The presidential election promised a decisive break with the Mubarak era. But daily life in the spring of 2012 reminded me of Mubarak’s penultimate speech, in which he warned of the fine line separating freedom and chaos.
One spring day Laura took our sons and another family on a visit to the Cairo neighborhood known as Garbage City, high in the cliffs overlooking Cairo. The refuse of Cairo was removed by trash collectors—zabaleen—who hauled it in bicycle and donkey carts back to Garbage City. There, whole families, including children, sifted it into towering piles of glass, paper, cardboard, varieties of metals, types of plastic, and so on, for resale and recycling. The zabaleen were Coptic Christians who had lived there for decades, and in 1976, they had blasted and carved out an immense, majestic cave cathedral in the cliffs. Known as the Monastery of St. Simon, it could accommodate twenty thousand worshippers. The Garbage City cave church was one of the largest houses of Christian worship in the Middle East.
Laura and our friends had agreed in advance with two taxi drivers on a fixed price, about eighteen dollars, for the trips there and back. But upon their return, the two drivers demanded double. Laura had no more cash, and the two drivers refused to leave. They began banging on our metal gates and scaring the children. When Laura threatened to call the police, the drivers laughed in her face. What police? The police had been AWOL for more than a year, since the Day of Rage.
A cheerful walrus of a police guard was always stationed on our corner, outside the nearby South Korean embassy, and he sauntered over to the taxi drivers with his hand on his sidearm.
Pay up, he told Laura.
She called me in a panic. I was more than an hour away, so a neighborhood friend eventually coughed up enough to get the drivers to leave (we paid him back). We had been warned.
Under Mubarak, most Egyptians thought of the police as abusive, corrupt, and frightening. But they were ubiquitous. Even if arbitrary, their punishments had deterred blatant criminality. Of course, for rich people or Westerners, it had always been a different story. The police had taken much better care of us than they did of ordinary Egyptians. Maadi under Mubarak felt as safe as Bethesda.
Having lunch at an Italian restaurant in our neighborhood not long after the taxi incident, Laura watched a half dozen men run out of a jewelry store carrying long guns and bags of loot. We heard that thieves on motorcycles were snatching purses outside local international schools, and then one of them tried to grab Laura’s. A private security team for an American oil company, Apache, caught one of the culprits. But the police did nothing.
Rena Effendi, a thirty-five-year-old photojournalist from Azerbaijan, was riding home to Maadi in a licensed taxi one night when the driver stopped the car, locked the doors, and pulled out a knife. He tried to rape her, but she fought back. He drove away with her handbag and left her in the dark by the side of the road.
Some days later, the police showed her a mug shot of a man they had caught using her stolen cell phone. But they made no effort to trace the chain of custody back to her assailant. “If they want to find him, they could,” she told me. “I don’t know if they are looking very hard.”
Other taxi drivers were victims. Thirty-two-year-old Sayid Fathy Mohamed said two passengers had pulled knives on him in broad daylight while two other accomplices on a motorcycle—one with a shotgun—had pulled up next to his taxi. The four bloodied his face, left him in a field, and made off with his car, cell phone, and wallet.
The police seemed afraid and refused to visit the scene of the crime. So he called his cell phone and reached his attackers. He borrowed money from neighbors to pay the thieves a ransom equivalent to two thousand dollars for the return of his taxi. “I paid the money and took the car on the spot,” he said.
Carjacking had become routine enough that thieves explicitly instructed victims to call their own phones to buy back their vehicles. Portions of the highway circling Cairo were so lawless that our driver refused to visit them even by day. Amani el-Sharkawi, a twenty-five-year-old English teacher, was riding in the back of a taxi when she saw men with chains and weapons stopping cars on a deserted patch of road just ahead. Her driver threw the car into reverse and backed down the highway. “Can you imagine that?” she marveled.
The poor inevitably bore the brunt of the crime, and in hard-pressed neighborhoods and towns some took matters into their own hands. In a small village in the Nile Delta province of Sharqiya, residents posted an internet video of two naked bodies hanging from a street lamp. Mayy el-Sheikh and I drove out to investigate.
A twenty-eight-year-old named Hazem Farrag had stepped from his family’s auto supply store to defend the driver of a tuk-tuk against a threatening passenger, and his intercession triggered a cascade of killings. The passenger shot and killed Farrag. Farrag’s friends strung up the killer. When one of the killer’s relatives turned up during the hanging, Farrag’s friends put a noose on him, too. No one in town could tell us their names.
“Disgraceful,” said Mahmoud al-Herawy, a fifty-one-year-old Arabic teacher who found the bodies the next morning. “That is not the way to enforce the law.”
In the nearby village of Ezbet el Tamanin we met a sixty-three-year-old farmer who invited us to sit with him on the carpeted floor of a shed his extended family used as a shared living room (none of the families had a private sitting space). The farmer, Mohamed Ibrahim Yousseff, said his cousin had been killed during a carjacking in February. At the funeral armed carjackers had attacked the vehicle of another cousin. When our host’s two sons had tried to intervene, the thieves killed one, Mahmoud, twenty-nine, and crippled the other, Abdullah, twenty-four. Then a mob of villagers killed and incinerated one of the carjackers.
“It is becoming the culture of the Egyptian countryside to confront thuggery with thuggery, to take matters into our own hands,” Yousseff told us mournfully. But what were the alternatives? “Should we surrender them to the police so they can release them in two hours?” (None of the vigilantes ever faced charges.)
Another farmer living near there told us that two of his sons, ages seven and ten, had recently been kidnapped. So the farmer, Hussein Abu Khisha, enlisted his neighbors to close down a highway, a pressure tactic to get the army and police to retrieve his boys. It worked: the army rescued his sons and the neighbors reopened the road. Such blockades had become a common sight, and now I understood why.
I later got to know a retired brigadier general in the Interior Ministry, Khaled Amin, who thought I should sympathize with the police. They felt “oppressed,” he said one night over tea at a water-pipe café in the affluent neighborhood of Heliopolis, near the presidential palace.
“We were blamed for the revolution and we were blamed for the corruption of the last eighty years,” he said. “The police felt abandoned and the regular officers were not listening to their leaders. So we spent more than a year after the revolution where we did nothing. We just did not deal with the people. The police essentially went home and even the ones who did show up did nothing. The traffic officers did not even look at the cars.” Supervising officers like him were ordered to tolerate the negligence. “So we put up with it,” he said, “for the sake of the unity of the ministry.” See how you miss us! the police seemed to say.
Laura and I got in the habit of locking our car doors from the inside so that thieves could not climb in at an intersection. Laura stopped taking taxis. Then she stopped driving alone at all, except near our house. We raised our fence and fortified our gate. I began paying protection money every month to the police guards outside the South Korean embassy. Egyptian friends had exulted that the era of bribery had ended. I was just starting.
Three former Mubarak lieutenants were running for president, and the farmer who had barricaded the road told me that he would vote for one of them over any of the Islamists. “When you are sick like this, you go to a specialized doctor, you don’t go to a beginner,” Hussein Abu Khisha said. The Islamists “insult the police.”
Voting in the presidential election began on May 23, 2012. More than a dozen candidates had qualified for a place on the ballot, and the top two vote getters were expected to face each other in a runoff in June. The first day of voting was scorching hot, but Egyptians seemed delighted to stand in line, often for several hours. Some held up scraps of cardboard to try to block out the sun. Anyone over eighteen was eligible to vote, more than fifty million Egyptians, and there had been a lot of voting since Mubarak: in a referendum, in two rounds for the main house of Parliament, and in two rounds for the almost powerless upper chamber. When I made the rounds of polling places for the first votes, many had said they doubted the process would be any fairer than it was under Mubarak. But after so many ballots with suspenseful results, Egyptians were confident of their power. One of Parliament’s few accomplishments was modernizing the voting procedures. Ballots were dropped into transparent, sealed plastic boxes. The contents were counted in public view, in the same room, as soon as the polls closed. There was no way to stuff ballots.
“It is enough that the new president will know he could go to jail if he does something wrong,” twenty-eight-year-old Mohamed Maher said assuredly, waiting to vote in the slum of Imbaba.
The generals boasted about their commitment to democracy. “If we wanted to commit fraud, we would have done it at the parliamentary elections,” the general in charge of legal affairs said during a televised news conference, peering bookishly over his reading glasses. “A military coup, is this our plan? After all this?”
A journalist for the state media had a question for him. How could the military council possibly trust a new president chosen only by the voters and not known in advance?
“There is no worry,” the general replied. Every Egyptian constitution since 1923, he said, had allowed the military to take power in a case of “catastrophe.”
I had rolled my eyes at the Egyptian penchant for conspiracy theories, but the presidential race took so many bizarre turns that I began to wonder. The commission overseeing the election was composed of Mubarak-era judges appointed under the generals, and in the final weeks before the vote the judges unexpectedly disqualified on technicalities three of the strongest, most popular candidates. The hard-line Salafi was knocked out because his mother had become a U.S. citizen; she was registered to vote in Santa Monica, California, of all places. Shater, the Brotherhood’s candidate, was eliminated on the basis of a politicized criminal conviction under Mubarak. A little-known understudy, Mohamed Morsi, stepped into his place.
Most intriguing to me was the case of Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s former spy chief and onetime American favorite. He had launched a presidential campaign from inside the intelligence service, run by his chief of staff. It had taken other campaigns months to collect the thirty thousand signatures from around the country required for a spot on the ballot; Suleiman’s campaign pulled it off in forty-eight hours.
“Divine facilitation,” Suleiman told a newspaper close to the intelligence services. (I saw no signs that anyone in the U.S. government was still hoping he would win, although I am sure some would have sighed with relief.)
Then the commission questioned a few of those signatures and disqualified him, too. Was the commission knocking out all the contenders it saw as strongest?
There was more weirdness. Borhami and the Salafi parties endorsed Aboul Fotouh—the equivalent of the Southern Baptist Convention backing Bernie Sanders. Salafi leaders told me Aboul Fotouh had the best chance of beating the Brotherhood. But he later told me that only one Salafi sheikh actually campaigned for him—an old friend from his student days who now lived in the Western desert province of Mersa Matruh. Aboul Fotouh concluded that the mukhabarat had orchestrated the Salafi endorsement to sabotage his campaign by driving away non-Islamist voters. Who knew? But the result was clear. He had started to build a movement transcending the old divides, and now I watched non-Islamist voters abandon him in droves.
“He uses double language,” a rival candidate, the former diplomat Amr Moussa, declared in the only televised debate. “He’s a Salafi with Salafis, he’s a centrist with centrists, and he’s a liberal with liberals.”
The Coptic Church surprised me, too. The bishops put together a committee of laymen to pick a candidate, and until the final weeks all indications were that the Copts were rallying behind Amr Moussa—a popular civilian and former foreign minister who was not Islamist. Only seven months had passed since the Maspero massacre and the military cover-up. I thought surely the church could not back a military candidate.
But, to Moussa’s surprise, the lay committee withdrew the church’s support in the final days before the vote. “There were forces that shifted at the last moment for I-don’t-know-why, but it was a plan,” Moussa later told me. Instead, the church committee backed a former air force commander and Mubarak prime minister, seventy-year-old Ahmed Shafik, who was campaigning as a Mubarak-style strongman. He had told an audience of business executives that he was proud to call Mubarak “a role model.” That was the kind of leader Egyptians needed. “The Egyptian people, contrary to the accusations, are obedient,” he said, to a roar of applause.
To my amazement, Coptic support all across Egypt swung strongly behind him. How had the church thrown its weight behind Shafik so soon after the Maspero massacre? “Because of his military background,” Youssef Sidhom, editor of the quasi-official Coptic newspaper and a member of the lay committee, told me at the time. “Copts are confident he will be strong enough to restore security and enforce the rule of law.”
As for the Maspero massacre, Sidhom said he saw no “conspiracy.” “There was a kind of chaos and panic among the small number of troops who were stationed there.” Of the military, the church was forgiving.
Among the voters who cast their ballot for an Islamist, Morsi, with the Brotherhood machine behind him, beat Aboul Fotouh by a margin of about four to three. Aboul Fotouh formed a new party and started preparing for the next election.
A majority of Egyptian voters cast ballots for liberalism or moderation. A narrow majority of voters in the first round chose one of the many candidates in the more or less liberal middle, but those moderate voters were divided among ten different candidates. The two top vote getters were at the extremes: two conservatives, one religious and the other military. The runoff was Morsi, the Muslim Brother, versus Shafik, Mubarak’s air marshal. That contest was a murkier story.