Richmond professor in Cairo reports on Egyptian upheaval

The media coverage of recent events in Cairo was unprecedented in the history of world revolutions, said Sheila Carapico, political science professor at the University of Richmond who is currently on sabbatical in Cairo.

Carapico published an article in Foreign Policy magazine about her "ring-side seat" to the massive protests against the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak starting in January.

"Never before have foreign television crews perched on balconies of high-rise buildings overlooking the center of the action given the world continuous real-time panoptic on images of such momentous upheaval," she wrote.

Teaching at the American University in Cairo, Carapico has lost most of her American students that were studying abroad, she said, because they were forced to evacuate the country by their home university during the protests.

Carapico had seen some American news coverage on the growing tensions in Egypt when she was home in January, but her first big news of the revolution came from Facebook, she said.

Circulating through Facebook was a video of a mother whose son had been beaten so badly in a police station that he was killed, she said.

The four-minute video showed the woman pleading in Arabic for people to protest on Jan. 25, Police Day, in Egypt -- and they did, Carapico said.

That day was the first day of the protests that lasted through Feb. 11, when Mubarak announced he was stepping down.

But Carapico had never expected them to continue, she said. She went to work Jan. 26 being vaguely aware of the building protests, she said. It was not until she went downtown that she realized what was happening around her, she said.

The only day Carapico felt scared or unsafe was Friday, Jan. 28, the day military officers used tear gas against protesters, she said.

What had previously been peaceful protests, erupted in violence, she said. Police had completely abandoned everything and there were fires in street, she said.

She had been lucky to get home that night, she said, because a family with five children in a car, whom Carapico had never met, picker her up and gave her a ride home.

"It was a very scary evening," she said. "But at the same time, strangers were taking care of me."

When the announcement came that Mubarak was stepping down, there was a huge street party throughout the entire city, Carapico said. It was a mass celebration with beating drums, fireworks and honking horns, she said.

The Egyptian government shut down the Internet and cell phone service during the protests, which "pissed people off," Carapico said.

It created a more anxious environment and with a five o'clock curfew put into place, her apartment was lonely at night with no Internet, she said.

Now, the curfew has been lifted, the state television seems to be filled with a little less propaganda, and the environment in Cairo seems stable, Carapico said.

The protests have created a huge national conversation, Carapico said. Some of her students had participated in the protests and wanted to talk about them when classes resumed but others did not, possibly because they might not support it, she said.

Tahrir square has become sort of a tourist spot, she said. Now, families with children wearing face paint and holding flags have turned the atmosphere into a street carnival, she said.

Military tanks still sit on street corners and in front of some major buildings, but the military is no longer walking around the streets, she said.

Carapico has been in Cairo since the beginning of 2010 and will continue to teach at the American University in Cairo through June.

Contact staff writer Brittany Brady at brittany.brady@richmond.edu