The distortions could be mind bending. Sisi spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in October 2014, and ended his speech by chanting his campaign slogan, in Arabic, “Tahya Masr!” Long Live Egypt! Most delegates looked on in bemused silence.
But Sisi’s entourage and some Arab allies leaped to their feet chanting and applauding. Egyptian networks showed only narrowly cropped shots of the cheering. The anchors reported that the whole general assembly was acclaiming Sisi.
“LONG LIVE EGYPT” ROCKS THE ASSEMBLY! Al Ahram declared in its front-page headline.
“Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was the groom of the United Nations, and Egypt was the bride,” said Amir Adeeb, a nationalist talk show host. “A thing of genius.”
When I wrote about that misrepresentation, Al Ahram published an article saying that I, too, was applauding for Sisi. “In Kirkpatrick’s view, Sisi was able to erase the image that was in the minds of some people, that what happened in Egypt in June 2013 was a ‘coup,’ not a revolution. . . . Kirkpatrick pointed out that all the diplomats were in a state of silence and enjoyment throughout Sisi’s speech.”
So the New York Times published on its website an English translation of Al Ahram’s article about “Kirkpatrick’s view,” side by side with my original.
Al Ahram’s editors did not see the humor. Kirkpatrick “fervently defends the terrorist organization”—the Muslim Brotherhood—“and always promotes the idea that there is oppression of freedoms,” Al Ahram wrote the next day in an unusual nonretraction of its original claims.
By 2015, progovernment talk show hosts were denouncing me on air, by name, as an enemy of Egypt. One host, Osama Kamal, put up my photograph and insisted on referring to me as Kirk Douglas. Did he know that my middle name is Douglas? I worried the attention might make me a target for harassment or mob violence, and I kept my head down. (Prosecutors opened a formal case against me in 2018.)
Female foreign correspondents told me that the intelligence agencies targeted them for other abuse. A British journalist told me that while she was reporting on the first massacre after the coup, a group of men broke into her apartment. She hid in the bedroom and listened as they searched the living room and desks. But the intruders stole nothing. (Her male roommate, another journalist, was away that night.)
A few days later, a group of men sprang on her outside her apartment and grabbed her from behind. One dragged a knife over her chest and her crotch. “Do you want me to cut your breasts?” he threatened in English. “Do you want me to cut your clitoris?” Then the men ran away, without stealing anything.
A few weeks later, after the Rabaa massacre, she received an anonymous email from an account under the name “Military Military.” In broken English, it accused her of sleeping with her housemate, called him a spy, and warned that she had drawn “the people rage” by joining the “terrorist” of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“We are watching all of you, counting your breath, 24/7,” the message read. “We are guardian angels. We can turn in a minute into kill devils.”
She moved in with another friend for safety. Then, on a Friday afternoon a few weeks later, a mob of a dozen men assaulted her not far from where she had been accosted with the knife. They shoved their hands inside her, and she screamed, struggled, and ran. At an army checkpoint up the street, she told me, soldiers watched and did nothing. She soon relocated out of Egypt.
I thought that the return of the police might at least better protect Egyptian women. But during the four days of demonstrations from June 30 through Morsi’s ouster, mobs had sexually assaulted at least ninety-one, according to a tally by Human Rights Watch and Nazra for Feminist Studies. At Sisi’s inauguration, in June 2014, female television correspondents covering the celebrations in Tahrir Square tried to report another wave of assaults. In at least two cases their anchors cut them off.
“They are happy,” the anchor Maha Bahnasy giggled to her correspondent. “They are having fun.”
A mobile phone video made one assault that day impossible to ignore. It showed a woman in the square naked except for a black shirt covering her shoulders. Her bottom was bruised purple and black, and men’s hands were all over her. A policeman waved his handgun, the camera moved away, and she reappeared. She was fully naked and faceup, her body limp and reddened. The hands of strangers laid her in a car.
Sisi had campaigned for president promising to restore Egypt’s “gallantry” and “manhood.” After two days of uproar over the video, state television cameras followed him into a hospital as he delivered a bouquet of red flowers to the victim. (Her face was pixilated.) “I apologize to you, and, as a state, we will not allow this to happen again,” he told her, placing his hand over his chest.
“Shame on you to let this happen,” he told Egyptians, speaking into the camera.
That apology was the extent of Sisi’s defense of women’s participation in public life. The state-sponsored National Council of Women resumed its official monopoly on women’s organizing. Mozn Hassan, the young feminist who tried to build a movement, was charged with the crime of accepting foreign donations to her nonprofit. Prosecutors froze her assets and banned her from travel. The last time I saw her, in early 2017, she was waiting to go to jail.
The new president of the National Council for Women, Maya Morsi (no relation to the former president), had no sympathy for Mozn and defended the prosecution. “Let us not judge the law!” Morsi told me. “If you know that there is a law saying ‘Don’t do this,’ would you?”
She insisted Sisi was “a savior” to the women of Egypt. She said she saw no problems at all with the way that the army and police treated women. When I asked about the virginity tests, she offered excuses. The soldiers had to follow procedure. The abuse of the Blue Bra Girl had misrepresented the true character of the noble Egyptian army.
“We saw the real Egyptian army afterward, in the second wave of the revolution, on the thirtieth of June,” she volunteered. “No one touched any woman, right?”
I was incredulous. Independent rights groups had collected the testimony of dozens of women sexually assaulted in the demonstrations that day.
Did she think there were any problems at all with the treatment of women by the army and police?
“I don’t see it.” She paused to consider. “No, I don’t see it,” she told me again.
* * *
• • •
Laura wondered at her own receding standards. She would never have agreed to move to an Arab capital on the brink of a revolution. Now bombs were going off in Cairo. The police had started arresting Western journalists. I had been labeled a terrorist sympathizer in the news media. Egyptian mothers she met at the playground took a step back at the mention of my name. But here we still were.
Maadi was shaken in the spring of 2015 by the news that an online message board used by jihadists had posted detailed instructions about how to hit a local international school. Security consultants for the international petroleum companies were buzzing about a wave of carjackings targeting SUVs (like ours). The consultants thought the militants wanted four-wheel-drive vehicles to run guns in the desert. A major energy company pulled its fleet of Land Rovers and required all employees to drive smaller cars. We canceled plans to visit the Siwa Oasis, in the western desert, and Mount Sinai, in the South Sinai. We no longer felt safe on the roads. The American embassy barred its employees from driving outside of Cairo or Sharm el-Sheikh.
When the Islamic State militants beheaded the Croatian employee of the French oil company that August, we took it as an ominous sign that they might target Westerners. The militants brought down the Russian charter jet a few months later, and they were testing attacks on tourist sites. But those worries were abstract.
More pressing was the day in early 2015 when my son Thomas stepped on a nail. He was nine years old. A flare-up of street protests had closed off the roads again, and there were repor
ts of more shooting. Laura was afraid to take him to a hospital. She made do with a trip to a local pharmacist, who mishandled the wound. Thomas needed surgery on his foot when we got back to the States.
Most Western journalists who had covered Tahrir Square were long gone by then. Some rotated out. Others decamped for Istanbul or Beirut—cosmopolitan cities closer to the action in Syria and Iraq. We met again when I was on assignments in Baghdad or Tunis, and the conversations over drinks always turned back to the tragedy in Egypt. But Laura and I stayed.
President Obama had decided not to call Sisi’s takeover a coup to avoid a cutoff of the $1.3 billion in annual military aid. Now he may have been the last one in his administration to accept the idea of resuming it. His face-to-face meeting with Sisi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014 was a turning point. Advisers had warned Obama that Sisi could be long-winded and grandiose, even talking over former president Bill Clinton during a meeting at his foundation. So Obama tried to put Sisi on the defensive with specific demands about rights and freedoms. That is one reason he asked for the release of Mohamed Soltan, the American citizen then on a hunger strike in prison.
Officials who sat in on the meeting remember Obama as forceful and tough. But Sisi smiled, nodded, and stonewalled. He wanted to remove any irritant to their relationship, he said, but Soltan’s fate was up to the judges. Sisi kept pushing for more military aid, to fight the war on “terrorism” inside of Egypt.
“Well, that guy is never going to change,” Obama murmured to his advisers as they were leaving the room.
Intelligence agencies reported back that Sisi barely noticed the criticism. He was delighted with the attention.
Obama met with his National Security Council in the spring of 2015 about the suspended military aid. Almost all the principals now were pushing for a restart, but Obama was still against it. “I have read all the papers and I am still not convinced,” Obama told one adviser before the meeting.
The White House, too, had been lowering its standards. First it had demanded a full restoration of democracy, then the loosening of restrictions on nonprofit groups, or greater access to the North Sinai. Now Obama was asking only for the release of some political prisoners, even one American citizen. Sisi still gave nothing. (Sisi had named as his national security adviser the same Mubarak loyalist who had led the raids on the American-backed International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute, the one who had trapped Sam LaHood in the U.S. embassy—Fayza Aboulnaga.)
Ambassador Robert S. Beecroft, the new envoy to Cairo, weighed in by teleconference. He emphasized the reactionary forces within Sisi’s own government—the judiciary, the religious establishment, the police, the intelligence agencies, his fellow generals, and so on. Sisi did not control the deep state, in other words. He was its instrument. Another general could replace him.
Obama was persuaded that continued pressure would gain nothing, and he called Sisi that March to announce the restoration of aid. The Egyptian military suffered almost no penalty.
* * *
• • •
Between the beheading of the Croatian and the nail in Thomas’s foot, Laura and I decided in the fall of 2015 that it was time to leave Egypt. Laura and the boys moved to London, my next posting. I filed from Cairo and Libya until a new bureau chief, Declan Walsh, took over in 2016. But unanswered questions kept pulling me back. What had come over Egypt in the summer of the coup? What happened to the young people who had filled Tahrir Square in 2011, the liberal intelligentsia that I had so admired? Some were once again bravely standing up for human rights under Sisi. But how could so many have celebrated the coup and the crackdown?
Even if liberal intellectuals did not win elections, their voices resonated in Egypt and beyond. If more had spoken out against the massacres, the military could not have claimed so successfully that its takeover was a liberal revolution or a national consensus. Washington, especially, listened to the liberals.
Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt’s most famous liberal, quit during the storming of the Rabaa sit-in. “Violence only begets violence,” he wrote in a public letter of resignation. “The beneficiaries of what happened today are the preachers of violence and terrorism, the most extremist groups.” He fled the country that day.
If ElBaradei ever took responsibility for his own role in the coup, I never heard it. Prosecutors opened a case against him for betraying the country. The news media denounced him as a traitor.
Amr Hamzawy had been virtually the lone liberal to publicly oppose the takeover as it happened. After Rabaa, prosecutors charged him with insulting the judiciary on the basis of a tweet he had written under Morsi. (It was about a court decision against the American employees of NDI and IRI.) First the authorities barred him from leaving Egypt (forcing him to cancel a lecture at Yale). Then he was threatened with jail and forced into exile.
Other “liberals” soon felt the same boot. Sisi promptly banned unauthorized street demonstrations—the tactic that had brought him to power. A crackdown on organizing threatened to extinguish every independent human rights group.
Human Rights Watch was expelled from the country. Heba Morayef, who had dined with me at the embassy iftar when I first arrived in Egypt, relocated to Tunis. Police imprisoned several of the most prominent activists linked to the Tahrir Square sit-in. The left-leaning April 6 Youth Movement was declared a terrorist organization and membership became a crime. Sisi also eventually jailed Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh—the liberal Islamist who had taken on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Private conversations no longer felt safe. A website and television show called The Black Box specialized in broadcasting telephone surveillance of liberal activists, Islamist lawyers, and others. It was almost never damning but always creepy. (Its host was elected to Parliament under Sisi.) Egyptian friends started insisting that we put our smartphones in a refrigerator whenever we talked, because even in the “off” mode they can be used as listening devices. By 2017, the Egyptian government blocked encrypted communications apps like Signal or WhatsApp. It blocked dozens of liberal or left-leaning publications and websites. An Egyptian essayist, Sara Khorshid, was briefly detained for the crime of sitting in a café with a foreigner; another patron had taken her for a spy and called the police. A member of the April 6 group was turned in by his mother.
A highly regarded liberal journalist, Ahmed Nagy, was jailed for ten months for obscenity in a literary novel. Sisi’s government cracked down on homosexuality and arrested dozens after rainbow flags were displayed at a rock concert; secret police flirted with gay men through online dating services to try to entrap them. Parliament debated criminalizing atheism. At the beginning of 2018, the scholar and former American diplomat Michele Dunne asked on Twitter, “For the umpteenth time, what would the international community have said had this happened during Morsi’s presidency?” It was a running joke in Egypt: Thank God we got rid of the Islamists.
Shaimaa el-Sabbagh was a leftist who had supported the protests against Morsi and celebrated Sisi’s takeover. She had grown up in Alexandria as the daughter of a conservative Muslim preacher and chafed against his traditionalism. “For the likes of you, wearing pants is ‘covering,’” he told her in resignation. Keeping her pants on was all the modesty he could hope for. She wore her wavy dark hair uncovered and cut above her shoulders.
By the time of the takeover, she was about thirty, married to an artist, the mother of a four-year-old son, and an accomplished poet. Most serious Egyptian poets write in formal Arabic; Sabbagh was one of the few published poets who wrote in the avant-garde style of free verse but using the colloquial Arabic of everyday life. Her poem called “A Letter in My Purse” begins:
I am not sure
Truly, she was nothing more than just a purse
But when lost, there was a problem
How to face the world without her
Es
pecially
Because the streets remember us together
The shops know her more than me
Because she is the one who pays
She knows the smell of my sweat and she loves it. . . .
Anyway, she has the house keys
And I am waiting for her.
Sabbagh was active in a small socialist party that had backed Sisi’s takeover, imagining a more progressive Egypt. The party then endorsed Sisi on the principle that he was better than an Islamist. But on the fourth anniversary of the original uprising, January 25, 2015, Sabbagh and her friends wanted to commemorate the “martyrs” who died protesting Mubarak.
Because police would be out in force that day to ensure against any repeat, Sabbagh and about two dozen others gathered on the afternoon of January 24. They met a few blocks from Tahrir Square, armed only with flowers that they planned to lay there. They saw no reason to fear the squad of masked riot police a few feet away.
The tear gas hit them almost before they took a step. Gunshots cracked through the smoke. Sabbagh’s head tilted back. Blood streaked her cheeks. As she started to collapse, a kneeling friend grabbed her by the waist to hold her upright, his head pressed against her abdomen. He cradled her and slowly lowered her to the ground.
Dozens of people drinking coffee in nearby sidewalk cafés watched her die in the street. Photojournalists captured her killing second by second, frame by frame. The pictures spread across Facebook within hours.
Yet her friends who went to the police were detained as suspects and held overnight. An Interior Ministry spokesman declared the next day that the police could not possibly have killed her; they would never shoot at such a small crowd. The photographs and videos were “no proof at all,” General Gamal Mokhtar insisted.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 38