Cairo Magazine - How much is enough?

Kermit the frog makes a regular appearance at Kifaya protests, where serious political grievances are often aired through humorous slogans and other antics.

Dana Smillie

The Egyptian Movement for Change—better known by its name and motto, “Kifaya” (Enough)—is becoming a well-known phenomenon. While few Egyptians have participated in a Kifaya demonstration, many are familiar with the group thanks to the coverage it has received from Arab satellite TV channels and the international media.

The movement calls for an end to the Mubarak presidency, to the National Democratic Party’s NDP) monopoly on power and to the emergency law. But the extent of its support base and potential for effecting change remain open to question.

Members of the NDP dismiss Kifaya as a “media phenomenon” or “photo-opportunity opposition.” Its supporters believe that it has the potential to change the political landscape by giving voice to the growing malaise among many Egyptians. Meanwhile, the small and diverse group has continued escalating its tactics—and pro-Mubarak forces have responded in kind.

At the end of April, Kifaya’s attempt to coordinate demonstrations across the country led to the detention, forcible removal or reported beating of hundreds of activists. During the 25 May referendum, Kifaya demonstrators were brutally beaten by police and gangs of young men led by NDP members. Some female

demonstrators were knocked to the ground, had items of their clothing ripped off and

were groped.

Hitting the streets

Kifaya members call themselves a “movement” (haraka), not a party, and say that they want to politicize the masses. A few days before the 25 May referendum, a group of Kifaya activists staged a demonstration of sorts in a low-income neighborhood in Maadi. One afternoon a team of young activists arrived on Hassanein Dessouqi Street (near the Hadayek Al Maadi metro stop). They quickly unfurled a number of anti-Mubarak banners and, waving their signal red and yellow “Kifaya” stickers, began engaging the crowd. While children and adolescents mingled excitedly, elders looked on disapprovingly from their shops and traffic came to a standstill in the narrow road, Kifaya members challenged residents to boycott the then-upcoming referendum. While a few discussions seemed to verge on becoming rows, other groups earnestly debated the political and economic situation in Egypt and the quality of Mubarak’s leadership.

Reactions were mixed. English teacher Ahmed Dessouqi, 30, looked on from the other side of the street and said the demonstration was “not good.”

“I think Mr. Hosni Mubarak is the best man nowadays,” he said. “They have the right [to demonstrate], they can do what they want, but I don’t agree. I don’t see why they object to Hosni Mubarak.” At the other end of the spectrum, Samy, 50, stood outside his shop clapping emphatically as the demonstrators walked by. “All people don’t want Mubarak,” he said. “Twenty-four years is enough! There must be change. The only ones who want him are employees in government companies.”

The Kifaya activists moved down several streets, standing and chanting on corners for a few minutes at a time while keeping a watchful eye out for police or security forces. They then rolled up their posters and quickly dispersed—but Cairo learned later that four of them were arrested that evening.

History

The Kifaya movement was founded in July 2004, when a group of veteran activists got together to look for new ways to express their opposition to the domestic and regional status quo. The ensuing statement—which over 5,000 have signed at Kifaya’s website, www.harakamasria.net—attacks the US occupation of Iraq, the “Zionist devastation” of the Palestinian people and the “designs, including the Broader Middle East Initiative, to recast the chart and fate of the Arab region and people.” It also criticizes “the repressive despotism that pervades all aspects of the Egyptian political system.”

Since then, the group has put up a website, printed huge numbers of its catchy red-on-yellow “Kifaya” stickers and, since January, has been holding increasingly frequent demonstrations, currently at least once a week. At these, protesters have regularly pushed the limits of political discourse, starting with direct verbal attacks on the president and security services.

Kifaya organizers and supporters come from a variety of different political backgrounds, a fact they are quick to point out. The great majority are veteran activists that came to political consciousness during the anti-Sadat student demonstrations of the late 1970s. According to Kifaya member and deputy director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies Muhammed Al Sayyed Said, Kifaya is “a continuation of a number of social movements, particularly student and labor movements in the early 1970s. It’s the resumption of a tradition.”

“We used to have a student movement after the 1967 defeat,” says Sawsan Mahmoud, an NGO worker and occasional Kifaya participant. “These are the people who founded [Kifaya], but then they started attracting new people.”

Kifaya has also drawn its cadres from the members of the lagan shaabia (popular committees) that were formed in the past few years around political issues. The precursors to the current Kifaya demonstrations were those held in response to the second Intifada and the US-led invasion of Iraq. At these demonstrations (notably in April 2001 after an Israeli raid on the West Bank town of Jenin and in March 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began), which were often violently repressed, regional issues mixed with frustration over Egyptian inaction or cooperation with the Bush administration. Activists that had focused their efforts on regional issues formed informal networks, held conferences and created links across ideological and social divides. In tandem with this process, the emergence of an Egyptian anti-globalization movement brought in a new generation of committed activists who looked to similar movements around the world for inspiration. As these movements developed, young, middle-class anti-globalization activists mingled with 1970s era communists, liberal businessmen and working-class trade unionists.

Usually hemmed in tightly by security, at the Shubra demonstration members of Kifaya were allowed to engage with bystanders.

Dana Smillie

A key problem dogging the anti-Israeli and anti-American protest movements of was a lack of clear leadership and coordinated logistics. To a certain extent, Kifaya remains a movement without a leader. It is not an opposition party—though it is considering nominating a presidential candidate—and is led by an eclectic group of experienced activists rather than a clear hierarchy.

On the group’s loosely-defined coordinating committee are George Ishaq (Christian education expert and one of the movement’s spokesmen), Amin Iskander (ex-Nasserist and a leader of the aspiring post-Nasserist Karama party), engineer Ahmad Bahaeddin Shaaban, Tagammu party member Abdel Ghafar Shubky, lawyer Issam Al Islambouli, Abou Ela Maadi (ex-Muslim Brother and head of aspiring Al Wasat party), Abdel Halim Qandil (editor of the Nasserist Al Arabi weekly) and many more who put ideological, political and sectarian differences aside for the sake of the movement.

Strategic problems

To some, Kifaya’s inclusiveness is a potential weakness.

“They don’t have a political action program,” says Muhammed Abdel Moneim Said, head of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and an NDP member. “Many of the serious issues in the country they are not discussing at all because they want to keep a kind of unity among different political forces … hence they don’t touch on anything more major than the word ‘change.’”

Muhammed Kamal, professor of Political Science at Cairo University and a member of the NDP’s Policies Secretariat, says Kifaya “is an elitist movement and its demands are also elitist in nature. It doesn’t have any economic or social program.”

But the group’s members say they don’t want to be a political party.

“We try to be something like a catalyst. We push other social groups to be more active,” says regional coordinator Emad Siyam. He says Kifaya has encouraged young people, students, professors, journalists and other social groups to pursue different forms of activism.

“I’m a businessman, not a politician,” says fellow coordinator Hany Enan. “Most of us have no ambitions of practicing politics as a career. We are practicing our own careers. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, consultants, businessmen … A lot us are just here because it’s a tough time for Egypt.”

Enan has joined other Kifaya members in paying for the group’s few expenses, which include the creation and maintenance of its website.

And the group’s purposeful non-affiliation with any political party may work to its advantage.

“I don’t like to join any political party or formation. I like to keep my independence,” says Hassan Nafaa, the head of the Political Science Department at Cairo University. But he signed on to Kifaya and says that “the movement has been very successful in attracting some of those who were never affiliated with political parties.”

But even within the movement, many are aware of its limitations. In late May, Hamdeen Sabahi, another Karama leader who is also an independent MP and Kifaya member, was speaking to an audience of young people at the Center for Socialist Studies. Sitting in one of the center’s sparsely-furnished rooms—fans droning overhead and the traffic of Midan Giza roaring outside—Sabahi expounded on Kifaya’s demands and its flexible, non-hierarchical structure. But even though he was arguably preaching to converts, questions from the audience of about 30 people were tough. Kifaya needs more structure, said one young man; right now it is too many different “small fronts.” And isn’t motivating journalists, doctors and professors still “working with the elites?” Another person in the audience asked how Kifaya can reach people who aren’t members of political parties.

A Kifaya activist explains the group's position in advance of the 25 May referendum.

Dana Smillie

After the meeting, a half-dozen attendees split up stacks of leaflets to distribute the following day, calling on Egyptians to boycott the then-upcoming referendum on the amendment to Article 76 of the constitution. But Muhammed, 22, a young Kifaya member, told Cairo that all of Kifaya’s efforts are “useless. Mubarak is so tough.”

Muhammed graduated from the Faculty of Tourism about a year ago. After graduation, he says, “I didn’t find work. I realized my education was really not that good. I felt bad about what was happening around me.” He learned of Kifaya through the Internet. At the first demonstration he attended, he recounts, “It felt so good saying ‘yasqut, yasqut Hosni Mubarak’ [down, down, Hosni Mubarak]. After that I asked about other demonstrations.” Going to Kifaya demonstrations, he says, “is the only way I have to express my feelings.” But he is discouraged by what he sees as the political apathy of those his age. “I talk, I talk, I keep talking,” he says. “I say: this is your duty, this is your country. They say: nothing will help, this is useless, we are nothing … People don’t want to participate. The problem is not Mubarak, it’s the people.”

Others are more optimistic, arguing that the Mubarak regime has purposely depoliticized the Egyptian public over 24 years of rule. Alfred, 27, is a founding member of Kifaya. “Kifaya proves there is hope to change the political regime in Egypt,” he says. “A few years ago people would never have dreamt of having other candidates for president.”

In the long run

Meanwhile, the group is trying to figure out how to expand beyond the politicized urban elite. Siyam says they want to send a message that “we are not only a movement of intellectuals in Cairo.” The group has organized two national demonstrations, with protesters coordinating across 13 to 20 cities, from Aswan in the south to Marsa Matrouh in the north. According to Siyam, “the initiative comes from the governorates. We didn’t go to Alex or Ismailiya and ask them to do something.”

Mark Marai, an engineer from Monofeya who attended a rally in Cairo in April, says, “I was searching for Kifaya for a long time— three months—before I found their website.” He had heard of them through the media. Marai wants to organize a meeting or debate in his house in Monofeya soon, although, he says, “When I went to my village, people from the NDP advised me: ‘Mark, stay away, it’s not good for you, you’ll get in trouble, you’re not going to change anything in this country.’” Marai says that his house was set on fire a few weeks later—he suspects that local NDP supporters wanted to teach him a lesson.

It is attitudes like these, say Kifaya members, that must be changed.

“You know, we are suffering from a culture of fear,” says George Ishaq, “and are trying to break this culture. And I think we succeeded a little bit; the people are now more encouraged, more brave and they come to demonstrations without any fear.”

Yet so far, only a few hundred demonstrators regularly push their way past the police trucks and rows of central security guards. Kamal says Kifaya is “a small group of people” with no “big weight in the street.”

The truth is that it remains hard to gauge the appeal of Kifaya’s message when freedoms of assembly and expression are so heavily curtailed by emergency law. Scores of Kifaya members—inside and outside of Cairo—were detained and harassed during recent demonstrations. Most notably, on the occasion of the 25 May referendum, NDP supporters beat Kifaya activists while security forces looked on. Kifaya demonstrations are almost always surrounded by cordons of intimidating Central Security troops, and Kifaya members say that when they put up stickers in the subway or in private establishments, security forces quickly rip them down.

“Nobody can tell exactly how strongly-rooted the movement is in society,” says Nafaa, “given the state of emergency and the restrictions you can see everywhere … Because you don’t really have a democratic system, you cannot weigh the political weight and impact of the movement.”

The recent violence against demonstrators means that Kifaya may be facing a new policy of “zero tolerance” on the part of the government. Even before the referendum, Nafaa warned of a “growing counter-attack” from the authorities. This was evident in the increasing number of attacks by the state-owned media and NDP supporters, as well as statements by the Interior Minister that he won’t tolerate demonstrators’ “curses” and “profanity” at “state leaders.” The state media establishment’s disarray was captured in the words of Ragab Al Banna, editor of Oktobar magazine, who asked “the sages of the nation to take the initiative to put things back in their place. What is happening proves that there exists a group of people intent on causing chaos, disturbances, heightened tensions and worry in the country. These people call on the cameras of Arab and foreign satellite channels to present them provocative content that serves their political ends.”

What next?

Kifaya members recognize, somewhat grudgingly, that their existence is due partly to the pressure that the Bush administration has put on Egypt to reform—even if many are skeptical of America’s true intentions and very critical of policies elsewhere in the region, notably in Iraq and Palestine. Kifaya has thus far refused to meet with American envoys such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who met with other opposition figures during her recent visit to Cairo.

The question that looms over Kifaya and its brand of single-issue activism asks what will happen once its aims have been achieved, or are no longer relevant. The amendment to Article 76 of the constitution made it practically impossible for the movement to field an independent candidate, making it likely that it will once again urge voters to boycott the elections, as it did the referendum. And if, as seems likely, President Mubarak is re-elected and the US endorses those elections as democratic, what momentum and protection will Kifaya have left?

“You know, the election of the president

is not the end of the world,” says George Ishaq. According to Mohamed Sayyed Said, Kifaya has the potential to continue as a “fertilizing agent” in the political

sphere. Said says the movement is not just about demonstrations—it needs to focus on “more deepening and broadening than displaying.” He says its “future hinges on how much it can attract a broader audience and establish a deeper and more profound

vision for the future of the country.” But according to Said, “anxiety about the future of our country and future of our region is the main reason behind the rise of Kifaya.” As long as that anxiety continues, says Said, there will be a role for Kifaya or for “different or parallel movements that take up the same agenda.”