Chris Hedges—Inside Egypt

Posted on Oct 19, 2006

AP / Mohamed Al-Sehety

An Egyptian demonstrator chants anti-government slogans in front of riot police during a pro-judges protest outside the Supreme Court in Cairo last May.  The protests were emblematic of the burgeoning free-speech movement in what is effectively an autocratic country. In this article Truthdig contributor Chris Hedges chronicles how Egyptian authorities silence those who would speak out.

By Chris Hedges

Editor’s note: In this article, the former New York Times Middle East bureau chief spends 10 days living with a lower-middle-class Egyptian family to expose the side of Egypt off-limits to most tourists—one made desperate by poverty and kept fearful by the omnipresent threat of state security officials.

QUS, Egypt—A line of 80 buses and vans idles as black-uniformed police move with clipboards and snub-nosed machineguns from driver to driver collecting information.  Tourists, their faces beet-colored, peer from the aquarium-like windows of the buses above onto the teeming world of the street.  The high-pitched whine of motorcycles, the honking and squeal of car horns and the rumble of decrepit blue and white taxis unite in a strident chorus.  Bicyclists in long, flowing gray and white galabayas and turbans weave deftly in and out of the traffic.  On the banks of the river, flat-roofed tour boats and floating hotels with names like Cheops III or Hamees are berthed three to a pier.  Couples in bathing suits sit on the roofs, next to the pools, shaded by the awning stretched over the boats.

The buses, given a signal at the front of the line, begin to move forward.  The convoy rumbles toward the resorts on the Red Sea, escorted by police in pickup trucks.  The mud-walled villages, the irrigation ditches, the dirt yards with chickens and donkeys and cattle, the barefoot children, the fields of sugar cane, the whitewashed domed tombs of local sheiks, the spindly blue and white minarets, the donkey carts with old car tires, the overcrowded passenger buses belching diesel smoke and tilting under the weight of the human cargo and the dilapidated cars and tractors held up at intersections so the convoy can pass rapidly become a blur, an indistinct and faintly remembered reminder of another Egypt. 

There are two Egypts.  One is crushed by poverty and groaning under the weight of an autocratic regime that has been in place for nearly three decades.  This Egypt is increasingly desperate, as the country’s population growth soars, and its economy, burdened by corruption and a stifling state bureaucracy, stagnates.  Out of the bowels of this Egypt have come mounting anti-government street demonstrations, anger, frustration and renewed acts of terrorist violence by Islamic militants.  The second Egypt, the one on view to foreign visitors, bears little in common with the first Egypt.  It is a manicured and heavily guarded Egypt of air-conditioned hotels, Nile cruises, majestic archeological sites, afternoons by swimming pools, evenings in disco clubs, posh restaurants and shops crammed with copies of statues of Horus and Nefertiti and glass jewelry cases filled with silver and gold hieroglyphic pendants. 

But the clash between these two Egypts is mounting.  It has left tourists, confined to these islands of privilege, caught in the middle, seen as symbols of all that is denied to most Egyptians.  And once again, as they were a decade ago, foreigners are being targeted and killed by armed militants as the government of President Hosni Mubarak promises reforms, including presidential and parliamentary election reform that Mubarak’s critics dismiss as cosmetic.

My van, after about 20 minutes, pulls off the road at a police checkpoint.  An arrow on the sign in front of us points left to the city of Qus.  The police, who check the passports, match the names to the list they hold in front of them.  The convoy, speeding along the road, disappears ahead of us.  All foreigners are required by Egyptian authorities to travel on the roads in the south with armed escorts.  They are banned from wandering into the impoverished villages outside of Luxor or Aswan.  I am permitted to depart from the city only with the convoy and have been required to pick up a policeman to travel to Qus. 

A uniformed officer with an AK-47 and the handle of a pistol poking out from the back of his pants climbs into the van.  We turn off the pavement along a rutted road.  For the next 10 days I will live in the village of Gazira in a mud-brick house with an Egyptian family.  It will be a rare look at the Egypt few are allowed to examine, one that has been beyond the reach of most of the outside world since November 1997 when Islamic militants armed with guns and swords killed 58 tourists and four Egyptians in the temple of Hatshepsut outside Luxor.  The six assailants and three police also died in the attack.  The terrorist attack was followed by a severe, nationwide crackdown that largely broke the armed Islamic militant cells; that effort without doubt was aided by the widespread revulsion many Egyptians felt toward the murderous rampage.  But Islamic radicalism has ebbed and flowed in Egypt for a century.  It follows a pattern.  Severe state repression cripples the movement for about 10 years and militant campaigns then reappear, with each successive incarnation spawning more radical and deadlier tactics.

This war has ebbed and flowed since 1928, when the homegrown fundamentalist movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood was organized. Advocating a return to the “pure” Islam of the Prophet, the brotherhood grew during the 1940s into a radical political movement prone to antigovernment violence. It helped topple Egypt’s monarchy in 1952 and almost succeeded in assassinating Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954. One of the extremist groups that grew out of the brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, did succeed in killing President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, immediately declared a national state of emergency, suspending civil liberties and other freedoms that have never been restored. Despite these crackdowns, Egypt, the intellectual capital of the Arab world, has continued to produce ideas and political figures with influence far beyond its borders. Most notorious of these is Ayman al Zawahiri. A leader of Islamic Jihad, he helped organize Al Qaeda and serves as Osama bin Laden’s chief advisor.

The van turns down a dirt road when we reach the village, dropping down a small rise so that we travel along the border of wheat fields that throw off a dark, luxurious green.  The house lies at the end of the road.  Facing the two-story house are the fields and rows of palm trees, their tops crowned with delicate leaves bowing over the serrated brown trunks.  The palms cast a delicate, lacey shadow on the dirt.  On the far side of the fields is an irrigation canal and, beyond, the whitewashed tomb of a local sheik.  Birds chatter.  The Nile, which we cannot see, is close.  The river seems to have calmed the village, given it another pace, its wide, stately majesty decreeing that all movement, even human movements, should be slowed. 

We carry our bags into the house down a dirt path.  We step over a small drainage ditch.  The house has a blue wooden front door.  In the sky we see the faint half crescent of the moon.  For water, there is a green metal hand pump a few feet from the front door.  The pump empties into a small concrete trough.  Ahmed, a minor official in the government information office, invites us to sit in his front room.  His wife brings us glasses of tea.  We are soon joined by two “state security” officials.  The police officer who rode with us, wearing a green sweater with red bars for epaulets and beige slacks, is tall and lanky and towers over his two colleagues.  One of the new arrivals wears a long-sleeved beige shirt with a blue pen poking out of his shirt pocket and has closely cropped hair.  The other is wearing a gray galabaya and worn plastic sandals.

“This gentleman is from the general police,” Ahmed says, turning to the uniformed officer.  “This gentleman is from state security,” he says, turning to the man with the shirt.  “And this gentleman ...” and here Ahmed stumbles, not sure what to say, until he hastily adds “...is also from the police.”

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