Why would people want to stay so long in Tahrir Square? There’s been progress; the government released, among other people, Wael Ghonim, a missing Google executive, and there was a lot of shopping and traffic in Cairo today (and a human chain around a government building). Also, Mubarak said today that he’s giving all public-sector employees a raise. But people aren’t leaving. Some of the answers, today, are the same as since the beginning: determination that this is the moment and that it can’t be allowed to slip away; and the feeling of community, both in the sense of the fellow-feeling on the square and of the commitment to one’s fellow-citizens, and country. And has been real joy along with the fear—see our dispatches from Wendell Steavenson and Jenna Krajeski. On one of the scariest days, last Tuesday, Steavenson heard protesters shout,
Is an open square in Cairo scary, compared to a closed room? The Times had a jarring piece by two of its reporters about being detained by the Army and brought to the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, or secret police—“In a strange exchange that only made sense later, Ms. Mekhennet asked a soldier, ‘Where are you taking us?’ The soldier answered: ‘My heart goes out to you. I’m sorry’ ”—and what they saw and heard there:
Maybe for some it is, relatively, a safe place to be, with the crowds. There was talk today of a divide between the younger protesters and the older ones, and between the desire for an orderly transition, with Hosni Mubarak in power until September (with the help of Omar Suleiman, a man whose career has been inseparable from the sounds of torture the reporters heard), and a somewhat faster one (sixty days, and no Mubarak). One concern may be that the government might use the time to put in order things like overseas bank accounts held by officials, rather than rules for orderly voting. How, and with what aggression, might the government use the time to shape the succession? Perhaps people are in Tahrir Square not because they are against orderliness but because they still have unanswered questions. The Times reported that the organizers of a Facebook page that played a key role in this had stepped forward: “a half-dozen scruffy-looking doctors, lawyers and other professionals in their early 30s.” The scruffiness, in some cases, was the result of just having been released from detention. (Ghonim, the Google executive, was also involved in getting the protesters set up on Facebook.)
By the way, one wonders—not because it’s immediately likely, but just as a thought experiment—what would happen if something like Tahrir Square took place in Kabul. What would the role of our military be? Of course, there are all sorts of political, cultural, and sociological differences—but still: What would we do?
Video: Demonstrators at Tahrir Square greet newcomers with the slogan “Egyptians are here. Here, here, here.”
