Graeme Wood : The Atlantic

In Cairo, Two Faces of Tahrir

2011-06-30T06:59:00-04:00

Last night, the city saw two autonomous sets of protesters: one dark, violent, and uncertain; the other light, peaceful, and committed

Reuters

CAIRO, Egypt -- Wednesday night, the light in Tahrir Square was bright enough to read by, and the crowd of demonstrators was so thin that I could sit with a book under a street-lamp for hours, my light blocked only rarely by a passerby. Three times I witnessed violence of the mildest sort. Twice, someone chucked a stone at a passing police truck (once, the stone zinged right past my head, and I had to chase grit from my hair). And once a shoving match broke out between a guy who had brought a small horse to the square (Tweeters were calling it the "Thawra Pony," or "Revolution Pony") and protesters who wanted to keep Tahrir a pony-free zone. By the end of my book, at around 10:30, the police had stopped doing drive-bys, and the Thawra Pony was still being led around the Square, seemingly without further controversy.

It hadn't been so calm for any part of that day. I'd been away for Tahrir for five months, and violence erupted late on Tuesday, as if to welcome me back. The families of those murdered in the revolution -- beaten, shot, sliced, and simply disappeared -- have been agitating for the prosecution of those responsible. On Wednesday, their protests turned sour, and Cairo erupted again into rock-throwing. This time the police (now universally called "khanzir," or "pig," by the protesters) have been more liberal in their use of tear-gas and rubber bullets.

But by evening this fighting had died down to embers, in large part because of the soccer game between the popular Zamalek and Ahly teams, a sports showdown capable of distracting Egyptians from all occasions other than their own weddings and funerals. (There were rumors that the game was going to be canceled -- a disastrous turn of events for the government, since it would have kept the Tahrir crowd big and angry all day and through the evening.) I walked around the circle and saw a level of rage that was palpable but insufficient to bring much real change. Tents went up, suggesting that their residents were planning to stay put, but there were only four of them. Souvenir stands sold postcards of Che Guevara, Yasir Arafat, and, more worryingly, Osama Bin Laden. Chants against Field Marshal Mohamed Hussain Tantawi, who as head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is the de facto ruler of Egypt, began and ended, like a wave at the soccer game that fans kept trying and failing to keep going.

What a difference, though, a block makes. To Tahrir Square's east is Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which was once the main drag of the elite American University in Cairo, whose students would toss frisbees across the road, over the rush of traffic. A little further is the Ministry of Interior -- and there the skirmishes continued, with unpredictable results.

Tahrir Square was a cathedral of light, but Mohamed Mahmoud Street remained dark and had every sign of being the front line of a danger zone. Stones and broken glass crunched underfoot, and the protesters milling in the dark were all men. When I got close I could see their faces, which looked dangerously indecisive, as if ready to be talked into doing anything at any moment, if only two or three people around them would make up their minds first. Occasionally, I'd see dozens of them run at a time -- never more than about 50 yards, and then they'd return to their positions. Several people walked around with clubs made of street-signs. Now and then someone dropped his with a clatter, but always another person picked it up.

At Mansour Street, police had formed a line, and around midnight they stood about 20 feet from this indecisive mob, their riot shields ready. The active side was the protesters': now and then someone yelled, or lit a fire on the road (a prelude to a fire-bomb strike), or threw a stone. But nothing ever happened. Some protesters -- as well as residents of the neighborhood, who wanted more than anything to keep their apartments from getting burnt down -- yelled at the rest and urged them to return to Tahrir. The protesters stayed put, milling and milling, half afraid of their potential and half thrilled by it.

When I left around 1:30 a.m., the line still held. And when I passed through Tahrir, the atmosphere of peeved solidarity remained, and the crowd looked very far from being ready to throw bombs or rocks with the intent to maim rather than menace. These were the two autonomous sets of protesters: one dark, violent, and uncertain; the other light, peaceful, and committed.

The latter was a much bigger group than the former, but also less clear in its methods. Would it have to seize and hold Tahrir again to keep pressing its demands? The dark group could throw a single Molotov cocktail and provoke a fight. (Indeed, a single member of that group could provoke a fight.) The light group prevailed on Wednesday -- so far, it seems the violence at the Interior remained minimal after I left -- but whether it will again tomorrow is anyone's guess.

With Mubarak Gone, Will Egypt's Revolutionaries Divide?

2011-02-14T13:00:00-05:00

The protests unified the opposition, but every uprising has its moderates and its radicals

CAIRO, Egypt -- Hosni Mubarak with donkey ears, Hosni Mubarak with a Hitler mustache, Hosni Mubarak as Colonel Sanders -- once the protesters started heaping on the scorn, they couldn't stop. It was a long time coming.

The only prior time I had heard anyone in Egypt express public contempt for Mubarak was in 2003, before a prosperous and well-educated audience at the American University in Cairo. Edward Said, the distinguished Palestinian-American literary critic, had just given a stirring lecture on the difficulty of life under a repressive regime, namely (of course) Israel. During the question and answer session, an American study-abroad student took the microphone to ask a question that sent such a frisson through the crowd that I doubt I am the only one who remembers it more or less verbatim. "Here in Egypt," he said, "we're living under a military dictatorship, and it looks like Hosni Mubarak wants to pass the leadership on to his son Gamal." How, he asked, could Egyptians fight back against repression?

The fear that passed through the crowd was audible, visible, palpable, and immediate. Someone yelped when the name "Gamal" was mentioned, and a professor rushed to cut off the microphone. Dissidents, including the university's own Saad Eddin Ibrahim, had been imprisoned for asking such questions. After several seconds of extreme distress -- followed by a round of light applause from students -- Said responded wanly, saying that all political regimes were inherently coercive, and yes, it's difficult, isn't it? At this point, the distressed yelps came from the students, who seemed to faint a little inside when they realized that if even Edward Said (beloved in Cairo, and with terminal leukemia, having little to lose) was too craven to support regime change, then no one would.

This weekend, men and women from that prosperous, educated class hit the streets, tidying up after the demonstrations and violence that had marred and hallowed Tahrir Square during the last two and a half weeks. One of the familiar characters of Egyptian domestic life is the zabbal, or garbage-man (usually a Coptic Christian, whose faith permits him to feed organic waste to Cairo's pigs). I lived in Cairo for two years, and no zabbal of mine ever picked up the trash in stiletto heels, or while moonlighting from his day job as a dermatologist. But in Tahrir Square this weekend, one saw miraculous things, and these were among them.

The Tahrir clean-up started before the party had even ended. Cairenes from all demographics, including the wealthy and educated, showed up in force, bearing cans of paint and push-brooms. The task was hardly thankless; some pinned signs to themselves and grinned with self-congratulation at stooping to filthy work for a country they loved. It was also totally impractical; as of late Saturday, the square still brimmed with massive crowds. Imagine trying to tidy up a Rolling Stones concert during the third verse of "Satisfaction." Two weeks earlier, the protesters had formed human chains to prevent vandals from looting the Egyptian Museum. Now they formed human chains because they had just swept and painted the curb, and weren't about to let anyone track dust onto it.

As of Sunday, the square was nearly emptied and cars were driving through all but a few of the streets. In the last day or so, the military has moved in to remove the bitter-enders, the protesters who cheered Mubarak's downfall but refused to leave until democracy, rather than a fragile military rule, had arrived. Their worry is entirely sensible: the Egyptian military never renounced Mubarak (who was, after all, one of their own); and although it pledges elections, it hasn't loosened the infamous Emergency Law or, for that matter, dismissed the government Mubarak hastily appointed two weeks ago.

There have been two groups of protesters in the square: the radicals, and the tourists. The radicals shed blood and risked everything to get rid of Mubarak, and the tourists supported them but didn't show up until the danger had passed. During the heady early days of the protests, none of the radicals indicated that they would be satisfied with anything less than democracy and the most severe justice for Mubarak and his people. Already, we've witnessed the gratifying spectacle of ex-Mubarak ministers' being denied permission to leave the country and, presumably, flee to luxurious exile. Early in the protests, Amr Bargisi warned in The Wall Street Journal that the protesters would commence a reign of terror if they won. "The next step," he said the protesters promised, "will be to knock on the doors of suburban villas and ask the owners: Where did you get the money to afford these?"

Where, then, are the Arab Jacobins, and should we fear them? The presence of elites out there, shoveling garbage with the common man, must be met with some ambivalence, I suppose: some among them are, for the moment, supporters of the revolution, and others could potentially be its victims. So far, the protesters have shown little appetite for gore and have cleared no space for a guillotine in Tahrir Square. Perhaps it is the military's role to stifle and suppress the most eager of these protesters and to allow the villa owners, many of whom have military connections, to prepare themselves for justice. The radical wing of protesters has shown little flexibility about anything so far, and eventually it will demand, in a word, satisfaction.

Photo by Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty

'We Are Egyptians: Hold Up Your Head!'

2011-02-11T16:35:00-05:00

Celebration and national pride overwhelm the Egyptian capital

CAIRO, Egypt -- One longs to know what finally convinced Hosni Mubarak to relinquish his office. What, as of this afternoon, did he see that he could not have seen before? By the end of January, he must have known that his people were desperate to be rid of him. By the end of last week, they showed they were prepared to fight and die. And by yesterday night, after his weird and deluded speech failed to mollify crowds and instead pumped them full of wrath, he must have known that the movement would metastasize beyond Tahrir Square, and that by staying in power he was only making things worse.

One theory: He was watching his own state television network. This afternoon around three o'clock, a crowd of about 1,000 people had the entrance of the building blocked, in an effort to send a message that could penetrate even the waxy ears of official State media. The crowd's cheers were led by a girl, no older than six, but with the lungs developed far beyond her years. Riding the shoulders of a man, probably at her father, she screamed the familiar incantations of Egyptian democracy, and the crowd screamed with her. Five minutes after she started, I saw her thwack her dad on the back, like a horse: she wanted not to face the crowd, but instead to face the M1 tanks and freshly stretched razor wire that stood between her and the state television building. If Mubarak was looking at the live raw feed from the windows of that building, he would have seen the glare of a child, fixed with bravery and loathing, and leading a crowd of thousands. How can one look back at that and continue in office is beyond me, and perhaps proved beyond him, too.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/10: Rage Against Mubarak's Speech
2/10: The Revolution's Second Act
2/7: Mistrust Spreads

Tonight, when the announcement of Mubarak's resignation percolated through Cairo's alleys, car horns confirmed the news before Twitter did. For the last several hours, the horns have not stopped. Not only in Tahrir, but also parts of Cairo so-far untouched by rioting, the refrain is "We are Egyptians: Hold up your head." This is entirely apposite, for a movement that Mubarak tried to slander as a foreign plot. But it's also something one has heard in Tahrir for many days. A man with a bandage told me he had applied for a visa to Canada but no longer had any intention of using it, because of the pride he felt in his country. Mubarak, he said, had defamed and befouled a great civilization. "Now I will never leave this place," he said. "This is my country. I finally discovered this."

"This is my country. I finally discovered this."

There are, now, few reminders of the squalid last moments of Mubarak's dictatorship. The curfew, imposed as an inconvenience to make the protests unpopular, is completely ignored. The bridges I once scurried across furtively late at night in hopes that I wouldn't be noticed and arrested, are now packed with cars and crowds, who are setting off firecrackers and engaging in light celebratory pyromania. Pieces of sheet metal crinkle underfoot: These were the barricades, now disassembled and trampled. The song of choice, played no fewer than five times in succession this evening near Talaat Harb Square, is Shadia's "Ya Habibti Ya Masr" -- "Oh Egypt, My Beloved."

And where to now? When the sun rises tomorrow on an Egypt that is so much closer to democracy, it will shine first on Sharm al Sheikh, where Mubarak fled this afternoon and is, one presumes, on the phone at this very minute to verify reports that his family assets in Swiss banks have been frozen. I've met almost no one in Tahrir willing to countenance amnesty for 30 years of corruption and tyranny, not to mention a crowning week of thuggery and murder. The crowds today are celebrating. Perhaps tomorrow will see a mass road trip to the Sinai.

Photo by Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty

'Go Away!' Rage in Tahrir Square Against Mubarak's Speech

2011-02-10T18:30:00-05:00

The crowd came expecting to celebrate victory but left furious and defiant, as Egypt's president refuses to step down

CAIRO, Egypt -- Unless you count the dummies that they've been hanging in effigy from lampposts for the last week, the protesters in Tahrir Square have been remarkably nonviolent in the imagery they've used against Hosni Mubarak. Tonight that equanimity began melting away. Not long before Mubarak came on television to speak, two men carried into the crowd a banner depicting Mubarak as Pharaoh. In one image he wore a King Tut/Yul Brynner headdress, and in the other he was dead and mummified.

Between the two images is a Koranic verse, implying that in death, Mubarak's corpse would serve as a reminder to other tyrants:

So today We will save you in body that you may be to those who succeed you a sign.

There is an established history of comparing Egypt's secular leaders to the pharoahs. When Mubarak's predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated, the killer's first words after emptying his AK-47 into sadat's body were, "I have killed the pharaoh! I do not fear death!"

As Mubarak started his speech tonight, the crowd hushed and was ready to hear him out. They wanted celebration, not blood. They seemed ready to cheer and exult, and would surely have done so even if all Mubarak said was that he intended to resign immediately. He wouldnt even have had to agree to a fixed date for elections: A simple "I'm going" would have sufficed. Instead the crowd murmured in disbelief as Mubarak droned on, defiantly granting no substantive concession whatsoever.

Nervous tics in the crowd surfaced, and young mothers with toddlers up past their bedtime started packing their things in case the scene turned ugly. Tears gave way to anger in about 90 seconds, and by the end of the speech no one cared what Mubarak was saying. The protesters heard only themselves, yelling "Irhal," or "Go away."

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/10: The Revolution's Second Act
2/7: Mistrust Spreads
2/4: Reenergized and Ready in Tahrir

Cellphone camera flashes had been popping like fireflies through the night. Now they ceased completely, and a few people looked angry at me when I took a few shots of my own. When Nasser cracked down on dissent, Egyptians used the phrase "zuwaar nuss al-layl," or "midnight visitors," to describe the knocks at the door by secret police. Were people suddenly worried that the crackdown might happen, and that snapshots would go into a secret police scrapbook somewhere? They were certainly worried about something.

I filed out of Tahrir with a crowd that kicked up dust as it went, like a cattle stampede. By now it was nearly midnight, and many who had come to watch history being made went home filled with rage. Others, in a group of a few hundred, marched to the state TV station -- a heavily guarded building about a kilometer away -- and were, as of a few minutes ago, chanting "Irhal" so furiously that one could hear them across the Nile and up and down the corniche.

If Mubarak hadn't delayed so long, perhaps the protesters would still have had the energy to take the TV building outright. I have not seen the faces in the Square seem so bitter or fuming before; they looked like they wanted to overturn cars. Tonight was the closest Mubarak will ever get to a graceful exit.

The Egyptian Revolution's Coming Second Act

2011-02-10T10:50:00-05:00

It's now on the protest movement either to take meaningful new steps or risk becoming little more than a carnival

CAIRO, Egypt -- The last week in Tahrir has taught a number of cruel lessons, chief among them that the old Marxist chronology of tragedy-then-farce is severely out of date. As my friend Graham Harman has observed, the spectacle of 21st-century camelborne cavalry charges against peaceful demonstrators is itself a blend of Pythonesque absurdity and profound evil. That tragicomedy happened in a single afternoon. What could possibly serve as a second act?

As of Monday, the Square's population had dwindled perceptibly. Now and then, one witnessed minor altercations when protesters suspected each other of infiltration. By the next day, these fears vanished -- not because of any lack of infiltrators, but because the massive crowds made policing Tahrir impossible. The Egyptian military still mans the entrances, but only halfheartedly. This weekend, one had to brave a crush of demonstrators to get inside, and endure the danger that all the pushing and shoving would knock you into a coil of concertina wire. Now, almost every entrance to the square is open, and the crowds are huge and unmanageable. Infiltrators come and go as they please.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/7: Mistrust Spreads
2/4: Reenergized and Ready in Tahrir
2/3: Dragged Through the Street

These crowds are a blessing. Until recently, the government could paint the demonstrators as foreign-led subversives. Now, Egyptians know the subversion is real but homegrown. Yet increasingly, the blessing seems mixed. Of the newcomers to the square, few are hard-core revolutionaries. Instead, they are tourists from Cairo and beyond, snapping photos and gawking at the remarkable spectacle of their president ridiculed, hanged in effigy, and taunted in a venue where he was once scarcely mentioned in an unflattering way. The square was once mobilized for self-defense, and at the rattle of a piece of sheet metal, a hundred men and women would sprint toward the threat, ready to be maimed for the cause of freedom. Now it takes ten minutes to cover the same distance, and you'd have to push past vendors of popcorn and novelty sunglasses to get there.

The protesters have tried to keep momentum by spilling south toward Parliament. But Parliament is not enough, and everyone knows it. The two sites commonly mentioned for the protesters' next step are the president's palace and the state TV building, which in January was attacked but not seized. During my years in Cairo, before any of the recent troubles, the state TV building was always heavily guarded and assumed to be a vital prize for anyone attempting a coup. It remains a forbidding target, with snipers in the windows and tanks on the streets. If the protesters mobilize to march there, expect violence.

It falls now to the protesters to prove that their revolution is alive and hasn't turned into a mere carnival. Outside the square, Egyptians are complaining. The complainers include even some who regard the protesters as heroes. "They should go home. Already they've made a change, and it can't be reversed," said Wanil, an Egyptian engineer outside the square. "Mubarak got his 70 billion dollars, and maybe that's the price we pay for being too lazy to get him out of power for 30 years. But whoever is president next, if he takes even one pound, we will eat him."

Elsewhere one sees strife due to lost wages, and the inconvenience of an eight o'clock curfew. Outside the headquarters of Omar Effendi, the Egyptian version of Macy's, about a hundred men rioted because they had missed pay during store closures last week. The protesters, of course, say that the blame falls on Mubarak. They echo Trotsky, who wrote that blaming revolutionaries for economic woes is "like accusing a newborn of the birth-pangs of the mother who brought him into the world."

Is the revolution stillborn, effectively smothered by the gawking crowds of Tahrir? There is plenty of reason to doubt that it is. Reports of riots and burning government buildings elsewhere in Egypt are a sign that it lives on. One waits, though, to see whether this revolutionary baby still has enough air in its lungs to scream to have its navel-strings severed and be allowed to crawl forward. Tomorrow, after Friday prayers, will be an interesting time.

Photo by Getty

Mistrust Spreads Among Egypt's Protesters: A Day and Night in Tahrir

2011-02-07T10:45:00-05:00

As circumstances on the ground shift less rapidly, the protest movement now faces subtler threats, with dissent and subversion becoming major preoccupations

CAIRO, Egypt -- There is trouble in paradise, and its name is fitna. At 2 a.m. yesterday in Tahrir Square, a brawl erupted near the Iberia Airlines office. It was not a fair fight: A crowd ganged up on one middle-aged man who had remarked loudly that he thought the anti-regime coalition was going to fall apart because of religious differences (devout vs. secular, Christian vs. Muslim). Another man overheard him, told him to shut up, and gathered a crowd first to shout him down and then shove him around. The first man gave up and skulked off, eventually scowling alone on the pavement, with his back against the stone wall of a travel agency, his arms hugging his sweater and his hands and face pelted with cold rain. The crowd yelled after him: "Fitna! Fitna! Fitna!" -- an Arabic word with a long history and a complicated English meaning, a cross between "strife," "disagreement," "discord," or "sedition." Or in plain English: "Why can't we all just get along?"

The situation among Egypt's protesters now shifts not by the minute or hour but by the day. With this new metabolism, the protest movement is having to deal with threats more subtle than flying bricks. Dissent and subversion are major preoccupations: There are signs of jitters, even paranoia. Foreigners now have to prove their identity as members of the press, and protesters identifying themselves as members of the movement's "security" team approach in the square to demand a reporter's identity documents. Until recently, this happened only on the outside.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/4: Reenergized and Ready in Tahrir
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'

After the fitna man walked away fuming, Muhammad Mamdouh voiced a suspicion. "He may have been sent here by [Vice President Omar] Suleiman," he said, referring to the Egyptian spymaster now assumed to be running the country. Mamdouh observed that until that day, the military hadn't allowed any food sellers in, and everyone had to pack in his own bread, spreads, and tubs of the Egyptian pasta-rice-tomato melee known as koshary. "Why till now don't you see the sellers? [Suleiman] introduced them to make crowds gather around them, to let things like this happen." He said he thought the man was a Mubarak agent, sent to make divisive comments in crowds and undermine the revolution. So now in addition to Molotov cocktails, the protesters must deal with the koshary threat.

Time is only partially on the protesters' side. They are, on the one hand, still wholly defiant, and if anything more resolved than on Friday. Ahmed, 24, repeated a line that I heard at least half a dozen times during a night in the square: "Half a revolution is like suicide," he said. If they leave now, the government will renege, and the protesters will begin to disappear in the night. He said he abandoned a lucrative perfume shop in 6 October City to be here, and now that he has seen fighting he has no fear. "When the police come, their first bullet makes you scared," he said. "But the second bullet, you catch it." He clawed once at the air, plucking an imaginary bullet from its path, like Mr. Miyagi catching a fly.

But with time, the protesters are having to develop systems for managing not only spies and perceived spies, but legitimate dissent in their midst. Around midnight, a group convened near the Arab League to produce propaganda videos. About half a dozen young organizers, more than half of them chic young women, sat in the middle of a crowd of about 40, reading out the concerns that they had heard on state media and inviting members of the crowd to respond by speaking to their cameras and producing videos that would later appear on YouTube. The meeting was a mess, with nearly all voices rendered inaudible by crosstalk. In the middle of filming, a man broke into the circle and screamed curses at them for bothering with this exercise while neglecting the core work of manning the barricades and watching for the next attack. Was this fitna? The crowd seemed unsure. Some applauded.

Now tasting disunity, demonstrators have to police themselves in case one faction decides to open negotiation with the government.

The men at the barricades have not had to repel a serious attack since Thursday night. Since "Bloody Wednesday" (as the protesters now call it), they have worked out simple systems of communication to tell each other when there's a threat nearby (whistle for more help, bang metal when you think you see something, wave your hands above your head to tell the incoming crowd that the situation is controlled). Alarms went out twice that night -- both times when the army turned over the ignition of the tanks near the Egyptian Museum, presumably to inch a little closer to the square and encroach on the protesters' space. Both times, a crowd gathered to sit in front of the tanks. After the second time, a few protesters just decided to spend the night curled in among the tanks' sprockets and treads, their bodies interlaced so that even a slight movement by a tank would grind them up. At four in the morning, these protesters were snoring. The tanks haven't been turned on since.

Even with the worries, an atmosphere of jubilation and tranquility rules the square. During the day, men, women, and even small children give speeches at the podium at Tahrir's eastern edge, near the Hardee's restaurant that has been converted into a potable water station. During the night, the podium hosted oud players and singers who performed well past three in the morning. Protesters have used the stones they stockpiled near the barricades to write out messages on the ground. One says "GO AWAY," but in mirror-writing. I asked one of the men who arranged it why it was backwards. "Well," he said with a shrug, "Mubarak doesn't seem to understand it when we write forwards."

Some are calling this love-in "the Republic of Tahrir," which captures well the other-worldliness of the place -- of Egypt but not in it, a most serene independent state whose laws and freedom stopped at the barricades. But the Tahrir Republic doesn't quite deserve the name yet. The protesters in Tahrir have so far gotten along swimmingly because their hatred of Mubarak has united them. Now, both on the ground in Tahrir and in politics beyond, they are beginning to taste disunity, and to police themselves in case one faction decides to open negotiation with the government.

Whether that self-policing will graduate to the level of more over suppression of dissent is not yet clear. There would be a poetic injustice in seeing the movement fray because it failed -- just as Egypt as a whole has failed -- to contain and manage dissenters and spies. (Our point exactly, Suleiman might say, with a dishonest sneer. Perhaps you'd like a side-order of order with your chaos?) There is still precious little evidence that there is much dissent of any kind in the Republic of Tahrir, which means it still functions admirably as an anarcho-commune, rather than as a republic. But the dissent will come.

I asked Mamdouh, the man who posited the koshary conspiracy, whether there might be any irony in a democratic movement beginning to shout down open debate. "No," he corrected me. "Tuesday was democracy," he said, referred to the day before the violence, when crowds thronged peacefully and in huge numbers to demand Mubarak's ouster. "Wednesday was war. And now, any opinion is allowed -- but just no pro-Mubarak." He made sense. Eventually, democracy will require the protesters to embrace fitna, rather than stamp it out. But that moment hasn't yet arrived.

Photo by Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty

Reenergized Protesters Ready to Keep Fighting Off Attacks in Tahrir Square

2011-02-04T10:15:00-05:00

With Mubarak's supporters bearing down for another round of assaults, demonstrators have found new strength in singing, dancing, and prayer

CAIRO, Egypt -- The demonstrators have been calling today "the day of departure" for Hosni Mubarak and, with their mission complete, presumably for themselves, too. Many protesters have been in Tahrir Square for as long as a week -- exhausted from stress, from having to sleep body-to-body on cold pavement and patchy grass, and from having to improvise (with miraculous effect) a static defense strategy against an enemy with virtually limitless supply lines.

And yet today it seemed as if many of the protesters want never to leave. The atmosphere a few days ago was doomed but resolute, like the last days of the Alamo. Now it was ecstatic, with an optimism that seemed wholly warranted. "We understand Mubarak's strategy, and we reject him," a young man who spent five days in the square told me. "This is a place of liberation [tahrir], not negotiation. Over our dead bodies." Two days ago those last words might have been sounded prophetic, but now they sounded merely figurative.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
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2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/3: Order vs. Chaos on the Streets

Cairenes poured into the square from several directions and in enormous numbers. The most heavily trafficked entry point, Kasr el Nil bridge, had multiple orderly queues, hundreds of yards long, with a wide cross-section of Egyptian society. Until late yesterday, the bridge was held by the Mubarak supporters. This morning, the only sign that the Mubarakites had been there was the disrepair of the base of the statue in the center of Opera Square, at the far end of the bridge from Tahrir. The stone had been broken up for throwing. Now those chunks of pink granite are stockpiled in Tahrir near the protesters' barricades, ready as ammunition against the next attack.

"This is a place of liberation, not negotiation. Over our dead bodies."

Using a tape measure and chalkmarks on the ground, the protesters organized themselves into neat lines for Friday prayer. So many newcomers appeared in the prayer lines that the bandaged heads were in the minority, although many still wore the headgear -- including hardhats and hunting caps -- that protected them as they dodged rocks yesterday. I asked a man with a thick callous on his forehead (a zabiba or "raisin," developed from years of placing one's forehead on the ground to pray) how he kept performing ritual ablutions without water. He said that when you're away from water and engaged in a just or holy cause, you can clean yourself not with water but with tayammum, the ritual striking of the earth with the palms. The cause of unseating Mubarak easily qualified, he said.

After prayers, the heads popped up like a hundred thousand jack-in-the-boxes, and fists pumped in the air to the chant of "Leave!" Next came a rendition of "My Country, My Country, My Country," the national anthem.

Mahmoud Awad, 35, approached me after prayers, with a forwardness that probably served him well in his former business as one of Tahrir Square's famously pushy tour guides. He wanted to go on the offensive, and said he wouldn't be satisfied even if Mubarak left. What he wanted was justice. "We will follow him everywhere. We will trap him," Awad said. "He stole our dreams, and we will never let him go."

The hatred is of course mutual. A café manager chased me out through his doors a few minutes ago in Zamalek, because a crowd of Mubarakites was on its way through to meet up with another Mubarakite group in Mohandiseen, and he wanted to shutter the business until they passed. Mohandiseen is on the other side of the Nile, in a business-dominated area with relatively strong Mubarak support. So far, Mubarakites have barely arrived at Tahrir to begin the day's attacks. When they arrive, they will find an opposing force that is physically, materially, and spiritually resupplied, and harder to dislodge than it has ever been.

Photo by AFP/Getty

Why I Was Dragged Through the Street by an Egyptian Mob

2011-02-03T16:40:00-05:00

As the regime plays up the supposed role of "foreign agendas" behind the protests, Mubarak supporters' attacks become more indiscriminate

CAIRO -- Egypt's cryptic new vice president, Omar Suleiman, is a man who chooses his words cautiously, if it counts as caution not to speak much at all. So when he said this afternoon that "foreign agents" might have instigated the demonstration against his boss Hosni Mubarak, he probably knew the consequences of his word choice. Today Egyptian state TV called out some of the enemy by name, positing a conspiracy between the Muslim Brotherhood (a major Egyptian element in the protests) and Qataris, who fund the pro-protester network Al Jazeera.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/3: Order vs. Chaos on the Streets
2/2: The Fight in Tahrir Square

This morning I discovered other elements to this sinister imaginary cabal. At around eleven o'clock, after a walk around the area of downtown north of Tahrir, I got into a cab and headed toward the Nile. Three times I found the road blocked by armed men demanding to see my passport, and twice they let me through with the usual apology for having to waylay me. On the third of these, the man roared with delight at seeing my foreign passport and began flipping through it, his eyes drawn first to the stamps with Arabic script. He called over others, and within seconds at least a dozen men in plain clothes surrounded me, two locking my arms behind my back, another threading his fingers tightly through a beltloop, and all the rest hooting with delight at having caught a real Iranian spy.

I have an Iranian stamp, a tourist visa from 2009. Like the United States, Iran includes a photo of the visa-holder on the visa itself. So they saw the visa, with all my biographical details and my photo and "Islamic Republic of Iran," and thought they were looking at the passport information page of an Iranian citizen. Pretty soon I was being dragged through the street like a deformed farm animal, and the people around me were yelling "Iranian! Iranian!" while I cried out in my best English in protest. We passed two cafés, and no one even bothered to take a shisha pipe out of his mouth to inquire about me.

Foreigners are under attack, not just journalists.

The men ultimately delivered me to a government building on the Nile, where a man in a police uniform spoke English and confirmed that I was either a native English speaker with an accent appropriate to his nationality, or an Iranian with an unusually effective ESL teacher. He guessed the former and let me go, but not before telling me by way of apology that there are "foreign people in the crowds who want to create danger and kill Egyptians." He said roadblocks and crowds along the corniche were advised to hunt down "Iranians, Hizbullah, Qataris, Hamas, and" -- because why not? -- "Israelis."

I suppose this list of suspects has some logic to it. Iran hates Egypt enough to have named a main Tehran thoroughfare after Khaled El Islambouli, the Egyptian artillery officer who gunned down Mubarak's predecessor Anwar Sadat (and injured Mubarak in the process). Qatar's Al Jazeera is indeed pro-demonstration. And Egypt is no friend of Hamas.

In any case, the net is wide, and purposefully so. Foreigners are under attack, not just journalists. A stroll down the corniche has never been so frightening.

Photo: Getty Images

'It Erupted Into a Full-Scale Medieval Battle': Interview From Cairo

2011-02-03T11:10:00-05:00

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell interviews Wood on Wednesday evening, early Thursday morning in Egypt

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

See Woods's dispatches from the scene:

Order vs. Chaos on the Streets of Cairo

2011-02-03T07:34:24-05:00

Regular Egyptians will soon face a choice: help Mubarak or help the demonstrators?

CAIRO, Egypt -- When I arrived at Cairo's international airport on Tuesday afternoon, I had to break curfew to get downtown. Curfew was three in the afternoon, which at this time of year is exactly when the afternoon sun starts hitting the dusty buildings at an angle that makes them glow instead merely look grimy.

My driver, who offered me hashish and Doritos (in that order) yelled "foreigner!" at the army's first checkpoint, and the soldiers let us pass. For the next two minutes, we sped along at an extraordinary pace: No cars were on the road, and if we continued unobstructed it seemed like we might get downtown, and within an easy walk of the protests, in just ten minutes or so--a speed I would have thought impossible in Cairo without chartering a helicopter. Instead, an army checkpoint stopped and redirected us through a labyrinth of backstreets, with each city-block applying a form of impromptu traffic direction that reminded me of Baghdad in 2004. Neighborhood men of all ages had constructed roadblocks, and they interrogated every driver.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/2: The Battle in Tahrir Square

The first man I saw carried the type of samurai sword known as a "wakizashi," and his four friends had long metal bars, like bo staffs, which they banged on the road to make us aware of their presence, in case four men with medieval weaponry were not attention-grabbing enough on their own. They talked to me, asked if I was Egyptian, and let me go without any difficulty at all. This scene repeated itself roughly three dozen more times between Heliopolis and downtown, and the traffic wardens apologized to me nearly every time for the inconvenience. Near Al Azhar University, a man with a huge gleaming meat cleaver--probably recently purchased from the kitchenware section of Khan al Khalili market--smiled and said, "Welcome to Egypt."

I do not recall ever being so pleased to be surrounded by blade-wielding Arab vigilantes. The smile, I thought, was telling. Many people have told me that they are angry at having to stay up all night with weapons, just to keep basic peace in their neighborhoods after the flight of the police Friday. But the smile of Mr. Cleaver told a different story. He seemed to enjoy being responsible for his area's safety, and pleased to be allowed to dispense justice there more responsibly than anyone in uniform had for quite some time. He was the place where the buck stopped and, if the buck wasn't careful, got ruthlessly chopped into many smaller bucks. His might not have been the role he wanted every day, but it evidently pleased him in the moment.

A man with a huge gleaming meat cleaver smiled and said, "Welcome to Egypt."

These encounters happened mostly on Cairo's backstreets. If Tahrir Square is Cairo's heart, those backstreets are the capillaries snaking through Heliopolis, Nasr City, Islamic Cairo, and other areas where a huge portion of Cairo's middle class resides. I bring up Mr. Cleaver now because he could, if the clashes in Tahrir drag on, be decisive. Right now he is in his neighborhood, and the newfound mastery of his (hyperlocal) destiny is strangely refreshing. At some point, though, he and his ilk will start making a decision. Will they choose more order or more chaos? More order means more Mubarak, in a devil's bargain with the middle class whereby he restores order by arresting the protesters, putting cops back on the street, and, with the collusion of neighborhood vigilantes, turns Egypt into not just a police state but a pariah state as well. More chaos means more demonstrations and a scary, unpredictable future that could make his role as author of his own destiny permanent. Right now I can't tell whether the Mr. Cleavers of Cairo are rushing to help the pro- or anti-Mubarak side--or are content to sit back and wait.

Photo by Marco Longari/AFP/Getty

The Battle in Cairo's Tahrir Square

2011-02-02T13:25:00-05:00

A first-hand account from our correspondent on the scene in Egypt

CAIRO, Egypt -- The Egyptian protest started getting violent early this afternoon, a few minutes after a cheerful girl, about 14 years old, handed me a caramel. Since I arrived yesterday afternoon, and up until the caramel reached my hand, Tahrir Square was a calm place lacking any menace whatsoever. Children were having their faces painted. Men and women were happily sweeping up trash, helping each other pitch tents, and waiting patiently for their turn at the water tap. It reminded me of Burning Man, except that in the place of stations for full-body nude massages or refills of psychedelics, it had little protest areas where one could find Muslim Brothers, students, and every other flavor of disaffected Egyptian.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/3: Order vs. Chaos in the Capital

I was sitting across from the Mogamma, the imposing futurist fortress on the edge of the square, when I heard that a pro-Mubarak crowd that started in Muhandiseen, about a mile away, had started to stream into the square from the direction of the Egyptian Museum. A few of them had already reached the KFC at the center of the square when I saw the first of more than a hundred injured men being carried back to safety, which for the protesters meant the center of the square. Then the stones started flying, and the blood gushing in full force. Each side was systematically unpaving downtown Cairo, and in moments when they were not throwing stones they were breaking them against the curb into smaller stones that they could throw further. Men and women were screaming and crying, and I lifted my notebook to my head to avoid getting brained by a stray rock.

Each side threw so many stones, they were practically unpaving downtown Cairo.

The protesters pushed back the pro-Mubarak crowd. Some of their charges (it really looked like a Civil War battle charge designed to overrun an enemy position) were so intense that I feared for the pro-government crowd's safety. That worry rapidly vanished. The pro-Mubarak group turned out to have great strategic depth, reaching all the way back to the Nile and beyond, and with sheer numbers it pushed forward, gradually rushing past the protesters and me. The Mubarak forces screamed "Yes Mubarak," and the protesters alternated between "Leave!" and "God is Great!" -- with the latter noticeably favored during moments when the protesters had the initiative. The injured were carried back, most with bloody head wounds. Seven middle-aged men stood in prayer next to a tank during the height of the stone-volleys, remarkably placid-looking, like the string quartet fiddling as the Titanic went down.

Gradually, near the entrance to the Egyptian Museum, each side began to realize that neither faction would be overrun completely. Entrenchment began, and a no-man's-land of about a hundred yards opened up. I stood there in the middle, taking video, dodging rocks coming from the side I could see and holding my notebook to cover the side I couldn't. Then, right by the Egyptian Museum entrance, five men in plainclothes grabbed me, hit me three times, twice in the back and once in the chest, and brought me toward the Museum itself. They grabbed my video camera and still camera, shouting "memory card," and tried to break it when they couldn't figure out how to remove it. Then two of them grabbed my arms and ejected me from the square, onto the Nile corniche, which was so calm that the first person I met was a newspaper journalist who had to ask me whether we were among Mubarak supporters or protesters.

I don't know whether he stayed, but if he waited another half hour his uncertainty about the sentiments of the crowd around us would evaporate. The pro-Mubarak group flooded the square, and its strategy became clear: All the entrances to the plaza were being probed and, if found lightly defended, overrun. I was now on the outside among the forward surge; no one was permitted to leave, but a trickle of captured protesters came out, each surrounded by at least a hundred screaming Mubarak supporters, and being beaten so intensely that I couldn't see their faces, only a circle of waving sticks and fists, raining down on whatever unfortunate was at the center. One female protester was brought out, thrashed, and delivered to a military unit inside the Egyptian Museum grounds. At one point a man was being crowd-surfed out and beaten; one of the pro-Mubarak men said he was a "Chinese journalist." "We will stay," the man said, "and then go into the square and take it over."

I'm now north of the square. There is no help coming for the protesters, but all the way up the banks of the Nile there are angry, screaming pro-Mubarak supporters walking and sometimes running to reach the front of the crowd and throw a stone. Men and women are pulling up cobblestones, breaking them, and using Egyptian flags to create bindles full of rocks and resupply the pro-Mubarak group.

Mubarak has the initiative and appears inclined to use it.

The last time I saw a massive protest in Tahrir Square was in 2003, during protests of the Iraq War. During those protests, the police encircled the protesters and let them scream for a couple days. Late at night, I stood among the police, asking them about their hometowns in Upper Egypt. Then, around midnight, they were called to attention, told to harden their lines, and finally to march toward the remaining protesters, letting none escape. Truncheons came down, and within a few minutes they had rounded everyone up into paddy wagons, and the square resumed its light evening traffic. I stood almost alone by the Mogamma, only because I was standing five feet outside the police ring rather than five feet inside it.

I assume the same will happen tonight, except instead of the police, the pro-Mubarak crowds will surge and then meet in the middle. I doubt the police or army would be willing, but the mobs certainly are -- and they will not have so light a touch with their weapons. Mubarak has the initiative, and he appears inclined to use it.

Photo: AFP/Getty

Shut Up and Sing: Sting Edition

2010-11-28T13:02:23-05:00

Andrew's readers are giving Gordon Sumner, better known as Sting, a hard time for his song "Russians":

It's not one of his better songs. There are hilariously pretentious lines here, including the indefensible "Mister Reagan says we will protect you / I don't subscribe to this point of view," sung with unaccountable emphasis on "point" and the first syllable of "protect." The failed meter is more repulsive than the politics.

I had the chance to take this up with Sting last March in Bombay, India. I was going into the Taj Hotel after a very late night at Leopold's, the cafe around the corner. The Taj and Leopold's were two of the sites attacked on November 26, 2008, when terrorists raided Bombay and killed 167. The Taj's security is understandably tight, with metal detectors and concrete barriers that create a small but permanent snarl of people waiting to enter and exit the hotel. Sting, or someone who looked just like him, was in front of the hotel with two women, among those on the way out.

At the time, Sting was in the news for his decision to play a concert in Uzbekistan for the daughter of President Islam Karimov. Karimov is accused of boiling his opponents to death. Sting reportedly took between two and three million dollars for the concert, which he claimed was sponsored by Unicef for some reason.

I turned back and asked him, "Are you Sting?"

His expression turned dead, and he stared off into the distance before saying, "No." I laughed. I had met Sting's wife, Trudy Styler, once before, and she was standing next to him. If the guy wasn't Sting, Styler certainly had a type.

"Are you sure you're not Sting?" I asked. He was sure, and kept looking off expressionless into the humid darkness of Front Bay. It was getting late, and not wanting to make him deny himself thrice before the crowing of the cock, I laughed again, wished him a good night, and went inside.

The next day I ate lunch by the Taj pool with Eli Lake of The Washington Times and Michael Kennedy of NPR. Sting was at the next table, but we left him alone. Then, as I sipped a dessert smoothie, Sting walked up and crouched by my chair. He wore a tattered blue t-shirt tight enough to reveal a lean, extremely healthy physique.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Sting. Sorry about last night when I said I wasn't Sting. The truth is, my wife and I were having a bit of a row, and, well...." He struggled a second for words. "It's nice to be Sting, but sometimes you really don't want to be Sting." We talked for a couple minutes before he shook my hand, apologized again, and sprang up to leave.

I found the gesture so charming that I forgot my quarrel with him, either about his crappiest lyrics or his tarnished human rights record.

He may be Sting, I thought, but he's not completely a prick.

Grope Away

2010-11-23T15:51:50-05:00

Atlantic bloggers are singing in unison in general support of tomorrow's Opt-Out Day, on which travelers will protest intrusive and ineffective backscatter scanning technology by opting for intrusive and ineffective crotch-fondling instead. But Slate's William Saletan thinks it's "idiocy" and implies that he hopes that The Atlantic's Voices get felt up good and proper as punishment.

He writes:

Ignore these imbeciles. Their plan would clog security lines and ruin your holiday for no good reason. They don't understand the importance of the electronic scans. They're wrong about the scanners' safety. And from the standpoint of dignity, their advice is insane. If you opt out of the scan, you'll get a pat-down instead. You'll trade a fast, invisible, intangible, privacy-protected machine inspection for an unpleasant, extended grope. In effect, you'll be telling TSA to touch your junk.

This imbecile's junk won't be touched tomorrow, at least not in any way that's any of Saletan's business. I won't be flying in the U.S. But when I eventually do get ushered toward one of the backscatter booths, I'll certainly opt for molestation instead. It's difficult to believe Saletan can't understand why.

I'll leave aside the issue of the safety of the machines, except to point out a few concerns that deserve more shrift than Saletan or the TSA give them. What surprises me is his obtuseness on question of dignity. The Opt-Out crowd knows that opting out will mean "an unpleasant, extended grope." If the point of the day were to pass rapidly through airport security without being groped, they would indeed by imbeciles. One might also say (drawing an analogy to a somewhat more serious protest) that Rosa Parks actually took more, not less, time to get home when she refused to give up her seat.

The point is to be publicly robbed of dignity, in a way that draws attention to policies and registers a public protest against them. The Opt-Out crowd consists of a coalition of those who hate strangers' touching their privates, those who think the security-versus-liberty calculus is out of whack, and those who think the scanners are inadequate to the threats posed by terrorists because (as Goldberg keeps saying) they do nothing to stop the anus-bomber threat. Apparently the directive to feel up passengers has already upset actual TSA screeners; that's part of the point. Indignity is the short-term goal. Dignity plus safety is the long-term goal.

My favorite (semi-)defense of the scanners so far has come from Tyler Cowen, who has a predictably heterodox take, suggesting that (among other things) we adjust our attitudes toward nudity to be more in line with Europe's: Freikörperkultur comes to America. I'm all in favor of that, though German nudism should be the subject of a later, lengthier post. Meantime, I'd rather those cultural norms shift on their own schedule, rather than because the TSA thinks it needs to irradiate me and see a picture of me naked to keep air travel safe.

Into the Psyche of Eustace Mullins

2010-09-23T18:00:30-04:00

The most incriminating book in my personal library is the only authorized biography of the poet Ezra Pound, inscribed to "my friend Graeme Wood" by its author, Eustace Mullins, whose work Glenn Beck cited yesterday on his show. Mullins was an open purveyor of blood libel: he claimed that Jews kidnap Christian children, ritually puncture their veins, and drink their blood as a restorative for their own degenerate bodies. During Pound's involuntary commitment in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington in the Fifties, Mullins visited him frequently, and under his direction, Mullins authored foundational texts in Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. Those theories have proved impressively durable. In addition to Glenn Beck's citation yesterday, Pat Robertson's books peddled variations on them in the 1980s, and elements of the Tea Party echo them now. (Short version: the Federal Reserve controls the world, and the UN is taking over the US via the New World Order.)

Mullins died in February at 86, and when I visited him in Staunton, Virginia, six years ago on assignment for The Jewish Daily Forward, he was already slowed by age, living in a creepy, dark rat-trap filled with religious icons, votive candles, and old newspapers. The wallpaper curled down off the wall in two-foot sections, and the chairs coughed up decades' worth of dust when we sat down. He surprised me by snatching the Pound biography from my hands and inscribing it. The moment reminded me of the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Doctor Jones accidentally gets Hitler's autograph in his notebook.

I had read almost everything Pound ever wrote, and much of Mullins's own writing. By visiting him I hoped to discover exactly how crazy Pound was during his time in the mental hospital. Pound had broadcast propaganda for Mussolini during the war, and some said he was feigning madness to avoid execution for treason. During his supposed madness he wrote some of the poetry for which he is best known. By meeting Mullins, I also wanted to learn something about how anti-Semites thought, and what allowed them (unlike people with most other mental pathologies) to be so unhinged about Jews while also being clever and insightful about other things, like modernist poetry.

On the first question, Mullins assured me that Pound was sane, and that he was a political prisoner who knew too much. I asked him to give an example of how Pound demonstrated his sanity. Mullins said that during one of his visits to Pound, an orderly came to Pound to say a man had showed up and wanted to meet him. Pound asked what the man's name was. The orderly said "Abrahamsen," a Norwegian patronymic. Pound told the orderly to tell the man to go away, Mullins said, and then snickered to Mullins that no Jew was getting near him today. That Mullins took this weird exchange as evidence of Pound's sanity demonstrates pretty vividly that both men were completely bananas.

The rest of his talk was pure mental illness theater. He told me that things were getting worse for the enemies of the Jews, and where once they came at him as single spies, now they attacked in battalions. They had tried to kill him seven times, most recently by cutting his brakelines.

They were everywhere. To find them, he said, watch CNN. David Duke showed up on the news via satellite up-link from the Tehran Holocaust-denial conference, and Mullins identified him immediately as an agent of Zion: no true enemy of the Jews could get airtime on a major network. "He's a playboy. Some Jew must have taken him to Hollywood and given him a big pompadour. He looks like a homosexual from the most homosexual part of New York." Duke, he said, was peddling ersatz Jew-hatred at the behest of the Jews themselves, as a way to discredit the anti-Semitic cause. Sharing airtime with Wolf Blitzer, he said, is its own proof of intellectual bankruptcy (admittedly not the craziest thing I ever heard).

Mullins was himself rumored to be gay. He never married. In 1968, he wrote that Jewish parasites had spawned "a massive wave of homosexuality and degeneracy in America," and that the rise of American Jewry had caused Gentile men to take on female secondary sexual characteristics. Mullins bragged to me about having spent a night with Allen Ginsberg in Manhattan. "He didn't bother me at all," Mullins said with a naughty smile, "which was rather insulting, because I considered myself a pretty good-looking guy."

On the second question -- how anti-Semitism could co-exist in the same brainpan with discerning opinions on art and poetry -- I came away simply wondering why I ever thought literary talent (or in Mullins's case, mastery of literary biographical trivia; even in dotage, he still had thoughtful opinions not just about Pound and T. S. Eliot but also about relatively minor figures like Richard Aldington, and the little-read poetry of Ford Madox Ford) was some defense against psychosis. Perhaps I should have known better.

The Forward accepted my story but never published it, due to objections from lawyers who noticed that Mullins was also incredibly litigious, demanding million-dollar judgments from everyone who slighted him. I suppose I should thank the lawyers for that decision. Mullins's influence was waning; he said that at his last speaking engagement in Oakland, California, the audience consisted of "one colored woman and a couple of elderly people." The cost of hiring lawyers wouldn't have been worth the pleasure of ridiculing him. In death there will be plenty of time for that.

Sole Survivor: A Kurdish Rebel and the Strength of the Iranian Regime

2010-08-10T10:15:11-04:00

Four years ago, in a remote area of the mountains of northern Iraq, I visited the guerrilla camp of several dozen dissident Iranian Kurds. They are now all dead. They were fighting to overthrow the government in Tehran and made regular incursions into Iranian territory to ambush and kill Revolutionary Guards. The Guards responded first by raining artillery onto the rebels' mountain redoubts, and then by buying off local people -- mostly fellow Kurds -- along the border, and getting them to rat out the rebel positions.

The only person I met in the camps who survived was a mild-mannered Iranian ex-lawyer named Wirya Rehmany. Rehmany wore fatigues and sometimes carried a weapon, but his main function was to camp out in the mountains and write about the Kurdish question, occasionally answering questions from pestering foreigners like me. He escaped and is now a political asylee in Paris, where I met him last Saturday at a Vietnamese restaurant in the neighborhood of Belleville.

It was an eerie reunion. I had photographs from the 2006 visit, and he flicked through them, narrating the grim end each of guerrilla. The majority were killed by Revolutionary Guards, or sepah, with the help of Kurdish collaborators. "He was called to a place near Mariwan," said Rehmany, indicating a graying field commander in one photo. A cat, slightly out of focus, purred on the roof of the camouflaged shack behind him. "The sepah stopped his car and shot it," Rehmany said. There was nothing left but a bloody wreck of broken glass and dead bodies.

Rehmany's group, called PJAK, swore allegiance to Abdullah Ocalan, the mercurial Turkish leftist who worked for the overthrow of Turkey until his capture in 1999. But because PJAK's target was Tehran, rather than Ankara, they hoped they could attract the attention and support of the United States. That never happened, perhaps because Ocalan was a psychopath and his followers acolytes of a psychopath. But for a brief period hopes were high. Rehmany said that when I visited the camp, deep in the mountains and with no introduction, everyone thought I was CIA, but they figured they should answer my questions anyway, since the more the CIA knew, themore it would be on PJAK's side against the mullahs.

Given that the surviving element of the PJAK unit I met is now sitting opposite me, poking at sticky pieces of yellow fish, it's clear that PJAK never got much US support, though Rehmany claims that US representatives came up into the hills a few times, not in uniform. Rehmany survived because he stayed back in the mountains rather than joining the attacks, and when the going got really tough he fell back even further, working in the Iraqi Kurdish capital Erbil for a few years while the French considered his asylum application. He barely speaks enough French to order tea, but he says he will stay forever, more or less totally estranged from his father (a sepah commander in Kermanshah) and his mother, whom he calls now and then over a phone line that he knows is tapped. Being the last of his kind has clearly exacted a deep emotional toll.

The PJAK threat was an asymmetric one, with some of the traits that have confounded the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran has crushed it most severely. The defeat seems to me another piece of evidence that the Iranian state remains robust, with a functioning immune system that destroys its internal enemies efficiently, and that shouldn't be underestimated by those who think anything as simple as Twitter-mobs will bring it down.

Embracing the Veil

2010-05-14T10:08:48-04:00

flickr/Island Spice

Andrew Sullivan's posts on the impending French burqa ban sound familiar. When I arrived at the American University in Cairo eight years ago, a contretemps was erupting over the right of students to veil themselves completely on campus, using the full-body black covering called niqab. The university compromised by letting them cover their whole bodies except the face, which they could conceal only with a sheet of white paper that they held in their hands, and that they would have to lower on demand at security checkpoints, or to prove identity when sitting for exams. In practice, the compromise meant that on most mornings you could see one or two dark figures striding about campus, looking very much like the Wraiths from Lord of the Rings, but with paper held to the face, as if to enjoy the scent from a scratch-and-sniff sticker.

Only a few students exercised their right to cover themselves, so I thought about the incident little until a few months ago, just before the burqa ban became an issue. I was in Ta'izz, Yemen, at a popular lunch joint that was, like most public spaces, totally male. Servers ran back and forth with salta, the wonderful green stew of lamb and fenugreek, and I marveled that they were able with bare hands to carry these red-hot ceramic crucibles of boiling liquid, straight to the tables from what looked like an industrial-strength Bunsen burner in the corner. When I tried to pay, the owner waved away my money and introduced me to a friendly Yemeni teacher of English and French who welcomed me to his table, bought me a soda, and asked if I would like to help him teach a class in a few minutes.

The students were fifteen females in full niqab. When I entered the classroom and saw fifteen students who looked identical in every way, I burst out laughing, and never totally regained composure. The utter neutrality of their aspect was disarming to say the least. After a few minutes, I started asking them questions in English about their lives and why they wanted to learn English. "I am a pharmacist!" chirped one of the bolder students, so I turned to look through her eyeslit and ask whether she thought Yemeni honey had medicinal properties. Instantly fourteen black-gloved hands shot out to point at one of the other women in the room: I was talking to the wrong student, six desks away. This drill happened about twenty more times in the next hour, and even though my sonar triangulation improved a little, even by the end I could narrow down blurted answers at best to a clump of five or so students. I ended up accidentally excusing women with no cars to check on their parking, and letting women with empty bladders go to the lavatory. In every case the errors lasted only seconds, but the experience was still totally bewildering.

So the garments did seem to have some serious pedagogical drawbacks. On the other hand, every wearer of burqa and niqab I have asked has viewed the garment as a blessing: a liberation not so much from the stares of men as from the stares of anyone at all. It freed them from caring about their appearance. They didn't have to do their hair. (Of course, since fashion abhors a vacuum, and when women's clothes are made forcibly subdued, they find ways to mark style by decorating the fringes of their abayas, say, or by paying heavy attention to eye make-up.) They could count money in public. They didn't get covered with filth, as I did, standing around waiting for the bus, and they could check me out and stare at me without risking the awkwardness of my staring back. No doubt there are women whose burqas are compulsory, but I have not met them.

Leading the charge to institute the ban, Jean-François Copé cites as reasons security (i.e., the risible notion that the ability to wear a mask in public is a significant public threat, and that we stand at the cusp of a crime-wave of burqa-clad bandits) and "refusal to exist as a person in the eyes of others," which is a stickier claim and one more borne out by my experience. Conservative Muslims agree with some Western feminists and argue the opposite, that a sexualized woman is deprived of her personhood when she goes out unveiled and has to deal with the male gaze. There is some truth to that as well.

But I must say, when I read about "refusal to exist as a person in the eyes of others," I feel not Copé's indignance nor some of Andrew's commenters' pity, but jealousy. There are times when I would love to cease existing as a person in the eyes of others, and to swim through crowds unnoticed, the way women do in their steel-blue burqas in Herat. Far from being an experience that no one should have, it seems one that everyone should have the choice to have. In a way, what Copé is suggesting is not just the ban of the niqab or burqa but the elimination of anonymity. The debate does not often phrase itself this way in public, but to the Muslim women who don't consider their clothes oppressive, perhaps it does in private.

Eyjafjallajökull's Chill Factor

2010-04-20T12:20:13-04:00

Brad Plumer at The New Republic and Nicole Allan at The Atlantic both have useful takes on whether the volcano could lower global temperatures by blocking out the sun. The answer: maybe, if the ash keeps on spewing for a lot longer. They both mention Mount Pinatubo's short-term chilling effect in 1991. My preferred example is Mount Tambora, which blew in 1815 and caused what is known as the Year Without a Summer, frosting the fields of England in July and destroying crops on a wide scale. There were amusing compensating discoveries, though. The lack of livestock feed made it hard to run horse-pulled carriages, so in search of alternatives, Karl Drais started the research that led to the bicycle. And if Joseph Smith's family hadn't fled the crop failures of Vermont and gone to Palmyra, New York, that year, the gold plates and magic spectacles he found in the forest might have lain undisturbed for another 1400 years.

So Eyjafjallajökull may cool the planet, and perhaps indirectly facilitate the excavation of Mormon artifacts. I might point out, though, that some of the concerns about the effects sulfur-aerosol geo-engineering would apply to volcanic-ash cooling as well. Specifically, the cooling is ephemeral, and when the ash-spewing stops, so does the cooling effect. The ash rapidly falls out of the sky. If we have continued to emit carbon during the warming holiday, all the heating the planet would have suffered would hit us all at once, very fast. Instead of adapting over decades to warmer temperatures, we might have to adapt over just a couple years and suffer a sort of climate-change whiplash.

Joseph Kony's Long Walk To, and From, Hell

2010-04-09T12:00:00-04:00

This article originally appeared in The Review, a supplement to the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National.

The latest stage in the world's most lopsided counterinsurgency began with what might be called a "Greetings, earthlings" moment. In early 2008, a four-seater aircraft landed on a red dirt runway in Obo, a town in the Central African Republic near the Sudanese and Congolese borders. Obo didn't see many planes at the time - it is one of the world's most disconnected places, no less than a week's travel from the nearest city of any size - so when the plane buzzed the runway and landed, townspeople ran to meet it. Two passengers emerged: Obo's traders recognised the first as a low-level functionary from the Sudanese border outpost at Tumbura, a day's drive away; the other was a much larger figure in full military dress with three stars on his shoulder, his shoes alone worth more than most people in Obo would make in two months.

The officer cleared his throat and addressed the group in English, while the Sudanese man translated into Zande. He said that in the coming months, Obo would be visited by a terrible scourge that his people - the Ugandans - had been fighting for years, a group that called itself tonga-tonga, "the people who cut off lips and ears". The tonga-tonga hailed from northern Uganda, where the military had defeated them after nearly two decades of fighting. Now they were on the move, and their path had led them here. They survived by abducting children, the Ugandan said, and the children of Obo would be next.

The officer was bending the truth a little - the group calls itself the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, not tonga-tonga - but if anything he understated the brutality of the LRA. Formed in 1987, the group is motivated by a complex mix of fundamentalist Christianity and allegiance to the traditions of the Acholi people of northern Uganda. Its leader, General Joseph Kony, aims to dislodge the Ugandan government headed by Yoweri Museveni and replace it with one led by northerners, who enjoyed privileged status during the first 20 years of Uganda's independence. But when Museveni's military drove the LRA out of the nation in 1994, the group initiated a period of brutal wandering. Uganda's northern and western neighbours, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have each taken turns as bases for the rebels, who move in small, ultraviolent gangs that abduct villagers, drug them and force them to work and fight for the insurgency. The LRA prefers to kidnap children, who are taught the Acholi language and raised to revere Kony. (They learn that powerful magic protects Kony from the Ugandan military, and that he can appear and disappear at will.) An American diplomat in Bangui compared the group to the Manson family, but given that the LRA has killed 12,000 people, the comparison is self-evidently unfair to Manson.

Since the LRA moved into the Central African Republic, the Ugandan military's hunt has entered what one might expect to be a decisive phase. The Ugandans are, after all, schooled in LRA tactics, and they enjoy one of the most decisive technological advantages in the annals of contemporary warfare. When I visited the Ugandan base near Obo, a young officer briefed me on the assets the Ugandans have at their disposal in pursuing the rebels: modern telecommunications, armoured vehicles, JetRanger helicopters and, at times, even the assistance of US intelligence and satellite imagery. The LRA, by contrast, no longer has large, permanent bases. Its fighters' weapon of choice is frequently a log of wood - about 150cm long and 10cm in diameter - applied with force to the back of the head. I shuddered when Daba Emmanuel, 32, an ex-fighter, told me he had killed many people with a plank. I asked if the killing was tough work. He said that it wasn't: "In five minutes, they're gone."

As the LRA cuts its swath, it moves farther from its home. One of the fundamental strengths of a successful insurgent is usually his ability to move undetected through a population of people whom he resembles, whose language he speaks and who feel an ethnic kinship with him. Yet the villagers around Obo are not Acholi, and they loathe the LRA. Most have fled the countryside to shelter near the Ugandan military encampment, and they fear for their lives whenever they stray more than three miles in any direction from the town centre. The LRA owns the forest and frequently makes hostages of those who wander beyond the villagers' shanty towns. At the Obo market - where women sell individually wrapped Maggi soup cubes and little heaps of shrivelled okra - cassava, the white tuber that is the staple of the Central African diet, has doubled in price over the last year, because everyone is afraid to go out to the fields and collect it.

So the niggling question is why the Ugandan military has so far failed to snuff the movement out. The LRA has hidden amid alien corn for years now, and because Obo remembers the "tonga-tonga" speech, the rebels can trust no one there. For foreign observers, like the Nato forces trying to wage counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, the least appetising inference to draw from the LRA's continued survival is that the business of counterinsurgency is even tougher than it looks. Even when the population is on your side, and your enemy reduced to Neolithic weaponry, the fight continues.

•••

I recently convened a meeting of about 20 Central Africans from Ligua, a village a few kilometres outside Obo that has been progressively abandoned since the LRA came to the area. The villagers have retreated to the relative safety of a refugee camp in town. There they live in wooden shanties, using sacks from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as roofing. The ground

is swept and raked, like a Japanese garden, both to keep things tidy and to leave no refuge for vipers. The displaced villagers met me in their open-air Catholic chapel, which consisted of a few wooden pews shaded by palms and acacias and a bamboo altar topped with a withered pink flower.

The first of them to meet an LRA rebel was a man named Paul who had been fishing for Nile perch on the Mbomu River. First he heard the explosions of a Ugandan military aerial bombardment nearby, on the Congolese side of the river. Then LRA fighters, fleeing from the bombers, crossed the river, found him and forced him to march with them into his village with Kalashnikovs and chain guns pointed at his head. The rebels also carried mortars, which the villagers call "papayas" for their shape, in case they met the Ugandans.

The LRA entered Ligua and immediately shot a 30-year old villager named Paul Ipa'ingba in the leg when he looked out his front door. He fell, and the LRA killed him with a bullet to the neck. Minutes later, the LRA fighters produced an interpreter whom they had kidnapped long ago and taught to speak Acholi, and he informed the villagers that they were now all slaves of the LRA. That night, huddled together and locked into one house, a handful of the villagers were made to shell bushel after bushel of peanuts for their captors. The next morning the rebels took food, kidnapped porters from among the villagers, and left as quickly as they came.

The LRA showed up about half a dozen more times in Ligua. Other villages suffered even more. When people caught on that I was looking for LRA stories, they began hiking up their clothes to show where they had been beaten and shot. Dieudonné Aiba, who was abducted late last year, showed the half-healed wounds to his left thigh - a small dark discolouration at mid-thigh where a bullet entered, and a pale, crusty star of a scar on the other side where it exited. An old woman who spent nearly a week as an LRA hostage in November said she owed her escape to a case of explosive diarrhoea: the LRA's guards let her relieve herself further than usual from the camp, and one day she ran until she found a Ugandan patrol. But they all had tales of murder. The LRA forced them to carry supplies on hiking trips north. One man, Joseph Guinibini, said he saw an unwilling porter complain that he was tired. The LRA caved in his head, telling him, "Now you have your rest."

•••

The Ugandan soldiers in Obo told me they suspected the LRA's core group was north of the town, perhaps around the Central African Republic city of Djemah, and that Kony was trying to migrate toward Darfur to link up with Sudanese forces willing to re-equip him. Some sources report that the LRA has already reached regions of south Darfur controlled by the Khartoum government, which would place the rebels beyond their opponents' reach. So far, the Ugandans' pursuit of the LRA has led them through the Congo and the Central African Republic, both barely-governed nations with porous borders. (In most parts of the world, it would be considerably more complicated for a foreign military to crash through sovereign territories on a hunting expedition.) If Kony has indeed reached Darfur, his pursuers may face new difficulties; Sudan, which exerts greater control over its territories, has in the past been friendly to the LRA, in part as retaliation for Museveni's support for the anti-Khartoum Sudanese People's Liberation Army.

The night after I met the villagers, I went to the Ugandan camp and sat with the brigadier general who runs Ugandan military operations in the Central African Republic and his young intelligence officer, Mark Sserunjogi, a veteran of the war in Somalia in 2007 and recent graduate in War Studies at King's College, London. Having travelled and studied counterinsurgency around the world, Sserunjogi made a smooth spokesman for the Ugandan military. Except for the brief deafening thwack of the JetRanger helicopter that interrupted our chat, the only sound in the night was the low murmur of CNN International on the other side of the tent, and the occasional buzz of an insect flying in. Since Obo has almost no electricity, darkness surrounded us, and it was easy to imagine that the LRA was watching our one pinpoint of light with interest.

The general explained that he approached the LRA not as a movement to be euthanised but as one to be reintegrated into the Ugandan state, if possible. Some of his own fighters, he said, are ex-LRA who know the rebels and can anticipate their tactics or even talk them into a surrender. Instead of killing, the Ugandans rehabilitate the LRA. "They come out, and we take them to Uganda, put them in a psychosocial programme to get them oriented into normal life. Then we set them free," the general said. Of the former LRA members recruited into the Ugandan army, he said: "You find that they make up the strongest corps, because if they are caught they will be killed. They know it."

This rehabilitative approach does have its downside: in trying to win the hearts and minds of the rebels, the Ugandans were losing the confidence of the local population. Some villagers spoke conspiratorially, claiming that the Ugandan military's overtures to its LRA countrymen - its requests for the rebels to turn in their weapons, submit to deprogramming, and return to fight their one-time comrades - were preventing it from using the full force of its firepower to quash the insurgency. "We are confused," said Paul, the fisherman from Ligua. "We go and tell the [Ugandan soldiers] we have seen traces of the rebels, but they don't show up."

Sserunjogi, the intelligence officer, said the villagers often made incorrect reports, confusing the bootprints of Ugandan soldiers with those of rebels. But he admitted that the primary objective of the Ugandan military in Obo was not population protection, but the destruction and reintegration of the LRA, and the placement of Joseph Kony and others in the dock at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He said the job of protecting the population fell to the Central African Armed Forces. The villagers, however, said their own national army was almost completely ineffective.

And so even if some locals did seem sceptical of the Ugandan force's ability to put a decisive end to the LRA's reign of terror, they were nonetheless grateful for the military presence. "If they leave," a villager named Daba Emmanuel said, "the LRA will be here tomorrow." Emmanuel has a deep personal stake in keeping the LRA at bay. He once fought in its ranks, and if the insurgents arrive they will dash out the brains of deserters like him first.

•••

Late one night in 2008, when Emmanuel was returning from a ceremony honouring a recent widow in his neighbourhood in Obo, the LRA arrived on one of its first raids. "They forced us to gather up everything we owned - food, clothes, everything - and walk away with it," he says. "They said, 'Come, come, we won't hurt you.' But whoever refused to come along would be killed."

Emmanuel spent the next year as an LRA slave and assassin. The story he tells begins with simple drudgery: a hike of several days into the Congolese interior, followed by grinding communal farm labour at an LRA settlement at Garamba, a huge, sparsely populated area best known for its national park. Emmanuel says he spent most of a year in an LRA "family" of 12 to 13 captives, of which a core LRA couple, a man and wife, were the den parents. Even the captives regarded each other with suspicion and caution, often using false names so they would be harder to find if ever they escaped. (Moving them far from home was in fact part of an LRA strategy to make escape difficult.)

The indoctrination was constant. Signs of outside loyalties, such as prayer, were punished with beatings, and they were forced to speak the languages of the LRA. "They made us learn Arabic and Acholi, and if you spoke Zande you would get beaten with sticks." At first, Emmanuel says, the prisoners were brainwashed into a freedom struggle against Museveni's government in Uganda. But as the movement incorporated more hostages from Congo, Sudan, and the Central African Republic, Joseph Kony began speaking with broader paranoia, against every government in the area. Emmanuel met Kony multiple times, he says, and observed the rebel leader using a portable entertainment system to watch films about dancing and about war.

For Emmanuel and the other prisoners, the drudgery of slave labour gave way to enforced savagery in December 2008, when the Ugandan military attacked and sent the LRA fleeing with its hostages into the bush. The Ugandans were assisted by the new US military command Africom, which, in one of its first missions, provided them with satellite images and fuel.
As a result, the LRA base splintered into many smaller, more volatile groups, whose leaders communicated by satellite phones, and who roamed northern Congo plundering villages and murdering in retaliation for their humiliating defeat at Garamba. "We killed the old immediately, and kept the young for work," Emmanuel says. Before entering a village, the LRA would inject the hostages with an unidentified drug that made them violent and amped up, "like animals".

The height of their marauding occurred around Christmas, just after the LRA's routing at Garamba. Emmanuel's group entered the Congolese town Doro under orders to seize food and take hostages to serve as porters. The raiders corralled the townspeople together. "We put them into the church and closed the doors," he says. "We entered only to choose some small girls and boys. The rest we burnt." Anyone who tried to escape they hacked with machetes or brained with logs or stones, "exactly like this one," he says, indicating a rock around the nearby fire, where his daughter was frying nuts.

Eventually, when the LRA guards trusted Emmanuel to guard a small road, he ran to the nearest village and sought refuge. The villagers suspected he was an LRA scout and beat him nearly to death with sticks and bayonets. Ultimately they let him go, first to Juba, in South Sudan, and finally back to Obo.

•••

The LRA survives only because its victims are so weak and its leaders so fanatical. According to the UN, the LRA murdered 300 people in December 2009 in the Congo, a reprise of the post-Garamba massacres there one year before. The group's leaders are undeniably shrewd: the tactic of kidnapping and indoctrinating pliant children has largely allowed them to circumvent the political challenges many insurgencies face with regards to recruitment. But its atrocities uniformly have the character of desperate ploys. A terrorist group that needs to force old women to shell peanuts all night is a terrorist group with serious problems, one that sounds as if it should be in what Dick Cheney would call its "last throes".

The question then remains - why are millions of dollars of US military aid, a relatively disciplined and well-equipped military and a firmly anti-LRA population not enough to stop the movement for good? After all, the LRA travels only on foot, while the Ugandan military has air support capable of chasing and gunning down rebels very effectively. The Ugandans estimate that the LRA has only a few hundred active members at this point.

To Sserunjogi, the environment is mostly to blame. The terrain is rough, and no military, however well-supported, could deal with such a sprawling area of operation. "In Somalia, you can conduct a cordon operation, like you have seen in Baghdad, but you can't do that here. Where do you begin? The enemy has a very big area to manoeuvre. They are very light, because they take what they need as they go, but we are very heavy, because we bring our own food and we don't steal."

Sserunjogi insisted that his army wanted nothing more than to finish off the LRA for good, and that it would apply all necessary military force to get the job done. But even he spoke of encounters that made military force sound like an ineffective tactic. That night, his composure broke only once, when he told me about an LRA rebel who had been coaxed into surrender last year. "I asked him how old he was when he was taken, and he said he was in Primary 4." The officer imagined the nine-year-old schoolboy's walk to class being interrupted by an LRA raid, then the child's years wielding a wooden log, graduating to a Kalashnikov when his minders decided he could be trusted. "So how do I deal with this boy? How do I judge him?"

In a way, the remaining LRA fighters seem to be just dead-enders, a rump element of a largely defeated movement. But it is nonetheless increasingly difficult to imagine them dying out completely any time soon. As with other insurgencies, the smaller and more resoundingly defeated the rebels are, the more brutally they fight. Once the LRA shrinks past a certain point, it appears that no amount of hunting, population protection, or reintegration effort is enough to bring the last soldiers in from the jungle.

Moreover, as long as the LRA lives to see another day, it stands the chance of kidnapping another generation of children, brainwashing them into its struggle and building another micro-slave state, as it did in Garamba. And Emmanuel's experience shows clearly that even the Ugandans' most decisive victory against the rebels - destroying their stronghold in the Congo - only provoked the insurgents' most gruesome acts of violence. His account doesn't argue in favour of easing up the fight against the LRA, but it does remind us that the last stage of destroying an insurgency may be the hardest.

Image: Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony in 2006. By Stuart Price/AFP/Getty.

From Revolt to Revolution

2009-12-30T15:28:46-05:00

Two sites, one very large and one very small, dominate my memories of Bucharest in 1992. The very large one was the House of the Republic, a US$10-billion mammoth edifice constructed by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who wanted his Palace and his Ministries of Truth, Love, and Peace all in one place. The small site was Ceausescu's grave.

In 1989, twenty years ago last Friday, after Ceausescu and his comically evil wife Elena returned from a scheduled visit to Iran, his people put them against a wall and shot them. He never saw the building fully occupied, and as of my visit a few years later, no one seemed entirely sure what to do with a Pentagon-sized memorial to one of Eastern Europe's worst strongmen in the middle of their city. They knew what to do with his grave, though, which was to dishonor it with almost no markings whatsoever -- just a little white wooden cross on a brown dirt patch in a crowded cemetery. When I stood by the grave, a few somber ex-officials of the toppled regime visited to pay furtive respect to their patron. Beneath dark overcoats they wore medals pinned to their chests, medals they could probably not wear without social discomfort elsewhere in the city.

I thought of that grave this weekend while reading coverage of the latest spasm of democratic revolt in Tehran. I am on record as a member of the cold-water bucket brigade with respect to this revolt's chance of being upgraded, like a tropical depression brewing into a hurricane, to a full-blown revolution. My trip to Iran earlier this year showed a clerical regime with a powerful base of conservative Iranians, and a small if fervent minority of reformists.

Last weekend's protests surprised me, though, in their intensity and in their happening at all. Andrew Sullivan, of course, curates the most impressive unfiltered English-language stream of protest coverage. The site is censored in Iran. Much of it is riveting: scenes of violence in familiar locations in Tehran, places that a couple months ago during other major protests saw no clashes at all. Steve Coll, via Steve Clemons, linked to this video of what looks like a crowd storming a gallows and saving the lives of two men nearly dead from hanging. I have no idea who the men are or even whether they have anything to do with the protests, but the images are remarkable anyway:

I would very much like to know how to tell whether the weekend's protests indeed herald a Ceausescu moment for the clerical regime, or whether the government is as sturdy as it so recently seemed. One measurement, I suppose, might be the atmosphere, such as it is measureable, outside Tehran. I spent most of my trip in Tehran, Qom, and Mashhad. The last two are exceptionally conservative towns, and surely colored my impression of the regime's durability.

But even when I was in Isfahan -- a relatively mercantile and liberal city -- the feeling was not one of inexorable movement toward revolution. Rather, the young people I met whined of the corruption of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Islamic revolutionary who became a rival to Ahmadinejad. Their specific complaint: that Rafsanjani had sucked the province's rivers dry to water his pistachio orchards. They alleged that he had made a billion dollars off pistachios, and that the city of Isfahan (known for picturesque bridges over a the Zayandeh river) suffered as a result. Sure enough, the Zayandeh was parched enough for me to walk across in my sneakers:

Of course, the testimony of a few Isfahanis jealous of Rafsanjani's pistachio scam is no basis on which to judge a revolution. But I do hope to hear more about the conditions outside Tehran, and away from the predictable sites of unrest. When I start reading reports of riots in Tabriz, Shiraz, and Yazd, the possibility of someday visiting a small grave, barely marked with the name "Khamenei," will seem considerably less remote.

Jack Black, Col. Qadhafi, and a Tube of Vaseline

2009-11-30T11:59:40-05:00

TRIPOLI - Afriqiyah Airways is better than its Web site suggests. Founded in 2001 as the airline of Africa (with a hub here, in the inconvenient-to-everywhere hermit state of Libya), it owns a fleet of Airbuses that still give off that nose-singeing, chemical-rich, new-plane smell. It is emphatically not Air Afrique, the West African carrier that went bust in 2002, that nearly shares Afriqiyah's name, and that became known for its eccentric service and proud defiance of its own timetables. Instead, the airline of Muammar al Qadhafi is sleek, attractive, and reliable. The seats -- green, the color of Libya's flag -- are clean, and have the usual movies, music, and games, all on an in-flight entertainment screen so jauntily functional that it looks almost as if they installed one of those MIT Hundred-Dollar-Laptops in the back of every seat.

Afriqiyah seats, via Wikimedia.

9.9.99 -- date of the declaration that established the African Union.

I would say that Afriqiyah resembles any other first-rate airline, except that one day earlier, on another more established airline, I had an experience Afriqiyah has taken great care to prevent. It was not an experience I wish to repeat. From KLM's library of in-flight entertainment I accidentally summoned Brüno -- more specifically, an extended sequence of the tidily shorn phallus of the title character dancing merrily across the screen. I looked down the dark aisle behind me to see if anyone had noticed, and a little Arab boy grinned at me mischievously from his seat.

Afriqiyah, by contrast, has taken what are apparently great pains to censor its in-flight content, even to the point of blurring out offensive images with what appear to be smudges of petroleum jelly. I chose Tropic Thunder, the sublime 2008 Justin Theroux/Ben Stiller comedy, and made an inexhaustive catalogue of the dialogue and images Afriqiyah deemed too hot for Tripoli. It is not an especially raunchy film, but the level of censorship -- an instance every minute or so -- surprised and tickled me:

The words "Booty Sweat" (blurred out and bleeped)
A sequence involving Toby McGuire as a young monk who experiences a homoerotic awakening with fellow monk Robert Downey, Jr.
Tyra Banks's shoulders (blurred out)
Images of Buddha (blurred out)
Multiple boring mentions of pornography, in discussion of the decisive factor in the success of Blu-Ray over HD-DVD
Jack Black's underwear (blurred out)
"Whore," as in "Your mother is a cankerous whore" (the rest of the sentence survives intact)
All mention of drugs (fully a third of the film happens in a Golden Triangle opium processing plant; it may as well be turmeric)

Many moments of dialogue are untranslated, quite enigmatically for non-English speakers. But when Tom Cruise screams over the phone at the heroin dealers holding Ben Stiller captive, and suggests that one of them "take two steps back and literally **** your own face," Afriqiyah's censors were evidently so horrified that they not only turned off the sound but actually blurred out their own Arabic words at the bottom of the screen. To this general amusement, add special treats for Arabic speakers, who get to see the nonsensical ways the translators dealt with Downey's faux black English, and such phrases as "never go full retard" (�…تخلف عقلي كا�…ل).

All of which raises the obvious question: why not just show a cleaner movie? To this, I have no answer, except that Muammar al Qadhafi is rarely less than interesting, and Tropic Thunder so zealously censored is even sillier than the original. If Afriqiyah is smart, they will take this and run with it, and become the world's foremost purveyor of airborne absurdist humor. If KLM and Brüno are the competition, it should be an easy niche to fill.

Cairo's Soccer War

2009-11-20T10:00:56-05:00

CAIRO -- After aerial bombing and rent control, I suppose one of the worst things that can happen to a city is acute mania for national sports. This week, Egypt went mad for soccer, as the Egyptian team played Algeria for the Arabs' only place in the 2010 World Cup. They beat Algeria in Cairo Saturday, scoring the decisive goal with seconds to go in stoppage time, then lost to Algeria in the tiebreaker game Wednesday night in Khartoum. I was present for the orgy of celebratory rioting and pyromania after the first match. This morning, after a citywide depressive episode following the loss in the second match, mobs have congregated around the Algerian embassy, and the thrown stones of the morning have the makings of a diplomatic incident by evening.

After and during the Saturday victory, fans set me on fire twice. They were harmless conflagrations, but they reminded me what a blessing it is, in so many ways, not to be the type who wears polyester and flammable hairspray. A man ignited a sparkler next to me, in an area packed so tight we were pressed together, chest to back. By the time he realized his folly, sparks had sizzled through my shirt and lightly scorched my skin. At Tahrir Square, which is Cairo's Times Square, fans shut the place down to traffic and began lighting aerosol cans ablaze. One burnt off the fringe of my hair. Here are photos:

I picked up one of the spent aerosol cans off the ground. It said "PYRO SOL" on it, which leads me to believe there is a brand specifically marketed to rioters who wish to create enormous fireballs in city streets.

It's enough to make one wonder whether victory is preferable to defeat. The previous worst riot in Cairo was a riot of rage: protesters shut down the city center as the US began its assault on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I was in Tahrir Square then, too, and saw riot police watch passively for the first couple days, then surround the protesters and close in, sending the most dedicated among them to jail. From then on, the response was more severe. The police severely truncheoned the crone who managed the public urinal opposite my apartment in Bab al Luq, because she was too lazy and old to abandon her smelly post when the riot police cleared the streets. But never during those awful scenes did I sense that someone was going to get set ablaze, or ground into the pavement by manic, dancing adults singing "Copa de la Vida," which may well be the most ignominious method of death yet devised by the dark heart of man.

These present riots combine rage with giddiness with disappointment. In 1989, the last time Algeria and Egypt competed in such a charged atmosphere, Lakhdar Belloumi, the Algerians' star player, allegedly gouged out the eye of the Egyptian team doctor with a broken bottle. (His team defended him, and said the goalkeeper did it.) This time, Egyptian fans stoned the Algerian team's bus when it arrived, and Algerian players wore bandages on the field, with some theatrical sense, to cover their wounds. When Egypt won, Algerians ransacked the EgyptAir office in Algiers, and Egyptian fans (see above) lightly tore apart downtown Cairo. These incidents combined to make Egyptians feel nationally aggrieved, in a way that must be taken out on the Algerian embassy here in Zamalek.

Preemptively, Egypt has lined the leafy streets of Zamalek with military trucks, and it lets only foreigners through. It is a strategy that reminds me of the Iranian response to the counterprotests on Quds Day -- clog the streets with metal and police, so that no rioters can even reach the site of the riot. I am now on a balcony of my friend the philosopher Graham Harman, opposite the Algerian embassy, watching roughly a thousand riot police ringing the embassy and preparing for a potential assault, if their deterrence by presence fails. If it does fail, expect photos here.

Superstition at the Checkpoints

2009-11-13T13:52:55-05:00

Last week, Rob Nordland filed a great story about the Iraqi police's use of the ADE 651, a bomb-detecting device that costs "$16,500 to $60,000 each" (love that margin of error) and does not, strictly speaking, detect bombs. The people at the James Randi Educational Foundation, never ones to decline a bet on a sure thing, offered a million dollars to the manufacturer if it could prove the device worked better than chance. The manufacturer, based in London, has not taken up the challenge, and the overall impression of the sneering article is that the Iraqi security forces are being blown up, and allowing their countrymen to be blown up, because they are too scientifically illiterate to know they've been had.

I'm sympathetic to Andrew Exum, who calls the deployment of these stupid toys "deadly idiocy." But Mauro De Lorenzo writes in to flag this passage from Nordland's report, and suggest a parallel:

Proponents of the wand often argue that errors stem from the human operator, who they say must be rested, with a steady pulse and body temperature, before using the device. Then the operator must walk in place a few moments to "charge" the device, since it has no battery or other power source, and walk with the wand at right angles to the body [...]. If, as often happens, no explosives or weapons are found, the police may blame a false positive on other things found in the car, like perfume, air fresheners or gold fillings in the driver's teeth.

Scientifically, this is preposterous. But who can deny that the prerequisites the Iraqis name for the proper operation of the device will make for better bomb searches? This magic wand (it is nothing less) forces Iraqi police to keep cool, to meditate themselves into a confident trance, and to approach suspicious vehicles with authority. Call it the Stone Soup theory of checkpoint bomb detection.

De Lorenzo offers an analogy to a Mayi-Mayi fetish, which stops bullets, but only if you follow a number of rules that themselves improve the chances that the bullet will miss you, perhaps by giving you enough confidence to evade the shooter, or even spooking him into missing on purpose. I would certainly shoot a little to the side, if I thought my enemy had magic on his side. Likewise, from the perspective of the potential bomber (bombers who do not subscribe to the James Randi blog, anyway), imagine having an Iraqi policeman approach, confident and armed with expensive equipment -- will you be more nervous, or less? Will you sweat more, and grip the steering wheel a little tighter? If so, the ADE 651 may have worked despite itself.

Finally, consider an American parallel. This magazine has long since concluded that the TSA searches are farcical and intrusive. When we hear that screeners miss bombs and guns in 20 of 22 tests, it is not much better than chance, depending on how you count. But does this vast and annoying security apparatus deter possible bombers? I suspect it does, no matter how Clouseau-esque it appears to careful, rational observers. It has a comically high false-positive rate, but few of us ever have the experience of bringing bombs onto planes without detection, so the false-negative rate is not something most of us can casually observe. (I exclude the false-negative rate for jackknives, Dasani bottles, and tweezers -- objects that no terrorist would ever bother with anyway.)

More technically speaking, to lay observers the screening at airports has low specificity but undetermined sensitivity. Less technically speaking, airport screening is a load of hooey. But we do it anyway, and one reason may be that having the procedures calms the nerves of those who are watching for telltale suspicious behavior, and inflames the nerves of those who have reason to be nervous. I have no idea if this hypothesis holds true in the Iraqi or American case. But if it does, I can understand why Iraqis and Americans would be reluctant to come clean and admit that their security works largely because of the false illusions on the part of terrorists and screeners alike.

Quds Day: Homeward Bound

2009-11-11T11:04:50-05:00

The Iranian government fielded an impressive squad of angry, hungry, Jew-hating fanatics. What of the opposition? Their counterprotest, centered slightly north and east of the main event, has attracted ample coverage from many sources, who offered reports that to my eyes, on the fringes of the counterprotest, sound plausible and accurate. I did not see Muhammad Khatami shoved to the ground, or any of the other more dramatic scenes of thuggery. Around Haft-e Tir, the government did break out the batons and beat protesters at the fringes, but mostly they seemed to have learned the lesson that by isolating the protesters to a few small areas they could avoid the spectacle of outright violence.

The real counterprotest was something I saw later that day, and the day after -- something much more muted, and harder for the government to suppress. By two in the afternoon on Enqelab Street, the streetsweepers had begun picking up the inevitable paper trash of a poster-intensive pro-government rally, where even pictures of Khomeini and Khamenei and Al Aqsa ended up dirty, folded, and ground into the street.

I headed back south toward my hotel, and stopped in at a dried-fruit stand to pick up snacks to tide me over till my iftar kebab. Down the road, though, past the natural moraine of parade detritus, I found a small pile of poster scraps, shredded in an obvious rage and left by the streetside. In the scraps were ragged triangles of bearded faces (funny how easy it is to identify Hassan Nasrullah or Ali Khamenei by facial hair alone). Someone had taken one of these posters and destroyed it, a silent protest against the day's events.

And there were more signs of protest, most of which I declined to photograph, in case someone found my camera later. In the neighborhood surrounding Tehran University, where the pro-government side of the rally started, the walls bore furtive graffiti. This was just outside the western edge of the campus:

It reads "Quds Day Green V," the Green for the color of the Mousavi movement and the V for Victory. So at least someone thought the counterprotest a triumph.

It would be awfully difficult to grind down the opposition so thoroughly that even the graffiti ceased. (After all, there is anti-government graffiti even in North Korea.) My sense is that the government regards the opposition now as something like herpes, capable of being managed but never cured. After all, the Mousavi opposition has -- unlike the Kurdish, Sunni, and Mujahedin-e Khalq oppositions -- never entered a violent phase, and successful political non-violence normally requires unsuccessful political violence as a prerequisite. The 2009 election will be always remembered as stolen, particularly by the young, but fury about the theft doesn't appear to be enduring enough to instigate change on its own. This generation's activists knew hope, briefly, but will have to get a little better acquainted with despair before they know it again.

This is the last installment of an account of the Quds Day protest in Tehran over a month ago. Click here to read all parts of the series.

Quds Day: Hunger Strikes

2009-11-05T15:38:04-05:00

Click here for all the installments of this account of the protests in Tehran last month.

This is a small point. I have mentioned the funny hats, the parade of uniforms, the howling masses seeking to be heard and then entertained. What kept the event from being even more like a carnival or state fair (think Shriners, Boy Scouts, crowds at a sideshow) was the total absence of food, let alone Cokes and funnel cakes. Quds Day fell, as it does every year, on the last Friday in Ramadan. Pervading this fiesta of Palestinian solidarity and anti-Semitism was hunger and thirst.

Ayatollah Khomeini started Quds Day in 1979, during a period of Israeli bombing in southern Lebanon and acute anti-Israeli sentiment among Shia. He explicitly intended the selection of the last Friday in Ramadan--a month recognized as holy by Muslims of all sects--to unite Sunnis and Shia behind a single banner. That Khomeini himself originally hoisted that banner would, not coincidentally, establish him as first among equals in the Muslim defiance of Israel and the West.

But that timing also guarantees that all observant protesters will be out with growling stomachs and parched mouths, famished and peevish after nearly a month of daytime fasting. At this year's march, the weather was hot and dry. I witnessed a government-sponsored march in Iran once before, in 2004, on the occasion of the Islamic Republic's 25th anniversary. Food was not only available but paid for by the government: Revolutionary Guards threw juice boxes and plastic-wrapped muffins from the backs of trucks, to keep the energy up among the marchers. And the energy was indeed much higher then than at this year's Quds Day.

Death to America: 2004.

Why does this matter? The fasting certainly helped change the tone of things, keying down the energy but also keying up the bitterness, the anger, the irritability. Year by year, the lunar and Islamic calendars trot forward by a couple weeks, so next year's Quds Day will be hotter and the day of fasting longer. And the year after that even more so. I look forward to seeing if these conditions make any difference.

Quds Day: Cartoon Edition

2009-11-05T10:54:08-05:00

(This is an account of the Quds Day rally in Tehran. Click here for all parts of the series.)

At a stand just off Enqelab, near the center of the Quds Day rally, a very active desk gave away and sold postcards and memorabilia about the Palestinian cause, and about the perfidy of the Israelis. For about $1.50 I bought Holocaust, a book of illustrations by the Iranian political cartoonist Maziar Bijani, whose work the organizers sold proudly. I reproduce a few key images below. Think of it as an anti-Maus.

I post these because they are, for starters, fascinating clinical documents. They largely provide their own comment, so I will add only a few observations.

The United Nations and the West are mostly depicted as dupes, rather than conspirators.
The cartoons deny the Holocaust (see the Jews' numbers multiply after the Second World War), but they mostly decry its instrumentalization.
The cartoonist's acquaintance with anti-Semitic tropes is fairly sophisticated, and he knows something about history -- what Zyklon B is, for example. This is not casual anti-Semitism, used cynically as a convenient tool against Israel (though that would be bad enough). It is sincere, calculated Holocaust denial that would presumably be just as deeply believed by its creator if there were no Occupation at all.