For two Brits, a holiday in Eqypt provided a chance to hear first-hand the reactions, hopes and concerns of Egyptians in the hours after Mubarak's fall from power.
Our third visit to Egypt turned out to be more timely than we could imagine. Arriving in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada on 11 February, we were astonished to discover that President Mubarak had stepped down a couple of hours earlier. Only the previous evening he had declared on Egyptian television that he would continue as President till elections could be held in six months’ time. He had crushed the expectations of the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square who wanted him to go immediately. Now he had fled, taking his family to his palace in Sharm el Sheikh in Sinai, a two-hour ferry ride across the sea from Hurghada.
What had brought about such a dramatic change? Did the Egyptian army lean on him? And did US President Barak Obama make it plain to the army, heavily dependent on military aid from the USA, that he had to go? Or was it simply that Murbarak finally realised that he had totally lost the support of the people? Whatever the reason, Allah, it seemed, had heard the Friday prayers of the people that morning.
The hotel staff were only too happy to talk about it. ‘Everyone in Egypt is very happy,’ the waiter called Abdo told us. There had been too much corruption, ‘too many payments’. And, he said, Mubarak ‘had all his wealth in a Swiss bank account’. He didn’t need to spell out how angry the vast majority of Egypt’s 88 million people are at the scale of the regime’s corruption, at a time when millions live in poverty. Forty per cent of the population survive on $2 a day or less, according to the World Bank. Corruption is said to cost Egypt $6 billion a year in lost public finances.
Mohamed at the reception desk said he was 25 years old and had lived all his life under Mubarak’s 30-year-rule. He admitted that he had ‘mixed feelings’ about what would happen now. But ‘we all trust the army’ - that they would keep to their promise of free elections in which they would play no part themselves.
Our tour company representative, whose father, he told us, was a career diplomat from Cairo, couldn’t believe how quickly the Mubarak regime had fallen. ‘Within 18 days!’ he exclaimed. Sixty per cent of the population are under 30, he said, and have known nothing other than Mubarak. The winter revolution in Cairo, and the ‘Arab spring’ across the whole region, has been in many ways a young people’s revolution of the Facebook and Twitter generation.
It has not been without cost. Lives have been lost and the Egyptian economy hit, businesses losing $310 million a day in lost trade, according to the BBC. The stock exchange was closed for two weeks. Tourism was badly hit. There were just 50 people in our hotel which has a full capacity of 500. Half the dining area was cordoned off and closed. Three days later the number of guests had risen to 125 but then fell back to 117 the following day, the reception desk staff told me. Nearly all the guests were Egyptian, in a resort that would have expected hundreds of Germans, Italians, Swedes, Russians and other nationals. An intrepid Swiss couple, however, were not to be put off their scuba diving.
Hurghada itself, a coastal town of 250,000 people, which expanded into a resort after oil was discovered nearby in the 1930s, was now like a ghost town. The dilapidated old town was virtually empty, though a Western couple at a cafe were smoking a hubbly-bubbly or hookah. There were hardly any tourists either in the modern new town with its wide boulevards, pedestrian precincts and Western shops. We were only too happy to spend what Egyptian pounds we could in the smaller shops. Trade was almost non-existent.
We felt impelled to watch the TV news in our room, BBC World as well as Al-Jazerra and CNN, for latest updates, and to watch the spread of pro-democracy demonstrations in other Arab states. I was reminded of President Roosevelt’s four freedoms which he gave in his 1941 state of the union address: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear - freedoms that the Obama administration would today also endorse.
These are the freedoms that young Egyptians and other Arab nations long for and perhaps at long last are realising: Freedom of expression including the freedom of assembly to demonstrate; the freedom to vote for the political party of one’s choice in democratic elections; the freedom of just laws; and freedom of the press and media. Freedom of worship, whether Muslim or Coptic Christian or of other faith tradition. Freedom from want: that is the great challenge now for economic development in Arab nations that have seen grinding poverty alongside corrupt, affluent, oil-rich regimes. And freedom from fear. Well, the demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and Yemen have shown that in bucket-loads, in the face of tear gas, batons and bullets, most dangerously so far in Libya.
There are of course other freedoms, especially freedom from corruption, greed and hatred - the freedoms of conscience - to live by. For the moment, the young Egyptians we met in Hurghada had smiles on their faces and hope in their eyes.
How far will it all extend? What will dictatorial regimes and their populations, from Iran to Burma to North Korea, make of it all? Can the Arab nations uphold the four freedoms for the world as a whole? And can the ancient civilisation of Egypt, to which the world owes so much, not least through the history of the Abrahamic faiths, be in the vanguard of this new revolution of liberation?
Michael Smith is a freelance journalist and head of communications for Initiatives of Change, UK.
NOTE: Individuals of many cultures, nationalities, religions, and beliefs are actively involved with Initiatives of Change. These commentaries represent the views of the writer and not necessarily those of Initiatives of Change as a whole.
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