Αναδημοσίευση από jadaliyya

We were on the edge of Tahrir Square on Wednesday 3 July when the army made its announcement. The square burst into jubilation. A member of our team checked his smartphone. He shouted over the din of drumbeats and squealing vuvuzelas: “Morsi’s gone. They’ve appointed the head of the constitutional court in his place and suspended the elections.”

We watched the celebrations. I looked around at the people I knew, with some of whom I had shared—what do I call it, the Tahrir of yore?—and the subsequent two-and-a-half years of anger, euphoria, exhaustion, triumph, dejection. Their faces were as expressionless as mine. The only emotion I could locate inside myself was fear—not of the political future, about which I no longer felt I understood a thing, and had lost my faith and footing in—but of the very next moment: how would we get back into the square?

After ten minutes, we could not put it off any more. We had to deliver food to the intervention teams posted around the square, and the celebrations would just get more massive and feverish as the night wore on. Our team formed a line and dove into the crowds, holding tightly onto one another and trying to protect each other from any onslaught of hands. I tried to be present—if not to enjoy the festivities, then at least to notice them—but all I could think of was cutting across this heaving sea. In a distant part of my mind I wondered about fear: is it an idea or a real understanding in the body? If I did not known what I did, would I be able to feel the exhilaration, to lose myself in the crowd as I had done before?

We reached the first intervention team and I flopped in their midst—an isle of safety in the square. This was not some slick special-forces unit in imposing uniform. It was a group of young women and women wearing white T-shirts with red lettering that said: “Anti-Sexual Harassment” and on the back, “A Square Safe for Everyone.”

It was my first day of volunteering with Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault (OpAntiSH). With everything I had heard about Tahrir lately, it was the last place I wanted to be. And yet—I no longer felt I had a place in the marches taking place all over the city; I could not stay home; and I could not turn my back on the one thing in the midst of all the madness that seemed to cleanly matter, to make sense.

I was trembling as I got out of the taxi by the Nile that afternoon and walked alone to our meeting point behind the square. As we gathered around in a circle to be briefed, a part of me was bewildered at the red nails of the girl standing next to me, at the smiles on people’s faces, when on mine tragedy must have been writ large—a sort of newcomer’s naiveté. I had not yet had time to recalibrate, to normalize.

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The thousands of people who marched in protest of a new bill that would grant the New Zealand’s government sweeping spy powers, were misinformed, Prime Minister John Key has said playing down the nationwide protests.

The surveillance bill, which is expected to be passed in parliament, would allow New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) free rein to listen in on citizens’ phone conversations.

Kiwis took to the streets on Saturday in 11 cities and towns in what has been dubbed as an “uphill battle” to stop the bill from going through.

Key, however, argued on Sunday that the turnout was “quite light” and insisting that those involved in the mass demonstrations were ill-informed or had a political agenda.

“At the risk of encouraging them to have more protests, I would have actually said those numbers were quite light – it wasn’t anything like what we saw for mining or anything else,” he told TVNZ’s Q&A program on Sunday.

“Secondly, a lot of people that would go along would be either A, politically aligned, or B, with the greatest of respect, misinformed,” he stressed.