still brewing

We’re now just short of 6 A.M. in Cairo, and it’s still dark. There are two fire trucks parked in front of the Algerian Embassy now, but that’s apparently just for insurance: the trucks aren’t doing anything yet, and the drivers aren’t even inside them anymore. They must have come while I was in here typing the last few entries.

Weird chants are coming from the backside of my building, and by listening out the back window I can tell that the mob is now on the backstreets of Zamalek, not far from here. They’re just as loud and angry at 6 AM as they were 8 hours ago.

When I posted last week that I’d never seen anything like this, Graeme Wood reminded me that there were huge street protests against the Iraq War. True, but what I was thinking of was location. During my time in Egypt there have been any number of massive protests down in Tahrir Square in the city center, where the American University main campus used to be until last year.

Zamalek, however, has been immune until now. It’s a leafy residential neighborhood where protests generally wouldn’t occur anyway. But more importantly, it is one of the main embassy districts, and I’ve always been told that the police seal off Zamalek during times of unrest for precisely that reason (since we’re on an island in the Nile, in principle we can be sealed off from the rest of the city just by blocking 5 or 6 bridges).

But this is definitely the only time in my experience, and perhaps the only time in the history of the city, that Zamalek has been ground zero for unrest. There’s no other reason why it ever would be except for cases like this one, where anger is focused on one particular embassy.