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

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  A twenty-eight-year-old named Hazem Farrag had stepped from his family’s auto supply store to defend the driver of a tuk-tuk against a threatening passenger, and his intercession triggered a cascade of killings. The passenger shot and killed Farrag. Farrag’s friends strung up the killer. When one of the killer’s relatives turned up during the hanging, Farrag’s friends put a noose on him, too. No one in town could tell us their names.

  “Disgraceful,” said Mahmoud al-Herawy, a fifty-one-year-old Arabic teacher who found the bodies the next morning. “That is not the way to enforce the law.”

  In the nearby village of Ezbet el Tamanin we met a sixty-three-year-old farmer who invited us to sit with him on the carpeted floor of a shed his extended family used as a shared living room (none of the families had a private sitting space). The farmer, Mohamed Ibrahim Yousseff, said his cousin had been killed during a carjacking in February. At the funeral armed carjackers had attacked the vehicle of another cousin. When our host’s two sons had tried to intervene, the thieves killed one, Mahmoud, twenty-nine, and crippled the other, Abdullah, twenty-four. Then a mob of villagers killed and incinerated one of the carjackers.

  “It is becoming the culture of the Egyptian countryside to confront thuggery with thuggery, to take matters into our own hands,” Yousseff told us mournfully. But what were the alternatives? “Should we surrender them to the police so they can release them in two hours?” (None of the vigilantes ever faced charges.)

  Another farmer living near there told us that two of his sons, ages seven and ten, had recently been kidnapped. So the farmer, Hussein Abu Khisha, enlisted his neighbors to close down a highway, a pressure tactic to get the army and police to retrieve his boys. It worked: the army rescued his sons and the neighbors reopened the road. Such blockades had become a common sight, and now I understood why.

  I later got to know a retired brigadier general in the Interior Ministry, Khaled Amin, who thought I should sympathize with the police. They felt “oppressed,” he said one night over tea at a water-pipe café in the affluent neighborhood of Heliopolis, near the presidential palace.

  “We were blamed for the revolution and we were blamed for the corruption of the last eighty years,” he said. “The police felt abandoned and the regular officers were not listening to their leaders. So we spent more than a year after the revolution where we did nothing. We just did not deal with the people. The police essentially went home and even the ones who did show up did nothing. The traffic officers did not even look at the cars.” Supervising officers like him were ordered to tolerate the negligence. “So we put up with it,” he said, “for the sake of the unity of the ministry.” See how you miss us! the police seemed to say.

  Laura and I got in the habit of locking our car doors from the inside so that thieves could not climb in at an intersection. Laura stopped taking taxis. Then she stopped driving alone at all, except near our house. We raised our fence and fortified our gate. I began paying protection money every month to the police guards outside the South Korean embassy. Egyptian friends had exulted that the era of bribery had ended. I was just starting.

  Three former Mubarak lieutenants were running for president, and the farmer who had barricaded the road told me that he would vote for one of them over any of the Islamists. “When you are sick like this, you go to a specialized doctor, you don’t go to a beginner,” Hussein Abu Khisha said. The Islamists “insult the police.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Voting in the presidential election began on May 23, 2012. More than a dozen candidates had qualified for a place on the ballot, and the top two vote getters were expected to face each other in a runoff in June. The first day of voting was scorching hot, but Egyptians seemed delighted to stand in line, often for several hours. Some held up scraps of cardboard to try to block out the sun. Anyone over eighteen was eligible to vote, more than fifty million Egyptians, and there had been a lot of voting since Mubarak: in a referendum, in two rounds for the main house of Parliament, and in two rounds for the almost powerless upper chamber. When I made the rounds of polling places for the first votes, many had said they doubted the process would be any fairer than it was under Mubarak. But after so many ballots with suspenseful results, Egyptians were confident of their power. One of Parliament’s few accomplishments was modernizing the voting procedures. Ballots were dropped into transparent, sealed plastic boxes. The contents were counted in public view, in the same room, as soon as the polls closed. There was no way to stuff ballots.

  “It is enough that the new president will know he could go to jail if he does something wrong,” twenty-eight-year-old Mohamed Maher said assuredly, waiting to vote in the slum of Imbaba.

  The generals boasted about their commitment to democracy. “If we wanted to commit fraud, we would have done it at the parliamentary elections,” the general in charge of legal affairs said during a televised news conference, peering bookishly over his reading glasses. “A military coup, is this our plan? After all this?”

  A journalist for the state media had a question for him. How could the military council possibly trust a new president chosen only by the voters and not known in advance?

  “There is no worry,” the general replied. Every Egyptian constitution since 1923, he said, had allowed the military to take power in a case of “catastrophe.”

  I had rolled my eyes at the Egyptian penchant for conspiracy theories, but the presidential race took so many bizarre turns that I began to wonder. The commission overseeing the election was composed of Mubarak-era judges appointed under the generals, and in the final weeks before the vote the judges unexpectedly disqualified on technicalities three of the strongest, most popular candidates. The hard-line Salafi was knocked out because his mother had become a U.S. citizen; she was registered to vote in Santa Monica, California, of all places. Shater, the Brotherhood’s candidate, was eliminated on the basis of a politicized criminal conviction under Mubarak. A little-known understudy, Mohamed Morsi, stepped into his place.

  Most intriguing to me was the case of Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s former spy chief and onetime American favorite. He had launched a presidential campaign from inside the intelligence service, run by his chief of staff. It had taken other campaigns months to collect the thirty thousand signatures from around the country required for a spot on the ballot; Suleiman’s campaign pulled it off in forty-eight hours.

  “Divine facilitation,” Suleiman told a newspaper close to the intelligence services. (I saw no signs that anyone in the U.S. government was still hoping he would win, although I am sure some would have sighed with relief.)

  Then the commission questioned a few of those signatures and disqualified him, too. Was the commission knocking out all the contenders it saw as strongest?

  There was more weirdness. Borhami and the Salafi parties endorsed Aboul Fotouh—the equivalent of the Southern Baptist Convention backing Bernie Sanders. Salafi leaders told me Aboul Fotouh had the best chance of beating the Brotherhood. But he later told me that only one Salafi sheikh actually campaigned for him—an old friend from his student days who now lived in the Western desert province of Mersa Matruh. Aboul Fotouh concluded that the mukhabarat had orchestrated the Salafi endorsement to sabotage his campaign by driving away non-Islamist voters. Who knew? But the result was clear. He had started to build a movement transcending the old divides, and now I watched non-Islamist voters abandon him in droves.

  “He uses double language,” a rival candidate, the former diplomat Amr Moussa, declared in the only televised debate. “He’s a Salafi with Salafis, he’s a centrist with centrists, and he’s a liberal with liberals.”

  The Coptic Church surprised me, too. The bishops put together a committee of laymen to pick a candidate, and until the final weeks all indications were that the Copts were rallying behind Amr Moussa—a popular civilian and former foreign minister who was not Islamist. Only seven months had passed
since the Maspero massacre and the military cover-up. I thought surely the church could not back a military candidate.

  But, to Moussa’s surprise, the lay committee withdrew the church’s support in the final days before the vote. “There were forces that shifted at the last moment for I-don’t-know-why, but it was a plan,” Moussa later told me. Instead, the church committee backed a former air force commander and Mubarak prime minister, seventy-year-old Ahmed Shafik, who was campaigning as a Mubarak-style strongman. He had told an audience of business executives that he was proud to call Mubarak “a role model.” That was the kind of leader Egyptians needed. “The Egyptian people, contrary to the accusations, are obedient,” he said, to a roar of applause.

  To my amazement, Coptic support all across Egypt swung strongly behind him. How had the church thrown its weight behind Shafik so soon after the Maspero massacre? “Because of his military background,” Youssef Sidhom, editor of the quasi-official Coptic newspaper and a member of the lay committee, told me at the time. “Copts are confident he will be strong enough to restore security and enforce the rule of law.”

  As for the Maspero massacre, Sidhom said he saw no “conspiracy.” “There was a kind of chaos and panic among the small number of troops who were stationed there.” Of the military, the church was forgiving.

  Among the voters who cast their ballot for an Islamist, Morsi, with the Brotherhood machine behind him, beat Aboul Fotouh by a margin of about four to three. Aboul Fotouh formed a new party and started preparing for the next election.

  A majority of Egyptian voters cast ballots for liberalism or moderation. A narrow majority of voters in the first round chose one of the many candidates in the more or less liberal middle, but those moderate voters were divided among ten different candidates. The two top vote getters were at the extremes: two conservatives, one religious and the other military. The runoff was Morsi, the Muslim Brother, versus Shafik, Mubarak’s air marshal. That contest was a murkier story.

  11

  The Judges Club

  June 17, 2012–June 30, 2012

  The Rube Goldberg design of Egypt’s transition—the election of a powerless Parliament followed by a misshapen presidential contest, all under military rule and with no progress toward a new constitution—was proving important. But as all this was being put together, the White House was focused on very different Egyptian issues. Instead of the architecture of the transition, the Obama administration was preoccupied by arguments with the generals over American aid to promote democracy, and especially with the case of Sam LaHood.

  LaHood was thirty-six years old, slender, and boyish looking, with a head of thick, short dark hair and an easygoing drawl. His grandfather had emigrated from Lebanon to Illinois, and his father was former Republican congressman Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation. I knew Sam as Egypt director of the International Republican Institute, one of two groups chartered and funded by the U.S. Congress to advance democracy abroad. The other was the National Democratic Institute. Both, if we are frank, were partly about dispensing patronage jobs to reward party operatives. The groups hired former congressional and campaign staff and sent them to interesting places all over the world. Some of those places were less safe than staying in Washington, but mostly working for IRI and NDI was a fun way to make a living. In Egypt, IRI and NDI used congressional funding to hold one- or two-day workshops to teach Egyptians about the basics of political campaigning—how to get to know your constituents, how to present your positions, and so forth. I naïvely thought Egyptians might appreciate the gesture. But it would never make much difference. How could a few workshops overcome networks and associations built up over decades?

  IRI and NDI had operated on a small scale inside Egypt under Mubarak. They had never received any response to their requests for official authorization as nonprofits, so they were technically illegal, but they had never been expelled or prosecuted either. Now they had received $40 million of the $65 million that the State Department had allocated to foster Egyptian democracy. That was exactly the kind of direct funding of grassroots activity outside Egyptian government channels that Mubarak-era laws expressly prohibited. Nationalist Egyptian media outlets had been inveighing against such foreign subversion since the summer of 2011, and Egyptian generals had been complaining about it in Washington. A few National Security Council staffers working on Egypt had tried to placate the generals by proposing that future funding, after the initial $65 million, could go through official channels in Cairo. The staffers had surreptitiously persuaded Defense Secretary Panetta to suggest the compromise in a weekly meeting with Secretary of State Clinton. But the proposed walk-back leaked to the press. Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, squashed it.

  The stakes of that skirmish seemed small to me until December 29, 2011. That morning, hundreds of heavily armed riot police swooped in to raid the offices of IRI, NDI, and eight other organizations that took money from the West. Prosecutors barred Sam LaHood and a half dozen other American employees of the two groups from leaving Egypt. Fearing arrest, they soon moved into the U.S. embassy (the men initially slept in an auditorium, the women in a guest room at the ambassador’s residence). The Egyptian employees of the groups were left at home on their own.

  Egyptian prosecutors announced that they had ordered the surprise raids because the CIA had been using the NDI and IRI to weaken Egypt for the benefit of Israel. The official leading the case claimed that Freedom House, another congressionally funded group hit by the raids, was “founded by the Jewish lobby.” And progovernment news media floated absurd conspiracy theories. LaHood had commissioned a poll with a question about religion; prosecutors called it a plot to sow sectarian strife. They cited IRI’s wall maps of Egyptian voting districts as evidence of a plan to partition the country, like the carving up of the Levant after World War I. Street photographs were said to constitute spying on the army. Stacks of greenbacks proved the groups paid illiterate laborers to demonstrate against military rule.

  Any trapped citizens were a problem for the White House. Americans working for groups close to Congress were a bigger issue. The captive son of a Cabinet member made this a full-blown crisis. In January and February 2012, as the Egyptian military was setting up the presidential election, the Obama administration convened weekly meetings of an intra-agency working group formed to deal exclusively with the funding crisis in Egypt. Tom Donilon had been forced to scratch a planned trip to Cairo. Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton devoted virtually all of their discussions with their Egyptian counterparts to getting LaHood out. President Obama himself sent three letters and made two long phone calls to Field Marshal Tantawi (still acting as Egypt’s head of state) about the funding case.

  Panetta was stunned by the time it consumed. “You get involved in that stuff, you are going to find yourself missing the bigger issues,” he told me later.

  The Obama administration went all out: It threatened to withhold the $1.3 billion in annual military aid. It hinted it might block a multibillion-dollar aid package from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. All the critical policy questions about the structure and timetable of Egypt’s transition—the questions that mattered to the outcome—had been set aside almost completely.

  By late February, LaHood and the other Americans had spent five weeks inside the embassy, and the White House was up against a congressional deadline in March to renew or block the military aid. The trial finally opened, and LaHood and the other Americans never showed up—only the twenty Egyptians who had worked for IRI, NDI, and other American- or European-funded organizations. They sat through the hearing inside the metal cage used to hold criminal defendants. One, Nancy Okail, the Egypt director for Freedom House, read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

  The generals had told the Americans from the start that they could not possibly intervene in sacrosanct judicial deliberations. Now they elaborated further. They told the White Hou
se that their fidelity to the law had left them only one option: to put themselves above it. In exchange for $4 million in bail, the generals would smuggle the six Americans out of the country.

  Some American officials felt that they had been baited into a trap, drawn into a pointless battle on the preferred terrain of the Egyptian bureaucracy—wrestling over the control of aid money. “We hugged the military council and let it drive our policy, and we waged the fight over democracy around funding,” Ben Rhodes later told me ruefully. “Instead of arguing about things that really matter, like the sequence of elections, we were arguing about Sam LaHood.”

  On March 1, an aging propeller plane that the State Department had chartered to ferry diplomats to Libya took off from the Cairo airport with LaHood and the other Americans. One diplomat on board compared it with the last scene of Casablanca. Loudspeakers inside played the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  The military aid to Egypt kept flowing. The United States later deducted the bail money from other nonmilitary aid to Egypt, and a Foreign Ministry spokesman complained about it angrily to me, as though Washington were depriving Egypt of its rightful baksheesh.

  The military council was hardly the ally that some in the White House had expected; many in the administration thought the generals looked clownish. But even after the entrapment of the son of a Cabinet secretary (not to mention the avalanche of anti-American vitriol in the promilitary news media), the generals had suffered no repercussions.

  If the generals concluded that American threats to cut the military aid were only bluffs, they were correct, Panetta later told me. “The Congress knew that in a part of the world where Israel does not have a lot of friends, it does not make a heck of a lot of sense to kick Egypt in the ass, because they are one of the few players in that area that are a friend to Israel,” he said. The generals “knew that, when push comes to shove, little was going to happen.”