Inside the Cairo neighborhood that won’t stop protesting

CAIRO, Egypt — During Egypt’s 2011 revolution, nearly every main square in every town was filled with people calling for “bread, freedom, social justice.”

It was commonplace to hear “we will not leave the square” or “we’ll always have Tahrir,” both expressions of the will to carry on until those three aims were achieved.

Today, hardly anyone dares take to the streets, particularly after a law was passed in 2013 outlawing protests without permits.

But in Matareya — a low-income neighborhood in Northeastern Cairo — the battle continues.

Since the removal of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi in July of 2013 and the violent dispersal of a sit-in of his supporters at Rabaa el-Adaweya that left over 800 dead, Matareya has remained a hotbed of dissent.

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Three days after the protests that marked the fourth anniversary of the revolution, Matareya feels like a city under martial law — with army green jeeps and APCs circling the neighborhood. The heads of officers rise out of them, faces obscured by black balaclavas, their guns pointed straight ahead.

A young boy of about eleven flashes the four-fingered salute that commemorates the Rabaa massacre at the retreating back of an APC. Two women on either side of him jump to put his hand down.

Adults look on, uneasy. When asked about the protests in recent days, the owner of a shop says: “I wasn’t here, I had a funeral to go to in Upper Egypt.”

“He was here,” a local resident says, “and his shop was open, he is just afraid to talk.”

Walls all over the neighborhood are covered in graffiti reading “Sisi is a pimp” or “Sisi, leave.”

Molotovs and fireworks

On the anniversary of the revolution this year, Matareya saw some of the deadliest violence in Egypt. Eighteen people were killed, including a ten-year-old boy.

Local resident Hisham (not his real name) took part in the protests. “Marches were to set out from five different places in Matareya on January 25, all of them mosques. But the security forces were ready for us,” he says.

He was in the El-Rahman mosque. At noon there were four APCs in front of the door waiting for them, he says. The would-be protesters ran. He says the security forces shot first with tear gas and birdshot and that the protesters retaliated with fireworks and hastily-fashioned Molotov cocktails.

A local resident said it was the protesters who started the confrontation by throwing fireworks.

Hisham says women carried backpacks full of cotton, bandages and other medical supplies and treated minor injuries in the side streets. The injured are afraid to go to public hospitals for fear of being arrested, he adds.

“We wanted other neighborhoods to do what Matareya did. If all the other neighborhoods did what we did, things would be different,” he says.

While many of Matareya’s residents share the zeal of the protesters, not everyone is supportive.

Doaa sits on a plastic crate selling fruit. She says she was in this exact spot during the protests with her two children. She is one of the many small-scale vegetable and fruit sellers who lost two days of business because of the fighting. She says that she felt the army and police were part of the people and should not be attacked.

Thousands imprisoned

So what makes this neighborhood different from the rest? Why has Matareya continued to fight, while nearly everywhere else has stopped?

“In Matareya Islamist sympathies are strong, there’s a high level of poverty and low level of education,” says Hisham. “I want my children to have a decent place to live and a good education. Today, as in 2011, we are calling for bread, freedom, social justice, human dignity. As you see people are scared.”

In addition to being a neighborhood, like others in Cairo, where many struggle to make enough to feel their families, Matareya has a high level of Muslim Brotherhood support.

Thousands of Brotherhood supporters have been imprisoned since Morsi’s ouster in 2013 and the group has been outlawed and declared a terrorist organization. Relations between residents and security forces here have long been strained and in 2014 there were multiple deaths in police custody.

The largest confrontation between protesters and security forces was on Freedom street. A charred body of a car attests to the recent battle scene. A busy market hub, normally the street is lined with large metal dumpsters on both sides. On January 25, the protesters used them to build a barricade with which they blocked the road, and behind which they hid from police projectiles while they launched their own.

“Of course they were defending themselves with those [Molotovs and firecrackers] and everyone sees it that way,” says Hisham.

So yesterday the army took them away. They were dumped a few streets away blackened and empty.

Today, the trash piles up on Freedom Street.