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

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Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 30

by David D. Kirkpatrick


  The Brotherhood organizers were welcoming any ally now. Hard-line Islamists raged from a soundstage about Islamic law and legitimacy—Sharia and shareia. A local affiliate of Al Jazeera was broadcasting live from Rabaa, and the other networks replayed sound bites about martyrdom, jihad, or retribution—terrifying many Egyptians who never came near the square.

  “These people dare to mock our religion!” roared Safwat Hegazy, the fire-and-brimstone TV preacher. “God will punish them!”

  “The people want the trial of the serial killer,” the crowd chanted against Sisi.

  Some blamed Christians or called the soldiers the “thugs of the church.” “Have you seen the crosses in Tahrir Square?” one asked from the stage. “Is this a crusade?”

  Mohamed Soltan was appalled by the rhetoric. His father was one of the Islamists giving those fiery speeches. But Mohamed was a twenty-five-year-old Egyptian American who had grown up mainly in the midwestern United States. Everyone around the sit-in knew him as the fat kid in Michael Jordan shorts and flip-flops. One of Mohamed’s uncles was a senior Brotherhood leader and (in classic Egyptian fashion) another uncle was a general in the army. Soltan himself was much more liberal than most Muslim Brothers. He had headed the thousand-strong Muslim Students Association at Ohio State University, volunteered for the Obama presidential campaign in Ohio in 2008, and returned to Egypt just in time to join the Tahrir Square protests in 2011. He did not consider himself an Islamist. He thought Morsi was too conservative and a lousy president. But Soltan opposed the military ouster of any democratically elected leader. So on the night of the coup he moved to Rabaa.

  “That Sharia and legitimacy thing—that does not represent me and people like me!” he told the Brotherhood leaders. He persuaded them to “rebrand” the sit-in. He switched the color of the backdrop behind the stage from green, the color of the flag of the Prophet Mohamed, to black, the color of mourning. Soon there were PRODEMOCRACY and ANTICOUP signs and T-shirts everywhere, beginning with the guards who patted me down at the gates. Soltan made sure that no television camera could zoom in on any sign with the written word JIHAD without also taking in at least one logo that said PRODEMOCRACY ANTICOUP. Banners spread everywhere that read CHILDREN AGAINST THE COUP, PHARMACISTS AGAINST THE COUP, LAWYERS AGAINST THE COUP, and so on. One sign proclaimed CHRISTIANS AGAINST THE COUP, though I doubted that many Egyptians flocked to that one.

  Beyond the sit-in, I met a few storekeepers, taxi drivers, service people, or strangers in elevators who probed my allegiance with careful questions. Is the New York Times controlled by the American government, like Al Ahram in Egypt? What did I think of Rabaa? If convinced that I was not a spy, the questioner might whisper that he stood with Morsi or loathed Sisi. But I must not tell anyone!

  * * *

  • • •

  Outside of Rabaa, Cairo felt transformed overnight, as though the Morsi era were already a distant memory. By July 4, smiling policemen appeared on the corners. The Interior Ministry took down the concrete barriers erected to block the streets around its headquarters. The minister—a Mubarak-era official appointed by Morsi and now an enthusiastic supporter of the coup—announced that the police at last stood “with the people.” Police posters sprang up around the city with a picture of children beaming up at a uniformed officer.

  The police were now open about their relief. “You had officers and individuals who were working under a specific policy that was against Islamic extremists and Islamists in general,” said Ihab Youssef, a former police official who acted as an informal spokesman to Westerners. “Then all of a sudden the regime flips and there is an Islamic regime ruling. They could never psychologically accept that.”

  Day-to-day life immediately improved. The gas lines and blackouts ended the day after the coup. Had some player—the military, for example—been holding back fuel reserves?

  “This was preparing for the coup,” Naser el-Farash, the Morsi-appointed ministry spokesman, now told me. “Different circles in the state—from the storage facilities to the cars that transport petrol products to the gas stations—all participated in creating the crisis.”

  Giddy newscasters and politicians wildly inflated the number of demonstrators who had turned out against Morsi on June 30. Where the military had initially told Morsi the demonstrators against him numbered 650,000 in Cairo, talk show hosts now said the turnout had been ten million. Then the Interior Ministry said seventeen million. Soon all the newscasts insisted that it must have been at least thirty million. “Fifty million Egyptians,” the tycoon and party leader Naguib Sawiris proclaimed in an interview on American television—virtually every Egyptian adult. “We are the ones who told the army to come!”

  Fireworks exploded over Tahrir Square every night for weeks. Egyptian flags covered the city. Roadside entrepreneurs rushed to my car window with buckets of little flags to try to sell me. Strangers in expensive latte shops heard me speak English and pulled me aside to tell me what a triumph had occurred. Egypt had reemerged from darkness! Why did Obama support the Brotherhood? Didn’t I fear the militants at Rabaa? Why did the Brothers refuse to disperse?

  Sawiris had predicted to me before the takeover that removing Morsi would bring in so much money from the oil-rich Persian Gulf that Egypt would no longer need a $4.8 billion IMF loan. His forecast was well informed: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait immediately gave Egypt a total of $12 billion—three times as much as the proposed IMF loan and eight times the annual American aid. Sisi “managed to save Egypt,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia declared in a statement issued within two hours of the coup. (Qatar, the lone Gulf state that supported the Brotherhood, did not join the donations.)

  “That will take us for twelve months with no problem,” Sawiris told me. In fact, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchs gave the post-Morsi government more than $2 billion a month for more than two years. On June 20, 2014, nearly a year afer the takeover, King Abdullah landed his executive jumbo jet at the Cairo airport long enough for Sisi, the onetime military attaché to Riyadh, to come aboard and pay homage in a half-hour meeting. One scholar called it “a victory lap” for the king. The Saudi press emphasized that the king had brought along his intelligence chief, Prince Bandar. It was a “thank you gesture” for helping to orchestrate the coup.

  The Egyptian foreign minister, Mohamed Kamel Amr, had resigned in the run-up to the takeover on July 3. But the next morning, he was back on the job and summoned me to his office. A thirty-four-story skyscraper among the luxury hotels along the Nile, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry contained nearly as much floor space as the State Department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters—a towering symbol of bureaucratic authority. Amr was a veteran Mubarak-era diplomat appointed by the generals and retained by Morsi. He welcomed me to his palatial office overlooking the river with a handshake and a grin, and he told me Morsi’s ouster was a great day for Egypt.

  Had I not noticed, at all those press conferences with visiting Americans, that he had always hung back, never smiling? That he had left the talking to others? Yes, he had stayed in the job under the new president. But he had always opposed Morsi, Amr said, including to Western diplomats. “I was presenting the true picture of this country to the outside world,” he told me. “I don’t mean to be blowing my own horn, but I believe that was respected by my counterparts.” Morsi’s own minister had been poisoning other foreign governments against him.

  I received a phone call from Mohamed ElBaradei while I was still in the building. I had admired ElBaradei since he had predicted in December 2010 that Mubarak’s time was up. He had defended the Muslim Brotherhood against false charges of terrorism. He was honest about the military massacre of Christians outside Maspero.

  But for three years he had repeatedly offered himself as a candidate for high office only to back out before elections. He never found the playing field clean or fair enough. His favorite strategy appeared to be a boycott. The only availabl
e polls confirmed what was obvious inside Egypt: ElBaradei was far more popular among Western journalists and diplomats than he was among Egyptians.

  Now, the day after the coup, he told me that he had just gotten off long phone calls with John Kerry and Catherine Ashton, the top diplomat for the European Union. ElBaradei had talked extensively to each of them all year, and he referred to them by their first names, like old friends.

  He said he had worked hard to convince them that Morsi’s removal would “restart” a transition to democracy, and now he tried to convince me, too. “As Yogi Berra said, ‘it’s déjà vu all over again,’” ElBaradei said. He meant that the “revolution” in Tahrir Square had a second chance, an opportunity to begin again and get it right this time. “I would be the first one to shout loud and clearly if I see any sign of regression in terms of democracy.”

  This time, he was sure the generals would respect the rule of law and yield to elected civilians. “The security people obviously are worried—there was an earthquake and we have to make sure that the tremors are predicted and controlled,” he said. “They are taking some precautionary measures to avoid violence; well, this is something that I guess they have to do as a security measure.”

  Still, he expressed surprising confidence in the chief prosecutor—a Mubarak loyalist whom he had previously panned. “Everybody who is being rounded up or detained, it is by order of the attorney general—and being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood is no crime,” ElBaradei said.

  He was talking as if he held some personal power in the new government to guarantee his promises. “I have emphasized to all the security authorities here that everything has to be done in due process,” he told me.

  About the Muslim Brothers, he said, “I was told that there are a number of accusations and they need to be investigated.” But President Morsi “was treated with dignity and respect—and that is important.” ElBaradei said he hoped the Muslim Brotherhood would compete in parliamentary elections.

  I felt sorry for him. He was a Nobel laureate, and he believed everything the generals were telling him.

  The next day, on Friday, July 5, a soldier outside the presidential guard complex tore up a Morsi poster hung on the barbed wire. A group of Morsi supporters had camped outside in the belief that the president was still held inside (which was correct, as I later learned from someone with him), and they grew angry. The soldiers shot and killed at least four of them. Around Egypt that day, at least thirty civilians were killed at demonstrations against the coup. No Egyptian television network covered any of it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ebrahim el-Sheikh, Mayy’s younger brother, lived with another sister in an apartment tower just a few blocks from the presidential guard complex. He had been apathetic about politics before 2011 but filled with hope after the uprising. After the presidential election, he blamed Morsi for the continued police abuse and thought he hogged too much power. So Ebrahim joined the Tamarrod petition and the June 30 protests.

  He was up before dawn on the morning of July 8—he had stayed out most of the night, as Egyptians sometimes do during Ramadan—when he heard the sound of gunfire outside. He ran to the window with a video camera and saw a group of unarmed men running up the street. Soldiers fired their weapons after them. The regular policeman stationed near the corner was a friend of Ebrahim, and the officer got into his patrol car to hide until it was over. The bullets blasted the doors and shattered the windows.

  A few hours later, Ebrahim and another neighbor pulled the policeman’s body out of the bullet-strewn car. “He did not have a head anymore,” Ebrahim told Mayy.

  The killing of the policeman was the tail end of an outburst of violence that morning. The guards outside the guard complex had started shooting again at dawn, for reasons I could never understand. By the time I reached the scene, T-shirts, scarves, and scraps of clothing were soaking in pools of blood on the street. Moataz Abu al-Shakra, a twenty-five-year-old electrical engineer, was holding up a sheet of corrugated metal that the demonstrators had tried to use as a shield. It was riddled with bullet holes. He and other witnesses—including opponents of Morsi—said soldiers inside guard towers had inexplicably started shooting during the prostrations for dawn prayer.

  “It is like they were fighting a war between two countries, not like our army or police,” he said.

  Bullet casings and bloodstains were spread over hundreds of yards. The soldiers had gunned down fleeing men as they ran, and they kept chasing demonstrators through the side streets for hours.

  An Egyptian American professor visiting from New York was staying in a thirteenth-floor apartment nearby, and he emailed me an account of what he had seen out of his window around 4:00 A.M. (He asked that I keep his name private for the safety of his family in Egypt.)

  “I saw hundreds of army and police soldiers firing bullets at unarmed protesters who were running frantically east-south direction into Al Tayaran street away from the soldiers and the bullets. . . . The protesters were running, there was no battle or exchange of fire.”

  The soldiers killed more than sixty and wounded more than four hundred. Officials said later that a soldier and two policemen were also killed. One was presumably the policeman-bystander killed by police bullets whose dead body Ebrahim helped to pull from his patrol car.

  I posted on Twitter from the street, amid the bullet casings and bloodstains. “Egyptian massacre . . . Dozens of witnesses, including bystanders who hate the Brotherhood, say the protesters were unarmed when the shooting began.”

  I thought I was reporting the news. My dispatch was received like an act of war, and from unexpected quarters. My tweet caught the eye of Nagla Rizk, an Egyptian economics professor affiliated with Harvard, Yale, and the American University of Cairo, and, as it happened, a friend of my wife, Laura.

  I thought Rizk was as liberal as could be. She wore her hair down, favored catlike red eyeglasses, and lived back and forth between New York and Zamalek. Her academic work was skeptical of property rights. She had marched against Mubarak on the Day of Rage, and a can of tear gas had torn her jeans.

  “Unfortunate that your coverage shows 1 side/part of story,” she fired back at me on Twitter after I used the word “massacre.” “Extremely unprofessional.”

  Dozens of others piled on.

  “I thought you were professional. Shame on you.”

  “Those are terrorists.”

  “They provoked the army.”

  “Why not gather a mob of 500 thugs & attack a US army facility with bricks, Molotov, and AK47? I bet they will be throwing roses.”

  “They were sneaking weapons into the mosque.”

  I called Rizk to ask, was she not worried about the dangers of the military retaking control?

  “It is not ideal” for the army to oust the president, she said, “but this is the best thing that can happen. . . . We know that this is the will of the people, and I am cautiously optimistic.”

  What she feared was the Muslim Brotherhood. “I am worried about safety. I am worried about terrorism. I am worried about somebody trying to bomb himself in a jihad move in the name of Morsi. I don’t want my kids to get bombed in the streets by some Morsi supporter who wants to defend Islam. That is my worry. This is a movement for an Islamic caliphate, so for them Egypt is just a detail.” The Brothers “were taking us back to the Dark Ages, at all levels,” and violence was “the only language that they know how to speak.”

  As for the mass shooting, “the evidence is mixed,” Rizk said. “I think that the pro-Morsi protesters are provoking counteractions that will get sympathy—global sympathy,” she said. “They are very good at portraying an image that appeals to the Western world, using Western terminology like ‘legitimacy’ and ‘democracy.’ They are very good at playing this game!”

  It was almost as if she believed the protesters had gotten themselves kil
led on purpose, as a performance for the West. (Years later, she acknowledged that she had been swept up in the moment, and in fact had communicated with me that day from New York. “What happened in 2013 . . .” she said, trailing off. “I mean, we are not happy. I am not as politically active as I was.”)

  I was beginning to feel the anti-Islamist mania gripping the liberals of Egypt. The National Salvation Front—so critical of police abuse under Morsi—defended the killings. The Front called a news conference and held up a banner: MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD-AMERICAN CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE REVOLUTION.

  “We expect violent actions from the side of the Muslim Brotherhood,” its spokesman declared.

  Talk show hosts who had crowed about their liberation from the mukhabarat in 2011 fell back into line as the Greek chorus of the crackdown. “Do you know what it means for Egyptians to take themselves to stand and shoot their military?” one host lamented, as though the demonstrators had been shooting at the guards.

  “Forget ideas. Forget the ideology they are saturated with. Only remember that it is Egyptian blood,” he declaimed solemnly, warning listeners that Brotherhood leaders had the minds of “wild beasts.”

  I felt a personal connection to one host: Lamees el-Hadidi. She had started her career as an assistant reporter for the Cairo bureau of the New York Times (in 1998, right after she had graduated from the American University in Cairo). She had gone on to become one of the most influential voices in the Egyptian media. Her face, with her trademark bangs swinging down over her forehead, was on billboards all over the highways. When we met for coffee at the Four Seasons, we were interrupted by fans seeking autographs. But she was still “a New York Times girl,” Hadidi told me whenever we talked.

 

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