraid, the only way to stop them was to kill them. Many Egyptians found this revelation tremendously empowering.

STAY THIRSTY: As the era of dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak came to an abrupt end, was there a genuine belief that a transition to democracy was really possible in Egypt?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: A window opened at the beginning of 2011 during which genuine democracy seemed possible. The transition really was contested. President Hosni Mubarak stepped down under pressure from the military. A popular revolt shook the ruling order, but in actual fact it was a military coup that unseated Mubarak. Still, while the military never lost power entirely, for the first year after Mubarak they were running scared. Again and again they capitulated to mass demonstrations. They were afraid of the secular young revolutionaries, they were afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood. The generals feared for a while that the ruling order would crumble entirely. But even at the beginning, the revolutionaries at the center of Tahrir Square knew they faced very long odds in their quest to end military domination of politics, hold the regime’s torturers and killers accountable, and dismantle the oppressive security state.

STAY THIRSTY: Leaderless revolts as we witnessed at Tahrir Square often collapse under their own weight. Will the ideals of the Tahrir Revolution nevertheless survive? Are they a true and lasting reflection of the will of the Egyptian people?

Tahrir Square (2011)

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: The ideals of the Tahrir Revolution are so attractive and unimpeachable that even Egypt’s new dictatorial ruler has adopted them, at least rhetorically. What’s not to like about “bread, freedom, social justice?” The more earth-shaking principals of Tahrir have survived as well, albeit under fire and among a beleaguered but brave vanguard: Think for yourself, dare to defy authority, believe in the near-impossible task of liberalizing an autocratic centralized state like Egypt’s. Arab autocrats believe they have the responsibilities of the ruler and ruled, and they see their subjects as fractious, infantilized, helpless without the strong hand of their father-leaders. Many of the opposition Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, share this same fundamental outlook. The Tahrir Revolution swept that patronizing set of ideas away, in the belief that Egyptians were citizens, with the power and the right to shape a state of their own choosing. These are subversive ideas, and they took root with enough vigor that protesters demanded the fall of three regimes in the three years from 2011 to 2013. That experience cannot be wiped away. The glimpse of a frightened, deposed tyrant scuttling from his palace, scared of his own subjects, lingers in the minds of Egyptians even today, at a time when the old regime and its cronies are on top again. Never again can an Egyptian dictator take his reign for granted, and never again will Egyptians believe that they are powerless sheep, good only to walk silently within the wall of fear.

STAY THIRSTY: With a poor education system, persistent deep poverty and few resources, do knowledgeable people believe that the 2011 Tahrir Revolution will eventually turn into a sustainable government? Or, with the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power, are the revolutionaries pre-programmed to trust the Egyptian military and drift back into a Mubarak-like governmental structure?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: Hopes and expectations are much more muted than they were in 2011, when many revolutionaries really believed that root reforms were possible, and could quickly improve life for most of the country’s poor. Most of Mubarak’s governing structure has remained intact throughout the transitional period, or as some would call it, the revolution and the counterrevolution. The old regime is back in power, with a new and more ruthless leader and a security establishment that feels super-empowered to take revenge on the revolutionaries who challenged it. The revolutionaries themselves, for the most part, haven’t repudiated their dreams of a different kind of government – although some [like the liberal character in my book, Basem Kamel] have ruled out radical change and embraced a more incremental reform project. But a great deal of the public appears to have given up on bold ideas. Huge crowds joined Tahrir. Then later, huge crowds turned out for the Muslim Brotherhood, which dominated parliamentary elections and won the presidency in 2012. In the most recent chapter, the hugest crowds yet welcomed a coup led by Sisi, an army general, and then Sisi’s elevation to the civilian presidency. So public opinion has been fickle. It’s now clear to everybody who’s interested in change that improving Egypt’s government is an enormous undertaking. The institutions of state are powerful but inept and corrupt. Many of the most important ones, including the courts, the police, the army, have grown into autonomous fiefdoms that aren’t even entirely controlled by the strongman at the top. All this makes painfully elusive the idea of a government “of the people” that actually tries to help the poor and solve Egypt’s disastrous underlying problems: failed health care, education, housing and job market.

Tahrir Square (2011) (credit: Jonathan Rashad)

STAY THIRSTY: Now that the murder charges against Hosni Mubarak for killing 239 of the Tahrir protestors have been dropped by the Egyptian courts, will he re-emerge as the country’s strongman even though he is 86?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: Mubarak’s torch has passed to a younger, more vigorous retired general. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is Egypt’s strongman now, and he’s consolidating power with a more stifling and violent crackdown than anything Mubarak attempted during his 29 years in power. But the new military regime seems to be treating Mubarak as a sort of despot emeritus. They could have chosen to keep him in prison, or keep him quiet. But they’re letting him talk to the press, giving a sort of gloating impression. As if they’re so confident in the reincarnation of the old regime that they’re not worried about going too far and pushing people to revolt again.

STAY THIRSTY: How were your views of Egypt changed by writing Once Upon A Revolution? Are you hopeful for the people that led your story?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: The Egyptian revolutionaries defied my expectations not just of Egypt but of human nature. I had grown quite cynical about the possibility of humans anywhere to undergo great change, and I certainly doubted that an apathetic public could suddenly get politicized and try to seize control of its destiny. I felt this way about humans in general, and Egypt seemed like a place whose public had been completely drummed into submission – not that people liked it, but they seemed to have given up a sense of possibility. What happened was really mind-blowing to me. A small group of people stood up against every kind of pressure to submit: not just police torture and regime harassment, but their own families telling them to stay home and shut up. They didn’t stay home, and then hundreds, maybe millions of people broke out of their habitual silence and acquiescence to protest or speak out or otherwise engage in politics. That’s a level of transformation that most people never experience in their adult lifetimes. Here, a huge number of people did it, at great risk. I will never again assume that just because something like the survival of a dictatorship is likely means it is guaranteed. I still have great hope for the individuals who made this daring creative leap. And I can’t give up completely on the chances for their grand project for Egypt. So long as these revolutionaries are still agitating and cogitating, be it in prison, in exile, or underground, their dreams might yet come to fruition. Not likely, perhaps, but not doomed.

STAY THIRSTY: When we look at the Arab Spring and its aftermath, when we look at the rise of ISIS and the role it is playing in Syria and Iraq and when we look at the role that Iran and Saudi Arabia are playing in the Arab Middle East, do you believe the DNA of the people in that region hardwires them for dictatorship or democracy?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: A kind of determinism or essentialism informs a lot of prejudiced thinking about ethnic or racial destiny, and I’d like to see us move away from that kind of thinking in our effort to understand why different countries end up with different kinds of governments. No group of people anywhere on earth is genetically programmed or otherwise predestined for the system of government under which it lives. Especially people living under autocratic systems, who have almost no mechanisms through which to voice their consent or shape the way they governed. I don’t mean to say that individuals have no responsibility. Often, in violent regimes, it’s a life-and-death struggle simply to avoid being complicit in regime crimes. That said, there are deep structural problems in governance across the Arab world, and there are many malignant forces to content with including takfiri jihad, rabid nationalism, and intolerance of minorities. It is very hard to force system change, especially against entrenched interest groups, like the Egyptians military, that are wealthy powerful, and violent. I think it will be a long struggle for Egypt to achieve some version of democracy. Same for war-ravaged polities like Syria and Iraq. Tunisia seems to have a good chance of developing a decent system. And perhaps unexpectedly, Iran has potential because despite its oppressive theocracy it has developed mature institutions and educated citizens, who could form the bedrock of a future democracy.

STAY THIRSTY: Is the world safer under the dictator you know or under a work-in-progress fledgling democracy? Is there any chance that the Middle East will move to a more orderly political environment or are we at the beginning of a very messy and disorderly period that will sacrifice vast numbers of lives and huge amounts of treasure without a clear outcome? Will the tyrants or the extremists eventually be the victors or will the tribal leaders seize control of their particular territories and dismantle the nation-states of the region?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: Change is unsettling, not just to the powerful but to the regular people living with uncertainty and often suffering real privation above and beyond the pain and poverty to which they were already subjected. I’m a fervent believer that repressive unaccountable regimes built on fear are unsustainable over the long run. Many players, including the governments of the US and Saudi Arabia, seem to be putting their money on a bet for stability in the form of reconstituted authoritarian dictatorships. These bets are doomed to fail not simply because these regimes are unjust and morally unpalatable; it’s because they fail on the simple metric of providing anything for their people. A dictator who keeps the people fed and clothed might stand a chance; but not a dictator who humiliates the population while consistently lowering its standard of living. There might be another waiting period in places like Egypt, where Sisi could buy some years, even a decade, before the next uprising. One way or another, across the region we’re going to see a long and turbulent transition toward new, more accountable and inclusive political systems. They might not necessarily be democracies; they might even be outright dictatorships but ones that are more stable because they’re built on a wider coalition. There’s a slim chance that some of the artificial borders drawn after World War I will change as a result of wars like the one waged by ISIS, but I think it’s unlikely. Even these gummy borders have taken on a sort of logic and momentum of their own, and I think the more likely outcome is a renegotiation of national pacts within existing borders.

Protesting in Tahrir Square (2011)

STAY THIRSTY: You live in Beirut and have written about its many great advantages in spite of its lack of government and police force. Is Beirut a model for how we can expect successful cities in the Arab world to function in the future?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: It might be a model but it’s not an inspiring one – more of a muddled least worst of a bunch of bad possibilities. I’ve heard the same refrain a lot: “We’re not going to be another Lebanon!” I heard it in Iraq immediately after the US invasion in 2003, and I heard it from Syrians after their civil war quickened in 2011. Now Iraq has adopted some of the worst aspects of Lebanon’s power-sharing model, which is essentially a form of institutionalized gridlock that guarantees nothing important can ever be accomplished by the government but which minimizes the chance of another sectarian civil war. Some Syrian revolutionaries who dreamed of a democracy now say they’d be happy to turn out like Lebanon. I don’t think this system would be anybody’s first choice, but it’s certainly better than civil war or a violent, centralized dictatorship. But try educating your children or treating a serious disease here, and you see the pitfalls of living in a nation without a state.

STAY THIRSTY: If you were given the opportunity to reshape the Middle East, what would it look like in twenty-five years?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: I could tell you about things I’d like to see happen, but I cannot begin to answer that question not least because no single entity, not even a modern superpower or the Ottoman Caliphate, had that much power to shape events. I’d like to see the US be less reactive and less supportive of repressive corrupt regimes out a misplaced interest in stability. I’d like to see a curtailing of the mostly malign regional influence of Iran, which supports a lot of militias, and Saudi Arabia, whose money underlies the growing reach of religious extremism. I’d like to see the rise of a credible, authentic, locally supported culture of rights, due process, rule of law, citizenship, and pluralism, and an end to cults of personality and police states. It’s not that different than the kind of freedom, equality, economic opportunity and just institutions that I’d like to see flourish everywhere.

STAY THIRSTY: What can we expect next from you?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: I don’t have any immediate plans for another book, but I didn’t plan on writing this one until January 25, 2011, when I realized I had no other choice. I’ll be keeping an eye on Egypt no matter what, but for the next few years I plan to focus on Lebanon and Syria. There’s a lot of fascinating dynamics playing out in the Syrian civil war, and like the Arab revolts overall, they’re part of a very long term process of political reinvention. New ideas are slowly coming to maturity: ideas about citizenship, governance, rights (along with a slough of not-so-appealing ideas about majoritarian rule and religious triumphalism). So are new power centers and networks. All these revolutionaries and activists are going to be at the core of the next generation’s elite. I’m excited to see what difference that makes. I’m also trying to take a respite from a decade’s focus on political struggles and war, with a line of reporting about culture and urban life in Beirut. Lots of the same questions, but played out in struggles that don’t usually involve killing.

Library Journal review out

Posted January 8th, 2015 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Writing

Tags: Once Upon a Revolution, Review

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Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story

Thanassis Cambanis

In January 2011, the Egyptian people began an uprising that ultimately led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the country’s longtime president. In this highly readable book, journalist and author Cambanis (A Privilege to Die) recounts the trials and tribulations of that revolution. The work is informed by the author’s sustained, on-the-ground, astute observations of the unfolding events in Egypt. His focus is on the activities of a number of activists from different walks of life, especially those of two unique individuals who joined the uprising – pharmacist Moaz Abdelkarim, a career activist who grew up in the milieu of the Muslim Brotherhood, and architect Basem Kamel, who had built a successful business and had generally stayed out of politics until the revolution began. As the author explains, both of these figures had to grapple with ambiguities and contradictions in their own thought process, as did most other Egyptians who took part in the rebellion. Ultimately, the movement failed to establish a democratic and accountable political order and the country once again succumbed to a military dictatorship. The author concludes that this was owing to organizational and political shortcomings and an incoherent ideology. Verdict: A welcome addition to the literature on Egypt’s uprising and a solid source for the general reader. – Nader Entessar, Univ. of South Alabama, Mobile

Publisher’s Weekly review

Posted December 16th, 2014 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Once Upon a Revolution,Writing

Tags: Book Review, Once Upon a Revolution

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Another review out in Publisher’s Weekly of Once Upon a Revolution.

ONCE UPON A REVOLUTION

As the heady days of revolution in Tahrir Square recede further into the past, liberal democracy in Egypt seems increasingly like a pipe dream. Beirut-based journalist Cambanis (A Privilege to Die) follows two leaders of the uprising from the beginnings of their political involvement to the military coup that overthrew Mohamed Morsi. Basem, an unassuming architect, becomes one of the few liberal members of parliament, while Moaz, a Muslim Brother, grows increasingly disenchanted with political Islam. Cambanis eloquently describes post-Mubarak Egypt and the “chaos coursing below the surface, but open conflict still just over the horizon,” as well as the “inability of secular and liberal forces to unify and organize,” which left the political field open to the military apparatus and the secretive Islamists. Crushed by arbitrary military edicts and ascendant puritanism, Egypt’s nascent civil society stalled and sputtered while its freewheeling press degenerated into “a brew of lies, delusion, paranoia, and justification.” The people Cambanis shadows never lose hope, exactly, but he makes clear that they feel as if they are spitting into the wind, struggling to enunciate what the revolution accomplished. Agent: Wendy Strothman, Strothman Agency. (Feb.)

Booklist reviews “Once Upon a Revolution”

Posted December 11th, 2014 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Once Upon a Revolution,Writing

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Middle East reporter Cambanis, who writes the “Internationalist” column for the Boston Globe and regularly contributes to the New York Times, offers a gripping portrayal of the forces that led to the eruption in Tahrir Square in Egypt on January 25, 2011. His reporting and analysis also move out from that event, considering a revolution that has not yet ended. He compares this revolution to the French Revolution, a long time coming and a long time continuing. Cambanis’ in-depth examination started, he says, with his on-the-ground reporting during the uprising, finding people in the square who were willing to continue to talk with him. The richness of his reporting informs his book, but it is the narrative nonfiction frame that humanizes the account and makes it more accessible. He focuses on two unlikely revolutionaries: Basem Kamel, a middle-class architect who came late to politics at 40, and Moaz Abdelkarim, a pharmacist and career activist. By tracing Kamel’s and Abdelkarim’s varying backgrounds, Cambanis manages both to give readers two insiders’ views of Egypt in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and to trace the origins of Tahrir Square and its ripples. Cambanis is master of the compelling detail: for example, in relating that Kamel was born in 1937, he notes that this was the year King Farouk I was crowned, a king who ate oysters by the hundred in his palace while his people endured WWII bombings. Wonderfully readable and insightful.

— Connie Fletcher

[Original here.]

Once Upon a Revolution: Kirkus Review

Posted November 18th, 2014 by Thanassis Cambanis and filed in Writing

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The first review, from Kirkus, of my forthcoming Egypt book is out. I’m excited to imagine people reading this story from the Egyptian revolution.

KIRKUS REVIEW

Smart, troubling study of the events surrounding Tahrir Square and their aftermath.

9781451658996 That Cairo landmark is a metonym. As journalist/historian Cambanis (A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel, 2010) records in this lucid account of the Egyptian uprising, strategists of the opposition spent much time figuring out just where they could organize protests without being quashed by the country’s well-organized military, setting some of the early demonstrations and meetings in places “where the streets were too narrow for police trucks and water cannons” until momentum grew. It didn’t take long for the revolt to sweep the country, with its crowning day on Jan. 25, 2011. Cambanis profiles ordinary Egyptians who rose up against the Mubarak regime, some out of support for the Islamist cause, others in the hope of secular democracy. Their political divide runs deep. As the author writes of one key actor, “El-Shater didn’t seem to understand how much the liberals hated the Islamists, and how much the revolutionary Islamist youth mistrusted the Brotherhood leadership, himself included.” It is for that reason that the revolution—which, Cambanis reminds us, necessarily involves tumult and violence—remains incomplete. “I fell in love with the Tahrir Revolution,” he writes, “but this love didn’t blind me to its faults.” Still, to judge by this account, those faults are fewer than those of the previous regime, which leaves some hope that the people of Egypt are headed in the right direction—even if the Muslim Brotherhood soon “exposed itself as power hungry and eager to use violent tools of repression to silence opponents.”

A clear exposition and analysis of complex, swiftly changing events. The book gives readers cause to understand why we might support regime change in the Middle East, even if it brings instability and incoherence.

KIRKUS REVIEW

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