The murder of Giulio Regeni threw
unexpected and unwelcome light on the Egyptian government. Not a single story proposed by senior
government figures to explain how the young Italian researcher came to be
tortured to death has proved the least bit convincing. Neither an automobile collision or a night of
rough sex leave a victim whose body shows evidence of having suffered electric
shock to the genitals, cigarette burns, and a broken neck. The most recent explanation proferred by the
government is that he was kidnapped by a gang specializing in the abduction and
robbery of foreigners. The police say
they killed all the members of the gang in a shoot-out but were able to obtain
Regeni’s identification papers (which the gang conveniently retained) as well as
his cash (which they equally conveniently neglected to spend).
For now everything is speculative but the marks of torture on
his body and the obstinacy with which the Egyptian government has resisted the
entreaties of Regeni’s family and the Italian government for a joint
investigation strongly suggest he was killed by Egyptian security agents.
One of the most puzzling aspects of
Regeni’s murder is understanding why the Egyptian government would have wanted him
dead or even why they would have tortured him. One
commonly held theory in Cairo and beyond is based on the suspicion of Egyptian
security agencies that foreigners are agitators. Thus they believe that the uprising of 2011
was the result of external interference rather than popular initiative. They therefore saw Regeni not as a researcher
but as an activist and he was deliberately retained after he attended a
gathering of independent trade union activists.
Regeni, in this reading of events, was not unlike the American and
German resident employees of organizations that funded civil society
associations who were formally accused of being foreign agents in 2011. If this were the belief of high government
officials then it would have been easy to deal with Regeni: either by revoking
his visa or an unofficial warning that he would be indicted if he did not leave
the country promptly.
Another theory is that he was simply unlucky. He took the subway from a stop near a meeting
with union activists to Tahrir Square to visit a friend on January 25, the
anniversary of the start of the 2011 uprising. He never arrived. The government
had put a massive police presence in place as well as undertaking widespread
arrests. Regeni, in this scenario, was
an accidental victim. If this were the
case, however, it is hard to fathom both why he was not let go and why the
government has had such trouble finding the guilty police agent. To appease public anger the government had no
trouble arresting and trying Mustafa Feto, a police officer who shot a Mohammad
Adel, cab driver in the lower-class neighborhood of Darb al-Ahmar, after an
altercation over a fare. Not quite two
months passed before Feto was sentenced to life in prison. Even if it proved impossible to discover who
had killed Regeni it would seem to be as easy to appease the anger of the
Italian government by bringing a sacrificial police lamb to trial as by the
deaths of five suspected criminals.
Seen in this light Regeni’s fate resembles that of Charles
Horman and Frank Teruggi, young Americans who were killed in Chile in the days
after the Pinochet regime came to power by overthrowing President Salvador
Allende. Horman and Teruggi, however,
were not picked up on the streets. The
were arrested by the authorities in their homes and executed along with Chilean
opponents of the junta when its hold on power was still uncertain. Most chillingly we now know for certain that
US officials knew of and may have encouraged their arrests because they also
saw these young men as enemies of the Chilean military and US policy. This is certainly not true of Italian
military or diplomatic officials in Egypt.
How, then it might well be asked, do
such obscure and enigmatic events throw light on the nature of the current
situation in Egypt? One answer to that
question is to suggest a slightly different scenario, elements of which
certainly have circulated in Cairo. This
suggestion is not for the purpose of telling the true story of what happened
but of illustrating the institutional balance of forces within the current
regime. In regard to Regeni we are truly
situated in the world of Akira Kurosawa’s famous film “Rashomon.” The deeper truth of the movie is not that there can be different accounts of a single event but that, for this is
how Kurosawa deliberately made the movie, we cannot construct out of those
different narratives a single coherent "true" account.
We may never know what really happened to Regeni but it nevertheless
illuminates the complexity and fragility of contemporary Egypt. If we accept
that the Egyptian government and particularly its security agencies fear that
foreigners are outside agitators and that Regeni was stopped and taken more or
less at random and taken into custody what does that tell us?
Authoritarian regimes are invariably
anxious about conspiracies whose origins they impute to foreign
machinations. Insofar as dictators claim
to represent an inherently united class, nation, race or religion the existence of opposition can
only arise from the temptations posed by outsiders who threaten the moral
integrity of the community. It is easy
to ridicule such fears as intellectually feeble excuses for repression and the
settling of political scores. It is less
easy to see that paranoia and xenophobia can be crippling. It is, however, giving the police in such
regimes far too much credit to believe that they have independent and
infallible ways to determine who the regime’s enemies are. They rely on many sources of
information: paid informers, complaints,
and denunciations. To say that these
sources are reliable or objective would be ridiculous. Informers inform for their own reasons which
may have little to do with the objective truth of the information they provide
to authorities. Using the government’s anxiety and enmity as a tool to rid
oneself of enemies real or imagined is probably as old as government itself.
Immediately after the coup in 2013,
Egyptians turned on each other.
Accusations of membership in the banned Muslim Brotherhood or in
terrorist cells mushroomed in a society in which conspiracy theories had been
nurtured by government officials for decades. The government arrested well-known leaders of
the Muslim Brothers for political reasons, but tens of thousands of other
Egyptians were arrested by local authorities.
Some of these arrests and subsequent trials became notorious due to the
summary death sentences imposed on defendants in mass trials. Other arrests and convictions of well-known
activists have merited intermittent treatment in the international press.
All these accounts of arrests and trials suggest that Egypt
has a unified government that knows what it is doing: limiting the political
activity of the opposition, frightening the population at large, reinforcing
the power of the dictatorship by targeting a variety of regime opponents. What it is doing may be wrong, unpalatable
and destructive, but at least the government has a clear authoritarian vision
of subduing the population. The public
trial of Al-Jazeera correspondents and the arrest of Egyptian reporters are all
designed to curtail access to information.
The pitiful spectacle of Esraa al-Taweel, a young woman on crutches weeping
at a hearing reinforced the sense of weakness and impotence of the movement to
which she belonged. The killing of
Shaimaa al-Sabbagh at a demonstration where she sought to lay flowers on the
ground as well as the jailing of Mohammad Soltan, the son of a Muslim
Brotherhood leader and an American citizen, or the deaths of countless others
were all designed to re-build the wall of fear that surrounded Egyptians since
the days of Nasser.
There is no doubt that the Egyptian government is willing to
use overwhelming and lethal force against its perceived enemies. In early July
2013 dozens of demonstrators were killed in front of the Republican Guard
headquarters in Cairo. Upwards of a thousand people were killed when
the government dispersed demonstration/encampments at Rabaa Square in Cairo and
Nahdet Misr Square in Giza. The
government has also prosecuted foreigners such as Peter Greste, an Australian employee
of Al-Jazeera news in the wake of the 2013 coup, for reporting without a
license and aiding a terrorist organization.
Yet each of these events have contradictory elements. What
if, instead of an all-seeing government we are actually witnessing a blind
Moloch? Greste was held for more than a year along with co-defendants Mohammad
Fahmy (a Canadian-Egyptian) and Baher Mohammad (an Egyptian). International pressure mounted heightening
the embarrassment of the Egyptian government.
The courts refused to end the trial until finding the defendants
guilty. In the end the Egyptian
government promulgated a law allowing President Sisi to deport foreigners such
as Greste accused or convicted. This
face-saving allowed Greste to leave the country. Fahmy and Mohammad were pardoned by Sisi
shortly after their convictions. Soltan had been sentenced to life in prison
but renounced his Egyptian citizenship and was later deported to the United
States. The policeman who shot al-Sabbagh
was later sentenced to 15 years in prison for assault (which suggests he will
serve about one third of the sentence).
In short, the Sisi government not infrequently finds itself
in embroiled in embarrassing situations or acts that provoke significant domestic
anger or foreign scorn that it can neither contain nor repress. The most dramatic such event was the claim by
the government in 2014 that it had discovered a cure for hepatitis C, a disease
of epidemic proportions in Egypt. The
bogus cure amounted to little more than metallic dowsing rods that swindlers in
Iraq have also claimed can detect explosive devices under cars. The government has since silently retired
both the apparatus and its inventor while moving to provide Egyptians with an
effective medication developed in the US and hoping its mis-steps would be
forgotten.
Regeni’s murder, however, will not be quickly forgotten nor
can it be easily fobbed off with excuses.
The inability of the Egyptian government to respond adequately to the
demands of the Italian government, however, point to the contradictory nature
of the case. Regeni’s murder has
provoked anger and fear but it has also produced some bewilderment. Therefore,
what events of the past two months suggest is a government struggling for control
and troubled as much by conflict within the ruling coalition as between that
coalition and society.
Assuming for the sake of argument
that the Egyptian police believed Regeni was himself organizing political
opposition to the regime, how would they have come to that belief? The police
would have already given Regeni clearance for his research since all foreign
academics submit such requests to obtain visas. Had they believed initially he was intending
to agitate rather than research it is unlikely he would have received a visa. More
plausibly someone among the people he studied was submitting reports to the
police. When demonstrators entered the
offices of the State Security Police in Cairo in March 2011, it became apparent
just how detailed (and frequently inconsequential when viewed objectively) the
level of reporting was and how many records were kept on many citizens.
There is no reason to believe that such reports in police
states are any more accurate than accounts of miraculous cures or membership in
banned organizations. False reports are
submitted for many reasons: personal dislike, revenge, a desire to please
superiors, simple malice, or even misunderstanding. I had good reason, when I was doing research
on trade union history in Egypt in the 1980s, to believe that the government
was receiving copies of my correspondence and that elderly union leaders were
followed to (and probably from) interviews.
The arrest and detention for over a year of Aya Hijazi, founder of the
society Beladi that sought to provide aid to Cairene street children, seems to
rely on false reports of trafficking and sexual abuse. Hijazi, an American citizen, has no known
connection to Egyptian political groups of any kind and none of the allegations
has held up under external investigation.
Even in liberal societies such secret police reports are
difficult to refute because they are hidden under a veil of secrecy. In Egypt today and yesterday there is essentially
no way to gain access to such reports and certainly no way to correct them. If Regeni was picked up on leaving the Cairo
metro in a sweep by police officers who initially had no idea who he was, his
file might have contained false or misleading accounts of his activity. If he was picked by police who already knew
his identity, they might have been guided by the same kind of reports. Regeni however would not necessarily have had
any idea why he was questioned about suspicious or illegal activity and would
have had no answers for an increasingly brutal and inexplicable
interrogation. Even readers of
translated Egyptian fiction such as Karnak Café by the late Nobel Prize winner Naguib
Mahfouz will be aware of the brutality of such interrogations and also of the
casual way with the accuracy of the accusations interrogators had.
We may never know what exactly happened to Regeni in the days
during which he was tortured to death.
Even with the prodding of the Italian government, Egyptian authorities
refused to release information about Regeni’s cellphone calls in his last hours
of freedom or the video footage that might have been available from Metro
cameras. Italian investigators claim
that their Egyptian counterparts are stalling the investigation, which of
course raises more suspicions.
Unlike deportations or the quick arrest and conviction of a
known perpetrator the government has been unable to put Regeni’s death behind
it. The belief that the government
purposely arrested Regeni and now seeks to hide the fact gains credence with
the fudged explanations and foot-dragging.
More recently it has been proposed that no matter what happened to
Regeni, President Sisi fears the police.
He will, it has been asserted, require the police to protect him should
another round of massive demonstrations threaten to sweep him from power.
The weakness of this account of the Regeni affair is that rarely,
if ever, have the Egyptian police safeguarded an incumbent executive from mass
demonstrations. For nearly a century
when kings and presidents have faced massive upheaval it was the armed
forces—not the police—that intervened to protect authority. In 1919 the British required armed columns
and martial law to put down a revolutionary uprising; in 1952 martial law was
again required after the burning of Cairo; in 1977 troops returned order after
the government lost control of the streets during protests about the rising
cost of food; in 1986 it was police units themselves rebelled and were put down
by the Armed Forces; and in 2011 the police vanished leaving the army to take
up positions in Cairo and Alexandria and ultimately to take direct control of
the government.
By the time mass demonstrations
engulf Egypt the police will be helpless.
No matter how imperfect, corrupt and brutal, however, the police do
manage to keep order in ways that the armed forces cannot in ordinary
circumstances. The withdrawal of the
police, their refusal at many points in the first three years of the uprising
to enforce the law, encouraged criminality and simply increased disorganization
on the streets in the first years of the uprising. The proliferation of street vendors, the
illegal sale of land and construction, the occasional gunfights as criminals
fought, as well as the proliferation of demonstrations were all the result of
decreased police presence or the unwillingness of the police to enforce
rules. The freedom to take to the
streets or the ability to buy cheap goods on the sidewalk are not equivalent to
violent criminal behavior or the theft of real estate. When the military took power in 2013 they
promised to restore order and begin to solve the economic and social problems
of the country. For this they need the
police.
And yet the police have already
threatened the new regime. There are
routine accounts of conflicts, including the use of weapons, between police
officers and army officers. These are,
of course, isolated and individual confrontations but they suggest deep
conflicts between the two security services about status and authority. Policemen have also engaged in demonstrations
against the government’s salary policy in blatant violation of the law against
unauthorized demonstrations.
The government needs the police because the armed forces can
seize power but they cannot police the country.
The police suffered a historic disaster in 2011 but now they have
recovered. Thus even a military
government that is on the defensive and embarrassed by the activities of the
police cannot afford to look too deeply into what they do and how they do it because
it cannot govern without them. This is
not to suggest that the President, his government and the military high command
are innocent victims of a police conspiracy.
It is to say that they have attempted to rule a large, largely urban,
and diverse country with tools that belong to a different generation and a
different country—the Egypt of the mid-20th century—and that their
grip on even those tools is weak. The
most important tool of a police state, the police, are now operating with
little or no oversight or self-restraint. Two months ago a policeman murdered a
taxicab driver in a dispute over a fare; days ago another policeman killed a
vendor in a dispute over the price of a glass of tea.
As my co-author, Hind Ahmed Zaki, and I argued in 2012 the
uprising of 2011 made the issue of respect for the state and the legal system
central concerns in Egypt.
Our fear that the courts might begin to lose legitimacy has unfortunately been
realized, but our greater fear was that the Egyptian state would be tempted to
restore its authority (“haibat al-dawlah”) by force and that this would
undermine the state and the very idea of the rule of law. We did not expect that police violence of an
almost random nature would come to pass, but its effects may be devastating.
The 2011 uprising was in significant measure due to concern
about police brutality and Regeni’s murder in 2016, on the anniversary of the
events of 2011, showed just how significant the problem of reforming and
controlling the security forces remains. The image of Khaled Said’s broken face
shocked members of the urban middle class who could see themselves in it. There is every reason to believe that the
image of Giulio Regeni would be, as his mother maintains, an equally powerful
testament to torture and brutality on the part of the police. It has become
common to say that Egypt today is more repressive than under Mubarak, but the
events of the last six months suggest an even more disturbing possibility: the
police are escaping from, or have already escaped from, control by Egypt’s
political leadership. If President Sisi,
his government, and the armed forces cannot bring themselves to bring the
police under control it may indeed be that they fear them. They do not fear them for what might happen
on the day after an uprising but because as Egyptians come to see them as
simply a violent and corrupt gang, any hope of reversing the economic and
political collapse of the last half decade will be utterly lost.
