The New Middle East (19 page)

Once again the two most powerful organisations in the country were squaring up, but for the first time it was in a free and fair fight at the ballot box. Neither man was wildly popular with the electorate and neither got more than 25 per cent of the votes in the first round. The results revealed a sharp drop in support for the Brotherhood compared with their performance in the parliamentary elections. This may have been partly due to the late substitution of the uncharismatic Morsi, which left him derided as the ‘spare tyre’ before the poll and as the ‘accidental president’ afterwards.

But the excitement caused by polling day was nothing compared with the drama staged by the SCAF. This was the moment when the SCAF conspired with the courts to dissolve the People’s Assembly just as the people were preparing for the presidential poll. Then two hours after the people finished voting for their new president the SCAF took back more power. It nullified the first thing the people had voted for after Mubarak fell, the new freedoms that were enshrined in the 30 March 2011 constitutional declaration.

In the space of four days, and with the help of a compliant Supreme Court, the generals had wiped out all the democratic gains of the post-revolutionary period. The army’s new amendments to the constitution announced on 17 June 2012 meant, a diplomat told me, that whomever the people put in the driving seat, the SCAF controlled the handbrake, and it was now full on.

And just in case people weren’t edgy enough, the announcement of the results was delayed by several days, and everyone I met thought the SCAF were trying to mess around with them too. The country believed it was on the brink of another upheaval. So severe was the tension that the Brotherhood tried to calm things down. ‘What happened in Algeria cannot be repeated in Egypt,’ promised the former speaker of the dissolved parliament, Saad al-Katatni. ‘We are fighting a legal struggle via the establishment and a popular struggle in the streets. This is the ceiling. I see the continuation of the struggle in this way.’
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The Brotherhood saw it was walking into a replay of the last Egyptian revolution in 1952, when the Ikhwan again was seen to have capitulated to the army only to have the Generals turn on them later. This time they began their ‘popular struggle’ by sending their supporters back into the square.

It may have been a new government in a new era, but these were not new faces and it was not a new struggle. The old political elite of the Mubarak regime had been replaced by the old political elite of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood won the presidency not because of its Islamist agenda, but because it was not the army. And it didn’t win by much. Morsi got 51.7 per cent of the vote, Shafiq 48.3 per cent. The minority groups like the Christians voted overwhelmingly for Shafiq because they feared for their future under Islamists. Secular women had a tough choice because they had been beaten up and subjected to ‘virginity’ tests by the army but weren’t sure they’d be much better off under the Brotherhood. Shafiq’s first act after the poll was to flee the country to avoid an arrest warrant for corruption. He denied the charges, describing them as the ‘settling of scores’.
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When President Mohamed Morsi finally took his oath of office it would turn out to be the Brotherhood’s last act of public subservience to the men in green. The newly anointed fifth president of the Egyptian Republic received many rapturous standing ovations throughout his speech. It seemed that the generals clapping enthusiastically in the front row were actually congratulating themselves. They thought they had won again, and so did much of Egypt.

But if the new president felt angry or humiliated he didn’t show it. The Muslim Brotherhood had survived battles with smarter, more ruthless soldiers than Tantawi. So Mohamed Morsi fell back on the instincts of his movement. He compromised and he waited.

Once again the Sinai Peninsula would settle the fate of an Egyptian leader. When Egypt signed its peace treaty with Israel in 1979 it got the Peninsula back, but there were strings attached. Its military presence on the border was strictly limited. This probably went some way to explaining why on 5 August 2012 a group of Islamist militants were able to storm an Egyptian border post, killing sixteen guards. It was the deadliest attack on Egyptian troops in the Sinai for decades, and it infuriated the nation. The army under Tantawi immediately launched a counter-offensive against the militants, though many probably escaped back through the illegal underground tunnels into Gaza, while others fled to hideouts in the Sinai mountains.

Israel made a point of saying it had shared intelligence with Egypt that an attack was imminent. Tantawi and his generals had either been incompetent or had hoped that an attack by Islamists might weaken Morsi. Nothing represented the change that had taken place in the Arab world more than the announcement at the time by Egypt’s new Islamist president that he had approved airstrikes on other Islamists in Sinai.

A week later Mohamed Morsi made another announcement, and this one was even more remarkable than the first. On 12 August he sacked Tantawi. He sacked the chief of staff, Sami Annan. And he cancelled the constitutional declaration made just days before he won his post that had stripped it of all its powers.

When the news was announced the whole nation took a huge breath and waited to see what would happen next. The answer was nothing. For the first time in Egyptian history a civilian had taken on the heads of the military and won, though the generation of soldiers who had ridiculed Tantawi were clearly complicit in the move. Altogether seven of the military’s top brass lost their jobs. As a parting gift the ‘Poodle’ got a new choker, though to be fair it was a rather nice one. The ‘Nile Collar’ is Egypt’s highest state honour and is awarded for exceptional public service. The irony of that, after his eighteen months of mismanagement, was probably lost only on the field marshal himself. Morsi was also clever enough to keep both Tantawi and Annan on as presidential advisers, which gave them a fig leaf of respectability and avoided the old soldier’s total humiliation.

Tantawi was replaced by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was thirty years his junior and had defended the virginity tests. General al-Sisi became both the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the defence minister. No one expected that the following year al-Sisi would outst Morsi.

‘We went through this battle representing the Egyptian people, it was not just our battle,’ said the Amr Darrag in February 2013.

Ironically it was somebody who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood who really finished the control of the military over political life with what Morsi did in August 2012. That was really, in my opinion and the opinion of many, the day when the revolution achieved a big part of what it aspired to. Getting rid of Mubarak was one thing, but for the military rule to have continued it would have been like we had never had a revolution.

‘I’ve been dealing with Egypt for a long time. Morsi has proven to be smarter than most of us thought,’ said one of Israel’s top Defence Ministry officials while the Ikhwan were in power. I asked him if Israel thought the Brotherhood had finally tamed the Egypt army. ‘Yes, he has Sisi and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces under his foot. What [Turkey’s] Erdogan only dared after five years, he has done it in six weeks. He deserves a medal.’ His last remark was dripping with sarcasm.

I put the same question to General Abdel Moneim Kato. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said indignantly.

On the contrary, Sisi’s loyalty is to Egypt and its army. In all his statements he always declares that the armed forces side with no one but the army. Therefore, all of the ongoing attempts by the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate the army will not succeed. Tantawi took a decision for the sake of Egypt. He could have said you do not have this authority and then a coup d’état would have taken place.

Professor Olivier Roy told me in early 2013:

The Muslim Brotherhood is not a revolutionary movement, it is not an ideological movement. And the army is not ideologically minded, the army is not secularised and it is not democratic. The army, at least the new generation of its officers, know it is in their best interests to stay in the background. Then they can keep their economic power, they can keep their autonomy and they are in a position to negotiate with all the other political forces if they have a problem with the Brotherhood. I don’t see the army at all resenting the Brotherhood coming into power because Morsi, at least, has given to the army a lot of assurances and guarantees. So the attempts by the Saudis and the people in the Gulf to get rid of the Brotherhood by supporting the army are doomed to fail.

The long war between the Brotherhood and the army is over. It is over because a much more powerful foe has finally set foot in the arena, in the shape of the Egyptian people. These two old institutions will no longer be able to fight between themselves over the destiny of Egypt, because the Egyptians now have the deciding say in the matter.

‘No one can now oppress the Egyptian people any more.’ That, says Abdul-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, is the greatest legacy of the revolution. ‘They have taken back their country and broken the barrier of fear. Egyptians are now free, and when angry they can take to the streets to express themselves. I believe the Egyptian people will never go back to their couches to watch from a distance.’

The Muslim Brotherhood expected to be able to run the country the way it ran the Ikhwan; it wasn’t used to having to justify its decisions to anyone. Its imperious style, once it held the levers of power, began to infuriate people. As the second anniversary of the uprising approached, Egypt’s President Morsi tried to explain all the missteps by saying of the new democratic process: ‘It’s a first experiment, it’s a first experience for us in our history. So what do you expect? Things to go very smooth? No. It has to be rough, at least. Not violent, but rough. So, we have enough patience.’
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That patience had begun to run out for everyone else as soon as the Brotherhood’s new MPs started taking their oaths of office.

The question everyone in Egypt was asking, even though Morsi officially resigned from the movement when he was elected, was, did the new president govern for the benefit of the Brotherhood or the country? I asked the senior Brotherhood leader Mahmoud Ghozlan, in February 2013, how the relationship between the president and his old comrades in the Ikhwan was working. He told me:

The ideas and principles of the Muslim Brotherhood are part of who he is, but from the organisational point of view he has nothing to do with the Ikhwan, or the Freedom and Justice Party. However, I can say a person can leave his position but can never leave his beliefs and principles. But the moment he became a head of state he became president of all Egyptians, which include the Muslim Brotherhood. He looks at the Muslim Brotherhood just like he looks at all Egyptians, but his principles remain to apply the parts of Islam which are not applied in the society in a gradual way.

And was President Morsi getting instructions from the Ikhwan leadership?

No, no, no! He now has his own group of advisers. But the Muslim Brotherhood are still Egyptians, and if they have an idea or suggestion they should be able to share it with the president just like Al-Wafd Party and other parties. The [Brotherhood’s] Supreme Guide looks up to Morsi as his president. Morsi has left the Ikhwan and he has no relation with our notion of listen and obey. This is for us only.

The Brotherhood was in power not because it landed a knockout blow, but because the military conceded defeat. The army realised it no longer wanted, or had the capacity, to rule. The army watched from the sidelines as the Brotherhood wrestled with the problems of governance. These are issues the military men are glad they have now left behind. The Brotherhood was in charge, but it did not have the full obedience of the institutions of the state. It has started to stuff government bodies with its own people, but it will take many years to take charge of Egypt’s vast bureaucracy, most of it appointed through ‘
wasta
’ with the old regime. But key to running the new Egypt is the consent of the people. Both the old foes now know that. This was illustrated by the mayhem that resulted from the death sentences imposed on twenty-one football fans for their role in the Port Said football riots.

Tensions were already high after protests on the second anniversary of the revolution, 25 January 2013, against the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi. Fighting took place between demonstrators and the security services in Tahrir Square, in Suez, Alexandria, and Isma’iliyah, where the Ikhwan headquarters was set ablaze. Hundreds of people were injured and five died.

But it was on the following day, when the football riots verdicts were read out, that the country descended into a political crisis, provoking Tantawi’s replacement General al-Sisi to warn: ‘The continuing conflict between political forces and their differences concerning the management of the country could lead to a collapse of the state and threaten future generations.’
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That is the sort of thing that generals like to say just before they embark on a coup. That did not happen. The protesters claimed that the football fans who had been sentenced to death were made scapegoats to protect the police and security officials, who they say should have been held accountable for failing to take action to stop the riots taking place. Their fury was only quelled after the army was deployed along the Suez Canal Zone where the violence was at its worst. More than fifty people died, hundreds were injured and the Muslim Brotherhood learned its most important lesson since it took power. It might be hard to live with the army, but it is impossible to govern without them.