When I met Awad Mahmoud el-Abedy, a 36-year-old tour guide, on Feb. 4, he was manning a pile of stones at the southern entrance to Tahrir Square and had the wild-eyed disheveled look of a freedom fighter. “I am here to die,” he said, having spent several sleepless nights in defense of the massive traffic circle in downtown Cairo that had become the epicenter of Egypt’s revolution. At the time, el-Abedy was joined by tens of thousands of men and women with a similar defiant passion and one unifying goal. “The goal is for Mubarak to step down,” he said of Egypt’s then President Hosni Mubarak. “After Mubarak steps down, I want to follow him and kill him in the square.”
How times change. Two months later, Mubarak has stepped down. The constitution has been amended via popular referendum. And Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, headed by Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, is in temporary control of the country. Mubarak has yet to be executed, or even tried. But el-Abedy is one of many early protesters who admit that fresh circumstances call for fresh perspectives. Says he: “We wanted everything quickly — for Mubarak to be killed here in Tahrir and for the system to go away with the wind. It takes time. We have to understand that.” The economy has stalled, and el-Abedy’s tourists have disappeared. “We need to start the active, normal life again,” he says.
And yet, Tahrir Square is once again closed to traffic — the roads leading into it are blocked by fresh piles of stones and heavy coils of concertina wire. Once more, for a sustained number of days, it has become a space of defiance, after the Egyptian military used violent force to crack down on a Friday protest that had spilled into the wee hours of Saturday morning. The protesters had been condemning the military’s detention and abuse of protesters and calling for continued pressure on the military to follow through with the prosecution of Mubarak-era officials. Two protesters were killed by gunshots, and scores of others were wounded in the clashes.
But, in the days following the violence, even as visitors to the square survey the burnt wreckage of a bus and a truck, there has been anything but consensus as to what has happened to the so-called Jan. 25 Revolution. “Down, down with Tantawi,” shout the scattered pockets of protesters who remain, in reference to the head of Egypt’s military leadership. “The people and the army are of one hand,” a few others scream back in opposition. The sidewalks and broken pavement are the scene of vigorous debate. Next to KFC, artists have painted an illustration of fire and bloodshed on a tall stretch of plywood. It depicts soldiers shooting civilians, protesters carrying their wounded away. But as spectators gather to view the artwork, debates ensue whether the scene represents a generalization about the armed forces or an accurate depiction of a few bad men. “The armed forces have done good things and bad things,” says Emad Mohamed Sharqawi, a mechanic, in defense of the illustration. “They’re just showing what happened here. We’re talking about a few people.”
See TIME’s exclusive photos “Uprising in Cairo.”
