EGYPT CELEBRATES LIBYAN REVOLUTION VICTORY

The apparent victory in Libya was joyously met in its next door neighbour, Egypt, and in ways hard to imagine: Ahram Online gets the reaction in Cairo

Mostafa Ali, Tuesday 23 Aug 2011

 

 

Protesters celebrating Gaddafi's fall at Embassy in Cairo (Photo: Mai Shaheen)

 

Egyptians rejoiced and celebrated as news agencies reported that Libyan rebels have entered the Libyan capital of Tripoli and were close to ending the 42-year-old regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

For months now many people in Egypt have supported the Libyan revolution against Gaddafi and prayed for the dictator’s fall.

Back in February when the anti-Gaddafi rebellion started, thousands of Egyptians, fresh from toppling their own dictator, Mubarak, joined Libyan protesters at numerous rallies in front of the Libyan embassy in the Zamalek district of Cairo to support the rebels' cause.

In Libya itself, tens of Egyptians who worked and lived there for years actually picked up weapons and joined the armed rebellion against Gaddafi.

But, with the Libyan rebels in control of over 93 percent of their country and Gaddafi apparently on the run in the last 24 hours, Egyptians focused, like the majority of Libyans, on celebrating this historic moment.

Mahmoud, a security guard in downtown Cairo interviewed by Ahram Online, called Gaddafi’s fall one of the happiest days in the history of all Arab peoples. “He was an ignorant dictator who ruled his country with an iron fist,” Mahmoud said.

Mary, a political activist with the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, was also elated that Gaddafi was on his way out. “I am really happy for the Libyan people today,” she told Ahram Online.

In a coffee shop in downtown Cairo, a supervisor at Akhbar Al Youm newspaper told Ahram Online that the rebellion of the Libyan people against Gaddafi was justified. “Gaddafi believed, like Mubarak did in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia, that he was a pharaoh and that he could rule forever,” he said. “But he had to go, like the other Arab dictators because they were all tyrants,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, Egyptian newspapers have been running story after story that reflect public excitement over Gaddafi’s fall.

For example, in the popular Al-Destour online daily website, writer Abdel Moneim Hussein ran a poem that celebrated the fall of Gaddafi. In the poem, Abdel Moneim taunts the dictator for having described the rebels as “rats” back in winter, as well as threatening to chase them into holes in the ground. He gloats:

"Which hole are you hiding in, now?

Are you hiding with the cockroaches in the sewers?

Or are you hiding among the rats in garbage bins?"

Meanwhile, tens of Egyptians tweeted messages of joy over Gaddafi’s demise to friends and followers.

“I am in tears with my Libyan friends here outside their embassy,” tweeted one supporter. “Hopefully, we will have all new leaders in the Arab world by the time the next Arab summit is held,” tweeted another.

Some Egyptians felt that the Egyptian government made a mistake in not recognising Libya’s rebel-led National Transitional Council before yesterday.

“Our government should have endorsed the Libyan rebels long ago. Instead, they walked the fence and did not take a principled position,” Mary, a political activist, told Ahram online.

Egypt and Libya have enjoyed close, but often tense relations over the course of the last four decades.
Since the oil boom started in the Arab world in the 1960s, millions of Egyptians have travelled and worked in Libya.

Millions of dollars in remittances that Egyptian workers in Libya sent home over the course of many years have kept countless numbers of families afloat in difficult times. On the other hand, Egyptian workers, teachers, engineers and doctors made significant contributions in the social and economic development of their next door neighbour.

In fact, at the time of the start of the rebellion against Gaddafi last winter, 1.5 million Egyptians still worked and lived in Libya; a whopping one-fourth of the total population of the host country.

However, back in the 1970s Egyptian-Libyan relations suffered major setbacks because Gaddafi opposed Egypt's late president, Sadat's, peace deal with Israel.

During the summer of 1976, Gaddafi expelled 225,000 Egyptian workers from Libya in order to send a strong message to Sadat.

For months after that, Sadat and Gaddafi exchanged accusations that each of them was conspiring to topple the other.

In the summer of 1977 the two countries actually went to war against each another and the Egyptian army occupied parts of eastern Libya, on its border with Egypt, for a brief period.

After Sadat’s assassination in 1981 Mubarak, who took over as president of Egypt, slowly rebuilt political and economic ties with Libya. Ironically, by the 1990’s Mubarak and Gaddafi became strong political allies on the Arab scene.

Nonetheless, throughout the years many Egyptians have always found Colonel Gaddafi’s style and rhetoric to be quite eccentric and somewhat ridiculous.

There has never been a shortage of Gaddafi jokes in coffee shops in Cairo or Alexandria (Egypt's second-largest city). The Colonel’s bizarre outfits, lavish-mobile-tents and the four-hour-long speeches he loved to give at international events was plenty of fodder.

One such famous joke made fun of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s seemingly never-ending hold on power. "Gaddafi dedicates a song by the famous Arab singer Nancy Ajram to his people: ‘I May Get Upset with You, But I Will Never Leave You.’”

Twenty-four hours after Gaddafi disappeared new jokes about him made their way into the mainstream: “Colonel Gaddafi declares in a new speech that he is the leader of the next Libyan revolution,” joked one Egyptian with his friends on Facebook yesterday.

Jokes aside, a genuine sense of relief and hope crossed over to the Egyptian streets after the rebels entered Tripoli.

Some Egyptians who support the January 25 Revolution are feeling that much-needed political and moral support could come to their nascent revolution from their western borders.

“There is no doubt that the Arab revolutions have given us a degree of freedom, allowing us to organise to change things for the better,” our colleague and friend at the coffee shop added.

“The Arab Spring has to continue spreading. Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad has to go next,” the security guard said in a decisive tone.