Once Upon a Revolution Read online

  A month after the revolution in Tahrir, mini-revolutions had seized workplaces all over the country. Inside the Maspero Building, the headquarters of state television, once-docile journalists went on strike in the lobby. “The people want the fall of the minister!” they chanted, clutching posters with slogans such as “Free speech.” On the mezzanine floor, the army had set up a machine-gun nest inside the international press center. A soldier scanned the Nile-front corniche while middle-aged functionaries processed journalist credentials. “We’re still trying to figure out who’s in charge,” the headman said. “Everyone wants to make their own revolution, and every boss is another Mubarak. We’ll find the way.”

  In addition to the usual student demonstrations, university professors marched across campus demanding the right to select their own deans. Traffic police wanted higher wages. Everything felt up for grabs, from the loftiest to the most base. Those who cared for politics fought over what sort of liberties should be inscribed in the new constitution. Those more preoccupied with the sudden hiatus of state authority took advantage prosaically. Street vendors hawked their wares on previously forbidden sidewalks. Drivers flouted the few remaining traffic rules. Farmers erected outbuildings and walls along Nile tributaries where construction was banned; they figured inspectors would be preoccupied during this revolutionary moment.

  Possibilities shimmered everywhere, and so did risks. The police had not returned to work since the January clashes. Criminals took note. Carjackings, once rare, threatened the entire busy ring road around Cairo. One taxi driver with whom I often traveled began to carry a retractable metal club beneath his seat. Before driving on lonely roads, he slipped a switchblade into his sleeve. A month after the revolution, he bought a gun as well. He fantasized about robbing a bank truck and retiring. In a single week, two well-known politicians were mugged in downtown Cairo, and another had his car stolen at gunpoint. Some people saw the lawlessness as a consequence of the revolt and blamed Tahrir for leaving Egypt exposed. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition saw it as blackmail. The police still accepted their government salaries but refused to do their jobs; eventually Egyptians would need them badly enough that they’d be willing to forgive previous crimes and give up on their revolution.

  Police presided over all aspects of daily life, not just criminal justice. Egyptians registered to vote at their local police branch. They filed affidavits there for almost any bureaucratic necessity, from obtaining a passport or driver’s license to reporting health code violations. State Security was the division that monitored and controlled everything else. It determined the hiring and firing of anyone in a politically sensitive job, which included everything from corporate middle management to medical department heads. It hired the millions of informants and thugs who reported on their neighbors and coworkers, on the local gangs, even on proregime politicians. State Security had infiltrated drug rings so deeply that it was impossible to tell whether they were spying on the dealers or running the deals themselves.

  Revolutionaries were scrambling, the police were in hiding, and the military junta was making a passable show of comforting the nation. One general on the SCAF, Mohsen el-Fengary, had delivered a moving tribute to the martyrs of January 25, saluting them for “sacrificing their souls for the freedom and security of this country.” His words struck the right tone, and as a result, few paid attention to what was actually happening. Only a few high-profile officials had been arrested: most prominently the steel tycoon Ahmed Ezz and interior minister Habib el-Adly. Superficially, it might have appeared like the start of accountability, but, in fact, the only major figures in detention were those whose power and financial interests conflicted with those of the military, which not only controlled its own security and intelligence branches but also ran a vast financial empire involved in everything from highway and resort construction to olive oil and ovens.

  Egyptians had noticed that despite the theatrics, the secret police were still at work. In early March, impatient to reap something tangible from the revolution, activists gathered in front of the State Security headquarters in Alexandria. Inside, agents hurriedly shredded evidence of their vast clandestine apparatus. The anger of the youth outside outweighed the power of the snipers and the guards. They breached the perimeter and broadcasted incriminating footage of destroyed documents. Within hours, crowds overran every other major secret police headquarters in the country. On March 5 they penetrated the heart of the deep state itself: the State Security headquarters in Nasr City, Cairo. Inside, activists found piles of burned records, bags of shredded documents, and more reams diligently assembled and awaiting destruction. Zyad and Ayyash looked in vain for their files, but Moaz found transcripts of his telephone conversations with other Islamist activists. They were sure that they had taken the security establishment by surprise; otherwise State Security would have hidden its archives more carefully. “This is the most important thing we have done,” Moaz declared.

  Soldiers formed a cordon to make sure that the vigilantes didn’t walk off with state secrets. The military was willing to allow its rivals in the secret police to be humiliated, but it didn’t want the actual evidence of the deep state to emerge in public. State Security officers were arrested in front of the television cameras and then released discreetly. The scenes from state police bunkers were tweeted and livecast on Bambuser, an online personal broadcasting service, with citizen journalists narrating their triumph, no longer dependent on state media. This was the iconic scene of popular agency, like the people of Romania overrunning the palace and lynching dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. The police had mishandled the Egyptian people, and, finally, the Egyptian people had struck back and won.

  Even at the moment of triumph, however, Moaz and the other activists weren’t fooled. They had achieved something pivotal by putting State Security on the defensive, but they hadn’t seized the deep state’s secret archives. Wise to the risks, State Security had hidden or destroyed its most important records. Activists had found almost no documents about torture or about State Security’s network of secret prisons. And where were the dossiers on prominent politicians, plutocrats, and Muslim Brothers who had lived under the State Security microscope? Where was all the dirt collected as blackmail reserves against regime supporters who might one day need to be kept in line? None of the mountain of papers found by the activists concerned Egypt’s real security issues: jihadists, the Sinai, the Israeli border, and armed domestic insurgents. It seemed that all the interesting security files had already been moved or destroyed.

  The military had stood by while people stormed State Security. It hadn’t choreographed the assault but had allowed and contained it. Some popular anger had been sublimated, as in the days of the marches for Palestine. Meanwhile, one of the military’s most threatening bureaucratic rivals had conveniently been dealt a critical blow. Military police made sure to confiscate most of the secret police files seized by demonstrators. It wasn’t as if the government had become more civil toward its citizens. The police and its old central security forces had fled the streets, but the military had replaced them. Now soldiers in camouflage uniforms beat and interrogated civilians with the same arbitrary vigor. Egypt still labored under a dictatorship, one with a greater concentration of power and even less transparency than Mubarak’s. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces never had published a list of its members. No one knew who was running the country and how.

  Man doesn’t kill by the blade alone. When a regime wants an entire people to submit, it cannot put them all in prison. It must bore their spirit to death, and among the best weapons for this purpose are rules and regulations. Egypt’s generals knew the power of paper. Bureaucrats to a man, the SCAF generals hadn’t smelled combat since 1973, except on the lucrative battlefield of contracting. They were going to contest power, and they were going to do it where it counted: in the small print, where they would aim to write themselves into a legal and permanent position of power. Why settle for informal power when you
could be Egypt’s legal guardian forever? People noticed sometimes if you shot them in the street, but they almost never read the terms and conditions published in the government’s official gazette.

  In spite of everything, many Egyptians believed in the law, the sanctity of their constitution, and the ideal of a government in which independent courts policed the separation of powers. Playing to this sentiment, and perhaps believing in it to some degree, the junta appointed a panel of scholars to draft a legal path forward. In a few days, the panel came up with a package of constitutional amendments. Few members of the general public paid attention to the details. The amendments seemed to spell a legal path forward to freedom and a less dictatorial system. The next president would be limited to two terms. There were some rules about how to run for president, which seemed more open than the old rigged system. Best of all, the newly liberated people of Egypt would get to vote on the amendments.

  But the small print enraged the revolutionaries and even the more cautious liberals such as ElBaradei. The amendments were full of restrictions that seemed designed to disqualify liberals with their international lifestyles and history of exile; for example, presidential candidates couldn’t be married to foreigners or have a parent who was a citizen of a foreign country. These articles clearly targeted ElBaradei, whose wife was widely if incorrectly believed to have a foreign passport. Even worse, there was no timeline for a transfer to civilian rule. In the Egyptian media, SCAF members said they’d like to hand over power within six months, but they made no promises or formal commitment to any specific process or date by which generals would surrender power to civilians.

  Such obtuseness could come only by design. The amendments were superficial and sloppy, drafted by a panel chosen by an opaque junta and dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brothers supported the generals’ plan because it provided an advantage to those who already had a political network: themselves. All those who were suspicious of military rule coalesced against the whole idea: the young revolutionaries and the disparate society of pluralists, liberals, and secularists. They believed the military should hand over power to civilians: any civilians, or even a presidential council that would include three or four luminaries along with a uniformed representative of the military. Then a newly legitimate presidency could design a process to draft a deliberate, revolutionary constitution for Egypt that would have popular input and legal foundations.

  The list of amendments was finalized on February 26. The Egyptian people would have a chance to vote on them only a few weeks later, on March 18. Only two groups actually wanted the referendum to pass: the SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood. They were the only two groups in Egypt that contributed to the text of the transitional constitution and that had the money and the organization to run nationwide election campaigns. The general public, maybe influenced by the cheery coverage in state media, applauded what seemed like a road map away from Mubarak’s times to something better. The offended revolutionaries scrambled to explain exactly why they opposed the amendments. They couldn’t even communicate with one another, distracted as they were by their different projects and ideological communities. How would they figure out how to talk to the public? Their opposition was to military rule, and in a brilliant act of political theater, the military junta was presenting itself as the champion of popular democracy. The people would get to vote, present their voice, in perhaps the first election in Egypt’s history that wouldn’t be a fraud. Could the revolutionaries oppose this popular referendum without seeming petty and petulant?

  In a nod to the newfangled methods of January 25, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces opened a Facebook page, where it posted its decrees. The junta was experimenting to see how much attention it had to pay to the unremitting daily protests. Twice the generals invited representatives of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition to meet. Moaz and the others reeled off their demands: Fire the prime minister, reform the police, end the state of emergency, hand authority to a civilian, and initiate economic reforms. The bemused generals listened politely and then ignored them. Soldiers beat up some protesters, but the SCAF apologized on Facebook. The small demonstrations intensified; to appease them, the government froze Mubarak’s assets.

  Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik was dispatched to nighttime television to mollify public sentiment. Shafik was an air force general and a Mubarak man through and through. Like most of the old guard, he was still learning the conventions of these new, post–January 25 politics, in which it was no longer acceptable to show open contempt for citizens. In his appearance, a red-faced Shafik insulted the “garbage” in Tahrir. He didn’t want to talk about putting his old boss Mubarak on trial; he wanted to order people off the streets and back to work. He seemed incredulous that a revolutionary novelist had equal billing on the talk show and was daring to ask him questions. Finally, the bewildered old general exploded.

  “I fought in wars!” he screeched, his irritation driving him to nonsense. “I killed and was killed!”

  The SCAF decided to fire Shafik even before he went off the air. They replaced him with an avuncular professor of traffic engineering named Essam Sharaf, who had been featured on the Revolutionary Youth Coalition’s list of acceptable candidates. Basem, Moaz, and the others took this as a sign of their strength; the junta had jettisoned one of its own loyalists for a man promoted by the revolutionary youth. But just a few days later, the military sent a countervailing signal, breaking up the small sit-in that had persisted in Tahrir. Soldiers burned tents and rounded up activists. They subjected the women they detained to “virginity tests,” probing their vaginas with their fingers. Supposedly this would determine whether their prisoners were already sexually active, so that they couldn’t later falsely accuse their captors of rape. One of the detainees was Ramy Essam, a singer who had become famous as the balladeer of Tahrir; he had become a symbol of the revolutionary youth and he performed his anti-regime songs at nearly every major protest. He was beaten across every stretch of his face and back.

  Egyptian media took the side of the military, refusing to publish the detainees’ accounts of torture and molestation after they were released. An unknown general named Abdel Fattah el-Sisi made his public debut defending the “virginity tests” as a distasteful necessity. A small group of human rights activists ramped up a campaign against the rampant use of military trials for civilians. But the military had succeeded in convincing much of the public to swallow any account offered by its rulers.

  The SCAF had begun a long experiment by first preying on those rebels who were the most marginal, and therefore the most vulnerable: artists, feminists, supporters of gay rights. These revolutionaries were viewed with distaste even by some of the more conventional activists. The military was going to find out whether there would be any uproar over their treatment. If it could finger-rape female demonstrators and scar a visible musician with impunity, then it could move on to bigger objectives.

  A sort of disorienting drunkenness had swept the revolutionary organizers; they were not sure what to do next. One week a dozen activists would appear on television repeating the same talking points; they would overexpose themselves, appearing self-promotional and undisciplined. The next week, in an effort to appear less eager, they would disappear, failing to address key developments about the referendum or condemn the beating and arrest of civilians. They scheduled press conferences but forgot to invite any journalists. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition agreed that, for now, it needed to maintain the street pressure. Sally was organizing revolutionary visits all over the country, a caravan that would link Tahrir to the cities and towns that endowed the uprising with its national character. Activists from all over Egypt had made the eighteen days possible; Sally knew that a true revolution required their continued involvement.

  The supporters of Mohamed ElBaradei who were now on the coalition also wanted a political tool that could pressure the military and articulate a change agenda for Egypt. They believed “the doctor,” as they affectiona
tely called him, could lead an enduring movement, but they waited in vain for ElBaradei to take action. “It’s time for us to form a political party,” Basem told ElBaradei. “The people need your leadership.” But ElBaradei hesitated. He kept postponing a decision, frustrating the acolytes who had welcomed him back to Egypt so effusively. Alone among them, Basem had a clear direction. Yes, there were infinite possible courses of action, but Basem had learned from his life that he preferred to choose one. Now he wanted to make an impact in politics. ElBaradei’s ideas had galvanized him in the first place, and he cared more for them than for the man. He would work to establish the strongest political party that embodied ElBaradei’s principles, with or without ElBaradei as the leader.

  The referendum was looming, and ElBaradei refused to take a position for or against it. Finally, the secular activists on the coalition decided to move on their own, but they differed on their priorities. One faction, including Sally and most of the veteran street fighters, wanted to preserve the tactics of Tahrir, opposing the referendum and spreading a revolutionary agenda through amorphous grassroots ventures. The other faction, led by Basem and Zyad, was convinced that only a viable political organization could exert any real influence. Anything else was a half measure. They wanted to build a national political party with a concrete social democratic agenda.

  Long after it might make a difference, the revolutionaries finally decided to make a public stand against the constitutional referendum that the military was foisting upon Egypt at knifepoint. Just four days before the March 19 vote, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition called a press conference in a borrowed lounge at Al Masry Al Youm, one of Egypt’s few credible independent newspapers. Nobody in the building seemed to know about it. Finally, someone directed the press corps to the newspaper’s kitchen, where a grumpy attendant brewed tea and reporters took their smoke breaks. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition leaders arrived an hour behind schedule; by then it was hard to see through the cigarette fumes.