Blog Egypt: Ahlain

This evening, Mohamed ElBaradei came to AUC to speak. ElBaradei is the director of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the UN agency tasked with assisting member states with the peaceful utilization of nuclear energy, and also with conducting inspections of all members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to ensure compliance with that treaty. You've probably read quite a bit about him over the last two years as the IAEA went back into Iraq, got kicked out of North Korea, and has gone into Libya and Iran. He's a pretty important dude, and he's also an Egyptian.

His speech was excellent, and I left the building feeling a lot of respect for this man who has been under a huge amount of pressure from the Bush administration over the last two years about Iraq. ElBaradei is exactly the sort of person that you want in the international civil service: he is dedicated, knowledgeable, passionate, and totally apolitical. This is a man who seeks solutions to crushingly difficult problems, and does so in spite of the fact that his organization is deeply, deeply flawed. After all, ElBaradei and the IAEA can only do what the member states of the UN allow them to do.

So, in short, Mohamed ElBaradei lived up to my expectations, and I hope he remains at the helm of the IAEA for a long time to come.

Alert! Even fewer posts than usual for the next 12 days! In a couple hours, after I email my thesis prospectus (do you think "The International Black Market Arms Trade and its Potential Role in Nuclear Proliferation to Non-State Actors" is a little strained?) back to Watson, spring break officially begins! Raghu, Thomas, Emily, Lisa and I fly tonight to Beirut, then next week to Amman. We'll check out Petra down in the south and take a safari at the Wadi Rum nature preserve, then it's across the Allenby Bridge into Israel, and to Jerusalem to see Ari! Ha ha ha ha, I get to hang out with Ari and you guys don't! Nyah nyah! Hopefully the checkpoints won't be a problem and we'll get to cross over into Ramallah for a day. Thompson wants to go to an Easter service in Jerusalem, so that's on tap as well. So goddamn psyched!

There's too many exclamation points in this post!

An interesting factoid to be had from Tom Paine's discussion of the Pledge:

"Also in 1942, to prevent the cheapening of the flag, the American Flag Code prohibited its use in advertising or on any disposable item, a prohibition that clearly has rarely been enforced."

So it turns out that those little American flag lapel pins that Bush Co. are so fond of are actually illegal! As are their TV ads!

Ok, ok, I realize that this of course means that every politician's ads are illegal, not just Bush's. And yes, I do think that this prohibition against using the flag in these ways is in poor taste, if not unconstitutional. I mean, if I'm going to support the right to burn the flag (which I emphatically do) then I better be for letting people put it on their suits...

But I just think it's funny that the Republicans, in their haste to claim the American flag for their party and therefore impugn the patriotism of the Dems, have been breaking the law every day for the last couple years!! (The lapel pin thing started only a couple years back.) Good for them.

*WARNING* Upon rereading this post, I realize that it is one huge ramble. But I had to get some of this stuff out. So, enter this thorny maze of political philosophical thought at your own risk.

This whole Richard Clarke (that's Dick Clarke, if you are part of the administration smear campaign) thing is really coming together in my head, now that Rand Beers name is in the mix as well. Rand Beers was the first person that I heard about who resigned from the Bush administration because he couldn't deal with the incompetence that pervades our security policy. Who is Beers? He's a career civil servant who has worked for Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. A registered Democrat yes, but also on the payroll of two of the most conservative presidents of the 20th century. So that says quite a bit about his impartiality, at least when it comes to doing his job. In August 2002 he was hired by Condi Rice to be Special Assistant to the President for Counter-Terrorism at the National Security Council. Six weeks after he resigned, he signed on as the Kerry campaign's senior advisor for security policy, because he decided the best thing he could do to make the United States more secure was get Bush the hell out of office. Sounds a lot like Clarke.

And here in Cairo, Alex P. just showed up, but I can't get ahold of her. Hopefully I'll snag her later tonight after class and show her around a bit.

Also, this is day #3 for Huge Pointless Internal Security Troops Show Of Force. Excuse my language, but I really can't stand this bullshit. I have never been the subject of political repression and physical intimidation before, but now I can tell you that it is awful. I don't feel threatened or anything, but it just makes you a little less human to be targeted by this stuff. And they are absolutely targeting the University. They pull up 30 troop carriers, unload all sorts of black riot-gear clad men, and just stand around glaring at you, screwing up the traffic.

It is hard not to feel really angry at the troops themselves. But they are not the problem, they are suffering as much as anyone, being forced conscripts in a security force that teaches you to hate indiscriminately. They get beaten for their training, which culminates in a long session (maybe 30 minutes) where a solo trainee is forced to scream abuse at a rock. A rock! The point being, of course, to make that person capable of hating, and abusing, anything and anyone. And they are prisoners, basically. When they sit for hours in these transports, you can see their faces peering out of the little square windows, their hands grasping the metal bars. They looks like prison trucks.

I get this incredible urge to just stand outside with a big sign that says "DEMOCRACY NOW. DEMOCROTIA DILWATIE." Just stand there, not say anything. Just to tell them that I see 'em. And I'm not ignoring them, because that would be admitting that this behavior is normal and O.K. But of course, were I to do that, I'd have the shit kicked out of me, arrested, deported. Who knows, tortured? It happens.

And anyways, it is hubris to think that it is my place to do that. (Hear that, Bush? Hubris.) It has to come from inside, it has to come from Egyptians. I can help through encouragement, through giving information. But I can't fight the fight, not here. I can only do that in the U.S.

Yesterday in our literature class, we spent the period discussing the Israeli killing of Sheik Yassin, the Hamas leader. Now, I don't waste any love on Yassin, but I do think that his killing was a pretty stupid, and immoral, thing to do. I just can't O.K. extra-judicial assassinations, and it is really a bad sign that Israel (and the U.S., remember the Hellfire missile in Yemen?) continues the practice. Furthermore, it is highly questionable that the killing actually damaged Hamas. It might only weaken the P.A., and give strength to Hamas. That's not a good thing, either. But back to the class. Many people were extremely upset. One guy kept asking "Why don't people just do something, I don't know what, but they need to do something." He was very emotional and frustrated, but couldn't express himself other than to say that he wanted action. This was a common theme. But no one talked about what they were going to do, themselves. One girl did, a little bit, but it was more about her past actions. So I asked the question, "You are AUC students. You are the rich, you are the powerful. Aren't you people the elite, or the future elite? You have to stop talking about change like it is some amorphous thing out there, because you have to do it yourself. If you want to physically want to help Palestinians, you can't do that from here. You can either go to Palestine and do aid work, or you can change Egypt." You know, corny "be the change you want to see" stuff. But that is the reality! My observation is that Egyptians have been disempowered for so long (forever?) that they cannot think in terms of really enacting change themselves. It is a bizarre dynamic, where people get the fight just taken right out of them, to the point where they don't know what fighting is anymore.

My friend Tom spent his winter break in Baghdad, and his stories are very telling of the mindset that develops within totalitarian regimes. Not to compare Iraq and Egypt, because they are very different. But it is important to look at the really extreme examples and then extrapolate backwards the symptoms. There are farmers all over Iraq that refuse to plant their fields. Tom told me about how he asked a farmer why didn't he plant his 10 acres that were currently barren? The farmer has the knowledge, has the seed, has the land, but isn't farming. And his family is starving! It doesn't add up. The farmer responds, because no one has told me to. So what?!? Just do it, who's going to stop you? Your family needs the food!

But that's the mindset that develops. A fear that runs so deep that a farmer refuses to plant his land until someone orders him to do so, for fear that his crop will only be stolen, or worse, that he will be killed. People begin to believe that being physically threatened by your government is normal. People rationalize it, and governments create crises to occupy the mind.

Makes you appreciate your basic rights, I've gotta say. Can't take them for granted, we've got to remember that.

Yesterday was an interesting day. Like so many other Saturday mornings, this one saw me up bright and early to tour some of Cairo's most ancient funerary monuments with my Art and Architecture of Cairo class. Of course, I barely got up in time, and was a little inconvenienced by the previous night's excesses at the Nile Hilton bar, rocking out with some crazy Irish cover band.

A few words on the cover band. The lead singer had long luxurious hair and a soul patch, and kept on changing his outfit before every set. He was drunk enough by the end of the first set that he couldn't play guitar anymore, and he gladly handed the microphone over to any person who happened to think he remembered the words to whatever song was being played. He broke one of the overhead lamps. There was a short-but-oh-so-sweet mosh pit to some song that probably didn't really warrant it. Tons of somewhat guilty pleasure had by all.

The fieldtrip was good, as usual. One mausoleum is covered by an absolutely huge wooden dome from the 15th century. The engineering devised to support such a structure is quite brilliant and also very beautiful. At every corner of the square room, in the so-called "transitional zone" between the four flat walls and the dome above, rise a series of arches standing one on top of the other. Each corner looks sort of like a three dimensional version of the pyramid that cheerleaders do. The construction is called a squinch, and the idea is to make a circle of radius r fit perfectly on top of a square whose sides are each 2r. If you draw this square and then draw the circle on top of it, you will see that they only touch at four points, in the exact center of each side of the square. What the squinch does is make points of contact all around the circle, and then bears that load down and out onto the square. That's a pretty poor description, and I'm sorry that I can't do better, but I hope I've gotten the idea across. The room, if I remember correctly, was on the order of 30 meters square, so you can imagine the size of the dome, and the resulting sizes of the four squinches. It was really very cool to see.

But the highpoint of the day came later. As you are probably aware, yesterday was the one year anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. As you can imagine, the war is profoundly unpopular in Egypt, and there was a sizable demonstration in Cairo's main square, Tahrir, to mark the day and protest the action. Now, underneath it all, Egypt is a police state. This is one of those countries that calls itself a democracy, but it just doesn't cut it. There is no criticism of the government, you do not say Mubarak's name unless you are praising him. There are police everywhere in the streets, carrying a motley collection of Kalishnikovs and various decrepit rifles with bayonets affixed. And on a day like yesterday, when there is a state-sanctioned demonstration, the internal security forces do not take chances. They shut the city down.

Cairo was locked down for probably 10 blocks in every direction away from Midan Tahrir, and military transports lined the streets. They had driven in from the barracks early in the morning and set up a maze of roadblocks and began prepositioning riot police. Arriving at school at 9am for the field trip, we saw hundreds of police in black riot gear with shields and clubs getting into their positions.

The protest was to begin at 1pm, so when we got back from the fieldtrip, we got some lunch and then, pointedly ignoring the emails from the embassy warning Americans to keep away from Tahrir, walked around the square checking things out. The place was crazy. Thousands of cops in ranks three men deep lined the roads for blocks. They had a series of barricades creating a path into the protest area. We spotted some friends of ours on top of one of the university buildings, and decided to climb up for a better view. The American University fronts onto Midan Tahrir and the seven-story science building provided an incredible view. From the roof, we could see the entire square and the patterns of the police deployment.

My personal estimate was that there were somewhere between four and six thousand riot police deployed, not counting those still inside the troop transport vehicles away from the square. So how many protesters were there? Twenty thousand? Not even close. No more than a thousand people showed up for the protest, and by Egyptian standards it was very large. There were six times as many riot police as there were demonstrators! Think about that! It's absurd! It's ridiculous! But that's the way this government does things.

The demonstrators were totally surrounded by ranks of riot police. It was clear that the police strategy towards crowd control was to completely encompass the demonstration, and then close the circle. They could do what they wanted inside, but they couldn't leave en masse. Whenever the crowd seemed to be moving in a certain direction towards the troops, the police would close ranks and another couple hundred men would come double-timing it from another part of the square to reinforce the circle.

They burned an Israeli flag, then an American one. They chanted and shouted. For a minute, they were chanting about Mubarak, but that got stopped immediately. It was all very interesting to see, but it left me with such a bitter taste in my mouth. A government that is so paranoid, so schizophrenic as this one, that believes a thousand protesters are such a threat as to warrant six times their number of riot police, that represses political speech to this extent, will fall. It may fall to the very people it is trying to keep down, or it may understand its own fundamental problems and move to reform itself. It seems that reform is the road that Mubarak has chosen. The Iraq war has pushed the Egyptian government much closer to a very important decision, between democracy and farce. In my mind, there is only one possible outcome. But on one path, democracy arises through peace, and on the other it arises through fire. I have no doubt in my mind that this region will become democratic, sooner or later, but I am worried about how. It has to come from within.

Last weekend me and some buds (Emily, Lisa, Thompson) went to Alexandria. The overt reason was that Emily's rugby team had a match against there, and the rest of us just wanted to get out of Cairo. But the deeper reason for going was the lingering suspicion that our previous trip to Alexandria, with Tomader Rifat and the ISSO, had not really shown us anything at all of the city. Turns out that was true.

So last time we were in Alex, we spent our days locked in this 5-star hotel compound next door to the palace of King Farouk. This time, we were out in the streets, in the fish market, walking through the souk, meeting folks at tea shops, eating great (cheap!) food, and staying in the oh-such-a-dive Hotel Acropole. But at $5 a night, we don't really mind. Lisa is a stronger person now for having slept on a mattress that is best described as fossilized, yet damp.

Emily's rugby team ran circles around the opposition in two no-tackle games. Really, they were playing tag. It was competitive, but it was still tag. Andrew would have giggled a high-pitched little giggle. Emily was very annoyed, as she plays rugby for Vassar and is very serious about the sport. (She claims that the Vassar team is very good. But I happen to know of one team that beat them this season on their way to nationals... BROWN! Add some oil baby, yeah, YEAH!) It was sooo pleasant to lounge on the grass in the sun, watching girls run around in shorts and short-sleeves. My god, I haven't seen that much ankle and fore-arm in months! English speakers abounded, apparently Victoria College is a British school or something. After being abroad and having seen the world a little, I've still got to say that those people just sound so funny some times.

We went back to the Bibliotecha Alexandria a couple more times. Last time we were there, we had 20 minutes to check it out, and we were pissed. So we took our time on this trip. It's definitely a pretty cool building. I can't admit to liking all of the little architectural details that were piled onto this building, but I really appreciate the effort and the amount of thought. The architect clearly loved the project. One example of something I dislike: the soft strips of blue and green lights on the ceiling that change color as the day progresses, like a color clock. While the idea of a passive, unintrusive reminder of the outside world and the progression of time definitely appeals to me, why did they have to do it with gross blue and green lights? They just seem so out of place and glaring. Too much technology for something that should have been about not-technology, in my humble opinion. But overall the building is great, with its sweeping descent from the top floor to the bottom and its massive sloping ceiling. The entire interior space is tied together because there is only one very high ceiling that all of the floors share. It looks like a terraced hillside, or what would happen if you took a big, squat, 8 story building and cut it in half on a shallow diagonal. Very cool. It is especially impressive in this country, where residential architecture tends towards the soul-crushing and official buildings reek authoritarianism. The library is one big Mediterranean gust of fresh air.

Let's see, what else did we do.... We walked all over the city, mostly on the beautiful Corniche along the sea, but also deeper into the urban press. Alexandria is an amazing city historically, and that feeling of the ebb and flow of time sort of pervades the place. It is also quite cosmopolitan, as far as Egypt goes. I guess that this is because of both its history and its location. It is very much a Mediterranean city, and it very much looks towards Europe.

We also ate a lot. And drank a lot. And it was good. Sea food to die for, especially the calamari that we had at a bar one night. One restaurant we went to was a very family-style, big 'ol lets-eat-20-fish-tonight sort of place, where you go to the front and look at all of the sea food on ice, point to which fish you want, and then they snatch that one up and cook it however you want. We had some fish that I can't pronounce, and a big plate of prawns. Prawns that still had their eyeballs, and antennae, and guts. Lots of guts. I tried not to eat the guts. Thompson loved 'em. Emily played with the 8-inch antennae, and then with the fish heads. Lisa and I looked on, trying to pretend that for once we were dining with grownups.

Then we went to our favorite bar and drank some bottles of wine that were cheap but got better as the night went on. We had a fascinating conversation about deafness and deaf culture. Lisa signs ASL, and knows quite a lot about the subject. It is one of the topics that will really get her going. Lots of things were news to me, I didn't know that such a thing as "deaf culture" existed, or that the cochlear implant is a very contentious issue within the deaf community. I just love nights like that: sitting around a bottle of wine with your friends and talking, and learning a thing or two. Sounds a lot like what'll be going down on Ives Street next year...

We didn't do any work, but we spoke more Arabic than we do in Cairo, and that is reason enough to get out of this city as often as possible.

Ok ok, so I understand that some readers prefer posts about Egypt to posts about random other things. And I respect that. And because of that feedback, I am going to make a concerted effort to post at least once or twice a week with in-depth, detailed descriptions of my life here in Cairo. Because really, if I can't think of some interesting stuff to tell you all about, then that's just pathetic. And I'm not really in a pathetic mood, so there you go. BUT, I defiantly reserve the right to post anything that I goddamn well please. If you are one of those peculiar individuals who doesn't like to read posts about politics or security or whatever, then go here instead. And the odds are that I will be posting plenty of the random stuff in the future, because I am just starting the preliminary research for my thesis on the nexus between the world black market for arms and proliferation of nuclear materials to non-state actors. Take warning, take warning.