The military regime in Egypt poses a sharp dilemma for western governments as they try to help stabilise the Middle East. Since Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seized power in 2013, overthrowing the democratically elected Islamist government of Mohammed Morsi, he has targeted opposition groups. Veterans of the 2011 Arab Spring have been arrested and in several cases imprisoned. Yet as Wendell Steavenson argues in this article, ordinary Egyptians crave the security that Sisi appears to promise. And in a region roiled by violent jihadism, he offers stability and a bulwark against the threat of Islamic State.
“It’s nice in Cairo now, the weather is perfect.” This was the first thing Lina Attalah, Editor of the news website Mada Masr, which is one of the very few independent voices in Egyptian media, told me waking up on a Monday morning. I could hear birdsong across the Skype connection. Lina is an old friend. I made a face at her. Really? What about the last two years of repression since General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took over? Forty-thousand people arrested, hundreds of NGOs closed, protests and strikes banned, torture and deaths in police custody.
Lina sighed. “Well I know we could just complain about the situation all the time, but after all we live here.”
After the Arab Spring and years of roiling Tahrir Square demonstrations, ancient imperturbable Egypt has returned to its quotidian cares. Once again a general is the President. Return of the strongman. Everything back to normal. I asked Lina about the bombs that go off all the time these days. She said that to some extent they had become background noise.
“Over the last few days people have been talking about the rise in the price of tomatoes. No, seriously. Just in the past few days they’ve gone up to 10 Egyptian pounds a kilo.” (According to the Central Bank of Egypt, the price of vegetables rose by 6.55 per cent in April. )
I lived in Cairo for a year and a half, from the 2011 protests on Tahrir Square that toppled Hosni Mubarak, to the presidential elections in June 2012 in which the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi beat a former Air Force general. I was back in Cairo a year later when 18m Egyptians took to the streets to protest against Morsi’s government; many more than had ever come out against Mubarak. People said it was the largest demonstration in human history. It was an extraordinary repudiation of political Islam in the country of its ideological origins. But was it revolution or counter-revolution? The military, Egypt’s rulers since Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed the King in 1952, took swift advantage of a protest movement they had encouraged behind the scenes all along, and reasserted control.
Sisi, like Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Mubarak before him, took off his military uniform, put on a civilian suit and ascended to the presidency. (He was elected last year with 96.9 per cent of the vote.) A comfortable and familiar paradigm. For Egyptians who had endured two and a half years of uncertainty, economic free-fall and a power vacuum that halted basic governance, Sisi represented stability.
“It’s not normal at all,” said another of my Cairo friends who had helped me navigate the chaos of the revolutionary years, Hussein Gohar, a prominent gynecologist who became politically involved during the original Tahrir demonstrations and is now the International Secretary of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party (ESDP). (The ESDP is, of the new parties that sprang up during the revolution, one of the very few to have survived all the mayhem; it is actually gaining membership even though there is still no parliament and the party has no MPs). “It’s definitely the road to dictatorship.”
Sisi is a strongman cipher cast in the traditional mould. He has all the usual accoutrements: a wide brimmed, visored hat with copious gold braid for ceremonial occasions, black sunglasses and personality cult (there are Sisi T-shirts, key chains, perfume, chocolate). He likes to refer himself in the third person in interviews. He is enormously popular. It is a source of no small frustration and disbelief for liberals like Lina and Hussein that many of the same people who protested against the army’s interim rule after Mubarak’s fall have ended up supporting a military regime. Now they shudder at the internecine violence in Libya and Syria and say, we’ve got a president and it’s enough. We don’t need all the complications of a parliament, he saved us all from Islamist fascism.
Sisi’s playbook is well thumbed. It’s a formula that has served the military regime that has been in place since Nasser and the Free Officers movement overthrew the monarchy in 1952. Above all, it is about control. The opposition has been imprisoned and intimidated. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest political movement, who won the most seats in the 2011-12 parliamentary election, has been declared a terrorist organisation and banned. Hundreds of its members, including most of its leadership, the Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie and Morsi himself, have been sentenced to death in mass trials. Liberal activists have also been targeted. The big names among the revolutionary youth I knew from Tahrir Square have found themselves hauled into court or back behind bars on various charges, spreading false news to disturb the peace, calling for protests, insulting the judiciary, insulting the police and insulting the Interior Ministry. Recently football fan organisations known as “Ultras,” who had been Tahrir Square regulars in the old protest days, have been outlawed too.
Hundreds of NGOs that focused on human rights and democracy-building have closed or gone into crisis mode, meeting only to discuss their own survival. The regime insists they register with state security so that any projects or funding from foreign sources can be approved. I talked to Heba Morayef, who I knew well when she was the head of Human Rights Watch in Egypt. Human Rights Watch in Egypt has since closed. “The government argues the political and democracy and human rights NGOs are troublemakers,” Heba told me. “They see them as a security threat. They hate the foreign funding, they think it’s designed to destabilise Egypt; they are very conspiracy driven.”
The media has been cowed by similar judicial harassment. Three Al Jazeera English journalists made global headlines when they were given sentences of between seven and 10 years on charges of falsifying news and having a negative impact on overseas perceptions of the country. (The charges were largely to do with the bad blood between the Egyptian army and Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based, and which had supported the Brotherhood). TV channels owned by big businessmen tend to toe the line. The satirist Bassem Youssef, known as Egypt’s Jon Stewart, has been off the air since June of last year. Recently, a talk show host who had been often critical of the military returned to the airwaves only to have her show cancelled after four episodes. There’s a new law, a revival of an old Mubarak-era one, that effectively bans the publication of any article that refers in any way to the armed forces.
All of these measures add up to a level of general repression which is greater than under the last years of Mubarak’s rule, a time that now looks, with hindsight, to have been relatively lax. Lina told me that her website is still pushing against the red lines and conducting investigations, but “we don’t want to be stupidly provocative. There’s a lot of things that could land us in prison.” The background fear of being shut down or arrested erupts every so often into a full blown anxiety attack. She shrugged as she told me this, brave and sanguine, as always.
The numbers of arrests are higher than they were under Mubarak, but the methods of pursuing prosecutions are familiar from the old days—summons, investigation, complicated court proceedings that can drag on, in an endless series of permutations and postponements, for years. The process is unpredictable and all the more effectively intimidating for being so. The Al Jazeera English journalists were convicted, then released pending a retrial. Mubarak, once convicted, has been acquitted. No one really expects the authorities will actually execute the Muslim Brotherhood leadership; the death sentences are all part of the game. Egyptians are long accustomed to the overlap of and collaboration between the judiciary, Ministry of Interior, the State Security Investigations Service and the Presidential Palace. The parameters of the relationship between the powers-that-be and ordinary Egyptians are well understood. More than 1,000 people were killed in August 2013 when the army cleared a Muslim Brotherhood sit-in; state security officers charged in connection with the deaths of 37 of those arrested, who suffocated in a prison van, were acquitted.
The new regime’s narrative catches on its own tautologies and paradoxes, however. Sisi promotes himself as the defender of the revolution while at the same time being the instrument of the coup that put a full stop to it. It doesn’t matter. The famous circular office building that houses 40,000 people who work in the state media has been recently repainted. The regime’s implacable logic turns into a kind of wish fulfillment—saying something is the case makes it so. Sisi labeled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation. Terrorism increased. There have been hundreds of attacks over the past two years. Mostly they are homemade bombs, primitive and directed against military targets or police stations. “What do you expect?” said Hussein. “People are angry. When you know someone who is tortured by the police, the families of prisoners that are killed—these people are not all terrorists. They are angry people.” The Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1960s, but there is an increasingly vociferous debate about returning to the armed struggle. While there’s no doubt that Brotherhood supporters are responsible for some of the attacks, says Hussein, they are often more about revenge and vendetta. “You can’t blame the Brotherhood for every incident.”
It’s easy enough to wield the accusation of terrorism in a region where local insurgencies are linking themselves to the jihadist network. A rebel group called Ansar Beit al-Maqdi, which translates as “Supporters of Jerusalem,” emerged in the Sinai peninsula after the fall of Mubarak. Its attacks have become more frequent since Morsi was ousted and have spread to the Egyptian mainland. It has bombed police compounds, fired rockets into Israel, assassinated Interior Ministry officals, targeted tourist buses and shot down military helicopters. In 2014 it pledged allegiance to Islamic State (IS). Naturally, this terrifies Egyptians, and so Sisi doesn’t have to do much to make the issue of security seem more important than human rights. To most Egyptians, it is.
Sisi may seem to be copying Nasser, but history doesn’t repeat itself so neatly. Nasser encased his coup in a popular revolution, but he was able to back it up with real economic reform. He confiscated land from the old elites and nationalised industry and the Suez canal. The money was spent on universal free education. Under Nasser, the children of the illiterate underclass went to school for the first time.
Sisi inherited a bankrupt economy: there was no money in the coffers, and the central bank had been trying to shore up the currency for years and had resorted to heavy-handed currency controls to try to stop the flight of cash abroad. Egypt desperately needs economic reform. It needs to encourage foreign investment, to reduce the massive state subsidies on oil and food and trim a bloated public sector. And it must tackle corruption.
Sisi has touted plans for grand infrastructure projects: a second Suez canal to be dredged in a single year; a million new homes to be built all over the country to ease the chronic housing shortage; a new administrative capital to be built in the desert between Cairo and the Red Sea. So far, these projects are pie-in-the-sky, all billboard and no fine print. “Sisi is not actually producing anything,” said Lina. “It’s only marketing.”
The stark truth is that the only thing underpinning the Egyptian economy is cash from the Gulf states. While the Qataris bankrolled the Muslim Brotherhood government under Morsi, the moment he was gone and Sisi installed, the Saudis, Emiratis and Kuwaitis announced $20bn of aid. Another $12bn was announced at a development conference, with the title “Egypt The Future,” that was held at Sharm El Sheikh in March. It was a splashy media event, with all the big names in attendance—John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, Philip Hammond, UK Foreign Secretary, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde and Tony Blair, who is advising Sisi as part of an Emirates-funded consultancy programme. The international community is happy to say nice words about the rebranding exercise, but despite a new investment law this year, it’s unclear how willing they are to jump into the murky complexities of Egyptian bureaucracy.
At the same time, America’s influence on Egypt, one of its main strategic allies in the Middle East, has waned. When Kerry went to meet Sisi in Cairo the Egyptians made him and his entourage go through a metal detector in a humiliating security check. And throughout the revolutionary turmoil, Americans equivocated and dithered, first supporting Mubarak, then Morsi, making lukewarm entreaties to the army to respect democracy. Their pragmatism won them no favours. After the democratically-elected Morsi was pushed out in 2013, Kerry praised Sisi for “restoring democracy.” I remember seeing anti-American placards in demonstrations of both pro and anti-Brotherhood supporters.
Compared to the big sums coming from the Gulf, America’s annual $1.3bn of military aid is a drop in the ocean. From time to time the US has delayed arms shipments and threatened to cut off the military funding, but this has just encouraged Sisi to find other sources. When the Americans delayed the delivery of four F16 fighter jets this spring, Sisi announced a deal with Vladimir Putin for the delivery of 46 Russian MiG 29s.
Sisi’s power depends on the support of his base within the armed forces, the interests of Egyptian big businessmen and money from the Gulf. From outside it looks like a solid alliance, but Lina told me there were signs that it was beginning to crack. Despite the charm offensive at Sharm El Sheikh, there has been talk in diplomatic circles that the Emirati paymasters are not happy with their access to investment opportunities. The Saudis are said to be annoyed that Sisi has not backed them up enough in their operations in Yemen to push out the Shia Houthis. Last year a prominent businessman warned of military interference in the economy and called for the army to pay the same taxes on its own business interests (the Egyptian military has huge commercial interests—from frozen chicken to real estate) that everyone else does. And there has been a steady stream of leaks of voice recordings of Sisi and his top generals, apparently mostly recorded in the office of his Chief of Staff. They are widely believed to be authentic, despite the military’s denials. Generals are on tape talking about how to position Sisi’s image in the media. They are also heard being high handed with their Gulf sponsors. In one recording Sisi says, “they have money like rice, man.”
“I don’t think the regime is in a precarious position,” Lina said, “but they are not as confident as they were a year ago.”
No one talks about Sisi being challenged from the street, as Mubarak and Morsi were. Protests are outlawed and even though crowds gather sporadically, the numbers are small and they are quickly dispersed. Egyptians sometimes talk about the “Hungry Revolution,” which will come when the poor majority finally gets fed up and takes to the streets. But this is an old liberal elite shibboleth and it has never materialised. “The regime will not change,” said Hussein. “The personnel might change, but...” The army’s line has always been that it is the only institution in Egypt that is efficient and strong enough to run the show. And more than 60 years of rule has cemented this proposition in fact. A month ago Hussein told me he had been having a conversation about the current state of affairs with a friend in a restaurant when a man at the next table who had overheard, started to shout at them: “Why are you saying these things? You are traitors! Fifth columnists! You want to destroy Egypt!”
“People just don’t even want to hear criticism of the regime,” Hussein said, shaking his head sadly. “Everyone’s back to their comfort zone.”
“It’s nice in Cairo now, the weather is perfect.” This was the first thing Lina Attalah, Editor of the news website Mada Masr, which is one of the very few independent voices in Egyptian media, told me waking up on a Monday morning. I could hear birdsong across the Skype connection. Lina is an old friend. I made a face at her. Really? What about the last two years of repression since General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took over? Forty-thousand people arrested, hundreds of NGOs closed, protests and strikes banned, torture and deaths in police custody.
Lina sighed. “Well I know we could just complain about the situation all the time, but after all we live here.”
After the Arab Spring and years of roiling Tahrir Square demonstrations, ancient imperturbable Egypt has returned to its quotidian cares. Once again a general is the President. Return of the strongman. Everything back to normal. I asked Lina about the bombs that go off all the time these days. She said that to some extent they had become background noise.
“Over the last few days people have been talking about the rise in the price of tomatoes. No, seriously. Just in the past few days they’ve gone up to 10 Egyptian pounds a kilo.” (According to the Central Bank of Egypt, the price of vegetables rose by 6.55 per cent in April. )
I lived in Cairo for a year and a half, from the 2011 protests on Tahrir Square that toppled Hosni Mubarak, to the presidential elections in June 2012 in which the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi beat a former Air Force general. I was back in Cairo a year later when 18m Egyptians took to the streets to protest against Morsi’s government; many more than had ever come out against Mubarak. People said it was the largest demonstration in human history. It was an extraordinary repudiation of political Islam in the country of its ideological origins. But was it revolution or counter-revolution? The military, Egypt’s rulers since Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed the King in 1952, took swift advantage of a protest movement they had encouraged behind the scenes all along, and reasserted control.
Sisi, like Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Mubarak before him, took off his military uniform, put on a civilian suit and ascended to the presidency. (He was elected last year with 96.9 per cent of the vote.) A comfortable and familiar paradigm. For Egyptians who had endured two and a half years of uncertainty, economic free-fall and a power vacuum that halted basic governance, Sisi represented stability.
“It’s not normal at all,” said another of my Cairo friends who had helped me navigate the chaos of the revolutionary years, Hussein Gohar, a prominent gynecologist who became politically involved during the original Tahrir demonstrations and is now the International Secretary of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party (ESDP). (The ESDP is, of the new parties that sprang up during the revolution, one of the very few to have survived all the mayhem; it is actually gaining membership even though there is still no parliament and the party has no MPs). “It’s definitely the road to dictatorship.”
Sisi is a strongman cipher cast in the traditional mould. He has all the usual accoutrements: a wide brimmed, visored hat with copious gold braid for ceremonial occasions, black sunglasses and personality cult (there are Sisi T-shirts, key chains, perfume, chocolate). He likes to refer himself in the third person in interviews. He is enormously popular. It is a source of no small frustration and disbelief for liberals like Lina and Hussein that many of the same people who protested against the army’s interim rule after Mubarak’s fall have ended up supporting a military regime. Now they shudder at the internecine violence in Libya and Syria and say, we’ve got a president and it’s enough. We don’t need all the complications of a parliament, he saved us all from Islamist fascism.
"Sisi’s playbook is well thumbed. Above all, it is about control"“But there’s absolutely no vision,” complained Hussein, “no political vision.” A promised parliament has been delayed by ongoing wranglings over electoral rules. And there is “no economic vision.” Prices are rising and last summer the electricity kept going off; this year the government is rumoured to be considering forcing state industry to operate at 50 per cent capacity so at least the lights can be kept on.
Sisi’s playbook is well thumbed. It’s a formula that has served the military regime that has been in place since Nasser and the Free Officers movement overthrew the monarchy in 1952. Above all, it is about control. The opposition has been imprisoned and intimidated. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest political movement, who won the most seats in the 2011-12 parliamentary election, has been declared a terrorist organisation and banned. Hundreds of its members, including most of its leadership, the Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie and Morsi himself, have been sentenced to death in mass trials. Liberal activists have also been targeted. The big names among the revolutionary youth I knew from Tahrir Square have found themselves hauled into court or back behind bars on various charges, spreading false news to disturb the peace, calling for protests, insulting the judiciary, insulting the police and insulting the Interior Ministry. Recently football fan organisations known as “Ultras,” who had been Tahrir Square regulars in the old protest days, have been outlawed too.
Hundreds of NGOs that focused on human rights and democracy-building have closed or gone into crisis mode, meeting only to discuss their own survival. The regime insists they register with state security so that any projects or funding from foreign sources can be approved. I talked to Heba Morayef, who I knew well when she was the head of Human Rights Watch in Egypt. Human Rights Watch in Egypt has since closed. “The government argues the political and democracy and human rights NGOs are troublemakers,” Heba told me. “They see them as a security threat. They hate the foreign funding, they think it’s designed to destabilise Egypt; they are very conspiracy driven.”
The media has been cowed by similar judicial harassment. Three Al Jazeera English journalists made global headlines when they were given sentences of between seven and 10 years on charges of falsifying news and having a negative impact on overseas perceptions of the country. (The charges were largely to do with the bad blood between the Egyptian army and Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based, and which had supported the Brotherhood). TV channels owned by big businessmen tend to toe the line. The satirist Bassem Youssef, known as Egypt’s Jon Stewart, has been off the air since June of last year. Recently, a talk show host who had been often critical of the military returned to the airwaves only to have her show cancelled after four episodes. There’s a new law, a revival of an old Mubarak-era one, that effectively bans the publication of any article that refers in any way to the armed forces.
All of these measures add up to a level of general repression which is greater than under the last years of Mubarak’s rule, a time that now looks, with hindsight, to have been relatively lax. Lina told me that her website is still pushing against the red lines and conducting investigations, but “we don’t want to be stupidly provocative. There’s a lot of things that could land us in prison.” The background fear of being shut down or arrested erupts every so often into a full blown anxiety attack. She shrugged as she told me this, brave and sanguine, as always.
The numbers of arrests are higher than they were under Mubarak, but the methods of pursuing prosecutions are familiar from the old days—summons, investigation, complicated court proceedings that can drag on, in an endless series of permutations and postponements, for years. The process is unpredictable and all the more effectively intimidating for being so. The Al Jazeera English journalists were convicted, then released pending a retrial. Mubarak, once convicted, has been acquitted. No one really expects the authorities will actually execute the Muslim Brotherhood leadership; the death sentences are all part of the game. Egyptians are long accustomed to the overlap of and collaboration between the judiciary, Ministry of Interior, the State Security Investigations Service and the Presidential Palace. The parameters of the relationship between the powers-that-be and ordinary Egyptians are well understood. More than 1,000 people were killed in August 2013 when the army cleared a Muslim Brotherhood sit-in; state security officers charged in connection with the deaths of 37 of those arrested, who suffocated in a prison van, were acquitted.
The new regime’s narrative catches on its own tautologies and paradoxes, however. Sisi promotes himself as the defender of the revolution while at the same time being the instrument of the coup that put a full stop to it. It doesn’t matter. The famous circular office building that houses 40,000 people who work in the state media has been recently repainted. The regime’s implacable logic turns into a kind of wish fulfillment—saying something is the case makes it so. Sisi labeled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation. Terrorism increased. There have been hundreds of attacks over the past two years. Mostly they are homemade bombs, primitive and directed against military targets or police stations. “What do you expect?” said Hussein. “People are angry. When you know someone who is tortured by the police, the families of prisoners that are killed—these people are not all terrorists. They are angry people.” The Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1960s, but there is an increasingly vociferous debate about returning to the armed struggle. While there’s no doubt that Brotherhood supporters are responsible for some of the attacks, says Hussein, they are often more about revenge and vendetta. “You can’t blame the Brotherhood for every incident.”
It’s easy enough to wield the accusation of terrorism in a region where local insurgencies are linking themselves to the jihadist network. A rebel group called Ansar Beit al-Maqdi, which translates as “Supporters of Jerusalem,” emerged in the Sinai peninsula after the fall of Mubarak. Its attacks have become more frequent since Morsi was ousted and have spread to the Egyptian mainland. It has bombed police compounds, fired rockets into Israel, assassinated Interior Ministry officals, targeted tourist buses and shot down military helicopters. In 2014 it pledged allegiance to Islamic State (IS). Naturally, this terrifies Egyptians, and so Sisi doesn’t have to do much to make the issue of security seem more important than human rights. To most Egyptians, it is.
"Sisi may seem to be copying Nasser, but history doesn’t repeat itself so neatly"In February, an IS franchise in Libya posted a video of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians on a beach at sunrise. The men were among the hundreds of thousands of poor Egyptians who have gone to find work across the border. Within hours Sisi ordered the Egyptian airforce to bomb IS targets in Libya. “Egypt and the whole world are in a fierce battle with extremist groups carrying extremist ideology and sharing the same goals,” he declared. There were some quiet misgivings in Egypt about killing Muslims in defence of Christians, but even the Nour party, a Salafist political movement, was tactfully acquiescent. Egyptian state television showed footage of the fighter planes taking off with the message “Long Live Egypt” painted on their tails.
Sisi may seem to be copying Nasser, but history doesn’t repeat itself so neatly. Nasser encased his coup in a popular revolution, but he was able to back it up with real economic reform. He confiscated land from the old elites and nationalised industry and the Suez canal. The money was spent on universal free education. Under Nasser, the children of the illiterate underclass went to school for the first time.
Sisi inherited a bankrupt economy: there was no money in the coffers, and the central bank had been trying to shore up the currency for years and had resorted to heavy-handed currency controls to try to stop the flight of cash abroad. Egypt desperately needs economic reform. It needs to encourage foreign investment, to reduce the massive state subsidies on oil and food and trim a bloated public sector. And it must tackle corruption.
Sisi has touted plans for grand infrastructure projects: a second Suez canal to be dredged in a single year; a million new homes to be built all over the country to ease the chronic housing shortage; a new administrative capital to be built in the desert between Cairo and the Red Sea. So far, these projects are pie-in-the-sky, all billboard and no fine print. “Sisi is not actually producing anything,” said Lina. “It’s only marketing.”
The stark truth is that the only thing underpinning the Egyptian economy is cash from the Gulf states. While the Qataris bankrolled the Muslim Brotherhood government under Morsi, the moment he was gone and Sisi installed, the Saudis, Emiratis and Kuwaitis announced $20bn of aid. Another $12bn was announced at a development conference, with the title “Egypt The Future,” that was held at Sharm El Sheikh in March. It was a splashy media event, with all the big names in attendance—John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, Philip Hammond, UK Foreign Secretary, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde and Tony Blair, who is advising Sisi as part of an Emirates-funded consultancy programme. The international community is happy to say nice words about the rebranding exercise, but despite a new investment law this year, it’s unclear how willing they are to jump into the murky complexities of Egyptian bureaucracy.
At the same time, America’s influence on Egypt, one of its main strategic allies in the Middle East, has waned. When Kerry went to meet Sisi in Cairo the Egyptians made him and his entourage go through a metal detector in a humiliating security check. And throughout the revolutionary turmoil, Americans equivocated and dithered, first supporting Mubarak, then Morsi, making lukewarm entreaties to the army to respect democracy. Their pragmatism won them no favours. After the democratically-elected Morsi was pushed out in 2013, Kerry praised Sisi for “restoring democracy.” I remember seeing anti-American placards in demonstrations of both pro and anti-Brotherhood supporters.
Compared to the big sums coming from the Gulf, America’s annual $1.3bn of military aid is a drop in the ocean. From time to time the US has delayed arms shipments and threatened to cut off the military funding, but this has just encouraged Sisi to find other sources. When the Americans delayed the delivery of four F16 fighter jets this spring, Sisi announced a deal with Vladimir Putin for the delivery of 46 Russian MiG 29s.
Sisi’s power depends on the support of his base within the armed forces, the interests of Egyptian big businessmen and money from the Gulf. From outside it looks like a solid alliance, but Lina told me there were signs that it was beginning to crack. Despite the charm offensive at Sharm El Sheikh, there has been talk in diplomatic circles that the Emirati paymasters are not happy with their access to investment opportunities. The Saudis are said to be annoyed that Sisi has not backed them up enough in their operations in Yemen to push out the Shia Houthis. Last year a prominent businessman warned of military interference in the economy and called for the army to pay the same taxes on its own business interests (the Egyptian military has huge commercial interests—from frozen chicken to real estate) that everyone else does. And there has been a steady stream of leaks of voice recordings of Sisi and his top generals, apparently mostly recorded in the office of his Chief of Staff. They are widely believed to be authentic, despite the military’s denials. Generals are on tape talking about how to position Sisi’s image in the media. They are also heard being high handed with their Gulf sponsors. In one recording Sisi says, “they have money like rice, man.”
“I don’t think the regime is in a precarious position,” Lina said, “but they are not as confident as they were a year ago.”
No one talks about Sisi being challenged from the street, as Mubarak and Morsi were. Protests are outlawed and even though crowds gather sporadically, the numbers are small and they are quickly dispersed. Egyptians sometimes talk about the “Hungry Revolution,” which will come when the poor majority finally gets fed up and takes to the streets. But this is an old liberal elite shibboleth and it has never materialised. “The regime will not change,” said Hussein. “The personnel might change, but...” The army’s line has always been that it is the only institution in Egypt that is efficient and strong enough to run the show. And more than 60 years of rule has cemented this proposition in fact. A month ago Hussein told me he had been having a conversation about the current state of affairs with a friend in a restaurant when a man at the next table who had overheard, started to shout at them: “Why are you saying these things? You are traitors! Fifth columnists! You want to destroy Egypt!”
“People just don’t even want to hear criticism of the regime,” Hussein said, shaking his head sadly. “Everyone’s back to their comfort zone.”
