Have you ever been asked where you were on a day when a significant historical event happened? Where, for example, were you when planes hit the World Trade Center in New York? Or when the first bombs were dropped in Iraq? What about when Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, resigned after 18 days of populace and peaceful protests?
I know where I was: glued to my laptop, like the previous eighteen nights, watching Aljazeera English’s online stream when it happened. It was sometime around 5 or 6 a.m. when the news of Mubarak’s resignation was delivered by the head of Egypt’s torture Gestapo: Omar Suleiman.
Because throughout the protests the international media had speculated if and when Mubarak would resign, I initially dismissed the headline reading “Mubarak steps down” as yet another speculation. It was the jubilation in Tahrir Square — appropriately referred to by a journalist as “the sounds of humanity” — that brought me to my senses and inevitable celebration.
I am certainly not an Egyptian, nor do I really know anyone from Egypt; but some friends and I stayed up for eighteen nights – littering each others’ Facebook profiles and e-mails – with live blog updates and articles in support of our Egyptian brothers and sisters.
In that instant, at that ungodly hour of the morning, we all felt Egyptian. Though we weren’t — sadly — in Tahrir Square, and though we had no Egyptian blood running in our veins, we all had one thing in common with Egyptians: an unspeakable hatred for Mubarak, for his regime, for his inhumane vice president and his security apparatus.
Although the moment was auspicious and I was already planning a weekend of celebration, I couldn’t shrug off the sick feeling of it not being over just yet; the announcement was delivered by vice president Omar Suleiman and not Hosni Mubarak, the coward that he is. To paraphrase a friend, it felt like the dictator was gone but not the dictatorship.
At around noon on Friday, it became somewhat clear that the Egyptian military had done what those of us who don’t pray were praying it would do: quietly but decisively kick Mubarak and his sidekick out of power.
The Supreme Council of the army had taken over the affairs of governance until the completion of the transition period to presidential elections.
A couple gallons of coffee later on Friday, something else became evident: Democracy can be created but not imposed. I realized how after 10 years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, billions of dollars spent and precious indigenous as well as American lives lost — we still have no democracy in those countries.
I wonder if what happened in Egypt — and what is now inevitable in other despotic regimes — will propel us to support democracy not in rhetoric but in practice.
I wonder if we will stop funding puppet dictators around the world because of a short-term foreign policy incentive. If we really are a beacon of democracy in the world, then we must do better than what we have with Egypt for the past 30 years.
Reach Sohail at sbayot@asu.edu
