Cairo activists defend revolutionary mural after whitewash by authorities

Associated Press

Cairo activists defend revolutionary mural as city tries to whitewash it

September 20, 2012

Sarah El Deeb

CAIRO—Under cover of darkness, a few municipal workers quietly began to paint over a landmark of Egypt’s revolution: the giant mural situated on a street that saw some of the most violent clashes between protesters and police over the past two years.

The mural, stretching three blocks along a wall off Cairo’s Tahrir Square, has been a sort of open-air museum of the history of the revolution and its goals — with “martyr” portraits of slain protesters, graffiti, jokes, freedom slogans.

Word of the whitewash quickly got out. A number of young revolutionaries showed up to defend the murals. In the dead of night, they began to film the workers as they painted under the guard of police, hoping to embarrass them. They talked with the painters about what the murals meant.

Arab Awakening: Egypt

The scene on Mohammed Mahmoud St. in the early hours Wednesday was a small but telling counterpoint to last week’s angry protests outside the U.S. Embassy, led by ultraconservative Islamists protesting an anti-Islam film. Those protests took place only a few blocks away, on another street off Tahrir.

Together, the scenes point to the political tug-of-war over the identity of the new Egypt, what it now stands for and what can be expressed.

The mix of largely secular activists who launched the revolt last year against longtime leader Hosni Mubarak say the “revolution” will continue until the country breaks with its authoritarian past and brings freedoms and economic justice.

The Islamists, who rode to power after Mubarak’s ouster, have their own vision for Egypt, which they say should adhere to an “Islamic identity” as they define it.

The government says it has launched a campaign to beautify Tahrir Square, the centre of anti-Mubarak protests. But activists see it as an attempt to blot out the calls for continued revolution and to assert its own view that a new and stable system is now in place under elected Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

“They are erasing history,” Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the father of a 19-year-old killed during the early days of anti-Mubarak protests, said as he stood at the mural street. “This is not my government. It doesn’t represent me.”

For some, repainting the wall just underlined the feeling that the Islamists have snatched the prizes of the revolution.

“This is not about the wall. It is about everything happening in Egypt,” said Nazly Hussein, one of the first to arrive at the scene to protest the paint job with a camera, live streaming the workers as they covered murals. “It is about territory they took away from us.”

The anti-film protests, she said, showed how under Morsi’s three-month-old rule progressives were still fighting for basic issues like freedom of expression. She pointed to government crackdowns on strikes and the recent sentencing of a Coptic Christian to six years in prison for insulting Morsi and the Prophet Muhammad.

“Our real battle is about freedom. Now we are fighting about the right to insult the president or not,” she said. “All those (martyrs painted) on the wall died for bread, freedom and social justice.”

After the intervention by activists, the municipal workers stopped the whitewashing at daybreak with only half the mural painted over. Graffiti artists moved in to start putting new images on the now white walls. By late Wednesday night, the municipal workers hadn’t returned to finish their job, amid the media uproar over the mural erasure.

The first drawing to go up was a portrait of a young man sticking his green tongue as a taunt. “Do it again! Erase, you cowardly regime,” was written beneath it.

Graffiti artist Ahmed Nadi painted a new caricature of Morsi, smiling smugly, with the words, “Happy now, Morsi?”

Ali Saleh, a 53-year old security guard at a nearby school, said the murals must stay as a reminder to authorities of the mistakes they committed.

“If we give up the graffiti, this would be the first nail in the coffin,” he said. “We are in for a worse dictatorship than Mubarak’s.”

In an apparent damage control gesture, Morsi’s Prime Minister Hesham Kandil said the whitewashing went against “intent to preserve the memory of the revolution,” and urged artists to turn Tahrir Square into a space that commemorates the revolution’s martyrs.

Many Egyptians just want stability after more than 20 months of turmoil. Some residents of the Mohammed Mahmoud area were happy to see the murals go, ending a reminder of the battles on their doorstep.

“This is ugly,” said Nour Nagati, referring to the graffiti of a man with his tongue out. “Paint me a flower, paint me a tree. This is a symbol of stability. But this provocation will only perpetuate provocation.”

Abdel-Karim Abu Bakr, a passerby, said the time for using the walls for protest was over.

“We had a revolution, we changed the regime. Let’s calm down ... we can’t have a revolution every day.”