A citizen-volunteer in the tattered plain clothes of the lower middle class is standing in the middle of a busy Alexandria intersection waving through traffic. Waiting at the cross street is a uniformed cop on a motorcycle. Welcome to the new Egypt.
This image is symbolic of the authority of civil society over the old security regime, the former having proved its mettle by protecting the streets of major cities through citizens’ councils that spontaneously formed when the Egyptian police disappeared on Jan. 29 near the start of the revolution. If the subsequent lack of police protection remains a concern for Egyptians, this is largely canceled out by the new freedom they feel to express their opinions and associate freely. Indeed, the withdrawal of the police — who were still only at 70 percent to 80 percent capacity during my recent visit – has caused a catharsis of free expression.
In this new Egypt, so much freer of surveillance and oppression, citizens routinely bump into strangers in public squares and exchange views about politics and society. For example, riding a taxi home in Cairo late one night I asked the driver to stop at a corner where a street vendor was selling tomorrow morning’s paper. Suddenly, my cab driver and another customer in a business suit were passionately debating the upcoming vote on constitutional amendments. Three days later in Alexandria, I got on the streetcar just after Friday prayers had ended and found two other passengers sitting in the booth I entered politely disagreeing about the merits of politicians who had announced their candidacy for president.
The new freedom manifests itself also in the newspapers, radio and television. Where television news used to begin and end with the most banal acts of the president and the first lady, they now present real news of developments in the country’s new political order and include real debate from different cross sections of society.
State-run newspapers, like the long-standing Al-Ahram, have also been transformed, offering a variety of opinions on their op-ed pages and covering issues from a number of points of view. The front page mastheads that in January carried government talking points are now filled with stories of scandal, embezzlement and corruption propagated by high-ranking party officials. Land deals in the South and Delta regions, natural gas sales to Israel and Jordan, gold mines operated in virtual secrecy – the stories of graft and kickbacks amount to tens of billions of dollars, millions of square meters of land, and tons of natural resources appropriated by oligarchs and outsiders at the expense of the Egyptian citizenry. “We knew there was corruption,” a lawyer involved in some of the cases told me, “but this scale we could never have imagined.”
During the 30 years that Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt, his regime received approximately $1.3 billion in U.S. aid per annum. This made it the second-highest recipient of American foreign aid nearly every year of his rule. Mubarak faithfully did the Americans’ bidding on regional issues in return, but at the same time, he became increasingly unpopular – even despised. As the influence of the amazing popular uprising against him continues to spread through the region and perhaps beyond, America must face some hard questions about this history.
As the revolution played out earlier this year, many in the U.S. expressed concern that Egypt would go the way of Iran and end up an Islamic Republic. After seeing with my own eyes the diversity of opinion and sophistication of political discourse in the country post-revolution, I must ask why we in the U.S. are not more concerned with our legacy of staunch support for a regime that we now know to be so historically corrupt, venal and degraded in its attitude towards its people. The tales of the old regime’s corruption are truly dizzying; yet we are ready to forget our own role in this massive ransacking of Egypt’s poor, its workers and its middle class.
If Egypt becomes the first truly transformative revolution of this century, the question it will pose for the U.S. in the coming phase is how the world’s only remaining superpower can create a new kind of foreign policy that builds bridges to citizens instead of to elites.
Aboul-Ela, an associate professor of English and adjunct professor of modern and classical languages at the University of Houston, has recently returned from a trip to Alexandria and Cairo.