The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (32 page)

I was surprised when Hilal said that Mubarak had recognized the necessity of changing the way he ruled. It is rare for a spokesman to a strongman to link any change in behavior to forces beyond the regime’s control. Typically, you could expect so much bland blather on making “judicious choices in the best interests of the people,” talk specifically intended to obscure the genuine reasons for directions taken or reversed.

The obvious question was, why, after being president for so long, had Mubarak decided it was no longer business as usual? What had changed?

“Because you recognize that democratization is expanding,” Hilal explained. “You recognize that you have to democratize further.”

“A further factor,” he continued, “could be the changing global milieu. Remember these are the years you have satellites, you have Al Jazeera, you have the Internet. You start thinking, ‘Well, things can’t continue as before. I no longer have an ability to have a monopoly over information.’ You start recognizing the importance of transparency. Not necessarily because you are an open man, but to keep your capability. Just for practical, pragmatic reasons, you have to.”

The previous ten years had been tumultuous for the regime.
Political protests, sparked by Israel’s bombing of the West Bank and the U.S. war in Iraq, broke out in Cairo’s streets and quickly boomeranged into demonstrations against the Egyptian government. These marches, as well as a rising number of labor strikes, were broadcast on cable news networks such as Al Jazeera. Word was spread further by bloggers, who often uploaded damning footage of violent government crackdowns. For a time, criticism from foreign governments, particularly the United States and the European Union, rose. Granted even a small space to operate, opposition newspapers became highly critical of Mubarak. In response to these and other pressures, Hilal explained, the regime had to find new ways to maintain its grip. It had to adapt. “The ruling elite over time has been intelligent enough to see the writing on the wall,” said Hilal, referring to the pressures to liberalize. “Once you see the writing on the wall, you initiate the process. On one side you see the slogans of your opponents, and instead of becoming a target of a change, you become a partner, in fact, a leader of the change.”

In other words, the regime attempted to remain in control of its own destiny, in part, by co-opting those trends that threatened to unhinge it. Hilal hastened to point out that it is important to understand that everything was still engineered. “It’s reform initiated, engineered, and regulated by the ruling elite and in particular the president,” he said. Mubarak wasn’t about to let events unfold organically; he sought to get out ahead of these forces and shape them.

At least that was the theory.

Egypt is not blessed with large oil deposits. Unlike Russia or Venezuela, the regime cannot funnel massive windfalls from selling oil or natural gas into buying public support. Nor has the Egyptian government created anything close to an economic miracle along the banks of the Nile. Unlike China, no one wants to follow the “Egypt model” for lifting people out of poverty, modernizing infrastructure, or creating sustained economic growth. But, as Hilal explained, under mounting pressures Mubarak’s regime was attempting to perfect another survival strategy for modern dictators: the art of conceding political space in order to maintain it.

In the final years of Mubarak’s regime, if you kept your eyes closed and listened only to the public pronouncements of Egyptian officials,
you would have believed the country’s political system was under constant renovation. Policies and practices were being “reformed,” “altered,” “revised,” “modernized,” “enhanced,” and “developed.” But all the supposed tinkering and talk of flux belied the fact that nothing changed. In fact, the regime’s real expertise was in redrawing the red lines of what freedoms were permissible—and which ones were not. Like a safety valve, the regime tried to let pressure out of the system without compromising its fundamental control. The challenge for the government was creating the appearance of greater freedom without inadvertently granting any freedom that created a meaningful threat to its dominion.

Take, for example, a basic element of the freedom of speech, the right to publicly criticize the president. During the 1980s and 1990s, no one in Egypt would take to the street and denounce Mubarak. It was understood that anyone doing so risked being hauled off to prison. In fact, the informal prohibition was so great that Egyptians would only refer to the “presidential institution” or “the presidency”—something that didn’t actually exist in the constitution—as code for Mubarak. Speaking out against the president was a red line not to be crossed.

But it was eventually abandoned. In recent years, when protests struck downtown Cairo, it wasn’t rare to hear people shout, “Down with Mubarak!” Beginning with the demonstrations over Israel’s military siege of Jenin and other West Bank cities in 2002, students and activists began to direct their anger at their own government, and some say that is when shouts against their longtime leader could first be heard. On December 12, 2004, Kefaya, the loose-knit opposition movement Ahmed Maher later joined, organized the first purely anti-Mubarak demonstration.

From 2005 on, it wasn’t uncommon to hear full-throated criticism of the president or the corruption of his wife and sons. At some point, the regime calculated that the costs of upholding the prohibition were greater than the benefits. In the end, so the thinking went, how much would it matter if a few hundred people yelled “Mubarak must go!” until they were hoarse? Indeed, it suited Egyptian officials just fine to be able to point to the fact that people could curse their president in a public square as evidence that the society was becoming freer. “
So the red lines are not the red lines that existed before,” the human rights
activist Gasser Abdel-Razek told me in early 2010. “Again, not to say that Mubarak will not wake up one day and say, ‘That bastard belongs in prison.’ And that bastard will be imprisoned very quickly. But they have learned.”

The most obvious evidence of this shift in tactics was the way the regime spoke. Not long before, Mubarak’s government greeted any criticism with denials and insults. If a human rights group issued a report on the widespread use of torture in Egyptian police stations, the government would categorically deny the charges as baseless and untrue. “
In 2000, if there was a UN event and Egyptian NGOs were there to present a report, [Egyptian] diplomats would either completely avoid contact with these NGOs or just accuse them of treason and working to implement foreign agendas,” says Hossam Bahgat, the founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

But that was not the experience that the thirty-year-old Bahgat would have several years later. His organization is an internationally respected NGO in Cairo that defends civil rights and liberties; its work made it one of the most outspoken critics of the regime. In 2010, Bahgat traveled to Geneva for the UN Human Rights Council’s annual review of member states’ human rights record. He was there to highlight the ongoing, systemic abuses that occur in Egypt. While in Geneva, he was invited to dinner at the Egyptian ambassador’s residence and was surprised to hear promises that they would work together on the follow-up to the human rights review. Rhetorically, the modern Egyptian regime had learned that it gained more by conceding some of its failings than by castigating every critic as a liar and a traitor. “If you speak now to people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about human rights violations, they will say, ‘Yes, yes, we have many serious problems and these are challenges, we are working on changing them, we are on the path of reform. We are perhaps not going fast enough, we should go faster,’ ” Bahgat said in early 2010. “Of course, implicit in this statement is that there is resistance from the old guard in the regime, or that perhaps if we have a younger president who is Western educated and reform-minded, maybe …” A younger president, like Gamal Mubarak.

——

It is impossible to separate the regime’s botched effort to refashion its dictatorship for the modern age from the political rise of Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son. In 2000, Gamal quit his investment-banking job in London to return to Cairo to take a leadership role in the ruling party. When he talked to the press, the suave forty-six-year-old presidential scion spoke about bringing new blood into the ruling party, reinvigorating its policies to better serve Egyptians. His talking points were sprinkled with words like “reform,” “process,” and “consensus”—odd hallmarks for a man who hoped to inherit the presidency from an aging dictator.

From the day he returned to Egypt, Gamal’s political activities were viewed as laying the groundwork for his succession, steps toward developing the credentials to make him a palatable choice to rule. Gamal almost immediately had an important portfolio within the party. His father appointed him to the General Secretariat’s executive committee, making him a voice in the ruling party’s day-to-day affairs. He also became the chairman of the newly created Policies Committee, which one NDP official described to me as “the
brain of the party.” The Policies Committee was one of the chief vehicles for Gamal to bring a younger generation of officials into the government. Whereas members of the old guard may have cut their teeth under Sadat and were well schooled in patronage politics, the people around Gamal looked more like consultants from McKinsey than bosses of Tammany Hall. Like Gamal, they were young, Western educated, and spoke fluent English. In their thirties or forties, they might hold a Ph.D. or an M.B.A. from an East Coast university. Some had spent time on Wall Street and knew a thing or two about attracting foreign investment dollars. Those on the Policies Committee were charged with helping to develop ideas, programs, and policies that went beyond the static and moribund socialist positions that had gathered dust for so long.

On the economic front, these technocrats were credited with making some progress.
Egypt’s economy grew at more than 7.2 percent a year from 2005 to 2008, although it was clear that these gains did not reach most Egyptians. The World Bank named Egypt the region’s top economic reformer three years in a row. Foreign investment jumped
to nearly $7 billion in 2009, more than three times what it had been five years earlier, and the country weathered the global financial crisis better than most people expected. But Gamal’s political project—attempting to modernize the ruling party—went nowhere. It never became a party of ideas, a party with a vision beyond the continuation of its own power. Indeed, in the end, it was more a massive patronage machine than a party at all.

One person who would not accept that description, however, was Mohamed Kamal. He was one of Gamal’s key political advisers and a member of the Policies Committee trying to help revitalize the ruling party. The forty-something political scientist earned his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and was as comfortable in downtown Washington as he was in Cairo. A student of American politics and political campaigning, Kamal could easily shift from a conversation about the U.S. Electoral College to one about the intricacies of Egyptian politics. He even once worked on Capitol Hill for a congressman from Ohio. When I first met him in Cairo in 2006, I asked him what papers he liked to read, expecting him to tell me the local media he favored. “
The same as you, I suspect,” he replied. “I like to start my mornings with the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
. Then I like to see if the think tanks on Massachusetts Avenue are producing anything new.” It was a clever jab; the Washington, D.C., think tank I worked for at the time was on Massachusetts Avenue.

When we last spoke, only months before the end of the regime he served, he tried unconvincingly to argue that the ruling party was more dynamic and capable than it appeared. “
The NDP can reinvent itself,” he told me. “It has the people and the ideas.” In fact, there was no evidence this was true. But he was right that one concession the regime had made was perhaps “the most significant political development of the last seven years”—namely, the decision to hold the 2005 presidential election. In that year, for the first time, President Mubarak went on the campaign trail and asked Egyptians for their vote. (For his first twenty-four years, voters had simply been presented with a yes-or-no referendum.) One of the Middle East’s oldest dictators was out on the stump, shaking hands and working rope lines. And Kamal, who headed up Mubarak’s communications team, set up a campaign war room worthy of James Carville. Young staffers picked
apart demographic data on voters block by block. Advance teams monitored turnout at thousands of polling places. Expensive, well-produced campaign ads presented the elder Mubarak as the reform candidate. Kamal told me his inspiration was American presidential races, in particular Bill Clinton’s 1992 White House run.

All of which meant that for the first time, Mubarak also had a presidential opponent. Ayman Nour, a lawyer and former legislator, was Mubarak’s main election adversary, and he took advantage of his time on the campaign hustings to pound away at the regime’s corruption and abuse of the emergency law. No one expected Nour to beat Mubarak in the polls; what votes the president’s slick campaign could not capture could still be gained through rigging and stuffed ballot boxes. But Nour’s presidential run was more significant than whatever votes it could collect. In allowing even a sham contest, the regime had made another vital concession in its bid to remain in power. The regime could never again choose its leader without a credible claim that he had been popularly elected. Another red line had been redrawn.

Ali Eddin Hilal had told me that Mubarak understood he could no longer practice business as usual. Mubarak’s strategy was to create a facade of political liberalization so he could try to ensure that the regime never fell victim to the real thing. If all freedoms and reforms were created by the state, then the state could at least try to keep liberalization on its own terms. Mubarak might loosen the noose around the country’s neck and then tighten the rope, only to loosen it again later. But it was never in question who held the rope.