The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (22 page)

As for the race for mayor of Caracas, it ended in an ironic twist. After López was forced to drop out, opposition voters threw their support behind Antonio Ledezma, a veteran member of the opposition and outspoken regime critic. Ledezma triumphed in the November elections. But Caracas’s new mayor also soon felt the full brunt of Chávez’s vengeance. His office’s funding was slashed to less than 20 percent of its previous budget.
The mayoral post was stripped of almost all of its authority. Those powers were then transferred to a new position, “head of government” for the Caracas Capital District,
which Chávez created five months after Ledezma’s election. And, in the most surprising turn, armed Chávez supporters seized city hall and other municipal office buildings and refused to relinquish them. Offices were ransacked, equipment and city vehicles destroyed or stolen. When I went to meet Ledezma more than a year after his election, he still had not been able to move into the mayor’s office. We had to meet in a private office building in downtown Caracas where he had set up a temporary work space. “Chávez is like a boxer who beats an opponent without mercy,” Ledezma told me. “He has done that to the political parties. This is when the neo-dictatorship movie begins.”

Ledezma tried to put the best spin on events, explaining some of the projects and goals he was trying to implement. But he was clearly making the best of an untenable situation. He has had to travel abroad to raise money for the city’s coffers. A few months before we met, he had embarked on a hunger strike to get the attention of the Organization of American States. He and his team have had to put as much energy into defending their right to exist as governing. As one of Ledezma’s top advisers, Milos Alcalay, told me, “Chávez wins when he wins, and he wins when he loses. If he doesn’t win, he just takes it.”

But for López, there may be a different ending. In September 2011,
the Inter-American Human Rights Court sided with the young Venezuelan politician, ordering Chávez’s government to lift the ban on López running for office. In response, Chávez denounced the international court as “worthless.” Precisely how the machinery of the Venezuelan state would respond was less clear. The Supreme Court at first issued an opinion that seemed to reject the international court’s decision. The head of the Venezuelan court explained the ruling by saying that López could run but not take office if elected. The National Electoral Council followed the court’s decision by clearing López to compete. Was the government allowing López to run to sow division in the opposition camp? Were the contradictory rulings an attempt to throw López and his supporters off balance? Had the government been intentionally ambiguous to leave open the possibility of banning López later? No one could be sure. But López had no doubt about his next move: he vowed to compete in the opposition’s presidential primaries. When he announced his candidacy, López immediately joined a field that included the opposition front-runner, Henrique Capriles.
The young opposition leaders were willing to fight for the right to fight Chávez.

My appointment was January 18, 2006, 9:00 a.m. sharp—five years before Egypt’s revolution. The world hadn’t yet become familiar with Tahrir Square. But on that morning, only a short walk from Tahrir, I was waiting in the second-floor lobby of the leftist Al-Tagammu Party headquarters, one of Egypt’s oldest opposition parties. Cairo is not an early morning city. At that hour, there are only two groups of people in the lobby: bodyguards and a growing throng of party faithful who have come to have a favor granted or a grievance heard. Like others, I am waiting to see Rifaat El-Said. He arrives and moves quickly through the typically shabby Cairo lobby, another once-beautiful building suffering from a mixture of age and neglect. Said doesn’t acknowledge anyone, and he ushers me into his office with a wave of his hand. Slight, wiry, and impatient, Said has a tendency to respond to questions with long-winded, dogmatic lectures you would expect from an aging Marxist.

Before the revolution, few people had good things to say about the Egyptian political opposition, even those in the opposition. It is undeniably true that they suffered at the hands of the state. These parties were harassed, intimidated, marginalized, and repressed by Hosni Mubarak’s regime. But even their suffering somehow failed to catch much of a spark. For many, the opposition parties seemed more like beaten dogs than martyrs. They had been trained, over time, to play a part and to accept their role. More energy seemed to be spent bickering among themselves than ever mounting a challenge to the regime. For the most part, they fought over the scraps that Mubarak left them—a handful of parliamentary seats here and there—and then would retreat to their corner to either gloat or grieve.

Rifaat El-Said is a quintessential example of the older generation of Egyptian opposition leaders. The morning we met in his office, it had been a little over a month since his party had been handed a resounding defeat in the parliamentary elections. Out of the fifty-nine candidates put forward by the Tagammu Party, only two had won
seats. Even by the low standards of the Egyptian opposition, this result was dismal. The losses had been so great that Khaled Mohieddin, the party’s founder, a former member of the Free Officers’ coup of 1952, failed to hold his seat. I expected the party leader to be at least somewhat moved by the outcome, whether angry or chastened. Said was utterly detached. “
I am not disappointed,” he told me from across his desk. “If I accumulate such feelings, I should not continue. We are used to being defeated.”

That, it seemed to me, was precisely the problem. Even if the opposition political parties were attempting to play a rigged game—and Egyptian elections were clearly rigged—there was no desire or urgency to shift tactics, change strategy, or even think differently about the problem. Most of the opposition had long slipped into a comfortable convalescence. When I pressed him on how his party might approach its work differently after such a stinging defeat, he offered no ideas, telling me, “It takes time. It takes time.” For most of the hour we spent together, he railed against the rival opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, not against Mubarak. Indeed, he told me that the bodyguards I had passed on my way into his office were a security detail provided by the government. He saw no irony in this fact. People had speculated that he had been co-opted by the regime when he gained a seat in the Shura Council, the upper house of the parliament that was little more than a government echo chamber, populated by notables and regime favorites. Now here he was, telling me that he was entrusting the government he supposedly opposed with his personal security? As I was preparing to leave, he offered, as a final thought, “We know how to suffer.” There was no arguing with that.

The danger of someone like Said is not that he was simply missing an opportunity to properly lead a party or apply pressure on the government. He could also be an effective weapon of the regime. Several years later, while in Cairo, I met with someone who was very close to Said.
His parents had been good friends with the party leader. At different times, when he was a young boy and his mother and father had been imprisoned by the regime, Said would look after him. “Rifaat Said is like a father to me,” he said. So he was disgusted when he saw the Tagammu Party leader go on television and denounce young
people who had first begun in 2008 to use Facebook to organize protests—the same youth who would eventually lead the revolution to oust Mubarak. In television interviews, Said told the country that such youth had essentially lost their minds and were not to be taken seriously. “I think [Said] is like Mubarak in a lot of ways, not just him, but that generation of politicians,” he told me. “They all think they know, and they’re the only ones that know.” In his opinion, the regime had simply called up Said and other reliable senior opposition leaders and told them to speak out against the youth. It was the price to be paid for the political courtesies and privileges the regime showed them.

When I walked into a different party headquarters on March 16, 2011, everyone was smiling. It had been a little over a month since the Egyptian people had risen up and ousted Hosni Mubarak, but the feeling of euphoria hadn’t subsided. I was visiting the offices of El Ghad, the opposition party led by Ayman Nour. Party workers came and went, often greeting each other with hugs. Down the hallway, a conference room overflowed with senior leaders and members discussing recent events and the strategy for the days ahead. Nour had made headlines within days of Mubarak’s departure, suggesting that the relationship between Egypt and Israel should be reevaluated now that Egypt was free from its dictator. Although it might have made many in Washington uncomfortable to hear such speculation, it was shrewd and not wholly unexpected politics for a figure like Nour. The lawyer and former parliamentarian was one of the best-known figures from the Egyptian opposition. Nevertheless, after thirty years of Mubarak, the secular opposition parties like El Ghad did not have a large following, and Nour could be expected to engage in some political posturing. In a few days, he would announce his candidacy for president, in what everyone hoped would be Egypt’s first free elections. However, unlike anyone else who intended to compete in this campaign, Nour was planning to run for president for the second time.

What was immediately striking was how different the mood was from the mood during my visit a year earlier. At that time, the debate about the country’s political future had long since fallen into a
tired and predictable rhythm, with the leading speculation being that Mubarak would be followed by either his son Gamal or a member of the military, most likely Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s intelligence chief. I went to visit Ayman Nour at his home in Zamalek, a tony north Nile neighborhood that was home to expats and Egyptian elites. Before I met with him, several people had warned me that Nour was no longer his voluble self. His battles with the regime had taken their toll.

For most of the previous five years, Nour hadn’t actually lived at that address; he had spent most of his days and nights in Cairo’s infamous Tora Prison. In January 2005, Nour was imprisoned for allegedly forging signatures on petitions he had filed to create his political party. The charges were widely derided as politically motivated. Thanks to pressure from the United States and Europe, Egyptian authorities released Nour, permitting him to compete in the September 2005 presidential election. More than 600,000 Egyptians had voted for Nour. The government may have been rattled by the size of Nour’s support. Even if it wasn’t, it wanted to send a message. Several months after the election, he was convicted on the forgery charges and sentenced to five years in prison. He remained in Tora Prison until February 18, 2009, when his sentence was unexpectedly lifted. The government released Nour ostensibly on medical grounds, but most observers believe the opposition leader’s freedom was restored as a gesture of goodwill to the newly elected Obama administration. For Nour, his surprise release just underscored how every aspect of his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment had been orchestrated by executive fiat, not legal procedure. When I arrived at his door in March 2010, prisoner number 1387 had been free for just over a year.

Nour’s apartment resembled a French salon and occupied the entire eighth floor of his building. Each room was furnished with chandeliers, elaborate floor-length drapes, oversized oriental vases, and ornate sofas and chairs. Almost every surface was covered with porcelain collectibles, glass trinkets, or various objets d’art. Despite its gracious size, it was actually somewhat amazing how many things had been sandwiched into his apartment, which in places seemed more like an antiques shop than someone’s home. In the main living room, above the sofa hung a large oil painting of Nour himself. It was a much younger man, perhaps from his early days as the country’s
youngest parliamentarian. The scene was Nour in a courtyard of the parliament building, cajoling some of his fellow legislators who represented a who’s who of Egyptian politics. Although I arrived on time for our Sunday evening appointment, his staff said he was asleep, and they were clearly debating whether or not they should disturb him.

Thirty minutes later, Nour came out to greet me. With his shirt comfortably unbuttoned around the neck, in blue jeans and a blue blazer, he walked, almost glided, slowly across the room. His manner was sedate, and he talked softly—so softly that I had to move my tape recorder closer to capture what he was saying. Sitting in his living room, Nour didn’t seem like a broken man, just wounded. The pain his jailers caused him seemed to be intertwined with his own disappointment in the help he thought he would receive, especially from the United States. Early in our conversation, he mentioned the false hopes raised by Bush administration officials. “I went back to prison after the presidential race, although weeks before going back to prison, I met Condoleezza Rice for the first time at a meeting she had with several people here in Cairo. And she told me to rest at ease. And I was very peaceful—in jail,” Nour said dryly.

“Every [time] Condoleezza came to Egypt while I was in jail, the minute it ends, the minute her visit ends, a disaster would happen in prison,” he continued. “In May 2007, one hour after Condoleezza Rice left Egypt, they broke into my cell and assaulted me physically. I still have sixteen scars that remain from that day, which was the seventeenth of May 2007.” At the end of her second visit, the government denied his request for a medical release from prison. On November 6, 2008, on the eve of Secretary Rice’s last official visit to Egypt, Nour’s party headquarters were burned to the ground while his wife, children, and supporters were attending a meeting inside. Everyone escaped, but the message was clear: the United States cannot protect you. “Thank God this was Condoleezza’s final visit,” Nour said, laughing.

Life had not been easy for Nour since he left prison. Shortly after he was released, the government issued a decree barring him from practicing law. His name was crossed off the bar association’s membership rolls. Nour had a contract to teach at a university, but he believed the security service had that contract canceled, too. The same
was true for an offer he had with a local television station. His father had passed away while he was in prison, so in an effort to raise funds, he decided to sell his father’s house. To complete the sale, he needed to have the real estate contract notarized. “I walked in and the employee at the notary office told me she was very happy to meet me, that she had belly danced in the back when she heard I was released,” Nour recounts, smiling. “When I gave her my ID to process the papers, she said, ‘I’m really sorry. We have instructions from the security service not to process any of your papers unless you get us a paper that says you have been released from prison.’ So I told her, ‘Well, I’m here. I didn’t jump over the fence.’ She said, ‘No, but we need paperwork.’ ”