Egypt: The Hidden Truth
AUGUST 16, 2012
Yasmine El Rashidi
Sherif Abd El Minoem/Handout/Reuters
Newly elected Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi (center) with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein
Tantawi, head of Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (left), and Egyptian Armed Forces
Chief of Staff Sami Anan (right), at a military ceremony in Alexandria, July 5, 2012
To arrive at the “new” Cairo International Airport is to arrive, in reality, at terminal three
—an optimistically shiny marble edifice commissioned at a cost of $347 million by
Ahmed Shafik, the former minister of civil aviation, who became the former prime
minister and a losing presidential candidate. Built by a Turkish contractor for a higher
price than Istanbul’s own airport expansion, the CIA is both deceptively functional and
selectively used (it’s reserved mainly for the domestic airline; most international airlines
are banished to the old terminal one, referred to as “the hall” or “the old airport”).
Although it has a state-of-the-art computerized system to deal with arrivals, the new
airport stubbornly deploys several uniformed officers to triple-check what the computer
has confirmed. Armed men glance speculatively at the traveler’s coin-sized arrival stamp
bearing the day’s date and a small outline of an airplane, along with six mentions of
“Egypt.” Such is the logic of the country—an administration that has achieved
supremacy in the creation of idle jobs. Duplicity is its mainstay.
Beyond the sliding glass doors of the terminal, and along the main road leading into the
city, the establishments of a titanic and looming administration are everywhere: the
Presidential Election Committee, the Technical College of the Armed Forces, the
Presidential Palace, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Investment, the National
Accounting Bureau, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, the
National Information Center, the Legal Department of the Authority, the General
Authority for Capital Market, the Military Judiciary Office, the Ministry of Planning, the
Public Notary, and various ranks of intelligence offices. These buildings, with their gray
façades, their rows of square windows, their sometimes palatial interiors concealed
behind miles of wall, and the many and heavily armed and sometimes deceptively
plainclothed guards that surround them, form the anatomy of Egyptian life. At the heart
of the city, one of them—the Mugamma, the government’s central office building—
forms the conspicuous backdrop to Tahrir Square.
It is from within these highly placed institutions that information has leaked and swirled
in recent weeks and since the revolution broke out in January 2011. We hear most about
the military council—the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF—which has
been governing the country since Hosni Mubarak resigned. We also hear about the
Americans, who had allegedly reached a deal that the council would cede power to the
Islamists. Mohamed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, was rightly
predicted to win the presidential election. Mubarak was said to be sick, in a coma,
clinically dead; or the Mubaraks were in London; Morsi sold the Brotherhood out; the
SCAF sold out Morsi’s opponent, Ahmed Shafik, the prime minister appointed by the
departing Mubarak; the country was on the brink of civil war.
Two days before the presidential election results were announced on June 24, Al-Dustor
newspaper ran across its front page, in big, bold, black and red print, the headline “The
Massacre of the Century,” referring to the Muslim Brotherhood’s alleged plan for Egypt,
which supposedly called for assassinations and disorder. The paper cited intelligence
sources and a secret meeting of the Brotherhood.
By the pool at the Gezira Sporting Club that morning, a group of retired army generals
and high-ranking intelligence officers spoke with assurance of Shafik’s coming win. The
officer really in charge of the country, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi,
commander in chief of the armed forces, “won’t have it any other way,” so it was said.
Later that day, when I chatted with a former Egyptian ambassador to Pakistan, he
vehemently contradicted them. “It will be Morsi, it’s what the Americans want.”
These speculations, stories spun by insider sources and cast as fact, the many armed—
often young—men in the streets, the deceptive titles of commander of this or that, have
been central to the daily life of this country of 82 million (official figure), or 91 million
(speculated figure). It was, in the end, these official buildings, the efficient tedium of the
line of command in one bureaucracy after another, that kept Egyptians—a sizable
portion of them—going through the past eighteen months of upheaval.
It also kept them attentive, wondering what next, debating the different outcomes,
shifting their alliances as predictions were circulated and spun. At the Foreign Ministry,
a mid-career diplomat tells me that even with the removal of senior ministers, the “chain
of production” continues: “You know what to do every day, down to the office boy who
runs errands. You keep going.” In the months without a president, El-Tahrir newspaper
reported one day in June, the Presidential Diwan, or office, spent $48.5 million—$5
million more than its average annual expenditure. It kept going. The factories of the
businessmen who were closely associated with the Mubaraks and were charged and
convicted of crimes also keep going. I see one of those tycoons frequently at that same
club where the generals sit by the poolside.
In a recent session of the short-lived Parliament’s Planning and Budget Committee—
short-lived because the Parliament that was elected by January 11, 2012, was dismissed
by the military council on June 14—the matter of government employees was brought
up for discussion. The committee had found that the total number of government
employees had risen from 2.5 million in 1982–1983 to 5.4 million today, despite a hiring
freeze imposed in 1999, when the number of employees was between 3 and 4.2 million,
depending on whose count you choose to consider.
Of those, 300,000 were found to have been appointed under the current Cabinet, i.e., in
the past few months. “We demand an explanation,” one MP cried out, to no effect. The
Parliament and its committees were dissolved before the matter could be investigated
further, but if one were to dig a little deeper, one could discover the various studies
showing that there were 5.7 million government employees in 2009, and closer to 7
million today.
Meeting with Ashraf Abdelwahab, the minister of state for administrative development, I
asked about these numbers. He swiftly mentioned the figure seven, “or maybe twelve.”
Million? “Yes, but I don’t know for sure. You know, nothing is sure. It’s hard to come
by accurate figures.” I asked him about the agency called CAPMAS (the official source
of statistical data and reports on Egypt for all state agencies and international
organizations) and the National Intelligence Council (NIC), both a few doors down from
the ministry on that same thoroughfare to and from the airport—“don’t they have
figures?”
As if to be polite about a naive question, he laughed, and the conversation moved on, to
the grand task of his ministry, which is to decentralize government, reform the
bureaucracy, weed out corruption, and install automation of public services. “That is, if
the ministry survives.” On January 30 of last year, when Ahmed Shafik was appointed
prime minister by Mubarak, he decided that the ministry should be scratched off the
government map. The following day, its dissolution was announced. “We were a
liability,” the minister said. “We had conducted studies on corruption and other sensitive
topics, so it was decided that it would be better if we simply didn’t exist; if we were
wiped out.” (Mubarak had ordered that these studies stay locked in a drawer.)
But where would they go, the employees of a system that guarantees permanent
employment? For a period of fifty-three days last year during Shafik’s time as prime
minister and for some weeks after, the ministry was simply hidden from view—wedged
in a low-ranking spot in the hierarchy of the Central Agency for Organization and
Administration (CAOA). It was renamed an “administrative development department.”
“We were still there, working, doing what we do, operating on the full ministry budget,
but nobody knew.”
I asked the minister, as well, about the “chain of production.” He laughed. “There is a
chain, but it doesn’t produce.” He explained away the 300,000 new government
employees (“maybe closer to 450,000, or even a million”) as the result of pressure to
hire. People were protesting at the gates of every ministry, so “we had to hire anyone
who wanted a job last year. We were repeating the same mistake we’ve been making for
decades, which is to use the administration to make angry people feel a bit more
comfortable. It was a political decision.” I asked him if he raised the problem of such
hiring to the Cabinet. “I didn’t exist then, it was when I was wiped out.”
Some nights later, at dinner with an American friend who has served as a consultant to
the government of Egypt since the 1980s, she threw up her hands when I mentioned new
employees. “There isn’t a single job description for anyone in government! And as for
figures—it’s not that there aren’t figures, but that each ministry, each government body,
has a different set of figures! They even have different maps! If you’re lucky, like I was,
you have access to the prime minister and you can get hold of either accurate figures, or
an agreed-upon compromise of the various sets of figures.”
I ventured from ministry to ministry and into the Nile Delta over the weeks leading up to
and past the presidential elections. I met with ministers, desk clerks, town mayors,
government office managers, and chatted in hallways with office boys and the women in
government buildings who sell toilet paper on a case-by-case basis for a tip.
In some ministries, I was struck by the rectangular dust marks on walls that I took to
indicate where Hosni Mubarak’s picture once hung. “The pictures came down
spontaneously, there was definitely no written order,” a Foreign Ministry manager told
me. “We never had Mubarak pictures here,” a senior executive at the state media empire,
Al-Ahram, told me. And when I pressed him: “Or maybe just pictures of the president
with important journalists. The picture in the presidential palace came down by mistake,
you know.” When I had dinner with the veteran publisher and regime critic Hisham
Kassem, I asked him about this. “In some cases they most certainly came down by court
decree,” he said.
On June 26, the day after my dinner with Hisham, and two days after the declaration that
the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi, had been elected president (he
won with 51.7 percent of the vote, to Ahmed Shafik’s 48.3 percent), Morsi’s
spokesperson announced that his picture should not be hung up in public offices or
schools. And no congratulatory advertisements should be placed in newspapers either,
please. “A written order will soon be issued.” On my way to Al-Ahram‘s offices one
afternoon later that week, I saw a portrait of Morsi go up anyway—at Abu Al Farag
elementary school.
At the supermarket sponsored by the Armed Forces Club on 26th of July Street—
commemorating the day in 1956 when Egypt seized the Suez Canal—people were
anxiously buying goods on the morning of June 21, the day the election results were to
be announced. I picked up a packet of sugar (which sells at four cents less than the price
in regular supermarkets), a bottle of oil, and some flour (we were warned to stock up on
“staple foods” and I wasn’t sure what I should buy). Banks were closing early, some
businesses had given employees the day off, government offices had emptied, and
around noon, a memo began to circulate at Al-Ahram asking all staff members to be out
of the building by 1 PM.
On Sunday, June 17—the second of the second two days of the election—the members
of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued an annex to the constitutional
declaration that was drafted and voted on last March, and later amended. The annex
limits the president’s powers, giving the SCAF the right of veto over the drafting of a
new constitution, as well as legislative powers until a new Parliament is elected. The
annex stated, moreover, that the SCAF remains responsible for the public budget, and it
gave the right to appoint the head of the armed forces not to the elected president but to
the SCAF itself. Both the Islamists and many in the opposition were outraged, calling it a
“soft coup” and once again taking to the square.
Just days before, on June 14, in a double verdict issued minutes apart, the Supreme
Constitutional Court had dissolved the recently elected, Islamist-dominated Parliament,
calling it unconstitutional. The court had simultaneously announced that Ahmed Shafik
was eligible to continue his run for president, despite a law banning high-ranking
members of the former regime from public office. There was, on this Thursday morning,
June 21, four days after the polls had closed, a fear that the Islamists, who had in the past
demonstrated in Tahrir Square, would storm government buildings. There was fear of
bloodshed. Everyone I know was on edge.
Tomas Munita/The New York Times/Redux
Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and former President Hosni Mubarak as two sides of the same
face on graffiti in Tahrir Square, Cairo, June 25, 2012
Days before any of this had been announced, Mona Makram Ebeid—a member of the
advisory council appointed by the SCAF last December and a former MP—had told me
that the special annex giving the military council oversight powers over the drafting of a
new constitution had been the advisory council’s idea. The drafting of the constitution
had reached a stalemate following the Islamists’ attempt to dominate and monopolize the
100-member constituent assembly that had been formed to draft it in March (a group of
which Mona was also a member). On June 5, in a final show of goodwill toward the
Islamist-dominated Parliament, the SCAF had given them a forty-eight-hour ultimatum
to put together a new, representative, constituent assembly, in which the Islamists would
have up to 50 percent of the seats. The Islamists once again tried to monopolize the
assembly through a power grab, or takweesh, of seats (takweesh is a term that was used
politically in the past to describe attempts by Mubarak’s sons to monopolize power and
wealth, and revived to refer to the Islamists). Now, in early July, there is still no
Parliament.
An army source and family friend had told us weeks before that the SCAF would never
let the Islamists have full power—the SCAF‘s constitutional annex had been brewing for
weeks; the advisory council’s proposal was, in effect, a green light for the military
council to finally issue the annex. He also said that the army had already been quietly
deployed around the country. “They are everywhere, even if you can’t see them.”
That Thursday morning, June 21, the election commission was still looking into the four
hundred allegations of fraud filed by the two candidates following the second round of
voting on June 16 and 17, and by the afternoon, it appeared that the results were under a
cloud of doubt. There were allegations that the names of the deceased were being used as
voters, that the Islamists had been intimidating the Copts, and that ballots had been
preprinted showing votes in favor of Morsi. We heard that the final results would be
delayed by two, maybe three, days. At the Ministry of State for Administrative
Development, which had created the election system, its database, and its websites, the
minister Ashraf Abdelwahab and his aides confirmed to me that, yes, there were most
definitely names of dead people on voter lists. When people die in Egypt, they continue
to exist in the system; their national IDs remain valid and usable—until such time as the
IDs are submitted, along with the death certificate, to the various appropriate authorities
and physically canceled. “Nobody does that with their dead, it’s too much of a hassle.”
I spoke with Minister Abdelwahab of a conversation with a campaign strategist for Amre
Moussa, the former minster of foreign affairs who was defeated as a presidential
candidate. The strategist described to me how convoluted the campaign process is for
candidates. It was, he said, impossible to run an independent campaign. The rules—such
as the requirement that candidates can’t open a campaign bank account until the day
before the three-week campaign period begins—force the candidates to break them.
(“They were made to make it impossible to contest Mubarak without being
disqualified.”)
Minister Abdelwahab, a rather jolly man, responded that it’s true, the system is made to
break those who want to change it—including reform-minded gentleman like himself.
“But on my part,” he told me, “I can say that if there was a single thing that was
achieved in this transitional period, it was the creation of the automated election system
and the OCV.” That is, “Out of Country Voters,” who were allowed to vote for the first
time. “If I return from my upcoming business trip to New York and I am no longer
minister, or there is no ministry, I will be satisfied with what we’ve done.”
As I walked home from the supermarket that Thursday morning, June 21, my phone
rang. It was Mona. “Any news?” she asked. I had seen Mona at her house before, and I
could tell she was pacing as she talked. She meant news from the street. We discussed
the various possibilities, and their implications for her own political future (she had been
approached by several candidates as a possible Copt vice-president, and had also been
asked by Kamal Ganzouri, the interim prime minister from the National Democratic
Party, to join his cabinet, which she refused). “You know, Yasmine,” she told me before
she hung up, “As nerve-wracking as it’s been, as much as we’ve been kept on edge, this
has been the most exciting year of my life. My whole life. And I’m your parents’ age,
you know.”
On June 24, the election results were finally released, with Mohamed Morsi winning by
3.4 percentage points over Ahmed Shafik. I met with Magda Boutros, the director of
criminal justice reform at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). Presidentelect Morsi had already denounced talk of purging the Interior Ministry (whose
employees, incidentally, received pay raises the week before), and he seemed ready to
work with those same forces—both within the Interior Ministry and outside it—who for
decades had persecuted him and his group, the long-outlawed and now ascendant
Muslim Brotherhood. The Interior Ministry had changed its slogan to “The Police in the
Service of the People” soon after the revolution, and the Amn Dawla—State Security—
had theoretically been dismantled but in fact simply been renamed Amn Watany—
National Security.
Last year, in one of its biggest initiatives of reform, the Interior Ministry spoke, in
abstract terms, of dismissing approximately five hundred employees. What happened to
them? Magda explained to me they were simply shifted into new positions, and often got
promotions. “Some of them were of retiring age and had simply retired.”
I asked her about the many police officers and conscripts who were charged in cases
related to the killing of protesters during the revolution. What happened to them? Most
of them, she said, have returned to their posts, sometimes with some reshuffling to
different districts, often with pay raises.
And what about the case of the 189 prisoners who were shot during the revolution? She
sighed. The prosecutor, she said, submitted a file that was inadequate, incomplete,
inconclusive, even though the evidence was clear. There were dozens of bullet holes all
over the walls of the prisons. The prisoners were shot by their guards. And what of the
prosecutor who was appointed by Mubarak and filed evidence in the Mubarak trial?
I didn’t need her to answer—I already knew from Ramy Raoof of EIPR and Heba
Morayef of Human Rights Watch and other lawyers and political figures and reports that
cases compiled by the prosecutor’s office have been “shoddy.” Or in the cases where
human rights groups have submitted substantial evidence directly to the court, political
verdicts appear to have been reached. Evidence of wrongdoing routinely disappears or is
dismissed as inadequate, insufficient. (“For the Mubarak trial we submitted five hundred
gigabytes of evidence showing police killing protesters, how can that be inadequate?”
Ramy said.)
There has, though, been one achievement in advancing human rights since Mubarak
stepped down—the abolition of the Emergency Law, which had been in place since 1981
and allowed the authorities to arrest people at will without regard for their rights. But
like practically everything else, Magda fears the law will be rewritten by the state and
indirectly replaced. “When they came to power last year, the SCAF added two articles to
the criminal law making baltaga—thuggery—a criminal offense.” The provisions of the
law are vague—the definition of thuggery can include scaring other people, or having a
threatening or menacing attitude. As Magda put it, “It’s a catch-all phrase that could
include anyone, really, and its been used to arrest people massively over the past year.
Now everyone is focused on thugs.”
I scan newspaper clips since the abolishment of the Emergency Law, and find that
Magda is right. The minister of interior, the prosecutor, and the head of national security
all say they are committed to cracking down on baltaga. They cite it as their top priority.
Magda admits that she worries Egypt will shift from a security state that was oppressing
political opponents to a security state that cracks down hard and arbitrarily on crime and
becomes brutal in its law enforcement—“like in Latin America after their revolutions.”
How many employees, I ask her, work for the Ministry of Interior? She is unsure. “It’s
considered a breach of national security” to know. I had asked Minister Ashraf this
question too. (The ministries have signed an agreement to create, as a joint venture, a
network between police stations, the ministry, and the prosecutor’s office.) He said he
could only cite an approximate figure, but the ministry, and others, would likely refute it.
I write in my notebook: “nobody knows.”
On Friday, June 29, President Morsi addressed hundreds of thousands of Egyptians in
Tahrir Square. I watched the speech partly from the square itself, and then from home,
on state TV, when the crowds and heat became too much. Now he, and the square, and
the whole downtown area, were protected—for his sake—by presidential guards and the
secret service and snipers. A phalanx of government guards tried to shield him as he
moved away from the podium and across the stage toward the crowds. His security
people panicked as he pushed them away and moved forward onto the stage. The
question everyone was asking was whether he would change the system. Or would those
who run the system simply change in small ways to accommodate, and then break him,
and turn him into one of their own?
This was, in the end, a president with limited and opaque powers; one who was fighting
to revive a dissolved Parliament, and who might be forced to work without one for a
while. He was a president whose budget for the coming year had been set by powers
other than his own (the former Cabinet drafted a 2012–2013 budget, which has been
approved by the SCAF). A president who has been described as “transitional” and
unlikely to complete his four-year term.
President-elect Morsi, in a sweeping, thirty-seven-minute-long speech, tried to appeal to
all factions of the population—including the family of the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel
Rahman, who was convicted in New York of plotting to bomb New York City targets,
and whose relatives were present in Tahrir wielding conspicuous banners. During his
speech Morsi said that he saw their banners and would ask for the extradition of the
sheikh just as he would try to release the civilians who had been put through military
trials in Egypt. (His spokesperson later said that Morsi would try to have Sheikh Rahman
extradited on “humanitarian” grounds but was not asking for his conviction to be
overturned.)
He was also setting himself up for possible failure. How would he deliver on promises of
jobs and economic growth and prosperity with the many constraints on power, and the
bloated administration and national debt and depleted reserves, that he had inherited?
The Saturday morning after that speech, I texted a businessman and former associate of
Gamal Mubarak’s, asking him, apologetically, if we could reschedule an appointment we
had set for that day. I apologized for any disruption to his schedule. He texted back
immediately: No problem, it’s called adaptive bureaucracy. I immediately thought of the
disappearing ministry, which didn’t disappear. Of the presidential portraits. Of the
Criminal Justice Law. Of the security apparatus. Of those guards in Tahrir. In years past,
students in the public school system were asked, at times, to write letters to the beloved
president as part of composition exams. This year, they were asked to write to the
“beloved Armed Forces.”
That same morning, President Morsi was to be sworn in before the Supreme
Constitutional Court. He would, as part of standard protocol, be saluted by Field Marshal
Tantawi, as chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. For a military man
to salute an Islamist in public would, in Egypt, be understood by many as a defeat, and a
source told Reuters that Tantawi would never allow such a sight to be seen. We
wondered how they would maneuver their way out of this one. It was announced, some
minutes before the swearing-in, that the session would be recorded and broadcast later.
Only state tv cameras would be let in. The salute, so it was understood, would be edited
out.
In the end, after a two-hour delay, the swearing-in was broadcast live—at the insistence
of the judges, who alleged that it was President Morsi who was the one who had not
wanted to be seen swearing the oath before the very court that had dissolved the
Parliament. In the end, Morsi swore the oath four times over the course of two days, and
he was, eventually, saluted once.
Postscript
On July 8, after Morsi called for the court-dissolved Parliament to reconvene, the
Supreme Constitutional Court responded that its verdict was “final and binding.” The
Parliament nevertheless met on the morning of July 10 for a six-minute session that
concluded with a vote approving the referral of the SCC‘s decision to a high court of
appeals and subsequently suspending Parliament. Later that day, the Supreme
Constitutional Court issued a ruling suspending the presidential decree to reinstate the
Parliament. Whether it will meet again is open to question.
—July 12, 2002
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