Satellite television networks linked to the Egyptian Brotherhood and broadcasting from Istanbul seethed with demands for revenge. “Now, it’s not ‘Our peacefulness is stronger than bullets,’” a man on the edge of a riot in greater Cairo told an interviewer in a phone call to one of the networks. “Our peacefulness is stronger with bullets.... Their women for our women. Their girls for our girls. Blood for blood.”
“That is what I was just saying!” the interviewer, Mohamed Nasser, agreed. “I sent a message to the wives of the officers and told them that revolutionaries will kill their husbands!”
The Egypt Call was too much for some elders of the movement. Sticking to nonviolence may feel like “grasping a burning coal,” one elder, Mahmoud Ghozlan, wrote in an open letter posted on the internet from an undisclosed location. But Brotherhood history had proven that “violence is the reason for defeat and demise.”
A revered senior scholar sometimes referred to as the mufti of the Brotherhood, Abdel Rahman al-Barr, seconded the reprimand. “Peacefulness is not a tactic or a maneuver,” he wrote in his open letter from a hidden location. “It is a fundamental choice based on religious jurisprudence” and “a correct reading of history.”
Online messages from angry young Brothers drowned out their warnings. “What you’re describing isn’t called ‘peacefulness,’ it’s called ‘shame and humiliation.’” “Bloodshed has overrun the meaning of prone ‘peacefulness.’”
Within days, the police arrested both elders. A court had already convicted them in absentia of inciting violence despite their public efforts to stop it. Their death sentences were waiting.
The Brotherhood, the grandfather of Islamist movements, had presented itself for decades as a bulwark against violence and extremism. Now it was too internally confused and divided to play any such role. By 2017, the Brotherhood had collapsed into endless debates about what went wrong, how to move forward, and most of all about who should take over. Had they moved too fast or too slow? Should they retreat into separatism or embrace confrontation? Could there be such a thing as “defensive violence”? Individual cells were split by loyalties to rival leadership teams.
For two years after 2011, Western journalists in the Middle East wrote about debates over the compatibility of Islam and democracy. After the summer of 2013, we wrote about whether Islam was inherently violent.
* * *
• • •
For the first few months after Rabaa, the army deployed heavily around the city each Friday morning to crush any protest before it got going. Occasionally supporters of the Brotherhood would hold Friday marches in or near our neighborhood, Maadi, and we had a couple of close calls. But most marches were quickly scattered by police. We always managed to keep our sons away. Then the pattern of street protests gradually faded.
The months of demonstrations were followed by an unnerving period of nocturnal explosions, sometimes in earshot of our bedroom. One night in October, a bomb destroyed a satellite dish that we passed each day driving our sons to their school. But over time it became clear that, unlike the jihadists, these attackers were targeting infrastructure or empty shops, not trying to kill civilians. Laura commended their restraint and breathed a little easier. The boys’ lives were now circumscribed by the few blocks between our home, their school, and the pool club, but they did not seem to mind. There were school plays and swim meets. Laura was working at the American University in Cairo. Most of her elite, Anglophone Egyptian colleagues were delighted to be rid of the Muslim Brothers.
One day a few weeks after Rabaa, my phone rang as I was ducking into a restaurant in Zamalek for dinner. “Hey, David, this is Mohamed Soltan . . .”
It was the Egyptian American Ohio State grad who took a bullet in his arm at the Rabaa sit-in. He was calling me from a lightless, overcrowded dungeon in the Tora prison complex.
The police had arrested him in a raid on his apartment a few days after the massacre. He had been inducted into prison with a ritual initiation known as the tashreefa, or honoring ceremony. He and the other new inmates were stripped to their underwear, then forced for two hours to run between two rows of guards beating them with whips, belts, and batons.
Provided no medical attention, Soltan relied on a prisoner with a medical degree to remove two thirteen-inch pins from his injured arm, using pliers and a straight razor, without anesthetic or sterilization. Then Soltan’s jailers threw him into an underground cell. Prisoners screamed and begged to get running water turned on for a few hours a day. Soltan had paid the equivalent of forty dollars to a street criminal for an hour’s use of a smuggled mobile phone. He called me and Abigail Hauslohner, my counterpart at the Washington Post.
I was terrified that he would be caught talking to me (was my phone under surveillance?) and endure more beatings. But Soltan knew his only hope was his American passport. He wanted to tell Americans that a fellow citizen was in jail for defending democracy. He bet that his midwestern accent would stir in me a feeling of connection, and in that he was right.
Egyptian prisons make the harshest American supermax look like the Four Seasons. The tens of thousands rounded up after the coup were deprived of decent food, sanitation, health care, or bedding. They slept on crowded floors infested with bugs. They were beaten and occasionally tortured. None of that was a surprise.
It was difficult, in a perverse way, to empathize. Their stories blurred together: a regional marketing executive for a Danish pharmaceutical company who was arrested at the airport on his way to a sales conference; the genial physician-turned-parliamentarian paraded before cameras still in his bedclothes; the septuagenarian general guide led off without his dentures. How could Egyptians do that to one another?
One memorable day two years after Rabaa I received three separate phone calls about three other friends who were all locked away in Egyptian jails—two Islamists and a liberal. The brother of one, the son of another, and the fiancé of the third all wanted to know: was there anything I could do to call attention to their cases?
No, I gently told them, there was nothing I could do. One more Egyptian political prisoner was hardly newsworthy.
Soltan was charged with inciting violence, just like so many others. But he knew his Americanness made him different. It was his slang, his profanity, his zeal for the Ohio State Buckeyes, his work knocking on doors for the 2008 Obama campaign. When he turned twenty-six on November 16, 2013, I helped arrange for the website of the New York Times to publish an open letter to Obama that Soltan had written that day and smuggled out of prison.
“Mr. President, all I long for is the opportunity to get together this Thanksgiving with family and friends and enjoy some turkey and pie. I keep dreaming about watching my Buckeyes winning it all this year after beating Michigan. Counting down the clocks on New Years. Watching the Super Bowl in my Tom Brady jersey (hopefully he isn’t a disappointment this past season!) and eating a good ol’ cheeseburger with a side of fries . . .”
On his twenty-seventh birthday, he smuggled out of prison a letter to his mother. He was surviving, he told her, on the lessons in determination and perseverance he learned playing high school basketball, from a coach he called Slappy.
Soltan had entered prison at five eleven and weighing 272 pounds. Over three months that fall, he gradually stopped eating protein or meat (what little there was in prison), then carbohydrates, and then dairy products. On January 26, 2014, he began a hunger strike, consuming only water, salt, and vitamins provided by his family.
After about fifteen days, he began losing consciousness occasionally. Sometimes he was taken to a prison hospital for intravenous infusions of glucose and saline. He was locked in solitary confinement and briefly broke down, banging his head against the door until he bled and needed a bandage. He later told me that guards had slipped razors under the door and exposed electrical wire inside his cell, to tempt him with suicide. “Relieve us and you of this
headache,” one told him.
He was kept awake by screams of pain from other cells. He was put under a twenty-four-hour-a day spotlight and then a blinking strobe. When he refused to let prison doctors take his vital signs, he was handcuffed to a wheelchair and beaten into submission.
Then an ailing prisoner named Rida was wheeled into Soltan’s hospital room. His new roommate screamed in agony and died in front of him. But no one answered Soltan’s cries for help. When someone finally came in at 3:00 P.M. the next day, Soltan had spent half a day alone with the corpse.
After eleven months on water and vitamins, Soltan had lost one hundred sixty pounds. United States diplomats in Cairo pleaded with the Egyptians to deport him. In September 2014, Obama met Sisi for the first time, during the United Nations General Assembly, and made a face-to-face push for Soltan’s release. Sisi murmured about the independence of the Egyptian judiciary. Soltan stayed in jail.
In January 2015, Soltan acceded to his family’s wishes and began accepting milk and yogurt, to keep his organs intact. They said Obama’s intervention might win his freedom. On May 30, 2015—after twenty-one months in prison and sixteen months on a hunger strike—he was finally deported to the United States.
I met Soltan at his sister’s home in northern Virginia the next winter, and he told me that the three friends arrested with him were all still in prison. So was his aging father. Unlike him, they were only Egyptians.
Islamic State jihadists, he said, had been recruiting avidly in the prison. “They say, ‘These apostates will never respect anything but violent resistance. They only understand the language of weapons,’” Soltan said. “The one thing that everybody in the prison had in common—the ISIS guys, the Muslim Brotherhood guys, the liberals, the guards, the officers—is that they all hated America.”
28
Deep State
August 14, 2013–June 1, 2017
Laura and I often bought our groceries at a chain store called Seoudi Market. Laura could walk there without leaving the safety of our neighborhood. Friendly deliverymen dropped off our purchases at our door, and Laura got to know them all. Then one day in late 2013 she went shopping and found a crowd of policemen outside the store. All the staff had been fired. The military had taken over the chain. Its owner was a Muslim Brother. The owner of its competitor, Metro, had connections.
On a drive to Alexandria that fall, we noticed that uniformed soldiers were running the toll road, too. The military, in the interest of security, had taken over the management and construction of all roads and bridges. The Alexandria highway tollbooth soon moved next to a military-owned gas station and rest stop, devastating the privately owned businesses at the old location. Over six months in 2014, military-owned firms received more than $1.5 billion in contracts to build apartment blocks, tunnels, roads, and many other things. These were boom times for Egyptian Army Inc.
The generals “consider Egypt a battlefield,” Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour, Sisi’s trade minister, told Abigail Hauslohner of the Washington Post. “That gives the military the right of first refusal on every piece of land.”
A British friend was developing a shopping mall in Cairo, and over drinks one night he explained the system. There had been bureaucracy and baksheesh under Mubarak, of course. But now the developer was required to hire the military to build all roads, sewage or water networks, and other infrastucture. The military subcontracted the jobs to a company whose principal shareholders had heavily backed the coup (the Sawiris family). That company passed contracts on to the son of Sisi’s then–prime minister, Ibrahim Mehleb. Everyone in the chain got a cut. And it was dangerous to bring up such official corruption in public.
Mehleb, who had headed the state construction company under Mubarak, brought a long record of corruption to the prime minister’s job. Court records introduced after Mubarak’s ouster showed that Mehleb had inflated government contracts to allow the president and his family to embezzle millions for lavish purchases like five German-made refrigerators, a private office for the First Lady in a five-star hotel, several villas by the Red Sea, and a farm outside Cairo. Mehleb fled to Saudi Arabia in 2012 to avoid prosecution for corruption. He returned only when Sisi’s government named him housing minister in 2013. Sisi made Mehleb prime minister eight months later, in February 2014, his past forgotten.
Was Mehleb now brazenly steering contracts to his son? I rushed to investigate, but there was no need. His son’s firm—Rawad Construction, founded by Mohamed Mehleb—listed its government contracts and subcontracts in a prominent place on its website: a terminal for the Cairo airport; sewage and water facilities in Cairo and on the Mediterranean coast; infrastructure for a new university in Giza; a power plant in the city of Bani Suef; a wind farm near the Red Sea; and roads for a new administrative center. In a downbeat economy, the Mehlebs were soaring.
Executives of the company assured me that it was all based on merit. But Sisi had suspended the competitive bidding rules, so it was impossible to know. And there was no independent prosecutor, Parliament, or Egyptian press to investigate.
“It’s not only Mehleb’s son,” Anwar Sadat, a lawmaker and the nephew of the former president, told me. “The whole military economic empire needs oversight.” (I assumed his famous name would protect Sadat, but in 2017, the rubber-stamp Parliament voted almost unanimously to expel him, for the crime of defending the independence of nonprofits. “We saw that Sadat was working against the Parliament and against the state,” one lawmaker said, suggesting treason.)
Corruption was the price of autocracy. The Egyptian government for decades has boasted an exceptionally powerful anticorruption watchdog—the Administrative Oversight Authority. It is a military-run domestic spy agency, conducting electronic surveillance, running its own jails, and detaining suspects or even witnesses without warrants or trials. Created by Abdel Nasser to help control the civilian bureaucracy, the authority reports directly to the president. That is the catch: it makes no pretense of autonomy.
In practice, the Adminstrative Oversight Authority often charges the president’s enemies with venality while covering up for the self-dealing of his friends and family. The watchdog, in other words, is itself an instrument of corruption. Other Arab autocracies run similar systems.
The uprising of 2011 once promised an end to impunity for self-dealing. In the heady days after Mubarak’s ouster, a police officer working for the agency came forward to expose its corruption. In formal complaints and, later, in television interviews, the whistle-blower presented evidence that the agency’s chief, General Mohamed Farid el-Tohamy, was still covering up for Mubarak even after his ouster. “He is protecting the former regime” by locking the evidence in “a secret safe,” the whistle-blower, Lieutenant Colonel Moatassem Fathi, charged.
He said Tohamy had pocketed millions of dollars in gifts—really, protection money—from state-owned companies and government agencies. In return Tohamy spent as much as sixteen thousand dollars a year of the agency’s budget on presents for the defense minister and still more on gifts for Mubarak’s sons. The allegations filled the newspapers. Prosecutors opened a case. A parliamentary committee started an investigation. And Morsi replaced the sixty-six-year-old Tohamy with another general from inside the authority.
Tohamy, though, was also a mentor to Sisi. Tohamy had promoted Sisi at military intelligence and then hired one of Sisi’s sons at the Administrative Oversight Authority. The day after Sisi took over—on July 4, 2013—Tohamy made a comeback. Sisi named his old friend as the new chief of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, one of the most powerful positions in the state. With Sisi’s ear, Tohamy became one of the most influential advocates of a scorched-earth eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood. “He was the most hard-line, the most absolutely unreformed,” one Western diplomat told me. “He talked as if the revolution of 2011 had never even happened.”
The allegations against Tohamy vanished. The w
histle-blower was exiled to a desk job far from Cairo. “They have got him locked in the basement,” Mohamed Ibrahim Soliman, a former housing minister incriminated by Fathi’s disclosures, told me with glee. Several politicians like Soliman who had been jailed for corruption after the uprising were soon back in business—including Ahmed Ezz, the most infamous face of the late Mubarak era. I found him back to work at an office inside the Four Seasons.
How much did corruption cost Egypt? Archaeologists had fretted after the 2011 uprising that the withdrawal of the police allowed looters to pillage ruins and excavations. But corruption continued to eat away at Egypt’s ancient patrimony after the police returned under Sisi. Western and Egyptian archaeologists spoke of the theft or mistreatment of ancient artifacts as an unreported tragedy. In 2014, Egyptian Museum workers were fixing a light fixture around the 3,300-year-old burial mask of King Tutankhamen when they accidentally snapped off his beard. Curators hastily reattached it with a form of superglue in order to cover up their error and keep the museum’s biggest draw open. A visitor noticed a sloppy ring of epoxy around the repair job, and it is unclear if King Tut’s beard will ever be the same.
A government auditor, Hisham Geneina, estimated in early 2016 that graft had cost the country $76 billion over the previous three years, mostly through the corrupt sales of government land. That was about three quarters of the annual government budget, and his estimate was surely low if you factored in the bribery, nepotism, and self-dealing at every level of the bureaucracy. Transparency International, the corruption monitor, ranked Egypt near the bottom of the Arab world, on a par with war zones like Yemen and Iraq.
Sisi took the assessment personally. He promptly fired Geneina. A court convicted Geneina of spreading false news. He was fined $2,200, sentenced to jail, and falsely attacked across the progovermment media as a secret Muslim Brother. (His sentence was suspended, stirring speculation that his conviction had been devised to snuff out political ambitions. In the run-up to Sisi’s reelection in 2018, a gang of unidentified men beat up Geneina and a few days later the police again arrested him.)
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 35