London Riots & Egyptian Revolution: the Lessons Not to Draw

I remember when London was the best place to get arrested- if you were Arab and not Irish, that is. That was back in the seventies, when I was a student at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. At the time, the terrorists setting bombs in the ‘Tube’ and blowing off people’s legs on the escalators were the Irish Republican Army, not Al Qaeda; Arabs and Iranians were the ones shopping on Bond St, being overcharged on Harley St, and looking for London apartments as safe havens from potential revolutions in their home countries.

Then there were all the students, like me, studying at the universities. One graduate student we knew, a Jordanian, had just heard his mother had died back in Jordan; he was devastated. “I’m going to go get drunk and pick a fight,” he muttered as he stomped out the door. The next morning his friends bailed him out of jail after he took a swing at a London policeman who tried to arrest him for drunk and disorderly conduct.

“Why did you have to pick on a policeman?” I lamented.

“But a Bobby is the safest person to pick a fight with!” He retorted. “The worst that can happen is that he’ll lock you up to cool off overnight. I wasn’t so drunk as to get into a fight with a hooligan who could really do me some damage.”

I no longer live in London but I still visit regularly; I spent most of June there this summer, taking long walks in Hyde Park and enjoying the live music wafting across the Serpentine from the Boathouse. So it came as a shock to see the images of arson and looting on a scale I never saw even at the height of the revolution in Egypt this past winter, when there was no police presence at all on the streets for four days and nights in a row and the prisons were broken into and criminals let loose. Every street set up an effective neighborhood watch against isolated criminal elements or the even greater threat of Mubarak regime henchmen deliberately trying to create chaos and panic.

No, the London riots were a manifestation of anomie that had nothing in common with the societal solidarity of the Egyptian revolution, when citizens displayed a civic-mindedness unknown under ordinary circumstances.

If Prime Minister Cameron and the British public are enraged, it is understandable. But to exploit that rage to crack down on civil rights is to go down a dangerous road. If it becomes legal to interrupt cell, Blackberry and internet connection to foil ‘rioters’, who is to decide when there are rioters and when there are legitimate protesters, as there were in Egypt? Once such laws are on the books, they are near-impossible to abrogate or to monitor in the application; Mubarak ruled under just such ‘emergency’ powers for thirty years since the assassination of Sadat, and even a revolution has not succeeded in abolishing those laws, they are still in effect.

Another measure is evicting the entire family of a convicted rioter from subsidized public housing. Is this not a form of collective punishment? Civilized societies reject collective punishment, retaliation against an entire community for the act of one individual. But even from a pragmatic, let alone moral, point of view, what is to become of the parents and young siblings of a teenage looter? Is putting people on the streets not putting society in even greater danger of criminality?

Another measure being debated is more ‘muscular’ police action, along the lines, perhaps, of the U.S. Taken too far, such action can lead to abuses that risk alienating entire societies from their police forces and delegitimizing the police, as happened in Egypt.

There has been much criticism of the London police, who initially seemed to stand by and let the looters carry on under their eyes. In Egypt, when the streets were left lawless and unsecured during the revolution, it was understood that the police’s intention was to humble the public into acknowledging their indispensable role. This backfired in Egypt. But the parallel in the U.K. is curious: the London Police stood by during the rioting just as a 20% budget cut in the force had been announced. This reduction in the police force is highly unlikely to be put into effect after the riots.

The Egyptian Revolution and the London riots are worlds apart, but there are lessons to be drawn. Keep London the safest place in the world to be arrested!  

The outlier in 27 Views of Chapel Hill

27 Views of Chapel Hill has just been released by Eno Publishers, and my own quirky perspective is represented by a short story. This year, I was also featured in a selection from Cairene authors of the past hundred years, in A Literary Atlas of Cairo, published by the AUC Press. That coincidence just about sums up my insider-outsider perspective!

It’s flattering to be in such good company. In 27 Views of Chapel Hill, one of my fellow contributors is Elisabeth Spencer of Light in the Piazza fame. And in A Literary Atlas of Cairo, an excerpt from my first novel, The Cairo House, rubs elbows with an excerpt from Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. 

Mubarak on Trial: Reading the Color-Coded Prison Garb

Schadenfreude has had a field day the past couple of weeks. First it was ‘the humblest day of my life’ for Rupert Murdoch, before whose power prime ministers groveled, Scotland Yard bowed and trade unions shattered. But that was closer to comedy than tragedy, with farcical relief in the form of a cream-pie attack.

Hosni Mubarak on trial is the real Greek tragedy. True to form, the anti-hero’s fatal flow was the stubbornness with which he clung to power, long after it should have been clear that the option of a graceful exit was evaporating, long after the violence he unleashed on peaceful demonstrators annulled any residual goodwill left toward him in the hearts of a sentimental people. Egyptians instinctively respect age and status, and inchoately associate national dignity with that of the ruler, even a tyrant. In spite of the hundreds of dead demonstrators, the revolutionaries had been more than ready to see him leave Egypt for some cushy exile. The chants in Tahrir went: “Leave, leave. O Mubarak, the plane to Saudi Arabia is waiting for you.”

He should have left; he would not be standing in the dock today. Perhaps his capacity for self-delusion, or the ambition of his sons, convinced him that there could be a potential second act for the Mubarak dynasty if they stayed on Egyptian soil. Perhaps he hoped that Sharm-el-Sheikh would be his Elba, not his St Helena. But as rumors of repeated attempts at counter-revolution struck time and again in the months after the Friday of Departure, the Mubarak faction was suspected of plotting in exile. As accountability for the stark abuses of the regime became the rallying cry of the revolutionaries, it was inevitable that the day would come when the man who wielded the ultimate power should be put on trial.

The sight of an old man lying on a stretcher behind the traditional Egyptian ‘cage of the accused’ while his good-looking sons hover over him solicitously, is enough to evoke reflexive sympathy in any observer. But then you remember that Mubarak felt no pity for others: that he remained unmoved before the horrific photos of the mangled, bloodied corpse of Khaled Said, tortured to death by Mubarak’s secret police for daring to criticize the regime in a blog; you remember that the president remained unmoved before a video recording of police officers torturing and sexually humiliating an innocent young man who fell into their hands at a routine traffic checkpoint. The criminal police officers incriminated in these and thousands of other cases were never held accountable; even when tried in response to public outcry, they were let off with a few weeks suspension before being re-instated in their posts. Mubarak made his police above the law, as long as they protected his regime and his dynastic ambitions. He had no pity for others, nor did he fear a day of reckoning.

No tyrant does. Which is why it is a salutary lesson for all tyrants, especially in the region, that their day of reckoning could come as well. Some argue the contrary, that the sight of Mubarak brought to justice could harden the resolve of a dictator like Qaddafi to cling to power till the bitter end. But that would be the wrong lesson to draw: Mubarak could have spared himself humiliation if he had agreed to leave the country when he had a chance. Nor is this a repeat of the macabre puppet theatre of Saddam Hussein’s public hanging under American auspices in an occupied Iraq. Hosni Mubarak is being brought to justice by his own people.

And there will be no hanging, public or otherwise. Watch the body language of the accused: Mubarak, his sons, reviled former police master El-Adly, as they glad-hand smiling, reassuring police and army officers outside the courthouse. The worst sentence Hosni Mubarak might receive will be to live out the rest of his days in a comfortable ‘prison’ hospital in Sharm-el-Sheikh. His sons are on trial for minor corruption only, not for the potentially more serious crimes of ordering the killing of peaceful civilian demonstrators.

Mubarak and his sons wear the white prison garb of the accused before trial, symbolically presumed innocent till proven guilty. If and when they are sentenced, they will exchange the white for dark blue. None of them will ever wear the red that purports capital punishment. And that is as it should be. This revolution should not bloody its hands.