Still, every weekend brought a new reminder of the generals’ need to placate the public. Whenever the transition faltered, the organizers behind Police Day called for another Friday afternoon millioneya—a million-man march. And each Thursday night the generals caved in, just in time to appease the protesters.
The generals removed prime ministers, shook up cabinets, jailed Mubarak, put him and his interior minister on trial for murder, scheduled elections, repealed the so-called emergency law suspending due process rights, and more—all to defuse impending millioneyas. “The only thing that works is going back to Tahrir, but then they back down,” one of the organizers, Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, told me. The “Thursdays of concessions,” some Egyptians called them.
The anonymous officer who had announced the military’s takeover in the name of the revolution now reappeared on television, shaking his forefinger at the camera and demanding an end to the protests. His name turned out to be General Mohsen al-Fanagry, and Egyptians compared him to a flip-flop sandal—shib-shib, in Egyptian Arabic—held on by a finger of plastic between the toes. “A shib-shib has a finger and Fanagry has a finger.” No one was afraid of him.
You could scarcely walk a few blocks without noticing a difference in the status of the police. “We don’t do that anymore, there’s been a revolution,” a young Egyptian woman I knew told a police officer, pushing him aside when he tried to shake her down for baksheesh to let her park her car. It was the police who were cowed.
“They treated people like pests, so imagine when these pests now rise up, challenge them, and humiliate them,” said Mahmoud Qutri, a former police officer. “They feel broken.”
Mohamed Ismail, a thirty-year-old who ran a mobile phone shop near a police station, said the officers had always demanded a 50 percent discount. Now they murmured “please” and paid the full price. “The tables have turned,” he said.
Hisham A. Fahmy ran a trade association for multinationals operating in Egypt, and he, too, was amazed by the way he heard ordinary Egyptians talking to the police. “It’s: ‘Talk to me properly! I am a citizen!’” he told me, dumbfounded.
A small group of demonstrators started a sit-in outside the U.S. embassy to call for the humanitarian release from jail of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheikh imprisoned in the United States for plotting related to the bombing in 1993 of the World Trade Center. “If Mubarak were still around, those guys would be thrown in jail and sodomized with pipes,” an American who worked in intelligence told a diplomat in the embassy.
Retreat was not defeat, of course, and the institutions of the old regime had hardly disappeared. Three days after the referendum, in late March, the generals sent every Egyptian news organization a letter reminding them of “the necessity of refraining from publishing any items—stories, news, announcements, complaints, advertisements, pictures—pertaining to the armed forces or to commanders of the armed forces” without prior approval. The satellite networks were still owned by the same small clique of Mubarak-friendly moguls, and they took it seriously.
One night the left-leaning blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy suggested modestly to a call-in show that “any institution of the country that takes taxes from us should be open to question.”
“No, no, no,” the host, Mahmoud Saad, interrupted. He hung up on Hamalawy. “I will not allow you to say those things on this network.”
A military officer called in Hamalawy for questioning the next day. “When the military says ‘please show up,’ it is kind of like an order, especially when they are ruling the country,” Hamalawy told me.
Curious about the shifting ground rules, I persuaded an officer in the military’s propaganda arm, the Department of Moral Affairs, to invite me to its headquarters, in the neighborhood of Heliopolis.
His office was like a college radio station. The stuffing was coming out of a cushion in the couch. Audio headsets and coaxial cables were lying all over. Like every Egyptian military officer I ever met, my host wanted to tell me how much he enjoyed his American training—in his case in Maryland. But he insisted that insulting the army was still a crime in Egypt.
“If someone presents proof that any officer is corrupt, then the officer would be subject to the law,” he said. “If the journalist doesn’t present any evidence, then the journalist would be subject to the law.”
A blogger had equated the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces—SCAF—with former president Mubarak. “That is why he is in jail,” this officer told me. “If I call you a dictator, you can take that as an insult.”
High stakes, if you took it seriously. But Hamalawy ignored the intimidation. He told his story to me, on his blog, and to anyone who would listen. Bottling up all the dissent coursing through Cairo seemed impossible then. Even atheists—previously afraid of arrest or ostracism, for the crime of insulting religion—were convening public meetings.
* * *
• • •
The White House and State Department now gushed with enthusiasm for the Egyptian revolution. The United States announced that it was shifting $65 million in economic aid into direct grants to promote democracy. The State Department bought advertisements in Egyptian newspapers to solicit grant proposals—after three decades in which the Mubarak government controlled every penny in American aid. To Mubarakite nationalists, Obama might as well have confessed to funding the protests in the first place.
But at the same time, the administration was more quietly embracing the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces as the best guarantee that the “revolution” would not go against American interests. “First you lean into the idea of Mubarak leading a transition,” one senior State Department official later told me. “When that doesn’t work, you lean into Omar Suleiman, and when that idea goes down, too, you think, ‘Okay, let’s work with the SCAF.’”
The Pentagon and National Security Council brought top Egyptian generals and intelligence chiefs to Washington, or sent senior officials to meet with them in Cairo. And the Pentagon made no secret of its backing for the military chief of staff, General Sami Anan, as Egypt’s next ruler. Anan was “the Pentagon’s man in Egypt,” my Times colleague Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington.
The de facto American policy, Ben Rhodes later told me, was “to hug SCAF as closely as possible.”
* * *
• • •
The security of Israel, an ever-present concern for American policy in Egypt, took on new urgency that August. An Israeli warplane chasing Palestinian militants inadvertently killed at least three Egyptian security officers inside their own border. Mubarak had smoothed over such incidents before, but now Egyptians demanded retribution.
Bowing again to street pressure, the generals recalled Egypt’s ambassador to Israel. When protesters began gathering outside the Israeli embassy, several stories up in an office building near the Cairo zoo, in Giza, the military government erected a thin metal barricade along the sidewalk to protect the building.
A few weeks later, at an unrelated rally in Tahrir Square on Friday, September 10, I saw a group of demonstrators headed for the Israeli embassy armed with hammers and ropes. I tagged along behind them and found a mob of young men spearheaded by a core group of ultras, the soccer hooligans—conspicuous because they brought their trademark chants, drums, horns, and fireworks. (The Muslim Brothers were notably absent, perhaps conscious of the international attention now on their movement.)
The ultras climbed the barricade, secured rope to it, and used cars to pull it down in chunks. By nightfall it was flattened. The handful of Egyptian soldiers and police stationed outside the embassy did nothing to stop the marauders, who easily climbed a locked gate. Hooligans hauled down the Israeli flag and set it on fire.
The situation looked explosive, and I did not know the half of it. I later learned that a half dozen embassy employees were trapped inside, hiding in a secure room. And they had firearms for p
rotection.
If the attackers had gotten any closer, the night would have ended in “a massacre,” Steven Simon, then director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council, later told me. He was on an open phone line to his Israeli counterparts, who had the terrified embassy employees on speakerphone. Over the phone, Simon could hear the ultras banging on the door of the embassy’s secure room.
Mustafa el-Sayed, a twenty-eight-year-old ultra who was milling around in the street outside, showed me mobile phone video of himself with about twenty friends inside the embassy. They had filmed themselves destroying furniture, rummaging through papers, and throwing binders out the window. He boasted that they had roughed up an embassy employee they found inside, too. Egyptian soldiers had eventually removed them without arresting them. They just regrouped in the street.
It was about 11:30 P.M. when riot-police trucks finally showed up. I counted as many as fifty. By then the rioters had set fire to a police kiosk in the street, and they began hurling rocks at the police in a game of cat and mouse through clouds of tear gas all around the neighborhood. I thought the hooligans might destroy the embassy while the police were preocuppied, and the generals were staying out of it.
Obama spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu. Marine Corps General James Mattis, chief of Central Command, talked to General Sisi, head of Egyptian military intelligence. Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, placed a panicked call to Leon Panetta, who was now defense secretary. Would Panetta please get the Egyptian army to stop this?
But by 7:30 P.M. in Washington—2:30 A.M. the next morning in Cairo—Field Marshal Tantawi still had not yet picked up the phone to respond to Panetta.
“I am sure he was trying to figure out what was going on,” Panetta later told me, charitably.
Panetta left the Pentagon to introduce a performance of Brahms’s German Requiem at the Kennedy Center to commemorate the September 11 terrorist attacks. Aides pulled him from the audience to an adjoining room set up for a secure phone call when Tantawi finally called back. Tantawi made the usual courtly small talk, “so I tried to cut through that shit,” Panetta told me.
“You have a serious situation there with the Israeli embassy,” Panetta told Tantawi. “If this is allowed to happen, not only could it jeopardize lives, but it is going to make Egypt look totally incompetent at providing security.”
Tantawi promised to do “whatever is necessary,” and shortly before 5:00 A.M. in Cairo, Egyptian commandos finally rescued the six employees trapped in the embassy. Two Egyptians died fighting with the police, one of a bullet wound; twelve hundred were seriously injured, and nineteen were arrested.
Israeli officials blamed the “Islamization” of Egypt, but in this case the attackers were irreligious soccer fans and the negligent government was under military control. The Muslim Brotherhood had played no role in the attack. The next day, the Brotherhood condemned it.
I began that night to understand some of the many layers of Egyptian-Israeli relations. The two states were no longer hostile. Their generals got along fine, American military officers and diplomats in Cairo often told me. But Egypt’s state and private news media fanned the flames of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism with undiminished zeal. And state censorship had silenced any debate about the peace or its paradoxes. As a result, Egyptian public opinion had been frozen in place since the eve of Camp David. Egyptian leaders put on a performance of hostility for their citizens at home, and, intentionally or not, that stage show helped convince American policy makers that the peace was so fragile that it demanded constant attention and payoffs—the $1.3 billion a year in aid. In truth, the Egyptian military had no hostile neighbors or, for that matter, known enemies.
Now the supposed guardians of the peace, the generals, were in direct control of the government, and they were doing a lousy job protecting the security of Israel. Without any prompting, they had released from jail more than eight hundred convicted Islamist militants. Some had been imprisoned for assassinating President Anwar Sadat in 1981 because he had made peace. On five separate occasions in the six months since Mubarak’s ouster, unidentified attackers had bombed pipelines carrying Egyptian natural gas to Israel without arrests or reprisals. Islamist militants based in the North Sinai had carried out a series of brazen cross-border attacks, including one that killed eight Israelis. (That set off the chase that ended in the accidental killing of the Egyptian security officers.) Direct military rule in Cairo was a disaster for Israel.
But Jerusalem saw only danger if the generals yielded more power, convinced that the alternative to military rule in Cairo would be far worse. Many in Washington seemed to agree. Even after Tantawi’s dilatory response to the sacking of the Israeli embassy, Panetta had only kind things to say about the Egyptian defense minister. “That is what I liked about the guy,” Panetta told me later. “Usually, if he gave his word about something, he did it.” The generals could still count on Washington.
5
The First Lady and the Blue Bra
March 8, 2011–December 20, 2011
Three weeks after Mubarak’s exit, on March 8, 2011, Laura brought our five-year-old son, Thomas, to Tahrir Square for a demonstration to mark International Women’s Day. Laura’s friend Joanna brought her six-year-old daughter. They all rode the women-only train car on the Cairo subway, a regular provision to protect against groping or harassment. When they got out, the two mothers carried the children on their shoulders. Thomas and his friend held hands in the air.
The crowd was smaller than Laura expected—a few dozen, mostly Western women. German and Egyptian teachers from our sons’ preschool had come with flyers to hand out. A handful of other demonstrators were holding a separate sit-in across the square, to demand an end to martial law. It all seemed happy enough. Perched on the shoulders of their mothers, the two children passed out the flyers.
“Where are you from?” an angry man challenged Laura. She heard a child crying. A second man had torn the flyers out of the hands of Joanna’s daughter and he was ripping them up in her face.
A gang of shouting men gathered around; they looked like neighborhood guys, not goons or Islamists. “The people want to bring down the women!” men chanted in Arabic. “Go back to the kitchen!”
Laura and Joanna fled with the children. Women who stuck around longer were groped and assaulted. Neither the police nor the “revolutionaries” protesting martial law did anything to stop it.
The question of what Mubarak’s ouster meant for the rights and freedoms of Egyptian women became central to debates about the uprising, especially in the West. The safety of Tahrir Square for women was shattered the moment he resigned. An ecstatic throng had celebrated that night by mauling Lara Logan, the CBS television correspondent. Now the attack on the International Women’s Day demonstration had happened in broad daylight, in a sparse crowd and in public view. Laura had always told me that pushing a stroller insulated her from street harassment. But these men had come after even mothers with children.
The question took on an uglier dimension the next night, March 9. Soldiers in riot gear moved in to clear out the last, lingering demonstrators against martial law, who had begun a small sit-in. The soldiers tore down tents, hammered demonstrators with batons, and detained nearly two hundred, including a small group of women. The army held its captives in the Egyptian Museum, where soldiers shocked them with electrical prods. Then a truck carried the women to a military base. Are you a virgin? the soldiers asked each of the women.
The question was worse than humiliating. Sexual experience can mean social stigma, isolation from family and peers, or disqualification for marriage in Egypt’s patriarchal culture. And the interrogation was just the beginning. Each of the seven women who answered yes to virginity was forced to submit to the examination of her hymen by a male army physician. Soldiers stood guard and, according to the women, snapped pictures. The women were released a few day
s later, but none dared speak about their ordeal. The shame of their exposure could make them pariahs.
Those two days in March framed years of debates. Supporters of the military or Mubarak talked only about the International Women’s Day attacks by civilians. The Islamists and self-described revolutionaries talked only about the virginity tests by the soldiers the next night.
Both sides “are just seeing women as prostitutes,” Mozn Hassan, founding director of Nazra for Feminist Studies, later told me, looking back on the time.
Fears about the fate of Arab women always figured prominently in Western worries about the Arab revolts, including at the highest levels of the American government. “STOP LOSS OF FORWARD MOVEMENT FOR WOMEN in Egypt,” Melanne Verveer, the United States ambassador-at-large for women’s issues, implored that April in an email to her old friend Hillary Clinton.
Verveer worried about the removal of First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, who had been president of her husband’s National Council of Women and was a friend of Clinton since her own years as first lady. Verveer felt that Suzanne Mubarak had been the exclusive source of improvements in Egyptian women’s rights for decades. She had handed down laws making it easier for Muslim women to divorce their husbands (although the laws did not help Christians); setting the minimum age for marriage at eighteen (although child “engagement” or marriage remained commonplace in the countryside); and criminalizing the performance of so-called female circumcision (although no one was ever convicted). She had also persuaded her husband to decree a minimum number of seats for women in Parliament (which he filled with loyalists).
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 8
