The New Middle East (17 page)

The demonstrators in the square would soon be demanding his dismissal, which was something many in his own ranks had also been wanting for years. The US embassy wrote to Washington in September 2008 to report that a source described ‘the mid-level officer corps as generally disgruntled and . . . openly expressing disdain for Tantawi’. ‘These officers refer to Tantawi as “Mubarak’s poodle”,’ the cable said, in an echo of the slights against Sadat. It noted the officers’ complaint that ‘this incompetent Defense Minister’, who reached his position only because of unwavering loyalty to Mubarak, was ‘running the military into the ground’.
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In Tunisia when Ben Ali went, the regime went with him. The army had been so sidelined that it had no vested interest in maintaining the status quo. In Tunisia after more than fifty years of dictatorship things could only get better for the army. In Egypt after more than fifty years of dictatorship the old generals knew things could only get worse. In Tunisia the army was poor, apolitical and had no friends in high places. In Egypt the army had provided every leader since Independence and had vast wealth. Nobody knew exactly how much, because the army’s worth was a state secret. It was against the law to ask in the media why the army runs thirty-five businesses producing chemicals, cement and consumer goods.
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Egyptians couldn’t enquire why the army was raising chickens, making pasta, baking bread, bottling mineral water and producing olive oil. It was certainly not so that it could invite the people around for lunch, because the army’s businesses are not there to serve the people who live outside the confines of the barracks.

Political power after the revolution was enjoyed by a select few in the army. The vast majority of the officer class had nothing to gain from the army being in charge, but they had quite a bit to lose. The longer the army was in the spotlight the more questions were being asked about its role in Egyptian society and, more importantly for the generals, its role in the Egyptian economy. Stepping away from the public gaze put the focus back on the government, but eventually the function of the army will have to be tackled. ‘No ministry should have its private economy,’ the economist Ahmed el-Sayed el-Naggar from Cairo’s al-Ahram Center told me. He believes the size of the army’s grip on the economy has been vastly overstated by Western observers and is probably closer to 5 per cent of GDP. However, even that damages the country:

Such logic of having its own economy leads to the dismantling of the state, because the Ministry of Agriculture could do the same and take lands to give it to its own people, and eventually things will look as if each ministry is a state within the state. The army’s present position has been legalised by creating laws to support it. In addition, all of the army’s companies dealing with civil services don’t pay tax. When their contracting company competes with other private and public companies, they can present better bids because they are exempted from taxes. From the very start, they have an advantage. So it is unfair competition.

Diplomats believed that the army had vast assets across Europe in places like Luxembourg, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with lots of cash washing around bank accounts in the United States and the Cayman Islands. What the diplomats did not know was how it was all controlled, and by whom. What they did know was that American military aid, and the threat of its reduction, was what gave the Obama administration its most direct leverage on the country’s transition in the post-Mubarak era.

The revolutionaries who overthrew Mubarak had not had a chance to think much beyond the act of getting rid of the man. It was clear almost from the moment Mubarak stepped down that the secular middle-class youth who led the uprising were the least equipped to convert their achievements into political capital. During the revolution there seemed for the first time to be the chance of a third force emerging to provide an alternative to the old choice of army or Ikhwan. It didn’t happen. Some of the social media activists who helped spark the protests leveraged their newly found fame into books and speaking appearances. Others like the football fans on the front lines went back to their daily lives. None of the new players in the game managed to build political parties to challenge the established order, because none of them had an infrastructure to build on.

Some of the wealthier Westernised protesters I met in Cairo sulkily refused to take part in any political process at all, including voting in the elections, because they failed to meet their lofty expectations. These hardliners protested in the square for months after the revolution. They were joined by a motley band of street vendors, hawkers, petty thieves and vagabonds. Tahrir grew as dirty and dishevelled as most of the people in it. Many in the capital wearied of the permanent occupation of the people’s space by these people who did not reflect the broad view of the nation.

During this period the SCAF seemed intent on going out of its way to undermine any faith the young revolutionaries might have had in them. After the country had voted to amend nine articles of Egypt’s 1971 constitution in March 2011 it turned out that the SCAF had quietly added a few of its own amendments, suggesting, as it later turned out, their reluctance to hand power back as quickly as the public wanted.

In the months that followed the SCAF was constantly issuing decrees and government drafts that sucked power back into their hands. There were regular protests and the army regularly gave more reasons to mistrust them. One of the worst incidents, which scandalised what is still a conservative society, was the army’s doctors performing ‘virginity tests’ on young women activists who were arrested during protests. The SCAF’s youngest member, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, told the human rights group Amnesty International that it was done to protect the army against claims the women had been raped in custody.
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The police were also accused of deliberately firing rubber bullets at the demonstrators’ eyes. One officer was nicknamed the ‘eye sniper’ and his image was spray-painted by protesters on Mohammed Mahmoud Street off Tahrir Square under a sign saying ‘Wanted’. Military not civilian courts were still used to try thousands of people, just as they had been before the revolution.

The sense of anger, frustration and the lack of a clear timetable for a transition to civilian rule built up throughout the year and reached its peak in November 2011 with massive demonstrations once again by a broad sweep of Cairo’s society. This followed a surge in sectarian tensions, because the security forces in Cairo had the previous month killed twenty-four Coptic Christians who were protesting against an attack on a church. The army claimed the protesters had attacked them and killed a number of soldiers.

To try to end November’s stand-off in Tahrir Square the SCAF sent in the army and the riot police. Amnesty International said ‘the security forces used tear gas and fired shotgun pellets and live rounds against protesters in five days of clashes . . . Some 51 people died and more than 3,000 were injured.’
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It was a huge miscalculation of the public mood. The capital began to feel as if it was getting ready for a second revolution. The generals blinked first and handed the protesters a significant concession. Tantawi announced that presidential elections and the return of power to civilians would take place by 1 July 2012. This replaced its earlier vague promise of it happening sometime in 2013 or 2014.

That suited the Muslim Brotherhood, who withdrew from the continuing protests, fearing they might jeopardise the timetable for the imminent parliamentary elections – the first round of three was due on 28 November. This act once again led to accusations that the Ikhwan was willing to sell out the revolution and do secret deals with the SCAF if it suited their own political ambitions.

Then in the middle of December 2011, when large crowds rallied in Tahrir to demand a faster transfer of power, the army’s fall from grace was captured in what became an iconic image of the chaotic post-revolution period. Soldiers were photographed dragging along the ground a half-naked woman who had been wearing a niqab, a full-face veil. As she was pulled through the square the picture showed one of the soldiers stamping on her bare stomach. That was catastrophic for an army that had presented itself as a protector of minorities and women against the growing influence of the Islamists.

The Muslim Brotherhood used the period of military rule to build up its political apparatus. Its new political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), was functioning by the end of April 2011, just two weeks after Mubarak’s National Democratic Party had been dissolved by the courts. The FJP was a legal party by 6 June. At its head was Mohamed Morsi, who was transferred from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau to run things.

The Supreme Guide of the Bureau is Muhammad Badie. However those who have studied the group believe the real power lies with his deputies, including people like Khairat al-Shater, who was the Brotherhood’s first choice as presidential candidate, and Mahmoud Ghozlan, its official spokesman.
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The Brotherhood’s shift into the political mainstream began with a lie, descended into farce, and, exactly a year after the president’s inauguration, it led to huge protests that drove Morsi from office. In the December 2011 parliamentary elections there had been an enthusiastic turnout for the Islamists. By the June 2012 presidential elections the mood had soured and voters merely considered the Brotherhood’s to be the least worst candidate. By the following summer many were much less sure even about that. After he was elected Morsi resigned from the Brotherhood and the FJP to try to present himself as president of all the people. The people were not convinced. They believed they had been duped by the Ikhwan. It was a sense they were starting to get used to.

Even before the debris from the January 2011 revolution had been cleaned from the streets, the Brotherhood tried to win over the secular youth and an equally suspicious outside world with a promise. The Ikhwan issued a statement that read: ‘The Muslim Brotherhood . . . are not seeking personal gains, so they announce they will not run for the presidency and will not seek to get a majority in the parliament and that they consider themselves servants of these decent people.’ It added that they were not ‘seekers of power’.
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They soon broke that promise, and fielded enough candidates in the December 2011 People’s Assembly elections, as did the hardline Salafist groups, to crowd the parliament with Islamists.

‘The Muslim Brotherhood and its political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, does not really grasp the idea of democracy and freedoms,’ said Abdul-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh. ‘You can’t expect people who don’t practise democracy in a truthful way within their own organisation to practise it within the society. Like anything else, if you don’t have something you cannot give it to somebody else.’

‘This is a big fat lie that democracy is not applied in the Muslim Brotherhood,’ Mahmoud Ghozlan told me when we met at his office in Cairo two years after the revolt. He is a key member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau.

This is absolutely false. All our affairs have two sides, the first of which is what we call ‘Shura’, which is democracy. The other side is ‘listening and obedience’. There is not a single decision taken at any levels within the Ikhwan, whether the Guidance Bureau, the Shura council or the local offices, without democratic discussion. Here at the Guidance Bureau, we sit and discuss and differ until we see what the majority vote for, even if this majority does not include the General Guide. However, once the majority decides, everyone must obey and abide by this decision whether they were with or against it. You have to respect the rule of the majority.

After the revolution, and for the first time in over eighty years, the Brotherhood was forced out into the open. Political Islam for the first time had government within its grasp. But that meant the Ikhwan were no longer able to hide in the shadows, play the victim, hedge their bets and fudge on every issue.

‘It’s a paradigm shift for us,’ said the Muslim Brotherhood’s Amr Darrag, who was also the secretary general of the Egyptian Constituent Assembly:

All of a sudden we find ourselves under the spotlight, everybody is talking to us as if we are in charge rather than as the banned group we were before the revolution. The Brotherhood has been there for more than eighty years, and we have a lot of experience and we can adapt quite well, but on some levels sometimes this change is not very easy. The mentality that sometimes people behave with is as if we are still this banned group, and what is strengthening this feeling is that almost everybody is attacking us. The media, the remnants of the old regime, the so-called opposition.

The Brotherhood was the best placed, most organised, least loathed of the two old conservative institutions vying for power, but it failed completely to translate that into broader support. The Ikhwan’s highly evolved sense of internal discipline, which had helped it survive the Mubarak years, seemed in the eyes of the wider population more like the actions of a creepy cult that punished its members for uttering a single word out of line. This was illustrated by the way it treated those younger members who had first dragged the leadership into grudgingly supporting a revolution from which the Ikhwan eventually gained so much.