A few days after the revolutionary peak of the 2011 anti-regime protests in Cairo, demanding the resignation of then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the mood changed.
The pro-government hulangs were unleashed in the crowds. They began targeting protesters, journalists covering the events and Westerners. Some of them had entered our hotel.
We were told to pack our bags, get in the cars and drive from the Hilton, overlooking Tahrir Square, to a relatively safer hotel a few miles away.
I shared a car with cameraman Joe Duran, who was sitting in the passenger seat, and with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper in the back seat.
On the bridge on October 6, a crowd forced our taxi to stop and surrounded us. They broke the windows. They threw stones at the car. The driver, surrounded by violent attackers, seemed to freeze.
In Arabic, I remember saying, “I’ll give you $ 500 for the windows if you keep going.” I ripped that figure out of the air. I still don’t know why this particular number came to mind. When he left, I thought we were safe.
We entered the Marriott entrance in our wrecked car. Dizzy, we headed to the lobby and checked in at the front desk.
Soon after, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof told me that some journalists were changing the names they checked so that any of the robbers entering the hotel asking for guest lists would not know which rooms they were in. foreign press.
My name is Arabic anyway, I thought, so I should be fine. “Say CNN anywhere on your form?” I remember Kristof asking me. I wasn’t sure, but I decided to take a chance. There’s no point in lingering at the front desk.
That night, we aired CNN’s special coverage on the floor of a hotel room. I remember thinking it looked like a hostage video. We would have many other nights like this, including a particularly tense evening barricaded in the CNN Cairo office, a couch closed.
We anchored hours of live coverage with the then head of our office, the legendary Ben Wedeman and Cooper. We sat cramped on the equipment boxes of the room, lit by a dim light on the faces, because the desks needed to look unoccupied from the outside.
Hopes for democracy
The government’s push against the uprising lasted several days.
The regime and its supporters tried to defeat the popular movement, but the army did not agree with Mubarak. As has been the case in Egypt for decades, in the end it was the generals who held the reins of power. When they left Mubarak, we all knew it wouldn’t last long.
On February 11, 2011, 17 days after the protests began, it ended: Hosni Mubarak resigned. This would mark the beginning of a new era; the hope was that decades of nepotism, corruption, police brutality and repression would give rise to something akin to democracy.
A few years later, we covered the 2013 Egyptian presidential election, which led to the victory of a Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi.
But eventually, a revived army will crush the Islamists in 2013 and bring the army back to power. They had been there all along, tolerating what turned out to be just a brief experiment with democracy.
Lost – even crushed – in this tragic story are the original protesters, who dreamed of a democracy to represent them.
Crushed optimism
In the first few weeks of the uprising, journalists like us shared their optimism: this could indeed be the time when the Arab world would evolve, slowly and painfully, into a system that serves its own people, rather than the illegitimate autocrats who have drained their countries have been drying up for decades?
Ten years ago, we allowed ourselves to believe.
Today, many of those who have been on the front lines of the protests are exiled, imprisoned or worse.
Elsewhere in the region, there have been more tragic results.
In Syria, the regime crushed its citizens’ cry for democracy with such brutality that peaceful protesters were quickly replaced by extremist rebels, fighting a government backed by outside forces to control a destroyed land.
Today, those of us who covered Egypt in 2011 still deeply feel the intense emotion of those early days.
There were some scary moments, but the historical significance of the events we documented acted as a fuel for missiles as we ran away from the crowds and hugged in the hotel rooms.
But for the revolutionaries in Egypt and beyond, it was not meant to be.
The Arab world, in many ways worse than before the Arab Spring, will have to wait for another generation to demand freedom from their leaders. And one can only hope that this time they will be victorious, just so that the sacrifices of those who came before them were not in vain.