Hossam
el-Hamalawy wrote his doctoral dissertation in Political Science at the
Freie Universität Berlin on the role of the security services in the
Egyptian counterrevolution
The birth of Egypt’s republican order, one year following the Free
Officers coup in 1952, produced a repressive apparatus that was
intentionally fragmented with overlapping mandates. The three main
components of this apparatus–the army, police and the General
Intelligence Service (GIS)–were encouraged to compete, not to share
information, nor coordinate action. The design was meant to coup-proof
the successive executive heads of state, whose dominant perceived threat remained a military coup, till the outbreak of the 2011 revolution.
The military deployed forces on the streets, after the collapse of
the police on 28 January 2011, to try to stabilize the country. The
senior brass did not support the uprising but were forced to remove Mubarak under pressure from protests and strikes.
The generals did not open fire on protesters, simply because they could
not guarantee the loyalty of their troops in the face of this wide,
multi-layered social revolt.
The army leadership initially sought an alliance with the Islamists, hoping the latter could defuse dissent and bring the revolution to a quick end.
Only when the Islamists failed to do so did the generals decide to
stage a coup and employ the level of violence they deemed necessary to
pacify the country once and for all.
The regime that evolved out of the post-2013 bloodbath
was not a restoration of the pre-2011 authoritarianism. Rather, Sisi
constructed a new regime with a different system of governance, whose
dominant perceived threat is a popular uprising. This had a fallout on
how the repressive apparatus was organised. For the first time in the
country’s modern history the security services were unified.
This unification was not a smooth and easy process. On the eve of the 2013 coup, the military had already streamlined the Ministry of Interior over the previous three years, but the GIS remained relatively independent and in fact at odds with the military.
Based on interviews I conducted with Egyptian exiles including a
former member of President Muhammad Morsi’s advisory team, Major General
Muhammad Raafat Shehata, then the GIS director, had not been involved
in plotting the overthrow of the country’s first democratically elected
president. In fact, Shehata warned Morsi of the impending coup.
Shehata and those in the GIS who did not support the coup were not
motivated by democratic values, as much as by their concerns that the
military intervention would plunge the country into chaos.
Two days following the coup, Shehata was sacked and replaced with Major General Muhammad Farid al-Tuhami, the former director of Military Intelligence and Administrative Control Authority. More importantly, Tuhami was Sisi’s mentor and among the hawks who advocated the wiping out of the Muslim Brothers.
Tuhami oversaw successive purges of middle- and high-ranking officers
at the GIS, whose loyalty to the new regime was in doubt. Loyalists
were promoted. Simultaneously, Sisi’s son Mamoud, a former military
officer, who joined the GIS presumably in 2009
(not in 2014 as some news outlets misreported), started playing a more
central role in managing the spy agency. He was joined later, presumably
in 2016, by his youngest brother, Hassan, an Al-Azhar graduate and
translator who previously worked at a petroleum company.
The above-mentioned scenario sums up Sisi’s strategy in extending his
control over state organs. He uses a carrot-and-stick approach, in
addition to family ties.
Sisi also oversaw the creation/reactivation of unofficial and
official “supreme councils” following the coup, which fostered
coordination between the different components of the repressive
apparatus. Some of these councils had already existed prior to 2011, but
rarely convened. Under Sisi, they meet ritualistically every three
months, and the unofficial coordination bodies are in daily contact and
share information.
Dissent in the ranks of the GIS could be exemplified by the continuous leaks
of sensitive phone calls between the army leaders and of Sisi’s
meetings that surfaced in the exiled Egyptian media outlets,from 2014
till 2018. The last pockets of internal dissent were wiped out during
the showdown between Sisi on the one hand and Ahmad Shafiq and Sami Anan
on the other when the latter two retired generals tried to challenge
him in the presidential election of 2018.
Sisi and his security services managed to eviscerate the country’s civil society,
unleashing a wave of lethal and carceral violence against all shades of
dissent in a manner unseen in the history of modern Egypt. Mubarak
presided over a dictatorial regime, but one that managed dissent, and
outsourced social control to a wide array of civilian institutions, not
just the repressive apparatus. And it is this exactly which Sisi and his
generals viewed as Mubarak’s mistake. He had been too “lenient” and this was the reason for the 2011 “catastrophe” which almost brought down the state. Sisi was going to have none of this. His approach to politics rested on eradicating rather than managing dissent.
Sisi has run the country over the past decade without a proper ruling
party, with no opposition, no NGOs, and a rubber stamp parliament. Any
actions or entities independent from the state have not been welcomed,
including those which are not even remotely political.
However, Sisi did so amid full regional and international backing.
The Arab Gulf sheikhdoms in specific, most notably the UAE and Saudi
Arabia, showered his regime with billions of dollars, and cheered his
grotesque violations of human rights with the aim of pacifying Egypt,
crushing the revolution, preventing its domino effect and dismantling
the Muslim Brothers.
With the economic crisis, spiralling debt and tensions with the
regional sponsors, the unity of the agents of coercion should not be
taken for granted though. History has taught us political and economic
crises are bound to create divisions among the ruling elites. Sisi’s
grip on power is still strong, but he is not as confident as he was ten
years ago, with his popularity plummeting and alienating all social classes. He is already facing a gradual revival in dissent in the professional syndicates,
and is currently conducting talks with the remnants of the opposition
(which he had already crippled) hoping they can now help him defuse
public anger.
In tomorrow’s newsletter we continue our analysis of the coup with Dina Wahba a feminist scholar and postdoctoral researcher in the Communication Science Department, University of Salzburg.