Jennifer Wiens is a writer and TV producer.
The news from Egypt is terrible and confusing. Protests and tear gas, an elderly ruler, angry youths and smashed cameras. The talking heads are saying wise things about unemployment rates, Mideast politics and always, always, the influence of extreme Islam. But I don't need to listen. I observed all these events from an hour I spent in a small room in Cairo over 15 years ago.
I was at a police station in Cairo with an Egyptian friend. She needed to register her identity card there and asked me to come along, as a chaperone. I thought she was being paranoid, but I had never been to an Egyptian police station, so I was curious.
The officer who spoke to us was a gentleman. He took us into a room, got chairs and served us tea. While he talked to my friend, other policeman came and went. My Arabic was good enough to understand their joking small talk. Then one of them said, "Well, back to work," and walked over to a small broom closet.
But what he pulled out wasn't a broom. It was two strange pieces of wood, with knotted ropes coming from both ends. He handed one to another officer, and they walked out and went into another room nearby.
Then the screams began. And the dull thudding and weird slaps of rope and wood hitting human flesh.
Back in our room, no one seemed to notice. The noises continued while the officer asked me where I was from, how I liked Egypt, had I been to the pyramids? Then he smiled, said we could go. As we walked out, I stole a look into the room next door. There were three young men on the floor, hands bound, waiting their turn, while the two police stood over a fourth man tied to a chair. No one even bothered to shut the door.
What happens to a country where brutality and torture are so common, the neighborhood police don't even bother to hide it? The longer I spent in Egypt, the more I understood what I'd seen was not an anomaly, but the underlying truth about Mubarak's Egypt. People were taken away and beaten for any reason, and even the smallest protests were quelled with tear gas and thugs wielding nunchucks. It is a very effective way to keep a country under control.
But it can't be sustained forever. Now, Egyptians are full of bitterness toward the leaders who were supposed to help but instead inflicted so much hurt. Now, with Mubarak old and weakening, they can finally hit back, say Kifaya, "enough," and ask the world to pay attention. I knew this moment would come, because I saw the slow-burning hatred in the eyes of those bound men in that room. It's a shame the U.S. didn't do anything to help the Egyptian people before this point. They must have known what was happening there; after all, the door was open the whole time.
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