The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  The day before the protest, the internet suddenly went down. It was to stay down for almost a week, but rather than take Egypt off the front pages, it drew attention from the international media which predicted that the Egyptian regime was turning the lights out pending a massive crackdown. On the day, the internet shutdown did little to deter protests. People were already congregating at the city's mosques for Friday prayers and from there they marched towards Tahrir. Thousands of protesters confronted police on the bridges leading into central Cairo. The Muslim Brotherhood had swung behind the protests, instantly multiplying the numbers. The promised crackdown was as vicious as many had feared, with tear gas and rubber bullets fired into the crowds. Protests broke out in Ismailia, Alexandria and other cities.

  Around Tahrir Square, youths, many of them supporters of Egypt's Ahly football club, were at the forefront of pitched battles with the police. Drawing on their extensive experience in confronting the police at football matches, these so-called Ultras were old hands at making Molotov cocktails to hurl at riot squads. By some accounts, they were instrumental in tiring out and confusing the police. Activists had also been in touch with their counterparts in Tunisia and picked up tips. They brought onions and vinegar with them to counteract the effect of the tear gas. Many brought first aid kits. Those who were involved speak of an uplifting sense of camaraderie among the protesters who picked up the wounded and brought them to nearby mosques and offices for medical aid.

  After a day of battles, the police melted away. The protesters had occupied the square. When Mubarak ordered tanks and troops in to restore order, the protesters cheered the soldiers, welcoming them as guardians of the people. Protesters gave the soldiers flowers and clambered on their tanks to have their photos taken. To some degree, this was a tactic used by non-violent demonstrators the world over, aimed at bringing soldiers onside and dividing their loyalties. For many demonstrators, though, there was a genuine affection for the army. By not involving itself in domestic repression over the years, the military had been able to distance itself from some of the more unpopular policies of successive presidents, and maintain its reputation as the honest and trusted guardian of the state. In times of crisis, the army had often emerged as one of the few competent organizations in a decaying and bloated public sector. Conscription for all men, with up to three years’ service for those with only a basic education, also reinforced a widespread identification with the military. Cries of ‘The people and the army are one hand’ spread through the crowds, and most demonstrators were willing to trust the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF), a body of which few Egyptians had previously heard, to manage the transition from Mubarak's presidency to a multi-party democracy.

  Through the ensuing two weeks, protesters camped out on the traffic island that is Tahrir Square, overlooked by the mogamma, a Soviet-funded edifice associated with labyrinthine bureaucracy and grasping corruption; by the red-hued Egyptian Museum, by the imposing headquarters of the ruling NDP and by the head office of the Arab League. Protesters, men and women, Muslim and Christian, secular and Islamist, young and old, waved the Egyptian flag and painted their faces in its red, white and black colours.

  But with the police gone and the army unprepared for routine policing duties, chaos and fear soon spread. Looters, who protesters believe were paid by Mubarak to instil fear, rampaged through the streets. Armed with sticks and rolling pins, Egyptians set up vigilante groups to protect their building, street or neighbourhood from attack. Baltagiya, paid thugs, infiltrated Tahrir Square and began to attack and intimidate protesters. A campaign by state media first sought to ignore the demonstrators, then to label them traitors involved in outlandish US-Israeli-Iranian-Qatari conspiracies involving – depending on the account – Hamas, Hezbollah and some US-funded NGOs. The chaos culminated in the so-called Camel Battle on 2 February, when touts who normally sell camel rides to tourists at the pyramids were brought in to attack the protesters.42 Images of camels careening through the crowds stunned viewers of satellite television and made the rounds online. The move backfired as those who had initially feared the chaos saw a clear attack on the people. Yet as time passed and Mubarak clung on, the protests began to lose momentum and to anger many Egyptians yearning for a return to normality. Penned inside Tahrir, the demonstrators risked becoming a sideshow, their numbers only swelling at weekends, while shops in centre of the capital complained about losing business.

  The momentum shifted again when Wael Ghonim, a youthful Google executive and Facebook activist, was released on 7 February 2011 after eleven days in jail. His appearance on the private Dream TV channel, in which he told the presenter through his tears that the protesters were not traitors and the hundreds of deaths were the fault of those who refused to relinquish power, drew widespread sympathy and galvanized support.43 The crowds swelled the next day.44 At the same time, labour unrest accelerated across the country. The main labour union, controlled by the government, had stood against the protesters, so unionists were not represented as a coherent group. But with hundreds of thousands in the streets, the four independent unions and the CTWS began to organize. An independent labour confederation was established in Tahrir Square, in the midst of the protests. By 10 February, a general strike was more or less in effect, paralyzing both public and private sector companies and factories.45

  When Mubarak finally stepped back on 11 February, many of those who had stayed and returned to Tahrir Square for those eighteen days and nights welcomed the army's new role at the pinnacle of political power. Over and over again, Egyptians said they trusted the military to defend what became known as the ‘25 January Revolution’, and to lead the transition to democracy. That trust was not to last.

  Devouring its Children

  The Egyptian military's gleaming hardware was on display on 6 October 2011. Every year, the parade marking the 1973 war with Israel displayed the prowess of the armed forces, but the show had taken on a special meaning with the country under the naked rule of the generals. Fighter jets sliced through the air during the week of the public holiday, a visual reminder of who was in charge and how powerful they really were. Yet the very same day, as state TV broadcast the parade, the newly-empowered unions were holding their own rally. Buses were at a standstill all week and strikes at Egypt's universities were slowly but surely easing out Mubarak-era appointees. The following afternoon, protests in Tahrir Square were held under the banner of ‘Thank you, now please return to your barracks’.

  Eight months on from February, military rule was beginning to chafe. The army's initial six-month timeline for the transfer of power had come and gone with a return to civilian rule not on the horizon for many more months. Activists and politicians who had welcomed the army began to ask if it would ever relinquish its new-found power, and allow the Egyptian people's success in removing Mubarak to be completed with a transition to rule by elected civilians.

  It appeared that by stripping away the cladding that was the NDP, the interior ministry forces and the Mubarak family, protesters had merely exposed the power that had been at the core of the Egyptian regime all along. While Tunisians were preparing for their first free elections, Egyptian activists found themselves facing not only the coercive might of the army, but its perceived high moral standing and the respect it enjoyed among large parts of the population. For Egypt's revolutionaries the struggle for freedom, dignity and the rule of law was far from over, but it would be a lopsided fight by a loose movement of atomized, unarmed and poorly-funded activists against a military establishment that had not only provided all the presidents since the overthrow of the monarchy sixty years earlier, but controlled a network of business interests too.

  The land holdings of the army, as well as its exact size, manpower and budget, have long been considered state secrets. The defence publisher, Jane's, estimated that Egypt's military expenditure in 2010 was $4.6 billion, excluding US aid. The army was broadly reckoned to employ more than 450,000 active personnel, including ov
er 250,000 conscripts, making it the largest in both Africa and the Middle East. In 2010, about a third of Egypt's provincial governors had military backgrounds, about a third had police backgrounds, and a third were civilians. Even Ahmed Shafiq, the prime minister appointed by Mubarak days before his overthrow and later ousted by protesters, was a military man.

  Over the decades, the armed forces had also developed vested economic interests they would be loath to leave open to the vagaries of a democracy, with its likely emphasis on public accountability, parliamentary oversight and reform. The military began its proper foray into civilian industry in the late 1970s, when the prospect of peace with Israel left it with spare industrial capacity and lots of young men with no wars to fight. When the 1979 peace deal prompted Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE to withdraw from the Arab Organization for Industrialization, which had been set up a few years earlier to develop a regional military-industrial complex, that spare capacity was put to use. Employing 16,000 people, by 2011 the AOI was one of the largest industrial organizations in Egypt and produced everything from televisions to DVDs, wooden furniture, hospital beds, incubators, ambulances, garbage trucks, train carriages, farm equipment and the ubiquitous blue butane gas canisters Egyptians use to fuel their cookers.46 A similar role was played by the National Service Products Organization, which was established in 1978 and controls an umbrella of subsidiaries ranging from construction to the manufacturing of the Safi brand of bottled water.47

  The military does not pay taxes and has access to abundant cheap labour in the form of conscripts, which gave it an edge over profit-making private-sector industries and generated a revenue stream that was independent of the budget it received from Egypt's treasury. Its industrial complex was large enough to have its own Ministry of Military Production, which in 2010 employed 40,000 civilians.48 The armed forces controlled anything between 5 and 40 per cent of the economy, depending on who you asked and what they counted as being under military control. The army's opacity makes it impossible to know for certain. What is clear, however, is that the Egyptian economy had shifted from being 67 per cent public-sector in the 1990s to 62 per cent private-sector in 2008/9.49 Even assuming the military's economic activities had continued apace, their share of a growing overall economy would likely have fallen. While Egypt's estimated annual military spending has not fallen, at least two studies estimate that its share of a growing GDP has been in steady decline, falling from 14 per cent in 1984 to 2.1 per cent in 2008.50

  Whatever the military's actual economic weight, it was certainly seen by most Egyptians on the eve of the uprising as a major, if diminished, force in politics, having a decisive say and perhaps even a veto over the choice of president. By grooming his son Gamal to take over, then, Mubarak threatened to dilute the army's influence on the top office. In this sense, the 2011 uprising resolved a problem that had been hanging over the military for more than a decade, allowing it to remove Gamal with popular blessing and restore its flagging political influence. In their focus on averting a Mubarak dynasty, the protesters had inadvertently strengthened the military core of the regime that they would later find themselves up against.

  By overwhelming the interior security forces on 28 January, burning down the NDP headquarters and ultimately forcing the military, with US encouragement, to remove Mubarak, the protesters had gone some way to undermining the two main counterbalances to the military's power. That power had hitherto been diminishing in terms of its political influence, economic clout and control of the coercive forces of the state. The revolt had removed Mubarak, a momentous achievement when many Egyptians had known no other leader. It had also ensured that there would be no Mubarak dynasty, another major triumph. But by entrusting the transition to the military, an integral part of the old order with a stake in so many economic and political interests, they increased the risk that Egypt's revolution would only be half-completed.

  With Mubarak overthrown, the twenty-member SCAF was now in charge. Chaired by the defence minister, Hussein Tantawi, it promptly dissolved parliament and set up a committee to draft an interim constitution that was ratified in March in a largely free and fair referendum. And after a summer and autumn of arrests, military trials and intimidation, it also held parliamentary elections that saw unprecedented numbers of Egyptians cast their ballots in a largely free vote.

  Throughout the year, however, youth activists, opposition politicians, bloggers and newspaper columnists became increasingly concerned that the military was stretching out the transition and exploiting the associated uncertainty to foment divisions within the opposition camp and limit the scope and depth of change. Not only did the military fail to lift the emergency law throughout 2011 – a move demanded by opposition activists of all stripes – but it seemed to take over the disgraced police force's campaign of repression.

  An assault on freedom of speech appeared to gather pace as 2011 dragged on, though it failed to suppress the new trend for outspoken criticism which had taken hold. At a reading of his novel Taxi in London in October 2011, Egyptian intellectual Khaled al-Khamissi said that none of his columns had been rejected or censored in the previous ten years, but three of his articles had been turned down in the six months after the uprising. Some 12,000 people were arrested and tried in military courts between February and October, more than the number tried in such courts in Mubarak's entire thirty-year tenure and more than the estimated 5,000 prisoners held without charge under the emergency law that had suspended constitutional protections throughout Mubarak's term.51, 52

  Those who appeared before military courts included the socialist activist and blogger Hussam al-Hamalawy, the blogger and pro-democracy activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, the 6 April Youth Movement activist Asmaa Mahfouz, the female presidential candidate and veteran activist Bouthaina Kamel, and many more. Indeed, the leading lights of Egypt's revolt ran into trouble for no more than holding protests against military rule, writing articles, blogs or even tweets criticizing the army, and in some cases for distributing critical fliers or hanging up posters. In an outcome that stunned activists, several among their number were summoned for taking part in a protest outside Cairo's Maspero building, which houses state television and radio, on 9 October 2011. Twenty-eight civilians were charged with attacking the army during the incident, which was sparked by a Coptic march, even though at least twenty-five protesters were killed.53 To many, it felt that the military was mounting a violent counter-revolution aimed at silencing the dissidents, largely youth activists who had continued to push for deeper political reforms after Mubarak's departure.

  ‘I never expected to repeat the experience of five years ago: after a revolution that deposed the tyrant, I go back to his jails?’ Abdel Fattah wrote in a 1 November letter from prison, where he was being temporarily held after refusing to be questioned by a military court on charges related to the Maspero protest. ‘I am locked up, again pending trial, again on a set of loose and flimsy charges – the one difference is that instead of the State Security Prosecutor, we have the Military Prosecutor – a change in keeping with the military moment we're living now.‘54 Indeed, the SCAF's handling of the Maspero incident appeared intended to turn the public against the protesters and to divide the opposition camp. As the clashes reached their height, state television was reporting that the army was under attack by Coptic protesters and urged ‘honourable Egyptians’ to take to the streets in its defence. Many Egyptians continue to believe this version of events and, at the time, some joined the mêlée against what had been a peaceful march.55

  The 6 April Youth Movement was singled out for particular attack with a constant drip of insidious propaganda that sought to discredit them as American agents seeking to destabilize Egypt. By the end of 2011, the Egyptian government was threatening to prosecute NGOs that had received foreign funding, including some of Egypt's most reputable human rights groups, for ‘treason’, using essentially the same tactics that Mubarak had once employed to discredit vocal critics of his human rights r
ecord and to starve them of funds.56 Human rights groups, pro-democracy groups and women's organizations found their bank records scrutinized for foreign cash and some had accounts shut down.57

  An initial revolution in state media coverage appeared by the end of 2011 to have been cosmetic. Accustomed for decades to self-censorship and to burnishing the image of those in power, they had simply switched from being a mouthpiece for Mubarak to being a mouthpiece for the generals. Controlling dozens of terrestrial and satellite television stations, radio stations, newspapers and magazines, the sheer size of state media had long given it enormous influence over public opinion.58

  Another incident that raised questions about the military junta's motives was the attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo on 9 September. A protester who had previously scaled the building and taken down the Israeli flag had been honoured rather than punished by the government.59 The embassy erected a wall to protect the building, but protesters were nevertheless allowed to chip away at the barrier unhindered for hours, before finally storming the embassy. When it eventually came, the crackdown resulted in clashes that left three people dead and over 1,000 wounded. Within days, the generals had announced that the emergency law, which had been due to be lifted before the elections, would remain.60 It reinforced the overall impression of a military council trying to prove, once more, that it was the only force preventing chaos and the collapse of the peace deal with Israel that is so valued by the United States.

  The way in which the elections were organized also smacked to some activists of a deliberate attempt to undermine the whole process and to shield the military from parliamentary scrutiny or oversight. After protracted to-ing and fro-ing, the military council settled on a complicated electoral system where two-thirds of the seats would be decided on a list basis by proportional representation, and the other third would go to candidates running as individuals. Allowing individuals to stand should have bolstered former NDP candidates who had dominated certain districts for years and limited the extent of change, but in the event the felool, or remnants, were roundly punished by the electorate. To complicate matters further, the list constituencies were different from the individual constituencies, confusing voters. Preparations for the elections began in September, allowing only two months of campaigning for those parties that had managed to form and register since the new parties law was introduced in March.