A few days after the revolutionary climax of the 2011 anti-regime protests in Cairo, calling for the resignation of then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the mood had changed.
Pro-government crooks were released into the crowd. They began targeting protesters, journalists who published the events and Westerners. Some of them had entered our hotel.
We were told to pack our things, stuff in cars, and drive from the Hilton, which overlooks Tahrir Square, to a relatively safer hotel a few miles away.
I shared a car with cameraman Joe Duran, who was in the passenger seat, and CNN anchored Anderson Cooper in the back seat.
On the bridge of October 6, a crowd forced our taxi to stop and surrounded us. They smashed the windows. They threw stones in the car. The driver, surrounded by the violent assailants, seemed to be freezing.
I remember saying in Arabic, “I’ll give you $ 500 for the windows if you go ahead.” I picked that figure out of nowhere. I still don’t know why that number in particular came to mind. When he drove away I thought we were safe.
We drove into the entrance of the Marriott in our broken-down car. Dazed, we entered the lobby and checked in at the reception.
Shortly afterward, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof told me that some journalists were changing the names they checked in with so that criminals who entered the hotel demanding guest lists wouldn’t know which rooms the foreign press was in.
My name is Arabic anyway, I thought, so I’ll be fine. “Is there CNN anywhere on your form?” I remember Kristof asking me. I wasn’t sure, but I decided to risk it. It makes no sense to linger at the reception for too long.
That night, we aired CNN’s special coverage from the floor of a hotel room. I remember thinking it looked like a hostage video. We would have many more nights like this, including a particularly exciting night barricaded in the CNN Cairo office, a sofa slamming the door.
I anchored hours of live coverage with our then bureau chief, legendary Ben Wedeman and Cooper. We huddled on boxes of camera equipment, lit with as dim light on our faces as possible, since the offices had to appear empty from the outside.
Hopes for democracy
The government’s backlash against the insurrection lasted several days.
The regime and its supporters tried to bring down the popular movement, but the military did not choose Mubarak. As had been the case in Egypt for decades, it was ultimately the generals who held power. When they dropped Mubarak, we all knew he wouldn’t last long.
On February 11, 2011, 17 days after the protests began, it was over: Hosni Mubarak resigned. This would mark the beginning of a new era; the hope was that decades of nepotism, corruption, police brutality and oppression would give way to something resembling democracy.
A few years later, I reported on the 2013 Egyptian presidential election, which led to the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi.
Ultimately, however, a revived army would crush the Islamists in 2013 and bring the military back to power. They had always been around and tolerated what turned out to be just a brief experiment in democracy.
Lost – even crushed – in this tragic story are the original protesters, who dreamed of a democracy that would represent them.
Optimism crushed
In the first few weeks of the uprising, journalists like us shared in their optimism: could this really be the moment when the Arab world would, slowly and painfully, evolve into a system that serves its own people, rather than the unelected autocrats who had exhausted their countries for decades to dry?
Ten years ago we let ourselves believe.
Today, many of those on the front lines of the protests have been exiled, imprisoned, or worse.
Elsewhere in the region, there were many more tragic consequences.
In Syria, the regime crushed its own citizens’ calls for democracy with such brutality that peaceful protesters were quickly replaced by extremist rebels fighting against a government backed by outside forces for control of a devastated country.
Today, those of us who treated Egypt in 2011 still feel the intense emotion of those early days.
There were a few scary moments, but the historical significance of the events we were documenting acted like rocket fuel as we ran from crowds and squatted in hotel rooms.
But for the revolutionaries in Egypt and beyond, it was not intended.
The Arab world, worse off in many ways than before the Arab Spring, will have to wait for another generation to demand freedom from their leaders. And you can only hope that this time they will be victorious, if only to prevent the sacrifices of those who came before them from being in vain.