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

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  Morsi and his aides spent hours that day in a frantic debate. Should he try to lower the mandatory retirement age of judges from seventy to sixty, which would force out the most vehement anti-Islamists (like Tahani el-Gebali)? Should he declare a national state of emergency, suspending all the laws? In either case, the court might try to overrule him.

  “The decision was, we have to do something to get out of this cycle,” his adviser Wael Haddara later told me.

  The Canadian journalist Patrick Graham later asked Morsi if he felt protected by the gratitude he received from Hillary Clinton for the deal in Gaza.

  “Oh, no, no. I don’t do this. Never ever. Not then. Not now. Not in the future. Nothing like this has been discussed at all,” he said. There had been no quid pro quo, he said.

  Morsi must have worried, though. He returned to the subject moments later, to ask of Clinton, “She didn’t say that, did she?”

  The day after Thanksgiving, the cities of Egypt exploded. Thousands headed for Tahrir Square. Rocks and tear gas filled the air around the Interior Ministry. By late afternoon, vandals had either attacked or burned down Muslim Brotherhood offices in towns all over Egypt, including Alexandria, Suez, Ismailia, and Port Said.

  A more astute politician might have made his case directly to his critics: his expanded powers were meant to protect the transition from imminent erasure. They would last only a few weeks. Instead, Morsi appeared that afternoon outside the palace, where he spoke at a televised rally of his core Islamist supporters calling for God’s law. “We sacrifice our lives, our blood, to protect you, Islam!” they chanted.

  Morsi rambled on about the Syrian uprising, the occupation of Gaza, martyrs’ pensions, a recent train crash, and vague conspiracy theories—everything but his decree. “Illicit money earned under a criminal regime is being used to hire thugs to attack institutions,” he said. Conspirators hid under the “respectable cloak” of the Egyptian judiciary. “I lie in wait for them and I will never let them go.”

  “Beware, do not imagine that I do not see you,” he said, as though addressing the plotters. “I knew this morning that there were two, three, or four sitting somewhere that they thought might conceal them . . . in a narrow alley.”

  His “narrow alley” entered the vernacular of Egyptian humor loaded with sexual innuendo. But a short salute that he made to “my people and my tribe” became his most infamous line. His supporters said he meant all Egyptians. The Egyptian news media repeated the phrase as a confession that he cared only for Islamists. Egyptian DJs sampled his words into remixes. Morsi’s “My people and my tribe” speech, we all called it.

  The official state media encouraged the protests against the president. I had no idea who was controlling it now, or if its holdover editors just hated Morsi. On the front page of Al Ahram, a venerable Sadat- and Mubarak-era political analyst urged readers, “Take to the streets and die, because Egypt is lost. . . . Immunizing the decisions of the president with a constitutional declaration is a forgery and a fraud.”

  Morsi backpedaled furiously. He visited a council of judges to work out a compromise. His spokesman read out an “explanation” that sounded like a retraction. He limited the range of decisions that he said could not be overturned by the courts. His aides cited precedents set under Mubarak that would have justified his immunity without his decree. And he called for the constitution to be completed in only one or two weeks instead of two months. His time above the courts would be short, his spokesman said, because his decree specified that the courts would regain their full authority with the passage of the new charter. Then the court postponed indefinitely its ruling that might have struck down the constitutional committee. Morsi promptly rescinded the part of his decree about judicial review. His time as “Pharaoh” lasted less than a month.

  The draft constitution he had been fighting for was released in December. In an act of revenge, it shrank the Supreme Constitutional Court enough to kick off Judge Gebali. It was rushed and sloppy, a missed opportunity. But it was still less authoritarian and more liberal than the Mubarak-era constitution. One clause, though, set the stage for a sensational stunt by Yasser Borhami, the Salafi leader with the giant prayer bruise, and his stunt takes some explaining.

  Arab constitutions for decades had had little consequence for actual governance. The texts became litanies of bombast about the people, their values, their Islam, and so on. The plebiscites that approved them were like mass loyalty oaths, as one American scholar put it.

  The second article of the Mubarak-era constitution had for thirty years declared that its foundation was “the principles of Sharia.” The courts had ensured the language was meaningless. Now the Muslim Brothers saw no need to change it. Liberals and Christians knew they had no chance of expunging it—the clause was too popular. But the Salafis had promised real Sharia, whatever that meant. They jammed up the process to demand something more.

  To resolve the impasse, the Muslim Brothers leading the constitution-drafting committee put together a negotiating group of about three dozen—including Salafis and liberal intellectuals as well as representatives of the Coptic Church, Al Azhar, and the secular parties. All finally agreed on a compromise. An article (219) was added that spelled out the principles of Sharia in a standard, mainstream Sunni Muslim way. The compromise defined the principles of Sharia to include the four major schools of Sunni Muslim thought, leaving room for a wide variety of sometimes contradictory interpretations. Shiite Muslims—there were only a few in Egypt—had something to complain about. So did any liberals or Christians who hoped to strike from the text all reference to Islam. But the liberals and Christians on the committee believed they had won a victory. This was almost the loosest possible definition of Sharia, and it gave liberals and jurists room to maneuver. (The Supreme Constitutional Court decided only one related case while the clause was in effect, and it changed nothing.)

  Salafi leaders, though, portrayed the compromise as a secret victory. “Secularists could not understand this point, just like the Christians also could not understand it,” Sheikh Borhami bragged in a speech delivered to a Salafi audience that was recorded on video and posted online.

  The new clause, he claimed, would secretly mandate a strict, literal-minded seventh-century Sharia: the stoning of adulterers, the amputations of thieves, the whole medieval package. “It was written and approved by thirty-six persons, Christians, liberals and Azharis! . . . This constitution imposes restrictions that have never been imposed by any Egyptian constitution before. . . . It restrains freedom of thought. It restrains freedom of religion. It restrains freedom of expression and creativity and this kind of thing.”

  Do not tell the news media, he said in the video. “Why? Because surely they were not aware of this point! They did not notice it!”

  The video got out, of course, and the news media went wild. Every non-Islamist network and newspaper called Borhami’s speech proof of the Brotherhood-Salafi conspiracy to take Egypt back to the Middle Ages. Khaled Dawoud, a liberal journalist and opposition party spokesman, summed up the reaction. “Hey, hey, hey, guys, we know each other!” he said. “This is where you start building an Iranian-style theocracy!”

  Borhami had done more than any liberal or nationalist to energize the battle against the Muslim Brothers. The Saudis and the mukhabarat were surely delighted.

  * * *

  • • •

  On Thanksgiving night at the White House, Prem Kumar, the Egypt director of the National Security Council, drafted a stern condemnation of Morsi’s decree. But the voices who had wanted to stick with Mubarak for the sake of stability now wanted to stand by Morsi. He had secured the truce in Gaza. Tom Donilon told Kumar not to cut Morsi off at the knees.

  The final statement ended up a puzzle of circumlocution. “The current constitutional vacuum in Egypt can only be resolved by the adoption of a constitution that includes checks and balances. . . .” Bu
t even that muted language enraged Donilon. He ordered a hunt to figure out who had revised the text and he demanded to know how it got through without his approval.

  Morsi’s decree was without a doubt the worst moment of his presidency, the nadir of his credibility as a democratic leader. For Egypt, it was a turning point. But in Washington almost nothing had changed. Morsi’s foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, arrived a few days later for meetings at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House. Haddad was scheduled to meet Donilon, his American counterpart, on December 3. But after lunch at the White House mess, Haddad was surprised to find himself escorted all the way to the Oval Office.

  Egypt’s ambassador had accompanied Haddad to the White House. Now Obama’s aides told the ambassador to wait outside the Oval Office, and as he sat there he fumed that no Egyptian president since Sadat had received such a welcome. Inside, Obama was warm and collegial. He made no effort to condemn Morsi’s Thanksgiving decree. He talked politician to politician. He observed that he had just won reelection that fall by about the same margin Morsi had won in the spring—about 52 percent of the vote. Obama said his opponents could be frustrating, too. But negotiating with the Republicans in Congress provided political cover, he told Haddad.

  “Our message was, you have to hug the opposition to give yourselves some space,” Obama’s adviser Rhodes later told me.

  Obama and Haddad talked for forty minutes: an extraordinary allocation of time for a visitor who was neither a head of state nor even a foreign minister.

  Haddad and Morsi, though, still thought Obama did not understand the dynamics on the ground. Their challenge was security, not politics. A wave of violence was rising against them. Vandals were burning Brotherhood offices, protesters menaced the presidential palace, and the police were letting it happen. None of that seemed to be under the control of their liberal opponents—and if it was, were they politicians or extortionists?

  But the meeting itself sent another message: forty minutes with the president. Obama had their back, the Morsi team thought.

  16

  A Rumble at the Palace

  December 3, 2012–December 7, 2012

  Morsi’s Thanksgiving decree conjured up a new alliance against him. An assortment of Mubarak-era politicians and businessmen gathered behind Mohamed ElBaradei, the liberal icon. Joined by one or two political newcomers, they demanded that Morsi cancel plans for a referendum on December 15 to approve the draft constitution (the rushed charter Morsi’s decree had been intended to protect). And they organized demonstrations twice a week in Tahrir Square and outside the palace. The Judges Club, at war with Morsi since the presidential campaign, announced that its members would refuse to supervise the voting, a legal requirement. A judge speaking in the square compared Morsi with Caligula and Hitler.

  The new alliance behind ElBaradei—calling itself the National Salvation Front—knew Morsi was unprotected. As demonstrations raged in Tahrir and the squares of other cities on the Friday after the Thanksgiving decree, Ahmed Said, a telecommunications mogul and anti-Islamist party leader, led a protest march to the presidential palace. The police and guards did nothing to stop him. His men scaled the palace walls and then strolled the grounds. No one lifted a finger.

  “The army was not ready yet,” Said told me later. “But the police were on our side. It was clear that the police and the army and the judiciary and all the institutions were not with Morsi. He had no control. His control was imaginary.”

  I had been requesting interviews at the Interior Ministry for two years. I was always rejected. But when I called after the protests against Morsi started, a deputy interior minister invited me to his office.

  It was a long, narrow room soaked in shadows. Closed blinds covered a row of picture windows. Clouds of cigarette smoke hovered in the air. I waited in silence through long pauses each time the deputy minister, Ahmed Helmy, took a drag.

  I had asked for the meeting to discuss the suspicious death of an anti-Islamist demonstrator. Did Helmy have a response to the allegations that police killed him? Helmy seemed bored by the case. Before he would discuss it, he wanted to clarify “the lessons of the revolution,” as seen through the eyes of the Egyptian police.

  He solemnly admitted that the internal security forces had once protected Mubarak and punished his opponents. But those days were over. The police were now “away from politics,” “independent,” and working only for “the people.” Most of all, he said, they did not work for Morsi.

  Did I get that? The police did not work for Morsi, he said again, and he repeated it several ways.

  I changed the subject. What were the ministry’s ideas about police reform? That had been the signature goal of the Tahrir Square protests and it was a repeated promise from Morsi.

  Helmy paused again to exhale. Did I mean geographic redeployments?

  No, I said delicately. I was thinking of human rights.

  More smoke. “Before I talk about human rights, I have to define, who is this human?” he told me. “Is it reasonable to ask me to be considerate of a citizen who has Molotov cocktails or a shotgun? And when I violate his rights, is it reasonable to accuse me of violating human rights?”

  I see, I told him. In his view, it was not the police who needed reforming. It was the citizens. Some did not all deserve the rights of a human.

  Khaled Amin, the police brigadier general, later told me that the younger officers felt “a lot of anger” toward Morsi. “The Muslim Brothers had been locked up before. The officers felt that they should not be in power.”

  Amin was stationed in the neighborhood near the palace that November. He said that by early that month, he had been starting to accept that Morsi was president. “I thought he was staying,” Amin said. He started doing his job. But the Thanksgiving decree changed that. “He issued a lot of decrees and then went back on them. If he was really making these decisions, he would not reverse them so fast,” he said. “That is when I decided Morsi was not in charge.” He assumed that the Brotherhood’s governing board was calling the shots.

  Inside the palace, some of Morsi’s advisers had urged him for months to move fast against the hostile institutions of the old regime like the Interior Ministry or the Supreme Constitutional Court. But others worried that he still did not have the clout. The first “second revolution” anti-Islamist demonstrators had started blocking roads outside the palace as early as August 24, and the police had repeatedly refused to disperse them. (A military spokesman would later tell my colleagues Mayy el-Sheikh and Kareem Fahim that Sisi, as defense minister, had also refused Morsi’s requests to protect the palace.)

  Morsi told advisers that the army and police would surely learn to accept “the new Egypt.” But he could be darkly fatalistic. “Don’t worry! Do you think this is the peak? No!” Morsi told his anxious advisers that December, grinning. “This is not the peak. The peak will be when you see my blood flowing on the floor.”

  Wael Haddara and other Morsi advisers met with Shater’s staff in December to coordinate with the Brotherhood. But the meeting disintegrated into a shouting match. “It turned into one long venting session by Shater’s people complaining that they were kept in the dark,” Haddara later told me.

  Shater’s aides told me that he was becoming increasingly frustrated at Morsi’s “stubbornness.” The Brotherhood was forced to defend Morsi’s unpopular decisions with its own money and manpower. He was cashing checks on the Brotherhood’s bank account.

  Voices all over the news media claimed Morsi was a puppet of Shater, but the tensions between them were an open secret in the political elite. “I had heard Shater was impatient with Morsi. I think everybody heard that,” Said, the opposition party leader, later told me. Morsi was isolated even within the Brotherhood. But the Brothers were also his only reliable bastion of support. “That is who he can depend on,” Haddara said at the time.

  Ess
am el-Haddad returned from Washington on December 5, and the grounds of the presidential palace felt under siege. The drafting committee had released the new charter on November 30, and on December 4, virtually every privately owned newspaper in Egypt—eleven in all—had skipped publication for a day to protest its porous protections for freedom of expression. Even Al Ahram reported that sixty of its journalists were joining the protests (like the other Egyptian journalists, the staff of Al Ahram had discovered a new and short-lived passion for press freedom). The violence against the Brotherhood had continued, too. More than two dozen Brotherhood offices had been attacked or burned down.

  The demonstrators around the palace were different from the mix in Tahrir Square. These looked like affluent urbanites, white-collar civil servants, and a large number of Coptic Christians. “This is not a revolt of the poor,” Farid Beshay, a twenty-nine-year-old Copt, told me. “This is people coming to demand their rights.”

  “Shave your beard, show your disgrace, you will find that you have Mubarak’s face!” they chanted.

  One night they broke into a guardhouse, looted its contents, and sprayed the palace walls with anti-Morsi slogans. A favorite insult was to call the Muslim Brothers “sheep,” brainwashed by their leaders. Some nights a Molotov cocktail might fly over the palace walls, and the guards inside extinguished the fire and let the protest continue. A Nasserite party provided tents and food for a sit-in, and some demonstrators spent nights there.

  On December 5, the alliance around ElBaradei called for another “final warning” march on the palace, and Morsi’s team turned in desperation back to the Muslim Brothers. Brotherhood media outlets rallied Islamists everywhere to defend the palace. “If state agencies are weak and still damaged by the wounds of the past, the people can impose their will,” one Brotherhood leader exhorted. “Besiege those thugs! This is the opportunity to arrest them, and to reveal the third party which is behind the shooting of live ammunition and the killing of protesters.”