Within thirty minutes, twenty-three Christian demonstrators were dying or dead. A third of them died of bullet wounds; the rest were crushed to death. More than two hundred were injured. “At Maspero we saw clearly who did the crime, and it was military one hundred percent,” Father Filopateer later told me.
But Egyptian state television inverted the news. “Breaking: Coptic protesters throw stones and Molotovs at soldiers from above the October 6 Bridge and burn cars” ran a news crawl along the bottom of the screen.
A newscaster, Rasha Magdy, accused Egyptians of abandoning their army under a Christian attack. “Eyewitnesses confirm that hundreds of Coptic demonstrators who blocked the road threw stones and Molotovs at the army and police assigned to guard the Maspero building,” she said, citing false reports of dead and injured soldiers. Egypt’s “honorable citizens,” she urged, must defend their armed forces. Newscasters interviewed soldiers who complained of a Christian ambush.
Some Muslim viewers knew better than to believe the newscasts, and they rushed to stand with the Christians. “Muslims get what is happening,” twenty-seven-year-old Nada el-Shazly told me, pulling down a surgical mask she had worn to protect against tear gas. The military “is trying to start a civil war,” she said.
But “honorable citizens” had set up vigilante checkpoints all around downtown. They demanded that passersby hold out their wrists, to be checked for tattooed crosses, or they forced them to recite the Muslim profession of faith. A Christian friend of mine escaped by holding the arm of a woman in a hijab; she said he was her brother.
Father Matthias fled into a building full of private television studios, and one let him hide inside as soldiers searched door-to-door. “I could see out the window the thugs coming and chanting, ‘Islamic! Islamic!’” he told me, “and then when they met the officers they stopped chanting and they were all smoking together by the side of the street.”
Father Filopateer hid for three hours inside a parked car in the garage of the Ramses Hilton. Someone eventually found a Christian policeman who escorted him to safety.
The next morning, at the main Coptic Christian hospital, the doctors showed me seventeen corpses. Most had died of bullet wounds, about a half dozen had been run over by APCs. One skull had been crushed under a wheel.
* * *
• • •
The Maspero massacre was the deadliest episode of sectarian violence in the modern history of Egypt. The church blamed the priests. The Coptic synod met in the cathedral the next day to debate putting the two priests to a church trial, “for seducing the Coptic youth to their death,” Father Matthias told me.
Pope Shenouda told the bishops to forgive the priests, but he also avoided confronting the generals. A church statement blamed the violence only on “infiltrators” who “got in the middle of our sons and committed mistakes to be blamed on our sons.” The statement made no reference to the military or police.
Thousands of Christians gathered for the funeral two days later in the Cathedral of St. Mark, the preeminent Coptic sanctuary. Pope Shenouda’s enormous jet-black miter weighed down his frail head, and his beard brushed his lectern. He praised the dead as martyrs and “unarmed children who never carried a gun.” But he still said nothing about who might have killed them. Having lived in Egypt only fourteen months at the time, I was shocked at his reticence.
The military council summoned foreign correspondents to the headquarters of the state information service later that week. The council was at pains to please both the West and the street in those days, and two generals pleaded for our sympathy. They showed us photographs and videos of Coptic demonstrators chanting for the execution of the defense minister. Civilians carried sticks, rocks, and bottle bombs. One hit an APC with a large wooden cross. Soldiers carried an injured colleague on a stretcher.
“The armed forces would never fire arms on the people,” General Adel Emara insisted.
The Christians, he said, had terrified the soldiers. “Imagine, as parents would, the soldier in his vehicle now who sees the scene and wants to run for his life. . . . He sees a car burning, and if someone jumps out, the crowd beats him up severely. So this is not safe either. What can he do, other than try to drive his car out of this hell to safety?” The poor soldiers were “traumatized.”
While the generals talked, the military police were arresting more than a dozen Christian demonstrators on charges such as attacking soldiers, burning cars, and storming the state broadcasting building. The two priests were taken in, too, but released later that day.
Afterward, Ben Rhodes told me that the Obama administration found it hard to blame the military when the Coptic Church itself had not. Others on the National Security Council did not want to alienate the generals, counting on them to manage a transition.
Secretary of State Clinton played Pollyanna. “The army doesn’t want to be a police force,” she told Reuters. “They just have to figure out how to create a police force again that will restore law and order while protecting people’s rights.” She saw the generals as a source of stability.
I tracked down the two priests years later. Father Filopateer had fled to North America. His outspoken criticism of the Egyptian government made him controversial in the Coptic diaspora, and he had bounced from church to church.
“If you dig into it more and you inflame things, it will only get worse and more people may die. That has always been the attitude of the Coptic Church, wisely,” one parishioner, Malak Isaac, in Richmond, Virginia, told me, urging me not to listen to Father Filopateer.
I caught up with him at a picnic table outside a strip mall in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Activists against military rule had complained to me for years about Father Filopateer for a different reason. They said that at the Coptic hospital on the morning after the massacre he had told the families of those killed at Maspero not to seek autopsies, even though an examination of the bodies might have helped prove the soldiers were responsible. After leading the march, they said, he had covered up the killing. Father Filopateer denied it. He said that he had only yielded to the wishes of the families.
But Father Matthias, secluded in a medieval monastery in the mountains near the Red Sea, told me his friend was right not to push for autopsies. “He knew it would not make any difference and they would not get their rights. When we started the Theban Legion, we wanted to change the overall situation in society. But after what happened at Maspero, we knew we could not get our rights from the army. There was no way for the Christians to get their rights from the army, and they were against the army now. Nothing had changed in our country.”
He understood the silence of the pope, too. “Politics in Egypt are very complicated,” he said. “We have to lie all the time in order to live in peace.”
7
“How the Downfall of a State Can Happen”
July 23, 2011–November 25, 2011
For sure! Everyone believes in democracy,” Omar Suleiman, the old spy chief, had told Christiane Amanpour of CNN in an interview during Mubarak’s last days in power. “But when? Only when the people have a culture of democracy.”
That was always the catch: how to get there? Everyone insisted that they wanted an open, accountable democracy, but they always feared that some rival clique or faction was conspiring to hog all the power. Christians feared Muslims. Cosmopolitans feared Islamists. Islamists feared the military. The generals feared the mob—at least, at the beginning.
By midsummer, the near weekly rallies and marches seemed never ending. The generals were still in direct control of the government, with the defense minister acting as head of state, and they appeared emboldened by the divisions in the streets. Their promised parliamentary and presidential elections were slipping further into the future.
General Hassan el-Roweini had once visited Tahrir Square during the eighteen-day sit-in against Mubarak. A crowd gathered around him, and h
e tried unsuccessfully to convince the protesters that the gunmen shooting at them had been Muslim Brothers, not police. Now, on July 23, Roweini brazenly boasted in an interview on state television that he had lied to manipulate the Tahrir Square demonstrations.
Take the case of Ahmed Ezz, the loathed steel mogul and power broker. “When I wanted to calm the square down, I would spread a rumor that Ahmed Ezz was arrested, and things would grow calm,” the general said.
“You were the source of these rumors, sir?” a female interviewer asked.
“Yes, of course,” Roweini answered. “I know the effects of rumors on revolutionary groups. I know how to calm things down in a square and how to make things rowdy.”
He had new rumors to share. Six months earlier the generals had promised to be out of power in six months, so the April 6 Youth Movement, which had spearheaded the use of nonviolent tactics against Mubarak, was calling for a march that evening to the Defense Ministry to demand an end to military rule. A small test march had taken place the previous night, but this time, Roweini said, the April 6 marchers would be armed with bottle bombs.
“You have information that they will move with Molotov cocktails?” the interviewer asked breathlessly.
“Yes, I have this information,” the general insisted.
No longer eager to get pictures taken with the leaders of the April 6 Youth Movement or other young activists, the military council issued a new communiqué—#69—accusing the group of committing treason. April 6 had accepted money from a foreign power in a plot to turn Egyptians against their army, the generals now warned. Everyone knew they meant money from Washington.
The new American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, had talked approvingly in her confirmation hearings about millions of dollars in aid for nonprofit groups in Egypt to foster democracy. A state-run magazine had welcomed her with a cover illustration depicting her holding wads of burning greenbacks and a bomb wrapped in the American flag. THE AMBASSADOR FROM HELL WHO LIT A FIRE IN TAHRIR ran the headline. Alarms were ringing all over the nationalist Egyptian news media. An Egyptian general had lectured a Washington think tank in July about how unfettered American aid to nonprofits undermined his country’s sovereignty and stability. It was some “thank you” for $1.3 billion a year in American aid. But the generals’ patrons in Washington did not seem bothered.
Were the April 6 activists really foreign-funded and -trained traitors? “Some strategic experts have said they know this for a fact,” the interviewer prompted Roweini.
“I will tell you some incomplete information,” General Roweini replied, as though culling tidbits from a trove of spy secrets.
It was well known, as the Times and others had reported, that members of April 6 had traveled to Serbia in the late Mubarak years to learn from the opposition group Otpor! Now Roweini claimed that the April 6 movement was executing a Serbian scheme to wreck the pillars of stability in Egypt: the police, the judiciary, the media, the educational system, and, finally, the armed forces. “I am explaining to you how the downfall of a state can happen,” Roweini told her.
Fortunately, Roweini continued, the patriotic residents of the neighborhood around the Defense Ministry were safeguarding the soldiers, by “dispersing people and making them go away.”
I had no idea why Roweini was spinning like that. Previous calls for marches on the Defense Ministry had never amounted to much. Still, I took a taxi to catch up with the April 6 protesters at around 7:00 P.M., and this time I found perhaps two thousand demonstrators—mostly young, middle- class men, along with a decent minority of women. I knew a few faces, and I saw no one with a weapon. They had walked about an hour and a half to the northeast. But at Abbasiya Square, shadowed by the minarets of the giant Nour Mosque, a half dozen tanks and hundreds of soldiers blocked the way.
Soldiers started firing into the air almost as soon as I arrived. The voice of an imam crackled from the loudspeaker at the top of the mosque’s minaret. “Peacefully, peacefully!” But when I turned to retreat, men from the neighborhood threw down rocks and bottles from the buildings. Soon others came out to square off against the march. Some of them brandished machetes and kitchen knives—“white weapons,” as Egyptians call them. They closed off the road in the other direction, back to Tahrir. Many of the neighbors earned their livings directly or indirectly off the nearby Defense Ministry headquarters, and they had heeded Roweini’s warning to arm and protect themselves. (I heard secondhand reports that soldiers had gone door-to-door to help spread the message.)
I was trapped with the demonstrators. Soon civilians on both sides were tearing up the pavement for missiles to hurl back at one another. I found a corner, pressed my back against the iron fence around the mosque, and took out a notebook.
Demonstrators pleaded with a man inside the mosque to open the gate so they could escape. Baltagiya—thugs—the marchers said. But as I was taking it all down a hand grabbed my right arm. A scrawny kid—he looked like a teenager—held on to me and shouted, “Agnabi, agnabi”—foreigner, foreigner—to call for reinforcements.
I am a little over six feet tall and a hundred sixty pounds. The kid was a foot shorter and no thicker than me. These were not baltagiya. Nobody would hire this kid as a thug. He had heard about the “hidden hands” and “foreign fingers” that the government kept blaming, and now he had caught one red-handed.
Some of his beefier friends were coming our way. I jerked my arm free, and the kid ripped off half my red Brooks Brothers button-down. I was standing in rags.
Thank God his friends were more civil. I was their guest in Egypt, they told the kid, touching their chests in apology to me.
The fight in the square went on for two hours, and the watching soldiers did nothing. Then police arrived and doused us all with tear gas. The gates of the Nour Mosque at last opened to take in the wounded. (Nearly three hundred were eventually treated for injuries.) I followed a few others around the back to escape, and I learned the next day that after a few more hours the soldiers had escorted the remaining demonstrators back to Tahrir Square and safety.
No one had died. The New York Times barely covered the skirmish. But the generals now had civilians fighting for them.
The events of July, I think, marked the turning of a corner. The generals’ transition plan, spelled out after the referendum in March, called for them to hold still-unscheduled parliamentary elections, and the Parliament would somehow oversee the drafting of a new constitution. Around the same time as the aborted march, Field Marshal Tantawi and the military council enlisted a new panel of jurists and law professors to propose a set of “principles” that the generals would impose on the writing of a constitution. The idea of these binding principles appealed to some liberals, who feared that an Islamist Parliament might limit personal freedoms. The liberals imagined something like the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution.
But some jurists on the new panel had argued for months that the generals should never fully relinquish political power at all, for fear that elections might yield an Islamist government. Judge Tahani el-Gebali of the Supreme Constitutional Court was especially outspoken about that. And when the so-called principles were unveiled in November, they indeed gave the generals permanent power over any elected civilians. The rules insulated the military council from any oversight and authorized it to intervene at will in the civilian institutions. A plan for quiet coup d’état, some called it.
On November 18, tens of thousands of Muslim Brothers and other Islamists jammed Tahrir Square to protest the power grab. The next day, a police sweep of the square ignited a riot. A handful of families (who were not Islamists) had camped out overnight demanding compensation for the deaths of relatives killed at the start of the uprising. When the police pulled up their tents, someone commandeered a police truck. Protesters climbed all over it. Twitter hummed with pictures. And as more riot police stormed in, the crowd of protesters swelled faster an
d faster. Hundreds of young men and women rushed into the square, despite the tear gas.
“The people want to bring down the field marshal,” they were chanting when I got there. “Down with military rule!”
“We saw that people were being attacked and we came down to help,” said Huda Ouda, a thirty-year-old secretary in a dark red hijab, pulling her scarf over her face against the gas. “We are completely against the military ruling this country.”
A young activist named Ahmed Harara had lost an eye to birdshot during the uprising against Mubarak; he lost his other eye that day battling the police.
The fighting went on for a week. It was confined, bizarrely, to a single block of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, leading from Tahrir Square in the direction of the Interior Ministry. But the supporting crowds in the square sometimes swelled to more than ten thousand.
One day, protesters paraded through the square with the dead body of a demonstrator killed by another police blitz. The Health Ministry had confirmed civilian deaths from live ammunition. But the next morning an army general stood on the steps of the Interior Ministry and insisted to the state media that neither the army nor the police had ever entered the space or used bullets. “An invisible hand in the square is causing a rift between the army and the people,” he said.
It was a golden era for talk shows. Generals, sheikhs, politicians, activists, and intellectuals—everyone went to the airwaves each night to make their case about the future of Egypt. Every night was like Sunday morning in Washington, and everyone was watching.
But that fall the talk show hosts were turning on the generals. One program broadcast footage of a soldier shooting a man in the back. As the man’s bloody body fell to the ground, the voice-over was the interior minister vowing that his forces had never once used a weapon.
“Do they want us to believe that our eyes do not see what they see?” the talk show’s host, Yosri Fouda, asked his audience, “that even when they see they do not see, and that if they indeed see, it means nothing?”
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 12