Egyptians expunge Mubarak’s legacy, one metro map at a time

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Egypt’s former president created a regime whose psychological hold may take longer to throw off than the physical one

From Saad Zaghloul station, named after the one-time Egyptian prime minister who led an uprising against the British in 1919, Cairo’s metro line trundles north under the weight of successive national liberators. Orabi station honours the general behind a 19th-century revolt against foreign domination; Nasser, Sadat and – finally – Mubarak all lie ahead as well, three generations of army officers turned presidents whose memories are enshrined in bricks and mortar deep below the ground.
“For too long we have put our faith in strong leaders, and as a result the strength of our institutions and our society suffered terribly,” said Ahmed Okasha, a leading Egyptian psychiatrist. “The hubris of our presidents made them think they were accountable only to God and history, and they conflated themselves and their country to the extent of thinking, ’There is no Egypt, I am Egypt.’ It’s time for that to change.”

Amid Egypt’s ongoing revolution, his words have been heeded by the metro authorities. Signage for Mubarak station has been replaced by hastily printed sheets of metal reading “al-Shuhadaa” (the Martyrs); on the trains, where the maps are yet to be updated, passengers have taken the initiative by scrubbing out every last reference to the 83-year-old autocrat with pens, coins and knives. Some deletions have been carried out with such ferocity that the surface behind is cracked.

But Egyptians know it will take more than renaming a metro station – as well as hundreds of Mubarak schools, police academies, roads and hospitals – to dismantle three decades of dictatorship. Domestically the complex web of legal and extra-legal measures that entrenched regime control is being unpicked in fits and bursts; constitutional amendments one day, a new electoral law the next.

It will prove harder to reverse 20 years of economic injustice that have left Egypt as one of the most unequal societies in the world – despite small but vital victories such as the effective re-nationalisation of its biggest department store, Omar Effendi, just one of countless institutions subjected to botched privatisations that lined the pockets of the rich and left ordinary Egyptians empty-handed. Expunging Hosni Mubarak’s legacy here will require a deeper socioeconomic revolution – a process Hossam el-Hamalawy, a leftwing campaigner, calls taking “Tahrir [Square] to the factories, to the universities, to the workplaces”.

On the international front there has been a more successful effort to haul Egypt out of the geopolitical stagnation into which the regime had dragged it. A Cairo-led reconciliation between Palestinian factions has raised hopes that Egypt’s role as a regional powerhouse can be reprised. So have subtle realignments of its pro-Israel and pro-US foreign policy and, perhaps most importantly, a new détente with its African neighbours that once looked towards the Arab giant for solidarity with their liberation movements but found themselves sidelined by Mubarak and pulled into angry squabbles over Nile water resources instead.

Yet it is only in the absence of Mubarak – and the energy of the countless new forces rushing on to the streets to fill that void – that the real impact of Egypt’s longest-serving ruler since Ramses II can truly be seen. Mubarak’s legitimacy abroad and his appeal to elites at home depended on his ability to cast Egypt as a seething mass of barely restrained ignorance and unpredictability, and himself as the only man who could stop the touch-paper being lit.

“We had an enormous sense that we were being deactivated and run down,” said the Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif.

“There was the presentation of Egypt as a country that is intolerant and volatile. The active promotion, the creation even, of sectarian divide. The repeated statements that ’these people’ are not ready for democracy … Our heads were being messed with because the message which was coming to us constantly was: ’You can’t do anything. You have no agency. You are powerless.’”

It is that psychological sabotage of Egyptian society that is now being furiously challenged, that incessant rhetoric of “stability” over freedom which, according to the writer and long-time Cairo resident Maria Golia, left people “infantilised” and “unaccustomed to representing themselves”. On almost every other street corner and faded downtown residential block you can find political meetings taking place; DJs sitting down with bearded Islamists and striking train-drivers to thrash out what kind of country citizens want to build.

“With Mubarak gone the true character of the Egyptian people is revealing itself,” said Nour Ayman Noor, a pro-change youth activist. “Now people are talking – for the first time when you go into a cafe the TV is not only showing football or music videos, but rather al-Jazeera and the other news channels.” The substitution of silent detachment for messy, inspirational engagement is under way.

The political establishment has been forced into acknowledging this altered reality. “The distance between people and power has nearly always been vast in this country,” wrote Golia. Although that gap has hardly closed, those who wish to wield influence in post-Mubarak Egypt must pay lip-service at least to the demands of the people. Presidential contenders Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa initially rejected the idea of Mubarak going on trial; now, after popular pressure, both endorse it.

When Mubarak’s last long-term prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, was interrupted by a student heckler at a speech in 2008, the student – who had been shouting: “Egypt’s youth are behind bars” – was dragged off by security agents. This year the interim prime minister, Essam Sharaf, marked his appointment by telling the crowds at Tahrir Square: “I draw my legitimacy from you.”

When unarmed protesters, facing down security forces’ bullets and teargas, chanted: “Hold your head up high, you are Egyptian,” it was more than a call for courage – it was a positive statement of what 30 years of Mubarak rule had done to the Egyptian psyche, and just how different things could be.

Within Egypt few are rosy-eyed about the tentative progress so far in the battle to move on. A culture of legal impunity for those charged with maintaining law and order is proving stubbornly resilient: even as Mubarak’s sons are locked up in Cairo’s notorious Tora jail, where their father will soon join them, dozens of peaceful pro-democracy protesters remain incarcerated in the same building.

They were placed there by military generals who claim they are overseeing Egypt’s transition to democracy, victims again of a top-down condemnation of “instability”. “As long as there is hope, nothing is impossible,” the young prisoners wrote in a letter to Heba Morayef, a local human rights activist.

The backbone of Mubarak’s rule, his all-encompassing and western-funded security apparatus, is also unlikely to fade away any time soon. A rebranding exercise has taken place but a vetting process for the new national security agency which may keep out those state security officers responsible for arbitrary detentions and torture under the regime is yet to be properly implemented or made public. “There is no real strategy of accountability at the moment, and that’s deeply concerning,” said Morayef. “Without it, you are not addressing the root causes of the revolution itself.”

Beyond that remains the man himself, still holed up for now in the resort he had built – Sharm el-Sheikh, an oasis of ostentatious wealth, high walls and social exclusion that ensured everyone from local Bedouins to bussed-in manual labourers were firmly cut out of the tourist riches it commanded. Mubarak may have thought he could remain insulated there from the patchy but powerful moves being made to reconstruct a country long moulded in his image. He was wrong. Last week a local business chief asked the authorities to move the former president to a hospital outside the city, claiming his presence was putting off foreign visitors and had led to a dramatic fall in the hotel occupancy rate.

He is already being investigated for corruption, ordering the killing of protesters and selling gas to Israel at vastly deflated prices, and the attempt to force Mubarak out of Sharm will not be the final indignity for this modern-day pharaoh – the dock, the cell and maybe even the gallows await. For the rest of Egypt trials of a different sort are on the horizon, as the legacy of a man who called himself their father continues to be scratched away, one train map at a time.

Voices from the revolution: The researcher
The most worrying development of the past few months has been the detentions and trials conducted by the military. It’s a very worrying precedent at the very time when people are looking to see how Egypt is going to manage the transitional process in terms of issues of justice and accountability.

The army is presenting itself as taking a strong hand against criminals and thugs, and that resonates with people, but historically this is exactly the kind of rhetoric that Mubarak’s police state depended on. We need a shift from whoever is governing the country towards the strict application of the rule of law, and that hasn’t happened extensively yet.

On certain points there has been progress but the picture is always mixed. For example, the interim government has allowed the formation of independent trade unions, but at the same time we’ve seen a draft law banning strikes and protests, which is very problematic.

There’s also been a liberalisation of the political parties law, allowing new parties to be created, and that freedom of association is an essential prerequisite to fair elections later this year. But for elections to take place you also need an environment which respects freedom of assembly and freedom of expression; the draft law contravenes that freedom of assembly, and when it comes to freedom of expression the military has been setting red lines regarding what is acceptable criticism of the current rulers.

Arbitrary arrests of protesters by the military have taken place on numerous occasions. At least 85 demonstrators who were detained on 9 March are still in Tora prison; all were taken to the grounds of the Egyptian Museum and then tortured – beaten, whipped, subjected to electric shocks.

Voices from the revolution: The journalist
The revolution was against the Mubarak regime, but all we’ve managed to do so far is remove Mubarak himself. The ones running the country now are Mubarak’s generals who were the backbone of his dictatorship from day one.

Many are therefore disappointed with Egypt’s progress – me less so, because I never had high expectations from an army takeover. But two things have changed which give me hope. The first is that mass strikes are continuing. The second is that workers have taken the step of establishing independent trade unions, which I believe are the silver bullet for any dictatorship.

Attempts are already under way by middle-class activists to place limits on this revolution and ensure it remains only within the realm of formal political institutions.

Look at Wael Ghonim’s famous tweet following Mubarak’s overthrow saying ’’mission accomplished’’. I have a lot of respect for Ghonim but he represents a certain type of middle-class politics where the sentiment is ’’thank you, now go back to work, don’t make trouble and invest 100% of your energies into building the new Egypt’’. The army and the media echo this line, portraying striking workers as greedy and self-interested.

But the main chunk of any revolution has to be socio-economic emancipation; if you want to eliminate corruption or stop vote-buying, then you have to give people decent salaries, make them aware of their rights and not leave them in dire economic need.

A middle-class activist can return to his executive job after they think the revolution is over, but you can’t ask a public transport worker who has spent 20 years in service and is getting paid only 189 Egyptian pounds (£19.50) a month to return to work and tell his starving kids ’’the military has told us to stop making trouble, everything will be sorted out once we have a civilian government in the future’’.

So this is phase two of the revolution, the phase of socio-economic change. We need to take Tahrir to the factories, to the universities and to the workplaces. In every single institution there is a mini-Mubarak, a figure from the old state security regime, who needs to be overthrown.

These guys are the counter-revolution – maybe the counter-revolution is not clearly organised with a specific command structure, but you have to assume that everyone who belonged to the old regime is going to try to defend their privileges, and much of the malaise in Egypt is down to that.

There is huge resentment among the working class about the neoliberal policies which have impoverished them over the past 20 years, and the struggle for change will be a dramatic one.

No doubt the western powers and Arab Gulf monarchs who are already deeply unhappy at what they see taking place in Egypt will be even more dismayed at this.

But however much pressure they put on the junta, the pressure of the street can be stronger. The Egyptian people are vigilant about their own revolution.