Issue No. 596
Opinion
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25 - 31 July 2002 Issue No. 596 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Not far from normal day
It would be impossible to forget my first encounter with the revolution, the moment when I first became aware of what was happening. On 23 July I was on my way to my office at the ministry where I worked; it appeared a perfectly normal working day. I had arrived at the tram station early in the morning with the intention of buying the papers and boarding the train that was my regular form of transport. But when I got there what struck me was the absence of trams. There were no trams to be seen. After waiting for a long time I went back to the newspaper vendor and asked him what happened to the trams. "The army is on strike," he said, explaining that soldiers had been positioned at the end of the line between Heliopolis and Abbassiya.
How can the army go on strike? I couldn't get my head around that, so I went back again to the vendor and asked again, "Did you say the army is on strike?" When he insisted that this was indeed the case, I remembered the Officers' Club elections incident, in which Mohamed Naguib had come out the winner against the palace candidate. The king refused to accept the result, causing great discontent among the officers. I thought the strike must be about that. So I set off along the street on foot and on the way encountered a tank parked in front the radio building. It was then that I finally realised that this was not an average day, that something significant was going on.
I didn't actually find out about the revolution until I reached the ministry. The late Abdel-Rahman Fahmi, the minister's secretary, told me what had happened. We sat together and listened to the officers' manifesto, which was broadcast on the radio several times in a row.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
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