On January 25, 2013, Hania Moheeb, a forty-two-year-old Egyptian journalist, joined tens of thousands of revelers packed into Tahrir Square to celebrate the uprising’s second anniversary. Not a policeman was in sight, of course, and some in the crowd saw a predatory opportunity. A gang of men cornered Moheeb, stripped off her clothes, and raped her for three quarters of an hour. Some of them shouted that they were coming to her rescue while they attacked her—“I’ll help you! I’ll help you!”
“My two hands were not enough to fight them all off,” she later said.
At least eighteen women were sexually assaulted in the square that day, according to the most conservative tally verified by independent rights groups. The government’s National Council of Women—still headed by Suzanne Mubarak’s friend Mervat Tallawy—put the number much higher. Six women were hospitalized. One was stabbed in the genitals. Another was given a hysterectomy as part of her treatment (I cannot judge the medical necessity).
The police, under Mubarak, had almost never allowed a crowd to gather in public (except at houses of worship or soccer stadiums), and a combination of shame and censorship kept reports of rape out of the news. Now street demonstrations were a staple of public life. Men and women mixed in tight crowds, and the absence of the police invited aggression. But that was not all that had changed. An era of silence had broken. The collapse of the old authorities had given women like Hania Moheeb the courage and ability to speak out, with access to the recently free news media. Their accounts riveted the attention of the world on the scale of the crisis.
After Moheeb spoke out, Yasmine el-Baramawy came forward to describe her rape near Tahrir Square the previous November. A gang of men had separated her from a friend, used knives to cut off most of her clothes, and then pinned her half naked to the hood of a car like a trophy, for a slow, hour-long drive to another neighborhood.
Now, three months later, whenever she saw the corner where she was attacked, “my hand automatically grabs my pants,” she said in a television interview. The New York Times stopped sending female journalists into Tahrir demonstrations, even accompanied by male colleagues.
Morsi condemned the attacks and defended the rights of women to join public events. Faulting the women in any way was “completely unacceptable,” said Pakinam el-Sharkawy, Morsi’s top political adviser and the highest-ranking woman in his administration.
But his opponents tried to pin the violence on Islamists, and prominent Islamists blamed the female victims. “Sometimes, a girl contributes one hundred percent to her own rape when she puts herself in these conditions,” said Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a Salafi lawmaker in the almost powerless upper house of Parliament (he had been a police general under Mubarak before coming out as a Salafi).
“How do they ask the Ministry of Interior to protect a woman when she stands among men?” asked Reda Saleh al-Hefnawi, a Brotherhood lawmaker.
Sheikh Ahmed Abdullah, a Salafi television preacher also known as Sheikh Abu Islam, said it was the victims who were the monsters. “You see those women speaking like ogres, without shame, politeness, fear, or even femininity,” he said. Such a woman was “like a demon,” he said, who had gone to the square “naked” deliberately, “to get raped.”
I came to suspect that the intelligence agencies were capitalizing on the chaos to move against the Muslim Brothers. One day a march of demonstrators against Morsi was snaking through the gauntlet of unlicensed peddlers along Talaat Harb Street—without police, the proliferation of peddlers had almost choked off the traffic—when I got a message about an attack on the nearby office of the Brotherhood’s website, Ikhwan Online.
The doorman and a bystander told me a group of men in face masks had rushed through the front door, up several flights of stairs, and straight into the empty office. Someone had tried to break in a few days earlier with a firebomb. It had failed to break a metal door gate but left dark flame marks on the bars. This time the attackers returned with a vial of acid to pour into the padlock. That burned it open.
“They said, ‘We are here to destroy this place,’” Ragab Abdel Hamid, a thirty-six-year-old printer for a liberal nonprofit in the same building, said. He had watched the attack. “It was planned.”
Desks and chairs were upended. The floor was littered with broken glass and smashed computer screens. The television sets and other valuables were still there, but the attackers had scooped up all the computer hard drives. I could not prove they were mukhabarat, but they were unusual burglars.
Other clues about the role of the intelligence agencies became public only later. El Sayyid el-Badawi was a pharmaceuticals mogul with a private satellite television network who had run the largest of the several pseudo-opposition parties in Mubarak’s rubber-stamp Parliament. He was recorded on a telephone call in early 2012 with someone who sounded like a senior intelligence official (based on his tone, his knowledge, and Badawi’s deference). Badawi explained that he hoped to win the backing of the Muslim Brothers for a presidential run.
“Oh, Sayyid,” the gravelly voice of the intelligence officer told him, “the upcoming period will be a dark one for the Brotherhood. . . . Armed militias will slaughter them in their own houses. Egypt will be full of orchestrated ‘terrorism’ to retaliate against the Brotherhood and seek revenge for the revolution that brought down the security apparatus.” The recording leaked out too late to make a difference except to history, but he was promising a campaign of violence orchestrated by the intelligence services against the Muslim Brothers.
The National Salvation Front, the anti-Islamist alliance behind ElBaradei, often met in the headquarters of Badawi’s political party, and members of the alliance later told me that they knew by early 2013 that the intelligence agencies were working covertly to bring Morsi down.
“We are not alone,” businessmen and party leaders like Badawi would say at the meetings, using familiar Egyptian euphemisms for the mukhabarat. “The state institutions are with us.”
“You would get people in the meetings who knew what the security agencies wanted, what the security agencies were pushing,” Khaled Dawoud, the journalist acting as spokesman for the group, later said. “We were the nice civilian faces,” but the spy agencies were “doing things to lay the groundwork.”
Police officials refused to provide special protection for Brotherhood offices, explaining that they could not protect all political parties—although, of course, the Brotherhood was the only faction under assault. The spree of attacks on its offices around the country had continued unabated since November. The burglary at the website’s office in Cairo took place on the second anniversary of the uprising, January 25, 2013, the same day other attackers burned or ransacked Brotherhood offices in Suez and Ismailia. In Suez, anti-Morsi protesters set fire to the government headquarters for the province. Seven civilians and two policemen were killed in fighting outside the building.
Brotherhood leaders looked pathetic. One night a rabble of the anti-Islamist protesters broke into the Brotherhood’s main headquarters, and by the time I got there, small bonfires made from the books and papers of the Brotherhood’s top leaders were burning in the streets.
“Be angry with us as you like, hate us as you like, but we’re telling you to be reasonable,” the Brotherhood’s general guide, Mohamed Badie, pleaded in a press conference the next day. “Protect Egypt. The unity of Egypt cannot withstand what is happening now.”
The intruders had ruined even his houseplants. “What did the plants ever do to be torn and cut apart?” he asked. He shook his head at the conspiracy theories about his power over the presidential palace. “Is this a man who’s ruling Egypt, a man who can’t protect his own office?”
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Tensions flared between Muslims and Christians, too. Someone in the town of Khossous, just north of Cairo, painted a red swastika on the wall of a Muslim institute. Or maybe Muslim and Chri
stian families had squabbled at a children’s soccer match. The explanations varied. But on the afternoon of Friday, April 5, the town erupted in violence. The police arrived more than two hours late and did little to stop it. Four Christians and a Muslim were killed in the fighting.
Mubarak had always insisted that sectarian animus was alien to Egypt, blaming shadowy third parties for any such strife. Morsi at least acknowledged the problem. In the summer of 2012, clashes had broken out in Dahshur, about twenty-five miles south of Cairo, over the burning of a Muslim’s shirt in a Christian-owned laundry. A mob of Muslims drove the Christian families from the town. Morsi sent his legal adviser to meet with the Christian families, directed the public prosecutor to investigate without bias, and ordered cash compensation to the Christian families affected. Almost all returned home.
The climate, nonetheless, had grown steadily more hostile to Christians since Mubarak’s ouster. It went without saying that the dominant political party, sponsored by the Brotherhood, included only token Christians. Hardline Salafi satellite networks unleashed a torrent of anti-Christian rhetoric. In the polarized aftermath of Morsi’s Thanksgiving decree, Islamists tarred their political foes as Christian “crusaders.” The number of lawsuits accusing Christians of insulting Islam—a crime since before Mubarak—rose from three in 2011 to twelve in 2012 and thirteen in 2013. They were almost always initiated by complaints from individuals who might not have dared draw attention under Mubarak; their claims usually ended in dismissal, but only after legal ordeals for the defendants.
But some patterns were counterintuitive. The rate of anti-Christian violence—sectarian attacks on Christians, churches, or Christian-owned properties, whether by civilians or security forces—had declined under Morsi compared with the preceding eighteen months under military rule. “If you compare the number or scale of the attacks, for sure it was worse under the military council than it was under Morsi,” Ishak Ibrahim, a researcher for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights who tracked the incidents, told me.
The difference favored Morsi even more starkly if the tally included the massacre of two dozen Christians by soldiers outside the Maspero building—the deadliest episode of sectarian bloodshed anyone could remember. But the symbolism of the violence that followed the killing of the four Christians at Khossous, on April 5, overshadowed Maspero.
A funeral was held two days later, on Sunday afternoon, at the Cathedral of St. Mark in Abbasiya—the Coptic analog to the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome. Mourners walked out of the Mass chanting, “With our blood and our souls we will sacrifice for the cross.”
A gang of men—apparently from the neighborhood—ambushed the procession, pelting the Christians with rocks and sticks. My colleague Kareem Fahim had attended the funeral and called me from the sanctuary. The mourners had retreated inside. The cathedral had come under siege.
When I arrived, I found the riot police, in black body armor, standing shoulder to shoulder with the civilian attackers. The officers were firing tear gas and birdshot toward the cathedral while the civilians standing with them flung rocks and Molotov cocktails in the same direction. Some made obscene hand gestures involving the sign of the cross.
Dozens of Christians were streaming in to defend the cathedral, pulling up their sleeves at the doorway to show cross tattoos on their wrists. Canisters of tear gas landed in the pews. Noxious fumes clouded the stained glass.
Young men on the rooftops returned fire with shards of brick or gas bombs. Kareem saw at least two of the Christians fire homemade handguns. At least two more Christians were killed in the fighting.
Yet the Interior Ministry blamed the Christians for all of it. “Some mourners vandalized a number of cars, which led to clashes and fights with the people of the area,” the ministry said in a statement released during the fighting. The police were “separating the clashing parties.”
Years later, I asked a Christian organizer who worked at the time with the anti-Morsi National Salvation Front if the Interior Ministry had ever helped their cause.
“Attacking the Coptic Cathedral was very helpful!” the organizer said. It was not that anyone in the ministry had orchestrated the initial attack or directed the police to join it; the locals and riot police were capable of that on their own. But Christians saw a clear warning, the organizer explained. “See what is going to happen if the minister of interior is aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood?”
Darkness had fallen by the time Morsi spoke. “I consider any aggression against the cathedral an aggression against me personally,” he said. He called Pope Tawadros II and ordered an investigation.
The pope blamed Morsi. “Sentiments” from the president “are not at all enough,” the pope said in a television interview two days later. “This inaction is humiliating for Egypt and for the image of the state.”
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The warm months in Cairo were just beginning. Peak summer air-conditioning season had brought occasional electricity blackouts every year since I had arrived. The lights were usually back on in less than an hour, at least in our affluent neighborhood. But in April 2013, the blackouts were getting worse by the week. The electricity went out several times a day, eventually for hours at a stretch, even in Maadi. Our sons did their homework by flashlight. We used iPhones to play the boys audiobooks in the dark as bedtime stories. I idled the car, plugged a laptop into the cigarette lighter, and filed articles from the passenger seat late into the night. We finally installed an industrial battery to keep a few lights on.
Fuel, though, was becoming an even bigger problem. Gas lines stretched for miles and clogged city squares. (The military owns its own commercial gas stations, which were always the last to run dry.) The New York Times authorized us to buy our own generator, like the bureaus in Baghdad and other war zones. But I wondered how we would obtain fuel to run it. Poor neighborhoods, of course, had it far worse.
Tourism, a critical source of hard currency, had collapsed with Mubarak’s ouster. The central bank’s reserves had fallen by half since 2010. The Egyptian pound dropped to almost seven pounds to the dollar that spring, down from about five in 2010. Inflation and unemployment were rising fast. Western diplomats worried privately about the wheat imports needed to provide the subsidized flatbread that sustained at least sixteen million families.
Newspapers reported (inaccurately) that Morsi planned to ration the bread. Dozens of bakers demonstrated downtown and blocked the traffic. The last time Egypt had cut bread subsidies was in 1977, under Sadat. Riots brought his government to its knees.
When I called, a new spokesman for the Ministry of Supply—a Muslim Brother named Naser el-Farash—invited me to his office in a Soviet-looking concrete pile not far from the Parliament. He said the government was rolling out a system of computerized “smart cards” to track the distribution of fuel and flour in order to cut down on black-market sales. The bakers were protesting because they were accustomed to reselling subsidized flour at a markup. “The bakers want to continue the old system because it is better for them, but it is illegal,” he said.
The fuel shortage, though, was a quandary. Egypt was importing just as much fuel as it had in 2010 and the economy had hardly grown. So why such shortages? Farash claimed that scared farmers were filling their barns with hoarded fuel. “Did you hear about the donkey who drank diesel and died?” Those who say Egypt cannot afford enough fuel are “trying to make problems for Dr. Morsi,” he insisted. “They are against the revolution.”
I had seen tanker trucks pull off on the highway and sell their diesel before it ever reached a gas station. But I doubted that profiteering and paranoia could explain the crisis. The buck stopped with Morsi, I thought at the time.
The demonstrations against him continued all spring. Protesters and police were still tearing up city streets for bricks to throw at one another. Rights advocates complained that reports of police abuse a
nd the deaths of prisoners in custody had resumed. Many of the street demonstrators told me the bad behavior of police was their main gripe with Morsi. Why did the police still attack demonstrations? Why did they fail to protect women or Christians, or to do something about the alleged corruption sapping fuel and flour supplies? And why had Morsi so publicly embraced the police unless he was in league with them?
“They are trying to build a new regime exactly like the old one, with all its disadvantages,” Mohamed Mokbel, a thirty-year-old art student and veteran protester, told me that spring, sipping Turkish coffee in an arty café under an awning in an alley downtown.
“Police attacking protesters is what causes the chaos,” he said, reminding me that riot police had the advantage of armor, helmets, and shields. “Even from the Molotov cocktails, not a single police officer has died. We do not want to burn down a place that we will end up paying to rebuild.”
His mobile phone buzzed. Twitter reported another clash with police had broken out near the presidential palace. When we got out of a taxi there together, he pulled from his backpack a pair of charred fireproof gloves, a gas mask, and a thick, hooded sweatshirt. Hundreds of demonstrators were fleeing toward us ahead of an advancing pair of armored police vehicles. Mokbel ran against the fleeing crowds and straight toward the oncoming APCs. He grabbed the smoking canisters of tear gas and hurled them back into the ranks of the police. Throwing back tear gas was his vocation now, and he kept at it for hours. Whatever the intentions of the police, their thuggish but ineffectual tactics kept the protests at a simmer.
Another court ruling in the case of the Port Said soccer riot was set for March 9, and this time, an army general had arrived a day before the verdict. A cheering crowd urged the general to take over. “What are you waiting for, sir?” several shouted.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 24