The Detainee

Like many Egyptians, 32-year-old industrial design engineer Mohamed Abdel Kerim was skeptical about the protests planned for January 25. He went to work as usual, not sure if it would be a day like any other or whether the country might actually see change.At midday, he heard that people were on the move, and he knew where they were headed. “I didn’t really know any of the people who called for the protests on that day, but I waited for any signal,” says Abdel Kerim, who has taken part in several protests around Cairo in recent years. “It came when I heard that thousands of people [were] actually on Tahrir Square […] Tahrir was always a red line, and that many people there means that people finally decided to cross the red line.” Abdel Kerim spent his day in Tahrir Square  protesting peacefully as riot police surrounded them. There were two kinds of people in the square that day, he says: the veterans ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause and those new to protesting who had decided that they should finally break their silence. Toward the end of the day, Abdel Kerim moved to the edge of the square to rest. “While I was sitting, I was grabbed from behind and pulled into the area where the central security police were all standing. I was beaten up, kidnapped and then put in the big riot police vehicles along with many other people.” In the truck with him were 82 people rounded up from protests around Cairo, among them were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, communists and other individuals. No one knew where they were going or why, but they eventually arrived at the central security camp in El-Salam on the Cairo–Ismailia Desert Road. “All 82 people were fit in a fairly small cell […] where one could barely sit,” he recalls. “No one would bring any accusations against us. For two nights they would just pull us out, count us, ask why we were [in Tahrir Square] and then return us to the cell.” Abdel Kerim says that it was at least two hours after they arrived before the injured detainees were sent to a hospital near the El-Salam camp. “I was covered in blood from my head, forehead and mouth, and when I was taken to the hospital I needed three stitches in my head,” he says. “There was another guy whose shoulder was dislocated and [should have] had to undergo surgery, but at the hospital they just put him in a cast and he was returned to the camp.” After two cold nights at the camp with far fewer blankets than people, Abdel Kerim and the others were handcuffed and driven to South Cairo Court to see the deputy public prosecutor. At the courthouse, he says there were many lawyers offering to defend the detainees.

“Because all the accusations against us in the police reports were very weak, we were promised that we would be released very soon,” Abdel Kerim says, “but before that we were locked again in another cell for hours underneath the court.”Officers repeatedly opened the door and then closed it again, claiming they would return to let them out. Eventually, Abdel Kerim and the person he was handcuffed prevent the officers from closing the door again, and that was when they were finally let out. Abdel Kerim was released the evening of January 27. Exhausted, he went home to recover, rather than go back out for the Day of Anger protests on January 28. By January 29, however, he was back in Tahrir Square. Abdel Kerim says he was impressed at how organized the demonstrations were and how willing the protesters were to spend nights out in the cold to get what they wanted. “I left maybe once in the middle of the week when I caught a bad cold because of the weather there,” he says. “I only made it back on the morning of February 2, the day that ended with deadly clashes.” And there he stayed, through the ‘Battle for Tahrir’, until Hosni Mubarak resigned as president on February 11. While the military has said they would not go after people who participated in the demonstrations, the veteran protester is still wary, declining to be photographed for Egypt Today. Abdel Kerim notes that after Mubarak stepped down, some groups started claiming that they were behind the success of this revolution. “I saw that night the Nasserites saying, ‘You sons of Abdel Nasser made it,’ but in reality no one group was behind the success of this revolution. All the people made it work.”