Sonia Farid: Is the ‘immortal’ really ‘happy’?

http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/06/07/152300.html

In Arabic Khaled means “immortal,” and Saeid means “happy.” Khaled Saeid is indeed immortal, for without realizing it he engraved his name in the memory of all Egyptians and although hardly anybody knew of him alive, his death constituted the cruelest of wake up calls for a people who had for long caved in then finally decided that enough is enough. Is he happy? That is quite a tricky question.

Yesterday, a year had passed since the brutal murder of the 28-year-old Alexandrian at the hands of two security officers, an event that sent a million chills down the spine of Egyptians and hammered the last nail in the coffin of a regime that proved so dexterous in watering the seeds of its own destruction. The picture of the smiley, clean-shaven boy in a grey jumper placed right next to a disfigured, hardly-identifiable face that was posted all over the Internet and independent newspapers, shown on prime-time TV shows, and held in dozens of protests calling for prosecuting the perpetrators kept reminding us that we all have his blood on our hands and that remaining silent meant betraying him and all other victims of the ruthless police state Egypt was. From that point onward, avenging Khaled Saeid, who later came to be called the “Bou Azizi of Egypt,” became equivalent to liberating Egypt and calls for the protests that eventually crystallized into the January 25 Revolution were initiated in the Facebook page We Are All Khaled Saeid and which presented the “emergency law martyr” as the epitome of any uprising that aims at ousting Hosni Mubarak. In fact, one of the most memorable banners seen in Tahrir Square and later in newspapers and social networking websites was a cartoon that depicted a big Khaled Saeid holding up with the tips of his thumb and index finger—a gesture that demonstrates disgust—a tiny, frightened Mubarak by the back of his jacket. For me, that was the perfect summing up of the possible relationship between the two in post-revolution Egypt.

With every step taken toward freedom, Khaled Saeid was deemed to have rested in peace after his and his fellow victims’ rights were restored and the culprits brought to justice. The ouster of the president, the incarceration of the former interior minister and the dismissal of several of the ministry’s leaderships, and the storming of State Security offices constituted for many, amongst them the martyr’s family, an indication that Khaled Saeid must be happy now as he sees what he has done to make Egyptians rise and what they have done to make sure his blood was not spilt in vain. Well… seems that was too idealistic and seems that the relative smoothness with which the revolution arrived at its main objective—deposing Mubarak and toppling the regime—has deceived all of us into thinking that the next day we’re going to wake up in the Garden of Eden. Within the month the preceded the first anniversary of Khaled Saeid’s death, two outrageous cases of torture to death took place in two police stations in Cairo. On May 23, Ramzy Salah el-Din was summoned to the police station after a complaint filed against him by a man who claimed he took money from him in return for buying him a three-wheel motorcycle cab (also known as tok-tok) and neither bought nor gave him back the money. On May 24, Salah el-Din was declared dead. According to the police, he showed signs of fatigue during interrogation then was transferred to hospital, and there he died. According to the coroner, the death was caused by internal bleeding and broken bones. Apparently, fatigue does to bones and what the bag of marijuana did to Khaled Saeid’s face (police claimed Saeid was a drug dealer and that his face got disfigured after he swallowed a bag of marijuana upon watching the officers approaching). On June 2, Mohamed Saeid, a bus driver, was asked by police officers to show his documents after he stopped in the middle of the street and obstructed traffic. A brawl ensued after the driver allegedly slapped the sheriff on the face and passersby started beating him up for showing no respect for the police. The sheriff, the official story goes, managed to save the driver from the angry mob and took him to the police station where guess what happened to him? He showed signs of fatigue—seems that’s a virus that infests all police stations—and passed away.

The fact that those two incidents almost coincided with the commemoration of Khaled Saeid’s death in the same barbaric manner was both beneficial and detrimental for Egypt and the revolution. On one hand, it was a much needed eye opener that alerted Egyptians who had been focusing on violations committed by the army—which are also not to be downplayed under any circumstances—that they have another battle to fight. On the other hand, hopes that the police have undergone an extreme makeover following the expulsion of the most notorious of its senior officials were crashed as it turned out that the torturing of the not-yet-proven-guilty is not just a modus operandi that can be suspended by the removal of its architects, but is rather a culture so deeply entrenched into the psyche of those officers who were taught starting first year Police Academy that outright physical abuse is the ideal way of dealing with “unruly” citizens. While some thought that after the revolution the police would revise its policies towards the public as part of the turning-a-new-leaf spirit that has been in the air since the ouster of the regime and as a way of admitting that power is indeed to the people, others argued that unless the entire police force is replaced by youths who have not been contaminated by long years dedicated to humiliating the subjects they were supposed to protect, nothing will change.

It would be overtly ideal to assume that after 18 days of protests—even if they were wrapped up by the toppling of the regime—the police will really abide by its resurrected slogan “The police are at the service of the people” and which came to replace the one introduced by the regime’s biggest top henchman former Interior Minister Habib al-Adli: “The police and the people are at the service of the nation”—the “nation” here meaning nothing other than the regime of course. On the contrary, the police were dealt the most fatal blow when this once formidable fortress collapsed disgracefully in the face of the will of the people and when it was suddenly the policeman who was afraid and running away and the citizen defiant and dauntless. The bitterness that followed this shameful defeat must have surfaced every time a cop felt he was forced to treat a citizen respectfully while deep down he wanted to grill him alive, let alone if this citizen decides to get back at the entire police force in the character of this policeman in one way or another. Some policemen manage to hold their reins even if this comes at the expense of their concept of pride—the one taught to them at the academy and the ministry—while others are incapable of swallowing the insult of having a citizen demand his rights and even threaten to retaliate if these rights are not duly granted. The result would be an immediate switch to the good old habits, which in some cases never die at all, through going back to those deterring tactics that put this “scum” in its place and shows who the boss is.

As much as I detest what had happened, I am not sure it is those officers that are to blame. If you feed a sparrow meat every day, it will eventually become a bird of prey and you can’t just turn it back into that sweet little singing creature it had once been years ago just by giving it some grains for breakfast for a week or two. I once heard an activist saying that policemen need rehabilitation and I couldn’t agree more. Policemen have become like someone who was unjustly sent to jail, yet comes out a real criminal and commits all the crimes he was once wrongly accused of. Can you then take him back to the time when he was a law-abiding citizen?

Not only are policemen not familiar with ways of handling citizens—suspects or not—other than bullying them, torturing them, and beating them to death, but they might have also developed a series of psychological disorders that made them insusceptible to any kind of remorse and unwilling to trade authority for mercy under any circumstances. They are in a much worse situation than war returnees who might forever live unable to get over the trauma of taking other people’s lives because at least the latter feel guilty and supposedly had a cause to fight for. So now you come and tell a policeman, “You know what? We had a revolution and you better be good” and you expect him to grow a halo the next day? What kind of knowledge of human nature, psychology, or sociology would make anyone adopt such a naïve hypothesis?

Does anyone realize what a lengthy process it is to raise a new generation of cops who are aware that their main job is to make the people feel safe instead of being their worst nightmare and what a lengthier process it is not only to rehabilitate policemen who operated during the former regime but also to heal the scars of their victims then have both put the past behind them?

Well… how about entitling the first class of first year Police Academy and the first policemen psycho-therapy session “The story of Khaled Saeid”? Show the first how low they can stoop if they trade their humanity for a sick pursuit of power and show the second how desperate they should be for restoring the humanity they have decided to give up. Make the boy who made a revolution that is bound to be the most memorable in modern history without getting the chance to see it happen a not-so-gentle reminder of how the spilling of one person’s innocent blood can bring about the annihilation of entire nations and think of what killing the albatross did to the Ancient Mariner.

We can then start breathing a little—only a little—sigh of relief and look up to the heavens above hoping to find a sign from the “khaled” that he is now really “saeid.”

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Sonia Farid

I teach for a living... write for a life!

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