Tahrir: The Last 18 Days of Mubarak:
An Insider's Account of the Uprising in Egypt
by Abdel Latif El-Menawy
Foreword by Michael Binyon OBE
Abdel Latif El-Menawy, the Controller of Egypt's television and radio, tells the inside story of exactly how January 2011's revolution played out. Besieged inside the State TV building for 18 days, El-Menawy was constantly in touch with the President and the ruling clique led by the President's son and heir apparent, Gamal, as well as ministers and officers at the highest levels of the Defence and Intelligence services.
Format: 210 x 125
Binding: Paperback
Extent: 320pp
Price: £12.95
Publication: 25 Jan 2012
ISBN: 978 1 908531 124
With exclusive photographs and screenshots of previously un-broadcast TV footage, this book answers many questions, among them:
• Why did the Army deploy on the streets and where did its loyalty lie?
• Was the revolution really brought about by Facebook and Twitter?
• How did the death of Hosni Mubarak's 12-year-old grandson in 2009 affect the ageing President's day to day running of the country?
• Why did Mubarak not step down until he was alone in Sharm El Sheikh without his wife, his son and all his men?
Abdel Latif El-Menawy is an author and journalist who has covered war zones, political crises and conflicts across the world in a career that has seen him report from Sudan, Bosnia, Libya, Algeria, France, Hong Kong, Germany and the UK. As Head of the News at the Egyptian Radio and Television Union - Egypt's equivalent of the BBC - Menawy oversaw all news content, founded Radio Misr, and pioneered documentary broadcasts.
Michael Binyon is a former Diplomatic Editor of The Times. He is currently a Leader Writer at The Times.
For further information, or to arrange an interview, please contact: Emma O'Bryen, Publicity T: 020 7619 0098 M: 07505 659641 E: eobr@blueyonder.co.uk or Max Scott at Gilgamesh T: 07753 745252 max@gilgamesh-publishing.co.uk
Except from Tahrir: The Last 18 Days of Mubarak
Day Three
It was almost five o’clock when a well-built Republican Presidential Guard officer in bulletproof body armour, carrying his gun, entered my office, flanked by two soldiers.
“The Television building is fully under our control, it is totally secure against protesters’ attempts to storm in, all live studios are under heavy security,” he declared, “any movement in or out of the building has to be in coordination with us.”
It was dusk of Friday the 28th of January, a day known as the “Friday of Rage” by revolutionary Egyptians. In the office, people’s eyes were red, streaming with tears from the stinging tear gas that the police had been launching it at protesters all day down in the square. As the day turned to night we could still see the scenes of confrontation and conflict between protesters and the security forces. We had just seen a CCTV feed of police bombarding protesters with teargas and water cannon atop the Kasr El-Nil Bridge, one of many that stretches across the Nile.
Thousands of protesters faced thousands of policemen in a constant game of hit and run, until the police finally gave way and a wave of protesters swept across the bridge towards Tahrir Square. Within seconds, the police were gone.
It was as if they had never even been there.
It seemed that Egypt’s institutions had disappeared; all that remained was the army out on the streets and the three remaining offices where we worked, on the 5th floor of the State TV building in downtown Cairo. Neither I, nor any of my colleagues or assistants had any idea what was going on that night.
* * * *
Day Seven
In the early evening, around 6 or 7pm, I got two calls from the army. The first said we were to issue a statement saying an “unnamed security source” called on all demonstrators to leave Tahrir Square immediately and that elements of the Muslim Brotherhood were firebombing the crowds from above. I put the text on the screen in two points. One point said that all demonstrators were to leave the square, the second was that some Ihkwan “elements” were throwing petrol bombs from rooftops surrounding Tahrir Square to encourage civil conflict.
A few minutes later I got the second call, where they asked us to broadcast an official warning across our TV channels:
“Because of agitators on their way with firebombs [literally translated as fireballs in Arabic] to Tahrir Square, we plead on all citizens to evacuate the square immediately.”
They asked me to repeat it over and over again.
When the text came in, I called all my contacts in the army, intelligence, cabinet and the palace asking what was going on, as I couldn’t quite believe the warning I’d been given. When questioned, they all agreed that the warning was correct and should be broadcast.
It reminded me of an old black and white film, very famous in Egypt, which features a scene of a man going into a pharmacy to buy medicine. The transaction seems to go smoothly save for the pharmacist’s blunder, silently revealed to the audience in a visual aside. The pharmacist hands the man deadly poison packaged within the benevolent confines of a medicine bottle. When the error was realised, the characters in the film commandeer the local radio station, announcing: “Don’t drink the medicine! This medicine is poison.” The cry was repeated over and over. Now I was calling on the country not to drink the medicine.
We put the warning on a loop, repeated across all our radio and TV channels. While the warnings were going out, I called all my friends in Tahrir Square and begged them to leave, in case they got hurt. When they asked me what was going on, I had to confess that I didn’t actually know, I just wanted them out of there and safe.
We had a reporter with us from Nile TV, the English language station down at the square. Before he went, he came to me to ask permission to get down to the square.
“Yes,” I told the young reporter, “go!”
He looked my in the eye before he headed off, “but” he said, “I will broadcast what I see.”
I looked him back in the eye, telling him, “don’t broadcast anything but what you see.”
We couldn’t give him a camera as we needed approval from the army, so he had to file his reports to the studio over the phone. We called him and told him to hurry back when the reports of firebombs started coming in.
I sent out a call to all of our staff, some of whom were heading to Tahrir, that they should all get away from the square. I pulled back a camera crew that I had sent there earlier.
The battle continued. Rocks and debris were launched at the opposing sides. The facades of the giant stone buildings around the square were damaged, windows were smashed, cars were destroyed. Molotov cocktails were still splashing on the pavements.
The army called again. They asked me to stop broadcasting the live feed from Tahrir Square. They didn’t want it on the screen. I was told, using the English word, that the picture would be “ugly”. I called around my contacts again. They were all in agreement.
I had no idea what to do. Perhaps I should just show people praying, or have my anchors repeat warnings not to let the country burn. Maybe some patriotic songs. There was only one live shot I had that wasn’t trained on the square, and that was from the camera set up on the tenth floor trained on Qasr El Nil bridge. An empty bridge.
I was given no choice. I was overworked, doing lots of different jobs. I was simultaneously running the three TV stations, several radio stations and fielding calls from the ground, acting as a contact for the army and the public. I’d been doing this for days on barely a few hours sleep. At the same time, I had to manage and all these different parties, both inside and outside the government, as they jostled for position. The pressure was unbearable.
It was coming up to 9pm, so I decided to at least run with the 9 o’clock news. Since the uprising began, we’d abandoned our regular news bulletins. When I talked it over with my staff, we decided we should at least do things properly, so we put together the evening news.
I was in the control room and the news was running when I suddenly fell into a pit of depression. It was, I felt, the lowest point of my professional career as a journalist. I felt that the people around me, who believed what I had told them, who were facing personal attacks from their friends and relatives for working with the State TV, were losing faith in what they were doing. Perhaps they wouldn’t bother coming in to work tomorrow.
I stared at the machines in the office, then looked up to my monitor, not showing the chaos developing less than a few hundred metres down the road. I looked at my staff. Their eyes were sunken. When they turned to me, their eyes seemed to say “What’s happened? This isn’t what we believed in....This isn’t what you told us to do.”
I thought about all the mistakes that had happened, that we had made. I couldn’t do anything about the mistakes I had made; they were out of my hands.
Something snapped inside my head. Perhaps there was something I could do. I stood up and announced to my staff, “right, that’s it, we’re changing the broadcast. Everyone, get hold of everything you can on Tahrir Square.”
I raced around the control room. There was suddenly a flurry of activity in front of the banks of monitors as people raced to get hold of material and control the broadcast. Commands were hastily bashed into keyboards and machines. I got hold of Ahmed Wagih, one of my field reporters, told him to grab a cameraman and get himself down to Tahrir Square straight away.
“Everyone!” I shouted, “don’t take any instructions from anybody but me. Get the link to Tahrir square back onto the screen. NOW!”
I picked up the telephone, and furiously dialled the army, the palace, the intelligence service, everyone who had just dictated to me what I was supposed to be showing on my channels. “LISTEN!” I shouted, “from this moment, I’m not going to do ANYTHING but what I want to! I will not be taking any instructions! If I don’t believe that what you're telling me is true, then I WILL NOT broadcast it! I’m warning you, get that guy on the ninth floor off my back! No one will be giving me ANY ORDERS if you want me to stay! Either that, or I’m leaving, and if I leave, ALL my people will be LEAVING WITH ME!”
I called round everyone with the same message. If they wanted me to stay, I would stay, but I would stay as a professional.
They got the message. From that moment onwards, we didn’t broadcast anything unless we thought it was right to do so. I started doing this job because I wanted to run a professional media organisation. That was how I intended to finish it.
They tried to interfere, of course, but the editorial choice was ours. I know that they put in a call to Anas and told him to let me do my job.
Uprising and revolutions are not peaceful. It’s the nature of what they are. People are always going to get hurt, on all sides. It was a grim night, that night. A lot of people were killed or injured. And everybody was responsible. The president, Gamal and his clique, the NDP, the Brotherhood, the protest groups, everybody.
Most importantly, for far too long I allowed our coverage to be dictated from higher powers. Because of that, I was also responsible.
An Insider's Account of the Uprising in Egypt
by Abdel Latif El-Menawy
Foreword by Michael Binyon OBE
Abdel Latif El-Menawy, the Controller of Egypt's television and radio, tells the inside story of exactly how January 2011's revolution played out. Besieged inside the State TV building for 18 days, El-Menawy was constantly in touch with the President and the ruling clique led by the President's son and heir apparent, Gamal, as well as ministers and officers at the highest levels of the Defence and Intelligence services.
Format: 210 x 125
Binding: Paperback
Extent: 320pp
Price: £12.95
Publication: 25 Jan 2012
ISBN: 978 1 908531 124
With exclusive photographs and screenshots of previously un-broadcast TV footage, this book answers many questions, among them:
• Why did the Army deploy on the streets and where did its loyalty lie?
• Was the revolution really brought about by Facebook and Twitter?
• How did the death of Hosni Mubarak's 12-year-old grandson in 2009 affect the ageing President's day to day running of the country?
• Why did Mubarak not step down until he was alone in Sharm El Sheikh without his wife, his son and all his men?
Abdel Latif El-Menawy is an author and journalist who has covered war zones, political crises and conflicts across the world in a career that has seen him report from Sudan, Bosnia, Libya, Algeria, France, Hong Kong, Germany and the UK. As Head of the News at the Egyptian Radio and Television Union - Egypt's equivalent of the BBC - Menawy oversaw all news content, founded Radio Misr, and pioneered documentary broadcasts.
Michael Binyon is a former Diplomatic Editor of The Times. He is currently a Leader Writer at The Times.
For further information, or to arrange an interview, please contact: Emma O'Bryen, Publicity T: 020 7619 0098 M: 07505 659641 E: eobr@blueyonder.co.uk or Max Scott at Gilgamesh T: 07753 745252 max@gilgamesh-publishing.co.uk
Except from Tahrir: The Last 18 Days of Mubarak
Day Three
It was almost five o’clock when a well-built Republican Presidential Guard officer in bulletproof body armour, carrying his gun, entered my office, flanked by two soldiers.
“The Television building is fully under our control, it is totally secure against protesters’ attempts to storm in, all live studios are under heavy security,” he declared, “any movement in or out of the building has to be in coordination with us.”
It was dusk of Friday the 28th of January, a day known as the “Friday of Rage” by revolutionary Egyptians. In the office, people’s eyes were red, streaming with tears from the stinging tear gas that the police had been launching it at protesters all day down in the square. As the day turned to night we could still see the scenes of confrontation and conflict between protesters and the security forces. We had just seen a CCTV feed of police bombarding protesters with teargas and water cannon atop the Kasr El-Nil Bridge, one of many that stretches across the Nile.
Thousands of protesters faced thousands of policemen in a constant game of hit and run, until the police finally gave way and a wave of protesters swept across the bridge towards Tahrir Square. Within seconds, the police were gone.
It was as if they had never even been there.
It seemed that Egypt’s institutions had disappeared; all that remained was the army out on the streets and the three remaining offices where we worked, on the 5th floor of the State TV building in downtown Cairo. Neither I, nor any of my colleagues or assistants had any idea what was going on that night.
* * * *
Day Seven
In the early evening, around 6 or 7pm, I got two calls from the army. The first said we were to issue a statement saying an “unnamed security source” called on all demonstrators to leave Tahrir Square immediately and that elements of the Muslim Brotherhood were firebombing the crowds from above. I put the text on the screen in two points. One point said that all demonstrators were to leave the square, the second was that some Ihkwan “elements” were throwing petrol bombs from rooftops surrounding Tahrir Square to encourage civil conflict.
A few minutes later I got the second call, where they asked us to broadcast an official warning across our TV channels:
“Because of agitators on their way with firebombs [literally translated as fireballs in Arabic] to Tahrir Square, we plead on all citizens to evacuate the square immediately.”
They asked me to repeat it over and over again.
When the text came in, I called all my contacts in the army, intelligence, cabinet and the palace asking what was going on, as I couldn’t quite believe the warning I’d been given. When questioned, they all agreed that the warning was correct and should be broadcast.
It reminded me of an old black and white film, very famous in Egypt, which features a scene of a man going into a pharmacy to buy medicine. The transaction seems to go smoothly save for the pharmacist’s blunder, silently revealed to the audience in a visual aside. The pharmacist hands the man deadly poison packaged within the benevolent confines of a medicine bottle. When the error was realised, the characters in the film commandeer the local radio station, announcing: “Don’t drink the medicine! This medicine is poison.” The cry was repeated over and over. Now I was calling on the country not to drink the medicine.
We put the warning on a loop, repeated across all our radio and TV channels. While the warnings were going out, I called all my friends in Tahrir Square and begged them to leave, in case they got hurt. When they asked me what was going on, I had to confess that I didn’t actually know, I just wanted them out of there and safe.
We had a reporter with us from Nile TV, the English language station down at the square. Before he went, he came to me to ask permission to get down to the square.
“Yes,” I told the young reporter, “go!”
He looked my in the eye before he headed off, “but” he said, “I will broadcast what I see.”
I looked him back in the eye, telling him, “don’t broadcast anything but what you see.”
We couldn’t give him a camera as we needed approval from the army, so he had to file his reports to the studio over the phone. We called him and told him to hurry back when the reports of firebombs started coming in.
I sent out a call to all of our staff, some of whom were heading to Tahrir, that they should all get away from the square. I pulled back a camera crew that I had sent there earlier.
The battle continued. Rocks and debris were launched at the opposing sides. The facades of the giant stone buildings around the square were damaged, windows were smashed, cars were destroyed. Molotov cocktails were still splashing on the pavements.
The army called again. They asked me to stop broadcasting the live feed from Tahrir Square. They didn’t want it on the screen. I was told, using the English word, that the picture would be “ugly”. I called around my contacts again. They were all in agreement.
I had no idea what to do. Perhaps I should just show people praying, or have my anchors repeat warnings not to let the country burn. Maybe some patriotic songs. There was only one live shot I had that wasn’t trained on the square, and that was from the camera set up on the tenth floor trained on Qasr El Nil bridge. An empty bridge.
I was given no choice. I was overworked, doing lots of different jobs. I was simultaneously running the three TV stations, several radio stations and fielding calls from the ground, acting as a contact for the army and the public. I’d been doing this for days on barely a few hours sleep. At the same time, I had to manage and all these different parties, both inside and outside the government, as they jostled for position. The pressure was unbearable.
It was coming up to 9pm, so I decided to at least run with the 9 o’clock news. Since the uprising began, we’d abandoned our regular news bulletins. When I talked it over with my staff, we decided we should at least do things properly, so we put together the evening news.
I was in the control room and the news was running when I suddenly fell into a pit of depression. It was, I felt, the lowest point of my professional career as a journalist. I felt that the people around me, who believed what I had told them, who were facing personal attacks from their friends and relatives for working with the State TV, were losing faith in what they were doing. Perhaps they wouldn’t bother coming in to work tomorrow.
I stared at the machines in the office, then looked up to my monitor, not showing the chaos developing less than a few hundred metres down the road. I looked at my staff. Their eyes were sunken. When they turned to me, their eyes seemed to say “What’s happened? This isn’t what we believed in....This isn’t what you told us to do.”
I thought about all the mistakes that had happened, that we had made. I couldn’t do anything about the mistakes I had made; they were out of my hands.
Something snapped inside my head. Perhaps there was something I could do. I stood up and announced to my staff, “right, that’s it, we’re changing the broadcast. Everyone, get hold of everything you can on Tahrir Square.”
I raced around the control room. There was suddenly a flurry of activity in front of the banks of monitors as people raced to get hold of material and control the broadcast. Commands were hastily bashed into keyboards and machines. I got hold of Ahmed Wagih, one of my field reporters, told him to grab a cameraman and get himself down to Tahrir Square straight away.
“Everyone!” I shouted, “don’t take any instructions from anybody but me. Get the link to Tahrir square back onto the screen. NOW!”
I picked up the telephone, and furiously dialled the army, the palace, the intelligence service, everyone who had just dictated to me what I was supposed to be showing on my channels. “LISTEN!” I shouted, “from this moment, I’m not going to do ANYTHING but what I want to! I will not be taking any instructions! If I don’t believe that what you're telling me is true, then I WILL NOT broadcast it! I’m warning you, get that guy on the ninth floor off my back! No one will be giving me ANY ORDERS if you want me to stay! Either that, or I’m leaving, and if I leave, ALL my people will be LEAVING WITH ME!”
I called round everyone with the same message. If they wanted me to stay, I would stay, but I would stay as a professional.
They got the message. From that moment onwards, we didn’t broadcast anything unless we thought it was right to do so. I started doing this job because I wanted to run a professional media organisation. That was how I intended to finish it.
They tried to interfere, of course, but the editorial choice was ours. I know that they put in a call to Anas and told him to let me do my job.
Uprising and revolutions are not peaceful. It’s the nature of what they are. People are always going to get hurt, on all sides. It was a grim night, that night. A lot of people were killed or injured. And everybody was responsible. The president, Gamal and his clique, the NDP, the Brotherhood, the protest groups, everybody.
Most importantly, for far too long I allowed our coverage to be dictated from higher powers. Because of that, I was also responsible.