Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Read online

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  In the middle of the twentieth century, Egypt had led the Arab world to independence from the former colonial powers. It became the wellspring of Arab nationalism, political Islam, and global jihad. Everything in the Arab world had seemed to start in Cairo. Anyone in the region who cared about local politics also followed politics in Cairo. The vibrancy, nightlife, and climate lured the princes of the oil-rich Gulf to holiday at the beaches of Sharm el-Sheikh or the Marriott in Zamalek. The people of neighboring basket cases like Yemen, Jordan, Libya, or the Palestinian territories looked to Egypt as a big brother. Cairo was the place for education and culture, the big time.

  But the experts in Washington had all assured me that nothing else interesting would happen in Egypt. It had now set the template for the stagnation of the region. Its docile citizenry would never challenge their corrupt rulers. Its corrupt rulers could never meet the needs of their exponentially expanding population. In economics, politics, and culture, the ancient Arab heartland was in irreversible decline.

  Most Egyptians lived a world apart from Zamalek or Maadi. There were 78 million of them in 2010, up from 66 million a decade before. Nearly a quarter lived in Cairo, and 95 percent in the valley of the Nile. More than 40 percent of Egyptians—and the vast majority in many rural areas—lived on less than $2.00 a day. A fifth survived on less than $1.25. At about $5.00 a pound, beef was an extravagance. Nearly one in four Egyptian adults could not read. Forty percent of households lacked access to sewage systems, and 10 percent lacked running water (including many in the urban slums of Cairo and Alexandria). Only 8 percent of the population owned a car, and that was still more than enough to clog the streets of the capital.

  I brought with me the standard Western assumptions. Islam fused religion and politics, mosque and state could never be separated, and so Arabs were all but doomed to choose between secular strongmen and religious extremists. Arab and Islamic culture, I was told, was uniquely resistant to the spread of democracy. Over the last two decades, democracy had taken root in Eastern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, but not yet in the Middle East—except for Israel. Arab exceptionalism, political scientists called it.

  I pictured Egypt and Israel as enemies held in a fragile peace only by American payments to both sides. But the $70 billion in American military aid over decades had made Egypt’s generals into Washington’s best Arab allies. Arab families were tribal, Arab culture antimodern, Arab women treated almost as chattel. And so on. Almost all of it was wrong.

  I was surprised at what I can only call the colonial feel of our lives. We drank gin and tonics at picnic tables among palm trees on the lawn of the Maadi British Club, a vestige of the occupation. We swam at an even more exclusive club, run by the American embassy for its staff and contractors (and for the non-Egyptian faculty of the American University in Cairo, where Laura taught law and advised the administration). The embassy commissary provided the club with imported wine, beer, pork, and other products that were almost impossible to find anywhere else in Egypt. Our friends in Zamalek spent weekends at a former British Officers’ Club with multiple swimming pools and a stable for horses. Abdel Nasser had nationalized it decades ago, but having a low membership number was still a status symbol. It meant your family had belonged longer.

  The police invariably sided with foreigners—khawagah is the derogatory term—in any dispute with Egyptians. The Arab wife of a Western journalist I knew showed her husband’s business card to any traffic policeman who stopped her, and the policeman always sped her on her way. In the Egyptian film Hassan and Marcus (2008), a general in the Interior Ministry announced that seventy-five people had died “pushing” to escape from a terrorist bomb blast. “And thankfully they are all Egyptians! No foreigners!” Big laughs from Egyptian moviegoers.

  Working-class Egyptians tumbled over themselves to help foreigners like us, only sometimes fishing for baksheesh. (“The taxi drivers see you as a bag of money,” an Arabic tutor told me.) But members of the Anglophone elite invariably tried to bond with us over the failings of their poorer countrymen, like the bureaucrat who had told me about “Egyptian IBM” and missing San Francisco.

  The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz wrote in the 1950s of an autobiographical character, Kamal, whose rich Egyptian friend pined for Paris or London. “How it hurt Kamal whenever his friend let slip some hint of his sense of superiority over the Egyptian people [as if] he was talking about a people to which neither of them belonged.” Many in the elite talked that way sixty years later. The minister of culture used to pontificate on state television about the tragic “backwardness” of his fellow Egyptians. Affluent Egyptians were often zealously chauvinistic about their homeland—“the Mother of the World,” as Egyptians called it. How could the same people identify so snobbishly with the West and condescend so deeply to their own countrymen? I was still new to the postcolonial world.

  Exclusive clubs, hotels, and restaurants had almost entirely blocked off the breezy banks along the Nile in Cairo by the time I arrived. Desperate for air, poorer Cairenes gathered at night in rows of plastic chairs on the narrow sidewalks of bridges, sipping juice or tea from vendors who paraded back and forth with tanks on their backs. On the edge of Maadi, families picnicked on a tiny patch of grass between the Total gas station and the busy road along the river.

  Only over the last decade had the rich begun fleeing to gated communities in newly built suburbs. Many were designed to look like Palm Springs, with pools, golf courses, and ceaseless irrigation. Mubarak’s ministers had sold off publicly owned desert land around the city at bargain prices to well-connected cronies. After the land grab, the race to build the suburbs had sucked so much capital away from other investments that it helped trigger a nationwide recession. An upscale project across the Nile in Giza was sold as “European CountrySide”—transliterated into Arabic letters that would spell “Eurobean” if pronounced correctly. A rich developer (and ruling-party lawmaker) marketed one of his projects as “Mayfair,” after the neighborhood of London. Another, on the Mediterranean, he called “Virginia Beach Village.”

  Khedive Ismail Pasha, the hereditary ruler who led Egypt into vassalage to Britain in the late nineteeth century, once proclaimed, “My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe.” He might have felt right at home in the early-twenty-first-century suburbs. Their development meant that for the first time in centuries Cairo no longer forced the rich and poor to mingle in the streets.

  One night in the summer of 2010, Laura and I dined at the suburban home of the Pakistani-born executive who ran Citigroup in Egypt. As we looked out over his pool and a golf course, he was explaining to an assortment of Western guests and Anglophone Egyptians that no population as poor and uneducated as Egypt’s could ever govern itself through democratic elections. He had learned that in Pakistan, he said. All nodded in agreement.

  Then an American executive of an international tobacco company, enjoying the wine, posed a question to the table. Was it true, he asked, that the Arabic language contained no word for “compromise?”

  For even the snobbiest Egyptian, this was too much. The Arabic language had developed over centuries across a vast swath of countries on three continents. It had accumulated a daunting multitude of synonyms for everything, including compromise. This supposed deficit was an urban myth in the West. The Arabic speakers politely corrected him. The wine flowed on. But I knew then that whenever I heard someone say, “Arabic has no word for . . . ,” I was in the presence of a racist.

  The most visible champion of the privatizations that created the new suburbs was a steel mogul and ruling party power broker named Ahmed Ezz. His face appeared almost daily on the front pages of Egypt’s privately owned newspapers. In his college days he had played the drums in a Fleetwood Mac–style rock-and-roll band. Then he took advantage of the opening up of the Egyptian economy under Sadat by exp
anding his father’s business selling building materials. By the 1990s, Ezz was rich and connected enough that Mubarak appointed him to a joint U.S.–Egyptian trade council. There he befriended another council member, Gamal Mubarak.

  That was also the time when, in 1996, Ezz managed to buy control of the massive state-owned steelmaker. He said that he had been the only one willing to inject needed capital; his critics said he got a sweet deal through his Mubarak connections. Either way, he now controlled at least two thirds of the booming steel market. He amassed a personal net worth of more than $2 billion. He became chairman of the Parliament’s most important finance committee, and he joined his friend Gamal atop the ruling party.

  Every Arab despot had an Ezz in those days. Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, and other Arab states all followed Western advice and opened their state-dominated economies to competition and markets. But their authoritarian rulers made no effort to open their political systems, or to make the government officials who were selling off the assets accountable to the public. Privatization ended up giving enormous windfalls to a handful of cronies. And in each country, a single well-connected businessman emerged as the grinning face of economic reform—Ezz in Egypt, Sakher el-Materi in Tunisia, Hassan Tatanaki in Libya, Rami Makhlouf in Syria, and so on. I pictured them all around a table at the Four Seasons in Dubai, raising their glasses to toast the Washington consensus.

  Ezz looked like a capitalist elf. He was about five and a half feet tall, with wavy dark hair parted to the side and sideburns down to the bottom of his ears. He favored platform shoes, Italian suits, spread collars, silver cuff links, and Cohiba cigarillos. He kept three wives—a practice allowed by Egyptian law and Muslim tradition but practical only for the rich and the bold. He was forty-nine years old in 2007 when he married his third wife, Shahinaz el-Naggar—an heiress, businesswoman, and fellow member of the ruling party’s parliamentary block (he insisted she resign after their marriage). Cairo gossip columnists reported that he had paid her a dowry of $5 million and bought a $175,000 ring. They flew to Switzerland for the wedding, and she moved into an apartment in the Four Seasons. (His second wife lived in another apartment in the hotel, and his first lived in a suburban compound.)

  By 2010, Ezz could boast that privatization had worked wonders. The economy had grown by about 50 percent over the decade, the highest rate in forty years. More Egyptians were buying cars and air conditioners. Home building was booming. So was the steel business. But to the majority of the population, Ezz embodied the widening gulf that divided them from the lucky few inside the new gated suburbs.

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  Ostrich! Ostrich! Over here, ostrich!” “Psst! Zebra, want to see zebra?”

  We took our sons to the Cairo zoo, and the animal keepers reminded Laura and me of the pot dealers who used to call out to passersby in Washington Square Park in New York City. Instead of caring for the animals, the keepers were there to pimp them out. For a dollar tip you could touch, feed, or ride whatever animal you fancied. We snapped pictures of our four-year-old riding a zebra, feeding an elephant, mingling with kangaroos, and petting lion cubs. One keeper convinced us to let our son pose with a mother tiger, as the attendant himself looked on with a menacing stick in his hand. He suggested we put a hand in the mouth of the lion. That we declined.

  Empty cigarette packs floated beside the crocodiles. We saw a keeper beat a tiger with a rod. Animals stared dazedly. I later learned that the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums had expelled the Cairo zoo for violating international standards for the treatment of animals. When we thought of the cruelty, it ruined the fun.

  Khedive Ismail, who once proclaimed Egypt part of Europe, founded the zoo in 1881. He commissioned no less than Gustave Eiffel to design a bridge for its garden. But the most glorious part of the original zoo lay along the Nile, and that had been sold off long before our visit. A Four Seasons Hotel now blocked the view of the river. Egyptian families looking for a few yards of grass to picnic on or play in swarmed over the remaining eighty acres. And the animals, for practical purposes, belonged to the zookeepers. Each saw his charge as a chance to profit off what was left of the zoo.

  In 2010 the Egyptian government spent more than a quarter of its budget on the salaries of more than six million civilian employees like the zookeepers, and that number excluded millions more in the army and police. Those six million were about 20 percent of Egypt’s civilian workforce—more than twice as many as the number of government employees that the United States and the United Kingdom employ together, or three times the size of the public sector workforce in Turkey, where the population was slightly smaller but the gross domestic product was three times as large. Turkey, infamous for its bloated bureaucracy, was a model of efficiency compared with Egypt.

  Most Egyptian public employees saw their positions as assets to rent out or withhold, a source of baksheesh. Traffic policemen took small bribes to forget moving violations (so, of course, the traffic was lawless). Or a policeman might stop you from parking in a perfectly legal space, but then require only a few pounds to let you park in any space you wanted—no matter what that did to the flow of cars and pedestrians. Civil servants brought vegetables to work, peeled them at their desks, and went home to cook lunch.

  It was the Nasserite social contract, and versions of it prevailed across most of the region. A paternalistic state had once furnished an abundance of jobs along with generous food and fuel subsidies. Abdel Nasser had guaranteed a job to everyone with a university degree, no matter how overcrowded the classes or poorly trained the graduates, and until 1990 Mubarak had kept up the pretense. Egyptians, in turn, put up with a government over which they had no say at all. But by 2010, the bargain was breaking. Anyone could see it. Just take a walk from the Four Seasons through the squalor of the zoo.

  For a police state, though, I found Egypt in 2010 remarkably open. Mubarak had first allowed the private ownership of news organizations about a half dozen years before I arrived. They were not fully independent: All the newspapers and television networks belonged to a small handful of businessmen close to Mubarak, and the owners were usually dependent on the state for other business interests. Their journalists worked within clear boundaries. Criticizing the military, Mubarak, or Islam would land you in jail. But within those lines, newspapers like El-Masry El-Youm—Today’s Egyptian—or talk show hosts like Mona Shazli managed to call attention to many of the state’s deficiencies, including the terrible economy, the soaring price of vegetables, or even the epidemic abuses of the Egyptian police.

  I heard a great deal that summer about a minibus driver named Emad el-Kabeer. A couple of years earlier, the police had accosted his cousin in a parking lot, and Kabeer made the mistake of attempting to intercede. The police arrested him, stripped him half naked, hung his feet from a ceiling, beat him senseless, and shoved a black pole into his anus. Using a mobile phone, an officer recorded a video of Kabeer’s humiliation.

  “Oh, pasha, forgive me, I beg your mercy, forgive me,” Kabeer pleaded.

  “Everyone in the parking lot will see this tomorrow,” the officer replied.

  The video reached the internet, and it was still circulating a few years later when I arrived in Cairo. The blogger at my table at the embassy iftar, Wael Abbas, had brought the Kabeer video to widespread attention. Talk shows took it from there. Emad el-Kabeer became one of the most recognized names in Egypt.

  Questioned about the video, the Interior Ministry responded by arresting Kabeer a second time. This time he was sentenced to three months in prison for assaulting an officer. Only after an overwhelming outcry did the police detain two of the officers involved. Or was that just a pretense? The torturers were soon released and reinstated.

  Emad el-Kabeer was back in the news in the summer of 2010 because of an echo. In June, policemen in Alexandria had dragged a clean-shaven young man out of a café for an uncertain reason. The ministry
later said the policemen had suspected him of smoking or dealing pot, but their motives were hazy. They pulled him into a nearby apartment building, beat him, and slammed his head against a marble staircase. In front of witnesses, the police watched him die of his wounds.

  One onlooker took a picture of the bloody remains with a mobile phone, and remembering Kabeer, Egyptians knew what to do. Within weeks two competing Facebook pages dedicated to the name of the latest police victim—“We are all Khaled Said”—had accumulated tens of thousands of followers. Interior Ministry officials said Khaled Said had choked to death on a clump of marijuana, trying to swallow the evidence. They barely tried to sell the lie. They seemed not to care if anyone believed it, and the new openness of the media made the ministry’s cynicism especially stark.

  A hit film, This Is Chaos, had reached satellite television that summer. Released to theaters in 2007 by the Egyptian directors Youssef Chahine and Khaled Youssef, the film began with a disclaimer to placate the censors: “We appreciate the patriotic role played by the police establishment to maintain stability and security. These are just isolated acts.” But that only added a laugh line. As the disclaimer faded, the film showed hundreds of riot police carelessly destroying a neighborhood vegetable market to chase down a handful of nonviolent demonstrators. The police beat them with batons, locked them in a dungeon, and tortured them on and off for the duration of the film.

  The main character, a policeman named Hatem, became an icon. “If you are not good to Hatem, you are not good to Egypt!” he forced local shopkeepers to repeat as he shook them down for bribes. “Law? Here, there is only one law. Hatem’s law,” he told a prisoner, administering electric shocks to his chest while the captive hung suspended from the ceiling. “Now let the law help you!”

  In one scene, Hatem attempted to steal a valuable oil painting from the office of a police commissioner by substituting a fake. It was common knowledge in the ministries of culture and antiquities that officials had been pilfering Egyptian treasures for years using similar methods. Western and Egyptian archaeologists groused to me that so many cheap knockoffs had been left in the storerooms of the Egyptian Museum that it was becoming hard to know what was real anymore. Those sticky fingers, too, became a public scandal in the summer of 2010. Poppy Flowers, painted by Vincent van Gogh and worth more than $50 million, was stolen from the walls of an Egyptian government museum. It was obviously an inside job. The same painting had been stolen from the same museum before, in 1977, although later recovered in Kuwait. No one was held accountable, and this time the painting has never resurfaced. In This Is Chaos, the policeman Hatem was such a philistine he ripped the canvas, tearing it from its frame, cheerfully unaware that he had destroyed its value.