Free Once Upon a Revolution by Thanassis Cambanis Page A

borrowed from his mother’s days as an active communist, Zyad brought together the full array of activists, who had never before worked together in a coordinated fashion.
    Basem and a few others represented ElBaradei’s supporters. Moaz and two others came from the Brotherhood. There were independent leftists, Islamists, and labor activists. They removed their cell phone batteries and arrived at Zyad’s mother’s apartment one by one so as not to attract police attention. There was much to plan and little time to socialize.Basem had met very few Muslim Brothers, and he was struck by Moaz’s singularity of focus. Moaz at first mistook Basem for a foreigner, maybe an Algerian, because of his wan complexion and light eyes, and noticed that he was much older than the other activists. He found Basem temperate and professional, and effective at keeping his colleagues on task. The activists labored to keep their expectations low, but they wanted the January 25 protest to be big. At their most unrealistic, they hoped that they could force the resignation of the hated interior minister, responsible for so much incompetence and so many deaths over his thirteen years in power. Their first challenge was summoning a crowd large enough to combat the riot police, who were well versed at dispersing gatherings before they reached a critical mass. The question was whether there were enough angry Egyptians to confront the regime in a way that would shock Mubarak and his operators.
    They hit on a simple plan. They would advertise twenty protest locations all over the city, at mosques and popular meeting places. Police would gather at those spots, which would serve as decoys. Meanwhile, Basem and Moaz’s cell, which included dozens of the most seasoned activists and street demonstrators, the most charismatic chant leaders, and the toughest fighters, would meet at an unannounced and most unlikely location: El Hayiss Pastries, an industrial shop in a fringe working-class neighborhood, where the streets were too narrow for police trucks and water cannons, and where no demonstration had ever taken place previously. The ploy would work only if the denizens of the neighborhood joined the call to protest. If they did, then the organizers could muster a thousand people by the time they reached the main boulevard and drew the attention of the Central Security Forces. If the residents of Bulaq Dakrour ignored the chants of Basem, Moaz, and their friends, then January 25’s Day of Rage would be just one more in a long line of protests that fizzled.

4.

THE REPUBLIC OF TAHRIR
    The revolutionaries labored under twin fears as they converged on El Hayiss Pastries on the morning of January 25, 2011. The first was simply that they would fail, that the uprising they had announced with such fanfare would amount to nothing, and Egyptians would prove as docile as the regime said they were. The second was more vague and complex. They worried that if the public’s anger were aroused, no one would be able to harness it for constructive ends. The fourteen activists who had planned the secret march out of Bulaq Dakrour represented some but not all of the activists laboring in Egypt. Basem had come to politics only recently, but others had been thinking about how to unseat Mubarak’s regime for a decade or more. They included Islamists, labor activists, communists, socialists, and liberals. They weren’t sure they could raise a revolution, but they were planning ahead just in case they succeeded.
    This small group, almost alone among Egyptians, didn’t consider politics a dirty word; they had formed a coalition with a goal of intimidating the regime and perhaps forcing the resignation of its top police official. They hoped they might prompt as many as ten thousand people to march to the city center, enough perhaps to demand Hosni Mubarak’s attention. They had studied the politics of their own country and, even more