My third British Royal Wedding- why this time it was different

I had no intention of getting up at 5 am US East Coast time to watch the royal wedding, but my body clock had other plans. Up at five, I thought I’d just turn on the television set and take a peek: two and a half hours later, I was still mesmerized by the screen. It wasn’t just Westminster Abbey, or the hats- could the Queen’s have looked more like an iced cake?- or the electrifying moment when a Mohamed el-Fayed look-alike was mistakenly misidentified by Katie Couric. It was the small details, the telling human gestures you only catch live: Prince William awkwardly trying to smooth his sparse hair after taking off his cap when he first enters the Abbey, or fumbling with the button on his white glove before handing his bride into their carriage; Prince Harry looking for someone to relieve him of the program in a hurry and saddling a guest with it; Katherine licking her lips repeatedly in the carriage, as if she were thirsty. For all the commentators repeated how relaxed she was, she appeared to me strained, as if she hadn’t slept or eaten in a week.

The level of voyeurism reached new heights with this wedding. I watched my first British royal wedding, Princess Anne’s to Marc Phillips, in London as a homesick student; my second, Prince Charles’ to Diana, from Michigan, as a homesick new expatriate to the US. But William and Kate’s wedding was staged on an entirely different level, down to hairdressers and make-up artists waiting “backstage” to touch them up when they went to sign the registry, down to rehearsing camera angles for the famous balcony kiss. The uncharitable thought went through my head that William and Kate were perhaps the world’s highest paid actors. But then came the redeeming kiss: not the scripted romantic lip-lock, but a quick, discreet peck, asserting that there were limits, after all, to the role they were willing to play for the public. Good for them!   

The Glamorous Face of Tyranny: Young Arab Women

In February, Vogue magazine published a flattering piece on the lovely, elegant Syrian first lady, Asmaa al-Assad- “A Rose in the Desert”- gushing about the hyperkinetic first lady’s supercharged day, the accessibility with which she and her husband President Bashar supposedly live, and their hobnobbing with Brad Pitt, who apparently was astounded by the absence of bodyguards- in Syria, the country with perhaps the most omnipresent surveillance services in the world! The timing of the article was unfortunate, to say the least: it appeared in the midst of the revolutionary storm that was upending dictatorships from Tunisia to Egypt.

Only a few weeks later, Syria would be the latest Arab country to burst into revolt against decades-old bloody dictatorships. True, in Syria it was the father, Hafez al-Assad, during his thirty year reign of terror, who was responsible for most of the bloodshed, including the infamous Homa massacre of thousands of his own countrymen.

The son, Bashar Al-Assad, took over on the death of his father ten years ago. A strikingly tall, London-trained ophthalmologist with a gorgeous, skinny London-raised stockbroker wife, the young couple were soon embraced by the Western media as the new face of a kinder, gentler Assad regime in Syria.

Asmaa al-Assad’s fashion-plate status in the women’s magazines rivaled that of model-thin, designer’s dream Queen Rania of Jordan, the Palestinian wife of forty-something King Abdullah. At least the young Jordanian monarchs, at last count, still seem to enjoy considerable support and popularity among their people in spite of sporadic protests.   

But the mirror image of the Assads in Syria were the Gamal Mubaraks in Egypt: Gamal, the forty-some, tall, urbane son of Hosni, was a London-based businessman until he returned to Egypt to assume- with an air of aloof entitlement that alienated a broad base of the Egyptian people- the role of heir apparent to his aging father. He added the requisite family-man image to his portfolio by marrying a tycoon’s daughter, Khadija, a considerably younger woman with a taste for flashy outfits.

Gamal Mubarak is behind bars today, toppled out of power by the winds of an unstoppable revolution that no-one could foresee. Bashar Al-Assad, though, must have seen the writing on the wall, but when revolution fever spread to Syria, true to form, he cracked down on the protesters with an iron fist, while promising reform and even announcing the lifting of the emergency laws that had allowed him and his father before him to rule unchecked for forty years. Those same emergency laws had kept Hosni Mubarak in power for thirty years- until they hadn’t.

It’s ironic that the most appealing young Arab first ladies, the most modern and fashion-conscious, the ones who do the most to advance women’s rights or the most to seduce the glamour-conscious Western media, are also the wives of the most ruthless rulers.

It’s especially ironic that if you were to take women’s rights in isolation- and it’s my argument that you can’t- then the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes were good for women- for that matter so was Saddam’s. They were equal-opportunity oppressors. Susan Mubarak, the ousted president’s wife and Gamal’s ambitious mother, used her influence to impose reforms to the laws regulating marriage and divorce, reforms in favor of women that would not have passed if put to a democratic referendum.

But favoring women’s rights does not make for a benevolent dictatorship, if women, as human beings and as citizens, are denied their human rights, their political rights, and their economic security. That is why there were so many women, young and old, rich and poor, veiled and bare-headed, of all walks of life and of all religious and political persuasions, united in protesting against the Mubarak regime in Tahrir Square and everywhere in Egypt.

And that is why the glamorous face of tyranny will not save the Assads today.

  

My Memories of Torah Prison: Mubarak in Jail

The idea of former president Hosni Mubarak behind bars is not met with unmitigated schadenfreude in Egypt, even among those who demonstrated to end his regime. The first time I stood with the million protesters in Tahrir Square, I saw, strung up on lampposts, a crude effigy I assumed to represent Mubarak. I shook my head.

“That’s not right, that shouldn’t represent the spirit of this movement,” I remarked to the strangers around me in the tight crush of protesters.

A woman in peasant dress, carrying an adorable red-headed, blue-eyed baby girl on her arm, looked at me.

“You haven’t walked in our shoes,” she told me, apparently making a judgment based on appearance, just as I had. 

“You don’t have to walk in someone shoes to feel for them,” I retorted. “But this revolution should stay peaceful. It’s enough to call for Mubarak to leave the country.”

“The effigy is just a symbol, that we want Mubarak tried and brought to justice,” a younger woman explained, bitterly.

But most people didn’t seem to go so far at the time: the banners, the chants, in Tahrir that day and every day until Mubarak finally resigned, only repeated the mantra: “Leave, leave.” “Your plane is waiting.” “Ben Ali is waiting.” “Saudi Arabia awaits you.”

But Mubarak didn’t leave the country after he resigned. He and his sons chose to stay in Egypt, in Sharm-el-Sheikh, no doubt hoping for a comeback, but in effect sealing their fate. Two months later, amid alarms of counter-revolution, and escalating public opinion pressure for bringing them to trial, the last straw was a defiant speech Mubarak broadcast on April 10, misjudging, as always, the moment and the national mood. The Supreme Military Council found itself with no option but to arrest the Mubarak sons and send them to Torah prison; the former president’s health, ostensibly, requires him to remain in hospital.

The sight of the urbane, aloof Gamal and Alaa Mubarak in Torah Prison- where political prisoners are sent- was shocking enough. The very word “Torah” was seared into my childhood memories; it was the word uttered with dread whenever my eldest uncle, or one of my other uncles and relatives, suddenly went missing. Under Nasser, and under Sadat, they were periodically picked up by the “dawn visitors”, the secret police that came in the early hours of the morning; days later, their families were informed where they were being held, usually Torah. Sometimes they were imprisoned for weeks, sometimes for years. One uncle was imprisoned for three years for walking in the funeral cortege of former Wafd leader Mustafa Nahas.

My eldest uncle, Fuad Serageddin, the party leader and statesman, told me once that he was imprisoned under everyone from the British and King Farouk to Nasser and Sadat.

“Which was the worst time?” I asked.

“The last time under Sadat, just before he was assassinated; no contest,” he answered. “For three days I wasn’t allowed to have my diabetes medication, or any food, except for inedible slops they served in a filthy bucket. I survived for those three days on three dried dates that one of the guards slipped me.”

He would have been seventy at the time, I calculated. When he noticed the shocked look on my face, he quickly added, with his usual humor: “Look on the bright side, I lost weight! Remember when I used to go to that weight-loss clinic outside London and they charged me an arm and a leg to starve me on half a grapefruit three times a day? Well I lost weight in Sadat’s prison for free!”

That was the last time my uncle saw the inside of Torah; under Hosni Mubarak, he was never imprisoned. In fact Mubarak tried to co-opt the venerable elder statesman my uncle had become in those later years, inviting him to lunch at Abdin Palace more than once to try to persuade him not to oppose Mubarak’s putting himself up for re-election yet again. Fuad Serageddin accepted the invitations graciously, but continued to oppose the Mubarak regime. When my uncle died, Mubarak even offered to give him a state funeral; the Serageldin family declined.

So I have no personal grievance against Mubarak. But it was not elder statesmen like my uncle who posed a threat to his regime; those who filled his prisons were a younger generation of dissidents of every sort, from Islamists to internet bloggers, and there is documented evidence of the torture and brutality with which countless numbers of them were treated. This was done in Mubarak’s name, and to protect his regime and ensure the succession to his son. These crimes cannot be ignored; there must be a day of reckoning.

But like many Egyptians, I fervently hope that the trials will be conducted as a model of the justice, transparency, order and dignity that the Mubarak regime denied its victims. There is no schadenfreude in watching the Mubaraks behind bars, only a tragic sense that they could have spared the nation this divisive and painful moment, if only they had heeded in time the chants of “leave, leave, leave!”

     

Radio interview this afternoon with Women's International League for Freedom

Radio interview at 5 this afternoon with the Women's International League for Freedom, WCOM 103.5 FM. If they ask about Mubarak and sons being put on trial, I think I will say the principle of accountability is important to affirm for future would-be dictators, but that I hope the trials are conducted with the fairness, openness and dignity that befits the highest ideals of the January 25th revolution. But there's so much else still going on I have to think about...