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

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  22

  Coup d’État

  July 4, 2013

  Obama summoned his National Security Council to the White House the next day, on July 4. Only a few days earlier, traveling in Africa, Obama had reminded journalists that unlike Mubarak, Morsi was “democratically elected.” So his opponents should follow “legal, legitimate processes.” But now Obama surprised the room. Of course, we cannot call Morsi’s ouster a coup d’état, Obama announced at the outset of the meeting.

  Everyone else had come prepared to argue over the application of the “coup law”: the statute that required cutting off aid to any military that toppled an elected government.

  Puzzled about the apparent turn in the president’s thinking, Philip Gordon, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, observed aloud that calling the takeover a coup would not necessarily require demanding Morsi’s reinstatement. Aid could flow again after a restoration of democracy.

  Obama, newly engaged, pointed to General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “If Marty deposed me and then another country cut off relations, Marty would not have to restore me before the other country restored relations?” Obama asked.

  Dempsey also defied expectations. Soldiers are taught not to remove an elected government, he said. Isn’t that what happened? Wouldn’t the White House risk its credibility if it did not call the coup what it was? Rhodes made the same case.

  But others wanted to back Morsi’s ouster. Some in the administration welcomed a return to military rule, several present later told me. The return of a military government “did represent some degree of familiarity and predictability that you could not entirely discount as having some benefit,” one senior official involved acknowledged.

  A top intelligence official had already conveyed his approval of the takeover to one of Sisi’s supporters in the region. Michael Morrell, deputy director of the CIA, had received a call hours after the takeover from a senior Arab ambassador to Washington. “Michael, what do you think about Egypt?” the ambassador had asked.

  “This is a good thing,” Morrell had replied. “Morsi was leading the country to ruin, to instability, and to extremism. Now Egypt has a chance again.”

  Morrell knew that answer was “inconsistent with U.S. policy,” as he later wrote in his memoir. But the ambassador concurred.

  “You are right,” the ambassador replied. (I later asked Morrell in an email if the ambassador was his friend Yousef al-Otaiba. Morrell declined to name his sources and added a smiley face emoticon.)

  Otaiba, for his part, had celebrated the night of the takeover with cocktails at the Hamilton, a trendy Washington bar and restaurant, joined by Ramy Yaacoub, the Egyptian who had delivered to the State Department the “Operation 6” memo about the planned military takeover. Otaiba had also fired off a threatening email to the White House.

  “My friendly advice here, the U.S. needs to somehow bless this move, even if it is a subtle and private wink-nod,” he wrote to two senior administration officials, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken. “If this blessing is not given, the perception will be the U.S. is defending Morsi and the anger in the streets that is currently directed toward Morsi will be redirected toward you and your embassy.”

  Some National Security Council staff told me that they also worried about the safety of the embassy personnel if Washington came out against the takeover. But Kerry argued in the July 4 meeting at the White House that Morsi’s removal was not, in fact, a coup. Sisi was bowing to the public will and acting to save Egypt, Kerry asserted with passion. “The generals said they removed Morsi for the purpose of avoiding an implosion and establishing the rule of law, not for the purpose of governing. They said they were going to put a road map back to elections in place. There was a clear schedule for the elections,” Kerry later told me he had argued.

  The military was not asking to run the country, he insisted. They said they were ready to let the voters decide. “We had to test that,” Kerry told me, and he added more pragmatic arguments. “If we called it a coup and walked away, we would lose any leverage and other countries would have happily filled the void.”

  Hagel, the intelligence directors, and ultimately Dempsey all sided with Kerry: the alliance with Egypt was too important to jeopardize, and the aid would give Washington pull to sway Sisi toward democracy and away from violence.

  “Why would you take away every instrument of influence that we have?” Hagel asked in the meeting. “If you cut Sisi and Egypt loose, Sisi will be on a plane to Moscow in forty-eight hours, and to China, and he will get funding.” The Saudis and the Emirates “will pour millions in, and the Israelis will be very upset, which we will have to deal with.”

  Years later, Kerry told me that the Americans who had opposed Morsi’s ouster were naïve about the region. “Everybody sits back and makes a judgment on a place like Egypt or the Middle East right now based on such a classic American mistake: they make suppositions about what it ought to be and what Egyptians ought to do based on our situation, our view of life, and our view of the world,” Kerry said. “But the problem is, that is usually completely divorced from the reality on the ground and what other actors are doing. We see things only through our own lens and our own ideals.

  “In Egypt, what was the alternative?” he continued. “It wasn’t Jeffersonian democracy. Was it Morsi? Or the Salafists? Or was it Sisi and company, and the establishment that has been there awhile? Are they democratic? No. Are they something to brag about at home? No. But over whatever number of years we have put about eighty billion dollars into Egypt. Most of the time, this is the kind of government they had—almost all of the time. And the reality is, no matter how much I wish it was different, it ain’t going to be different tomorrow.”

  To defend Morsi at the expense of alienating Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchies made no sense to Kerry. He needed those allies for higher priorities. He was focusing on the nuclear deal with Iran, the Syrian civil war, and a Palestinian peace agreement. He did not want to “get into a fight with them over something as historically clear as how Egypt works,” Kerry told me.

  “If we just say, ‘Hey, you guys, we are washing our hands, you are done,’ then guess what? Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and all the other countries, including Israel, will be right there, one hundred percent. They are all, at heart, in the same frame of mind.”

  In their customary roles, a secretary of state lobbies for concerns like rights, democracy, and long-term stability while the secretary of defense speaks for immediate security interests. But in this debate both Cabinet members lined up on the same side. The loudest voice in the White House for rights and democracy, Samantha Power, was absent, preparing for her confirmation as ambassador to the United Nations. It was a one-sided debate, in favor of Sisi.

  “We were isolated in our own government,” Ben Rhodes later told me. “The people who wanted to have a different kind of relationship with the Egyptian people, including the president, were on an island in our own government. It was hard enough to take the position that we took at the height of the Tahrir Square protests, and now it was much harder. There was a sense of inevitability about the military resuming control.”

  Obama did not fight it. He decided not to disclose any decision. The administration made no determination about whether what had happened on July 3 in Cairo was or was not a military coup, thus sidestepping the coup law. Privately, some White House staff came to call Morsi’s ouster “the couplike event.”

  23

  Killing Themselves

  July 3, 2013–July 24, 2013

  Rabaa al-Adawiya was a slave girl in the eighth century in the city of Basra, in what is now southern Iraq. Her father, a poor man, had named her rabaa—fourth—because she was his fourth daughter. One day her owner-master found her kneeling in prayer and surrounded by light.

  “If I were free I would pass the whole day and night in prayers,�
� she prayed aloud. “But what should I do when You have made me the slave of a human being?”

  Moved by her faith, her master granted Rabaa her freedom. She ran into the desert, slept with a brick for a pillow, and wrote poetry. She became the first in a long line of female Sufi mystics and saints. Then 1960s Egyptian cinema, in its Nasser-era golden age, got hold of her story. Rabaa was reborn in celluloid as the most glamorous scribbling ascetic in history. An Egyptian-made film portrayed her in her slave days as a dazzling beauty in gold hoop earrings and flowing silk. She danced in and out of love affairs to the songs of the great Egyptian diva Om Kalthoum. It may have been the film as much as the legend that had inspired a group of Cairo businessmen in the 1990s to build a mosque named for Rabaa al-Adawiya in the middle-class neighborhood of Nasr City.

  Rabaa was still twirling through late-night television around the Arab world when I lived in Cairo, and I thought of her as the patron saint of the city’s special blend of piety and hustle. Cairo is the capital of a transnational Arab culture that defies stereotypes and generalities, where the same people might revere the saint, enjoy the movie, and laugh off the contradiction. The New York Times banned the use of the word “secular” to describe any Egyptian. Even the most ardent anti-Islamist so often turned out to be fervently religious (albeit in different ways), and even the most secular Egyptians spoke and acted in ways that struck Americans as pious. Never trust anyone who tries to generalize about “the Egyptian people” and their religion, especially anyone who tells you that “the people” either chose or rejected political Islam.

  The open pavement around the mosque named for Rabaa al-Adawiya was the place that Morsi’s supporters chose as their rallying point before the June 30 protests. It was walking distance from the presidential palace, but far enough away to avoid another clash there like the rumble in December. By the time Sisi’s forty-eight-hour ultimatum expired on Wednesday, July 3, the crowds around Rabaa al-Adawiya Square had grown to tens of thousands.

  The security forces started rounding up Morsi advisers and Brotherhood leaders while Sisi was still talking. Soldiers and police shut down all Islamist television networks and Al Jazeera’s Cairo office. Every Egyptian news outlet still operating was celebrating the takeover. One talk show host wrapped himself in an Egyptian flag. Another danced around his studio as balloons fell from the ceiling. A female newscaster wept into her handkerchief and then sang the national anthem.

  “Welcome back, Egypt,” they all said. Egypt has “returned.”

  Television screens showed bearded men led away in handcuffs through crowds of jeering soldiers. Then the cameras cut to middle-aged women in abayas waving flags and ululating. Newscasters argued about whether they were celebrating a second revolution or the completion of the first one.

  There was no turning back. Some percentage of Egyptians believed that day that Sisi was committing a crime. Was that 15 percent, as his supporters might say? Or was it 30 percent, or 50 percent, or perhaps even more, and where was it? Support for the Muslim Brotherhood had always run much higher outside of Cairo, so anecdotal evidence from the capital had limited value. In any case, Sisi risked a prison sentence if he ever allowed a democratic election.

  Mayy el-Sheikh had stayed at Rabaa to monitor the scene, and she reported that the numbers continued to swell after Sisi announced Morsi’s ouster. Nervous energy amped up the chants. Grown men wept. Soldiers had been keeping watch around the perimeter. Now some of the Islamists hugged the sentries, wrapping arms around their body armor. Confidence or denial?

  At the edge of the crowd, Mayy struck up a conversation with a Muslim Sister named Esraa el-Berry, a thirty-year-old wife and mother who covered her hair but wore a Western-style skirt and a blouse. “We’re staying until our votes mean something,” she shouted to be heard over the din. “We didn’t defend our votes the first time when we went to the ballot boxes and elected a Parliament and then watched as they shattered it. But from now on, we will cast our votes and we will stand behind them with our blood. . . . I will not give up my freedom.”

  But it is all over, Mayy told her. Morsi’s gone. The constitution is gone.

  “We thought the military was at our backs,” the woman answered. “God wanted to teach us that no one has our back in this world, that He and He alone is our refuge.”

  Tens of thousands marched through the streets that Friday carrying pictures of Morsi and demanding his return. Hundreds of thousands were rallying for the same cause in other cities and towns (where the Islamists were stronger). The police shut down all train service and blocked the highways into Cairo, to prevent an invasion.

  News reports said that Mohamed Badie, the Brotherhood’s general guide, had been arrested. But he appeared at Rabaa to declare his defiance: “Our peacefulness is stronger than their bullets.” That became the slogan of the sit-in.

  A gunfight had taken place the night before the coup at a smaller, parallel Islamist sit-in that had been taking place at Nahda Square, near Cairo University in Giza, and in the morning, Mayy and I counted the smoldering remains of seven cars and a motorcycle. Islamists said that unknown gunmen had killed a dozen of their number. But the bullet holes had gone in two directions and extended deep into the side streets. At Nahda Square, both the Islamists and their opponents must have had weapons.

  Neither I nor any other Western journalist I know ever saw weapons at Rabaa during the sit-in, and I visited often. Rabaa was the place to find all the Brotherhood leaders not yet in jail; it was the only place they were safe from arrest. They had set up a headquarters and media center inside the mosque. All of them told me with great confidence that the Egyptian public would never stand for a coup. The soldiers and police would never turn on their fellow Egyptians. Every soldier had a cousin who was a Muslim Brother.

  “I think the military has to yield; they won’t have any choice,” Gehad el-Haddad, the Brotherhood spokesman, told me. “We are stepping it up every few days, with protests around the country. We are logistically capable of carrying this on for months.” His father, Essam el-Haddad, had disappeared with Morsi.

  The crisis revived the unity of the movement. Within about a week, more than a hundred thousand people—men, women, and children—were spending the night at the Rabaa sit-in. A little town extended over several blocks and intersections. Some left for work each day but returned to sleep there. The organizers stacked bags of sand or pried stones from the pavement, and they built low walls and improvised gates at the perimeter. Bearded men in orange vests checked my identification and patted me down. Some kept sticks or clubs handy in case of attack. But they were always very welcoming to Western journalists like me. We were their best hope of getting a message to the world. Although the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera network was on their side, every Egyptian news organization still in business was against them.

  Footpaths led through rows of makeshift tents or wooden structures, some of which grew to two stories. Residents camped on cots, pads, or blankets. During Ramadan many napped on the ground through the heat of midday. They strung wires from lampposts to pirate electricity for lights, fans, televisions, or internet access. They used small, portable gas stoves to make tea or coffee, or to cook plates of beans.

  The Brotherhood organized four large communal kitchens making simple meals like kushari or macaroni. Some served more than twenty thousand meals a night. Men and women formed separate lines, segregated by gender, to pick up their dinner. Trucks hauled in clean water, and men carried jugs of it back to campsites within the sit-in. Cleaning crews passed through the sit-in twice a day to collect trash, but litter was accumulating, and you could smell the humanity.

  Much of the time the camp atmosphere was oddly festive. Maybe it was the feeling of community, or a nervous excitement, or a willful denial. When Ramadan began on July 8, families and friends broke the fast there together. Islamic anthems blared over loudspeakers. Stalls sold grilled chicken, roasted corn on
the cob, or Egyptian flags. A barber was giving out trims on a chair near his tent (free, but donations were welcome). A few couples held weddings. Children fired plastic water guns or jumped on trampolines and inflatable slides. Someone set up a small swimming pool.

  My colleague Ben Hubbard spent twenty-four hours wandering the sit-in with a video camera, and he concluded that it was Woodstock for Islamists. Some giggling families were snapping photos by a pen of a dozen ducklings under a sign that read DUCKS AGAINST THE COUP.

  “The duck comes out of an egg and cannot go back in, just as we got our freedom and will not go back,” their owner, forty-nine-year-old Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, told Hubbard.

  Sometimes it felt like a reenactment of the original Tahrir Square protests, the way middle-aged Americans march with bayonets to relive Gettysburg. This time, though, there were no bushy-haired hipsters, no curious matrons from the Egyptian elite, no “Gucci corner” of rich kids from the American University, and no Copts. These were almost all Islamists. Five times a day, every man in the sit-in was down on his knees.

  As time went on, an undercurrent of anxiety grew more palpable. Men and women at Rabaa talked about the bad old days when a loud knock on the door before dawn meant that the police had come to haul an Islamist out of his bed and lock him away. Some recalled their torture—beatings, suspensions in the air, electrical shocks to the genitals. A MILLION MARTYRS! signs at Rabaa declared, all but daring Sisi to try to kill them all. But no one wanted to die.

  I knew by then that the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood privately blamed Morsi for getting them into this mess. But in public they lionized him. His picture covered every tent, wall, lamppost, and picket. Vendors sold Morsi face masks and demonstrators wore them around. Speakers on the soundstage repeated his name like a prophet of God.