1 year later, reflections on Arab Spring

The University asked them to leave. They wanted to stay. And their parents — oceans away — were, for the most part, in the dark.

Welcome to Cairo.

For most University students, the turbulence of the Arab Spring was experienced through television screens and Twitter feeds halfway around the world. But for four University students completing their Wilson School task force at the American University in Cairo, the revolution in Egypt dawned right outside their windows.

Beginning as a peaceful civil disobedience movement, the revolution would go on to rock the political foundations of the entire Middle East, toppling the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the country’s president since 1981. One year after the earliest protests in Tahrir Square, Oren Samet-Marram ’12, Tal Eisenzweig ’12, Kelly Roache ’12 and Michael Gibbs ’12 finally broke their silence and told their story.

“We knew there were going to be protests,” Samet-Marram said. He explained that following the fall of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali on Jan. 14, signs of social unrest in other Arab countries were already visible.

The group arrived in Cairo on Sunday, Jan. 23, staying in a youth hostel down the street from the famed Tahrir Square for their first night. The next day, they moved into an apartment in the nearby neighborhood of Doqi, located across the Nile River on its eastern bank.

The first protests did not begin until Tuesday. Yet the group said that they didn’t yet sense the sounds of protest.

“We didn’t really feel it at all in our neighborhood,” Samet-Marram said. “We just saw it on the news.”

They did sense, though, the sounds of silence.

“The day after the initial protests, it was dead quiet, not a single person,” Eisenzweig said. There was an eerie quietness following the harsh police crackdown on the initial protestors, she said. “Usually Cairo is a city that never sleeps ... You could sense the tension with the silence.”

Samet-Marram said that most of the students he spoke to at course registration seemed excited about the protests. Some of them even planned on joining in.

Police and military units forcibly cleared Tahrir Square on Wednesday night following the initial protests. The next day, the government shut down all Internet and cell phone service nationwide in an attempt to prevent the coordination of even more disorder.

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The Americans abroad were amid a revolution. And just like that, they became even more alone.

“We had one landline that we could receive calls coming in on, but we couldn’t call out because we couldn’t get phone cards,” Roache said.

As the group roamed the streets of Cairo, the sounds of protest began to echo. On Friday night, the group saw Egyptians purchasing six or seven vats of frying oil. They were stocking up for the weeks to come.

Eisenzweig said that Friday, Jan. 28 — the ‘Day of Rage’ — was a turning point.

“There was looting just near where we were living ... just across the street from us,” Eisenzweig said. She noted the abrupt change in the city’s atmosphere with the disintegration of the tightly controlled police state that was in control just a few days prior. “Before the revolution there was no looting; there was very little crime.”

Roache strikingly described the chaos in the streets.

“It was unbelievable; they were even taking the mannequins out of the stores. It was picked clean. Everyone who hadn’t had their store broken into was covering theirs up with newspaper.”

Samet-Marram noted that basic law and order broke down throughout the city almost immediately after the Day of Rage. Between Friday and Saturday, he said, security officials practically disappeared, although military units remained around Tahrir Square and government buildings for some time. Their landlord, like other people, organized a system of neighborhood watches.

The landlord was a former general who accompanied Mubarak on some of his visits to the United States. The group, Eisenzweig added, could sense that he was not a run-of-the mill officer.

“They were just sitting out there in a circle of chairs, and they all had guns or sticks,” Samet-Marram said. “They put up these roadblocks of tires and sandbags; they put up sort of corrugated iron across the streets.”

Gibbs explained that these sights were common throughout Cairo, based on what they saw from their final taxi ride out of the city.

On Friday, the four students ran into the protestors twice.

The protestors came close to their apartment, and the students followed the group but stuck close to the back.

“They literally walked along the street where our apartment was; it was a group of maybe a couple hundred — not that many,” Samet-Marram said. “They were all sort of converging, so that’s why we went to follow them ... We could see them from afar, but we didn’t want to go too close because that’s when we started hearing tear gas canisters being fired.”

Roache said they left when they started hearing shots.

The following day, the group stayed within their neighborhood in Doqi, choosing to visit a cafe and escape the violence. But even in the coffee shop, the group could still sense the revolution. The visit provided insight into the psychology of the Egyptian people.

“Suddenly, they were able to say things critical of the government,” Eisenzweig said. “It was really interesting talking to people who were unemployed, or didn’t have a high-end job, and getting their point of view.”

Roache noted one particularly interesting interaction with a local man who said he planned to go to Tahrir Square.

“Maybe you shouldn’t do that — it seems kind of dangerous,” the group told him.

“My life for Egypt,” he said repeatedly.

Despite the unrest, the quad wanted to stay in Cairo.

“We were downplaying to our parents the whole time,” Eisenzweig said. “Princeton said if it was bad we’ll take you out, and we’ll do something else with your semester, but we wanted to stay.”

But the events of Saturday changed the reality of their voyage to the Middle East.

The government declared a curfew that day in an effort to cut down on the looting that often occurred at night. But without police in many parts of the city, the curfew was largely ignored. On the same night, reports began to surface about a large prison break in southeastern Cairo, with hundreds of prisoners marching up the highway.

Roache said it was at this point they thought they might have to leave.

“It’s not just the revolution. It’s what happens as a result of the revolution,” she said. The landlord called them that night to tell them to lock their door and barricade it.

Tensions with foreigners rose, too. Roache explained how two friends of theirs, who were also living in Doqi, were held up at knifepoint and accused of being Israeli spies, as part of a larger effort by the government to paint foreigners as the main reason for the unrest.

Early Sunday morning, the group received a call from University officials urging them to evacuate immediately, though it was during curfew. If they left then, the students told the University, they didn’t know what would happen. The group finally settled on leaving around 8 a.m. on Sunday.

Leaving the apartment, Roache said, was the “diciest” part of their time in Cairo.

“You could just see everything that you had seen on the news — you could see the smoke, you could see the fires,” she said. “It was the first time you saw tanks in the streets, which was a little jarring,” she added.

They proceeded to drive through the streets of downtown Cairo on the way to the airport, carefully navigating the barricades still in place. While they were en route, the army stopped a bus and forced its riders off.

“Suddenly all of these young Egyptian men were flooding off of the bus and trying to get into cars on the highway,” Roache said. “People were trying to walk up to us and get in our taxi. We had to explain to the driver that this was not a good situation and he had to keep going.”

The group made it to the airport after a day, after which the U.S. government ordered the evacuation of all US citizens. The group flew back to the United States on Tuesday afternoon. They continued to study abroad at other Universities — Roache and Eisenzweig at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Gibbs at Bogazici University in Istanbul and Samet-Marram at the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Undergraduate College of Menton.

The students found the reactions of the Arab world to the revolution interesting and strange.

“When Mubarak fell, I was with my Israeli family in Tel-Aviv. And they had a very different reaction to the news,” Eisenzweig noted, as her family seemed far less comfortable with the outcome than she did.

Roache had a similar experience when she heard the news.

“Both of us were with people who were unhappy to hear that news ... which was pretty unfathomable to us,” she said. “They feared things like the fall of the peace treaty. It was a very different perspective than you had in Cairo.”

Gibbs said that the Egyptians were as uncertain about the outcome of the revolution as they were. One Libyan man the group met in the airport was dropping off his parents. The stranger predicted — astutely — that the protests could spread to the rest of the Arab world.

Not Libya, though, he said.

“We learned a lot about Egypt in those 10 days,” Gibbs said. “But there’s this Libyan who lived there his whole life and had no idea how it would turn out.”

Editor's Note: Due to reporting and editing errors, several facts were misstated in this article. The name of one of the students, Oren Samet-Marram, was misspelled. The date for the "Day of Rage" in Cairo was incorrect; it was Jan. 28. The incident regarding friends held at knifepoint occurred after the events described. Due to inaccurate information provided to the 'Prince,' the students lived in Cairo but were not within viewing distance from Tahrir Square. Due to inaccurate information provided to the 'Prince,' the students did not actually join in protests. In addition, due to incorrect information provided to the 'Prince,' it is unclear whether the landlord was a police or military general. Also due to incorrect information provided to the 'Prince,' the students were not certain whether they heard live ammunition or tear gas canisters being fired. Due to an editing error in the same article, members of a Cairo neighborhood watch were inadvertently called protestors. The 'Prince' regrets the errors.