Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East

by David D. Kirkpatrick

Are you kidding? he asked in perfect English, with a yellowing smile. He was a Muslim Brother, he said, and he handed me a business card that identified him as an engineering professor at Cairo University. He led me to a field hospital run by Muslim Brothers in the alley behind the KFC. A short doctor in a white lab coat was standing on an upside-down crate, barking orders. He stepped down to meet me. Volunteers pulled back sheets to show me the bodies of two dead demonstrators, killed by gunshot wounds just before dawn. More than twelve hundred Egyptians had been seriously wounded in the battle that day and at least thirteen had died, though only a few were killed or injured by gunshots. I had never been so close to a corpse, or seen one outside a funeral coffin, but no one else was flinching. I playacted foreign correspondent and pretended that I had seen it all before.

  The witnesses all told the same story: At least one of the plainclothes thugs on the Mubarak side had started shooting shortly before dawn. Instead of rolling out onto the tent city, the uniformed soldiers had fired their own weapons into the air in the direction of pro-Mubarak attackers. At that, the thugs scattered, thanks to the intervention of the soldiers.

  Several people in the Obama administration later told me that the Pentagon and the State Department had organized systematic call lists to press their contacts at every level of the Egyptian armed forces. Hold back from attacking the demonstrators, the Americans urged. Remember your bond with your people. Do not turn on your own civilians.

  But the thugs had attacked the demonstrators at 2:30 P.M. The army had waited until nearly dawn the next morning to stop it, after more than a dozen deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations. Why did the army wait fourteen hours? The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had pledged four days earlier, in the televised message from the anonymous soldier, that it would not act against civilians.

  When the eagerness for credit had cooled, several senior American officials—including Leon Panetta, then head of the CIA—later told me that they believed the generals had made up their own minds, for their own reasons, about how to play it. The Egyptian army relies on mandatory conscription. Turning against the body of Egyptians gathered in the square—Egyptians of every stripe—was unthinkable. It might have been different if the crowd was only Islamists. But I learned that only later.

  “We are reeling a bit,” Jon Finer, a senior State Department official wrote later that day to my colleague Anthony Shadid, an old friend of Finer’s, who forwarded me the email. “I’ve heard from a bunch of people who got the shit kicked out of them,” Finer wrote. He said the Times report was one of the few that “explicitly called it what it was—a government crackdown, not ‘clashes’ between rival groups.”

  “Shocking how much pushback there was to that notion here,” Finer added. Even after the Battle of the Camel, many in the United States government sympathized with Mubarak and distrusted the revolt. The White House did not realize that the square—that pluralistic little republic—had already won.

  Two days later, Wisner, Obama’s envoy, publicly backed Mubarak. “President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical,” Wisner told a security conference in Munich. Mubarak should “write his own legacy” and “show the way forward.”

  Clinton, at the same conference, backed Suleiman. “It’s important to follow the transition process announced by the Egyptian government, actually headed by Vice President Omar Suleiman,” she told journalists, as though the old spy were perfectly well suited to lead a transition to democracy. “That is what we are supporting.”

  Clinton worried privately that she came too close to pressuring Mubarak toward the door. “I am afraid that what I said yesterday is being used to support the idea that we are pushing his leaving,” she wrote in an email to her closest adviser, Jake Sullivan.

  But Obama, who had written off Mubarak on that first Day of Rage, wished she had come closer to doing just that. He “took me to the woodshed,” Clinton later wrote.

  “There was substantive discord,” Rhodes later told me.

  Nine days after the Battle of the Camel, shortly before the end of Friday prayers on February 11, I received an email from the White House telling me to call as soon as I could. The sender was someone I had known in Obama’s Senate office. When I reached him, around 7:00 A.M. in Washington, he sounded like he had not gotten much sleep.

  “Mubarak has left the capital,” he said, slowly. “He is no longer in the presidential palace.”

  He would not tell me how he knew; officials invariably declined to answer that question in roughly the same way when the information came from classified intelligence or electronic surveillance. What did it mean for Egypt? “I leave that up to you,” he told me.

  Why he was telling me was becoming clear enough. The previous day, Thursday, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had released “Communiqué #1” to announce that the generals had begun meeting “in continuous session.” Photographs showed the council without Mubarak. His associates hinted publicly that he would soon step aside. Panetta suggested the same thing, in open testimony to Congress.

  Instead, Mubarak on Thursday night had delivered a harangue full of righteous self-justification, fatherly condescension, and vows to soldier on. “The worst speech he had made in his life,” Abdel Latif el-Menawy, the chief of the state news service, later recalled. “It was arrogant. It was senseless. It was a disaster.”

  Some in Tahrir Square called for a march on the heavily guarded presidential palace—a walk into a firing squad. The Police Day organizers worried to me that they were losing control.

  Now, on the morning of February 11, aides close to Obama had concluded that Mubarak’s ouster was indeed the winning bet. “We were sensitive to the idea that Obama was late to that,” Rhodes later told me, “because we knew that he was there early.” Obama had been right all along, and if Mubarak was going, they wanted him to own it.

  I hung up with the White House, posted a tentative article on the Times website about the reports of Mubarak’s movements, and hurried to the square. I was unsure whether to expect violence or exultation. But the tent city was as cheerful as ever. I found Anthony Shadid and told him what I had heard. We called our colleague Kareem Fahim, and he turned back from a trip to Suez. Then we waited, and kept waiting.

  At the beginning of late afternoon prayers, I turned to go. Thousands of men were prostrating themselves in neat rows across the asphalt, and I stepped between them as politely as I could, my mind on the placement of my hiking boots.

  I heard a shout and looked up. A skinny adolescent sprang from a tent clutching a transistor radio. What was he saying? Soon everyone knew. Thousands rose from their knees as one—a tidal wave across the square.

  Omar Suleiman had read a terse statement broadcast over the Egyptian state news media. Mubarak had handed power to the generals. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces announced that it had now taken control. And the anonymous officer with the gravelly voice lifted a hand to his hard-brimmed hat in a salute to those he now called the martyrs of the revolution.

  I braced for rioting, maybe looting beyond the square. I expected to hear the signature chants of the sit-in, about bread, freedom, and social justice. But the moment was much deeper and more primal. I had often heard Egyptians laugh off their country’s corruption, incompetence, and complacency, or joke that history had left them behind. Now Egypt lurched forward so fast that I felt my gut sinking. The humiliation had been lifted. The square was filled with a sense of relief. I heard a new chant arise from all corners. “Hold your head high, you are Egyptian.”

  4

  “We Don’t Do That Anymore”

  February 12, 2011–September 11, 2011

  A council of generals had taken power from a president. One might call that a coup. But Arabs everywhere saw a revolution in Egypt. Protests erupted in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Baghdad, Jordan, Sudan, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, and beyond. The New York Times did not
have enough reporters or column inches to cover it all. Even the Persian Gulf monarchs handed out pay raises to their subjects as inoculation against the contagion. Everything was up for renegotiation.

  I landed in Libya on February 25, 2011, about two weeks after Mubarak’s exit. Security officers were using whips and clubs to beat back thousands of dark-skinned African migrant laborers trying to push their way into the Tripoli airport, desperate to get out of the country before it imploded. The rule of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi was in a way the most honest of the Middle East autocracies. He made barely a pretense of the rule of law, a written constitution, or even a rubber-stamp Parliament. He kept the rank of colonel in homage to his idol, Gamal Abdel Nasser. But Qaddafi never even bothered to give himself a formal title like president or prime minister. He was simply “the leader.” He ruled through undisguised coercion.

  Cynicism defined the regime. Even Qaddafi’s most vocal supporters did not seem to believe in what they were selling. Covering it felt like watching bad theater. Qaddafi’s henchmen invited me and scores of other Western journalists to Tripoli but then tried to keep us locked in the five-star Rixos hotel. When the United Nations authorized a NATO bombing campaign to restrain Qaddafi’s military, his right-hand man, Musa Kusa, delivered a prepared address to us that was supposed to convey only defiance. But his hands, like Ben Ali’s, were visibly shaking, and within days he had defected to Europe.

  Everyone seemed to be playacting. Ideology or loyalty was hard to pin down. Qaddafi militiamen cruised the streets of the capital with the barrels of the Kalashnikovs protruding from the windows of their white Toyota Hilux Double Cab pickups, and it was prudent to display a green Qaddafi flag in your car window to keep yourself safe. But when I escaped the hotel, I noticed that the same faces turned up at demonstrations for Qaddafi on one day and against him the next. “When NATO bombs at night, I hear my neighbors clap and cheer ‘bravo,’ and in the morning they are with the leader,” the Egyptian who led the only Protestant church in Tripoli, Rev. Hamdy Daoud, told me when I managed to sneak out unnoticed for a Friday morning service. (Christians in the Muslim-majority world often worship together on Fridays.)

  One night civilian homes were destroyed in a NATO air strike. A Qaddafi spokesman awoke everyone over the hotel loudspeaker with undisguised glee, eager to bus us all there to see for ourselves. “Attention all journalists, come immediately to the hotel lobby,” he intoned slowly into every hotel room. “There are bodies in the rubble. I repeat, there are bodies in the rubble.”

  “Okay,” the same spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, confided to me one night over espresso in the hotel café. “This is not the most legitimate regime.”

  One morning in late March, a Libyan woman with a badly bruised face burst into the lobby of the Rixos asking for journalists from Reuters and the New York Times—presumably the only two international news organizations she could think of. She gave her name as Eman al-Obeidi and started telling her story over breakfast in the main dining room. Qaddafi soldiers had stopped her at a checkpoint, detained her because she belonged to a tribe (Obeidi) based in a rebel region, and repeatedly raped and beat her until she escaped, she said. There was a large scar on her upper thigh, narrow and deep scratch marks on her lower leg, and binding marks around her hands and feet. “They violated my honor,” she said.

  Before she could finish, our official escorts, translators, hotel waiters, and even the shy hijabi barista from the hotel café were crashing into the room, trying to apprehend her. It turned out that even the uniformed hotel staff serving lattes and clearing plates were all Qaddafi agents. Scuffles broke out as journalists tried to protect her. At least two of the hotel staff threatened her and us with kitchen knives. One of our “escorts” pulled out a handgun. Others snatched and destroyed a CNN camera.

  “Turn them around! Turn them around!” a waiter shouted to the other employees, imploring them to keep us away from her.

  “Why are you doing this? You are a traitor!” the barista screamed at Obeidi, trying to force a heavy, dark coat over her head to cover her face.

  Some journalists wrestled with her pursuers. But she was hauled away, imprisoned again, and eventually deported. I was vigilant after that about what I said in earshot of the hotel staff, certain that the receptionists, barmaids, and bellboys were spies playacting.

  In the middle of a night at the beginning of August, one of those escorts drove me to a shuttered and darkened Radisson Blu Hotel where Qaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam was waiting inside on a love seat in a borrowed sitting room. After styling himself for years as an Anglophone liberal reformer, he had grown a beard and he was fingering prayer beads. He told me that he and his father were forming a partnership with Islamist militants to fight off the liberal rebels and rule as a team. “The liberals will escape or be killed,” he told me. “Libya will look like Saudi Arabia, like Iran. So what?” He enjoyed his own irony: “It is a funny story,” he said. He was making it all up, presumably to scare the West, but he insisted he spoke in earnest.

  It was his last scene in the play. Tripoli fell to the rebels just two weeks later. On a visit to the headquarters of the rebels’ transitional government I ran into the same Qaddafi functionary who had corralled us into buses for propaganda trips and tracked us down when we escaped the Rixos (I was always caught eventually, including after my visit to the church). The day after the rebel takeover he had found a job organizing transportation for the new government’s leaders.

  “My uncle and my son were soldiers for the revolution,” the man, Khalid Saad, told me when I bumped into him. “Everyone will be happy now. Everything is changed now. Everyone is free.”

  Many of Qaddafi’s former henchmen switched sides that way. “It is legitimate, all these things they are doing—freedom of the press, the rule of law,” the former chief of Qaddafi’s foreign media operation, Abdulmajeed el-Dursi, told me, sipping coffee at a Tripoli café full of rebels. “We always thought it was the right thing to do.” I came to love Libya, and its bad theater was part of the reason. Everyone seemed to know that everyone else was just pretending.

  * * *

  • • •

  I felt silly saying the word “revolutionary” aloud, as though I had never read George Orwell. But there was no other word to describe the mood in Cairo. The day after Mubarak’s exit, the organizers of the sit-in had called for another day in the square to clean the mess, and thousands of volunteers had worked late into the night. Our sons’ nursery school was caught in the spirit and the kids had picked up litter in Maadi. New restaurants served high-end versions of Egyptian peasant food, like kushari with brown rice and organic lentils, or fancy fuul—slow-cooked beans, the classic breakfast—in bright pastel beladi flatbreads made with spinach or beets. Egyptian friends told me that for the first time they sought out Egyptian-made products in stores instead of avoiding them. Workers all over the country were holding wildcat strikes demanding better wages, continuing a wave that started during the uprising.

  The generals in Cairo insisted that Egypt’s era of coercion had ended with Mubarak’s ouster. The top brass rushed to get pictures taken with the revolt’s best-known leaders, and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was as eager as any of them. “They were very cute,” Ahmed Maher of the April 6 group later told me. “They smiled and promised us many things and said, ‘You are our children; you did what we wanted to do for many years!’”

  Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the seventy-five-year-old defense minister and highest-ranking military officer, declared himself interim head of state, ruling on behalf of the roughly two dozen generals of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. The council postured as the guardian of the revolution and promised to move quickly toward elections that would replace Tantawi with a civilian government. They put Mubarak under house arrest in his Red Sea vacation home.

  The generals invited small groups of opinion shapers—intellectuals, professors, columnis
ts, and newspaper editors—to a series of dinners at the gilded Al Masah Hotel and Spa in Heliopolis (owned by the military), where they drove home the message that they were proud that they had removed Mubarak and set Egypt on a path to democracy. Sometimes, a senior officer pointed to Sisi and recalled his prediction in 2010 of a popular uprising and his recommendation to break with Mubarak. “They had a plan to go to the streets and they simply moved it forward, to take advantage of the revolution,” Hassan Nafaa, a liberal political scientist at Cairo University who attended one of the dinners, later told me. At the dinners, he said, “We did not recognize Sisi at all.”

  That spring, a state television camera followed Tantawi on a stroll through the streets in a business suit. Was he auditioning for the role of civilian president? Egyptians thought it was hilarious.

  “Toys ‘R’ Us at Christmas: We have Tantawi in shorts, Tantawi in a tuxedo, Tantawi the sailor, Tantawi the doctor,” ran one joke making the rounds on the internet. Mubarak, like every competent Arab autocrat, had long understood that the most immediate threat to his power was a coup by his defense minister. Tantawi stood out for his meekness. The other military officers derided him as “Mubarak’s Poodle.”

  Some countries in transition invite international experts to share the lessons of South Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, South Korea, Spain, the Philippines, and so on. Egypt sought no such assistance. A senior general had a son who happened to work as a legal consultant to the Supreme Constitutional Court, and the military council tapped that son as the first of eight jurists on a panel to produce an interim charter. The panel then turned to Google, and it relied mainly on a website set up by Princeton University, “Constitution Writing and Conflict Resolution.” It was all improvisation.

  The goal of the legal experts was to transfer power to civilians as soon as possible. That way the generals would not have a chance to put their stamp on the drafting of a permanent constitution. But when the draft of an interim charter was put to a referendum on March 19, 2011, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces surprised Egypt on the eve of the vote by revising the writ of its panel. A general in charge of legal affairs announced that the military council would still issue its own modifications to the transitional charter after the vote. And the military’s tweaks allowed the generals to stay in control long past parliamentary elections and through the writing of a permanent constitution—undoing what had been the main objective of the panel.