Not Yet Satisfied, Protesters Return to Tahrir Square

@nytimesThe New York Times

Not Yet Satisfied, Protesters Return to Tahrir Square

CAIRO — Past a battered Fiat displaying T-shirts on its hood that read “I am free,” and a little way from a vendor hawking roasted sweet potatoes wrapped in membership applications for the once-ruling National Democratic Party, a sign hangs from a tent in Tahrir Square that says something about the pride, regret and hope ofEgypt’s revolution.

“Our mistake,” it declares, “is that we left the square.”

Eighteen days of protests here reached a climax Feb. 11, a moment celebrated across the Arab world, when the crumbling government of President Hosni Mubarak finally gave way. Now, in a summer of discontent, thousands of protesters have returned to the square, and after midnight on Tuesday they offered a rebuttal to the idea that a revolution is a moment.

Egypt is a turbulent place these days, as is the Arab world it once led. Defiant, festive and messy scenes unfold at night in a square that is at once a place and an idea. Revolutions are about expectations, and everywhere in Egypt, it seems, expectations— about who should rule, how they should rule and who should decide the way they rule — have not been met.

“Sit-in! Sit-in!” young men shouted. “A sit-in until the regime is put on trial.”

“We have a feeling the regime is still there, somehow,” said Tarek Geddawy, a 25-year-old musician, who returned to the square Friday and has stayed since then, a little sleeplessly. “They sacrificed the icons of the regime, but the cornerstone is still there.”

From a cluster of tents behind him, a song by an Egyptian icon of another age, Abdel-Halim Hafez, played from a loudspeaker, seeming to echo his words.

“If the world falls asleep, I will keep my guard up,” the song goes. “My weapon in my hand, day and night awake, telling revolutionaries that our enemy can’t be trusted.”

Even in its reincarnation, Tahrir Square has kept the ebullience of months past. NourRamadan painted Egyptian flags on tired faces, charging a dollar or so. Musicians like Cairo Kee took the stage, giving way after short sets at 1 a.m. to impromptu poetry, oud recitals, children’s a cappella and Arabic rap that denounced American and Israeli policies in the same riff with calls for speedier trials of Mr. Mubarak and his men.

But a unity of purpose has given way to a multiplicity of demands, mirroring the divides that beset Egypt’s political life these days. Debates rage over the timing of elections, the power of Islamists, the weakness of civilian rulers, and the lack of accountability of their military counterparts, who suggested on Tuesday, in a seeming concession to protesters, that they would help protect civil liberties in the drafting of a new constitution.

The iconic slogan — “People want to topple the regime” — has given rise to endless corollaries, even among the largely secular crowd here. In any gaggle of youths, “the regime” was replaced with Prime Minister Essam Sharaf; the military council; and the corruption that seems a synonym for all the decades of misrule.

In the revolutionary fervor of February, Tahrir Square was a liberated enclave in an authoritarian country, an imagined community of sorts. Now it is Egypt itself, the distilled scene of all the fights and struggles, debates and fears that will decide its future.

“The revolution has informed people of the meaning of politics,” said Abdel-Aziz Moussa, a 25-year-old dentist. “We all know when we’re being played now.”

In that, he captured a microcosm of the square today that stands as perhaps the revolution’s most remarkable legacy. For so long, Arab leaders endured despite their relentless repression, colossal mismanagement or subservience to the West, because they managed to depoliticize their populations, often by force. But today, whether it is the hotel manager from an oasis in the Western Desert or the student from the southern village of Qena, everyone in the square seemed to talk politics, with skepticism and critique.

“We changed, and they didn’t,” Ayman Abu Zeid, a 25-year-old doctor, said of the old regime. He slept under the treads of tanks parked in Tahrir Square in February, blocking their way in case they tried to assault the demonstrations, and now he is in the square again. “Nobody is going to go back home,” he added. “No one.”

As a phrase, “the Arab spring” may never have captured what has unfolded this year. Libya is a civil war, Syria depressingly bloody. Bahrain was manipulated into a sectarian formula, and Yemen wrestled with the remarkable obstinance of its leader. But it does suggest what the events meant for politics in nearly all those places, rejuvenating societies.