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11 Pyramid Schemes Cairo, Egypt: April 2011 Friday, April 8, 11 a.m. | She wants me to look at the sign she holds high above the heads of protesters and read the words she has written on either side of a photograph of her five-year-old grandson. “From the revolution where are my rights” “I’m an innocent child release my father” And this below his picture: “Bring my father out quickly “Bring my father out injustice is not good. “Bring my father out I want to see him “I see everything dark without my father “Bring my father out or you will go to hell” Dozens of people push and shove, jostling around the grandmother, forty-eight-year-old Magada Ahmed Mohammad. They are spinning in circles, moving one way and then another, with no apparent purpose other than to escape the crush of bodies descending on Cairo’s Tahrir Square for today’s demonstration, a day of “cleansing and prosecution,” as organizers have called it. Two months earlier similar gatherings in the square forced Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to leave office. Those demonstrations also had names: “The Day of Revolt,” “The Friday of Anger,” and, most memorably , “The Friday of Departure,” when Mubarak quit the presidency on February 11. 181 182 lost and gone Now the youth movement that defied him has grown impatient with the slow pace of change since he left office. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that now rules the country appears reluctant to prosecute Mubarak and his cabinet for corruption and human rights abuses. So the hundreds of protesters now clogging the square have decided to demonstrate once again and to stay until Mubarak and his cronies are arrested and charged with crimes. Magada sits on a green railing, holding her sign aloft, her black hair hanging as loosely around her lined face as the baggy rumpled blouse that sags around her body. She is in the square for an altogether different reason than the protesters. She seeks justice for her thirty-year-old son, Abdel-Hamid Mohammad, the father of her grandson, whose wide-eyed photo stands out among all the hand-held Egyptian flags waving around it. Magada hopes someone in the square will see the photo and ask about it. Someone who has the clout to do something on behalf of the boy’s father. She thought I might be that someone, until I explain through my Egyptian colleague Rashad that I am an American journalist covering the protest. She purses her lips and nods, giving me a look that lets me know I am of no use to her but rather another example of the bittersweet days following the fall of Mubarak, when hope spread throughout the country and region and even helped inspire a revolt in Libya, before those expectations began to be overshadowed by the lingering hangover of the despot’s long reign: government corruption, including money laundering and profiteering; a nearly 10 percent unemployment rate; and the continued mass arrests of political opponents. Magada tells Rashad that Abdel-Hamid was detained in November 2007 for marijuana possession and drug dealing and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Magada insists crooked police manufactured the allegations against him. She has left messages at the prime minister ’s office, at the district attorney’s office, and with secretaries to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. No one responds. As she tells her story, Magada’s sense of isolation increases with the rising bustle around us. The commotion reminds me more of the Super Bowl than a protest. Vendors hawk black and red wristbands—the colors of the Egyptian flag—E-shaped key chains, and V-for-victory pins. Boys sell chocolate candy, peanuts, and popcorn. Bugs Bunny, Cinderella, and SpongeBob balloons bob beneath banners denouncing Mubarak. Pyramid Schemes 183 The beaming white mustachioed face of Colonel Sanders, just feet away at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, offers American-style fast food and large glass windows for hastily scrawled protest signs taped crookedly across advertisements for family-friendly Variety Big Box Meals: “The people want prosecutions!” “Put Mubarak on trial!” “We will not leave until a judgment is passed on Mubarak!” Various demonstrations have used the square as a rallying point for years, including the 1977 Egyptian bread riots and the March 2003 rally against the U.S.-led war in Iraq. A large and busy traffic circle occupies its center. A statue of Omar Makram, who resisted Napoleon...

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