REVOLT IN EGYPT PART TWO: THE REGIME

REVOLT IN EGYPT

INTERVIEW

HAZEM KANDIL


B. THE REGIME

Mubarak has gone, but the apparatuses on which his dictatorship rested have not vanished. The armed forces currently hold ultimate power, in the shape of the Supreme Military Council. How should the Egyptian military be characterized, and what role is it now likely to play?

When a regime has come to power through military force, either by coup or conquest, it typically issues into a tripartite structure, with a division of labour between its three component parts, each crystallizing into separate institutions. The first component of this ‘power triangle’ consists of those who take over daily government through a political apparatus, typically composed of a presidency (or monarchy) and a ruling party. The second component consists of military officers who handle domestic repression through a multilayered security complex, which includes police, intelligence and paramilitary forces. The third group consists of those who return to the barracks and continue to represent the military proper. Over time, each develops different agendas, which observers mistakenly minimize or conflate. For institutions develop their own identities, form their own corporate interests and shape their members in their own image. Thus in the case of Egypt, analysts across the board tend to speak of Mubarak, Omar Suleiman and Ahmed Shafiq as military figures, because Mubarak was head of the air force thirty-five years ago, Suleiman was an army general over twenty years ago, Shafiq commanded the air force ten years ago. But this sort of classification is illusive. Once they pass into the regime’s political or security apparatus, these agents no longer represent the interest of the military as an institution.

By temperament and training the military is not particularly bent on exercising either direct governance or domestic repression. Its interest tends to lie in enhancing its firepower and overall combat readiness, in addition to the economic status of the armed forces as a whole. The officer corps is often content, as in Turkey or Latin America, with setting up a political process in which there are competing parties, and then stepping back to act as the guardian of the system it has just created—intervening only when necessary through warnings or limited ‘corrective’ coups.

Quite different is the security coterie, an unnatural creature that can thrive only in an authoritarian environment. Should the regime democratize, it becomes completely deflated, its influence diminished. Equally important, its members realize they will be held accountable for the atrocities they committed; compared to the military, the security apparatus is much more implicated in human-rights violations and much less able to guarantee amnesty for its own. When there is a democratic change, the new rulers flinch from antagonizing the military, but do not hesitate to mark security officers for trial. So unlike the military, security organs always push for authoritarian rule to continue.

The political leadership in this system is normally suspended in the middle. It is vulnerable in so far as it has no direct means of repressing the population without the support of the military or the security complex. At the same time, it does not necessarily require a permanent ultra-authoritarian setting; it can still cling to power while offering limited compromises leading to so-called ‘semi-’ or ‘quasi-liberalization’. Because of these varying dispositions and capacities, the three components of this kind of regime both cooperate and compete, their interests both overlapping and diverging all the time, according to domestic or international developments. What complicates the picture even further is that none of these components is monolithic in character; each has its own internal subdivisions and tensions.

The Egyptian military have embodied this schema?

Under Nasser, as I have mentioned, the military was originally in charge of domestic repression. But after the Six-Day War in 1967, the political apparatus decided it had had enough of the mood swings in the armed forces, and began the process of isolating the military politically under the pretext of professionalizing it. This process was taken to great lengths by Sadat in the days leading up to the October War of 1973, and in its aftermath. Mubarak pushed it even further in the eighties. The last charismatic leader of the Egyptian military, Field Marshal Abd Al-Halim Abu Ghazala, was removed in 1989. From that point on, the armed forces were politically sterilized.

Today, the total size of the military establishment is somewhere over 450,000. Of these, around 300,000 are conscripts. All Egyptian males are called up for a year if they have a college degree, and for three if they do not, unless they have either a familial (no siblings to look after parents) or medical exemption. Conscripts generally have little to do with combat training—they might end up shooting a rifle a few times, but that is it. They basically perform logistical and ‘office boy’ services: cleaning and mopping, delivering things, buying groceries for officers. The real strength of the military lies in its professional officers and ncos. Their position within the ruling system, and society at large, is often misunderstood abroad. It is much less privileged than many observers imagine. Politically speaking, under Mubarak the leverage of the military was much less than that of the ruling party and the security agencies. Socially too, the position of army officers depreciated, if we compare it to that of their counterparts in the police, or the ndp. No one thought of them as masters of the country.

Economically, officers were granted some autonomy; they were given control of their own enterprises and a good deal of land, to keep them docile. Sadat and Mubarak understood that if they were going to open up the economy, they could not afford to leave the military at the mercy of market forces; they had to be assured of self-sufficiency. So they were given projects that would provide profits which could fund a decent life for officers: a car, a flat, a vacation house, and so on. But this is no economic empire on the scale the Turkish army has built up, for example. It is a much more modest enterprise. Military facilities are quite shabby compared with what is on offer in the wealthy districts of Cairo. Officers have not grossly enriched themselves. What you gain in the army or air force pales in comparison to what you can get as a senior police officer or member of the ruling party. Under Mubarak, the Minister of the Interior stashed over $1 billion in his bank account. The Minister of Defence could not dream of that kind of money.

Strategically, moreover, behind all its modern weaponry the Egyptian military has been suffering an identity crisis. After the October War, Sadat knew that to prevent them from becoming too frustrated, he had to give the armed forces considerable symbolic satisfaction. So he made sure the us provided them with state-of-the-art weapons and training, and the prestige of being the tenth biggest military in the world. But they have come to realize that these things are for display only, and feel completely toothless. They have no ability to project strategic power into any country around them—not only Israel, but also the rest of Egypt’s neighbours. After the First Gulf War, there was talk of Egyptian forces becoming part of the Gulf security system—what was referred to as the Damascus Declaration of 1991—but the Americans said no, they would handle that through installing their own bases in Gulf countries. Then there was the question of playing a more active role in stabilizing Gaza or Lebanon. That came to nothing too. But it was the division of Sudan, weeks before the January revolt, which sent shock waves throughout the armed forces. Sudan occupies a central place in Egypt’s national security doctrine. The secession of the South threatens Egypt’s control over the head-waters of the Nile. But again the military was told that this is an area of American influence. So there was now a widespread feeling among officers that to enlist in the army is to build roads, run fisheries, or anything else other than play the role of soldiers. The first captain to fraternize with demonstrators in the Square started complaining about this. What have we actually been doing? What is our mission? What have we done in Gaza or Sudan?

The evidence of this malaise could be seen after Mubarak was gone. For more than thirty years, since the fall of the Shah, the regime never allowed vessels from Iran, whether civilian or military, to pass through the Suez Canal. Within a month of Mubarak’s departure, the Egyptian military gave passage to two Iranian warships bound for Syria, refusing to comply with demands from the us and Israel that they be blocked, or at the very least searched. The military has no intention of burning its bridges with either country. They were just sending a message that they would decide what is in the national interest, as the Turkish military does, for example. Further steps were taken in that direction when the Supreme Military Council sent the new director of General Intelligence to Syria and Qatar in mid-March to discuss ways of enhancing strategic relations. Of course Syria and Qatar, in concert with Turkey and Iran, are part of a new regional power bloc that is trying to secure relative autonomy from the Western agenda, without necessarily antagonizing any of the key Western powers.

In all this, there is no sign—as yet—of any serious divisions within the Egyptian military apparatus. Had there been real fractures between the upper and lower ranks of the army during the popular revolt, we would have seen some evidence of that—the lower ranks, for example, defying orders to end the demonstrations. Or we would have seen dozens of soldiers and junior officers breaking ranks and joining the demonstrations—the kind of wide-scale fraternizing that happened during the Iranian Revolution, for instance. We did not see any of that in Egypt. So far the military has been speaking with a unified voice, across services and across ranks.

Under Mubarak, how did the political and military apparatuses connect within the regime?

From 1967 onwards the President has been Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. He appoints the Minister of Defence, the heads of all the services, and the general staff. He also has directly under him the Republican Guard, which the press calls the Presidential Guard, which forms a fifth service alongside the Army, Navy, Air Force and Air Defence. The Guard remained quite small for a decade and a half after its creation in 1953, numbering no more than a few hundred. When Nasser began to marginalize the military politically, following its defeat in 1967, he raised this elite corps to battalion strength; Sadat then expanded it to a brigade of around 15–30,000 troops—the numbers are not certain—equipped with heavy armour. Unlike other military units, the Guard is not stationed in barracks outside the city, but around the various Presidential palaces, and its commander has always been picked for special loyalty to the ruler. On February 11, demonstrators feared that Mubarak would mobilize the Guard to quench the revolt. But in the end it sided with the rest of the military, not the President.

How do the security forces compare with the regular army?

When Nasser first came to power he charged one of his closest associates, Zakaria Mohieddin, with developing the Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior, created by the British, into a renamed General Investigations Department responsible for surveillance and disruption of any political activity, with the help of the newly created General Intelligence Service. But the Army decided to shoulder the task of regime maintenance. Under its charismatic commander, Field Marshal Amer, Military Intelligence, Military Police and Military Prisons played the leading role in internal security. After the 1967 war, when Nasser sought to cut the Army down to size, Military Intelligence was confined to spying on other countries’ militaries; General Intelligence was redirected towards foreign espionage and domestic counterintelligence (against enemy agents in Egypt); while the General Investigations Department was restored to sole control of internal repression.

Then Nasser decided he needed another body to control the streets, and created the Central Security Forces, based like the army on conscription, and on the same scale—300,000 strong. Their job would be to maintain order and protect strategic sites—the tv building, the Ministries, the Parliament, foreign embassies and banks. So now domestic repression had a head and an arm: the head was the General Investigations Department and the arm was the Central Security Forces. Sadat upgraded the former into the State Security Investigations Sector—our own ss—and also beefed up the Central Security Forces. Under Mubarak, total personnel engaged in domestic repression has been estimated at the heroic figure of two million operatives. Of these, however, a million and a half were hired thugs or informers without uniforms or ranks, often people with a criminal record who had cut deals with the authorities; they were neither part of the police corps proper nor of the Central Security forces nor of the ss. So while the overall number is very inflated, the unleashing of so many people with shadowy relations with the police has terrorized citizens.

If you exclude these, you are left with a security apparatus of about 400,000, of which 300,000 are conscripts armed with bludgeons, but led by an elite usually referred to as the Special Forces, which are equipped with armoured vehicles, rubber bullets, water hoses and tear gas for riot control. Then you have about 70,000 police proper, dealing with drugs, vice, tourism etc. Finally State Security, the most lethal force, has some 3,000 officers. These rely on the latest technologies for detection of political dissent and torture of detainees.

What about the party organization of the dictatorship, the ndp —cheek by jowl with New Labour, the ps and spd and the rest of European social-democracy as fellow members of the Socialist International? What kind of structure is it?

In 1953 Nasser, at that point not yet Prime Minister, decided to form what he called the Liberation Rally: a loose mass movement intended to undermine rather than replace all the other political forces of the time. Five years later he turned that into the National Union, to stage demonstrations in support of the regime, garner the necessary votes if elections and referendums were needed, and generally act as a sounding-board for him in society. He entrusted some of his closest lieutenants with the task of creating this party, which by 1962 had developed into the Arab Socialist Union. Amer had proved impossible to remove as head of the army, and Nasser wanted to supplement his own charisma and popularity with an entrenched political organization as a counterweight to the military. Nominally the aim was mass mobilization, but in practice the asu simply plugged into the existing power structures in the countryside, where three-quarters of the Egyptian population still lived, co-opting middling landowners, who were economically dominant figures in the villages, to tot up votes from peasants.

In the towns, Nasser had relied on capitalists throughout the fifties, but they held back investment because they did not trust the military. With the wave of nationalizations in 1961 most of these capitalists became part of the state machinery. The most famous example is Osman Ahmed Osman, the construction magnate and richest man in the country. When his company was nationalized he became its ceo, working for the government. Once this layer was incorporated into the bureaucracy, it too became a key component of the Arab Socialist Union. Naturally, there was nothing socialist about it, nor anything to do with mass mobilization. The function of the party was simply to rally the bureaucracy and the workers in the public sector on the one hand, and the peasants on the other, to clientelistic support of the regime.

This was the structure Sadat inherited in the seventies. Towards the end of the decade, he decided to create more of a façade of democracy, allowing some people with leftist tendencies to form the Tagammu party, others with more liberal tendencies to operate as the Wafd and Liberal parties, as decoration for a system in which the ruling party was reborn as the National Democratic Party in 1978, with exactly the same patronage networks of old. In due course, this was taken over by Mubarak. But by the late nineties, once the economy was opened up and the regime set about trying to attract foreign investment, another facelift was required. Here Gamal Mubarak played a key role. His circle persuaded him that he could change the ndp by sidelining the technocrats who headed it, who had typically enriched themselves with bribes and commissions as middlemen, in favour of real businessmen who were younger, better educated and, most importantly, linked to global capitalist centres. They could infuse the ndp with ‘new thinking’ to make it more appealing, and at the same time give Gamal a platform for his presidential ambitions.

Mubarak, who wanted to pass the baton on to his son, backed the creation of the Policy Committee which became the new core of the party, at the expense of its traditional patriarchs. One of these, Kamal El-Shazly, famously portrayed in the best-selling novel The Yacoubian Building, died a timely death. Another, Safwat El-Sherif, was kicked upstairs as the party’s Secretary General. So there were hurt egos in the change, but no real divisions in the party. Old and new guards were in the same boat together, and it was a formidable vessel. Millions held a nominal membership in the ndp, of whom maybe two million were active. If you were a young businessman who wanted to get ahead, or a small trader who did not want to be harassed by the police, you joined the party. So a lot of this membership was accommodation without commitment. But that should not blind us to the fact that many have a good deal to lose if the ndp were to be dissolved.

You have given a vivid account of the power triangle on which the dictatorship rested. But, of course, there was another decisive power on which it depended, outside the country. The United States was the ultimate guarantor of the regime, from the moment Washington saved Sadat from Israeli encirclement in 1973, when the idf was about to cut off the Egyptian armies in Sinai and repeat its crushing victory of 1967. The price of that rescue was Camp David and the conversion of Egypt into a pivot of the American strategic system in the Middle East. The popular uprising against Mubarak put the us on red alert, and it is fairly clear that the decision of the military finally to abandon him was taken in consultation with the White House, not to speak of the Pentagon. How would you describe the interface between the different components of the regime and their American patrons?

From the eighties onwards, three institutions were in regular interaction with the US: foreign intelligence, the military and the presidency. The General Intelligence Service under Omar Suleiman was, of course, after the Mossad the CIA’s key partner in the Middle East, working hand in glove with it to manipulate the PLO, throttle Hamas and torture prisoners in the American rendition system. After 9/11, its importance for Langley naturally soared. Suleiman was probably the single most valued Egyptian official in the eyes of Washington. Mubarak could be slow and stubborn. Suleiman was neither, and both the US and Israeli establishments looked to him as the best possible successor as ruler of the country.

On the political side of the regime, from the time of Sadat onwards there was always close contact between the presidencies of the two countries, with many a state visit back and forth, once Egypt had become America’s ‘staunch regional ally’. Obama made Cairo his first stop in the Middle East, to deliver the speech which won him his Nobel Prize, and Mubarak was being toasted in Washington a couple of months later. Alongside this traditional diplomatic alignment went increasingly close commercial ties. Sadat openly said his best friend was David Rockefeller, from whom he took his ideas about how to shape the Egyptian economy. The president intervened to bring first Chase Manhattan, then Boeing, Westinghouse, gm and other American corporations into Egypt. Before the eighties came to a close, the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt was the strongest business lobby in the country. ‘Door-knocking expeditions’ in the US became constant. Each President visiting the us would be accompanied by a large entourage of businessmen and officials of the ruling party, who would call on the various lobbies in Washington and then fan out across the country after the President had left, in search of deals and investors. These connexions became much closer when Mubarak formed the businessmen’s cabinet under Ahmed Nazif in 2004, which was greeted with enthusiasm on Wall Street. Corporate America stood to gain handsomely from the new neo-liberal team in Cairo, while the new business elite entrenched in the ndp could expect healthy profits from increased US investments and the change in us aid policy mooted at this time. Civilian assistance of between $850 million and $1 billion that in the past had always been disbursed to the Egyptian government would now be redirected to the private sector, for projects at which it is famously more efficient and less corrupt, as every right-thinking economist knows. Naturally, decent us consultancy fees would be involved, and us advisors would be on hand to ensure the right policy conditions were in place—Washington in fact has hundreds of these operating as a kind of collective shadow cabinet in Egypt. So there is a close, mutually profitable interlocking of interests between corporate America and Egyptian big business, which extends into the political establishments of the two countries.

As for the military, it goes without saying that the relations with the Pentagon have been extremely close. Annual flows of over $1 billion for weapons and training—more than to any armed forces in the world save Israel’s—speak for themselves. Whether this has bought unconditional fealty to the United States is another matter. The Pentagon has a vital stake in its relations with the Egyptian military, to preserve strategic control of the Middle East, and no doubt personal ties between the top brass of the two are often quite intimate. But it does not follow that the Egyptian officer corps are therefore playthings of Washington. They have their own outlook on the world, and corporate interests to consider. Once the uprising started this year, it is pretty clear that the message from the Pentagon was: the best-case scenario is for Mubarak to stay on till September and then gracefully step down, or—still better—for Omar Suleiman to take over. It is equally clear the Egyptian military at some point told them that was no longer possible: you have to cut your losses—if you want to avoid chaos, stop an Islamist takeover, prevent any destabilization that could affect Israel, we need to nudge the President out of power. In the end the US assented. So while the military certainly consulted Washington, I think it made a rational decision for its own reasons.


New Left Review 68, March-April 2011