HS journalist’s window-seat view of Cairo unrest

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By Jukka Huusko
     
      ”Don’t stop” Don’t go there!” shouts a man from the window of his car as he comes in the other direction.
      I pay no heed to the warning. I know where I’m going.
      A fearful Cairo cab driver has left me 500 metres from my destination, speeding off around the corner looking in all directions. I drag my suitcase along the long and dusty Al-Ibrahimi Street in the Egyptian capital and try to assess the situation.
     
The labyrinthine streets of Garden City appear to be rather quiet. There is surprisingly little tear gas in the air.
      I assure the demonstrator that runs in the other direction, offering to guide me elsewhere that I’m not lost.
     
I get a text message: “Be careful, situation still hot. Send message as soon as you get home.”
      It was sent by my worried friend Mohammed from Giza. He has noticed from my Facebook update that I have returned to Cairo after a three-week paternity leave in Finland.
      And there’s my Cairo home – on the edge of the small Sheikh Yusuf Square, across the street from the United States Embassy.
     
Kasr al-Aini street, which runs behind my building, and which is usually very busy, is pitch dark and silent. Access has been blocked by a barbed wire fence. Soldiers of the Egyptian Army are marching behind the fence, in front of the House of Parliament and the Shura Council, the upper house.
      I walk to the gate of the metal fence that surrounds my building. Two soldiers holding Kalashnikovs are standing in front of the gate. Both are familiar faces.
      “Hello Juka! Welcome”, says one of the soldiers.
     
I walk inside my home, turn on the television, and take a look at Twitter.
      At least ten people had been killed yesterday and today when soldiers emptied the demonstrators’ camp in front of the government building, the news agencies report.
      This all happened behind the wall - in my back yard.
     
When I went to Cairo in September, before my stint as correspondent began, to look for a place to live, I felt that it would be important for Tahrir Square to be within walking distance.
      By a stroke of luck, the estate agent offered me an apartment in Garden City, about 400 metres from the famous revolutionary square.
      “This apartment is in the core of events, but it is nevertheless the safest corner in the centre of Cairo”, the agent said, pointing through the living room window to the US Embassy.
     
The embassy is an uninviting large lump of concrete. Along with the streets that run adjacent to it, it is probably one of the best-guarded corners in central Cairo.
      “These streets were safe even during the big demonstrations of January and February”, the agent continued.
      And it is no wonder. Practically all streets surrounding the US Embassy are off limits to ordinary people, and the only way to get inside the cordoned-off area is to pass through military checkpoints. My apartment is located inside the zone.
     
I moved into my new home in early October. It is located on the bottom floor of a five-storey building about 100 years old. Most of the residents in the building are middle, or upper-class Egyptians, but the apartment that I rented is owned by a French consultant who lives in Cairo.
      There are two bedrooms with antique furnishings and an office with a separate door to the outside. I was enchanted by the brand-new bright-red kitchen, and especially the Erard-brand grand piano dating back to the 1890s, which stood in the corner.
      I got all of this at a reasonable price, because rents in Cairo have plunged since the uprising that began a year ago.
     
Things were quiet in my neighbourhood in the first weeks, with the exception of the killing of 24 Christian demonstrators at the television centre about a kilometre and a half away.
      However, one senses on the street that the situation is tense. The activists’ patience with the military council that rules Egypt is running out.
      Demonstrators gathered at Tahrir Square every Friday, demanding the release of arrested activists, the overturning of the state of emergency, and a specific date when the military council hands power back to the people.
     
In November, as parliamentary elections approached, the situation finally went out of control.
      On the morning of November 19th I was on my way to lunch, walking through Tahrir Square, when I saw the riot police emptying and destroying the demonstrators’ camp in front of the Mugamma office building.
      When I walked back along the same route half an hour later I saw seven men jumping on the roof of an empty police lorry parked on the square. The men, two of whom were actually in their early teens, were smashing the windscreen with sticks, and trying to persuade passers-by to join them.
     
I felt that they did not look like typical Tahrir activists. They seemed more like criminals and street children. Around them gathered hundreds of people who just looked on.
      I hurried back along Kasr al-Aini Street to get home. On the street about 100 riot police marched in the other direction.
      This led to a clash which sparked several weeks of unrest. The streets of Cairo filled with tear gas, demonstrators, and soldiers.
     
It is a four-minute walk from my home to Tahrir Square, but on the noisiest days I did not even need to leave the building to get an idea of the situation.
      When the situation near Tahriri heated up, more army forces and vehicles appeared on the al-Sahra and Kamal El-Deen Hussein streets which surrounded the US Embassy. There were also dark green lorries filled with riot police and military police, as well as sand-coloured land rovers, and men in suits roaming around the streets wearing earpieces.
      I understood that the Egyptian Army used the closed-off streets surrounding the US Embassy as a place to keep their forces.
     
When the activists called people to join the demonstrations on Twitter, all that I needed to do was to look out my living room window.
      I saw how the riot police crawled out of their lorries – something was clearly going on. Now the soldiers and police were putting on riot gear and lining up.
      A few uplifting slogans and the forces marched in clear formation toward Tahrir, clubs and metal tubes swinging on their shoulders.
     
A half-hour later the group jogged in a considerably less-organised formation from Tahrir back under my window. Some were limping, while others were bleeding from the forehead.
      Panting and sweating the soldiers took off their riot helmets and crawled back into the lorries to rest and to wait for new orders.
      I watched this process several times from the window of my home next to the Erard grand piano.
     
I can still remember the words of the real estate agent as he promoted my apartment on Sheikh Yussif Square: “This is a perfect apartment for a reporter.”
      He got that one right.
      My home in Cairo is in the eye of the storm. Inside the walls it was always safe, even if total war prevailed outside.
     
However, on the worst nights in late November so much tear gas was being fired in the surrounding streets that it was not possible to go outside without the Chinese-made gas mask that I bought at Tahrir for two euros.
      The gas came in through the windows and doors, causing the eyes and skin to itch, even when I was inside.
      At the same time there were rumours on Twitter that nerve gas was being used. I tried to concentrate and see if there might be any changes in my state of health.
     
And what about the sounds? At the end of November I woke up nearly every night to the shouts of thousands of people, gunfire, or the screeches of military vehicles behind my wall. In front of my building, on Kasr al-Aini Street soldiers shot several people and ran over at least one demonstrator with a vehicle.
      A conflicted relationship developed between the soldiers and me. They were killing demonstrators behind my wall, but on the other hand, they diligently protected my home.
      I tried to keep a low profile, as the military council had started to blame “foreign forces” for inciting unrest in Egypt. I knew that military police had arrested Western journalists. The journalists were suspected of spying.
     
One evening as I was returning home, a soldier at the checkpoint pointed his rifle at me. “Stop” he said. I stopped immediately.
      A broad smile appeared on the soldier’s face. “Welcome to Egypt”, he said and let me through.
      At times soldiers who I got to know let me go to places to which few others, journalists included, had access.
     
Right after the serious unrest on December 17th and 18th, I walked through a military roadblock to the closed Kasr al-Ain, where ten demonstrators had been killed the previous day.
      The ground-floor windows of the Shura Council had been broken and the yard in front of it was full of debris from the previous day’s riots. The Ministry of Transport next to it had burned all the way to the third floor, and faces of soldiers peeked out of the blackened windows.
      I looked from behind the backs of the riot police how the historically valuable Institut d’Egypte smouldered after an arson attack. Further away, behind a concrete wall I could hear the noise of the demonstrators on Tahrir Square.
     
Late December and early January were quite peaceful in my area. In spite of this I decided to leave my old home in the midst of the ongoing revolution and move to a more peaceful area.
      The reason was not because the anniversary of the uprising, January 25th, was approaching – a day when more street action might be expected.
      The reason was that a two-year-old scamp and his one-month-old sister were finally coming from Helsinki to their new home town Cairo.
     
I called my familiar estate agent who understood my concern: too much tear gas, too many soldiers, shooting, and shouting.
      A home in the midst of a revolution was a correspondent’s dream, but for children it might have given a somewhat excessively skewed view of the state of the world.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 15.1.2012


See also:
  Tuomioja in Cairo pays visit to Tahrir Square (22.11.2011)

JUKKA HUUSKO / Helsingin Sanomat
jukka.huusko@hs.fi