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NY Review of Books, JUNE 8, 2017 ISSUE
Egypt: The New Dictatorship
Joshua Hammer
The Egyptians: A Radical History of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution
by Jack Shenker
New Press, 538 pp., $32.50
Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism: Illiberal Intelligentsia and
the Future of Egyptian Democracy
edited by Dalia F. Fahmy and Daanish Faruqi
Oneworld, 388 pp., $35.00 (paper)
On July 3, 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, chief of staff of the
Egyptian Armed Forces, appeared on national television. Clad in a
military uniform and black beret, he announced that he was acting on “a
call for help by the Egyptian people” and seizing power from the Muslim
Brotherhood. Since winning parliamentary elections in 2011 and the
presidential election the following year, the Brotherhood—a grassroots
movement founded in Egypt in the 1920s—had stacked the government with
Islamists, failed to deliver on promises to improve the country’s
deteriorating infrastructure, and attempted to rewrite Egypt’s
constitution to reflect traditional religious values. These moves had
provoked large demonstrations and violent clashes between supporters and
secular opponents.
Sisi declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group and jailed its
leadership—including the president he had deposed, Mohamed Morsi. Six
weeks later, on August 13, he ordered the police to clear Brotherhood
supporters from protest camps at two squares in Cairo: al-Nahda and
Rabaa al-Adawiya. According to official health ministry statistics, 595
civilians and forty-three police officers were killed in exceptionally
violent confrontations with the protesters, but the Brotherhood claims
that the number of victims was much higher.
That fall, Sisi launched a sweeping crackdown on civil society. Citing
the need to restore security and stability, the regime banned protests,
passed antiterrorism laws that mandated long prison terms for acts of
civil disobedience, gave prosecutors broad powers to extend pretrial
detention periods, purged liberal and pro-Islamist judges, and froze the
bank accounts of NGOs and law firms that defend democracy activists.
Human rights groups in Egypt estimate that between 40,000 and 60,000
political prisoners, including both Muslim Brotherhood members and
secular pro-democracy activists, now languish in the country’s jails.
Twenty prisons have been built since Sisi took power.
In October 2013, President Barack Obama demonstrated his disapproval of
the violent crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood supporters by suspending
military aid to Egypt. The aid—including a dozen F-16 fighter jets,
twenty Harpoon missiles, and up to 125 US Abrams M1A1 tank kits—was
restored eight months later. By that point, Sisi had shed his military
uniform and become Egypt’s civilian president, winning more than 95
percent of the vote in a stage-managed May 2014 election. But Obama kept
his distance, refusing to invite Sisi to the White House.
Donald Trump, who has spoken bluntly about “radical Islamic terrorism”
and appears to share Sisi’s view that the Muslim Brotherhood is involved
in such activity, quickly signaled his support for the military
government. Sisi was the first Arab leader with whom Trump spoke after
his inauguration, and in April the US president invited him to the White
House for what was described as a cordial private meeting. According to
reports, Trump did not broach the subject of human rights violations,
and observers believe that his embrace may embolden the Egyptian leader
to extend his repressive policies.
But recent events in Egypt have raised the question of whether the
tradeoff Sisi has offered the Egyptian public—keeping them safe in
exchange for an authoritarian state and far-reaching restrictions on
civil society—is working. In the northern Sinai Peninsula, an Islamic
State–affiliated group called Sinai Province has launched an alarming
number of attacks on security forces in recent months. The group has
claimed to have killed 1,500 people—including security forces and
“collaborators”—since the beginning of 2016. (Egyptian military
officials say that number is wildly exaggerated.)
International peacekeepers describe the fighting in Sinai as starting to
resemble the conflict in Afghanistan, with a committed army of religious
fundamentalists, rocket and sniper attacks on foreign military
observers, and defections by government troops angered by the state’s
persecution of Islamists. “They are globally inspired local insurgents,”
Major-General Denis Thompson, the Canadian former commander of the
peacekeeping force, said in a recent interview. “And their effort is
really to use the [ISIS] brand to attract recruits, and locally they’re
trying to redress many long-standing grievances they have with the
Egyptian government.” Abuses by the military may also be drawing more
local men to the ISIS cause. In late April, Human Rights Watch urged the
US government to suspend military aid to Egypt after a video surfaced
showing troops executing eight captured insurgents, then planting rifles
next to their corpses to make it look as if they were killed in combat.
Meanwhile, a previously unknown militant group called Lewaa El-Thawra
(Revolution Brigade) has taken the Islamist insurgency to more populous
parts of the country. At dawn on a Saturday morning last October, a
senior Egyptian army officer who commanded forces in the Sinai was shot
dead by members of the group outside his home in an affluent Cairo
suburb. In early April, the group injured a dozen policemen in an attack
on a training academy in the Nile Delta. “The current regime has
destroyed the people’s revolution, killed its members, and imprisoned
others,” the brigade declared in a video released last fall, announcing
that it was going to war to avenge the Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda
killings. “Our message to the Interior Ministry’s mercenaries is that
you all will be fired upon soon.”
Far more worrisome for Egypt’s stability, however, has been a series of
large-scale attacks on the country’s Coptic Christian minority. Copts,
who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 90 million people, have been
repeatedly attacked since the 2011 revolution, and numerous churches
have been bombed. Many Christians blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for this
violence and supported the coup that brought Sisi to power.
But the most recent attacks have caused many Christians to question that
support. In December, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a chapel
beside Egypt’s main Coptic cathedral in Cairo, killing twenty-five. Two
months later, ISIS released a video that called Christians the
jihadists’ “favorite prey” and vowed that the Cairo bombing was “only
the beginning” of a campaign to “kill every infidel.” On Palm Sunday,
two attackers detonated explosive vests within hours of each other at
crowded Coptic churches in Alexandria and the Nile Delta. The
coordinated bombings, for which the Islamic State again assumed
responsibility, killed forty-five people and injured more than one
hundred. It was the deadliest day of attacks against Christians in
modern Egyptian history.
Some Egyptian intelligence officials believe that jihadists, facing
pressure in other parts of the Middle East, are intent on opening a new
front in Egypt. Many of the six hundred Egyptians believed to have
fought with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq have apparently
abandoned the conflict in recent months and drifted home. With its
erratic security forces, proximity to other jihadist battlefields, large
Christian minority, repression of Islamists, and large population of
young Muslims unmoored and angered by the authoritarian rule of Sisi,
Egypt may present a rich opportunity for jihad.
Ayman Abdelmeguid, a member of the now outlawed April 6 Youth Movement,
a secular opposition group that helped launch the Egyptian revolution,
spent several weeks locked in a small cell with dozens of Muslim
Brotherhood members last year after his arrest for violating the protest
law. Many of these young men, who faced indefinite incarceration without
trial, had been drawn to jihadism, he told me, by their experience in
Sisi’s prisons. “The guys who started to shift toward violence had the
sole idea of revenge and breaking the regime,” he said. “They argued
that the regime deliberately killed, tortured, raped, and imprisoned
them and their families and friends and hence deserved an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth.” If these men were released, Abdelmeguid told
me, they would be ripe candidates for recruitment by jihadist groups.
After the Palm Sunday attacks, Sisi ordered the seizure of copies of a
private newspaper critical of the regime and declared a three-month
state of emergency, the first he had imposed since the aftermath of the
violence in Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda in 2013. The law allows him to
dispatch civilians to State Security Emergency courts, where no appeals
are permitted; overrule court decisions that aren’t to his liking;
monitor and intercept all forms of communication and correspondence;
censor and confiscate publications; impose a curfew; shut down
businesses; and seize property.
On May 8, an Egyptian court sentenced the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual
leader, Mohammed Badie, and two deputies to life in prison for “planning
violent attacks” following the Rabaa al-Adawiya killings. The public
prosecutor’s office had charged the men, along with three dozen other
Brotherhood members, with “preparing an operations room to confront the
state and create chaos in the country” and “planning to burn public
property and churches.”
Sisi has meanwhile created three permanent regulatory bodies to monitor
the press: the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, the National Press
Authority, and the National Media Authority. Composed of panels of
journalists and government officials, the new bodies can fine or suspend
publications, broadcasters, and individual journalists—including the
foreign media. Democracy activists I talked to, who were already chafing
under a dictatorship that one called “far worse than the Mubarak era,”
say there now appear to be few, if any, checks on Sisi’s power.
How did Egypt reach this point? In The Egyptians: A Radical History of
Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution, Jack Shenker, a former correspondent for
The Guardian in Cairo, examines the brief period of hope that followed
Mubarak’s downfall—and the unraveling that led to Sisi’s police state
and the crushing of the country’s democratic aspirations. As Shenker
tells it, Sisi’s primary interest has been to safeguard the military’s
hold on power and the vast network of financial interests—land holdings,
corporate investments, and businesses—it has accumulated over six
decades. He has used the threat of terror to justify a clampdown on any
kind of dissent.
Shenker draws a straight line from Sisi back to Gamal Abdel Nasser, who
took power following a military coup in 1952. Under the stringent terms
of a bargain that Nasser struck with his citizens, writes Shenker,
a new nationalist government would ensure healthcare, education and
employment was available to all. But…there was no room for anti-regime
protest or democratic participation by the masses; those who tried to
intrude upon the realm of governance would be cast out from the national
family as unpatriotic and dangerous, and face punishment.
After Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, his successor, Anwar Sadat,
kept the police state intact but took away the safety net that had
guaranteed Egyptians employment and subsidized basic commodities.
Islamist army officers assassinated Sadat in 1981, an event that brought
Hosni Mubarak to power. Also under the guise of fighting terror, Mubarak
imposed a state of emergency immediately after Sadat’s assassination,
stifled political activity, jailed thousands of Muslim Brotherhood
members, and unleashed his state security forces to keep the population
in line. Meanwhile, his National Democratic Party (NDP) served as a
patronage machine for a coterie of businessmen-politicians who, in later
years, gathered around Mubarak’s son and heir apparent, Gamal Mubarak.
Public utilities and other state-owned assets were sold off for a song
to Mubarak’s NDP cronies, who often plundered them, laid off thousands
of workers, and then resold them for huge profits.
By the late 2000s, Shenker writes, “unemployment had risen so sharply
that one in four Egyptians was out of work; among the millions who had
been born since 1981 and knew no other leader than Mubarak, the jobless
figure was estimated at over 75 per cent.” On the surface, Mubarak’s
Egypt was stable, secular, and welcoming to tourists, but few of those
who came to gaze at the pyramids and cruise down the Nile had any sense
of the corruption, police brutality, and gross disparities of wealth
that were breeding discontent among the population.
Shenker identifies several causes of the 2011 revolution: the rise of
social media, which offered an alternative to the self-censored press of
the Mubarak era; the stirrings of an organized opposition during a
political opening caused by the US invasion of Iraq and President George
W. Bush’s quixotic determination to democratize the Middle East; pockets
of activism such as Mahalla, an industrial town in the Nile Delta that,
in 2008, became the setting for a lengthy strike that attracted wide
support; and the excesses of Mubarak’s thuggish security forces. The
tipping point may have come in June 2010, when Khaled Said, a young man
who had posted photos online of police engaging in illegal activity, was
arrested in a Cairo Internet café, dragged into an adjoining building,
and beaten to death. When photos surfaced of Said in the morgue, his
face bloody and disfigured, a protest page was started on Facebook that
attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.
Months later, in December 2010, a wave of protests erupted against
Tunisia’s president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, forcing him to flee soon
after and further mobilizing a generation of Egyptians fed up with
stagnation, powerlessness, and state-sanctioned violence. Beginning on
January 25, 2011, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir
Square, starting the uprising that less than three weeks later brought
down Mubarak.
After Mubarak stepped down on February 11, 2011, power passed to a
military body called the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF),
which was determined to protect its interests and stop the revolution in
its tracks. In The Battle for Egypt: Dispatches from the Revolution
(2011), an enthralling account of the eighteen days of protests that led
to Mubarak’s fall, originally published on The New York Review’s
website, Yasmine El Rashidi captures the sense of foreboding that took
hold as the SCAF tightened its grip. “Everyone I have spoken to over the
past few days is concerned about the current situation,” she wrote on
February 23, 2011:
There is general unease about the army and its growing power. We have
become accustomed to tanks rolling through our streets; most of the
soldiers are young, and in many ways just like us. But while the
military leadership has arrested former business leaders and ministers,
and corruption cases are now being reviewed, it is also becoming much
more assertive about curfews, and activists have been alarmed by reports
that people detained during the revolt were tortured.
About a week after Mubarak stepped down, two young protest leaders,
Ahmed Maher, the cofounder of the April 6 Youth Movement, and Wael
Ghonim, were taken to meet Sisi, then head of military intelligence. As
Maher recalled when I met him in Cairo in February, Sisi told him:
“You are heroes, you did miracles, you brought down Mubarak, you did
something we failed to do for years, but now we need you to stop
demonstrating.” I told him, “The revolution is not complete. We need to
change the structure of the government.” I met Sisi three times after
that, and he said the same thing: “We need to be united, stop
demonstrating.” Sisi hated the protests.
As street battles continued between security forces and protesters,
resulting in hundreds of deaths, SCAF searched for a way to end the
impasse. The challenge facing the generals was to appear to bow to
popular pressure without sacrificing their power. “The military needed a
political settlement that combined procedural democracy—the Egyptian
people would clearly not be sated by anything less—with practical
autocracy,” Shenker argues, “and to that end they needed a new partner
in the ruling enterprise. That partner was the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Other close observers of the jockeying for power after Mubarak’s fall,
including El Rashidi, have argued that the SCAF was simply bowing to the
inevitable: the Muslim Brotherhood was by far the best organized
political movement outside the fallen regime and was particularly
popular in rural Egypt, largely because of its extensive network of
charities and the spread of conservative Islam. According to this
reading, military leaders saw little to be gained by actively opposing
it. “Military leaders view the Brotherhood as the devil they know,” El
Rashidi wrote at the time about the March nationwide referendum that led
to parliamentary elections; “even in the event of a large Islamist
representation in parliament, they would understand what they were
getting and how to deal with it.”
As Shenker presents it, however, a behind-the-scenes bargain was struck
that seemed to offer both sides advantages: the Muslim Brotherhood would
let the military keep its assets and control the crucial ministries of
Interior and Defense. The generals would cede to the Muslim Brotherhood
day-to-day governance and allow it to write a new constitution. Yet the
Morsi government lasted barely a year before Sisi overthrew it, jailed
Morsi, and began reconstituting the police state.
Why did the revolution fail? In the four years since the military coup,
journalists and historians have offered a number of explanations.
According to some, the military cabal set out to sabotage the elected
government from the start, blocking fuel supplies and creating
electricity shortages to undermine popular support. Shenker places the
blame squarely on the Brotherhood. “Once he had the tools of the
authoritarian state at his disposal, Morsi turned upon the revolution,”
he argues, “breaking strikes, beating protesters,…defending the security
apparatus against popular demands for reform.”
The essays collected in Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism:
Illiberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy, edited by
Dalia F. Fahmy and Daanish Faruqi, single out a different culprit: the
country’s liberal elite. In an essay about the Muslim Brotherhood,
Mohamad Elmasry, an Egyptian-American analyst of Arab media, argues that
Morsi was set up as a bogeyman by secular democrats who had initially
embraced his electoral victory as expressing the will of the people but
subsequently recoiled from his Islamist vision.
In late 2012, Morsi was engaged in a battle with Mubarak-appointed
judges, who had already dissolved parliament and were threatening to
break up the constitutional assembly and reverse Morsi’s decree keeping
the military out of politics. Morsi issued a controversial new edict
granting himself, for a limited period, sweeping powers and shielding
his decisions from judicial oversight. That same day, the opposition
leader Mohamed ElBaradei tweeted: “Morsi today usurped all state powers
and appointed himself Egypt’s new pharaoh.” Tens of thousands gathered
outside the presidential palace demanding that he withdraw the order,
and violent clashes broke out between anti-Morsi and pro-Morsi factions.
Elmasry argues:
The decree’s negative ramifications were grossly exaggerated in the
Egyptian media and political circles. Disagreeing with Morsi’s
decree—which was mishandled on a number of levels—was politically
legitimate. Claiming that Morsi had turned into a dictator, however,
represented a gross exaggeration, and fed an already existing myth about
the Muslim Brotherhood’s alleged dictatorial, anti-democratic fantasies.
Some of the country’s leading secular democrats joined Tamarod, a
grassroots campaign—allegedly orchestrated by the military—that
collected millions of signatures in an effort to force early elections
and drive Morsi from office. In the aftermath of Sisi’s seizure of
power, Faruqi and Fahmy note in their introductory essay, prominent
liberals lined up behind him. Alaa al-Aswany, the popular novelist who
had taken part in the protests in Tahrir Square, praised the general as
a “national hero”; Saad Eddin Ibrahim, one of the Arab world’s most
respected pro-democracy reformers, lent “his enthusiastic support to the
overthrow of Morsi, going so far as to support then General Sisi’s
presidential ambitions”; and the respected journalist Ibrahim Eissa, a
“champion of liberal values,” transformed himself into a “political
reactionary” who applauded “the arrest of the April 6th Youth Movement
founder Ahmed Maher, questioning the movement’s patriotism.” Maher would
end up spending three years in the notorious Tora Prison, mostly in
solitary confinement.
“There is little doubt that Egypt’s intelligentsia betrayed the
revolution that they claimed to celebrate and support,” writes Khaled
Abou El Fadl, a scholar of Islam at UCLA, in a harsh polemic, “Egypt’s
Secularized Intelligentsia and the Guardians of Truth.” What they got
instead was a police state far worse than any previous regime. Shenker
writes:
In an effort to shut down Revolution Country, the state pressed
Egyptians to turn in on themselves. A microbus passenger turned
provocateur spoke of rebellion on a journey; when a fellow traveller
agreed with her criticisms of Sisi, she hauled him off the bus and
denounced him as a terrorist to the security forces. Schoolchildren were
detained for sporting potentially seditious stickers on their pencil
cases. A man who named his donkey “Sisi” was thrown into prison.
Today Egypt’s former revolutionaries are quiet, dispirited, and fearful.
During two visits to Cairo in November 2016 and February 2017, I tracked
down a dozen members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which a judge
outlawed in 2014. Most had spent time in jail during the last four
years. They were among the lucky ones: other members were still serving
prison terms of up to twenty years, convicted by pro-Sisi judges and
prosecutors of a raft of trumped-up offenses including assault, blocking
roads, and “thuggery,” a catchall term for troublemaking introduced by
the SCAF in 2011. Ahmed Maher was now under around-the-clock
surveillance and, according to the terms of his release, was obliged to
spend every night for the next three years at a local police station.
“Even when I was in prison I had more freedom than I have now to
criticize the regime,” he told me. He had frequently smuggled out
eloquent critiques of the Sisi dictatorship, published in the Egyptian
media and in The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, and sharp
denunciations of the conditions at Tora. “I have to be very careful now,
I don’t want to end up in prison again.”
Nearly everyone I talked to in Egypt believed that Sisi’s
authoritarianism would only breed more violence and terror. One
unseasonably cold afternoon in February, I visited an old acquaintance,
Gamel Eid, a lawyer and the head of the Arabic Network for Human Rights
Information, in his office in Maadi, near the Nile. Eid has defended
many political prisoners in recent years, including the prominent
photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, known as Shawkan, who was arrested
while covering the August 2013 crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood
protesters at Rabaa al-Adawiya. Charged with murder, Shawkan has been
sitting in prison, awaiting trial, for nearly 1,400 days. “The general
prosecutor can extend detention as long as he wants. It’s outside the
law,” Eid told me. “Many times we find a person after a few months,
[held] in a secret prison. It often means that he was kidnapped, tortured.”
Khaled Dawoud, a prominent journalist and leader of a small liberal
opposition party, is among many in Egypt’s intelligentsia who supported
Sisi’s removal of Morsi—he still refuses to call it a “military coup.”
But he believes that Sisi’s position is more fragile than it appears. In
Dawoud’s view, the dictator has staked his legitimacy on effectively
fighting terror and turning around an economy that collapsed after the
2011 revolution; he has failed on both counts. The economy remains
stagnant, with tourism down, inflation high, and huge, failing
infrastructure projects such as a $9 billion expansion of the Suez Canal
sucking up the country’s hard currency. Meanwhile, Sisi’s repression,
Dawoud argues, has done little but foment anger. The Internet, he said,
was the only free space left, “and they are chasing us there. People
have been arrested for administering Facebook pages.”
When I talked to him in February, Dawoud predicted more violence and
extremism in the months to come. “Libya is in shambles, and hundreds of
fighters are coming back here intent on blowing things up,” he told me.
“Egyptians who go to Syria are coming back to Egypt, having learned [to
make bombs], and they’re screwing us. How can you solve this? By giving
people political space.” Sisi has shown no inclination to do that,
however, and with a new friend in the White House, he seems likely
instead to shrink this space even further.
—May 10, 2017
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