The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (36 page)

That wasn’t the case in Egypt in 1952. In the end, the people did not slaughter their royals or even put their king on trial. Instead, the military threw him a going-away party, complete with a twenty-one-gun salute. At dusk on July 26, three days after the officers had seized control, King Farouk simply boarded his yacht and sailed to the Italian coast, spending the rest of his days in Capri. Egyptians called it a revolution, but it was the world’s most genteel military coup. More important, the Egyptian people played no part in it.

In this respect, it could not have been more different from 2011. The people did not wait to see if Gamal Mubarak would be more just or generous than his father. They did not wait for the military to rise up against a thoroughly corrupt regime, as it did in 1952. They, instead, spoke for themselves and became their own independent force for change, amassing in the square, defending their ground, and shattering whatever illusion of legitimacy Mubarak still retained. And, however dramatic those first eighteen days were, the impact of this
popular rebellion was far greater than the first spasms of courage that brought people out to the streets. Indeed, because the rebellion was a homegrown popular movement fed, nurtured, and protected by the people themselves, they felt an intrinsic ownership of it.

In 2011, the political life of Egypt woke from a long slumber. I saw it for myself a month after Mubarak was deposed, on the eve of the vote for the military’s constitutional amendments. Although the debate over the amendments was intense in the lead-up to the vote, in some ways the differing opinions were less important than the vote itself. For the first time, millions of Egyptians would be lining up to cast ballots they could honestly believe would be counted. The night before the referendum I walked by outdoor cafés in downtown Cairo. The only topic of conversation seemed to be the next day’s vote. Friends were debating this and that clause of the amendments. Family members were trying to persuade each other to vote either yes or no. Just before midnight, the streets leading to Tahrir Square filled with people holding up posters and placards doing last-minute canvassing. In one of its more absurd directives, the military had issued an order two days earlier forbidding the media to print or discuss anything about the constitutional referendum that might sway opinion. But the Egyptian people did not need to rely on journalists to debate their political future. As one activist told me, “
These days everyone is a constitutional expert.”

Today, Egypt exists somewhere between dictatorship and democracy. As difficult as it is to imagine the country going back to the authoritarianism of Mubarak, it is by no means certain what Egypt will become. Because of the dominant role the military will continue to play, skepticism about the country’s democratic prospects is certainly warranted. Egypt may move closer to the rough outline of a democracy—cleaner elections, more boisterous opposition parties, even an occasional rotation of leaders—while retaining much of its illiberal substance. Forty years ago, before the beginning of the democratic wave that began in 1972, the line that separated democracies and dictatorships was clearer. At that time, only a handful of authoritarian states masked themselves behind a democratic facade. Today, several dozen states—many that were once thought to be on the road to democracy—have become only a few shades less dark than their
authoritarian past. Asia, Africa, and central Asia are littered with governments that are more democratic in form than function. The imitation of democracy isn’t a mere possibility for these regimes; it is the reality.

Fortunately, many Egyptians do not need to be told this. They have a healthy skepticism left over from years of lies. It is worth remembering that it wasn’t always obvious that Hosni Mubarak would become one of the Middle East’s longest-serving dictators. In the beginning, he cut a very different figure from his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. He appeared set on reversing many of Sadat’s strictest policies. A month before he was assassinated, Sadat had locked up more than fifteen hundred political prisoners, many of them important elites who had been guilty of nothing more than disagreeing with him. Academics, journalists, lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats were among those thrown into Tora Prison. When Mubarak became president, he began releasing them almost immediately. The early Mubarak claimed that “democracy is the best guarantee of our future” and he had “no wish to monopolize decision making.” Opposition political parties were allowed to reopen their doors and once again publish their newspapers. The number of NGOs and civil society groups grew. Mubarak changed the election rules that had been devised under Sadat in a way that initially proved more generous to opposition parties. Members of the opposition were invited to travel with the president when he went abroad. Mubarak even suggested early on that no one should be president for more than two terms.

But for all his talk of moving forward with “democracy in doses,” clues soon emerged of a different agenda. Mubarak did not appoint a vice president. Each of his predecessors had eventually been replaced by his No. 2. Despite this tradition, or perhaps because of it, Mubarak never designated his own successor—only naming Omar Suleiman vice president in his final days, as the crowds in Tahrir Square grew in size. The emergency law he invoked after Sadat’s assassination was not relaxed a single day in thirty years. The only instrument of the government that saw its power and influence steadily increase was the office of the president. “
The creation of the dictatorship we have,” Gasser Abdel-Razek, the human rights activist, told me, “started the day he took office and people decided not to push him.”

In retrospect, it was a crucial mistake. Mubarak was weak and politically inexperienced. Sadat had tapped him as vice president precisely because he showed none of the ambition or spark of being the nation’s next leader. In the aftermath of an assassination and with a government in crisis, Mubarak needed to buy himself time. And Egypt’s public figures, including the political elites who were released from jail cells across Cairo in the fall of 1981, accepted the small, incremental reforms Mubarak offered in exchange. They gave Mubarak the time he needed to master the game of playing the opposition parties off each other and playing to people’s fears of radical Islam. A year before Mubarak was finally pushed from power, Abdel-Razek told me, “We’re paying the price today for the fact that those people that came out repeated a common mistake of giving him the benefit of the doubt. They gave him the chance to develop his own tactics and techniques to continue running the country for thirty years.”

In July 2011, a delegation of Egyptian generals from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces visited Washington, D.C. In a private meeting with leading Egypt experts, they delivered a familiar message. “
Please trust that we are not an extension of the last regime. We are fully committed to human rights and the right of the Egyptian people to live in dignity,” Major General Said el-Assar told the assembled. “Please trust me in this.”

The Egyptian people are not novices. They know they are now the biggest check on history repeating itself. And they can be forgiven their skepticism; they know, better than anyone, that giving the remnants of an authoritarian regime time is never in the best interest of those who seek to establish a genuine democracy. Their vigilance in the months and years ahead will ultimately determine whether 2011 was truly the year of revolution.

T
he workshop takes place at a run-down seaside hotel five minutes from the airport. Outside, vacationers relax on plastic lounge chairs lining the beach. Faux-thatch umbrellas shield them from the summer sun as they drink dark bottles of beer and stare out at the Mediterranean. The beach is close enough to the airport to be on the flight path for incoming planes. Every twenty minutes children yell and wave their hands toward the sky as another jet makes its approach. Besides a few palm trees, the landscape is dreary. A string of fish restaurants and tired hotels, generously described as two stars, dot a sunbaked road that hugs the water’s edge, leading to the city center. Many of the lots are abandoned or unkempt. The salmon-colored building next door advertises “Beachside Apartments,” but the only residents appear to be feral cats and the hundreds of pigeons that roost on the balconies with closed doors. The island boasts posh resorts and fine beaches. But they are not here. This stretch is a vacationland for locals and a handful of European budget travelers. It gets no mention in Fodor’s.

We meet on the hotel’s second floor. Twenty people—thirteen men and seven women—make their way into a conference room and take their seats around tables that have been arranged in a horseshoe. They are from their mid-twenties to their early forties in age, although they all dress like students. A lecturer addresses the group, occasionally pointing to the PowerPoint presentation projected on the wall behind him.

The hotel has designated its second floor for meetings and events, and with the help of partitions and dividers it can host a couple of functions at the same time. On this particular afternoon, a local weight-loss group akin to Weight Watchers is in the room next door. We must pass through their meeting, nodding to a group of thirty or forty heavyset older women, to attend our workshop.

Every few minutes, we hear shouts and clapping as one of the participants reports how much weight she has lost since their last get-together. At one point, it gets loud enough that the lecturer in our room has to repeat himself, raising his voice over the din outside. “If your movement grows too rapidly, it’s very dangerous. You won’t have the necessary structures in place. You won’t have the discipline. You risk a Libya,” he says, referring to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s massacre of demonstrators several months earlier. The slide behind him lists the “pillars of support” for an authoritarian regime.

Faintly, a woman is heard saying, “Nine kilos!” The words are met by a round of applause.

In this shabby hotel, in a nondescript corner of a Mediterranean island, twenty activists had come to attend a clandestine meeting on revolution: specifically, how to start one. Their instructors in this weeklong course were two former members of the Serbian youth group Otpor, which ousted the dictator Slobodan Miloševic in 2000. Today, they work as trainers for an organization called the Centre for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, otherwise known as CANVAS. The Belgrade-based organization, staffed with veterans from nonviolent democratic struggles in Serbia, Georgia, Lebanon, the Philippines, and South Africa, is one of the leading groups training democratic political movements around the world. In the past nine years, this outfit has advised movements in more than fifty countries. The list reads like a global field manual for the battle between dictators and democrats: Belarus, Bolivia, Burma, Egypt, Georgia, Guatemala, Iran, the Maldives, Tibet, Venezuela, Vietnam, West Sahara, and Zimbabwe. The trainers running this seminar are two of CANVAS’s most experienced instructors; they have run more than seventy workshops between them, in dozens of countries.

The workshop’s twenty students are all members of a democratic movement from a country in the Middle East. (In order to attend this
weeklong seminar, I had to agree to ground rules to preserve the security of those involved. Namely, I could not reveal the location of the meeting, the country the activists call home, or the identity of any of the participants.) They came with many questions: How could they build support for their cause? How could they counter a regime that was becoming more draconian? What protest actions might shake people from their apathy? They wanted to be more effective as an organization, to make the leap from a protest group to a resistance movement. But after eighteen months, they had hit a wall. They feared that they had become reactive, predictable. “
We always feel in a state of emergency. It blocks our thinking,” says one of the activists. “We continue doing what we already know how to do.”

For the group’s leadership, the workshop is more than a lesson in tactics and methods; it’s a crossroads. The movement, which can reliably call out several hundred people to the streets, grew faster than anyone anticipated. Much of this growth came from activists who engaged in direct actions and then joined forces to make common cause. But the leadership, a core of five or six people, want to take the movement in a more professional, calculated, and strategic direction. The trouble is they know that some of the group’s lieutenants, a second-tier leadership of say twenty to thirty people, are split on their objectives. Some fully share their more professionalized goals. Others, they fear, almost enjoy protesting for protesting’s sake. These members would be quick to call a more pragmatic campaign a sellout of the movement’s purest revolutionary goals. The group’s top leaders are prepared for this division or disagreement to come out into the open, and they almost seek it. Although it may thin their ranks temporarily, they suspect they will require a greater unity of purpose if they are to be successful and become a more sophisticated and potent political force. So they have come to CANVAS, in part, to provoke this discussion, win over some of their colleagues, and perhaps leave some realizing they are on the fringe. “
We are not thinking through what we gain from our actions. We need to agree on clear objectives,” one of the leaders told me. “If that means we are fewer, at least for a little while, then so be it.”