The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (13 page)

Afifi spoke up; he had some questions he wanted answered. Adly replied, “You again? Get out!” He added that if others had a problem following these orders, they should leave, too. About five other officers walked out of the meeting hall. That was Afifi’s third and final no.

Afifi’s lack of cooperation had now caught the attention of senior security officials, and there were real consequences. Not long after the election—which, unsurprisingly, the ruling party won by large margins—the order came down that Afifi would be transferred to Upper Egypt. At that time, clashes with violent Islamist groups were on the rise there, and Egyptian police officers were often targeted in attacks. Afifi feared that he would die either at the hands of militants or, more likely, as the casualty of friendly fire. He submitted a complaint and managed to gain a transfer to a firefighting unit back in Cairo.

Afifi was unhappy and unsure what to do. His career as a police officer was effectively over, and he continued to fear for his own safety. It was then, in 2000, when he was near his lowest, that he got lucky. He learned about a contest sponsored by the International Red Cross that gave Egyptian judges or police officers the opportunity to study international human rights law abroad. Four people would be awarded the scholarship. Afifi won the scholarship and first studied in Tunis. His course work left an immediate impression on him. He realized for the first time that there was an entire body of law and literature on human rights, something he had felt intuitively when he stood up to his superiors but never knew existed in such concrete terms. When the program in Tunis ended, he won another scholarship that allowed him to earn a law degree. In 2004, the former police officer returned to Cairo an attorney.

He quickly put his education to work as a criminal defense attorney. Within two years, he had developed a reputation as a skilled lawyer and advocate. But the advantage that Afifi had over other attorneys wasn’t his foreign legal training; it was his knowledge of proper police procedure. He knew how the system worked in practice, and he was extremely effective at pointing out procedural violations. Few of his clients had any notion of their rights. More important, police officers,
unaccustomed to having their actions scrutinized, often took an undisciplined approach to their work. Afifi was able to exploit this vulnerability to the advantage of his clients.

His work as a criminal defense attorney did not provoke the ire of the regime. What angered the regime was when he began to share his expertise with the public at large. Because of his work, Afifi was invited to be a recurring guest on
Cairo Today
, a live satellite television show. During a forty-five-minute segment, he would explain some aspect of Egyptians’ legal rights in clear and simple language. In the first episode, which aired on November 13, 2007, he tackled the subject of what people’s rights were if they were stopped by the police on the street. In the second episode, he discussed what people’s rights were within their homes and the need for search warrants.

By the second episode, the regime had sat up to take notice. A state security official called the anchor of the television show during a commercial break. He was furious with what Afifi was telling the television audience. “Have you lost your mind?” he yelled at the anchor over the phone. “Fuck you! We are going to cut off your satellite link if you keep going!”

The third episode was supposed to discuss people’s rights in a police station. But there would be no third episode. State security contacted Afifi after the second show and asked him if he wanted to do a show for them on the virtues of the police force. They would pay him $2,000 a week. (Afifi was making $800 a week for the satellite channel.) When he refused, they threatened him. “They told me that if I don’t comply, a shot could just go astray. Don’t be a hero,” recalls Afifi. He understood that he had touched a nerve and that they were serious. He agreed he would not speak out anymore.

But he didn’t say anything about writing. Based on the public reaction to his first two television appearances, Afifi had already decided that he would write a book offering the same straightforward advice on people’s rights when dealing with the police. He worked on the book for several months but had difficulty finding a publisher; no one wanted to run afoul of the regime. In early 2008, he found someone who was willing to print copies in secret. On March 20, he began to distribute five thousand copies of his book,
So You Don’t Get Slapped on the Back of the Neck
. (The title came from a colloquial Egyptian
saying.) Afifi sent a thousand copies to journalists at both official and independent newspapers. It drew a front-page headline in a popular newsweekly. The reaction, he recalls, was almost instantaneous. He quickly received requests for ten thousand more copies. Then forty thousand more. He had put his own cell phone number in the book, so calls were coming in directly to him. “It was like the Bible,” he says, laughing at his book’s popularity. “I didn’t expect it.”

By April 7, he had received orders from bookstores for thousands more copies. He never got a chance to fill those orders. The next day, at 10:00 a.m., his cell phone rang. It was the owner of a bookstore selling his book. State security had just walked in and seized all of his copies. In short order, they had taken roughly five thousand books, the bulk of the remaining copies he had printed.

Afifi didn’t have very much time to worry about printing more books. The next call on his cell phone was from a friend on the police force. He told him he was no longer safe. State security had staked out his home and his office; whatever patience the regime had had for Afifi had run out. Afifi believed his old colleague was overreacting. He knew he had been playing a dangerous game, but he hadn’t actually broken any laws. Indeed, he was only explaining the law, as it was written, in a way that people could understand. He called a trusted contact at the Ministry of Interior, someone he knew would tell him how serious things had become. When he heard his friend answer, he said, “Hey, it’s me.” He won’t forget what he heard next.

“It’s the wrong number,” his friend replied.

“What? What do you mean?” said Afifi.

“Sorry. You have the wrong number,” he repeated as he hung up.

Afifi was terrified when the phone went dead. He had just received his final warning. His friend on the police force had been right; it was no longer safe. He believed at best he would be locked away and tortured; at worst, the authorities would just dispose of him. He knew he couldn’t go home and he couldn’t go anywhere near his office. He made the instantaneous decision that he had to flee. He couldn’t remain in Egypt. It was as simple as that.

He turned off his cell phone and took out the battery. He would use only landlines and no credit cards. He found a way to get a message to his son: he would have to retrieve his passport and meet him
in a safe location. For the next three days, Afifi lived in the street and in the back of his car. It wasn’t safe for him to go anywhere state security might expect to find him. When his son brought him his passport, the only valid visa was for the United States. The other, for the European Union, had expired. He was going to the United States.

Security for Cairo International Airport is provided by police officers from Cairo central security. Fortunately for Afifi, he knew several officers from earlier in his career who now worked at the airport. He arrived at the airport late in the evening on April 11. One of his fellow police officers took his passport; he would get it stamped without going through the official system. The others got Afifi through security and told him to wait at a different gate, not the one for his flight. He waited until everyone had boarded the flight. At the last moment, he was given the signal and boarded the plane just as the door was closing. He was on the last flight to JFK. He landed in New York, a little over twelve hours later, with nothing but $50 and a gold watch.

For a dictator, the exile of his opponents might seem like a tidy solution. There would be no outcry over the murder of Omar Afifi. No funeral processions that turn into public demonstrations. No demands for justice. Afifi would be granted asylum abroad and live out his days far away. He would be safe from the regime, and the regime would be safe from him. It has the makings of a stalemate, maybe even a truce.

Few people set out to be branded enemies of the state. Pu Zhiqiang, Yevgenia Chirikova, and Omar Afifi did not intend to be at odds with their governments. They had not been born advocates and activists; they were made. Indeed, they worked within the system, as imperfect as it may be, to attempt to hold a regime accountable to its own rules. But once they were branded as opponents, once their governments marked them for their persistence, they became people no longer interested in tidy solutions. Even as Pu Zhiqiang saw his colleagues hauled away, he gave no thought to stopping his work. He would still bring his cases. In April 2011, the Kremlin sent bulldozers into Khimki Forest, and Chirikova and her supporters were repeatedly beaten and arrested. But, she had told me a year earlier, her fight was now bigger than a single forest. The regime had made her into an activist, and she would continue regardless of the outcome.

Nor was Afifi prepared to abandon his fight, even after he boarded
a plane to New York. He gained political asylum in the United States, but his opposition to Mubarak’s regime did not rest. He understood that his background in the Egyptian security apparatus made him unique among the regime’s opponents. Even from six thousand miles away, in an apartment a short drive from Washington, D.C., he knew the regime from the inside out; specifically, he understood how the police would be deployed to stop a rebellion.

When Egypt’s revolution unexpectedly erupted in January 2011, the youth in the street quickly learned they had a potent ally in the former police officer. At a command station he created in his small Falls Church apartment, Afifi advised Egyptian youth leaders on the police tactics they would face. At his desk, three oversized computer screens fed him a steady flow of information from activists in the street—as well as, he says, from old colleagues still inside the regime. With the help of Google Maps, he pinpointed routes that would give the protesters the upper hand. Via Twitter and Facebook, he stayed in contact with the revolution’s foot soldiers, helping them prepare for Mubarak’s inevitable crackdown. When I visited him, it was nearly impossible to speak for more than five minutes without our conversation being interrupted by a call on one of his five cell phones and a stream of messages being relayed to him over Skype. “
I am not here,” Afifi told me, gesturing at the northern Virginia apartment that surrounded us. “I’m in Egypt.”

The regime had created an enemy it couldn’t shake.

T
he Ramo Verde military prison became smaller as we drove away. We had just left the last cordon of the prison’s security—a bored, young soldier lazily holding a machine gun in one hand and opening and closing the metal gate with the other. The prison sits right above Los Teques, the capital city of the state of Miranda. Still, the jail seemed utterly desolate when you stood outside its walls, a small outcropping atop a dusty Venezuelan mountainside. It was a destination you could not have arrived at by accident. The prison appeared to be the only physical structure for miles.

But from the front seat of our rental car, we kept staring back at it. A friend and I had visited Ramo Verde on this Saturday morning to interview one of its inmates. The fact that a foreigner was visiting the facility had made the guards—all of them military police officers—uneasy. While the handful of other people who had turned up this morning were weighed down with parcels, presumably gifts for family or friends housed inside, I hadn’t been permitted to bring anything within the prison’s walls, not a tape recorder, not a pen and paper, nothing. Indeed, no one in the prison felt senior enough even to permit me to enter. They pulled me aside as an officer called military intelligence for instructions. Afterward, on my way out an hour later, they searched us a second time. It was then, as we exited, that one of the military police said into his cell phone, “
Yes, sir. I will follow them.”

His name was García; it was written in black letters across the chest pocket of his green fatigues. He was the same military officer
who had questioned me before I entered the prison. He was a large, somewhat portly soldier, with a round face and serious expression. García appeared to outrank the others on duty, and he was the one who had felt it necessary to alert intelligence officials far from this outpost. The road snaked down the mountainside, swerving to the left and right as we descended. As we did, we kept looking in the rearview mirror for García. Ten minutes later, near the base of the hill, there still was no sign of him.

Besides keeping an eye out for García, I was dealing with one other complication. Once inside the prison, I had borrowed pen and paper from an inmate, so I could take notes during my interview. Knowing I would likely be frisked again on the way out, I had also found someone in the prison—someone who would not be searched going in or out—to smuggle my notes outside. The plan was to meet up with this contact once we were a safe distance from Ramo Verde. I worried we could unintentionally be leading a military police officer to our rendezvous.