Jadi perang Iraq itu ya sia-sia..
Ini bukti tambahan bahwa, seperti dikatakan oleh jendral Claude Le Borgne, ("La
guerre est morte") perang itu sungguh tidak ada gunanya.
Witness: Unlike Iraq, Egyptians do regime change their way
By Samia NakhoulPosted 2011/02/12 at 2:55 pm EST
CAIRO, Feb. 12, 2011 (Reuters) The last Arab despot I saw overthrown was
Saddam Hussein. That was all very different from the fall of Hosni Mubarak,
toppled this week by his own people, not the might of a foreign army.
February 12, 2011. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez
CAIRO (Reuters) - The last Arab despot I saw overthrown was Saddam Hussein.
That was all very different from the fall of Hosni Mubarak, toppled this week
by his own people, not the might of a foreign army.
In 2003, I spent 18 days under fire in Baghdad as waves of cruise missiles
vaporized swathes of the city. It was pounded day after day by American B-52s
and British Tornados, before U.S. tanks rolled in to a prostrate capital and
declared Iraq liberated from a brutal dictator.
Iraq, and the Arab world, was shocked, and awed. But the fall of Saddam, at a
cost of thousands of lives -- and a foreboding of so much more blood to come --
failed to ignite the sense of national triumph among Iraqis that has had
Egyptians dancing in the streets after 18 days of popular protests.
In Iraq, there was, of course, elation, especially among the oppressed Shi'ites
and Kurds. But there was also fear and anxiety. Saddam was gone but so too were
many of their loved ones. And scores of "mini-Saddams" were to emerge in his
place.
Liberation had been delivered, by foreign tanks and warplanes, after years of
punitive Western sanctions and three weeks of relentless bombardment. Pictures
of U.S. marines helping topple a statue of Saddam outside the international
media hotel in Baghdad became the iconic images of those events eight years
ago. Many Iraqis had little to be jubilant about. They inherited a broken
country, a society that was about to fracture, causing tens of thousands more
deaths.
In Cairo, the only tanks are Egyptian, and they have not opened fire. Instead,
demonstrators painted them with anti-Mubarak slogans and soldiers smiled. Now
Mubarak is gone.
It is hard to believe. No one who has lived in Egypt, as I did in the 1990s,
could easily imagine him going, other than through illness or, like his
predecessor Anwar Sadat, through an assassin's bullet -- and Mubarak had dodged
several of those. Arab dictators tend to die with their boots on.
Judging by the sheer inebriation of joy in Cairo's streets on Friday night, the
roads into Tahrir Square drowning in the elation, euphoria and exhilaration at
Mubarak's departure, few Egyptians had ever really imagined they could force
him to give way. People too many to count all said it was like a dream.
NEW DREAM
But the dream was real and Egypt and its people woke up to a new dawn. As the
muezzin's call to prayer reverberated from a thousand mosques across Cairo at
dawn, the sounds of Egyptians still cheering at Mubarak's departure grew
louder. Egypt's capital tells a story of a country that has changed overnight.
Mubarak's resignation electrified Egypt and the current is being felt across
Arab lands and the palaces of their rulers. Egyptians in their millions danced
and partied, celebrating the fall of the man who ruled like a pharaoh. They
brought children to celebrate the seismic change Egypt has undergone. Women
ululated, as though at a wedding. Young men danced. At the heart of the
uprising in Cairo's Tahrir Square, packed so tight hardly another soul could
fit in, people embraced and wept in joy and disbelief at a day some thought
would never come.
Never before had I seen Egyptians so jubilant. In one day they regained a sense
of dignity and national pride that had been buried under the degradation of
Mubarak's autocratic rule. Egyptians from all walks of life, old and young,
women and men, religious and secular, rich and poor, leftists and Islamists,
all across the nation had united in their loathing of him.
As a journalist long used to the sullen quiet of the police states that still
make up much of the Middle East, I felt the surging joy and overwhelming
emotions of the population around me as a palpable, physical sensation.
Only once before had I witnessed such ecstatic emotions, in 1994 when I
accompanied Palestinian President Yasser Arafat -- and Mubarak -- in the convoy
that drove Arafat in his first historic journey back to the Gaza Strip after
years in exile.
Egyptians had always seemed unlikely revolutionaries. Throughout the years I
lived and worked here I came to know them Egyptians as kind, cheerful and
generous, but also often docile and resigned to poverty and hardship as "God's
will".
GRIM PAST
The ferocity with which Mubarak's security forces previously dealt with
opposition may have had a lot to do with that, and makes the bravery of those
who began the protests on January 25 all the more startling.
In 1992, I moved to Cairo after 16 years of civil war in my native Lebanon and
time spent also covering the first Gulf war. In Egypt, long the cultural hub of
the Arab world, I was looking forward to writing about life not death, peace
not war, and about a country in hopeful transition, reforming its way into the
modern world. I was excited by the country's majestic archaeological treasures
and reputed intellectuals.
Just one week into my new job, however, the Islamist militant group al-Gama'a
al-Islamiya staged its first attack against foreign tourists, targeting Egypt's
number one currency earner and economic lifeline. The Islamist resurgence
became my focus and I set off to the slums of Imbaba, on Cairo's outskirts, to
find out whether it was true that the radical Islamists had set up a sharia law
state-within-a-state.
I interviewed their emir or sheikh. Soon after, I had my first "invitation" to
Egypt's Interior Ministry. After I refused to provide information on whom I had
met, I soon began seeing men in cars parked outside my apartment building,
ostentatiously reading newspapers; just in case I hadn't noticed, the men from
the ministry made sure to tell me that I was being followed.
There ensued several weeks of slander in government newspapers. They depicted
me as the Lebanese who had come to Cairo to spread civil war, some sort of
Levantine Mata Hari. Mubarak himself indignantly denied that there was any such
thing as an Islamist challenge to his Egypt. Yet a month later he sent more
than 20,000 troops into Imbaba. In a week of house-to-house fighting, they
rounded up scores of suspected Islamists including the sheikh I had
interviewed. Days later he was paraded on state television. His face was
bruised and swollen. He was hard to recognize.
Throughout the mid-1990s, I travelled to meet Islamists in their strongholds in
Cairo and the southern province of Assiut, witnessing attacks on mosques by
Mubarak's men and learning to play cat-and-mouse with the ubiquitous security
services: always do interviews in distant towns before checking in to the
hotel; if you register first, the police will be on your tail.
I learned, too, how to get through my regular "invitations" to enjoy the
hospitality at the Interior Ministry -- keep your answers consistent; don't
lose your temper; and don't count the hours. For all that, entering their
headquarters at La Zoughly, no one could shut out of their mind the
well-documented tales of savage torture that was routine for prisoners in the
dungeons.
I grabbed interviews with the accused in their courtroom cages. They were
fleeting. The judges wasted little time before banging down the gavel and
meting out the death sentence.
POVERTY, BRUTALITY
Heart-rending scenes would ensue. Mothers fainted, fathers sobbed, the
condemned would brandish the Koran. Sometimes, it was the judge who looked most
frightened. I remember one who read out his verdict and fled, ducking a chair
hurled by a mother. "The sons of Islam will haunt you," she yelled. "Mubarak,
you are a tyrant!"
Much of the trial process was a sham. The state occasionally produced
indictments against men already hanged. Such was the impunity of state power,
no one bothered to cover up the errors.
While some of those convicted had indeed taken up arms, many were condemned
only for membership of Islamist parties. And they were far from alone in
harbouring deep grievances against Mubarak. By this year, millions of young
people have never had a job. Whether Islamist or secular, many millions were
frustrated by the arrogance and corruption of the elite.
In the past decade, Egypt seemed sink further into poverty and exploitation,
hardly covered by the fantasies of state media which continued to trumpet the
achievements of Mubarak's rule. As in Iraq under Saddam, the security apparatus
stretched its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life.
Rights groups said thousands of detainees filled Egypt's jails. No one knew, or
knows still, the exact figure.
Mubarak pushed economic liberalization policies that drew crony capitalists
into the bosom of the administration but left tens of millions of Egyptians
below the poverty line. As the middle class was emaciated, the rich opted for
gated communities in the desert around Cairo. The poor got poorer in the slum
belts.
I watched the capital of the Arab world, a city rich with thousands of years of
civilization and history, going from bad to worse, its buildings crumbling, its
diplomatic role in the world diminishing, its creativity stifled and freedoms
thwarted.
The revolution that began on January 25 has given Egyptians back their pride
and dignity. They have not just thrown out an unpopular ruler. Unarmed, they
have faced down the might of a ruthless police state which had never shrunk
from detaining anyone, for any reason, for any length of time.
In the process, they have ripped up stereotypes of a nation that for millennia
was supposedly ready to bow down before the pharaoh, regardless of the
humiliations heaped upon it.
Opposition politician Ayman Nour -- a man who paid the price of prison for
daring to challenge Mubarak's supremacy at the ballot box -- said it was the
greatest day in Egypt's history.
"This nation has been born again," he said. "These people have been born again,
and this is a new Egypt."
Whereas, Baghdad, subdued and occupied, descended into an orgy of looting and
violence among the communities which Saddam had divided in order to rule, Cairo
is having a carnival.
In the joy of the moment, each Egyptian seems to have the sense that they
personally have taken on Pharaoh, and won.
"I am Egyptian, I have toppled Hosni," people chanted on streets, drunk on the
heady scent of a free nation.
So very unlike Iraq eight years ago and, surely, a better starting point for an
uncertain future.
(Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
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