A love-hate relationship with revolution | Sarah El-Ashmawy | TEDxExeter

Sarah El-Ashmawy left Egypt one week before the popular uprising of 2011. Her realization that she had become disconnected from her country led her to return and conduct conversations about responses to the revolution and its outcomes.

Sarah El-Ashmawy is a young Egyptian woman with a BA in Political Sciences and International Law from the American University in Cairo. She graduated in 2012 with High Honors. In 2009, Sarah volunteered for the Cairo based NGO "Association for Health and Environmental Development." In 2010, she became part of the newly created Anti-Trafficking Unit at the Ministry of Family and Population. In April 2012, she joined a team of researchers working on a chapter about the democratic transition in Egypt for a book by the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) Regional Office in Cairo. In September 2012, she became Minority Rights Group International's (MRG) Program Officer, launching the implementation of an anti-religious discrimination program. Since then, Sarah has worked with religious minorities in Egypt to build a strong network advocating greater religious freedom. She has also worked as a research assistant for the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) on the upgrading of their Social Assessment Manual and as a research assistant for the UNDP working on a synopsis of their Governance Week Conference held in Cairo in November 2012. She is currently a Masters' Student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, pursuing a degree in Violence, Conflict and Development, while she continues to be part of the Egypt programme team at MRG.

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Hi! My name is Sarah.

I'm a Minority Rights activist
and an Egyptian.

For the past three years,
being an Egyptian has meant for me

reclaiming my belonging to this nation.

This is because, for the past
three years in Egypt,

I've been part of a collective effort
to formulate who we are,

but more importantly, what we want.

This is new because for the past 30 years
in Egypt, we've been taught by our regime

that what we will do is connected
to who we are as individuals

and not to what we want as people.

So, for the past 20 years,
I've been planning my future

independently from the fate
of my own people,

and I ended up leaving Cairo for Paris

on January 17, 2011,
to pursue my education.

On January 18,

I met this German journalist,
Camille, in a bar in Paris,

and she was doing work
on the uprisings in Tunisia.

After a few drinks,
she inevitably asked me,

"So, what do you think will happen
now that Ben Ali's regime is down?"

and I told her, "What do you mean?"

She said, "Well, don't you think
Egyptians will have their own revolution?"

I smiled at her sarcastically
and I said, "Of course not."

Obviously, she was right and I was wrong

because the revolution went ahead
and took place on January 25, 2011.

And I just couldn't believe I left Egypt
a week before the revolution,

and now I had to sit back
and watch it from so far away!

So, I developed a love-hate
relationship with this revolution.

I loved it because, for the first time
in my life, I could envision an Egypt

that I wished for and could be part of.

In fact, the idea was that anyone
could be part of this new Egypt.

I hated it because its very
existence reminded me

that I had lived for the past 20 years

completely disconnected
from my own people.

In June 2011, I went back to Egypt,

and I decided I will have random
conversations with friends and family

to make up my mind about this revolution.

At this time, Egypt was already
questioning the path

that it had taken to democracy.

And I soon discovered

that many of us shared this bitter-sweet
relationship with the revolution.

Ahmad El-Gamal, who was a blind journalist

I met on the course of a Minority Rights
training I was organizing in Egypt,

is a good example of that.

Ahmad might be blind,

but it honestly took me five minutes
on a noisy bus ride in Cairo

to discover that he sees Egypt
much more clearly than I do.

And if you ask Ahmad
about his story with the revolution,

he will tell you two things.

He will tell you that three years
before the revolution,

he met his assigned officer
from the Ministry of Interior.

This officer was responsible
for monitoring his anti-regime writings

and would come and pick him up regularly
in the middle of the night from his bed,

so he could spend the night
in prison for his writings.

Then Ahmad will amazingly fast forward

to January 28, 2011,

a date that Egyptians
call the "Day of Anger,"

where he will tell you that he saw
all the colors of Egypt at Tahrir Square.

And he will tell you that it's on this day

that he realized that there
will be freedom in Egypt.

You see, before January 2011,
there was no freedom in Egypt.

Ironically, the best way to describe it
is to say that Egypt was a pyramid.

And depending on your class,
education, gender, ethnicity, religion,

you would be somewhere in this pyramid.

In a way, we were all
stuck in these categories

that defined who we are
and where we are in this structure.

There was no way to change that.

It went on for so long, because it allowed
everyone to exclude at least someone:

the rich excluded the poor;
the men excluded the women;

the Muslims excluded the non-Muslims.

If you ask Egyptians about
how to call this type of regimes,

they will tell you two things.

Either they will tell you
it's not a dictatorial regime,

it's not an authoritarian regime,
it's not a military regime.

They will refuse all the above
categories that we usually use.

Or, they will tell you that
they can't agree on how to call it.

But, one thing they will tell you
is that they all felt excluded,

and that, no matter
where they were in the structure.

So no one knew the only chant everyone
agrees on about the revolution

is the Egyptians want
the end of the regime.

Unfortunately, the end of the Mubarak
regime in February 2011

did not mean the end
of the exclusion regime.

In fact, in February 2011,
the military took over,

and, while they were announcing
presidential and parliamentary elections,

a lot of street movements
like trade unions and youth unions

went on demonstrations
and became violent on November 2011.

For a lot of people
who had lived disconnected

from the political life like myself,
this was a double struggle.

This was a struggle
for political participation

but it was also a struggle against
our own little governments: our mothers.

Because we were prohibited -
my mum is in the public ...

(Laughter)

We were prohibited from going
to these demonstrations,

so myself and a few friends decided

that we will take the bus
to the university

and then we would agree
with the bus driver from the university

to take us to Tahrir Square
and then take us back home.

So we would go there,
scream from the top of our lungs

and then go home like nothing happened.

(Laughter)

As a journalist once put it, back then,

"Egypt is the only country where youths
are more afraid of their parents

than they are afraid of tanks."

(Laughter)

After a long fight, we eventually got
to elect our first civilian president

in June 2012.

The losers of the old regime
had become the winners of the new regime.

Everything was wonderful
until, on November 22, 2012,

I got this phone call
from a friend of mine, Manar,

who's a journalist about my same age,

and I was driving my little black car
in the crazy streets of Cairo.

She said, "Where are you?"
I told her, "I'm coming to meet you."

She said, "Well, pull over."
so I pulled over,

and she said, "President Morsi
just announced a constitutional decree

protecting his decisions
from all accountability."

I sat in silence in my car,

chocking in my deepest, darkest fears.

I felt betrayed and I felt angry
because this was a "déjà-vu,"

and the question of how we got there was
just running again and again in my head.

I drove to my friend and,
as we sat talking and talking,

our anger transformed
into hatred against the Islamists.

And it hit me!

I realized that the biggest crime
that had been committed against Egyptians

for the past 30 years
is that the exclusion regime

was so embedded in our very ideas,
in our very soul, in our very being,

that we didn't even know about it.

We didn't even know about it
until we hit rock bottom,

and that rock bottom
was when our first elected president

had just excluded us from decision making.

You know, the more I think
about it, the more I tell myself

that the January revolution
and the June movement

and all the coming revolutions
are inescapable.

This is simply because exclusion regimes
bear the seeds of their own destruction.

With time and resistance,
they become violent.

And I'm not only talking
about the kind of violence

that Ahmad El-Gamal had to handle.

I am talking about all
the other kinds of violence

that are so subtle and end up
marginalizing everyone.

A lot of people ask us
why we went down on November,

and why we went down
against Morsi in June.

My answer is "because
the question is not about elections

and not about the parliamentary system.

it's about building a system
where we can all find a place

and realize our full potential."

No, we were not afraid of dying
because we don't want to live in a country

where we have to trade our freedom
and rights for a piece of bread

so that we can't hold
our governments accountable

for any other types of exclusion
that we have to handle everyday.

A lot of people ask me
why I work on Minority Rights in Egypt,

why I don't work on education
or raising awareness

to help democracy strike.

My answer is "because I believe
democracy starts at the margins."

It's only when a society
looks inside itself

and realizes the exclusion regimes
it is producing by its own self

that it can truly become democratic.

Today, the question in Egypt
and, I believe, everywhere is,

how can we talk about equality
if we're not talking about discrimination?

How can we talk about justice

if we can't talk about the violence
that has been done to us?

But more importantly, the violence
that we are doing to each other?

If I've learnt one thing for the past
three years of revolution in Egypt,

it's that democracy is about dialog,

and not the pretty sugar-coated dialog
that we hear in the media

about all the things we're doing right.

I am talking about the blunt,
honest and painful dialog

that we have to have with each other
about all the things we're doing wrong.

Today, Egyptians have created

the first electronic map

for sexual harassment.

They have engaged in monologues

to tell each other about the experiences
of violence they are living.

They have done things
like this and this

where they will paint a wall

that was made to prohibit
them from protesting,

into their own vision of what it should
be and their own vision of the future.

And this why today, if you ask me
right outside this hall,

if I believe that the Egyptian
revolution will succeed,

I will smile at you,
and this time honestly tell you,

"Of course yes!"

Thank you.

(Applause)