by Ronan Farrow
Emergency room doctors saved his life by removing most of a bullet-shredded kidney. The rest was a daze. His strongest memory was of the bodies: dozens piled in the back of military trucks, and more overwhelming the hospital. “I tried to scream,” he said, “but I’m not sure any sound came out.” Butturini, a meticulous photojournalist who had kept snapping pictures through other violent crises, retained few images from that day. His memory card, stashed in a boot as he arrived at the hospital, disappeared as Egyptian security officers swarmed the premises, taking surviving protesters into custody.
This was, many who lived to tell the tale remarked, Egypt’s “Tiananmen Square.” Reports suggested eight hundred seventeen people were killed at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square alone. By most counts more than one thousand were likely killed in crackdowns across Egypt that day. Human Rights Watch, after a yearlong, exhaustive investigation, concluded that Egyptian “police and army forces systematically and intentionally used excessive lethal force . . . resulting in killings of protesters at a scale unprecedented in Egypt.” Snipers were placed on rooftops to fire on protesters. Soldiers were stationed to block exits as people desperately tried to escape.
THE UNITED STATES KNEW the massacre was coming. “It wasn’t a secret that the government was going to go in there with overwhelming force,” said Anne Patterson, whom I had encountered in Pakistan and who was, by August 2013, the American ambassador in Cairo. “That had been our concern for weeks prior to this.” During those weeks, the United States scrambled for a diplomatic solution, both from State Department officials like Patterson and from congressional leaders. Secretary of State John Kerry sent his deputy, Bill Burns, to work out an agreement that would limit the scope and size of the Brotherhood’s protests. Congress dispatched its top two foreign policy hawks—Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham—the week before the massacre to press for a return to calm and to civilian control. The senators pleaded with Egypt’s top general, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, interim vice president Mohamed ElBaradei, interim prime minister Hazem el-Beblawi and others, before the Egyptian cabinet sat down to debate intervention.
Graham later told the press the effort never inspired optimism. “You could tell people were itching for a fight. The prime minister was a disaster,” he said, describing Beblawi’s approach to the growing ranks of protesters. “He kept preaching to me: ‘You can’t negotiate with these people. They’ve got to get out of the streets and respect the rule of law.’ ” Sisi, meanwhile, seemed “intoxicated by power,” as Graham recalled. “We talked to the military endlessly by that time,” Patterson, the ambassador, explained. “They had gotten calls from Washington, from me. There just didn’t seem to be anything else to be done at that point. I talked to Sisi the day before. They said they were going to exercise restraint.”
Even Pentagon leadership eventually stepped in, with then–Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel calling General Sisi again and again, sometimes as often as every other day, for weeks on end. John Kerry was among the officials who told me the military-to-military rapport that has long anchored US-Egyptian relations was the most potent channel for defusing such crises. “The US investment over decades in building up the Egyptian military . . . made a difference when Mubarak was considering firing on the protesters” during the earlier flash point in Tahrir Square, Kerry said. In that case, “there were back-channel mil-to-mil conversations that I promise you factored into the Egyptian military telling Mubarak they would not follow his orders if he wanted them to go kill ten thousand kids in the square.” But in the case of the Rabaa massacre under Sisi’s leadership a few years later, those same pleas from American military leaders fell on deaf ears. None of it registered in Cairo.
“Did you make an angry call after it started?” I asked Patterson.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Because I think we’d said everything we had to say at that point.”
IN THE DAYS BEFORE THE MASSACRE, the Egyptian cabinet huddled in a government building in Tahrir Square to discuss what to do about the protesters. The exertions of the Americans had little bearing on the conversation. “I met McCain and Graham but I felt that they were not able to understand how important [it was] for a transition government . . . to assure they can protect the security of the people,” said Beblawi, the interim prime minister. “The security of the people cannot be accepted and believed in,” he continued, “if you feel somebody is staking out territory by force, in the middle of the capital.” Beblawi told me he had taken calls from Ambassador Patterson and heard her out, but that, ultimately, “I didn’t feel any pressure.”
Beblawi was in his office at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, slouching in a green chair that swallowed up his small form. A mantle of dandruff dusted his shoulders. Three years had passed since the Rabaa massacre. “I have no regrets,” he said. “I feel very sorry this happened. I don’t know how it ended this way, but I think if the situation would have been reversed, it might be even worse.” He furrowed his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “The cost was high, no one expected it to be as much. Also there was a lot of exaggeration and many numbers were brought from outside,” he said skeptically. Beblawi’s response, like those of most officials behind the crackdown, was a thicket. The loss of life was regrettable, but also not so bad as all that. The decision was the right one, but also out of their hands. The police and military, he later told me tartly, “are not controllable all the time.” In any case, he felt, the protesters started it. “Of course, they are challenging the authority, challenging it by force, and actually in both Rabaa and Enada, the first bullet was coming from among the Muslim Brothers. This is for sure, the starting of the using fire was on them.” I pointed out to Beblawi that most international human rights assessments disputed that narrative. He shrugged. “They asked for this.” When I asked him if American influence had any effect, he said, simply, “No.”
Interim Vice President ElBaradei—who had been leading negotiations with the Brotherhood protesters and served as one of the main liaisons with Graham and McCain—pushed back against armed intervention, arguing that a deal with the demonstrators was possible, according to several sources present at the time. Fahmy, the interim foreign minister, reportedly took his side, though he refused to confirm his position on the matter to me. “The decision to do Rabaa was a cabinet decision,” Fahmy said, declining to elaborate on the breakdown of perspectives in those final, critical days. After the fact, Fahmy, like Beblawi, has struck a defensive posture, assigning blame to the protesters. “They had blocked all the streets,” he told me, shaking his head. “And this area, by the way, is a heavily inhabited area.” The largely unarmed protesters, he suggested, were a menace to public safety. This was the influence America’s most muscular diplomatic intervention—and an annual military assistance package totaling $1.3 billion—had purchased: at best, a few extra words, behind closed doors, shortly before the slaughter.
A YEAR AND A HALF BEFORE, on a hot Saturday in February 2012, I’d watched as Hillary Clinton filed into a palace in Tunisia overlooking the Mediterranean, to deliver a speech about the future of democracy in the region. After Richard Holbrooke’s death, I had put together a small team of Foreign Service officers to focus on the global implications of the youth unrest I’d seen vividly in Afghanistan and that then unfolded across North Africa and the Middle East. That February in Tunisia, Clinton was announcing my role as part of an initiative focused on youth outreach and public diplomacy.
There was a placard on the podium with a map of the world showing a glowing gradient centered on the Middle East. This was meant to suggest a spreading wave of democratic enlightenment, but it looked more like a blast radius. Clinton appeared small behind the podium, in a vaulted chamber at the heart of the palace, a blue and white jewel of a building called Nejma Ezzohara (Arabic for “Star of Venus”), constructed in the 1920s by an heir to a French banking fortune, Baron Rodolphe d’Erlanger.
A sea of upturned faces—the kind of optimistic, educat
ed, and generally nonrepresentative youths rounded up by American embassies for photo ops—looked on as Clinton preached the virtues of democracy. “You were fearless on the front lines of the revolution, enduring tear gas and beatings. It takes a different kind of courage to be guardians of your new democracy,” she told them. “Transitions can be derailed and detoured to new autocracies,” she continued. “The victors of revolutions can become their victims. It is up to you to resist the calls of demagogues, to build coalitions, to keep faith in the system even when your candidates lose at the polls. . . . That means not just talking about tolerance and pluralism—it means living it.”
On the way out, Clinton, hair pulled back ballerina-tight, black and blue jacket billowing, paused on one of Nejma Ezzohara’s spectacular terraces. Squinting into the sun, she extended an arm toward the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean. “Things are changing,” she mused.
BUT THE TRUTH WAS that those changes had caught the United States flat-footed and robbed it of credibility on the themes of Clinton’s speech. American administrations had chosen to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Middle East’s autocratic strongmen for decades. When those autocrats’ regimes crumbled and the alliances with them became a liability, the United States was slow to adapt. In the Middle East, as in Central Asia, military-to-military deals had eclipsed diplomacy for so long, we barely knew how to do anything else. Egypt was Exhibit A.
Throughout the Cold War, Soviet sponsorship of Egypt’s military and constant conflict with Israel were at the heart of the US-Egypt relationship. Bloody skirmishes over land—including the attempt to reclaim the Sinai after which the 6th October Bridge was named—continued into the 1970s. But Egypt’s new leader at that time, Anwar Sadat, was dogged in his reorientation of Egypt toward two radical new goals: a peace deal with Israel, and closer ties to the United States. Above all, he wanted the Sinai back in Egyptian hands, and felt peace was the way to achieve this.
In the United States, newly elected president Jimmy Carter seized on the moment, bringing together Egypt and Israel at Camp David for an iconic thirteen-day negotiation. One of its outcomes, a peace treaty signed six months later, forged the modern relationship between Israel, Egypt, and the United States. Israel agreed to withdraw from the Sinai and return it to Egypt. In exchange, diplomatic relations were restored between the two countries, and Israel was guaranteed free passage through the Suez Canal. The diplomatic achievement was secured with military funds, an arrangement that would blight the relationship for decades after. Under the agreement, the United States would commit to bankrolling Egypt.
Since 1987, that assistance has held steady at $1.3 billion per year. The bullets that ripped through protesters during the Rabaa massacre were almost certainly purchased with American funds. US military aid covers the cost of as much as 80 percent of Egypt’s weapons. By 2011, the word “Egypt” appeared 13,500 times in the Pentagon’s database of military contracts.
That arrangement reflected one of the oldest assumptions in foreign policy: that you can buy security. For a generation, Egypt appeared to be a proof point for that thinking. The country’s repressive leaders—for most of those years, the Mubarak regime—helped secure American equities in the region. But, from the revolts of 2011 to the Rabaa massacre in 2013, when change swept the region, it betrayed fatal flaws in that conventional American wisdom. Buying security wasn’t enough. Years of neglected diplomacy meant that Washington lacked other, essential tools of persuasion when conflict broke out.
THE CRACKS BEGAN TO SHOW in January 2011. Revolution was spreading—from neighboring Tunisia to Alexandria, and then to Cairo. That month, thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square rallied around an array of frustrations with Mubarak and his regime: from mass unemployment to corruption to heavy-handed policing.
The protesters sweeping the Arab world looked askance at the United States’ reliance on Egypt’s repressive military regime as a surrogate. But the US was slow on the uptake: as violence began to spark, then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton proclaimed the regime “stable.” She deployed Frank Wisner, Richard Holbrooke’s old friend and a veteran diplomat who had long been sympathetic to the Mubaraks, who informed the public that “the president must stay in office.” The State Department was forced to disavow its own envoy’s remarks. It called for Mubarak to step down, too late and to little effect. In just seventeen days, the uprising ended fifty-nine years of military rule. Mubarak was removed, and America’s relationship with Egypt was unmoored.
A committee of generals known as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) stepped in as a caretaker government while preparations were made for the first free elections in Egyptian history, and promptly began a series of vicious crackdowns on civil society. In one December 2011 incident, employees from ten NGOs were banned from leaving the country—among them Sam LaHood, son of then–US transportation secretary Ray LaHood. The military leadership was thumbing its nose at the Americans.
Anne Patterson, who arrived as the new US ambassador to Egypt in the first months of SCAF’s leadership, called that period “really, really disruptive . . . There were some Americans at the embassy; it took weeks to get them out, maybe longer. We basically paid bail and then they jumped bail—that was the deal. That got the relationship off on a really bad foot.”
WHEN THE ELECTIONS TOOK PLACE, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood party swept the Parliament, with its leader, Mohamed Morsi, securing the presidency. It was yet another shift in gravity for which the United States was ill-prepared. The Brotherhood quickly proved more problematic than the SCAF. Worst of all, from the perspective of the American foreign policy establishment, Morsi threw into doubt the core tenet of the US-Egyptian alliance: support for Israel. The politician had, years earlier, described Zionists as “bloodsuckers” and “war-mongers,” and complained that “futile [Israeli-Palestinian] negotiations are a waste of time and opportunities.” Domestically, the Brotherhood’s harsh social policies on issues such as women’s rights and alcohol consumption alienated much of Egypt’s largely secular population. A hastily constructed and fraudulently ratified constitution with terms favorable to the Brotherhood further infuriated Egyptians. After just one year in power, Morsi faced street protests as large as those that had ousted Mubarak.
As protests became more violent, the military—led by then–defense minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—forced Morsi from power and placed him on trial. Sisi was, in some ways, a return to the status quo ante: a strongman who would hold the line on Israel.
“I knew Sisi very well, and I knew it wasn’t going to be great, don’t get me wrong,” said Patterson. “But frankly he’s proven a lot more brutal than I ever would have predicted.” Sisi’s security forces clashed with protesters who took to the streets, enraged at the ouster of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood regime. Tensions mounted as the sit-ins and rallies grew, finally culminating in the bloody massacres of August 2013, at Rabaa, and elsewhere. In the years since, crackdowns have continued unabated. In the first year after the 2013 coup, under Sisi’s rule, at least 2,500 civilians were killed and 17,000 wounded by the police or military. By March 2015, security forces had arrested more than 40,000 people, the majority of them on grounds of suspected support for the Muslim Brotherhood, although leftist activists, journalists, and university students were also detained. Hundreds of Egyptians were “disappeared.” The repression, according to Human Rights Watch, was “on a scale unprecedented in Egypt’s modern history.”
Most of the targeted individuals were thrown in jail on sham charges—or on none whatsoever. As one prisoner recalled of his time at Azouli, an isolated military jail: “There is no documentation that says you are there. If you die at Azouli, no one would know.” In April 2014, 529 Brotherhood members were sentenced to death, one of the largest ever mass death sentences anywhere in the world. The attorneys of the accused were denied access to the “evidence” and those who protested were threatened.
The following year, the
same court sentenced Morsi for his alleged role in the 2011 uprising. The former president faced public execution, by hanging, with more than 100 others sentenced alongside him. Morsi’s coconspirators included one man who has been in jail since the 1990s and two who had already died.
“I would say it’s the worst of anywhere I’ve ever seen outside of a war zone,” said Frank Lowenstein, the longtime adviser to John Kerry. Tony Blinken, the deputy national security advisor at the time, offered a bleak prognosis of Sisi’s impact: “Over time and almost inevitably if he continues to repress a significant minority of his own population . . . liberals, secularists, moderates, journalists, you name it, all have their voice taken away and many of them get thrown in jail, and thrown in jail where they’re mixed with genuine radicals, that is a recipe for radicalizing a lot more people. And we can’t forget that al-Qaeda was born in an Egyptian jail.”
GROWING CONCERN OVER THE SISI REGIME and its use of American weapons did, at least, spark a debate over accountability. After Morsi’s removal, questions arose over whether to abide by the so-called “coup clause” in US appropriations law—mandating a halt to direct assistance to “any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup d’état” until democracy is restored. President Morsi, though divisive, was by any account “duly elected.” His removal was widely called a coup because, well, what else could you call it? Sisi’s military regime had made no pretense of democracy.
But with $1.3 billion in annual military assistance at stake, the Obama administration refused to use the word. It first resorted to what the Associated Press called “difficult contortions” of language to avoid the term. Then, finally, senior State Department official Bill Burns was dispatched to inform lawmakers of the administration’s formal decision: this coup would not be called a coup. The most militarized corners of American foreign policy were also among the most constrained, so much so that one of the most obvious coups in recent history could never be called what it was. Those constraints were tightened by the lack of alternatives: there was no diplomatic strategy to confront the disruption that would follow enforcing such a legislative provision.