The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (31 page)

At roughly 11:00 p.m., Samira and sixteen other women were
taken to the prosecutor’s office. There, military officers claimed the female demonstrators had been found with knives and the ingredients for Molotov cocktails; in fact, the soldiers had planted all of the evidence. The women were then moved to one of the main military prisons. Samira was held there for the next three days. Over those days, the abuse, insults, and intimidation continued. The soldiers spit on her. All of her belongings were stolen. (When she complained, an officer told her, “Don’t say a word or I will kill you and no one will ask for you.”) Her meals consisted of kerosene-soaked bread.

But the most humiliating moment came when they first brought her into the prison. She and the other women were stripped and forcibly examined to determine whether they were virgins. The officers told Samira that any woman found not to be a virgin would have prostitution added to her charges. They led her into a room; it wasn’t a medical office, and she didn’t believe the officer was a doctor. Just before she was about to suffer this indignity, she froze. Behind the man waiting for her, she saw a photograph hanging on the wall. It was a portrait of Hosni Mubarak. She asked the soldier, “Why do you keep that up there?”

“Because we like him.”

Egyptians love their military. It is the protector of Egypt, the defender of the nation. From an early age, schoolchildren learn of the military’s heroism and sacrifice during the 1973 war against Israel. The regimes under presidents Gamal Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak—all former generals—lionized the armed forces for their patriotism and the role they played in ending the Egyptian monarchy in 1952. Whereas the country’s civilian institutions were allowed to deteriorate into corrupt and unresponsive islands of dysfunction, the Egyptian military maintained a measure of professionalism. The average Egyptian has far more faith in the military than in the country’s bloated bureaucracy or reviled police. When high prices led to riots over bread shortages in 2008, it was the military that answered the call, handing out bread from its bakeries. I saw it for myself in 2006. In that year, Egypt was the choice to host the Africa Cup of Nations,
the continent’s premier soccer championship. But as the date for the tournament neared, it became obvious that the construction companies the government had contracted with to build and refurbish soccer stadiums would not meet the deadline. Again, the military stepped in, sending its cranes and construction crews to finish the job in the nick of time. It wasn’t unheard of, even during the final years of Mubarak’s reign, for opposition politicians to call openly for military rule. The message was clear: the Egyptian military was the only institution that worked.

It was in keeping with this belief that the Egyptian military became one of the heroes of the 2011 revolution. In the early days, as tanks rolled into Tahrir Square and military units staked out positions with concrete barriers and razor wire, young Egyptian officers were welcomed and embraced. The now-famous cries from the demonstrators—“The army and the people are one hand!”—echoed through Cairo. Even if the military’s top brass had not yet decided whom it would support, it was not hard for the people to accept the rank-and-file soldiers as brothers in arms. And when the hour finally came, the country’s generals understood that the dictator they served had become too great a burden to shoulder. They abandoned their commander and quietly took control of the government on February 10, 2011. The next day, at roughly 6:00 p.m., a solemn-looking Omar Suleiman shared the news with the people. Suleiman, the former head of military intelligence who had become Mubarak’s first vice president only thirteen days earlier, announced that Mubarak had “decided to waive the office of the president of the republic and instructed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to run the affairs of the country.” The military, according to popular feeling, had chosen to stand with the people.

The events of March 9 were one of the first in a growing string of incidents that would tarnish the military’s image. With the military’s star shining so bright, though, it took a lot for mainstream Egyptians to question the integrity and intentions of their men in uniform. “
People worship the army. They will side with the army even when the army commits abuses,” one human rights activist told me. “People are refusing to believe the torture stories. They go on Facebook and there are video testimonies of torture victims showing torture marks on their backs, and the comments are still saying, ‘Not true!’ ”

At first, no one accused the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of staging a coup. Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and the other eighteen generals on the council had been widely expected to rule for a short period, bridging the gap between Mubarak’s fall and new elections that were supposed to set Egypt in a genuinely democratic direction. With those elections, the Egyptian military would return to its barracks. The only trouble with this scenario was that the Egyptian military had not been confined to its barracks for decades.

Strictly speaking, Mubarak’s Egypt could not be labeled a military dictatorship as neatly as, say, Burma’s military junta once could. Egypt had a president, held elections, tolerated weak opposition parties, and had branches of government and many other democratic trappings. Moreover, political power rested in Mubarak’s hands. But a military dictatorship comes closer to the truth than most possible descriptions. By contrast, the militaries in China, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are tremendously influential, but they are not peerless institutions the way the military is in Egypt. The military’s reach into the Egyptian government went far deeper than Mubarak the former general. Most of the country’s governors were former generals. It was not uncommon for Mubarak’s senior advisers and cabinet officials to have a military pedigree. And, as the most influential institution within the regime, the armed forces had been allowed to expand their interests far beyond the defense of the nation. Indeed,
the empire that today’s Egyptian military is most concerned with is its own business empire. The military bottles water, builds roads, sells olive oil, operates mines, makes jeeps, and runs a successful chain of hotels and resorts. In daily life in Egypt, it is easy to come into contact with a business with military ties. Control of so many enterprises gives the military attractive perks and privileges to dole out to senior officers. The question therefore arises, why would an institution that has benefited so much from the system as it exists seek to change it?

Within weeks of Mubarak’s ouster, many Egyptians had a creeping sense that the military’s definition of a democratic revolution was very different from their own. The military did not move to bring civilians into its decision making. Instead, activists believed the military’s so-called dialogue sessions were vacuous and all too similar to the divide-and-rule tactics of the former regime. It refused to end the emergency law—a central demand of the demonstrators—which
gave it broad latitude to make arrests without evidence, hold citizens without charges, and forbid strikes and public demonstrations. These laws had been in place for all thirty years of Mubarak’s rule and were one of the worst symbols of his repression.
Indeed, far from relaxing some of Mubarak’s most repressive tools, the military put some of its own—like trying civilians in military courts—to greater use. Rather than attempt to raze the state security apparatus that had oppressed people for decades, the generals simply renamed it. It was with these examples in mind that Hayam Ahmed, a middle-aged schoolteacher and protester in Tahrir, told me, “
We have found the regime is still out there. And they are part of the army.”

Nevertheless, 2011 could not be a return to 1952 in one important respect. Although the final push may have come from the military, Mubarak had not been ousted by a small cabal of generals, as King Farouk had. This was a popular rebellion. The Egyptian people, defying the myth of their own apathy, had risen up to demand an end to Mubarak’s regime. And having witnessed their own collective power, they would not hesitate to return to Tahrir Square, the place that had become the locus of political change. Demonstrators continued to win concessions from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces for months after it seized control. Few doubted that the Egyptian military wanted to go back behind the curtain or that Tantawi wanted to remain the face of the regime. The spotlight was blinding and unfamiliar territory for the generals. But as the months wore on, it became increasingly difficult to argue that they did not seek a version of the old status quo, albeit refurbished. Authoritarianism, as Egyptians were learning, was far more durable than the fate of a single dictator.

The joke went like this. The day before the presidential election, the prime minister went to see Hosni Mubarak. He told the president, “Although I am sure you won’t need it, just in case, you should probably prepare a farewell address to the Egyptian people.”

Mubarak replies, “Why? Where are they going?”

It was a popular joke in 2010 as Hosni Mubarak prepared to enter his third decade as president of Egypt. (I heard three different people
deliver the same punch line in just one week.) At the time, Egyptians were engaged in rampant speculation that their president might finally be departing the scene. Mubarak hadn’t suggested he might be stepping down; rather, he was lying in bed at Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany, recovering from an emergency surgery. At the time, the only thing Egyptians thought could rid them of their dictator was his own mortality.

Even for a civilization once ruled by pharaohs, thirty years in power was a considerable feat. Mubarak was the third-longest ruler in Egypt’s six-thousand-year history. By 2011, he had succeeded in serving as president longer than the republic’s previous three presidents combined. Over the years, he had watched as the heads of state of his most important foreign ally, the United States, came and went; Barack Obama was the fifth American president to welcome him to the White House.

Mubarak, an unremarkable, colorless vice president and former air force commander, came to power after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat at the hands of Islamic militants.
Mubarak is said to have urged Sadat not to attend the military parade where Sadat met his end. Sadat, who supposedly had refused to wear a bulletproof vest because it ruined the lines on his Prussian-style uniform, was left crumpled in the reviewing stand, his body riddled with bullets. Incredibly, Mubarak, who was standing next to him on October 6, 1981, as the assassins opened fire, was left virtually unscathed. Eight days later, he was sworn in as Egypt’s fourth president since the country’s independence.

Hosni Mubarak was not an inspiring figure. He had no gift for oratory. Even his friends admitted that he had not accomplished any great victories, political or military, in the decades since becoming president. When Cairo was hit by a massive earthquake in 1992 that killed hundreds and injured thousands, it was the Muslim Brotherhood, the powerful Islamist opposition group, and not his government that first came to people’s aid with food, water, and blankets. Aside from some economic growth in the last handful of years, Egypt did not fare well under Mubarak.
Roughly 44 percent of Egyptians still live on no more than $2 a day.
Fewer than half the homes are connected to public sewer systems.
Roughly 30 percent of the adult
population is illiterate. In the UN Development Programme’s 2010
Human Development Report
, Egypt ranked 101 out of 169 countries, well behind Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and war-torn Sri Lanka.

Of course, as is true of other Middle Eastern autocrats, the longevity of Mubarak’s rule was in part based on fear.
The Ministry of Interior, which oversaw the regime’s domestic security apparatus, employed more than 1.5 million people and had a budget of more than a billion dollars. But Mubarak’s formula relied on more than the regime’s jackboot. His primary political tool was to prey on people’s fears of what would happen if he weren’t there. He and his ruling party, the National Democratic Party (NDP), constantly reminded Egyptians that but for the wisdom of their president, the country would have long since been engulfed in the flames of the Middle East’s violence or fallen victim to a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism. He based his legitimacy on an alternative history, on events that hadn’t happened but that he insisted could. Mubarak’s chief political argument was a scary unknown that he skillfully conjured for audiences with the conviction of certainty.
The message was center stage at the ruling party’s annual conferences. For example, in 2009, moments before Mubarak rose to the podium to make an address, the delegates were directed to watch a short video. There, on the big screen, party members were treated to a montage of violence across the Middle East—bombings, machine-gun fire, the chaos of war-torn neighborhoods and streets—and a familiar takeaway: without Mubarak, these images would be of Egyptian neighborhoods and streets.

Still, as one decade gives way to the next, it becomes harder to rely on the same methods and message—however effective they may have been—to maintain support for a regime. Any regime, even a dictatorship, must find ways to renew its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. Vladimir Putin swapped the office of the president for the prime minister’s chambers, if only temporarily, to maintain a democratic facade. When times are tough, Hugo Chávez rails against “the empire” to the north. China, of course, has its blazing economic growth. And as the world changed, so did the pressures on Egypt’s modern-day pharaoh. At least that is how one senior member of the ruling party explained it to me: “
Mubarak recognized that it isn’t business as usual. And he cannot continue acting or ruling in the same way.”

The words came from Ali Eddin Hilal, the ruling party’s media secretary and spokesman. Hilal had served Mubarak’s government for many years. He received arguably his most important post in 2001, when Mubarak appointed him—along with his own son Gamal Mubarak—to the executive committee of the General Secretariat, the small body that oversees the day-to-day affairs of the ruling party. A political scientist by training, Hilal earned a Ph.D. at McGill University in Montreal in the 1970s, did stints as a visiting professor at UCLA and Princeton, and had long held a position at Cairo University. Although he was old enough to be a member of the regime’s old guard, Hilal was polished and sharp and had a silver tongue, qualities that had kept him in favor with the younger, pro-business generation associated with Gamal. Indeed, several people I spoke with referred to Hilal as “Gamal’s coach”—one of those charged with helping to groom the son to one day replace the father. We met less than ten months before the regime’s demise in the offices of his son’s law firm, which were as sleek and stylish as any Manhattan architectural firm.