Egypt notebook

Last week I was in Cairo and Alexandria. This is my diary Sunday January 30 We arrive at Ben Gurion airport at 9am after a panicky and much-delayed drive involving torrential rain and a broken-down car. The departures board says our flight to Cairo is cancelled. The woman at the ticket office is unsympathetic; she thinks we are insane to be trying to get to Cairo. The only other option is an El Al flight at 8pm. We’re told this one will depart as every seat on the return leg tonight is booked by Israelis desperate to get out of Egypt. We settle down for an 11-hour wait. At the boarding gate, it’s clear that there are only around a dozen people on the outward leg to Cairo – all journalists bar one, an EU official going to assess the situation in Cairo for staff based there. We land around 10.30pm and are told by a cheery airport official that there will be no problem getting into the city centre tonight, everything is “normal”. A cruel joke? The curfew means no taxis will take us downtown or indeed anywhere. We persuade a shuttle bus driver to drop us at an airport hotel. In the lobby, there are chaotic scenes: luggage piled up; people either milling about aimlessly or sleeping on every available chair and floor space. We decide to try the next-door hotel. The scene here is similar but not quite as bad; there are no rooms available, but the doorman says he might be able to find rooms at another hotel in half an hour. We go to the bar. An hour later, we cut our losses and find a corner of the lobby. But before we can lay down on the carpet to try to sleep, a group of stranded Brits want to tell us every detail of their abortive holiday. It is an extraordinary tale, but I am swaying on my feet, desperate to shut my eyes. Monday January 31 We wake up early, having slept fitfully. The curfew lifts at 8am, no chance of any transport until then. Eventually we get one taxi back to the airport terminal, then another into the centre of Cairo. The road is punctuated by army tanks and armoured personnel carriers. I wonder why the vehicles are painted yellow instead of the standard green until I try to find a more accurate description of the colour. Sand yellow. Ah yes, that’s why. There is almost no traffic on the roads: the journey from the airport takes around 40 minutes, in contrast to a more standard two hours according to one of my fellow passengers. Smog lies over the city. It is my first visit to Cairo. I check into the Marriott although the rest of the Guardian team are in another hotel, closer to Tahrir Square. I take a cab over there – a stupid mistake as what is a 15 minute walk becomes a 45 minute car ride as the driver takes a circuitous route to avoid roadblocks and vigilantes. Peter Beaumont and Jack Shenker are there, on the 19th floor in a room that looks a bit like a war zone itself. They give me a debrief on the latest situation and some useful phone numbers; then they are off to report stories. I head to Tahrir Square. It’s an amazing spectacle – thousands of people gathering with home-made signs and one message: Mubarak must go. The protesters are good-humoured and relaxed; everyone is keen to speak to a western reporter. I feel fine about wandering around on my own, tweeting, doing phone interviews with Matt Weaver, our live blogger in London, and filling my notebook. People are eloquent about the reasons for their uprising. Many speak of economic hardship, lack of democracy, the desire for freedom. One of the most memorable comments in a day, a week, of memorable conversations comes from a guy who tells me he has come “to fight the fear inside me”. The curfew starts at 3pm but no one takes any notice – in fact more and more people are coming into the square. There is no military or police presence in the square itself, and the soldiers a block back are friendly. Eventually I head back to file a piece. There is no internet of course, so the choice is dictating my copy down the phone or faxing it over to the office. I choose the former. This is what it was like before the internet. It’s not just getting the copy to London; I can’t find anything out. “Now I’m here, you know a million times more than me what’s happening,” I joke to Dave Munk, deputy foreign editor. Except I’m not joking. Tuesday February 1 I decide to leave for Alexandria, Egypt’s second biggest city, and the scene of some of the worst violence the previous Friday. I find a driver willing to take me – it’s not clear whether the roads are open, although I am in touch with Channel 4′s Lindsey Hilsum who made the journey the previous day without hitch. I call the hotel where Lindsey and other journalists are staying. “Are you a reporter?” the guy on reception asks. When I say yes, he refuses me a room, saying there has been trouble at the hotel over journalists staying there. I make a reservation elsewhere. The three-hour trip is uneventful, though there are army checkpoints and roadblocks on the way into Alex. I check into my eerily locked and deserted hotel and head out immediately, despite the hotel security guys trying to stop me. Today is the “million man march” day and I’m not going to watch from my hotel balcony. The area around the Ibrahim mosque fills up quickly. It’s a carnival atmosphere, people are cheerful and happy to talk – this is easy reporting. There are incredible sights and sounds: people praying on the pavement; a man in army fatigues being carried shoulder-high through the cheering crowd; tens of thousands of people singing the national anthem. Then the crowd moves off, and I go with it. No one seems to know the destination. All the side streets are guarded by citizen-vigilantes bearing sticks, iron bars and even knives. There was a lot of looting and violence last week. Eventually I peel off, needing to go back to the hotel to write a story. It’s about 5pm and getting dark, and I realise the only way back is to walk. Despite – or because of – the citizen-vigilantes, it’s not frightening; at least, not until I realise I’m lost in a city under curfew. I try to flag down the occasional passing taxi but they are all completely full. At the next citizen-checkpoint, I ask for directions. It’s not safe for you to be on the streets, they say, we will find someone to take to your hotel. They are stopping all cars anyway to check the occupants. When they find one with a spare seat, they tell the driver to take me. Later someone asked me if it had been wise to get into a car with an unknown person in a city on the brink of revolution. I didn’t really have much choice. Wednesday February 2 I need to change hotels; I want to be with other journalists. I go to the hotel I tried to get into 24 hours previously and they give me a room, but plead with me to be discreet and not take pictures or use recording equipment in or near the hotel. Time for the streets again. I go the mosque, and immediately it feels different. There were reports overnight of violence in Alex; 12 people have been injured in clashes I’m told. Today there is a smaller number of anti-regime protesters, but there is a fightback by Mubarak supporters. Furious arguments, complete with finger-jabbing and shoving, break out everywhere; the mood is ugly. Anti-regime protesters repeatedly tell me that the pro-Mubarak people are paid agents of the state. Then people begin to question me – who am I? Where am I from? What news organisation do I represent? Every time I try to interview someone, an angry crowd forms around me. Ramy, a tall and friendly student, appoints himself my protector but nevertheless I feel the need to move out of the thick crowd. This is not like the previous days; I begin to feel uncomfortable about being alone. Confrontations between supporters and opponents of the regime continue through the day; and although the threat of violence is palpable, it never seems to be quite realised. It’s only later, back at the hotel, that I learn the full extent of the street battles and bloodshed in Cairo. The internet comes back to life later in the evening. I want to kiss my laptop screen. Thursday February 4 I’m keen to try to get back to Cairo – that’s where the main action is and I’d rather be with the Guardian team there. But I have no idea whether the roads are open, and my editors want me to stay; it’s good to have a perspective from outside the capital, they say, and we have enough people in Cairo. I hook up with a local fixer and we head off to speak to people for a piece my editors have asked for on the mood among students, traditionally the forefront of any uprising. All the universities in Alex have been closed – locked and guarded – for more than a week, so we go first to coffee shops in quiet back streets. It’s a mixed picture; away from the protests, most of the students I speak to are worried and frightened and to varying degrees feel it’s time to scale back or halt the protests. All say their economic prospects are dim and this is the reason for the protests. But in the square in front of the mosque, students are adamant they must keep going until Mubarak is toppled. It’s even harder today to speak to anyone without being surrounded by angry people. They are now saying journalists are Israeli spies, and that my fixer is also a Zionist. I am shoved in the shoulder by a man yelling in my face. My fixer tells me the Egyptian state tv has told viewers to beware of Israeli spies masquerading as western journalists. I become acutely conscious that I have an Israeli work permit in my passport, and business cards identifying me as the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent. This is not good; we retreat to the hotel. There we meet up with the Channel 4 team again, who have just had a very threatening situation in a residential street. They feel the hotel is now a target – it has been mobbed by protesters several times, looking for western journalists. Two NPR reporters were surrounded on the street by an angry crowd who then followed them back to the hotel. The security guys are getting very, very twitchy. The Channel 4 team are decamping to an apartment which they are using as their bureau. They invite me to go with them, and I gratefully accept. But the apartment’s owner vetoes this plan; he knows his property could also become a target. Reports filter through from Cairo of journalists being intimidated, detained and beaten up. I call my editors for advice; they feel it’s time to get out and book me on a flight from Alex to Amman the following day. Friday February 4 The “Day of Departure” turns out to be mine, not Mubarak’s. I meet two Danish tv guys in the hotel lobby. They arrived in Alex the previous evening. Coming into the city, their car was surrounded by 60-70 people brandishing knives and sticks and trying to drag them out of the car. They got away, but are very shaken up and have also decided to leave. We go to the airport together. My trip home – Alex to Amman, then Amman to Tel Aviv – takes 10 hours despite being in the air for only around 120 minutes. I feel very ambivalent about leaving. It had become almost impossible to do any proper reporting and in any case the focus, rightly, was on Cairo. But I now have a huge attachment to the story, and I keep thinking about the extraordinary people I met and the amazing things I saw, both in Cairo and Alexandria. It’s hard to know how this is going to pan out, but it’s impossible to be indifferent. • Comments on this article are set to remain open for 12 hours from the time of publication but may be closed overnight Egypt Harriet Sherwood guardian.co.uk

Posted by on February 6, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry