In time the reasons why the Egyptian uprising took place and the reasons for its success will appear ever clearer and perhaps some elements will jump out that we cannot discern now. Civil disobedience could be traced back, ironically, to the period from 2003 to 2005 when the Bush administration pressured governments in the region to take some steps, however slight or meaningless, towards “democratization”. Mubarak himself ordered constitutional amendments that would allow competitors to challenge him at the ballot box for the first time in the presidential election of 2005; Saudi Arabia allowed men to vote for male candidates to half of the seats on municipal councils. They were indeed slim pickings. But opposition activists took advantage of the moment to begin a street protest movement aimed against the ascent of Mubarak’s son Gamal who his father had placed at the head of his National Democratic Party’s policy committee, and that was widely seen as the prelude to installing Gamal one way or another as his father’s successor. The Kifaya movement endured police brutality in the streets and was not able to keep up the momentum itself, but it showed the public that it was possible to mobilize. The centre of activism largely shifted to labour movements in Mubarak’s final term in office, and 6 April 2008 stands out for the strikes over wages and conditions staged by textile workers in al-Mahalla al-Kubra which police met with brute force. That day led to the creation of the 6 April Youth Movement Facebook page, which became a vibrant forum for discussing political and economic rights.

During that time though, two events seemed to have hardened attitutes towards Mubarak’s regime. On foreign policy, Mubarak’s position on the Gaza war of December 2008 and January 2009 took Egypt’s Palestinian policy into new territory with a clearer alignment with Israeli positions than seen previously. Egypt’s opposition to Hamas rule in Gaza and closure of its border with the territory was extremely controversial in the Arab world and played badly on the leading Arab news channel Al-Jazeera. Egypt stated during the conflict that Palestinians had no need of weapons since resistance to occupation should be entirely through peaceful means, a position not previously taken, and subsequently began building its own security wall along its border with Gaza as it cooperated with Israel to destroy tunnels where weapons were one of many items including foodstuffs smuggled to Palestinians. Secondly, on the domestic front, the parliamentary elections of 2010 were widely seen as the most blatantly fraudulent of the Mubarak years – a sad litany of violence and cheating – which the Muslim Brotherhood and Wafd boycotted after the first round of voting made it clear what kind of poll this was going to be but which government apologists like Mustafa al-Fiqi defended in the media.

Two weeks after Tunisians forced out Zain al-Abideen Ben Ali, mass protests for reform began in Egypt on 25 January. It’s interesting to consider that there may have been points when the revolt could have floundered and Mubarak could have survived. In hindsight this revolution and its success will likely be seen as having been inevitable – the way historical events often are viewed – but while there were many factors that led to the street mobilization from 25 January to 11 February there were a number of turning points from 25 January onwards where the future direction of events was in the balance and not clear at all. Plus of course we do not at this stage have information on what the deliberations were inside the regime during that period, though some tidbits have seeped into the press, such as the fights between Gamal and Alaa Mubarak just before Mubarak stepped down.

28 January was the first major turning point, when protesters endured the security forces’ attempt to break them, the Interior Ministry took the critical decision to take all police and security forces off the street and the army was deployed.  The absence of police to fight the protesters over the next two weeks was a key underlying element in bringing Mubarak down, as was the army’s position that it would not clash with the people exercising peacably their right to demand change. These two elements – no police and an army committed to leave the protests alone (despite repeated calls on the protesters at Tahrir Square to give up) – set the scene for a war of nerves and brinkmanship, and some desperate attempts on the regime’s part to find alternative means of coercion and violence. There was virtually nothing to stop the protest at Tahrir Square swelling to huge numbers – probably 200-300,000, though it’s hard to judge exactly how many people the square can hold – on many days during the ensuing struggle, bringing critical pressure to bear on Mubarak and those advising him such as the army and his foreign interlocuters.  

The regime tried several tricks. First Mubarak’s second speech on 1 February. It was a clever appeal to the emotions of Egyptians, especially those who were on the fence and prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. That includes protesters themselves, some of whom began to leave Tahrir Square on that Tuesday night. However, the regime made a fatal misjudgement by following up with an attempt at coercion, and one apparently coordinated with the speech. Immediately it was over, Mubarak supporters appeared on the streets around Cairo. The next day they overplayed their hand when pro-Mubarak militias stormed Tahrir Square on camels and horses. They failed to break up the protest encampment, though the loyalists remained a force around central Cairo and elsewhere for the rest of the crisis. In the coming days many of the protesters inside the Tahrir commune – a kind of sanctified zone, with no overbearing state, corruption or police brutality, where the prototype of a new Egypt was in formation – told me they had wavered after Mubarak said he did not want another term in office but was proud of what he had done for his country in war and peace and was determined not to leave his land.

A kind of stalemate set in that stage. During that time, state media tried to increase pressure on the protesters to give up, while Mubarak’s vice president Omar Suleiman made the mistake of going to American media in a plea for foreigner support and understanding (and claiming Egyptians were not mature enough for democracy, an old favourite of the region’s dictators). Mubarak had two meetings with foreign officials -both, tellingly, from the Gulf, where the entrenched ruling dynasties were in shock at the events unfolding in Egypt – an advisor to Sultan Qaboos of Oman on 6 February and the UAE foreign minister two days later. Omar Suleiman held some meetings with opposition groups. But events moved again through the tears of an activist on Egyptian television. Wael Ghoneim was interviewed on Dream TV on Monday, 7 February after he had spent some two weeks – most of the period of the unrest – in the custody of state security. When the interviewer told Ghoneim, a Facebook rights activists who worked with Google, about some of the 300 people who died in the unrest while he was incarcerated, he broke down in tears. “We didn’t do anything wrong. We did what our consciences dictated to us,” he said. Within minutes of the interview’s conclusion, thousands had joined new pages on Facebook.  “I authorize Wael Ghoneim to speak in the name of Egypt’s revolutionaries” – the main support page – gathered more than 120,000 “likes” within 12 hours. It was interesting that Ghoneim’s tears contrasted with the lack of remorse shown by Mubarak over the deaths, which did not even feature in his first and second speeches – another of the mistakes that led to the final denouement.

All efforts to end the democracy activists’ occupation of Tahrir Square had come to nothing. The protesters understood that without the pressure of their street presence, the promises of reform were highly likely to come to nothing, indeed the regime’s revenge against them could be bloody. On Thursday, 10 February Mubarak appeared on television for his third speech. The expectation was huge that he would finally step down. In the event, he said he would delegate unspecified presidential powers to Suleiman but not that he would no longer be president. It was a badly-framed speech that relied on the same rhetorical tricks of the previous one, as Mubarak talked arrogantly about his services to the country (“I did not seek any type of forced popularity and I am quite confident that the majority of the Egyptian people know who Hosni Mubarak is”). The presence of several hundreds thousands packed into Tahrir the next day still demanding his immediate exit was the clear spur to the military to push Mubarak out. In a brief speech, Suleiman announced Mubarak’s resignation and that the armed forces council would temporarily run the country. Suleiman, the head of the General Intelligence Service accused by one al-Qa’ida suspect of personally torturing him, was technically a member of the military council, but he withdrew from public view.

Another factor one has to bear in mind during the 17 days of the uprising is the position of the American government. What is not clear is to what degree White House comments in public and private pressured Mubarak, the military and others in the regime to take further action or gave them the confidence to think they could ride the situation out. Obama never publicly called on Mubarak to step down. He spoke with him after Mubarak’s first speech on 28 January then said publicly the government should “refrain from any violence against peaceful protestors”, which sounded a tad weak, though he did set out the principle that “the people of Egypt have rights that are universal”. From 1 February Obama started to talk of “change” and “now”, and that remained the administration’s refrain until he stepped down 10 days later. Once Mubarak had gone, Obama came out with one of his classic rousing speech praising the uprising and comparing the movement to those led by Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

So much for Obama; the picture is more disturbing when one looks at the comments of others in his administration. After the first showdown on 25 January Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged all sides to refrain from violence – an absurd comment given the brutality of Egyptian security forces and the bravery of those prepared to stand up against them. Obama’s vice president infamously said of Mubarak on 27 January “I would not refer to him as a dictator”. He also equated the protesters and the security forces they faced off against, saying the former should do their thing “peacefully” and the latter should do theirs “responsibly”. He praised Mubarak’s friendship to America over the years and talked of the need to establish that which was “legitimate” about the protesters demands, as if there were some in the dirty ragbag that might be illegitimate. Obama appointed a special envoy to Egypt during the unrest whose public comments suggested his remit was to save Mubarak, not meet Egyptian demands that a dictator of 30 years must fall. “We need to get a national consensus around the preconditions for the next step forward. The president must stay in office to steer those changes,” the envoy Frank Wisner told a security conference in Germany via video conference from Washington on 5 February. “I therefore believe that President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical – it’s his opportunity to write his own legacy.”  In a phone call with former Israeli cabinet minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer one day before he was ousted, Mubarak sounded jaded because the United States had not done more to help him. Omar Suleiman’s two interviews to ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, on 3 and 7 February, were part of an effort to keep Washington faithful to the end to Mubarak. That it was not was the work of the revolutionaries.
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