The extraordinary scenes in Cairo today should not blind us to the fact that Hosni Mubarak’s apparent departure is not the beginning of the end but merely the end of the beginning. The army may have assured the protestors – whose gallantry, courage and peaceful presence on the streets of Egypt’s cities has been as startling as it has been wondrous – that their demands will be met but those demands cannot be satisfied just by Hosni Mubarak’s departure. It’s not just personal, you might say, it’s business too. And that business is real and verifiable reform.
Like Brother Korski I remain optimistic that momentum now lies with the reform movement. Omar Suleiman is no kind of acceptable replacement. Nor, in anything other than the short-term, is the army. A military guarantee of stability while new arrangements and the timing of free and multi-party elections are worked out is one thing (and possibly a necessary thing too); continued martial rule quite another.
These protests have been remarkable. The mixture of legitimate democratic demands and economic necessity has proved more powerful than even the small cadre of middle-east optimists can ever have imagined. Satisfying both of these complaints is Egypt’s next challenge. There must, one imagines, be every chance that large parts of Egyptian society – the silent majority, perhaps – crave a return to some semblance of normality. Albeit a better normalcy than has been on offer in recent years. Law, order and stability may be more pressing than liberty. More reassuring for some, too.
Nevertheless, the democracy genie has escaped its bottle and it will be hard, one hopes, for it to be captured and incarcerated again. The army is hardly a guarantor of progress on these fronts but it’s plainly a more attractive, provided this is temporary, option than the miserable status quo.
Yes, it will take time to build the institutions needed to buttress real liberalisation but Egypt, it should not be forgotten, already has nascent opposition groups and a press that, while hardly free, is not completely chained either. This is more than just a start. So too, one hopes, is the energy of the crowds whose own expectations have been raised these past 17 days. Their demands have increased in proportion to the growing sense of what might, with luck and perseverance, be possible. Disaster remains a possibility; success seems much more likely than it did a fortnight ago.
Here the international community – and this is more Dan’s area than mine – could do much to support and foster the mechanisms that grease a free society. This will require tact and generosity in equal measure. There is much work to do but this has been quite a beginning.
Meanwhile, who would have thought that a 26-year old fruit seller in Tunisia would be the Man of the Year? Mohamed Bouazizi’s legacy is not written yet but when it is it should, with luck, prove quite a tale. Heady, delicate, risky days indeed.
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