My taxi, trying to reach its destination before curfew, cut through a poor neighborhood of Cairo. The local population had been “entrusted” with the task of providing security. For many, that was an incentive to practice violence—weapons are plentiful here—and also an Army-sanctioned opportunity to brutalize and mug people unlucky enough to pass by.
Some of the men stopped me and searched my bag. When they saw my computer, it sent them in a nervous frenzy. I made the mistake of saying that I was a journalist—clearly a profession they didn’t like. Two loud accusations followed: first, that, as someone with a computer, and presumably Internet access, I must be in touch with the rest of the world, and so a foreign agent of some sort; second, that I must be one of those “Facebook youth”—and thus somehow responsible for the revolution.
A tall man with a thick mustache and a sixteen-inch butcher knife—I would later realize that I was near Cairo’s slaughterhouse district, El Madbah—grabbed my laptop and pulled me to an Army captain a few dozen yards away. I thought that the misunderstanding would be resolved in seconds, and I’d be on my way; I even instructed the taxi driver to wait. But the officer looked at my I.D. and decided to take me along. Fine with me, by then—the crowd was getting thicker by the second, and there were more butcher knives out.
Then the beating started. A smack on the back of the head, as I grabbed my bag by one hand, trying to shove in my computer, as the man with the mustache gripped my other arm. This was apparently a sign for more of them to begin pummelling me. I fell on the ground. Thieves were reaching into my pockets, too, trying to get what they could. I hugged my backpack and computer as kick after kick came. At one moment, I recall sitting on my knees, hands raised, yelling for my life—surreal.
I was shoved into the Army captain’s car, then pulled out of it and into an ambulance used as a transport vehicle by the Army. By then, my head was bleeding and the blood visibly trickling behind my ear and onto my neck. I touched my head and raised my fingers, which were covered in blood. Throughout the ordeal, an Army officer and two soldiers were just two yards away—and stood absolutely idle.
Two from the mob got in the front seat of the ambulance and spewed a continuous flow of insults as we drove about a mile, to where an Army commander, a lieutenant colonel, was stationed.
The officer looked at me blankly as he listened to my story, then instructed me to stand aside. A larger mob was bringing in other people they had “arrested”—including any foreigner they came across. Foreigners—and journalists and people with computers—were the enemy.
For the following eight hours I was in unofficial detention—the Army officer seemed to realize that I was no criminal but confiscated my camera and phones anyway, and, in a burst of anger, smashed the nicer of the phones on the ground and stamped on it repeatedly. (Luckily, I had first made a phone call to inform my colleagues of my whereabouts.) “He’s a very decent man,” said Sameh, one of neighborhood men who was bringing people in, told me. He was speaking of the captain—whom I had earlier heard talking to his superior on the phone, asking for guidance on what to do with various prisoners, and referring to the Tahrir Square demonstrators as “sons of dogs” who had “paralyzed the entire country.”
Sameh was a forty-year-old man with a week’s worth of beard and a very yellow tooth. He worked at the nearby veterinary hospital. He was part of the pro-Mubarak group that went to attack demonstrators in Tahrir on Wednesday, the most violent day of clashes. He denied having been paid to do it. When I told him that the demonstrators in the square weren’t paid foreign agents, he was flabbergasted.
During the next hours I would see a few foreign journalists—I was told there were two Americans, two Swiss, and a Palestinian citizen of Israel. And I saw buses of people “arrested.”
There were also two loads of corpses—we were a street away from the morgue. When local residents pressed the officer to inform them where they were arriving from—“Were there clashes in Tahrir? In Imbaba?”—he told them they came from prisons. (Some of the men speculated that there had been a violent attempt to break out.) Soldiers in civilian clothes walked toward the morgue in a column of two. They were going to pick up the corpses. An hour later one came out, vomiting and gasping. An Army tank fired its machine gun in the air in warning after getting reports of fights nearby.
And truckloads of food and medication arrived—they had been meant for the demonstrators, but had been seized. Sameh passed some of it around. I ate a tasteless Danish and sipped some Coca-Cola. My throat closed up as I thought that, if it weren’t for the thugs in control of our city now, I’d be in Tahrir Square, eating that same Danish. But it would’ve been offered to me, kind-heartedly, maybe by a woman I’d never seen and would never see again.
By 1 A.M., I got a chance to retrieve my belongings, including my phone (smashed beyond repair) and my camera. The secondary memory card had been removed from the camera, but the main one had been overlooked. My I.D. was nowhere to be found, and the commander couldn’t be bothered to try and locate the captain who had it: “And if you try to go there again, they’ll arrest you again.”
“If you try to go home now with your backpack, you’ll either be robbed—or killed and robbed,” said Mohamed, a journalist who had been a voice of reason throughout the evening. And so I spent the rest of the night in Mohamed’s house. He was originally from Egypt’s agricultural south, and insisted on giving me his bed.
More than seventeen hours after my first attempt to get home, I got into another taxi. I headed straight to the police station in my neighborhood. They wouldn’t let me file an assault complaint—“you’d need to do that in the police station of the neighborhood where you were beaten”—but wrote up a report saying that I had “lost my documents.”
“So, happy now? Happy with all the instability, the violence? Wasn’t it better before?” said the policeman filing my report.
“Before”—when the police were still deployed in the streets? Before they abandoned the Egyptian population to punish us for speaking up?
“I just want to get home without getting beaten up,” I answered. “Of course, it was better when the police were guarding the country.”
He shrugged and handed me a document to sign.
Read more from our coverage of the protests in Egypt and beyond.
