Inanities

On Friday night, three hours into the celebration, I saw a man in the masses on Qasr El-Nil bridge say to his wife as he took off his glasses and wiped his face, “ah…meshayna keteer ya Hosny [ah…we’ve walked so far, Hosny]. I’m not sure he was just talking about Thursday, or the past 18 days.

On Thursday night premature celebrations began at dusk. The flags were unfurled, the triumphant car beeping began. Children were paraded on shoulders and car roofs, totems of hope and pride. There was an air of certainty. Mubarak was going to make yet another TV appearance; what could he possibly have to say other than goodbye?

(In hindsight the fact of Mubarak himself appearing was a big clue that our hopes would be dashed; the pilot’s hubris would never permit Mubarak to announce his own defeat).

We watched the speech in El Boursa, an area of street cafes that takes its name from the stock exchange at its centre. The place was already packed when we arrived twenty minutes before Hosny’s address was meant to begin, full of men and women carrying flags and other items in red, white and black. We chose a café that had two wooden boxed televisions next to each other, both of which dated from approximately 1986. At one point the electricity failed, prompting roars of outrage from the clientele. It eventually returned, but a waiter had to spend five minutes with his finger pressed on a button, apparently to tune it into the satellite receiver.

After completing this onerous task he immediately and accidentally pressed a wrong button, turning the TV off. He slapped himself on the forehead and a look of pure anguish passed over his face. It was that kind of night.

When the speech was late in starting a customer demanded that state channel 1 be checked in case the problem was with Al Jazeera. Acres of satellite stations, of Turkish soap operas and animated preachers were traversed without channel 1 being found, as customers threatened mutiny.

We made it back to Al-Jazeera in time. Hosny started half an hour late. When he did eventually appear spiritual entreaties of ya rab, ya rab bandied around the café, and a rare and intense silence descended on the café. The prayers didn’t work – or at least they didn’t take effect for 24 hours – and even before Hosny had said the last word of the big fuck you that was his speech, El Boursa – and all of Egypt – erupted, and the final march began.

When this did begin?

In another street café on another evening in the blur of days that was this week a fire-eater appeared, accompanied by a girl of around 5 or 6.

As the man twirled the lit batons and recited a stream of barely audible poetry or perhaps prayer, the tiny veiled girl periodically chimed in with him, emitting a “ha!” in the pauses as she scratched her right calf with her left leg sandal and scoured the cafe’s clientele for money-givers. Then she scuttled over and took the charity – and on one occasion, a plastic bag of sandwiches – before resuming her position beside the man, who meanwhile hacked up a phlegm of the fire and petrol he had ingested. A final round of the customers and the pair disappeared into the darkness. They couldn’t have left with more than LE 20.

Mubarak’s Egypt was (was; so strange, so sweet) a labyrinth of hate and danger, a place where fortune was never a matter of chance, where guilt or innocence was decided at birth, where honesty was weakness and deceit the foundations of the fortress. Mubarak almost – almost – succeeding in doing the impossible: stripping Egyptians of their pride, slowly and systematically, over the course of 30 years.

His fingerprints are everywhere. On the bodies of desperate migrants drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, on shanty homes in informal areas, on instruments of torture in police stations, on school books which reinforce the prejudice and lies and ignorance which were the bulwark of his rule and most of all they are all over the little girl, the fire-eater assistant, another Egyptian who Mubarak has robbed of a childhood.

For three years I covered protests of various sizes, but which never exceeded two or three thousand. Courageous people who braved the vicious police response, or the heat or simply persisted even when there were more riot police than protestors.

Some of these activists – Kamal Khalil, Aida Seif El-Dawla, Laila Soueif, Mona Mina to name but a few – have been protesting for decades. What faith and fortitude to never give up to keep going on and on and on in the face of both regime brutality and public apathy, what strong hearts.

Because it is a terrible thing to go a protest and recognise everyone there, including the state security officers watching from behind the line of riot police who smoke and smirk at the chants because they know that they are winning, that activists are not reaching the public no matter how hellish their circumstances are.

Ever since January 25^th I have been trying to work out how the revolution happened, when something snapped. I’ve concluded that there wasn’t a single snapping point, but several, and like it or not I am going to list them below.

Khaled Said

Said’s death at the hands of the police in June 2010 galvanised public anger against the Interior Ministry, a group of thugs masquerading as a law enforcement agency. Crucially, Said’s family bravely and selflessly transformed the tragedy of his death into a tool that was seized on my Internet activists and used against the regime.

The We Are All Khaled Said Facebook Group

Wael Ghoneim and the other admins of the Arabic version of this group did an incredible job in maintaining the momentum generated by anger at Said’s death. The movement eventually gained a life of its own and was critical in translating online participation into a physical presence on the streets.

State media

The obscene crudity of the State media response to the Khaled Said campaign, and the allegations it made against Khaled Said and his family were breathtaking even by NDP standards. The subsequent attempt to discredit and slander the Tahrir protestors was so shockingly shameless that even some state media presenters quit in protest.

Mahalla April 6 2008

Thousands took to the streets of Mahalla in 2008, three died, hundreds were arrested, 49 men were subjected to a show trial. The Mahalla protest was the first mass riot in Egypt since 1977 and critical in giving people the confidence to reclaim public space and challenge authority.

It also gave birth to the 6 April Youth Movement and was showed how social media such as Facebook and Twitter could be used to mobilise for protests, building on the critically important work of activists (Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan, Alaa Abdel-Fatah, Wael Abbas, Nora Younes and others) who demonstrated that the Internet can provide a public space for organising where repressive authorities make “real life” organisation impossible.

Tunisia

The Tunisian revolution raised the bar. It made the impossible a certainty.

The January Alexandria bombing protests

These were my first riots and the first time I saw the police succumb. I remember Dr Moftases and I commenting that the riot police have numbers but are absolutely useless in terms of strategy. We remarked that all it would take is a series of large, simultaneous protests to bring the police in Cairo to its knees. This turned out to be true.

Labour protests

Egypt’s amazing workers have been integral to Egyptian activism. It was the strikes and protests which intensified in recent days that gave Mubarak the final shove.

January 25th & 28^th

The momentum of the Tahrir sit-in was maintained in part because people who protested for the first time on these two days were the victims of the police’s excessive use of force. It galvanised their anger.

The stupidity of the regime

What kind of dumb fuck cuts off the Internet and mobile phone network in a nation whose main hobby is talking? People had nothing else to do. They took to the streets.

What now

I was at Maspero when the news that Mubarak had finally been forced out arrived. Annoyingly a man shouted out that it was only a rumour and then my mum called to congratulate me, so in the course of three minutes I experienced emotions that almost killed me.

Then we took to the streets and the sky was a sea of red, white and black, and fireworks. And – best of all – the new chant was erfa3 rasak fow2, enta masry [hold your head up high, you’re Egyptian].

Nothing has changed in Egypt other than the president. Psychologically the lifting of this burden is enormous but the regime is still in power. The security apparatus has taken a blow but is still functioning and economically the country continues to screw over the have-nots.

I still want, and insist that the NDP be banned.

I’m also still unsure about what the army wants and whose interests it has at heart (this is the institution that prosecutes bloggers and Facebook users, remember, and has been accused of torture in the past 18 days).

Despite the uncertainty, I cannot help but be proud, be grateful though that Egypt is experiencing a respite (however brief) from injustice, that the country I love so much has fought back, as I always hoped it would.

PROBLEM PAGE

Dear Agony Aunt

After 30 years with my husband I feel like I need a new start, but he doesn’t feel the same way, and now I can’t get rid of him.

I married my current husband in a rather speedy manner after my previous husband, god rest his soul, was shot by a neighbour who objected to the rather oppressive manner in which my former husband dealt with my neighbour’s plants.

My current husband seemed a little dull and to be honest seemed to lack enthusiasm for tying the knot but I was thinking about my kids so the union went ahead. I learnt to put up with his penchant for inappropriate jokes and the hair dye spilt all over the bathroom once a month. He soon developed a taste for the husband role however and within weeks was preventing me from meeting in groups larger than five and locking me up in our bedroom for weeks without telling anyone where I was if I criticised his taste in shirts.

I also had to contend with his sons from his first marriage, one of whom is an insipid streak of bald shite and the other a football-mad idiot. His ex-wife is no better, always trotting around with her handbag and her perfect hair going on about the importance of everyone reading.

Still I put up with him because whenever I even thought about criticising him his friend Safwat would come round and make me a cup of tea and whisper how he would be happy to “whisk me away from my troubles in no time at all”.

Things went along like this for years until recently when my husband stopped buying stuff for the house and my kids went hungry and every time they complained he’d beat them up and get his mate Habib to lock them in the shed. Whenever I complained he’d go on about how I better shut up because he has friends all over the world especially America and one of them owns a gun shop and if I open my mouth again he’ll get a gun and shoot me in the knees.

Things changed drastically when my next door neighbour chucked her fella out and I realised that I didn’t have to take my husband’s shit anymore. My kids took over the garden, preventing him from getting to his vegetable patch, and burnt down his shed. When Habib and Safwat came round and tried to get them to leave they sprayed them with fertilizer and made them fuck off.

My husband then tried a new tactic by getting his mates from the pub to surround the garden and lob rocks on us. We resisted, and they got bored and buggered off. So then my husband started spreading rumours about me on Facebook, saying that I sleep with men for take away meals, especially fried chicken and chips from Kentucky. That didn’t work, so then he got his mates to beat up any one who came near my house and got people from the Neighbourhood Watch to join in.

Two weeks later and all this failed. My kids are still in the garden going strong and my husband has still not fucked off. Now he’s got his friend Omar to intercede but to be honest, Omar gives me the creeps and I hear that he had a dodgy past.

Please advise me how the fuck I get the message across to this turd on legs that he is no longer wanted.

Yours Sincerely,

Mrs Masr

—-

Dear Mrs Masr,

ولعي فيه

I moved to Egypt in 2003, intent on recapturing the magic of a year I spent in Alexandria during a study year abroad. The study year abroad, and the decision to learn Arabic was itself guided by memories of the year I spent living in Egypt as a kid; the hours at the swimming pool with my cousins, the smell of wet dust when the sprinklers were turned on at dusk – almost always outside, never alone.

Most people were supportive of the decision because they thought it wouldn’t last long. Also I was moving from Croydon, which made the decision far more understandable.

As one year turned into 2, and then 3 and then 8 I found myself assailed more and more frequently with questions about why the hell I would choose to live in Egypt when I have a European passport.

People were particularly flummoxed by my quest to get the Egyptian nationality in 2004 when a law was passed giving Egyptian women married to non-Egyptians (other than Palestinians) the right to confer nationality on their children. I was thrilled when I got my first green passport. Possibly the only Egyptian in history to experience such feelings, if a sample of my network is anything to go by. In addition to it being worthless, having the Egyptian nationality makes you more vulnerable they told me. It undermines the protection offered by my British passport, they said.

It got exhausting having to defend myself, again and again, particularly in response to the favourite argument of “you don’t fully understand Egypt, you don’t see its bad side, you haven’t lived here long enough, you’re not properly Egyptian and aren’t fucked over by the country like we are”.

Everyone’s Egypt is different. My experience hasn’t all been perfect. My work has exposed me to the very ugliest aspects of Mubarak’s Egypt, and everyday life is frequently a series of needless and nonsensical battles. There is much darkness here. Live here long enough and it becomes unavoidable.

But I have stayed, and the thought of leaving always made me depressed. A friend (a doctor from Assiut who himself emigrated to the US, partly in despair at his future prospects in Egypt and strongly advised me to also get out) once challenged me to write a list of good things in Egypt. I tried, but they all seemed too personal, and stupid, or impossible to put in words. How do you describe indefatigable joy? How do you capture and convey spirit, spirit even in the cruelest sadness?

I’ve written on this blog about Egypt for five years now and I much of it is descriptions of injustice and tragedy, but I hope some of it has been the love letter to Egypt I meant it to be.

Tonight I watched Wael Ghoneim in a heart-breaking interview about his role in the uprising and the 12 days he spent in state security detention, and I felt vindicated. To be more accurate, I felt vindicated mid-afternoon on January 25^th when thousands of us broke through security cordons and flooded into Tahrir Square and everything changed forever. And then again on Friday 28^th when protestors fought and beat security bodies prepared to open fire on them while they were praying. And again last Wednesday, when protestors defended Tahrir Square from attacks by government-sponsored thugs for hours.

And I feel vindicated every time I enter Tahrir Square and find all the good in Egypt concentrated in one place. The day before yesterday I was standing on the wall which runs the perimeter of Tahrir’s grassy island watching men sing and dance. It was a tight squeeze and I was standing dead close to a middle-aged lady clapping and singing. She tapped me on the shoulder, I thought she wanted to say something to me so I leant over. She kissed me on the cheek and went back to watching.

The atmosphere in Tahrir Square is such that when you’re there you think that Mubarak has no choice but to resign at some point in the next ten minutes. Then you go outside the square’s perimeter and feel Egypt will be lumbered with him, or a version of him, forever.

Yesterday was advertised as the gom3a el ra7eel [“Friday of departure”], the day when Hosny would go. Today was jokingly referred to as sabt el transit [“transit Saturday]. It’s the jokes that keep us going.

Tahrir Square was, as usual, full of similar witticisms, on giant banners, placards and demonstrators’ anatomies. One of my favourites was ctrl+alt+Mubarak. The sense of optimism and joy in the demonstration is almost crushing it’s so intense. Like being informed that you have just been promoted, you are expecting a child and that Tamer Hosny has lost the ability to speak, all while at your best friend’s wedding.

I spent a happy 2 or 3 hours there before suddenly feeling famished, and so we buggered off to get food from a Koshary shop, only to find it was shut. As a result we wandered away from Tahrir Square in search of sustenance just as dusk was falling and the public defence committees were starting to appear.

We procured sandwiches, from a restaurant underneath the Hisham Law Mubarak Centre which the military police raided on Wednesday, arresting 23 human rights activists in the process. As darkness fell the mood changed and downtown became increasingly more tense. Men and boys with clubs and knives appeared on the empty streets. A sort of malignant, angry, sense of waiting permeated everything.

Moftases, a friend called Shady ended up at one of these public defence committee checkpoints. I won’t go into any details because there are currently more accounts on the Internet of foreigners and Egyptians being manhandled than there are of Justin Bieber’s fringe. Suffice it to say that the cunt and his 25 assistants who run this particular defence committee are off my Christmas card list.

A word on the xenophobic hysteria: a friend asked whether there had been similar attacks in Egypt’s second biggest city, Alexandria. Another friend made a few phone calls and we were told that there had been one or two incidents. Compare this with the situation in Cairo where at least six of my friends have been beaten up, or intimidated or detained, and all of my acquaintances also know people to whom this has happened.

This led us to conclude that 1. Alexandrians don’t watch state television or 2. Alexandrians know better than to believe its hysterical bear-baiting crap unlike their central Cairo brethren or 3. the targeting of foreigners is mostly restricted to the areas surrounding Tahrir Square and conducted in an organised – i.e. orders from above – fashion, rather than some xenophobic mass panic.

I read Arabist’s post this evening and lapsed into a dark mood at his suggestion that the uprising may have been usurped somehow by an inner NDP pensioner massacre/reshuffle, that perhaps the booting out of the old guard had been on the cards for some time and that 300 Egyptians will have died for nothing.

I try to ignore people who suggest that the Tahrir sit-in must end because Hosny has made concessions and he’ll be out in September. Other than getting rid of dead wood and a promise that Hosny has somehow been persuaded to uncurl his withered fingers from the reins of power at some point later this year what exactly has changed? The police are slowly sliding back onto the streets from the gutter they disappeared into, the NDP remains in power albeit with a New Look and Mubarak is not yet in Saudi Arabia. The door opened on a better future on the 25^th, but I feel like it’s closing again. But then there is still hope in Tahrir.

I didn’t go out at all today (Thursday) because as part of its campaign against the Tahrir protestors the regime has ordered the media to initiate a vile hate campaign against journalists and foreigners – which I am sort of both.

The mood changed yesterday and suddenly I was unable to leave my house. Friends rang me, warning me that gangs of people were roaming around Cairo’s streets attacking foreigners, or people who look foreign, or are suspected of being foreign, or agents, or spies, or Israeli, or Palestinian, or Iranian, or all of the above. Over 20 journalists were detained, some were roughed up, a photojournalist was stabbed. Journalists were chucked out of hotels, apparently on government orders.

An Egyptian friend told me that she went to rescue two foreign journalists near the October Bridge in Dokki and was herself set upon by a mob who accused her of being a foreign agent. Her and her brother were bundled into a taxi where her brother shielded her with his body. The army eventually intervened and rescued them and, in a strange coincidence, she and her brother added up at an army checkpoint with the girlfriend of a mate of mine, who had also been set upon in the same place. They were kept there until the mob dispersed.

I had thought that my problem was that, despite being biologically Egyptian-British, my Egyptian mother’s genes seem to have been on strike when I was formed and I am very much a Carol from Croydon. Usually this isn’t a problem (other than being welcomed to Egypt frequently by strange men) but it has now taken on a sinister tone. Another halfie with the Egyptian nationality I know was stopped at an army checkpoint and subjected to all sorts of bullshit just because they felt she looked different, or talked different or is somehow alien.

I’ve written about the identity issues I experience as a result of being a halfie elsewhere. Mostly I ignore them, because you know, who says I want to be part of your club anyway, but having to persuade a gang of 20 people that you are Egyptian five times every hour in order to be allowed to take photographs is exhausting, even more so when your physical safety depends on persuading said group that your Egyptianness levels meets their requirements.

The worst thing about this is how very un-Egyptian it is. Much is made of the legendary Egyptian hospitality, and for good reason. Egyptians take care of their guests. Which is not to say that xenophobia or racism doesn’t exist, and doesn’t exist in its worst forms. But very generally speaking I’ve felt safer and more looked after in Egypt than anywhere else in the world.

The descent into murky hatred coincides with a concerted state media campaign against foreigners and sinister “foreign agents” who are behind the Tahir protests, a continuation of previous campaigns against foreigners which have targeted e.g. Palestinians, religious minorities, gays, Shias…etc. State media is an extension of the regime. Add this to a security vacuum and the withdrawal of the police and a desperate regime and uncertainty and you get this, another highly convenient instance of manufactured discontent.

A strange peculiarity about the Egyptian regime is its insistence on attempting to retain a veneer of legitimacy – even after 30 years of flagrantly falsified elections, torture, corruption and, most recently, an ill-advised Internet blackout that succeeded in making Egypt a trending topic on Twitter.

It’s a habit they clearly find difficult to shake off. We woke up today to the news that thousands of “pro-Mubarak supporters” had gathered in the Mostafa Mahmoud Square, Cairo (incidentally the scene of the 2005 massacre of over 30 protesting Sudanese refugees by security bodies). I arrived at Tahrir Square around 3 p.m. The atmosphere in the area around the central grassy area was peaceful and positive, as it had been on Tuesday when tens of thousands congregated.

Down the road however in Abdel Meneim Reyad Square, next to the Cairo Museum, just beyond a couple of tanks stood a dense crowd of people, clearly separated from the Tahrir protestors. I stood on top of a building and watched as suddenly the pro-Mubarak protestors burst through the tanks and towards Tahrir Square. There was something incredibly unsettling about this assault, conducted as it was on camels, and on the short-tailed skinny horses tourists ride around the pyramids. The brutality of it all, as the terrified animals mowed down protestors and their riders hit out with their whips at anyone who crossed their path and people were crushed underfoot.

The use of hired thugs is classic Mubarak. The regime’s relationship with its people has always depended on intimidation and violence, which proved problematic with the wave of demonstrations and labour protests that have been a growing phenomenon since 2003 – acts of public police rage tend to put the tourists off. In 2005 elections young men were paid to sexually assault female protestors. Last year during the trial of two policemen accused of involvement in the death of Khaled Said a rowdy group of teenagers stood outside the courtroom and accused anti-torture protestors of being Israeli spies, before launching missiles at them. During the elections boys in matching t-shirts danced in front of polling stations while burly colleagues intimated voters on behalf of National Democratic Party candidates.

The idea is that these groups of men – who receive a modest daily stipend for their services – can execute regime orders without their actions being directly attributable to them. In the current scenario we are meant to believe that after four days of absolute silence peaceful pro-Mubarak protestors so irrevocably moved by the president’s speech and his promise not to stand for another term decided to organise mass counter protests. And attend these protests on camels and horses. And launch rocks and Molotov cocktails at camping Tahrir protestors whose only act of physical aggression has been against litter in the camp.

Purely coincidentally, the Internet was turned back on in Egypt on the day these millions of Mubarak “loyalists” decided to take to the streets, so the whole world can see the love and respect he commands.

They are a sad, troubled knot of poverty, miseducation and anger, these hired fists, some of them reportedly recruited today for LE 50 (according to activists speaking to thugs detained by anti-government protestors).

More than anything they are a reminder why, no matter what the cost to protestors and to Egyptians struggling to accept the interruption to daily life, the Tahrir occupation must continue. An NDP promise cannot be trusted, and if every last bit of the NDP is not removed Egypt will never heal.

Mubarak’s regime is a cancer that has metastasized and spread to every part of Egyptian society. It has stripped the act of earning a living of its nobility and cheapened the currency of dreams; on our way home we talked to a taxi driver who expressed support for Mubarak. We asked him how exactly he had benefited from Mubarak’s rule and he said “stability”- not opened up new horizons for his children, not given him the opportunity to consider a life of doing something other than taxi-driving. Mubarak has simply ensured that Egypt does not enter into external conflict while declaring a war of never-ending grinding attrition on his own people.

We’ve started a collaborative blog which aims to provide short updates about the situation here as frequently as possible. Please spread.

Have you ever been alone in a house at night and thought you heard someone breaking in, and laid, awake and immobilised by fear watching moving shadows until day breaks and the ordinary objects of your home are no longer monsters? That is how I felt walking around the streets of downtown Cairo yesterday.

We arrived in Tahrir Square around 3 p.m. to find an army checkpoint at the entrance to the square from Qasr El-Aini Bridge formed by two tanks. Someone had scrawled Fuck Mubarak on the back of one. Soldiers checked bags and patted people down for weapons.

Beyond this a man stood holding a piece of paper above his head reading, “have some respect for yourself Mubarak and leave”.

To the side of him men sweeped the ground and picked up litter, a sight I have witnessed numerous times in Tahrir Square and which never fails to move me; Cairo is a notoriously filthy city and littering is a huge problem; now here was one man picking up tiny bits of paper off the ground – he has reclaimed ownership and now he and the thousands of others sleeping, eating, singing and resisting in the square feel a duty to look after it and surrounding streets in a way the government never did.

Shortly after I arrived two jet fighters started circling overhead, flying so low that it hurt my ears. Some people cheered, others began chanting mesh meshyeen, mesh meshyeen [“we’re not moving”]. The message these jets were sending is unclear. Mubarak is an air forces man; were they expressing loyalty to him? Were they air forces jets or did they belong to the Presidential Guard? (a force composed of around 22,000 men which is reportedly fiercely loyal to Mubarak).

If the intention was to frighten people it didn’t work, nobody moved – and in fact most people ignored them – because they were too busy being amazing. Small groups have formed all over the square, some people have erected tents, some are standing on top of street signs waving flags, at night there are small fires around which people sit and discuss events. Waves of chants come from all directions and a sense of freedom and possibility pervades everything.

As soon as I arrived I realised why state media has ramped up the looting and pillaging rumours which on Saturday prompted protestors to leave Tahrir Square; it is a desperate effort to break spirits and get them out. People are not frightened of tear gas or bullets any more; the old tactics no longer work because they have discovered the strength of numbers, and of camaraderie. If this is in any doubt watch protestors force riot police to retreat in this incredible video. I hope Western leaders have seen it. This is how the supposedly politically moribund Arab street frees itself, Mr Bush.

There are no cars on the streets leading off Tahrir Square and everywhere there is anti-government graffiti. My favourite was “your last flight will be to Saudi, Mubarak” and “I want to see a new president before I die”. Most shops are still closed. Families and groups investigate the area, revelling in the open streets and clean air (another by-product of the uprising, less traffic). People are running the city with oversight from tanks and army jeeps stand guard on some street corners. The soldiers I have interacted with have all been incredibly polite and efficient, but alas some of them are a bit funny about people photographing their tanks.

The streets leading to the Interior Ministry are a scorched mess of twisted metal and broken glass. Protestors destroyed anything police they could get their hands on. Meanwhile police snipers and riot police shot protestors using live ammunition. People were still scared to approach the Interior Ministry a day after the battle because of the sniper issue.

Seeing these burnt out shells has been extremely gratifying. For three years I reported on cases of torture, disappearances and brutality at the hands of this institution. My heart sank every time I was with a male friend and we had to deal with a police officer on any level because I knew the outcome of that encounter would be decided by a million factors other than justice and rule of law.

We ran into a labour lawyer in Downtown who said hello and then left us saying, “I’m going to go and breathe in freedom”. For the first time in my life I walked down an Egyptian street yesterday and didn’t see a single policemen, not a single man in plain clothes with the crackling walkie talkie and the ability to casually change your life forever in a second. I was free.

As I wrote this last night men from my neighbourhood stood in the darkness of the street outside carrying truncheons, planks of wood, kitchen knives, swords and guns. There was even a rumour that someone has an AK47.

They erected makeshift blockades using boulders, cars, a garden bench, abandoned police barricades… Someone pointed out that the stars are unusually visible – reduced traffic, reduced pollution. My area is also eerily quiet; the distant hum of car engines, horns, roaming sellers, barking dogs, televisions – the soundtrack of Egyptian everyday life – has been silenced. In its place is gunfire, and intermittent shouts as the men outside identify or imagine a threat.

At one point shouts started and there were reports that two looters had been detained and taken to a nearby military academy. I went out and had a look at these “popular defence committees”, ordinary men suddenly thrust into the role of heroes, protecting the women and children upstairs. One middle-aged man was wearing a tracksuit and carrying a large stick and every so often sort of ran on the spot to exercise his calves.

Everything has happened so fast since Tuesday. On Thursday evening I watched as Egyptian friends on my Twitter feed and Facebook slowly slipped away, as Internet service providers sold their souls to the devil and implemented government orders and silenced us. The net is still not back for most Egyptians. We slept on Thursday night knowing that the mobile network would be cut off on Friday, and that we would be attending a mass protest (with which the Interior Ministry had promised to deal harshly) without being able to communicate with each other.

I went to Abbaseyya on Friday, shortly after the prayer finished. Residents had already blocked the street leading to the Nour mosque. Outside the mosque itself a large group of men chanted. The local M.P, a member of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) at one point instructed a man to step back to let cars through in something of an imperious manner. The man objected, tensions rised and the NDP MP was encircled. The tone was set from that moment.

The march started, to the familiar refrain of el sha3b yoreed esqaat el nezaam [the people want the regime to fall]. The crowd grew as it marched until there were perhaps 7 or 8,000 walking. Behind us men with huge sticks stood on a police pick up truck and followed us. Some of them mingled in the crowd; I saw a man with a huge black truncheon with silver stars on it that looked so much like a fancy dildo that I stared at him and laughed.

The crowd marched through Abbaseya. Some of the most moving moments were when the crowd beckoned to people watching from their flats to come down, chanting enzel…ya masry [come down Egyptian man]. Men in unshaven faces and Friday vests smoking cigarettes leaned on their balcony railings and watched. Women raised flags, clapped, raised the palms of their hands in entreaty.

The march went past people in bread queues who didn’t look twice, men waiting for buses who didn’t respond to protestors’ encouragement to join and others who did.

In Port Saeed Street the demonstration was tear gassed. A much-reduced demonstration regrouped, and made for Fagala. More tear gas near Ramsis Square, but something happened: people stopped running and for the second time in four days it was like the ground shifted and nothing would be the same anymore.

The effect a crowd not retreating creates is inspirational and terrifying, its sense of power in freefall like allowing yourself to fall backwards into somebody’s arms. There were moments – as a woman – when I was truly terrified amongst this raging sea of men – but mostly it was exhilarating.

If you have any doubt about what this uprising was about draw up a list of the places targeted: the NDP, police stations, malls and above all the Interior Ministry, where on Saturday protestors waged war for hours. Men miseducated by Mubarak, kept poor by Mubarak, tortured by Mubarak and abused by Mubarak converged on symbols of his rule.

About the looting and lawlessness: I feel safer at the moment than I ever did living under Mubarak’s Interior Ministry. We are all wondering whether the claims of looting and the are not an exaggeration, an attempt to focus people’s minds on things other than doing uprising. The protests I saw were peaceful – to a fault almost. The defence committees were formed in response to rumours that gangs of armed thugs on pick-up trucks are roaming around Cairo breaking into people’s homes. In our neighbourhood we had a couple of reports of looters. Sharshar, the Pig and others reported hearing gunfire in the distance but there were no incidents of them apprehending anyone. There were also reports that apprehended looters were carrying police ID.

ASIDE: Sharshar has a fetish for wearing army clothes as well as a large stock of martial arts weapons. One of the many beautiful things about all this is that he has been able to combine these two interests, and the vision of him standing there being a vigilante in his combat trousers and numbchucks is inspiring to say the least.

Cairo’s streets have been temporarily cleansed of the police and state security officers that transformed the city into a prison for Egyptians, but the rumour is that they are on enforced leave. Army tanks are still in the streets but it is still unclear what role they are playing in this drama. The latest news is that state-controlled Nilesat has taken Al-Jazeera Arabic off air. Whether Al-Jazeera English will be able to film and broadcast is unclear. The question now is whether this is a prelude to some coming horror or just another one of their genius decisions, but delayed.

One thing is certain: people still have their eyes on the prize. I saw Mubarak’s speech – in which he did not announce that he was fucking off – in a hospital with doctors and others who watched him with contempt.

There are currently 3,000 – 5,000 people in Tahrir, congregated for a prayer for the people killed during the uprising. The army is there, but apparently all is quiet. The announcement that the government has been fired and Omar Suleiman appointed vice-president was, of course rejected.

The question now is whether the momentum can be kept going, whether government attempts to distract people from their demands and contain this overwhelming anger will work. When I was in the street yesterday watching citizens direct traffic and later residents come together and organise defence committees I thought to myself that we have come so far it is impossible to go back. But then this regime, with its international backers, has gone beyond the limits of our imaginations so many times, committed egregious act after egregious act and walked away wiping the blood off its hands to live another day. I hope this time is different.

It’s one thing to terrorise your people with uniformed officers, but quite another to let loose swaggering plain-clothed men in helmets bearing cattle prods, metre-length planks of wood and rubber truncheons.

Yesterday a group of mostly young men marched outside the Ramsis Hilton chanting what has become the anthem of this uprising, el sha3b, yoreed, esqaat el nezaam [the people want the regime removed].

At the head of the procession a man stood aloft a four-wheeled waste container full of burning rubbish. Its acrid smoke filled the air as the crowd proceeded forward before stopping underneath the October Bridge where some of them placed an iron barrier in front of traffic before others removed it.

A riot police cordon stood in the distance in front of the television building and they stopped, uncertain where to go. Like all of the other demonstrations I have attended, this one had no clear leader and I did not see a single activist I recognised. This is both a strength and a weakness, I think. Protestors milled about, still chanting, as traffic pushed its way through. The countdown to the crackdown started and sure enough it appeared, but this time they weren’t the young conscripts in black.

Instead it was the men in moustaches. My friend Liam Stack joked that being descended on by them is like being assaulted by accountants, such is their proclivity for beige casual jackets and slacks. But the similarity ends there. A female friend of mine was hit on the side of the head by one of them with such force that she temporarily lost her hearing.

We fled up the October Bridge. Below a state security officer I recognised gave orders. A group of young men was bundled underneath a bridge exit by a huge number of state security officers and baltageyya the plain-clothed thugs employed by the Interior Ministry to do its dirty work.

They waited, and then one of them, carrying what looked like an iron rod stopped a passing microbus (Egypt’s unofficial public transport network given the hopelessness of the state bus network) full of passengers. He summarily ordered them to get out. Yalla ya welad el metnaka! [quickly you motherfuckers!]. Then he commandeered the vehicle and its driver. The detainees were bundled inside.

There was an odd scene after that when a huge green public bus already almost full pulled up and men got on. We were unable to establish whether they were detainees or not, nor where they were going.

A short walk down the street we passed the NDP headquarters. It was gratifying to see that rows of riot police are now permanently stationed outside it. The demonstrators are very clear about their targets and the message has got through.

Another spontaneous protest downtown, on Mohamed Farid Street. Around 400 men and women, again no activists. Whistling and clapping rang around the surrounding buildings and then again, another riot police cordon, another standoff.

What has been really heartbreaking in all this is that as protestors approach the police they begin chanting selmeyya, selmeyya [peaceful, peaceful], when they almost certainly know that they are marching into a world of pain. So far I have not seen any protestors instigate any violence. Any rock throwing has been in response to police violence, and remember we are talking water canon, tear gas, rubber bullets.

Both riot police and the plain-clothed thugs were deployed this time. I took refuge in a shop and watched as outside men in motorcycle helmets carrying cattle prods chased people into dead end alleys. Elsewhere groups of four of five brandishing various assortments of homemade and police-issued weapons laid into individuals. I saw one man with a plank of wood almost as long as he was tall.

About this time I tweeted “The really dirty games have begun. State security now running things”, and what I meant is that where the police and riot police are clumsy and heavy-handed and casually break the rules, when it comes to state security there are no rules to break. This is a body that kidnaps people, drives them away in vehicles without number plates and abuses them in unknown locations. Rarely if ever, are their officers held to account for acts of torture and murder. They are a state within a state and flaunt this with unabashed arrogance. Yesterday night, when they were not beating the shit out of people they were screaming at shopkeepers to shut their shops while invoking the shopkeepers’ mothers, all the time waving huge sticks in their faces.

It is difficult to describe the feelings of insecurity produced by knowing that a gang of armed men with carte blanche to do as they please is running your world.

One brave man, who I interviewed here, objected vociferously to their treatment of the protestors, pointing at the thugs and showering them with abuse. An exchange followed before the thugs started gathering and walking towards him. He retreated, still shouting and they began banging their sticks on the walls and anything before them. We all legged it.

In Champollian Street the shops were all shut and the mechanics shutters’ drawn in anticipation of violence. Around 150 mostly young people had gathered underneath the giant picture of Abu Tarek and his “only one branch” of Koshary shop. A young woman led the chants and, when the thugs appeared told the men to stand firm.

The thugs of Champollian Street were particularly obnoxious. As they faced off against the protestors one of them grabbed his crotch while he waved his truncheon at them. Then suddenly they charged, disappearing down the street.

To my delight they reappeared three minutes later in retreat, under a hail of protestors’ rocks. They were subsequently dispersed with tear gas.

I had two interesting conversations last night. As I was standing around covertly looking at the thugs in their track suits crouch on the ground one of them asked me what I was doing standing around. Conversation followed and I asked him what his job is.

“Ana mowaten 3ady” [I’m an ordinary citizen] he said, as he swung his truncheon.

The other exchange was with a traffic cop. As we walked by we heard him say to someone, “el shorta fe khedmat el sha3b” [the police are in the service of the people], to which Moftases and I erupted in laughter.

The man, a middle-aged bloke who generally seemed like a not bad sort launched into an impassioned defence, insisting that he has nothing to do with the group behind him, which as we spoke had seated a group of young men on the pavement like prisoners of war, presumably waiting for a police truck.

I asked him why he doesn’t take off his uniform and join protestors. He said that he couldn’t, that he’d ruin his future, i.e. his professional future. But there was no condemnation of the protestors and he was desperate to distance himself from the thugs.