The New Middle East (15 page)

Her boss wrote later: ‘I was hopeful that Egypt would be a leader for freedom and reform in the Arab world.’
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Ms Rice said she intended to deliver a speech that was ‘bold’, but before she did she went to see Hosni Mubarak at his seaside home in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.
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By this stage Mubarak was partially deaf, and so the secretary of state ‘talked loudly and looked directly at him, hoping the elderly leader could hear me or, if necessary, read my lips’. Either way he got the message and replied: ‘I know my people. The Egyptians need a strong hand, and they don’t like foreign interference. We are proud people.’
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He was probably talking about himself.

Ms Rice’s speech was remarkable because it publicly articulated, at a venue in the heart of the Arab world, what everybody knew was wrong with the Middle East. Just as importantly, it was being said by the diplomat-in-chief of the country that had been propping up the whole rotten system.

‘For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East – and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people,’ she told her audience.
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‘President Mubarak’s decision to amend the country’s constitution and hold multiparty elections is encouraging,’ she said; he had ‘unlocked the door for change’.
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Which was exactly what Mubarak was worried about. Mubarak was furious about the whole idea, but he could draw comfort from the fact that there was still one issue over which he and the US could agree. In a question-and-answer session just after her speech Ms Rice made a point of reiterating who was not invited to the democratic party. ‘We have not had contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood . . . we have not engaged the Muslim Brotherhood and we don’t – we won’t.’
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In addition the Bush team followed successive US administrations in turning a blind eye to the way the Mubarak regime persecuted the Ikhwan even after it had clearly steered a path away from violence. Only when non-Islamist politicians were harassed and jailed were they willing to speak out.

Throughout Mubarak’s rule, after the crackdown in the wake of the assassination of Sadat, the Brotherhood evolved towards a more moderate position that inevitably led it into the political arena.

The Brotherhood took its first steps into parliamentary politics in 1984 in an alliance with the more liberal Wafd Party. Mubarak eased restrictions on moderate Islamists to counter the radicals he had been fighting earlier on in his presidency. In the years that followed the Brotherhood candidates took part in a series of clearly rigged parliamentary elections, standing as ‘independents’ because the organisation was still banned. It reassured the regime that it would not directly challenge its authority with another Orwellian expression of its pragmatism: ‘participation not domination’. This meant that until Mubarak was overthrown the Ikhwan never fielded enough candidates to actually win power.

Under pressure from Washington, even before Rice’s Cairo speech, Mubarak announced in February 2005 that Egypt would, for the first time, hold presidential elections in which candidates other than him would be able to run. Parliamentary elections were also being held later that year in which Muslim Brotherhood members would again stand as individuals.

In those parliamentary elections the Brotherhood did much better than Mubarak had expected. The mood of his regime was conveyed in a confidential briefing to the then FBI director Robert S. Mueller ahead of his visit to Cairo in 2006. The memo from the US embassy in Cairo informed him:

The Egyptians have a long history of threatening us with the MB bogeyman. Your counterparts may try to suggest that the President’s insistence on greater democracy in Egypt is somehow responsible for the MB’s electoral success. You should push back that, on the contrary, the MB’s rise signals the need for greater democracy and transparency in government. The images of intimidation and fraud that have emerged from the recent elections favor the extremists both we and the Egyptian government oppose. The best way to counter narrow-minded Islamist politics is to open the system.
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George W. Bush’s ‘Freedom agenda’ may have broadly failed in the region, but it did expose just how undemocratic Egypt was. Mubarak ran again as president in 2005 and ‘won’ and then locked up his only serious challenger on trumped-up forgery charges for three years.

But by the time the next parliamentary elections were held in the winter of 2010 George Bush had retired to his ranch, and promoting democracy in the Middle East seemed to be less of a priority for his successor Barack Obama. After three decades of untrammelled corruption Mubarak’s people considered themselves pretty good at cooking the books. Unfortunately for the regime its last act of political fraud was shameless even by its usual spectacularly crooked standards, and it took place just weeks before Mohamed Bouaziz, in Tunisia, lost patience and hope with his own venal leadership.

‘Tunisia coincided with a particular time in Egyptian history,’ said Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Doha Center.

It came right after the most rigged parliamentary elections in history. I was there for the 2010 elections, it was so blatant, it was embarrassingly blatant, and I think people learned after that that ‘there’s no hope within the system, we have to work outside the system, we have to find alternatives, civil disobedience, mass protests,’ so I think Tunisia happened at a time when Egyptians were ready for that sort of message.

In the first round of the winter poll held on 28 November 2010, the Brotherhood, which had a fifth of the seats in the previous parliament, was reduced to none. The second-largest opposition party in the previous parliament, the Wafd, got just two seats.
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They both pulled out of the second round, by which time the government was trying to rig things the other way so that at least a token opposition was elected. Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) had proved beyond doubt that it was not democratic at all. It ended the year 2010 with 83 per cent of the seats in parliament and zero credibility.

The following month, on 25 January 2011, groups of young people began to gather around the country to mark national ‘Police Day’ by protesting against police brutality. ‘Police Day’ commemorated the refusal by Egyptian officers in 1952 to obey an order by the occupying British forces to withdraw from the city of Isma’iliyah, near the Suez Canal, and surrender their guns. The British government issued a statement back then saying: ‘The Egyptian police casualties were 41 killed, 73 wounded, and 886 surrendered.’
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The event provoked anti-British riots across the country and placed policemen in the vanguard of resistance to the colonial power. It was an event Egyptians were genuinely proud of.

However, by the time President Hosni Mubarak declared in 2009 that the event would be marked by a national public holiday it symbolised much more just how far the nation and its police force had fallen in the public estimation. As in Tunisia, in modern Egypt policemen were people you avoided at all costs. Your treatment at their hands was not decided by your guilt or innocence but by the mood of the officer whose attention you had been unlucky enough to attract. Often it was small bribes to escape trumped-up offences, or youngsters getting slapped around for being youngsters. The really awful beatings, torture and murders tended to happen to the poor, to members of the Muslim Brotherhood or to political activists – anyone who lacked the
wasta
to save themselves. After 2011, 25 January would for ever be remembered not for the bravery of the police, but for that of the Egyptians who fought against them.

During Mubarak’s rule the country was still being run under an uninterrupted state of emergency introduced since the assassination of Sadat three decades earlier. One former police brigadier said that the police ‘don’t have enough resources, so they use other techniques that save time and money. Usually they cuff your hands and put a bar under your knees and beat your feet. In state security departments, they might bring someone’s wife, sister or daughter and rape her to make him confess.’
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The worst abuses would provoke some outrage from human rights groups and journalists, but then it would die down. That was apart from the rare occasions when the police were stupid enough to film themselves carrying out the abuse on their mobile phones and it made its way onto the Internet.

Normally though the outrage didn’t gain traction, because the authorities controlled the media. If the victim was poor the authorities wove a web of lies about them. If the victim was a member of the Brotherhood the fear of Islamic extremism meant that sympathy among liberals was often in short supply. In each case the victim came from a different world to much of the liberal middle classes, so they could say: ‘Well, maybe he did have it coming.’ They kept telling themselves that until one day it happened to one of them, and that suddenly made a whole new class of people feel more vulnerable.

Late on the evening of 6 June 2010 two policemen beat to death a young man called Khaled Said, whom they had just dragged out of an Internet café in the port city of Alexandria. Why they picked on him has never been ascertained, though the usual swirl of government-inspired rumours soon emerged to paint him as a petty criminal. What they couldn’t cover up was his middle-class credentials. And what they couldn’t explain away was how a man the police medical examiner claimed had died of asphyxiation after trying to swallow his drugs stash ended up with what Human Rights Watch described as a ‘mangled face’. This time Egyptians could judge the truth for themselves, because Khaled’s brother Ahmed managed to take photographs on a mobile phone of the corpse. Human Rights Watch documented the injuries on ‘Said’s battered and deformed face’ as a ‘fractured skull, dislocated jaw, broken nose and numerous other signs of trauma’.
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The pictures, juxtaposed with an earlier image of Khaled’s fresh smiling face, went viral on Egyptian social media. A few days after Said was killed, Wa’el Ghonim, the Egyptian marketing executive working for Google in Dubai, set up a Facebook page called ‘We Are All Khaled Said’. It went well beyond his expectations.

As the following year began, Ghonim’s Facebook page had five hundred thousand supporters and was being commented on in the mainstream Egyptian media.
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The middle classes had always known there was a risk of falling prey to the savage internal security system. Khaled Said became the physical embodiment of that fear. Suddenly it was something they could no longer live with or ignore.

The year 2011 may have been when the wider world woke up to the use of social media for political change, but it was not a new phenomenon in the Middle East and certainly not in Egypt. The ‘April 6th Youth Movement’ had used Facebook to support a planned nationwide strike on that day in 2008. As National Police Day approached, Ghonim, the ‘April 6th Youth’ and other Internet activists combined their efforts to encourage support for the planned demonstration. Because social media had been used to organise protest in Egypt before, the authorities were not unaware of it. But they were dismissive of the young people, their message and their medium. ‘I tell the public that this Facebook call comes from the youth,’ declared the much-loathed interior minister Habib el-Adly through the pages of the state-owned newspaper
Al-Ahram
on the eve of the revolution. ‘Youth street action has no impact and security is capable of deterring any acts outside the law.’
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El-Adly would soon be granted a long period of reflection to ponder the wisdom of his predictions. His removal and the end of police brutality were among the initial demands of the protesters. He was sacrificed by Mubarak during the height of the protest and the following year he found himself sitting next to his old boss as they were both sentenced for complicity in the killings of the young people he had so casually scorned.

All of which must have seemed an impossible outcome for the youngsters busy swapping encouraging messages in the last few hours before they began their historic protest. What el-Adly didn’t realise was that long before Tunisia showed that a successful rebellion was possible, people in Egypt had started to lose their fear.

Hosni Mubarak had always been a bit of a joke. He was disparagingly known as the ‘Laughing Cow’, after the picture on the front of the popular French soft cheese spread. He got that name because Sadat made sure his deputy kept his mouth shut, so Mubarak was always seen just standing next to him grinning. Most jokes about Mubarak though nearly always focused on his mental ability or supposed lack of it. It is a tribute to the ingenuity of the Egyptian people that despite having to make the same joke for thirty years they still found new ways to make it funny.