We stood, since sitting on the filthy chairs was out of the question, and a lamp on the table illuminated the room and cast its light onto us. The meeting, it seemed, was going to be an ordeal for everyone.
Al-Asyuti spoke first. “So, the drone wasn’t lost after all,” he said, pointing at my shoulder. Suleiman Madi, the aide, looked over at me and nodded: “We dispatched it to inform you about the meeting but it never returned. We assumed it had been broken or stolen, and we weren’t sure if the message had reached you or not. Don’t ask me why, but it appears to have become quite attached to you.”
Was Madi trying to make a fool of me?
“How can a drone disobey its orders and attach itself to someone?” I asked.
“It rarely happens and then we have to reprogram it to factory settings. It’ll operate normally after that. Anyway, we have no choice. Drones are scarce these days.”
Al-Asyuti looked around, studying our faces. With a sweep of his hand he said, “Everyone’s here. Let’s begin.”
He appeared to be in a considerable hurry and infirm as well, having trouble holding himself upright. Why I felt sorry for him I don’t know. He stared absently at the floor as though searching for something he’d misplaced. To us three, Madi said, “We’re missing one officer, but his mission is a little different from yours, so we can start without him. In any case, we have absolute faith in you, just as we do in him.”
He turned to me.
“Incidentally, he’s in charge of the drones. In a few minutes, he’ll be here and he’ll take that one off your hands.”
For a few moments he was silent, gazing at us each in turn, then: “The resistance has tried everything to drive out the occupier. You know what we’ve done. You have been our long arm in these operations and not one of those many assassinations would have been possible were it not for your skill and bravery. Civilian casualties were unavoidable and we have never blamed you for them. If anything, perhaps there should have been more. At the end of the day, the occupation is still with us and civilians are going to have to make more sacrifices. Why shouldn’t we become that land of five million martyrs?”
Smiles appeared on everyone’s faces. Al-Asyuti remained completely silent, completely preoccupied—with us in body, but his mind elsewhere.
Madi went on: “You’re the cream of the resistance snipers, and the mission to come will be the hardest any of you have undertaken. By hardest, I don’t mean technically difficult; I’m talking about the ethical side of things. Each one of you will have to debate this with yourselves, but I hope you will stay pragmatic and level-headed. This kind of opportunity doesn’t come along that often. We’re standing atop a volcano of public rage and we mustn’t let the chance slip.”
Public rage? Where? I hadn’t noticed any in the last few hours. There wasn’t any rage out there at all.
“The occupier now has more experience of how the resistance operates and our assassination rate has dropped off. Become ineffective, even. Worse still, the occupier’s begun taking out our people. He’s gotten smarter: arresting our operatives and executing them in public. Naturally, people sympathize with our martyrs, a sympathy we simply must exploit, and that is why, over the past few months, we have been changing course. Our objective now is to push the population to overthrow the occupier. We’re going to engineer a new grassroots revolution.”
I understood perfectly. In recent years, the people had been led, sheep-like, into uprisings, revolutions, and demonstrations. We ourselves prompted them to revolt against a previous revolution that others had led them into, and every step of the way—with every incitement to take action or encouragement to desist—we were assisted by the media.
“Four months ago, we initiated an ambitious strategy to bring people onto the streets. We have stirred up alarm at social collapse and caused them to fear the occupier. We have talked at length about water being unfit to drink, about the diseases being spread by prostitutes, about the extent of the moral decline that has taken hold since prostitution was legalized, about civilians being murdered at random and their bodies tossed on rubbish dumps, and we’ve stressed to them that it is the occupier who bears responsibility for keeping them safe and well. All this we’ve achieved using our men on the ground and online, and we’ve exploited the zeal shown by a few civilians, their sincere desire to expel the occupier (and also, perhaps, their imperfect understanding of our plan), and we’ve let them help us out, though without any kind of formal agreement. What has delayed us considerably has been our inability to persuade the media to take our side. The entire media has sided with the occupier. The Interior Ministry going back to work was clearly not the best thing to have happened—the media went over to them and abandoned us and, most unfortunately, have shamefully exploited the issue of collateral damage incurred during assassinations, directing the filthiest accusations against the resistance, which is perhaps the reason the people hate us.”
What was the point of all this talk? Madi was setting the stage for something, but just what I couldn’t tell.
“But we shall never, ever give up. We shall persevere until the occupier has been driven out completely. In a few days’ time, you shall ignite the revolution that will sweep him away.”
This was over the top. When a police officer loses his cool and gets excitable, you can be sure disaster lies ahead.
“The civilians know we’re bastards and that we kill them, but when all’s said and done they’d rather have us than the occupier. Not because we’re patriots or fellow citizens, or because we speak the same language. It’s simply that we will go on killing them as long as the occupation endures. They can work out for themselves that once the occupier’s gone we’ll leave them be. Do you know how many citizens have lost their lives at the hands of the occupier over the last three-and-a-half years? Three hundred thousand. Not much, really. It practically amounts to an oversight. Do you know how many we’ve killed in the same period, whether as collaborators or as unintended casualties of our operations? Many more than that. And in the days ahead you’ll be required to kill still more. This is our moment. . . .”
Major General al-Asyuti was peering about. He heard what was being said, yet he didn’t hear. With us and not with us. Serenely and incessantly fiddling with his hair, his nose, and his beard, while his eyes roamed around the room. For a moment, his aide fell silent, waiting for a comment from his audience, or maybe to emphasize the importance of what came next.
“We have taken a number of steps to prepare the way for this revolution, and now that the people are more aware of the true nature of the dire social and economic reality of life under occupation, they are panicked. The thought of war profiteers keeps them up at night; the casual killing terrifies them. They yearn to be safe and secure, and they don’t want to be forever fretting about their children and loved ones.”
What was new? People had been yearning for that for the last ten years.
“But one final step still remains. It appears that provoking mass panic about declining morals is not enough to mobilize the people, and if we wait any longer the panic will subside and we won’t be able to whip it up again. Moral panic, like any form of terrorism, is a fraud. People only spot the lie long after the fear has got its claws into them, but once they’ve seen through it it’s impossible to convince them of it again. It’s up to us, it seems, to go one step further. Instead of engineering a fake crisis, we must give them the real deal. Pure panic.”
This looked like it was going to be bad, but surely it wouldn’t be as bad as Madi was making out?
“In a few days, at a set time, the streets are going to be full of murder. It will be a crime without punishment. In every street in Cairo, the casualty rates will soar. No escape from the gunshots, the gangs of thugs, and the speeding cars, running pedestrians down. There will be no looting of shops or homes, just murder—killing without rhyme or reason. The fragile barrier of security, the wall that the Interior Ministry struggles so hard to preserve, will
collapse without warning, and it is at that moment that the people will have no option but to rise up.”
I knew what he was talking about. It’s exactly what we had done all those many years ago, on that so-called Day of Rage, back in 2011. We hadn’t done it to push them into an uprising, though, but to avenge ourselves, the police, upon them.
“Your mission is easier than that of the others. You will take up position at specific locations on the top of certain buildings. You’ll receive enough ammunition to kill hundreds. Your task will be to kill the greatest possible number of people in the street. You will be our vanguard, the first to open fire. And rest easy: there are no restrictions to what you can do—select your victims with total freedom. Men and women, children and the elderly, it’s all the same. It will be easy because you will be concealed. For the teams on the street, the mission will be more difficult. Some of them are courageous colleagues of yours and will face real peril. These men are potential martyrs.”
His words stirred an old memory. Here we were carrying out the same plan we’d fallen victim to years before.
“We shall make sure that it is your bullets that kill first. Then the thugs and extremists will appear, to kill people with blades and clubs, prompted and directed by our operatives on the ground. Primitive warfare. So: people will first of all fall victim to your bullets, fired from unknown locations, and then to a deluge of swords and staves. We’ll take them to the outer reaches of terror.”
And not a single question. My two fellow snipers, it seemed, hadn’t a thought in their heads. They were younger than me and I knew nothing about them, but surely they had minds of their own, yet confronted with everything that had just been said they didn’t respond, let alone object. Fine then. I was silent because, although I knew that what was going to happen would lead nowhere (not to revolution, not to anything), I didn’t want to appear at odds with the leadership’s decisions. But what about those two? Did they know what I knew? Were they prepared to carry out the mission in full? Were they genuinely persuaded by what Madi was saying? Would they be ready to kill a family member if one happened to wander across their sights?
“You will receive full information about your sniping positions in the next few days. Be ready to go to work at any time, and make sure you are present at the safe houses allocated to you between the hours of midnight and sunset. This period, with the exception of tomorrow, is when the messages will reach you. Be ready at all times.”
Would the debate start now? Wasn’t anybody going to ask about the morality of this?
Al-Asyuti looked at us. “Everything clear? Are there any questions?” He waited for a response, then, with the tone of someone calling an end to business, said, “God be with you. It seems we’ll have to wait a while longer for our tardy friend. Give him a call, Madi, we don’t have much time. You men can all relax. This meeting is over.”
No questions, then. The meeting had been a resounding success.
We stayed standing, but loosened up a little, lit up, then in lowered tones began to talk among ourselves. Major General al-Asyuti spoke to Suleiman Madi in a louder voice and the two other officers whispered back and forth, while I stood silently, waiting for someone to address me. That’s how it used to be in meetings before the occupation; these friendly chats did much to reduce the tension. Things were always difficult, and personal interests were forever intruding into meetings and the decision-making process. Casual conversation had a magical effect on the permanent atmosphere of suppressed irritation.
Talking to them, I learned that the two snipers moved fairly freely around East Cairo, returning home daily or every few days. Al-Asyuti lived in West Cairo and only rarely ventured out. It seemed to me as though he were handing over control to the enthusiastic Suleiman Madi. Al-Asyuti’s calm, his air of being absent, made me wonder about his effectiveness and ability to lead. Ranks evidently weren’t in effect here, or at least no longer as tightly observed as they had been in the ministry. There was no real system now. We were officers, and still thought of ourselves as officers, but the whole discipline thing was out of the window. Laughter rose up in response to a joke, and before it had died away one of the snipers asked Suleiman Madi, “But didn’t this happen before—killing people during the January troubles?”
Madi’s chuckle slowly died away and he was still smiling when he said, “Not that old story.”
There were muffled giggles. The troubles of January 2011 had been a disaster, and the Day of Rage on 28 January would live long in the ministry’s memory as a black day.
They were thinking back to what had happened, I could tell. We’d known the people were a time bomb, permanently on the verge of going off in your face, and were certain that bullets were the best way to deal with it when it did.
“The January troubles were different,” Madi continued. “The shooting was our attempt to frighten people and get them to go back home. To defend the police stations. It had the opposite effect entirely. I don’t know what the leaders were thinking back then. There was confusion over everything we did. Of course, there weren’t any explicit orders to fire. That never happened. The idiotic way things worked back then, giving orders like that could land you in court and maybe prison. A few years after 2011, all that was done away with of course, and killing was permitted to dispose of terrorists, troublemakers, fifth columnists, and demonstrators, with the unconditional support of the people, the prosecutor general, and the judiciary.”
Indeed. Truly wonderful days.
“Everyone knows when an officer is supposed to shoot, don’t they? What happened in January was that the officers got it completely wrong. But why are we discussing January and not what came after? August 2013 was the real epic. The Battle of Rabaa, when we crushed the Brotherhood with the blessing of the overwhelming majority of the people and without the slightest feelings of guilt or regret. Or March 2018, when we opened fire in Manshiya Square in Alexandria without receiving orders, without any prior agreement among ourselves. Perfect timing. Four thousand dead in six days and no one brought to book. And don’t get me started on September 2019. That was a real day out. Al-Azhar Park and the Faculty of Engineering at Ain Shams University. Thousands of teenagers on a sit-in protest at both sites for some silly reason—I can’t even remember why. And because the planning for that operation had been especially meticulous, we dropped more than two thousand of them in two hours. We used a ‘mince the legs’ strategy that worked a charm: if you don’t fancy killing a protestor, then just dip your sights and shoot at his knees. He won’t be going on any more demonstrations after that. He won’t be getting out of bed. September 2019 was a demonstration of our control over public spaces and the universities, and of our capacity to mobilize and occupy a number of locations simultaneously. Of our capacity to break up any gathering, demonstration, or protest. Followed up by some truly heroic work by the prosecutor. Sure, we used live rounds, but no one stepped forward to point the finger. Confirmation of the threefold power of the Interior Ministry, the prosecutor’s office, and the judiciary. That day, we achieved everything we set out to do and we managed to tame the people forever. After September 2019, we knew none of us would ever be prosecuted for killing a citizen during disturbances. There would never be any repeat of the January courts, gentlemen. The prosecutor had understood that all that had been a huge error, and the judges hadn’t hesitated to set us free, silencing the agents and traitors. At last, everyone came to accept that we were their long arm; that if it wasn’t for us, the judiciary would have no dignity to speak of and their rulings would never be carried out. On many occasions, on many days—in January and August, March and September—we showed ourselves to be heroes, courageous, proved that we were worth more than the average citizen, that our lives were worth more than his life. Indeed, we showed that the life of the average citizen was worthless when measured against the value of safeguarding the state. But rest easy. We’re planning to take back the state from the occupier, and if killing citizens is perm
issible in order to safeguard the state, then it’s a positive duty when you’re setting out to reclaim it.”
For some minutes, nobody said a thing. Madi, I believe, had a lot more to say. He was grave and eager, and it was as though he was trying to add a lighthearted touch to his former excitability when he gave a bark of laughter and said, “Reverlooshun!” At which everybody dissolved in laughter.
Through the booming laughter, someone said, “Marters of the reverlooshun!” and al-Asyuti gave a chuckle, finally snapping out of his reverie. The laughter fell off a little and Suleiman Madi said, “It’s all a consequence of our own actions, gentlemen. If we hadn’t opened fire in January, none of this would have happened. Maybe we wouldn’t be standing here now, and the army would definitely never have turned on Mubarak. But one thing has changed: we now know when to shoot them down and when to let them rise up. Brothers, people called what happened a ‘revolution’ and, in their minds, that’s how it’s stayed for years. Thank God they woke up in the end and changed the term to ‘troubles.’”
Otared Page 7