Egypt protesters find unity difficult to maintain

The twentysomethings answering the phones and offering advice to Egyptians waking up in a new world couldn’t settle on a name for themselves.

“Why can’t we just agree on what to call the call center? It’s the source of constant debate. Every day, every hour,” said Nihal Nasr El-Din, a researcher for a feminist organization who lived in the center for days, tending to calls every waking hour. “Let’s just settle on ‘call center.’”

The volunteers at this ad hoc crisis center — hipster artists and university students, suburban office workers and pious Muslims — had come together last month in the giddy passion of a revolution.

During cigarette breaks and chatter between calls in the rooms and lobby of a drab, down-market tourist hotel, they realized how differently they saw the revolution’s goal. Should Egypt be an Islamic state, a liberal democracy, or something else?

But even as their viewpoints diverged, the volunteers marveled at the close ties they formed. As they found doctors for the injured and helped families locate the missing, some became best friends, some even fell in love.

“Anyone would have protected the other from a gunshot. Anyone would sacrifice himself to protect the other,” said Mohammed Kenaway, a pharmacy student at Cairo University.

Many of the volunteers turned to the call center after hearing about it from friends or seeing its founder, Jawad Nabulsi, on television. It seemed a natural next step in their life-altering political awakening during the protests of Tahrir Square. Some had slept there night after night, embracing each other to keep warm. None wanted to go back to their old jobs and preoccupations, their old lives.

The call center provided a chance to live with clear purpose and fulfillment for a bit longer.

Its goal was to provide aid to protesters who suffered misfortune as they pushed for change. Nabulsi had himself struggled to find a doctor when shrapnel in Tahrir badly damaged his left eye.

Volunteers recorded callers’ problems, used contacts in the government to track down the missing and compiled lists of doctors and others willing to help with whatever was needed.

But their work to spur President Hosni Mubarak’s removal and the promise of free elections had come to seem like the easy part.

The volunteers — about 300 of them — realized that they were participating in a rare moment when bottom-up politics was dominant. Yet the uncorking of political expression also tore at the group’s cohesion, much like what was happening to the fractured opposition as a whole as it began to move unsteadily into a post-Mubarak era.

“In Tahrir Square, there was total agreement: No one represents the revolution, we all represent the revolution,” said volunteer Ahmed Mamdouh Zaki, a trainer in a customer service center for U.S. companies.

“But in the call center,” he said, “everyone started coming out and saying, ‘I represent the revolution,’ ‘No, I represent the revolution,’ ‘No, I represent the revolution.’”

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Political participation among young Egyptians was dismal before the uprising, even by the standards of the Middle East. Very few of the call center volunteers had ever voted. And many had imagined moving abroad.

“I had decided to move back to England and spend my life. You have a lot of freedom, everything is fine there,” said Kenaway, who models his personal style on actor Richard Gere. “But when the revolution happened, I now have a lot of things to do for my country. Now I feel it is my country, not the regime’s country.”

Because Egypt was a place with a nascent political culture, organizations like the call center had little structure to build upon. No one initially claimed leadership, believing that the strength of the group was that it did not depend on a charismatic figure who could be vilified or corrupted.

“There are thousands of leaders for this revolution,” said Nabulsi, who is from a prosperous family and drives a Ferrari. “Whenever they try to kill one, 300 more appear.”

Still, an absence of leadership led to some practical issues.

“When we got there, we found [the volunteers] wanted to do a good job, but it was a total mess,” Zaki said.

The volunteers were spread across the floor taking down information on paper. Not all of it was loaded into a computer database, and the data that did reach the database were improperly catalogued, making it impossible to properly search through the cases.

Because of his call center experience, Zaki became operations chief. By chance, additional seasoned workers volunteered as they were laid off from their regular jobs. As the unrest blocked the roads to many of these Egyptians’ offices, wait times for American callers ballooned and companies moved their calls to contractors in other countries.

“They may be truly the heroes here,” Zaki said. “Because of the revolution, they were out of their job, but instead of blaming the revolution, they joined it.”

The center was gaining momentum, but the workers found that seemingly mundane tasks took on polarizing political significance.

One volunteer wanted to tally the number of dead in the database, but others blocked the effort. In a country where pictures of the revolution’s martyrs now hang from countless rear-view windows, they feared an accurate count might be incendiary.

“We are saying now that there were 300 to 500 people who died. Now, what’s the real number? I don’t know,” Zaki said. “Because you had people who were interested in not letting the number grow.”

Another battle erupted when some volunteers wanted to connect people who had suffered severe injuries at the hands of police with human rights attorneys to pursue claims. Others argued that associating the call center with lawyers with political affiliations was unwise.

“This was ridiculous to me, but I had to respect the final decision,” said El-Din, the researcher for the Egyptian feminist group.

Perhaps most important, they couldn’t agree on what Egypt should become.

Zaki, who aspires to be a pious Sunni Muslim, said “it doesn’t really matter” if Islamic law becomes more dominant in Egyptian society. “The good thing about Sharia,” he said, “is that it allows people who are minorities to have their own judiciary. The Christians in Egypt wouldn’t need to abide by Islamic law.”

For El-Din, that prospect was not even a possibility. For her, the revolution offered an opportunity to return to the best aspects of the Egypt of the 1920s, a period that appeals to young people partly because the refined charm glorified in television and films stands in such contrast to the decay of today.

Still, the volunteers did find common ground, and more.

Zaki fell in love with another volunteer and was nervously preparing to ask her father permission to marry.

Kenaway realized that another volunteer, Abdel Rahman, a dentist, was his neighbor, but they had never met before the revolution.

“Being friends and experiencing these things together is more important than experiencing the sum of the 22 years prior with anyone else,” Rahman said. “He has become my best friend really in about 20 days.”

Despite the growing closeness, the volunteers soon resolved that their still-developing goals required the call center to break apart. El-Din left to start a new human rights group, Nabulsi to lead a strictly non-political charity. Others contemplated starting their own groups.

When the volunteers gathered their things in the hotel recently, they were exuberant about the future but also expressed some sadness.

“I think we realized that the unity of Tahrir Square can never really be replicated,” Zaki said. “It’s unimaginable.... And it’s not there anymore; even if you go back to the square Friday, it won’t be there. I don’t think I’ll ever experience that feeling anywhere again.”

garrett.therolf@latimes.com

Special correspondent Doha Al Zohairy contributed to this report.