Gitana, you bring up many excellent points. For folks who don't understand the Middle East, its people, its politics, its history - it's hard to get a grasp on what is really happening over there. And what is happening is so intertwined on many levels with other issues: an overpopulous country with millions living in poverty and no way to support them; a worldwide economic depression that is making that situation worse; a corrupt government; a fragile balance between being an Arabic nation with so many Western influences and ties; etc., etc.
My husband and I were discussing all of this again - as we have been all day. His specialty is the Middle East for his job and he has spent years traveling/working all over that region -- Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Kuwait, and then I moved with him to Egypt. Even so, he admits knowing very little about what is going on and what the real issues are. I think it's a case of, "the more you know, the more you realize you don't know" for him. He knows quite a bit but he realizes there's so much more out there to know, kwim? I agree and I feel that I know just enough to get myself in trouble if I start giving my opinion about the politics of it all. So I'm not going to comment on that part right now.
However, from what I do know and have seen: I believe that whatever happens over there - the new leader (and there will be one, IMHO), the new government - has a daunting task:
how do you revive a country that is so overrun with poverty and unemployment? When we lived there, unemployment was rumored to be about 30%, although "officially" it was much lower. (With the govt having no transparency, who knows how they came up with the numbers they did?) It was my first time out of the U.S. when we arrived - and I had never seen anything like it.
--There are many many people living in poverty. There was an upper class and huge lower class, with a budding/growing middle class. Most of the homes of the lower class did not have proper sewage/sanitation.
--Trash is dumped in the Nile, in the canals, anywhere they can put it. You can smell it. There are sections of town and even streets in our neighborhood where you knew to roll up the window before you got there because the smell was so bad.
--Many can't afford the "public" schools because there are still fees associated with it, and even those that can, the majority of the lower class (which make up the largest part of the population) don't go beyond sixth grade - and even before then most of those don't bother to attend.
--When it rained while we lived there (two days in 1 1/2 years), the streets flooded b/c there is not a drainage system - and the puddles that remained afterwards reeked of raw sewage on the street in front of our villa. I remember stepping ever so carefully over and around them, for a week or two before it receded and soaked into the ground.
So, yes, a lot of people are discontented, but how do you solve it?
How do you create jobs or improve conditions for millions of people? Even here in the U.S., where we have much more money, much less poverty, and a much more stable government, we can't even manage to fix our own struggling economy right now. Imagine how difficult of a task this is in a country like Egypt.
It's also very hard to go back and fix a government where corruption is so rampant and so entrenched throughout the whole system. We saw it on the very low levels. This type of corruption starts at the highest levels of the government and filters down, because generally if it's not tolerated at the top then it's not tolerated at the bottom.
Two examples of corruption that we personally experienced:
1) When we lived there, I used the internet all the time through our phone line. It was never explained to us that data is billed by the minute. When we went to leave, I had to go to the phone company (gov't owned) and pay the phone bill. You get the bill something like once a year, and we got ours a few weeks before we were leaving. Our landlord reminded us to pay and get a receipt: our bill said that we owed the equivalent of about $1000 USD. We were shocked but there was nothing to do about it. We just didn't know - and our landlord didn't tell us because they assumed that we knew and that it was that way back here in the States. With my husband working, I went down to the phone company to pay the bill. It is a cash-based society (mainly) and so I went in with cash (almost 4000 LE -- Egyptian pounds). That is probably a year's salary for the workers at the phone company. I was the only woman in the lobby that was filled to capacity, stifling hot, and smelled dirty. Behind the desks were about 10 people taking money and many more working at desks behind them. I believe there was one woman back there but I can't recall now. When it was my turn, I kept saying, "Ingleezee, min fadlak?" ("English, please?"). There was one English-speaking teller and I was directed to him. Several of his buddies left their stations/desk to gather around and see what this Western woman needed. I showed him the phone bill and he said that he could help. I told him that I would need a receipt and he said no problem. He counted out the money with folks hanging over his shoulder. He wrote out a receipt, showed it to a few folks who nodded, and handed it to me. I could speak very little Arabic and could read/write even less, but I did recognize the dollar amount of what I had paid. He also scribbled something on the bill and circled the dollar amount. Satisfied, I left. Knowing my flight date, our landlord called a few days later to tell me that the phone bill had not been paid. I told her that it had been and that I had a receipt. She said she would have someone check again and get back with us. I then stared at the receipt, and got nervous. When my husband came home from work, I ran out and showed his driver and asked him what it said. He said that it said really nothing - just that I had asked how much we owed and the man basically rewrote the bill on another piece of paper. They had stolen our money. We relayed our story to the landlord, who went to the phone company and was told that I did not pay them anything. We left the country without paying again. What really bothered me is this: it was not just one gov't employee -- there were at least a dozen people watching who knew exactly what was going on. I'm sure they all split the money when I left.
2) We bought a vehicle there and had to have the registration switched over. Because we were expats, it's a different process with a lot of paperwork. As with most things over there with the govt offices, it involved baksheesh (tips) that kept getting higher and higher with each step. It took forever and a day -- and lots of sitting and sitting at the gov't office. And with each step, they would come back out and say they needed more baksheesh. When my husband finally got fed up and complained (my husband went with an Egyptian coworker), he was told to leave if he didn't like it. We had no choice but to pay in order to get the correct tags/permits so that the sale could take place.
(And if you really want to read a story, read this one:
http://www.cruisingworld.com/destinations/places/baksheesh)
The human rights issues are a whole 'nother post... but my brain is tired after writing all of this out. I really do love the country and its people. And my heart is with them as they struggle right now. I'll leave you guys with this picture of what you don't see in the tourist books and to give you an idea of
what we saw nearly every day. This isn't going to be easy to fix:
