There’s an old saying that revolutions never go backwards. Certainly, Egypt will never be the same. The young people who brought down a 30-year-old dictatorship simply by insisting their voices be heard will be difficult to silence ever again.
But none of that means liberty is certain or democracy inevitable.
What it does mean, we think and we hope, is that there’s an opportunity for the demonstrations at Tahrir Square to be remembered in the way that the crumbling of the Berlin Wall is remembered.
First, it’s up to the Egyptian army, now the nation’s ruling force, to help move the country forward. It must repeal Egypt’s onerous emergency laws, which have been in place since the 1981 murder of Anwar Sadat. These laws allow for, among other niceties, indiscriminate arrest. They’ve allowed Hosni Mubarak’s secret police to intimidate a nation.
The army also must invite credible opposition groups to help form an interim government and allow civilians to control the move toward elections. The army is now apparently able to amend Egypt’s constitution to help ensure free elections, particularly by allowing opposition parties to compete fairly.
No one expects the going to be easy or smooth. But Egypt does have assets. It has more than 80 million people, a significant educated class and an economy that, according to the experts, could grow rapidly without the twin burdens of patronage and corruption.
What it doesn’t have are any of the foundations of democracy, including freedoms of speech or press. One of the more poignant moments Friday was when an anchor on the state-run television apologized for the lies the station had been forced to tell.
No one knows how this will turn out. University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami wrote in Politico that the Egyptian revolution was a blow to al-Qaeda, whose second-in- command, Ayman Zawahiri, is an Egyptian doctor. Al-Qaeda, Telhani wrote, has always said that militant Islam is the only way to bring down corrupt Arab dictators.
But the protesters in Tahrir Square showed another way. The flame began when a Tunisian fruit grower set himself afire. In Egypt, the fire burned continuously until Mubarak was finally forced to leave.
We live in a world that now moves so quickly, sometimes the hardest thing to do is take a moment to catch your breath. What has happened in Egypt is breathtaking.
President Obama, whose slow embrace of the protesters quickened in the past few days, noted the remarkable non-violence of the protest and how the protesters, in their triumph, evoked the teachings of Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Obama closed his speech Friday with these words: “The word ‘Tahrir’ means liberation. It is a word that speaks to that something in our souls . . . and forever more it will remind us of the Egyptian people, of what they did, of the things that they stood for and how they changed their country and in doing so changed the world.”
The world has changed. The hard work now, for Egyptians, is to keep the change moving for the better.
