CAIRO – As the plane banks towards Cairo airport, passengers peer from the windows onto the highways below, empty of the cars usually inching along in heavy traffic at all hours of the day and night. Arriving in Egypt’s protest-shaken capital after curfew, visitors quickly see how the usually heaving, noisy city has been transformed by eight days of demonstrations against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
At the arrivals terminal, immigration booths that are usually fully staffed and tending to enthusiastic tourists are now mostly empty. Two officials process the lone arrivals, a group of journalists. “To be honest, you’ve arrived at a terrible time,” one official tells them. In the departures lounge, hundreds of tourists wait for flights out of the turmoil that has swept Egypt as protesters seek to end Mubarak’s 30-year rule.
The military has declared a curfew from 3:00 pm to 8:00 am, stationing tanks on major roads and near key government buildings and hotels. But Egyptian citizens, terrorised by reports of looting and home invasions, have set up their own checkpoints, intent on preventing their homes from being targeted. At the airport car park, the standard throng of taxi drivers offering their best price to take people into town has disappeared.
After curfew, it is virtually impossible to convince anyone to risk venturing onto the roads, but eventually a driver agrees to take a group into town over the objections of his boss, who insists it is unsafe. The highway from the airport is eerily empty for 9:00 pm, early evening by Egyptian standards, and the bus speeds along before arriving at the first checkpoint of the evening, a tank in the middle of the road.
A soldier peers into the bus, but waves it through after a cursory glance at the driver’s identity card. After a second military checkpoint, and a third, the bus encounters its first civilian stop, manned by five Egyptian men, in the upscale neighbourhood of Heliopolis, not far from Mubarak’s presidential palace. Each wields a weapon: shotguns, knives lashed to bamboo, pistols, sticks and metal bars.
They scrutinise the driver’s licence and identity card but allow the bus to pass. Inside the neighbourhood, the checkpoints multiply, with the bus stopping almost every 500 metres.
