The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (34 page)

Nine months later the people occupied the square. On January 29, on the fifth day of protests, Ezz resigned from the ruling party. A few
days later his bank accounts were frozen, and he was banned from traveling abroad. Mubarak, who certainly knew how deeply Ezz was reviled, was quick to offer him as a sacrifice to the demonstrators, one of the first in a string of desperate concessions the regime made in its final days. On February 17, the week after Mubarak himself had been forced from power, Ezz was arrested by order of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. In September 2011, an Egyptian criminal court sentenced him to ten years in prison on charges of corruption. Now he was the one without his freedom.

The people had been warned. No protests—not even peaceful protests—would be tolerated. They were ordered to clear the square. Those who remained, the regime told onlookers, were “agitators” and “foreign agents” working to destroy Egypt. Tensions were running high, so it was no surprise when the first volley of tear-gas cartridges landed in the crowds. People, some in uniform, others in plain clothes, charged the demonstrators. Goons sent by the Ministry of Interior were wielding knives and chains. Others had truncheons as they descended on any protesters who had become separated from the larger groups. They beat them until they were unconscious. Rubber bullets pierced through the throng of people; snipers appeared to have taken positions in the buildings surrounding Tahrir Square. Live ammunition could be heard. One activist in the center of the chaos posted an urgent plea on Facebook. “I breathe tear gaz!” he wrote. “Help us against the military!”

It wasn’t January 2011; it was late June. And the security forces that attacked the demonstrators in and around Tahrir Square that night did not do so at the behest of Hosni Mubarak. The ousted dictator had long since been confined to a hospital in Sharm el-Sheikh awaiting trial. They acted on the orders of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

Nor was it an isolated event. After the March 9 attack on Tahrir that netted Samira Ibrahim, confrontations between the military and protesters became more common. By the summer, they had become almost a weekly occurrence. In the months since Mubarak’s fall, the
military council’s actions increasingly appeared to belie their promises to steer Egypt toward a democratic future. Although the generals had pledged to end the emergency law, it remained in place. Rather than dissolve the dreaded State Security Investigations Service, they renamed it the National Security Agency and placed a former Mubarak appointee in charge of the Ministry of Interior. The Egyptian military showed no interest in partnering with a civilian-led transition; indeed, it kept control of the smallest details. Far from encouraging cooperation with activists, the military council began issuing communiqués falsely charging that the April 6 movement—the very youth leaders who had played a role in mobilizing the uprising—had received military training in Serbia. Egypt’s generals forbid foreign observers to monitor the upcoming elections and accused domestic NGOs that expressed a similar interest in the polls of engaging in treasonous behavior. Taken together, the military’s actions suggested that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces was not interested in seizing a democratic opening for Egypt as much as it was circling the wagons to protect what remained of the old regime, particularly its own fiefdoms. What concessions the military offered the protesters were not intended to raze Mubarak’s authoritarianism as much as rebrand it. “
I don’t believe in the credibility of the military council anymore,” Kamel Arafa, a twenty-five-year-old activist, told me. “It is a huge monster and it has fingers that are still playing.”

No one knows how powerful the Egyptian military is. In fact, no one knows much about the Egyptian military at all. It is estimated that it numbers between 300,000 and 400,000 strong; the precise figure isn’t published. Nor are the names of its general officer corps. The secrecy surrounding the Egyptian military extends to almost all aspects of its affairs. It has received nearly $40 billion from the United States in the last thirty years, but no one knows how big a slice it takes from the country’s national budget. Even Egypt’s own parliament didn’t know how it all adds up. The military refuses to open its books.

Under Mubarak, although other centers of the government grew powerful—namely, the Interior Ministry’s domestic security apparatus and the new business elites associated with Gamal—the military remained the government’s backbone. And, befitting its place as the country’s most powerful institution, criticism of the military and its
interests always represented the regime’s last, uncompromised red line. If the parliament could not know its budget, the people were entitled to know—or say—even less. “
The one thing we cannot discuss is the army,” Hossam Bahgat, the NGO activist, told me in early 2010. “That’s the one red line that people pay a heavy price for comments.” He then asked, “You heard about the twenty-year-old blogger?”

The twenty-year-old blogger was Ahmed Mustafa. An engineering student from Upper Egypt, Mustafa was arrested in February 2010 because of a blog post he had written more than a year earlier. In the post, Mustafa had criticized the nepotism he claimed was practiced at the country’s military academies. Specifically, he had reported that a student had been forced to quit one of the academies in order to give his spot to a prospective student with better connections. I never met anyone who was familiar with Mustafa’s blog or had read his post before his arrest. I suspect the military had taken more than a year to arrest him because it wasn’t aware of his blog, either.

Nevertheless, the authorities weren’t concerned with whether Mustafa had a following or not. He was arrested and brought before a military court on charges of “defaming” the armed forces. The charges were ultimately dropped after the ensuing international outcry for clemency, but the regime had made its point: don’t cross the military.

It was a prohibition that extended beyond young bloggers. The regime made this amply clear in 2006 with the swift arrest, conviction, and sentencing of the parliamentarian Talaat Sadat. Sadat was the nephew of the former president Anwar Sadat. On October 4, 2006, Sadat gave a television interview in which he claimed that his uncle’s assassination had never been thoroughly investigated and that it was clear that factions within the Egyptian military had been behind the plot. The very next day, the fifty-two-year-old Sadat was stripped of his parliamentary immunity from prosecution. Six days later, his trial began before a military court. Before the month was out, he had been convicted of defaming the armed forces and sentenced to one year in prison with hard labor. A year later a chastened Sadat was released from prison and permitted to return to his seat in parliament. “
It happened because this is a red line and people are not allowed to even joke or half-seriously speculate about it,” says Bahgat. “Just don’t mention the army.”

Even after Mubarak was gone, it wasn’t a prohibition the military intended to lift. Egyptian reporters I spoke with in Cairo told me about the pressure they had come under not to report on the military’s torture of protesters or use of virginity tests. If the stories were ever written, editors typically spiked them. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces sent letters to media outlets warning them to review any coverage of the military before airing it.
One famous Egyptian television host was sacked in July 2011 after interviewing a retired air force general on her morning show. Her mistake was to have asked the general if he had any evidence to back up claims he had made about two potential presidential candidates supporting a U.S. political agenda in Egypt. In the military’s Egypt, asking a general to substantiate an allegation was a firing offense.

The military’s utter intolerance of criticism was dramatically revealed in the case of another young blogger.
Maikel Nabil was highly critical of the military. He had led a campaign against military conscription and denounced the military for conducting virginity tests. On his blog he wrote, “The revolution has so far managed to get rid of the dictator but not the dictatorship.” For this, the twenty-five-year-old was arrested at his home in late March on charges of “insulting the military” and “spreading false information.” A military court then sentenced him to three years in prison.

Military courts quickly became the Egyptian military’s most systematic tool for denying thousands of citizens any civil or political rights. Within a month of the military’s seizing power, its tribunals began trying civilians, sometimes hundreds in a single day. According to human rights organizations, demonstrators, activists, and even simple bystanders were swept up in a broad campaign of military arrests. People caught in this indiscriminate dragnet were taken to the military prosecution’s office and then to a military court, where they would be sentenced and transferred to prison. (Ironically, many of these people were charged with being
baltagiya
, or thugs, even though it was already clear that the military, much like the previous regime, was still hiring plainclothes thugs for its most heavy-handed attempts to clear Tahrir Square.) It could take no more than five hours for a person to receive a sentence of five years. These defendants had no legal representation, no access to case files, and no examination of
evidence. By summer, human rights activists estimated that military courts had sentenced roughly ten thousand Egyptians—more than had been tried in thirty years under Mubarak.

What troubled activists was how difficult it was to combat the military’s abuses. If the Interior Ministry of the old regime seemed like a black box, the military was even more opaque. “
In the old system, with all its violence and horrors, we knew how it functioned. We could save people if we knew at the right time,” says Gasser Abdel-Razek, a well-known human rights activist. “Now lawyers cannot even approach the military prosecution office. People are sentenced at 10:00 p.m. in a military trial without a lawyer to five years in prison. It’s worse than our worst nightmare under Mubarak. At least when he used military courts, people were represented!”

What was the military’s endgame in 2011? Most believed Tantawi did not harbor a desire to take Mubarak’s place as Egypt’s next president. Indeed, with political activists so attuned to the military council’s every move, it would be difficult for an Egyptian general to remove his uniform, don a suit and tie, and declare himself a presidential candidate. The gesture would be transparent and unacceptable to Egyptian liberals and religious conservatives alike. Indeed, there are very few full-fledged military juntas left in the world, and most activists believed Egypt’s generals had no interest in adding another one. Rather, the generals had a more modest goal: to preserve the previous system, particularly their primacy in it.

The foundation of that system had been laid in 1952, when Gamal Nasser and the Free Officers ousted King Farouk. They did more than remove a king; they also swept away the limited parliamentary system and whatever political pluralism then existed. In its place, they established a strong presidential-style republic, which they have filled with their own men ever since. So it was no surprise that Egypt’s generals moved quickly to maintain the presidential system as soon as Mubarak had departed. The constitutional amendments they proposed in late March—and won in a landslide vote—did little to reduce the immense powers of the presidency and seemed to end any conversation that the legislative branch might be strengthened at the expense of the executive. (If Egypt’s generals are familiar with the experience of the former Soviet states, they know that every former
Communist country that opted for a strong presidential system has lapsed into autocracy.) Indeed, Egypt’s generals went far enough to suggest the adoption of a “declaration of basic principles” to guide the drafting of a future constitution; it is widely believed that the purpose of such principles will be to shield the military’s interests from scrutiny. In October,
the government’s military-appointed cabinet put forward a proposal that would elevate it above parliamentary supervision and give the military a veto over any legislation involving its affairs. The proposal also named the military the guardian of “constitutional legitimacy”—a vague phrasing that was widely interpreted as a way to enshrine its position as the final arbiter in Egyptian politics. Having enjoyed a nearly sacrosanct position for sixty years, Egypt’s generals have no intention of diminishing that role in any future political arrangement. “
They understand the game now,” says Sherif Mickawi, a former air force officer turned political activist. “When a big storm comes, you need to lean with it. When the storm leaves, you can stand up again. They don’t mean to lose what they achieved in 1952.”

First Lieutenant Sherif Osman had a comfortable life in Mubarak’s Egypt. Born into an upper-middle-class family, he had received an excellent education, graduated from the Egyptian Military Academy, and had a career to look forward to as an air force communications officer. His fluent English made him a valuable asset to senior officers on the Cairo West Air Force Base, where he served. His mother, who worked for the military as a doctor, had retired with the rank of a one-star general. In fact, several members of his family had served in the military. Although he was far from wealthy, Osman moved in fairly privileged circles, and in a place where knowing people can make life much easier, he had very good connections. “
I had a really magnificent network of people,” he told me. “Even down to my favorite nightspot, the Cairo Jazz Club. I knew the owner.” He lived in Maadi, one of Cairo’s nicer neighborhoods, which is also home to many of the city’s expats. “There were chicks around from the multinational community in Cairo,” says Osman. “I didn’t miss a Western life. There is a softball league in Maadi. I was living a Westernized life.”

Osman, however, was anything but content. In retrospect, the military had not been the best career path for him. By his own admission, he had a tendency to speak out of turn and a rebellious streak that did not sit well with senior officers. He says he realized early that he probably would not rise above colonel, the point at which the military thins the corps of officers destined for senior posts. But what troubled him ran far deeper than a few misspent years as a junior military officer. Osman’s time in the military opened his eyes to the country, and more specifically the institution he served. As he rose from first lieutenant to captain and had more contact with senior officers, he saw and heard more of the military’s corruption. Any illusion he had that there was distance between the military and the country’s corrosive politics came to an end. “Between the rank of captain and major, you are realizing what you are a part of—a dictatorship, you’re part of the regime,” says Osman. “Egypt is a military-run country for the past sixty years. It’s a military dictatorship with a civilian skin.”