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

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  By midnight, I was outside the Brotherhood’s headquarters. Six decades earlier, on October 27, 1954, the day Abdel Nasser survived the attempted assassination in Alexandria, a government-orchestrated mob attack on the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Cairo marked the beginning of the most severe crackdown in the history of the movement. Now a thinner but more methodical crowd had surrounded the Brotherhood’s gleaming new offices. Dozens of young men hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails. A few fired shotguns loaded with birdshot, and others were shining green laser pointers toward the upper floors.

  Why the light show? I asked discreetly. They were hunting for a few remaining Muslim Brothers hiding inside, one of the attackers said. “Their leaders have left them like sheep for the slaughter.”

  I later saw video footage of Muslim Brothers hiding behind sandbags inside the windows and firing shotguns at the attackers. But while I was there the crowd outside was hurling their gas bombs with businesslike efficiency. There was no cheering or chanting, no street demonstration. A fire engulfed the entrance. Two middle-aged men watched from folding chairs at the edge of some open ground abutting the headquarters, like football fans at a tailgate party. Were they spectators, or supervisors? I suspected intelligence agents.

  Two uniformed policemen were talking on handheld radios outside a patrol car about a block away from the fire, doing nothing. Then two armored police vehicles pulled up. The attackers taunted the policemen to arrest the remaining Muslim Brothers inside. But the police drove away and let the arson continue.

  After I left, one of the Brothers tried to escape but was beaten, dragged along the ground, and turned over to the police. That, too, was recorded on video. Eight others were killed at the scene, according to the Health Ministry, presumably shot by Muslim Brothers defending their headquarters. It was still burning in the morning, on July 1. Two looters were carrying out a porcelain toilet.

  * * *

  • • •

  I wondered how it must feel to be the elected leader of eighty million people—the first democratically elected leader in the history of your country—hunkered down to fight your last stand. Crowds outside are baying for your blood. Your security forces have turned against you. You believe that you are defending nothing less than the chance to build a new democracy after millennia of tyranny. But everything I imagined was wrong. Morsi still did not see it.

  Fifteen people had been killed around the country. Several governors appointed by Morsi were locked out of their offices, but the ones who had come from the military or the police were all well protected. Almost everyone who was not a Muslim Brother had resigned from his administration—including the Salafis. Now, on July 1, Egyptian Air Force F-16s with colored contrails were painting hearts in the sky over Tahrir Square. Five military helicopters circled downtown with giant Egyptian flags hanging below them.

  The military’s presidential guard unit had relocated Morsi to a work space inside its own complex, ostensibly for his own protection during the protests. He was isolated there with his top advisers, who monitored the demonstrations through the media, intelligence reports, the provincial governors, and the Muslim Brotherhood. They saw the slaughtered sheep and they heard the Sisi chants. But Morsi thought he had survived.

  A British political scientist who studied the crowd sizes, Neil Ketchley, later put the “plausible upper threshold” of the turnout against Morsi on June 30 at around one million people across the country. But on July 1, the Brotherhood, the news media, the military, and the intelligence agencies all gave Morsi widely varying estimates. The military’s estimate was highest and put the number around 650,000 in Cairo. Morsi and his aides collected data from the mobile phone companies about how many phones were in Tahrir Square and other places, and his advisers had turned to Google Earth to try to compare crowds. The demonstrations in their support had continued in Cairo and elsewhere, and they concluded that the crowds for Morsi had been as big as the ones against them. Why not? For two and a half years, the Islamist crowds had always been bigger.

  Now that the opposition had shown its full strength, Morsi was ready to negotiate. He had discussed a package of compromises with Sisi over the last week, and now Morsi expected to share control of the government by working out the details of a new prime minister and Cabinet.

  Obama was traveling in Africa and called Morsi from Tanzania. It was their second conversation in two weeks, and Obama warned for a second time that Washington could not control the Egyptian army.

  “We conveyed our interest in avoiding military intervention in the political system,” Obama told him, according to a record of the call made by the staff of the White House. “The fact is, if the Egyptian military thinks the country’s stability is at risk, they are going to make their own decision. They are not taking direction from the United States.”

  Perhaps the military should take direction from Egypt’s democratically elected government, Morsi replied.

  Obama knew by then that the military and intelligence agencies were spurring on the protests. But he and some advisers still believed that Morsi might salvage his presidency and with it a political process. Obama again urged Morsi to seek reconciliation as a way to hang on to his office.

  “I have made calls for dialogue,” Morsi told him. “I am trying to reach out to Christians, the youth . . . I will take what they are saying very seriously. . . . I don’t like to see my country divided. I am interested in making changes to the government. If we finish the law and start elections for the Parliament . . .”

  Morsi was still talking about a long term. “I am doing my best to write history for a new Egypt that is really democratic, and what I want to see in my life is that power is transferred in elections to another candidate. I will be very happy if that happens.”

  Obama underscored the urgency of crisis. “If you just treat this as another routine problem, I am afraid it won’t be enough to break the fever,” Obama told him. “You started with fifty-one percent of the vote and a lot of people who weren’t sure about the Muslim Brotherhood, so you need structures that you are bringing them into, so it is almost a unity government.”

  Then Obama set aside his talking points.

  “I just left South Africa, where Nelson Mandela is in the hospital and is very sick. When he came to power he could have gone to the white minority and said, ‘We are the majority and we are going to do what we want.’ But he did not do this. He went out of his way to reach out to the minority. He even put his former prison guard—the man who had been the warden at the prison where he had been held—and he put him in charge of the security services. It was because of those gestures that he showed he was about bringing the country together and sending a message that everyone is a part of this thing.”

  Morsi seemed to grasp Obama’s earnestness. “I agree with all of what you have said,” he said. “I consider this very good advice, from a sincere friend of Egypt and to myself.”

  Morsi pledged to meet the next day with his opponents to discuss drastic actions, “about building a civil, democratic state.”

  “Be bold,” Obama told him. “History is waiting for you but you have to meet it, not just with legalism, not just with following the rules on the page, but you have to make some bold gestures.”

  Ambassador Patterson arrived at the presidential guard complex after Obama’s call. “I hate to say it,” she told them, “but it is going to be over, you have got to do something. You are going to end up in jail.”

  Haddad, Morsi’s national security adviser, asked what the U.S. president meant by “bold gestures.” Patterson replied that changing the prime minister might have been enough a few weeks ago, but now it could require Morsi’s resignation. She wanted to be sure Morsi knew that it was not his civilian opponents who were making the decisions. “Your audience is Sisi.”

  Haddad told her that Sisi had agreed days before to support Morsi’s compromises, and Patterson lo
oked stunned. As one Morsi adviser later described it, “It was as close to her jaw dropping as you can get from a diplomat.” The team showed her a list of candidates whom Morsi proposed to name as prime minister—perhaps one of the Western-friendly current or former central bank governors, or perhaps a third time around for a geriatric premier who had served first under Mubarak and then under the generals. Patterson approved of any of them, if it would resolve the impasse.

  “Are you sure you are safe?” she asked as she left. “Take care,” she said.

  Everyone around Morsi believed Washington could control the generals (despite what Obama had said). They pestered Haddad about what Patterson had told him.

  “She said, ‘Take care,’” Haddad answered. Morsi’s advisers adopted it as a nickname. “Ambassador Take Care,” they called her.

  Sisi arrived moments later. In a photograph released to the news media, the two men looked like nothing had changed. Morsi leaned back in a gilded armchair and smiled confidently. Sisi sat on the edge of a couch, slightly hunched, with his hands together between his knees and a briefcase beside him, looking at Morsi.

  But while they were discussing potential Cabinet shake-ups, Morsi’s office manager interrupted them to hand the president a message. State television had broadcast a communiqué from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

  “If the demands of the people have not been met” within “forty-eight hours,” the military council would “enforce” its own “road map,” the communiqué read. “The armed forces will not be party to the circle of politics or ruling” but “the wasting of more time will only create more division and conflict.”

  What did this mean? Morsi demanded.

  Sisi again tried to explain it away. The armed forces were encouraging all sides to compromise, not planning a coup, he told Morsi. Sisi promised that a new statement would clarify his intentions.

  But the statement released a few hours later was a puzzle of double meanings. It pledged that the Egyptian armed forces would never carry out a “military coup,” but it defined “coup” in a way that excluded the military takeovers of 1952 (deposing the king) or of 2011 (deposing Mubarak). The army had gone into the streets only “to stand with the will of the great Egyptian people.”

  Morsi was the last in his circle to realize that Sisi had turned on him, but now even Morsi saw it. “We understand it as a military coup,” Wael Haddara told me. “What form that will take remains to be seen.”

  The capital and country were quiet. The June 30 crowds went home that night and stayed out of the streets. Only a small demonstration of promilitary nationalists were still waiving Egyptian flags in Tahrir Square when Sisi visited Morsi in the Republican Guard complex again on Tuesday, July 2.

  Morsi had a new gambit, a “bold gesture,” in Obama’s words: Morsi offered Sisi the added role of prime minister. No one could doubt the authority or independence of Egypt’s minister of defense. No one could say that Morsi was hogging control.

  Sisi presented himself as a mere intermediary. He promised to carry Morsi’s ideas to the opposition, and he said he would report back as soon as possible. But no one in the opposition heard from him. It is unclear if he consulted any civilian. He never again spoke to Morsi.

  The answer came at 9:00 P.M. in a call from a different member of the military council, General Mohamed el-Assar, one of the two who had been talking to ElBaradei’s group all along.

  “El basha yemshy,” Assar told Haddad. The pasha goes.

  Morsi turned to the public. Convinced Egyptians would not stand for a military takeover so soon after rising up against Mubarak, Morsi delivered his final address as president from a small television studio in the guard complex. “The people empowered me, the people chose me, through a free and fair election,” he said. “Legitimacy is the only way to protect our country and prevent bloodshed.”

  The Arab word for legitimacy, shareia, comes from the same root as Sharia. Morsi repeated shareia more than fifty times in the space of a few minutes. “If the price of protecting legitimacy is my blood,” he said, “I am willing to pay the price.”

  The first draft of the official history was rolling off the presses. REMOVAL OR RESIGNATION was the banner headline on the front page of Al Ahram as the first copies hit the newsstands around midnight. The newspaper reported that the generals were already arresting leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Soldiers would detain “anyone who resists these decisions.” Television networks displayed “Morsi timers” counting down Sisi’s forty-eight-hour deadline like the minutes to the New Year.

  The Qatari foreign minister, Khalid al-Attiyah, called Haddad with a final proposal from Kerry. Morsi could remain a figurehead while delegating all of his powers to a new prime minister, presumably ElBaradei. “A polite way of stepping down,” one Morsi adviser later told me.

  The advisers knew Morsi would never accept. He had often pointed to his own neck and told them, “This before that.” I will die before capitulating to a military takeover.

  So Haddad called Patterson with Morsi’s counteroffer. He was willing to step down after the election of a new Parliament.

  Too late, Patterson said. Sisi was finalizing the road map, with ElBaradei and others.

  Now Haddad was thinking about history. On his laptop, he wrote a warning to the West in English and posted it to Facebook.

  As I write these lines I am fully aware that these may be the last lines I get to post on this page. For the sake of Egypt and for historical accuracy, let’s call what is happening by its real name: Military coup. . . .

  On January 25 [2011] I stood in Tahrir square. My children stood in protest in Cairo and Alexandria. We stood ready to sacrifice for this revolution. When we did that, we did not support a revolution of elites. And we did not support a conditional democracy. We stood, and we still stand, for a very simple idea: given freedom, we Egyptians can build institutions that allow us to promote and choose among all the different visions for the country. We quickly discovered that almost none of the other actors were willing to extend that idea to include us.

  You have heard much during the past thirty months about Ikhwan excluding all others. I will not try to convince you otherwise today. Perhaps there will come a day when honest academics have the courage to examine the record.

  Today only one thing matters. In this day and age no military coup can succeed in the face of sizeable popular force without considerable bloodshed. Who among you is ready to shoulder that blame?

  I am fully aware of the Egyptian media that has already attempted to frame Ikhwan for every act of violence that has taken place in Egypt since January 2011. I am sure that you are tempted to believe this. But it will not be easy.

  There are still people in Egypt who believe in their right to make a democratic choice. Hundreds of thousands of them have gathered in support of democracy and the Presidency. And they will not leave in the face of this attack. To move them, there will have to be violence. It will either come from the army, the police, or the hired mercenaries. Either way there will be considerable bloodshed. And the message will resonate throughout the Muslim World loud and clear: democracy is not for Muslims.

  I do not need to explain in detail the worldwide catastrophic ramifications of this message. . . .

  In the last year we have been castigated by foreign governments, foreign media, and rights groups whenever our reforms in the areas of rights and freedoms did not keep pace with the ambitions of some or adhere exactly to the forms used in other cultures. The silence of all of those voices with an impending military coup is hypocritical and that hypocrisy will not be lost on a large swath of Egyptians, Arabs, and Muslims.

  Many have seen fit in these last months to lecture us on how democracy is more than just the ballot box. That may indeed be true. But what is definitely true is that there is no democracy without the ballot box.

  Haddad delivered a v
ersion of the same warning in a last phone call to the White House. He spoke with Susan Rice, Obama’s new national security adviser, who had taken over on July 1. Rice had been ambassador to the United Nations in 2011 and she had been among the early advocates of breaking with Mubarak and siding with those in Tahrir Square. But the tumult under Morsi had dampened her enthusiasm about the hope for a democratic Egypt. She told Haddad that Morsi should accept his ouster, for the sake of stability. When he hung up, Haddad told the others around Morsi to expect no help from Washington.

  “Mother just told us that we will stop playing in one hour,” one of Morsi’s advisers wrote in a text message to a relative outside Egypt. Mother America, Egypt’s international patron.

  Only one woman was in the guard complex with Morsi and his inner circle—Pakinam el-Sharkawy, his chief policy adviser. Morsi ordered her out for her safety. He expected that soldiers would kill him that night, his advisers later told me. But he seemed oddly at peace. He told stories and laughed about the politicians of his youth, under President Sadat.

  As the last aide walked out of the complex, he heard a general order the guards: “Lock the gates.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Sisi, looking boyish in short sleeves and a black beret, appeared on television standing at a podium with an all-star cast seated behind him: Mohamed ElBaradei, the Coptic pope, the grand imam of Al Azhar, and a Salafi party leader.

  Egyptians “are not calling on us to assume power,” Sisi said, only “to secure essential protection for the demands of the revolution.”

  I raced back toward the place where Morsi’s supporters had gathered, to look for signs of violence, but military vehicles blocked the way. A column of tanks and armored personnel carriers churned through the streets. They had encircled both the presidential palace and the guard complex as well.

  I had seen several almost–coups d’état in Egypt: generals removing a president because they feared public unrest, generals scheming for behind-the-scenes control, generals dissolving a Parliament, and generals trying to overturn a vote. In each case, politics went on, full of suspense and surprises. But there is no mistaking a real coup when you see one.