He
told me to get off at the last kiosk on the highway that connects
East with West Cairo. After the driver dropped me off, there was no
one to be seen in the area. I walked down the concrete stairs by the
side of the road. The stairs led me into the pit of this neighborhood
named after a village that never was. There was Mahmoud, sitting in a
coffee shop only meters away. He told me he had stood by the road for
some time waiting for me but then had gotten cold and came down
below. We walked together to his home, but slowly, because Mahmoud
limped, and I wondered if he had ever made it up those makeshift
steps or if he had merely said so out of politeness.
By
the time we were finished with our interview I saw pain in his eyes.
Earlier in the evening he had told me that he took painkillers, the
effect of which lasted for two days, making it bearable for him to
walk and work. Mahmoud works as a day laborer, a construction worker.
Living meters away from the highway that leads past old Cairo and
into the vast frontiers of the constant construction of "New"
Cairo places him in the perfect location as a builder. But that is
where his stroke of luck ends. His son Ahmed disappeared one year ago
on the very day of my visit. During the course of the interview,
Mahmoud told me that Ahmed limped the same way that he does.
I
can only imagine the day Ahmed joined the battle against Central
Security Forces and army soldiers who killed him that day outside the
cabinet office on 17 December 2011. Ahmed had just returned to Cairo
after losing his job in Alexandria two days earlier, like so many
others. Egypt's economy, increasingly dependent on foreign pleasure
seekers, had taken a hard hit as the number of travelers dropped
greatly. The people who oiled the tourism machine stayed home
penniless. Ahmed went to the front lines near Tahrir Square in demand
of a future. I imagine that his lack of familiarity with the space
and the conditions of the battle lines put him at a disadvantage in
the face of his armed, trained attackers. Ahmed tried to escape the
unannounced onslaught, struggling with his cursed leg. The boy was
not fast enough, and was shot, captured, beaten, tortured, and
finally murdered. His captors threw his lifeless body into the Nile.
Ahmed carried no form of identification that day and was added to the
list of disappeared—those eaten by the revolution. But his parents
sought after him until—through the maze of paperwork, lies, and
legal dead ends—they found him. The clothes he was wearing that day
in a plastic bag allowed them to identify his bloated, charred body.
Ahmed
is one of the many martyrs who remain unnamed—Ahmed Mahmoud Mohamed
Bekheit. The opposition of such a frail person against a mighty state
apparatus is at the soul of this revolution—people against a system
that is meant to represent us, decide the best for us, provide for
our welfare, and yet does the exact opposite wherever possible.
Ahmed's
motives and desires like so many fighters remain unspoken—this one
will forever hold his silence. With all the honesty I can muster, I
write these feeble words, which he may have uttered but was never
given a chance to.
A
Paper that Buries a Murder
When Ahmed's bereaved parents finally
found their son's body they were shocked. Mahmoud went to the deputy
public prosecutor and lost all sense of control. “I cannot burry my
son like this,” he said. He had just seen Ahmed's body after
thirty-six days of searching. This was not the body of a person who
had drowned, as the officials at the morgue had told him. Mahmoud's
son was murdered. The bureaucrat told him to just burry his son
because for seventeen days he had been "tortured." He did
not imply that for the past seventeen days he had been tortured under
police custody, but rather used the Arabic expression evoking the
idea that his son's soul would remain tormented until receiving
religious burial. The pretext of religious ritual would pave the way
to clearing the members of the state apparatus of the crimes they had
committed. The bureaucrat told Mahmoud to put his son at ease by
burying his scorched and broken body and place his trust in the
document that would prove the cause of his son's death: the forensics
report. One year later that document has still not appeared and the
records of Ahmed's body arriving at the police station on 22 December
2011 have disappeared, much like Ahmed did for those three
weeks—criminally hidden from those who deserve to know.
Ahmed's
eleven-year-old brother Islam is the last member of his family to
have seen him alive. On the morning of his murder Ahmed had said he
was leaving to run an errand. He was well dressed, and told his
little brother he would go alone. Islam looked into the lens and
told the world, "no matter what, I will not rest until those who
did this to my brother and to all the other martyrs are brought to
justice. Until I am older, bear this in mind." This revolution
has shown a tendency to create new revolutionaries in the place of
every fallen martyr.
These
reflections on a video I filmed are only but an excerpt of the many
details that are lost among the startling images captured and the
breaking news written for immediate public consumption. These
thoughts are an attempt to raise a matter of no triviality and that
escapes the meta-narratives of revolution: the cost. Today the Muslim
Brothers are attempting to build their hegemony of control. As this
new political elite tries to erect its own empire of financial
gain—justified by the "economic crisis" in a period of
"instability”—this priceless cost that people pay is washed
over in the process.
It
is the risk of martyrdom that is at the heart of revolution. And it
is the risk of martyrdom that is entailed in opposing a system of
control. The names of Mina Danial, Sheikh Emad Effat and Jika may
carry this revolution's loudest echo, but there are thousands others,
recorded and unrecorded, who have borne this same cost.
It
is the most powerful gift one can give—in Ahmed's case, as so
often, without articulated intent. This is yet again, the cost of
fighting for a freedom from the suppression performed today by the
very men claiming to act in the name of the revolution, yet another
set of criminals killing in the name of the state.
