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

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  Kerry and other American officials had lost patience with Morsi for moving too slowly to reach a deal with the International Monetary Fund during his first and only year in office. Sisi openly opposed the deal and sent the IMF packing.

  Why reform? The Persian Gulf monarchs could not let Sisi fail and thereby give another chance to the Muslim Brothers. The Gulf rulers appeared willing to pay anything to keep propping up their man in Cairo.

  Another secretly recorded conversation captured Sisi conferring with other generals in early 2014 about how to handle one of his Persian Gulf patrons. “You tell him that we need ten to be put into the army’s account. Those ten, when God makes us successful, we will put to work for the state,” Sisi said, rattling off his demands for more cash. “We need another ten from the UAE, and an additional two cents to be put in the Central Bank, to complete the accounting for the year 2014.”

  His office manager, who was another general, chuckled out loud. “Why are you laughing?” Sisi asked. “They have money like rice, man!”

  Sisi sometimes lost count of it all. “No, no, no! Not eight billion dollars in six months—no!” he exclaimed in another recording. So the generals tallied it all up with him. A few billion here, a few billion there, and they realized that they had received far more—more than $30 billion.

  “May God continue providing!” Sisi said.

  “Amen, sir,” another general answered.

  Sisi held his hand out to Washington, too. In a private meeting, he told Kerry to send “an aircraft carrier full of money,” according to several Americans present or briefed on the meeting.

  But by late 2016, after his first three years in power—three times as long as Morsi held office—Sisi had made only token reforms to the economy. He continued a program begun under Morsi to use “smart cards” to track subsidized goods like fuel and flour. But without accountability or oversight, it ended up as riddled with corruption as the rest of the bureaucracy. So the military took it over, naturally.

  By then, with oil prices and revenue down, even the Persian Gulf monarchs lost patience. They tempered their generosity. Dependent on their donations, Egypt’s reserves dipped dangerously. The value of the pound started to fall, and Sisi tried to prop it up through coercion alone. He decreed an artificially high exchange rate and jailed money changers who undercut it. The authorities restricted bank transfers out of the country, limited the use of Egyptian credit cards abroad, and searched luggage at the airport for any large wads of cash.

  It was no use. Dollars grew scarce. Stores and factories ran short on imported goods and materials. Manufacturers laid off workers. Imports vanished from store shelves. For me, that meant doing without my preferred brands of cereal and peanut butter. For Egyptians it meant serious shortages of medicines, including antibiotics. Mothers who needed imported infant formula demonstrated in the street over a shortage, and the army brought in a supply to start handing it out. The real value of the pound fell to half the official rate and a black market in dollars flourished despite the police.

  Finally, in November 2016, Sisi was forced to go back to the International Monetary Fund. The $4.8 billion bailout discussed under Morsi was no longer nearly sufficient. Egypt needed $12 billion now.

  The IMF mandated a free float of the currency that cut the value of the Egyptian pound by more than half overnight. It hung at around 18 or 20 pounds to the dollar, down from about 7.5 under Morsi. In 2017, food prices were rising at a rate of more than 30 percent a year. Wages were stagnant. Unemployment was soaring. With my wallet full of dollars, I could live like a king. My Egyptian friends shook their heads in misery.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sisi rewrote his own history. In the thirty months before the Rabaa massacre, he had often told Egyptian confidants and American officials that he was happy to be serving under a democratically elected president from the Muslim Brotherhood (as several of those confidants and officials told me at the time). After Rabaa, he insisted that he had warned all along against allowing Islamists a chance to take power.

  “I always told you, Anne, that political Islam would fail,” he told Ambassador Patterson, who wrote to Washington that Sisi had never said anything of the kind.

  No longer defending the earnestness of his efforts to help Morsi, Sisi hinted that he had duped the president from the start. “He underestimated me,” Sisi told the visiting American scholar Shibley Telhami in early 2014.

  Mubarak, in another leaked recording of a conversation with his doctor, reassessed Sisi. “He turned out to be devious.”

  Sisi spoke of himself in the third person, like a historical figure. “Sisi would never do a coop,” he told Hagel and Obama—pronouncing the p in coup d’état.

  He always returned to the classic authoritarian’s refrain, that the alternative was chaos. I heard the same thing constantly from supporters of his takeover. Sisi’s first prime minister was Hazem el-Beblawi, an internationally recognized economist who had been among Egypt’s most prominent liberals. When I visited his home less than a year after the Rabaa massacre, Beblawi was sitting in an armchair by a window of his grand apartment overlooking Nasr City. A book of economics and a tobacco pipe sat on a small, round side table.

  Beblawi had spoken out against the Maspero massacre and he had at least acknowledged that the death toll at Rabaa approached a thousand. I was ready to like him, and I tried to warm him up with easy questions. In your tenure as prime minister, I asked, what were you most proud of?

  Clearing the Rabaa sit-in, he volunteered, without hesitation.

  Really? I asked, delicately. He was proudest of the bloodshed?

  Of course he knew many would die, he told me. So did Sisi. “This is the police of a country like Egypt,” Beblawi said. “I cannot say this is Denmark.”

  “It is a matter of the prestige of the state,” Beblawi continued. “We are talking about a country where the state is central, and if there is a doubt about the state everything will disintegrate.” The Rabaa sit-in “was a test of whether we could have a state or not.”

  Beblawi had distilled for me the ideology of the Arab deep state. Turks and Arabs have been using the term for years to describe the machinery of the permanent government—the bureaucracy, the military, the police and judges, the media, and religious establishments, and so on—long before the phrase “deep state” came into vogue under Trump in Washington. The deep state is a machine that can churn on regardless of who is supposed to be driving. As Morsi discovered.

  The institutions of the Egyptian deep state seemed to me remarkably sturdy. They had survived revolutions, elections, parliaments, and presidents. The same functionaries who had welcomed me to Egypt under Mubarak had set up my meeting with Morsi, and they were still in place under Sisi. Everywhere, the same bureaucrats occupied the same desks that they had when I first arrived in Egypt.

  But the philosophy of the deep state—the ideology of Arab authoritarianism—depended on the opposite premise: that the state itself is as fragile and precious as a sarcophagus under glass in the Egyptian Museum. At the slightest jolt, savagery would prevail. The prestige of the state—the awe of the state, as it was sometimes translated—was the only bulwark against chaos.

  We learn in American civics class that stability rests on the rule of law, and that the law, by definition, must constrain even a president. The ideology of the deep state turned that axiom on its head. The social order was so tenuous that its guardians—the generals, the police, and the mukhabarat, the “state institutions,” in the Egyptian euphemism—must wield power without constraint. They must put themselves above the law in order to save it.

  Sisi embraced the paradox the moment he removed Morsi, on July 3, 2013. He was forced to act to prevent “the collapse of the state,” he declared, and to do that he suspended a newly ratified constitution, removed a recently elected president, and ordered a blitz of extraleg
al arrests and censorship. He vowed to preserve the rule of law and in the process shredded it completely.

  In meetings with Kerry or Obama, Sisi smiled, nodded, and seemed to agree with them. He said yes in body language, but no with his words. No, he would not free jailed Americans, or Egyptian journalists, or Brotherhood leaders. No, he would not loosen the restrictions on rights groups or political parties. He could not interfere with the sacrosanct independence of the judiciary, he insisted, convincing no one.

  He acted as if the bloodshed at Rabaa had been out of his hands. “He said, ‘Yes, it is terrible. We are investigating. The police got out of control,’” Kerry later recalled. “Sometimes I thought he was genuinely trying to work through problems. . . . Other times, he was making excuses.”

  Sisi, in de facto power since the coup, stood in a pro-forma presidential election in 2014. He scheduled it at the last minute, and he campaigned for only three weeks. He never bothered to attend his own rallies, nor did he spell out a platform. He was “the candidate of necessity,” as Heikal put it.

  Sisi’s only opponent was a Nasserite civilian. He mostly agreed with Sisi, especially about his ouster of Morsi. But when the polls opened on May 26, 2014, a panic seized the deep state. Almost no one was voting!

  At the last moment, election officials opened the polls for an extraordinary third, additional day. The prime minister declared a national holiday, canceled public transit fares, and threatened fines for nonvoters. Talk show hosts flew into hysterics. “Anybody who does not vote is giving the kiss of life to the terrorists,” one host, Mustafa Bakry, screamed. “Those who do not come out are traitors! Traitors! Traitors! They are selling out this country.”

  Sisi was declared the winner with 98 percent of the vote. But the independent monitors had pulled out over the irregularities, so who could be sure? A coalition led by a former intelligence officer dominated the parliamentary elections a few months later, with a platform consisting only of support, in all things, for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. (He was reelected by a similar margin in 2015 after the arrests of several possible challengers.)

  What was Sisi’s vision for Egypt? At the center of the square where the Rabaa sit-in took place, Sisi erected a singular monument. Two towers of granite each angled toward the other, and in the center a flimsy-looking white ball hung suspended in the air. A plaque explained that the taller stone was the military and its shorter sibling was the police. They were two hands. The fragile white orb cupped in them was the Egyptian people.

  Sisi had once told fellow military officers to think of Egyptians as children. The army is “the very big brother, the very big father who has a son who is a bit of a failure and does not understand the facts,” he told a group of senior officers, in another leaked recording. “Does the father kill the son? Or does he always shelter him and say, ‘I’ll be patient until my son understands’?”

  “You want to be a first class nation?” he asked Egyptians in another conversation, this time with his journalist-confidant. “Will you bear it if I make you walk on your feet? Will you bear it when I wake you up at five in the morning every day? Will you bear cutting back on food, cutting back on air conditioners? Will you bear me removing the subsidies all at once? Will you bear this from me?”

  Instead of faulting government policies, Sisi always blamed Egyptians—for their supposed lack of industry and enterprise, for their moral laxity, and for their prodigious birth rate. On the campaign trail, he complained to doctors that his government could not possibly afford to provide all Egyptians with the same standard of health care that the army provided soldiers. “Why? Because there is nothing, there is nothing!” he shouted. The doctors, he said, must work harder for less.

  But if the people were the problem, government power was always his answer. Inflation? He proposed mandatory price controls and state-run factories. Energy shortages? He would force Egyptians to install energy-efficient lightbulbs in every home socket, even if he had to send government employees to screw in each one. “Sisi bulbs,” the hardware store clerk told me when I bought one (voluntarily).

  “I’m not leaving a chance for people to act on their own,” Sisi explained in the only television interview of his short campaign. “My program will be mandatory.”

  In the economy, “the state has to be in control here,” he added, so his government would plan, choose, “and execute.”

  The centerpiece of his economic program was a “new” Suez Canal—his answer to Abdel Nasser’s High Dam. Twenty thousand conscripts a year had worked for ten years to dig the original canal, completed in 1869. Sisi promised to finish his new one in a single year, no matter how much the rush cost. In September 2014, he sold $8 billion of special government bonds to the public to pay for it (with no foreign funding).

  EGYPT REJOICES, EGYPT’S GIFT TO THE WORLD newspaper headlines declared when construction was finished on time in 2015. The government ordered every imam to preach a sermon comparing the new canal with a battle trench dug by the Prophet Mohamed himself. “An additional artery of prosperity for the world,” Sisi declared to an audience of ambassadors and dignitaries at the opening. Its official $8 billion price tag was roughly as much as Egypt spent that year to subsidize bread.

  This “new canal,” though, was actually a parallel bypass that ran alongside only about a third of the original. It eliminated some potential bottlenecks, but not all of them. And it was unnecessary. The Suez Canal had been operating far below capacity for years. Changing trade patterns meant shipping volumes were falling. But no matter. When canal revenue continued to decline, the Egyptian news media forgot the embarrassment of Sisi’s rosy forecasts of future windfalls.

  In 2016—three years after he took power, two years after his inauguration, and one year after the seating of his rubber-stamp Parliament—Sisi delivered a speech about his plan for Egypt over the next two decades. But he was still talking, now sometimes manically, about the same existential threat he had used to justify his takeover.

  “Our goal is to preserve the Egyptian state,” Sisi declared, and he repeated the phrase another dozen times. “Any country’s main goal is preserving the state, preserving the state, preserving the state,” he insisted. “There are still efforts and conspiracies being carried out to bring Egypt down,” he said. “I am still talking about the national goal of preserving the state.”

  Everyone knew he depended on the backing of the military council, but Sisi now warned his listeners that only he could save Egypt. “Do not listen to anyone but me,” Sisi said. “I am a man who does not lie, who does not beat around the bush, and who cares only for his country!”

  He would eradicate all enemies, he repeated again. “I will wipe off the face of the earth anyone who threatens this country,” he promised. “I am telling every Egyptian listening to me now, What do you think is going on? Who are you?”

  An echo: Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, Egypt’s crazy neighbor, had used the same words to challenge the Libyans rising against him in the Arab Spring revolt. Man antoum? Who are you? When revolutions were in style, I bought Man antoum T-shirts for my sons. Did Sisi intend to quote Qaddafi?

  Sisi bluntly acknowledged he had no time for the democracy he once pledged to restore. “It’s still early to start practicing democracy in an open sense, where we criticize this or that, and this guy is kicked out. It’s still early days.”

  Stop complaining, he told Egyptians. He would be the judge. “Will you know better than I do if this government is good or not?” he asked. Why should his ministers tolerate criticism from the public? “What do they get in return for tolerating you? What do they get in return for your attacks all day and night?”

  Yet a few months later, at a youth conference in Suez in April 2017, Sisi blamed those ministers for his government’s failings. “His excellency the minister of agriculture is talking about creating ‘synergistic communities,’” Sisi said sarcastically. “Why
didn’t we create them three years ago? There have been three ministers of agriculture. Why didn’t we do it?”

  “People,” Sisi chided, “saying things here is one thing, but turning this talk into action is a completely different story—or else Egypt would not be so backward.”

  He reminded the audience of his own unfulfilled promise to develop a million and a half acres of desert as farmland, and he again blamed his ministers. “The ministries of irrigation and agriculture would allocate the lands, allocate the water, and then retreat.” He could hardly fire them, though. “Will I let someone go who has only worked with me for five or six months? Where would my credibility be if I removed everyone who comes to work with me?” Where indeed! The crowd at the conference roared with applause.

  Plenty of Egyptians told me that they were grateful for Sisi. They felt lucky not to live in the chaos of Libya, Syria, Iraq, or Yemen. That idea was a running theme of the progovernment news media. Even my former Arabic tutor, who once ranted at Mubarak’s “gang of thieves” and his brutal police, told me in 2016 that he had changed his mind. The “revolution” taught him to appreciate the police and to appreciate Sisi.

  Other Egyptians, though, could only laugh at their leader. Sisi boasted of his love for Egypt at the end of one speech. “I swear to God, if I could sell myself, I would.”

  An eBay listing was up within minutes: “One Egyptian president slightly used . . . May not ship to Qatar.” Bids surpassed $100,301 before eBay shut down the auction. (The author of the listing remained anonymous and presumably abroad; insulting the president is once again a jailable crime inside Egypt.)

  To some Egyptians, Sisi called to mind a comic film made in Cairo in the 1980s. Its cab driver hero happened to resemble a delusional mental patient named Balaha—which is also the Arabic word for a date, as in the fruit on palm trees.