A Republic Called Tahrir

By Roger Cohen
This commentary was published in The New York Times on 06/02/2011

CAIRO — Beyond politics there is culture. You don’t live on the same patch of land for millennia without acquiring a deep form of it. If, for Flaubert, style was “the discharge from a deeper wound,” Egyptian culture is also the product of this nation’s scars. Its wisdom, issued from suffering, is rooted in humanity.

Tahrir Square — the locus of a great national awakening from almost six decades of dictatorship, overlooked appropriately enough by a museum that houses the Egyptian heritage and by the headquarters of the long-slumbering Arab League — has become a reflection of that culture. Its spontaneous development into a tolerant mini-republic is a riposte to President Hosni Mubarak’s warnings of chaos.

Far from chaos, there is serendipitous order. “We’ve been organizing as we go; if there’s a problem, solve it,” Omar el-Shamy, a 21-year-old student who hasn’t left the square for a week, told me. Through necessity talent is allotted: the doctor here, the engineer there, the security guy in that corner and the IT expert in this one.

An infirmary is born. Garbage is collected, defense marshaled. Food is ferried, prayer respected. The Brotherhood coexists with a dynamic sisterhood. As my colleague David Kirkpatrick remarked of a flag-waving youth atop a lamppost: “Where is Delacroix when you need him?”

I spoke to an investment banker. He’d been talking to a guy cleaning the square. In Cairo where dust is the city’s very element! Why, the banker asked, this Sisyphean sweeping? The reply: just decided to do it. “Never in a million years would that have happened before,” the banker tells me.

It’s startling what pride reborn will do, what a gleaming eye will see that a sullen eye was blind to.

A square, of course, is not a nation of 83 million people. Egypt has its lethargy and its pharaoh’s tradition. Mubarak, this boss whose only real idea in three decades has been security and whose sole currency has been fear, now says he will go in September. That’s enough for some Egyptians — and now, it seems, for Barack Obama’s America.

It’s a preposterous idea, really, to imagine that this anti-democrat Mubarak, aided by his longtime henchman Omar Suleiman, can now at 82 reverse his every instinct and deliver, within seven months, a free and fair election; to believe that this man whose security forces have killed or disappeared dozens (including a Google executive Wael Ghonim) can become a disciple of the rule of law; to ask this Honecker to become Havel.

I don’t buy it and I don’t think the “Yes-we-can” American president should have adopted the tiptoeing “No-we-can’t” that leaves Mubarak as a dead man walking.

Just three months ago, in the farcical November parliamentary elections, my colleague Robert Worth watched regime gunmen burst into a Cairo polling station firing shots into the air. Several hundred people waiting to vote were ordered to disperse: Sorry, too dangerous!

“Why would we trust them now to play it right?” Mounir Fakhry Abdel-Nour, the secretary general of the secular Wafd opposition party, asked me. That’s a question the West hasn’t answered.

The deeper problem is more cultural than political. To accept the Mubarak-or-chaos argument is a form of disrespect to the civility and capacity of Tahrir Square. It is an expression of Western failure before the exploding Arab thirst for dignity and representative government. It reflects the old conditioning which sees in an Egyptian culture that was, after all, deep enough and realistic enough to accept peace with Israel, no more than a disaster waiting to happen if the iron fist is removed.

Western leaders say events in the Arab world should spur Israelis and Palestinians to peace because they show how unstable the region is. Wrong: these events are themselves the spur to the only sustainable peace, one based on Arab self-respect and self-expression.

“There is one united front calling for one single demand: Mubarak needs to go,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel prize-winning opposition figure, told me. “People need a new beginning, and psychologically that new beginning is when Mubarak leaves — with all dignity.” And, I asked, immunity? Yes, ElBaradei said, in principle — Egyptians are not seeking retribution.

The Western fiction, he said, is “that somehow Arabs are not really ready for democracy, that maybe they have horns.” It is time to overcome that fiction and look at what Tahrir says about culture emerging, technology-sped, from a deep sleep.

There is a better way forward. It begins with Mubarak’s departure. It involves the installation of a three-member presidential council, including a representative of the army, and a caretaker government of respected figures to oversee constitutional and other reforms needed for free elections a year from now. How can credible political parties emerge by September in Mubarak’s wilderness?

That investment banker talked to me about how, early in the uprising, people formed a human chain around the Egyptian Museum to protect the nation’s culture. It was one in the stream of acts that have dignified Egypt.

“Look,” he said. “If we’re capable of doing that, surely you can give me the benefit of the doubt.”