Wednesday, January 26, 2011
I returned to southwest Cairo after two nights in Bahariya Oasis, and as my taxi crawled up the road along the west bank of the Nile I noted the presence of a number of blue vans, with riot police inside or milling about. On Gezira - literally "the island" - there were more vans and police, and on eventually reaching Midan Tahrir, where there were even more police lined up, I finally asked why; I’d never seen anywhere near so many police in Egypt. It turned out that there had been an anti-government demonstration here on the public holiday Tuesday, and indeed several hundred people were still chanting that day on the pavement in front of KFC, catty-corner from the Mugamma.
Midan Tahrir is the major intersection of downtown Cairo. The Mugamma, monolithic home of Egyptian bureaucracy stands there, as does part of the American University in Cairo. Metro station Sadat lies beneath it. The apricot walls and dome of the Egyptian Museum are visible a block away, and just behind those can be seen the towering concrete block that is the headquarters of the National Democratic Party, who have controlled Egypt since the coup that ousted the monarchy. We slowly moved into Talaat Harb St, past more vans and more riot police including one with what looked like a metre-long shotgun. At Midan Talaat Harb, we turned into Kasr Il Nile Street - traffic on the remainder of Talaat Harb runs south from Midan Orabi - and from there made our way to the Yacoubian Building, home of the hotel.
The courier with my replacement credit card hadn't arrived yet. The telecommunications centre I knew was on Midan Tahrir on the same segment as the protest, but the protest was small so I walked down there. The riot police were blocking any entrance to the pavement, however, so I returned back up Talaat Harb. Instead I called Visa from my hotel’s phone, and discovered that the card was due to be delivered the next evening. There was some talk that the Government had curtailed the use of social media sites, but I had no problem in accessing any internet sites that night. There was also talk that an Al Jezeera journalists had been shot many times with rubber bullets.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
As I was leaving, one of the three Americans staying there said that she and her friend had caught a little tear gas late the previous night. The morning was, however, quiet: I walked down the near-deserted Talaat Harb to the near-deserted Midan Tahrir, and caught a train to El Munieb, south of Giza. From the bus station there, I caught a microbus to the Fayyum, the artificial oasis where a significant amount of Egypt's food is grown and spent the day there. In the evening, I returned to Ramses (Mubarak) the major train station in Cairo and walked down through the souk to Metro Attaba where I discovered that Cairo had a region filled with second hand bookstalls, and from there returned to my hotel. Everything seemed normal -- business as usual -- if a little quieter than usual.
My card had arrived, but when I walked down again to Midan Tahrir, the travel agent that represented Ethiopian Air had closed. The corner was devoid of protesters. At the hotel, however, the internet wasn't working - this was before midnight, earlier than reports which widely list the shutdown as being sometime on the Friday.
Friday January 28, 2011
[The exact sequence of the events of the day is as best as I can reconstruct it; I was not taking notes at the time]
The Caribbean Russian left early in the morning carrying her daypack; the bearded Japanese also left - I believe he’d a day tour booked. The internet was still down, and mobile phones had been cut off some time overnight as well to stop protests being organised. "I may need to stay another night, depending on whether I can get a ticket for tonight or not", I informed the Egyptian manager -- it was no problem, but I should come back by midday as there were likely to be protests after prayers. With the internet and mobile telephony cut off, the last major avenue of organised protest was the mosques. The agency was closed, as were many other businesses. A shoe store was getting roller security shutters fitted.
On Adly Street, just north of the hotel, a bunch of green mats had been spread on the pavement and out onto the road, but Adly Street was almost deserted. I went down into the street. There's a juice stall opposite, and I grabbed a drink of orange there. The male American student [R.] had grabbed some McDonalds and was returning to the building. I considered it -- McDonalds was one of the few other shops open at the moment -- but decided against it. Previous Friday evenings had been busy, after all. It was a quarter to twelve and the calls to prayers went out. Normally these only last ten or fifteen minutes, but it was around 12:30pm before they stopped. A stream of around a hundred people went round into Adly street, and perhaps further. A sermon was broadcast in the middle-distance; it did not sound happy. The sermon finished. All was quiet, and eventually a loose crowd of people returned down Adly Street, and wandered up or down Talaat Harb St.
Nothing happened.
Vodaphone connections were still working, R. discovered, as he called his folks to let them know that everything was ok. Vodaphone connections stopped working. I went downstairs to see if the diner next door was open; R., who was wanting to visit the British Museum eventually, also came down. The diner wasn’t open, and nor was the one across the street. McDonalds seemed like an option, but it was closed. “I may as well walk down towards the Museum. Maybe the travel agent has opened”, said I.
We never got anywhere near there.
Things happened.
A hundred of hundred metres or so down the street a crowd marched out onto Talaat Harb and stopped facing towards us. At Champoleon St, just south of Midan Orabi, riot police massed; the High Court is on Champoleon. Getting back to the hotel ASAP, thankfully only a few metres away seemed like a Very Good Idea. At the entrance a burly middle-aged man asked if were we journalists -- No. We didn’t need to worry, he told us, noone wanted tourists to get hurt, and the few traffic police nearby were actually security forces. This was not entirely reassuring, and we entered the Yacoubian Building and got up to the fourth floor.
Three of the hotel’s rooms on the fourth floor face out onto Talaat Harb. The sitting room at the north and the dorm at the south have balconies. Unless you lean out you are reasonably screened from the sightlines of Midan Orabi and Midan Talaat Harb, so risk appeared reasonably low to watch proceedings.
The crowd advanced towards Orabi. Most of the crowd stopped at Abdel Khalek Sarwat St, just south of the hotel. The few who advanced walked up past Adly, and at the front a lone girl in a red jacket brandished what I remember as being a sign aloft (although I have seen images of what looks like the same girl brandishing a flag), while photojournalists behind her snapped their photos.
The riot police parted to let an armoured vehicle through. A riot policeman in the hatch at the top fired teargas - it turned out the huge shotgun I saw earlier in the week was used for firing canisters. Billowing white trails arced through the air, and when they landed protestors would try to kick or throw the canisters back. They called for onions (apparently an antidote to tear gas), and from various balconies around purple onions were thrown down, and sometimes bottles of water too, most of which splattered on the ground. With all the gas being fired, and the zenith of some of the arcs being well above our level, tear gas reached our balconies. This was generally fairly dilute, and only a few times was it strong enough to force us to retreat inside. At one point a canister landed on a balcony opposite but higher than ours, and plumes of tear gas drifted down. Later on, while we were all inside, a canister landed on the balcony of the sitting room, fumes wafting under the French doors. [Tear gas, incidently, smells something like a firecracker crossed with a burning sensation in the sinuses, and while it mainly hurts the mucous membranes it also irritates skin as well]
At various times, the crowd pushed towards Adly and at others they retreated past Sarwat. “Come down” called some of the protesters. None of us did. Security barriers were dumped in the street to stop the assault vehicle advancing. Pavers were taken from the corner at Sarwat and broken up to provide stones, which were thrown; some of the police threw the stones back -- they were armed with shields and metre-long batons, and only a few riot shotguns between them. The assault vehicle left for elsewhere. Tear gas continued to be fired. It's possible that rubber bullets or beanbags were being fired in addition to the tear gas canisters - some of the shots had a different sound.
Someone had been injured - perhaps a direct hit by a tear gas canister. An Ambulance came down Adly and stopped in front of our building, and paramedics raced into the back-alley area opposite. Very occasionally a private vehicle would come down Adly and very quickly return back up the one-way street. At some point in the afternoon, a taxi pulled up and quickly disgorged the Japanese.
For a while there was a second front at Sarwat as another group riot police pushed into the intersection. The battles went back and forth, but eventually the crowd split. Those towards Talaat Harb went out of view, while those still up our end dissipated. A crowd of what could have been fifty plainclothes security personnel wielding sticks (and in one case a metal baseball bat) came up the street pursuing stragglers and dragging protesters out from the back-alley section, whapping them with their sticks, and arresting them. One of the arrestees appeared to be about twelve years old. An armoured vehicle drove to the doorway of a block of flats further up the street, teargas poured from every floor, and soon people were being dragged from there as well.
Talaat Harb settled right down. We all ducked downstairs, where the snack shop next to the juice shop had half-opened his roller-door, and bought food-ish items. Things started up again - there was more fighting along Sarwat, and the muzzle flash of the riot shotguns were bright in the evening darkness. Later, three Army people movers raced into Talaat Harb and down towards Midan Tahrir. The police had left, and the Army was taking over security. At times during the day, and through much of the night we watched the satellite news channels - Al Jazeera, CNN, and BBC World. These had not been able to be cut off (although very occasionally there was static on Al Jazeera and notes that the channel was scrambled). There was a lot of repetition in the footage used - a minute or so of protestors on and under the overpass at Dokki while riot police were below, an armoured vehicle hitting a protestor and another one with its door being ripped open, and so on. And there was new news too - the headquarters of the NDP was reported to have been set on fire, looters had briefly hit the Egyptian Museum but commandos were now patrolling its halls, there was a curfew (widely ignored by the folks wandering up Talaat Harb), and the airport had been shut down.
Saturday January 29, 2011
The next day Talaat Harb was clear; I wandered down. A crowd was gathered in front of the Egyptian Museum, and a lonely fire engine poured water into the still aflame NDP headquarters. Another crowd was gathered in Midan Tahrir but had left the pavement clear. There were a couple of tanks parked off the square. The travel agency was closed; the money changers were closed; even McDonalds was closed; most everything in downtown seemed closed.
The other way on Talaat Harb and a bit of damage could be seen - some shop windows broken by stray stones or canisters (the shopkeeper opposite had spent the night outside his boarded frontage), and the liquor store deliberately broken into and its contents destroyed. Only one shop I saw had been looted - and only the contents of its front window. At Midan Orabi, the market was opening, with fruitsellers and bakers and grocery shops.
The Russian still hadn’t returned but another American turned up fresh from the airport - it was open again. A few of the guests headed to Ramses to see if they could get to Luxor; others of us headed for the airport. More military personnel could be seen on the way there.
Many flights were cancelled or delayed. There was a KLM flight up the top of the listing that had been listed as being delayed a day and a half. Curfew kicked in at 4pm, so that those who arrived afterwards were stuck in the airport. Conversely, it’s likely that not everyone managed to get to the airport. The eateries at both Terminals 1 and 3 ran out of supplies and closed very early. I booked myself on an Egypt Air flight leaving late that night from Terminal 3, but by about 10pm, nearly every Egypt Air flight, both internal and external had been cancelled. The ticket window at Terminal 3 was swamped with unhappy travellers, but I at least managed to get a refund when I returned to Terminal 1. Plan B (Ethiopian Airlines to Addis) was revealed to also have been cancelled, and plan C (Kenyan Airlines to Nairobi via Khartoum) was already boarding and its office now closed. I went with the less than ideal Plan D (Etihad to Abu Dhabi; bus to Dubai; Ethiopian Airlines to Addis), which was the only flight listed to the region until at least 11am the next day. It too was delayed, but at l(e)ast it left.
