Students and faculty crowded into the lecture hall in the Public Affairs Center (PAC) last Thursday afternoon while a live feed of the massive protests in Cairo, Egypt were streamed from the Al Jazeera English website and projected onto a screen. The panel discussion featured Andrus Professor of History Bruce Masters, Assistant Professor of Government Anne Peters, and Alex Meadow ’12, who studied abroad in Egypt last semester. Muslim Chaplain Marwa Aly, who organized the panel along with the Muslim Student Association and the members of Turath House, moderated the event.

The panel was quickly assembled in response to the rapidly growing demonstrations in the country.  Egyptian citizens demanded that President Hosni Mubarak, who ruled the country with an iron fist since 1981, resign immediately. At the time of the event on Thursday, Mubarak had publicly refused to resign until the end of his term in September in a televised speech. The day following the panel, however, Mubarak reportedly fled the capitol, and the Egyptian military took over in the interim. The military has dissolved the Egyptian constitution and parliament and has stated that there will be parliamentary elections in September.

Chaplain Aly said she organized the event to help students better understand the implications of the protests at home and abroad.

“Students were asking questions and it was important to understand that our American values were not necessarily aligned with our interests in the Middle East,” she said. “I thought that this would be an opportune time to provide a platform for experts at Wesleyan to explain the background of the corruption and the implications this would have on U.S. foreign policy specifically, and the world generally.”

All three speakers reflected on their personal experiences in Egypt to put the protests in context. Meadow, who noted that he got out of the country just before the demonstrations began, said that he was surprised by the protests, and didn’t see any tension building while he was studying there.

“I felt safer in Egypt than I do walking the streets of Middletown at night,” he said. “Mubarak had such a tight grip on society.”

Peters explained that past protests in Egypt had been mostly unsuccessful.

“When I was in Egypt working on my dissertation [2007-2008] there was low turnout for a protest in 2007,” she said. “People were pretty pessimistic about the power of Egyptian protests to produce domestic change. Police abuse in Egypt is rampant. I lived near a police station in Cairo and you could occasionally hear people crying out.”

She attributes the success of the recent protests to widespread internet access, as well as the success of Tunisian protesters in ousting President Ben Ali on Jan. 14.

“Lots of these protests were organized using new social media like Facebook and Twitter,” Peters said. “You can access them at an Internet café. You don’t need to be particularly wealthy. Also, the Tunisia trigger made people change their frame of reference.”

The protests were largely organized and attended by Egyptian youth who grew up in the online era. Masters believes this new generation may represent a drastic change from their parents’ generation, which he said were “famous for being passive.”

“This generation of Arabs are quite different from the ones who were my friends,” Masters said. “I think this generation has moved and grown in a way their parents could not.”

Masters also correctly predicted that the Egyptian Armed Forces, which is a conscription army in which all citizens serve for one to three years, would play an important part in the transition of power.

“I don’t like to make predictions,” he said. “The only thing I can give you is the army will be part of it. Is the army going to move towards the democratization? Maybe. The army isn’t just the army. It owns hotels. It owns the factories that make all the plastic in Egypt. I can imagine a more democratic Egypt and that’s what I’m hoping for.”

In an e-mail to The Argus, Peters expressed her excitement over more recent developments in Egypt.

“I think that Mubarak’s resignation is a tremendous victory for the Egyptian people, and a first step towards the orderly transition that the Obama administration has been supporting for the past two weeks,” she wrote. “However, much remains to be done in terms of ensuring that Egypt’s next set of elections, to occur in six months, will be free and fair and that the military and remaining elements of the Mubarak regime transition out of political power.”

Aly expressed her own jubilation at the news of the protests’ success.

“When Mubarak stepped down, I could hardly believe it,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Argus. “It was a great day to be alive and I’m grateful to have witnessed it. It couldn’t have happened without all of the sacrifice from the Egyptian youth. All the martyrs that died during the days of protests were so young. In order for their sacrifices not to be in vain, we need to see to it that the military will abide by the demands of the protestors. They have already dissolved the Parliament and lifted the emergency law; however, that is only scraping the surface of the changes which need to happen. The road ahead will be long and will need a resilient group of civilians, activists, thinkers, and above all just leaders, to realize a democratic Egypt.”