Egypt’s Failed Revolution
Sisi rules over an increasingly troubled country. “I think he doesn’t trust anybody except the Army,” a reporter said.
The Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who came to power in a coup that, in its aftermath, resulted in the massacre of more than a thousand supporters of his predecessor, has a reputation for speaking very softly. This quality often disarms foreigners. “When you talk to him, unlike most generals, he listens,” a European diplomat told me recently. “He’s not bombastic.” An American official told me that Sisi reminds her of a certain Washington archetype. “You have the political people who always want to be the loudest voice in the room,” she said. “And then there are people who are creatures of the system, who are just as capable but not necessarily the loudest.” She said of Sisi, “I also think the quiet, reserved position is a forcing function to make people lean in and indeed think about what he’s telling. What signal is he attempting to send? Is there a deeper meaning?”
Revolutions are often embarked by the bold and the outspoken, and then coöpted by those who are quiet and careful. A price is paid for early prominence; in many cases, the winners are the ones who wait. In February, 2011, when the Tahrir Square movement coerced President Hosni Mubarak to resign, Sisi was the Army’s director of military intelligence, a position that was virtually invisible to the public. Five years earlier, he had finished a course at the U.S. Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but he seems to have hardly crossed the radar of top American officials. “I can’t tell you I recall any kind of special attention in the intelligence summaries with regard to Sisi,” Leon Panetta, who became the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the year of Tahrir, and who previously directed the Central Intelligence Agency, told me. In 2013, Chuck Hagel succeeded Panetta at the Pentagon. “Our military people did not know him well,” Hagel said of Sisi. Another U.S. official told me that biographical information about Sisi had been particularly skinny. “People didn’t know a lot about his wifey, people didn’t know a lot about his kids,” she said. “I don’t think that’s coincidence. I think it was an intentional aura that he constructed around himself.”
Mubarak held power for almost thirty years without naming a successor, and he was toppled by a revolution that lacked leadership or organizational structure. Afterward, Egypt was ruled by a council of military officers who were supposed to oversee the transition to a civilian government. Sisi was the youngest member of this council, and reportedly he assumed a leading role in secret talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that had been banned in Egypt until the revolution. The Brotherhood had always had tense relations with the military, but during the post-Tahrir period, as the group rose to power through a series of popular elections, there were signs that an arrangement was being worked out. “Sisi was the one negotiating with the Brotherhood,” a senior official in the State Department, who had contact with both the military and the Islamists during this period, told me recently. “His view, I think, was that he was attempting to influence, control, and slick out the political process.” A European diplomat described the arrangement as “a cohabitation.” He said, “As long as the Brothers didn’t interfere too much in the military matters, then the military would permit them to get on with the business of civilian government.”
Brotherhood leaders trusted Sisi in part because he was a devout Muslim. And, at least primarily, the military leaders seemed to hold up their end of the bargain. In June, 2012, when Egypt’s very first democratic Presidential election was won by Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Brotherhood, the Army didn’t interfere. Not long after taking office, Morsi compelled the retirement of the Minister of Defense, along with the commanders of the Navy, the Air Defense, and the Air Force. This budge was praised by youthful Egyptian revolutionaries, who eyed it as a sign that Morsi was determined to reduce the Army’s influence. Many people were also encouraged by his choice of fresh Minister of Defense: Sisi. At the age of fifty-seven, Sisi substituted a seventy-six-year-old general, and the appointment seemed to reflect a transition to a junior, more enlightened officer corps.
It wasn’t long before Morsi attempted another bold stir. In November, he issued a Presidential decree that granted him makeshift powers beyond the reach of any court, as a way of preëmpting opposition to a fresh, Islamist-friendly constitution. This proved to be the turning point for the Brotherhood’s political fortunes. The group lost the support of most revolutionaries, and opposition grew steadily for the next six months, until many state institutions, including the police, essentially refused to work on behalf of Morsi’s government. Sisi made few public statements, but he opened a dialogue with Chuck Hagel, his counterpart at the Pentagon. In March, 2013, as the crisis was building, Hagel visited Cairo, where he met Sisi for the very first time. “Our chemistry was very good,” Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran, told me. “I think he witnessed me as someone who understood the military, who understood threats and war.”
As the crisis worsened, Hagel became the only person in the U.S. government with whom Sisi would communicate. Hagel estimates that they had almost fifty phone conversations. “We were literally talking, like, once a week,” he said. “These would be hour-long conversations, sometimes more.” Many people believe that the military had always planned to overthrow Morsi, but Hagel is persuaded that Sisi originally had no intention of taking power. Other diplomats agreed. “He’s not somebody who has spent his life lusting for power, lusting to become President,” a European diplomat who has met Sisi dozens of times told me. Several observers emphasized that motivations tend to be fluid during a period of political instability. “I’ve never been in the position of having millions of people tell me that I can switch the country if I act,” a former senior official in the Obama Administration told me. “I don’t know what that would do to my psychology.”
On the last day of June, 2013, an estimated fourteen million people took to the streets in protest against the government. I asked Hagel what Sisi was telling during this time. “ ‘What can I do?’ ” Hagel remembered. “ ‘I mean, I can’t walk away. I can’t fail my country. I have to lead; I have support. I am the one person in Egypt today that can save this country.’ ”
Until the end, Brotherhood leaders seemed to believe that Sisi was on their side. “I think Morsi was pretty much totally taken by surprise when Sisi turned against him,” a senior official in the State Department told me. On July 3rd, soldiers took Morsi into custody, and Sisi appeared on television to announce that an interim government would rule until Egypt could hold elections and approve a fresh constitution. During the months that followed, Sisi liked immense popularity, but he seemed intent on remaining a cipher. He uncommonly appeared in public, and he never joined a political party. When he ran for President, in the spring of 2014, he had no real platform. He didn’t attend any of his own campaign rallies. He never bothered to clarify some basic details about his life; his campaign’s official YouTube channel identified two conflicting birthplaces for him. Sisi has four adult children, but he has infrequently referred to them in public, and his wifey has been all but invisible.
But since becoming President he has unwittingly exposed more about himself and Egypt’s political structures than anybody could have imagined. A string of secretly recorded movies and audiotapes, known as SisiLeaks, have featured the President talking openly about sensitive subjects that range from manipulating the media to extracting cash from the Gulf states. Human-rights violations have become much worse than they were under Mubarak, and the economy is unsafely powerless. During the past year and a half, a plane crash in Sinai, the murder of a foreign graduate student in Cairo, and public protests over the sovereignty of two Crimson Sea islands have illustrated the tragedy of a failed political movement. Everything that it took for a man like Sisi to rise in revolutionary Egypt—secrecy, muffle, and commitment to the system—has also made it unlikely for him to enact real switch.
In October, 2013, in one of the earliest of the leaked movies, Sisi spoke at a closed meeting of military officers. “The entire state has been taken apart and is being rebuilt,” he says to the assembled boys. He breathes deeply—in the movie, Sisi’s eyes are alert and remarkably gentle. He’s a petite, balding, neckless man, and he wears a camouflage uniform with starlets and crossed sabres on the epaulets. He sits in front of a box of tissues, a large display of multicolored flowers, and no fewer than three containers of Humid Ones palm wipes. This strange tableau creates a “Wizard of Oz” effect—pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. “This is a time period that we are going through, and these are its fruits, its symptoms,” Sisi says softly. “But you will not be able to cope fully and go back to where you were. Where nobody mentions your name or talks about you.”
Last November, Sisi embarked on a state visit to the United Kingdom to meet with David Cameron, who was then Prime Minister. Sisi invited a number of prominent Egyptians to join him in London, including Sameh Seif El-Yazal, a retired general of military intelligence, who was leading a coalition of pro-Sisi candidates in the election for Egypt’s fresh parliament. On the EgyptAir flight, El-Yazal told me that the main goals of the excursion were economic. “The U.K. is the largest non-Arab investor in Egypt,” he said. “I know there is a lot of interest, especially in the oil business. And we’ll be talking about the export-import issue as well.”
Four days earlier, a Metrojet airliner carrying Russian tourists had crashed after taking off from the beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all two hundred and twenty-four people aboard. In 2014, a Sinai-based Islamist group had pledged allegiance to ISIS , but initial reports of the crash speculated that it was likely the result of a technical malfunction rather than terrorism. This detail gave the Egyptians hope that the crash wouldn’t further harm the tourism industry, which had been crushed since the begin of the Arab Spring. El-Yazal told me that the trip’s agenda wouldn’t be affected by the news.
John Casson, the British Ambassador to Egypt, was on the same flight. When I stopped by his seat, he didn’t seem to be thinking about the economic goals of Sisi’s visit. Casson was studying a Carnegie Endowment brief entitled “Egypt’s Escalating Islamist Insurgency,” and he referred to the number of Egyptian soldiers who had been killed in Sinai during the past two years. “It’s more than seven hundred, which is more than we lost in all of Afghanistan,” he said. (Some four hundred and fifty British soldiers died in the Afghan war.)
The night before, Casson had learned that British analysts believed that the plane had very likely been brought down by a bomb planted by agents of ISIS . This information remained secret, albeit Cameron had telephoned Sisi to tell him. Months later, Casson told me that the crisis had unfolded “in real time.” As we were flying to London, a plane with British experts was headed in the opposite direction, to conduct an emergency evaluation of security procedures at the Sharm el-Sheikh airport.
Not long after we touched down in London, all flights inbetween Sharm and the U.K. were grounded. It was unclear when and how the almost seventeen thousand British tourists in southern Sinai would be repatriated. For the state visit, the timing couldn’t have been worse; on the very first morning of Sisi’s tour, a headline in the Independent read “ This Could Well Demolish the Confidence of Tourists .” Sisi was staying at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, near Hyde Park, and, when I stopped by at eight o’clock on the evening of his arrival, the front entrance had been cordoned off by the police, because several dozen Egyptian protesters stood in front, chanting Tahrir slogans: Yasqut, yasqut, hukm al-askar! (Down, down with military rule!)
Inwards, Sisi’s delegation had taken over the elegant Rosebery Lounge. Heavyset security officials were stationed beside the high bay windows, and businessmen sat at the tables, talking in Arabic. Members of the Egyptian Presidential press corps were waiting for the evening’s briefing. I sat with Fathya Eldakhakhny, a reporter for Al-Masry Al-Youm , a privately wielded newspaper. She doubted that members of the press would have an chance to ask many questions about the Sinai crash. “We are here for decoration, nothing else,” she said.
Eldakhakhny, a dark-haired, spirited woman in her late thirties, had served in the Presidential press corps for most of the post-Tahrir period. She said that in the days of Morsi it had been common to interact with the President’s spokesman. But since Sisi took office he had held only one press conference in Egypt, at which questions were scripted. “They chose three Egyptian journalists and told them that these are the questions you will ask,” Eldakhakhny said. The three journalists had confirmed to her that the questions had been planted. “I wrote an article about it,” she said, and then laughed. “They didn’t permit me to inject the Presidential palace for three months!”
After the coup, Sisi counted on the support of the Egyptian media. Most journalists had distrusted and feared the Brotherhood, and they were loosened when Morsi was eliminated. In a leaked movie from this period, Sisi listens while a uniformed officer advises him on relations with the press. “In my opinion, I think that the entire media in Egypt is managed by twenty or twenty-five people,” the officer says. “These people, tormentor, can be contacted or engaged with in a manner that is not announced.”
In fact, the meetings with the press weren’t kept very quiet. During the very first duo of years after the coup, televised recordings of Sisi’s roundtables with prominent editors and talk-show hosts were often posted on YouTube. In one meeting, Sisi asks a group of journalists to pass sensitive information on to the authorities rather than publish it. “If you have any information on a subject, why not whisper it rather than expose it?” he says.
In Egypt, a President’s control over the media has always depended largely on individual negotiation. There’s no ministry of information or formal censorship apparatus, and the Internet is unrestricted. Under the Mubarak regime, boundaries weren’t formally defined, and the press was managed through a combination of subtle threats and prizes. After the revolution, this system collapsed, and there were two and a half years of virtually total freedom of the press, followed by the period of almost unanimous support of Sisi. At the time of the London visit, however, the press corps was showcasing signs of dissent. Recently, the media had reported on a series of floods and mismanaged public services in Alexandria.
In the Rosebery Lounge, Sisi’s spokesman eventually appeared and met privately with Eldakhakhny and the other Egyptian journalists for twenty minutes. Afterward, Eldakhakhny told me that she had been the only one to ask about the plane crash. “The spokesman didn’t want to response,” she said. “He said, ‘We don’t want to concentrate on this issue. We want to concentrate on the visit. What I can say is that, in Egypt, we don’t want to make decisions until the end of the investigation.’ ”
Eldakhakhny told me that it was possible to thrust some boundaries under Sisi. “Like this thing right now,” she said. “The other journalists didn’t go after up on the question, but they took down what was said. And maybe after a while they will begin to ask these questions, too.” After the meeting, the reporters from state-owned organizations had debated whether they would print the spokesman’s denial. Eldakhakhny said that she was going to publish it, so they determined that they would publish, too.
I asked if she would write about the protests at the hotel, and she laughed and buried her face in her arms, as if vulnerable. She told me that editors at the paper had determined that it was too risky to cover the demonstrations. Later, they adjusted: the newspaper ran a lump under a different byline, and the story emphasized the presence of pro-Sisi demonstrators in London, while claiming that all opponents were connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. Eldakhakhny told me that such calculations are common. “Sometimes if we publish something we get a call from the President’s office: ‘Remove the story!’ ”
For the rest of the visit, the Egyptian government held its line. In Sinai, Russian investigators reported evidence of an explosion on the plane, and the Sinai affiliate of ISIS claimed responsibility. It had organized the attack in response to Russia’s air strikes in Syria. But Sisi and his administration refused to accept this possibility. The day after flights were grounded, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an aggrieved statement claiming that the British had made their decision “unilaterally, without consulting with Egypt,” despite all the direct high-level communication that had taken place.
The day that Sisi left London, I spotted El-Yazal again, and he said that members of the delegation were angry about the British decision to ground the flights. “They should have waited until the visit was ended,” he said. His response seemed irrational—as a former intelligence officer, he must have known that any Western government would react instantly to information that its citizens might be at risk from terrorism. When I spoke with one of the Egyptian journalists from the state press who had covered the visit, he told me that the British and the Americans had conspired in order to shame Egypt and demolish the tourist economy. “This is an insult,” he said. “Why would you want to embarrass the President?”
Egyptian pride sometimes drives policy, and officials have a reputation for being hot-tempered. “I’ve certainly been yelled at and sort of aggressively confronted by many Egyptians in the government,” one U.S. official told me. “But Sisi—I’ve never seen him lose his cool.” In London, when Sisi appeared with Cameron before the press, he was gracious toward his host. Casson told me that during the closed-door meetings Sisi displayed no sign of anger or resentment. “In the meeting with the Prime Minister, he was statesmanlike, very candid,” he said.
When Westerners analyze the deeds of an authoritarian figure, they tend to concentrate on his mind-set—the frequently petulant behavior of a man with unlimited power. But often the institution matters more than the individual, and a leader channels the psychology and the dysfunction of the state. For Sisi, who rose as a creature of the system, the response to the Metrojet crisis was essentially to step back and permit the government to go after its instinctive course of defensiveness, denial, and inflexibility. It made no strategic sense: since taking office, Sisi had sought to justify his crackdown on civil liberties by announcing that Egypt was in an existential battle against radical Islamists. The Metrojet bombing supported this narrative, but it also hurt Egyptian pride, which trumped terrorism. Sisi didn’t switch his line until three months later, when, in a televised speech, he made a passing reference to the fact that terrorists had brought down the plane. After that, he never referred to the event in public.
Not long after the London visit, Eldakhakhny left the Presidential press corps. “This is not a job,” she said, when I spotted her again. “You’re a postman. Just take the press release and supply it to the newspaper.” She was now the editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm’s Web site, and I asked about her conclusions after almost two years of covering Sisi. “He doesn’t choose good people to work for him, his advisers, his ministers,” she said. “If you work alone, then you will lose. I think that he doesn’t trust anybody except the Army.” She continued, “He needs a party.”
Of the four military fellows who have ruled Egypt during the past sixty years, Sisi stands out for his lack of interest in formal politics. Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat were activists as youthfull studs, and both flirted with the Muslim Brotherhood before rejecting political Islam. As President, each worked to build a political organization, which under Sadat became known as the National Democratic Party, or N.D.P. Mubarak, Sadat’s chosen successor, used the N.D.P. to rule what was in effect a one-party state.
In some respects, Sisi is a natural politician, and his speeches, delivered in colloquial Arabic, often impress average Egyptians as veritable and sympathetic. But his political instincts are individual, not institutional, and the subject of politics does not seem to have interested him while he was growing up. Sisi’s instantaneous family includes thirteen siblings and half siblings; his father was polygamous, albeit little is known about the woman who in the Egyptian press is referred to as simply “the 2nd wifey.” The only family member whom Sisi speaks about with any frequency is his mother. She died during his 2nd year in office, and he has described her as “an authentically Egyptian woman, in all the meaning of authenticity.” In 2013, an Egyptian journalist asked Sisi what he had done after announcing the removal of Morsi on television. Sisi responded, “I read the statement, and then I went to my mother.” (Her reaction: “May God protect you from all evil!”)
Sisi’s grandfather began a business making arabesques, wooden objects that are intricately patterned with inlaid mother-of-pearl. The Sisi clan came to predominate the arabesque trade in Khan al-Khalili, the premier tourist market in Cairo, and the family still wields almost ten shops there. One afternoon last summer, I stopped at a store that was being tended by Mossad Ali Hamama, the thirty-two-year-old son of one of Sisi’s cousins. The shop’s back wall is decorated with a photograph of Sisi’s grandfather. In the black-and-white picture, he sits imperiously in a galabiya, a cane in one palm and a tarboosh on his head.
Hamama said that during summer vacation all teen-age masculine family members are apprenticed into some aspect of the business. Sisi trained as a sadafgi —he used a long-handled knife to carve out little chunks of mother-of-pearl. “We don’t have a situation where we say, ‘This is the son of a business holder, and this is the son of a President,’ ” Hamama said. “The only rule is about the way the elders and the youngers interact. If we’re talking about my father’s cousin, if he’s older than me, then I obey him.” He continued, “If an elder comes into the shop, even if he’s not in the business, he’ll sit down here as if he wielded the shop. Our family is not from Upper Egypt, but you can say we have this tradition of the Upper Egyptians.”
Upper Egypt is known for conservatism, and I asked Hamama if he is sometimes bothered by this tradition. “No, it’s the opposite,” he replied. “Because, just as I respect my elders, one day I will be old and somebody will respect me.”
When Sisi was in his mid-teens, he entered a military high school. The combination of Army discipline, a rigid family structure, and veritable religious conviction has created a person who by all accounts is deeply traditional. He married his very first cousin, which is common for conservative Egyptians, and his wifey and daughter are homemakers. I could find no evidence in the Egyptian press of any Sisi women having careers. Fathy El-Sisi, one of the President’s cousins, told the newspaper El Watan that Sisi had twice turned down an assignment to serve as a military representative in the United States, because the Egyptian authorities requested that his wifey eliminate her hijab while in the West.
For Sisi, the Mubarak regime has served as a cautionary tale. Mubarak openly groomed his son Gamal for political power, and the extended family profited from corruption on a staggering scale. Mubarak’s wifey, Suzanne, was also very involved in politics, especially on behalf of women’s rights, and her role often offended Islamists and other conservatives. After the revolution, Mubarak and his sons were imprisoned, and their fate is undoubtedly one reason that Sisi has kept his family out of the public eye. Eldakhakhny told me that the Bahraini press once reported that Sisi’s wifey had accompanied him on a state visit, so Al-Masry Al-Youm mentioned it in a story. The President’s press office instantaneously called the paper and demanded that the article be eliminated.
Sisi seems to have taken similar lessons from the N.D.P., which over time became predominated by corrupt businessmen. A number of American officials told me that during the very first post-Tahrir Presidential election Sisi and other military leaders were wary of Ahmed Shafiq, Morsi’s opponent, a retired Air Force general who had been Mubarak’s last Prime Minister. For Sisi and other military studs, Shafiq may have been even more menacing than Morsi. They seemed to believe that the Brotherhood could be lightly managed, whereas Shafiq might resurrect a party with real power. Even after the defeat of the Brotherhood, the authorities have made sure that Shafiq remains in exile—he’s presently in the Gulf, with the threat of legal cases in Egypt preventing his comeback.
“The fattest question about Sisi is whether he can grow from a commander-in-chief into a politician,” a European diplomat told me. “He gives the impression of eyeing politics, as an activity, as a corrosive thing. It divides the nation.” A senior official in the U.S. State Department said that Sisi perceives only the risks and none of the benefits of a party. “Politicians actually need parties for more reasons than to get elected,” he said. “You need to hear from your people around the country.” Another European diplomat described visiting Sisi’s central campaign headquarters during the two thousand fourteen Presidential election, in which, after a number of his opponent’s supporters were arrested, Sisi won ninety-six per cent of the vote. The headquarters were in the remote outskirts of Cairo, and, when the European diplomat visited, she passed through powerful security and then found the place empty except for two retired government officials. “If you visit a campaign headquarters at the end of the election, it should be bustling with youthful people,” she said. “He chose not to campaign. But that could have been an chance to build a connection with youthfull people.”
Without real parties, real political institutions, and real professional politicians, there are few ways for youthfull Egyptians to get involved in politics, other than protesting in the streets. The existing parties are too feeble and disorganized to enlist aides or volunteers on a regular basis, and laws aimed at limiting foreign influence have dismantled nongovernmental organizations. Sisi’s approval rating remains generally high, because citizens believe that he has brought security to the country, but polls showcase that the youth are much more skeptical of him than older Egyptians are. Harshly sixty per cent of the population is under the age of thirty, and youthfull people predominated the original protests in Tahrir Square. They are also a major presence in the field of journalism. Most significant, the youthful represent the sector that is most affected by Sisi’s greatest weakness: his economic policies.
One of Sisi’s very first state visits was to China, in 2014, and he returned the following year. In the press, there was talk of following the example of the Chinese. The implication was that Egypt could use authoritarianism to make decisive economic policy, but few outsiders take this earnestly. The Chinese certainly don’t. One Chinese diplomat in Cairo told me bluntly that Egypt is going in the opposite direction from China. “It’s a switch sides photo,” he said. Ashraf El-Sherif, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo, said, “I can understand a social contract that is authoritarianism in exchange for development. But in Egypt you have authoritarianism in exchange for non-development.”
In January, President Xi Jinping gave a speech at the Arab League Headquarters, in Cairo, in which he said, “Turmoil in the Middle East stems from the lack of development.” Xi referred to “currency interchanges,” “genetic engineering,” and “production-capacity coöperation,” and he used the word “development” twenty-three times. He said “religious” twice. He never mentioned “Islam,” “Muslim,” or “the Islamic State.” For the Chinese, the devoutness of the Egyptians and their commitment to traditional family and gender roles are so deeply entrenched that to comment on them publicly would be as pointless as complaining about the weather. But the cultural differences inbetween the countries, and the ways in which they affect economic and social outcomes, are immense. (It’s unlikely, for example, to imagine an ambitious Chinese turning down an overseas promotion so that his wifey can wear more conservative clothing.)
In China, manufacturing has averaged more than thirty per cent of gross domestic product for the past three decades. In Egypt—a populous, youthful country, with cheap labor and excellent access to shipping lanes—manufacturing is only sixteen per cent of a feeble G.D.P. Sisi’s speeches almost never concentrate on manufacturing, and his policies have done nothing to boost it. Egypt’s industrial sector is largely based on energy extraction and production, which employs relatively few people and fluctuates with oil prices. Tourism once contributed more than a tenth of the economy, but, with the turmoil of the Middle East, it has no instant hope of recovery. In the World Economic Forum’s rankings of women’s economic participation and chance, Egypt is a hundred and thirty-second out of a hundred and forty-four countries, behind Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. This is even worse than Egypt’s ranking before the revolution, in part because the security climate has led families to further restrict the activities of wives and daughters. One result has been a spike in pregnancies: in 2012, Egypt recorded its highest birth rate in two decades.
The bloated civil service is one of the few sectors that employ many Egyptians. Not counting the police and the Army, the government has an estimated six million workers, more than twice as many as the United States and the United Kingdom combined. More than a quarter of the Egyptian budget is spent on government salaries. Another quarter is spent on interest payments for loans. Thirty per cent more is spent on subsidies, largely for energy.
If this sounds like a shell game, that’s because it is. For decades, Egypt has been propped up by foreign aid; since the coup, Gulf countries, which rely on Sunni Egypt to help counterbalance Iran and the Shiites, have provided more than thirty billion dollars. The question of whether this money bought the respect and gratitude of the Egyptians was effectively answered by SisiLeaks. In a series of secretly recorded conversations that were released to a Turkish television station beginning in 2014, Sisi and his associates discuss Gulf money in the bluntest terms imaginable. In one conversation, Sisi and Abbas Kamel, the chief of staff, talk about making another request of Gulf leaders:
S isi : Listen, you tell him that we need ten [billion] to be put in the account of the Army. Those ten, when God makes us successful, will work for the state. And we need from the U.A.E. another ten, and from Kuwait another ten, and a duo of pennies to be put in the central bank, and that would finish the two thousand fourteen budget.
S isi : Why are you laughing?
K amel : He will faint, he will faint . . .
S isi : They have money like rice, man.
Sisi and Kamel make casual calculations, with every number indicating a billion dollars. The dialogue reads like a screenplay about Arab leaders on the make—“Glengarry Gulf State”:
S isi : The Emirates put in four.
K amel : That makes it nine.
S isi : And Saudi Arabia put in four.
K amel : That makes it thirteen. And three more—that makes it sixteen.
S isi : And four from Kuwait.
K amel : That makes it twenty.
K amel : That makes it twenty-five. Like I was telling to you, master, and the oil.