Translator: Audrey Smondack Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
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)