The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (35 page)

One of his first realizations of this came in 2002. Osman didn’t have anything to do late one afternoon, so he went to visit a friend who was a major. He knew his friend would be working late, so he thought he would just stop by to say hello. When he walked into his office, the major, who worked in operations, was on the phone with a senior commander. They were discussing a colored map that was laid out across the desk. From overhearing his friend’s side of the conversation, he could tell the senior commander was telling him to make revisions to the map, adding different locations and markers. Curious, Osman looked at the map for himself. It was labeled “Strategic Points Defensive Plan,” and it covered all of Cairo. Key passages and landmarks around the city—bridges, highways, government buildings, presidential palaces, hotel districts—were marked in different colors. It was the air force’s plan for the defense of Cairo.

His friend hung up the phone. “This is the dumbest thing I have ever seen,” said Osman, after he had a chance to study the map. “I really don’t think the Israelis are going to walk their army into Cairo. That’d be a suicide mission. I mean, they may bomb it, but they aren’t going to occupy it.”

“Who said anything about Israel?” asked his friend.

“What do you mean?” replied Osman.

“What do you think?” his friend responded.

Osman stared blankly at the map for a few seconds. And then he looked up at his friend. “Do you mean this is a defense of Cairo—from Egyptians? Is this a defense against revolution?”

His friend stared back at him and scoffed at his naïveté, as if to say, “Of course that’s what it is.” Osman says he felt incredibly young at that moment. “I had wider eyes from that point,” he told me.

And that made it impossible to miss the graft, corruption, and self-dealing all around him. While Osman served as a group commander for Squadron 660, a mobile communications unit, his soldiers came to him and told him about a one-star general who had a side business selling engines and spare parts from military vehicles on the open market. The place where these vehicle engines would be lifted and then resold backed up on the lot where Osman and his unit were housed. When Osman raised it with senior officers, he was told that his rank was “too light” to discuss such things. “I reported that first-star general, and I got nothing but bullshit back,” says Osman. He was soon transferred to Cairo West Air Force Base.

Cairo West, as they call it, is an operational hub for the U.S. military in the Middle East. Mubarak served as its base commander in the 1960s. Today, the U.S. and Egyptian militaries conduct Operation Bright Star, their major multinational joint training exercises, from Cairo West every two years. Osman looked forward to the transfer because he saw time on Cairo West as a chance to meet American military officers and use his English. But his perception of his own military’s senior officers grew more cynical. As he saw it, generals ran a variety of schemes that allowed them to skim a little off the top of what would otherwise be legitimate enterprises. An early example at Cairo West was the sand-mining business. Outside companies had contracts to mine for sand on the base’s grounds. When the trucks would arrive, one of the officers working for the base commander would shake down the mining company’s representatives for a bribe. Osman asked one of the members of the commander’s staff about it. “He was like, ‘Yeah, but you know, if the base commander wants some money, we’ve got to bring him some money.’ ” Osman says that basic principle was applied to a wide range of “Cairo West base businesses.” Everyone senior is entitled to a taste. “A chunk goes to the base commander.
Another chunk goes to the air force commander. And a bigger chunk goes to Tantawi. It’s like that,” says Osman. “It’s a mafia.”

Osman says that most of the corruption he saw with his own eyes was small-scale graft, money for padding wallets rather than filling overseas bank accounts. But with time, he began to hear from other officers a few grades higher—majors and lieutenant colonels—which generals were the biggest rainmakers. Osman says one of the most notorious is General Hassan al-Ruwaini, the Cairo commander and member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Ruwaini, who was the chief of northern command, is rumored to have had a very lucrative real estate portfolio. Officers say that he was charged with developing properties running along the Mediterranean coastline from Alexandria toward the Libyan border. In the past fifteen years, stretches of this coastline have been turned into villas, gated communities, and attractive seaside villages. Afterward, Ruwaini was transferred to central command in Cairo, where he continued to flip properties for the military. “The regime does not like so many faces. I’m not going to hire another dirty scandalous general and test him in this area,” says Osman. “No, I already know that person, I’m 100 percent sure that he’s corrupt, and he’ll run the business successfully. I’m going to move him from place A to place B to run the same business again.”

It wasn’t an easy choice, but Osman decided he needed to make a move, too. He believed his proficiency in English might be his ticket out of the Egyptian military. A handful of Egyptian officers are periodically selected to come to the United States for six months to receive advanced language training. Afterward, they become English instructors for the Egyptian Air Force. Osman scored high enough on the exam and was selected for the training. But he had a different plan. While doing the course work in 2005 at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, he was also experimenting with the idea of living in the United States—permanently. He wanted to figure out for himself if he could make it on his own there. He decided he could. So, on the last day of his training, when he was supposed to travel back to Egypt, Osman didn’t show up. He defected from the Egyptian military.

Six years later, in January 2011, Osman had settled into a fairly typical American life. He was married, had a steady job working as a translator, and still called San Antonio home. During those eighteen
days in January and February, Osman was glued to his television set, watching as the regime began to teeter. Once Mubarak fell, he was desperate to hear from friends in Cairo, especially his military buddies. He spent hours on the phone, talking to his friends who were still officers. They told him things were different; there had never been a better time to be in the Egyptian military. They had been given raises, and people were looking to the military to lead the way. “I had so many phone calls with officers in Egypt. They said, ‘They are taking care of us. People are giving us respect wherever we go. We are the heroes.’ ”

For a couple of weeks, Osman wondered if things really were different. If the generals intended to set Egypt on a new path, it could mean an entirely new relationship between the military and the government. It ran against his instincts, but he wanted to believe it was true, because, if it was, it might also mean he could return to Egypt. “I had the impression—that I doubted in my head and heart—that Tantawi and his council would have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to have their names written in gold in Egyptian history. They had the chance to be the founders of the modern country,” recalls Osman. “It was like seeing another Fourth of July—happening in Egypt.”

Those hopes were dashed for him on February 25. On that day, with thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square, the military and plainclothes thugs attacked demonstrators. The military later apologized for this first serious clash between its soldiers and the people. But Osman had seen all he needed to see. “I saw the pictures of the military police having thugs with sticks in their trucks in Tahrir Square,” says Osman. “At that moment, I was 110 percent sure that Tantawi is the same person. He was and he will always be Mubarak’s toy.”

So, on March 1, Osman did what may now seem like a familiar impulse for anyone seeking to challenge authority in Egypt: he set up a Facebook group. After consulting with many active Egyptian military officers, he created the page “Officers for the Revolution.” He wasn’t surprised that most of the officers he spoke with were resistant to helping at first. The cost for being caught up with something critical of the military would be severe. “Most of them would say, ‘Well, what you are saying is right—Tantawi is corrupted—but this is not the appropriate time,’ ” says Osman. But as soon as he had five officers agree to join, he started the page.

He had a clear purpose from the start. “This is the first wake-up
call to the people not to trust the military council,” says Osman. “The page is working, on the one hand, to enlighten the people that the military council is something that you should be fearing, not hugging, and on the other hand, it is looking for the brave officers who support this idea.” Osman attacked the notion that the Egyptian military was somehow sacrosanct and above reproach, with a self-described tone on the page that was “mean, insulting, and sarcastic.” But for those he hoped to reach and persuade—politically active Egyptians with little knowledge of the opaque military that ruled the country—he offered real information about the military’s methods, based on his own service and the tips and leaks he got from officers on the inside.

To be most effective, he needed numbers—not just readers and people willing to join the page, but also officers willing to be his eyes and ears. But Osman said he was never worried about that; he was certain the military would help him on both counts. “The more Tantawi screws up the country, the more I’ll get people on the page,” says Osman.

He was right. At first, the arrival of “Officers for the Revolution” was met with denunciations. People wrote that the people behind the page must be “traitors” and “betrayers.” But on March 9, when the military police raided Tahrir Square and dragged demonstrators to the Egyptian Museum to be tortured, the response was different. “From March 9, the story started to change,” Osman told me. “The numbers were increasing.” And not just the number of people who were joining the group. Osman says that more and more officers began to come forward, offering to support the page by sharing information on the military’s tactics and thinking. Within a few months of Osman’s starting the group, nearly twenty-five thousand people had joined. Osman estimated that the number of officers actively supporting the group had grown from the original five to a couple of hundred.

Osman knew he had hit a nerve when he heard from an old friend from Maadi. When the page had only reached four thousand people, he was contacted out of the blue by a “close, close friend” on Skype.

“Hey, there is an offer,” his friend said.

“An offer for what?” asked Osman.

“An offer to shut down the page.”

Osman was thrilled; this meant the page had actually gotten to the generals. His friend wasn’t nearly as enthused.

“Dude, it’s no joke. The guy from intelligence called me and said to talk to Sherif and see what he wants and we are willing to get Tantawi to accept what he wants.”

“Wow! They are bargaining on my three years,” said Osman. When he had defected from the military, the regime had sentenced him in absentia to three years in prison.

“Pretty much,” replied his friend.

“I’m not going to shut down the page,” said Osman.

“Close the page yourself because they’re going to shut it down in a couple of days,” his friend responded.

“You’re telling me that the Egyptian government is so powerful that they can shut down a Facebook page that was made in San Antonio, Texas, just because it says something they don’t like?”

“Yeah, they said so.”

“If they were able to close the page, they wouldn’t have offered me shit,” replied Osman. “They just want to shut my mouth before it gets really loud.”

And so each day Osman and his growing army of officers conduct their war against Egypt’s most powerful generals. “Information, information, information,” says Osman. “I tell people if you really want to help the revolution, it’s the information that will always put us ahead of the SCAF,” or Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

The last time I spoke with Osman, he had just exposed a cabinet appointment the military was attempting to make without revealing the person’s true background. “Today they announced they are going to choose new cabinet members in the Egyptian government. One of the names was the former chief of command of the air force, the No. 2. And they announced him as Mr. So-and-So,” Osman told me, laughing. “I was like, ‘Hells no.’ This is a former general who was selected by Mubarak to be the deputy of the air force. But they don’t say General So-and-So, because people would say, ‘Ah, another general!’ If somebody is a general, he dies a general. He is not a mister.”

Efforts like Osman’s Facebook page were precisely the types of forces that made the Egyptian military want to slide back into the shadows, passing the formal responsibilities to rule to someone else. For an institution that prized its privacy, there was little to be had with people like Osman criticizing its every move. Then again, the generals had chosen to formally replace Mubarak, even if only temporarily.
It should hardly have surprised them that the same tools that once targeted the dictator would now be used against them.

For many years, Egyptians talked about the “revolution.” When they did, they were not talking about the future, about some hopeful, far-off day when they would be able to cast off decades of dictatorship. They were talking about their past, recalling the Free Officers’ movement of 1952, when a group of officers led by Gamal Nasser forced the abdication of King Farouk. In the popular imagination, revolutions invoke something grand. Whether peaceful or bloody, they usher in a new age in a country’s political life, a break from the past. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, monarchs sometimes became—quite literally—casualties to more progressive ideas. The peaceful revolutions of more recent times—say, for example, Indonesia in 1998 and Serbia in 2000—opened the way for civilian leadership, multiparty democracy, and the gradual dismantling of the corrupt institutions that preceded them. But one element is generally true: if the revolution is to lead to genuine change, the people must participate in it.