Madding Crowd, Part 1:
The Egyptian Civil War by Chris Oakley
In February of 2011, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had been in
power nearly thirty years. Thrust into office by the assassination of
his political mentor Anwar Sadat in 1981, Mubarak had done everything
he could to strengthen Egypt’s ties with the United States as well as
preserve the fragile peace with Israel that had existed since the 1978
Camp David accords. He had also done a great deal to maintain his hold
on the presidency, and in the process turned his country into the kind
of one-party state which has been all too common in the Middle East in
the past half-century; now the Egyptian public, fed up with Mubarak’s
authoritarian ways, was a powder keg needing only a small spark to set
off a political explosion.
That spark came in the form of a televised statement by Mubarak in
February 13th in which he stated he would not capitulate to the demand
by Egyptian dissidents that he resign his office to make way for a new
president and the election of a democratic government. Outraged by his
refusal to step down, thousands of demonstrators met in Cairo’s Tahrir
Square to protest what they saw as a naked power grab; police and army
units were swiftly dispatched to break up these rallies. Twelve hours
into this latest wave of protest, Egyptian army tanks tried to breach
an improvised barricade set up by university students to protect their
encampment; in a moment of fury at what the tank crew was trying to do
an older man picked up a stone or a piece of brick-- it’s not entirely
clear which --and threw it at the tank crew commander, striking him in
the side of the head.
Convinced the tank was being attacked, the tank crew’s machine
gunner turned his weapon on the unfortunate older man...and from that
moment all hope of avoiding bloodshed was effectively wiped out. Just
seconds after the tank commander was hit, the telltale staccato of the
machine gunner’s .50 caliber piece could be heard over the screams of
the demonstrators; an Al Jazeera correspondent covering the protests
at the time described the machine gun burst as sounding much like, in
his words, “an approaching thunderstorm”. When the machine gun stopped
firing just twenty seconds later, the old man was dead along with two
bystanders and an Egyptian security police officer who’d been sent to
intervene in the melee and been mistaken for one of the protestors. At
that point, all bets were off and the scene soon degenerated into one
of utter violent chaos.
By dawn on February 14th nearly a hundred people were dead, with
at least as many more injured or missing, and virtually every foreign
embassy in Cairo was on lockdown as governments around the world began
scrambling to figure out ways of evacuating their diplomats from what
was indisputably and rapidly turning into a war zone. Across the Sinai
Peninsula, IDF troops patrolling the Egyptian-Israeli border nervously
watched the horizon wondering if the Camp David peace accords that had
been signed between Egypt and Israel nearly a quarter-century earlier
were about to collapse. Egypt’s western neighbor Libya, which was in
the midst of its own political and social upheaval at the time, braced
itself for an influx of refugees trying to flee the anarchy gripping
Cairo. To the south Sudan was in little position to influence events
either for good or for ill, since it was locked in a bitter guerrilla
war between rival ethnic factions that had been going on for years and
would still be raging long after the turmoil in Egypt died down.
******
While the police were solidly behind the Mubarak government, the
army was considerably more divided. This was especially true among the
ranks of the Egyptian army’s ordinary soldiers; for every man who was
still loyal to the government, there was another who either tacitly or
openly backed the Tahrir Square demonstrators. More than one of those
sympathizers would eventually defect to the insurgents and in so doing
draw the Mubarak regime’s wrath. The schism among the Egyptian army’s
rank and file was mirrored by an equally deep split inside the highest
echelons of the general staff-- a split that prompted one Middle East
expert at the U.S. State Department to warn the White House three days
after the carnage in Tahrir Square about the real and growing risk of
a full-fledged civil war breaking out in Egypt.
Even as the first funerals were being held for those who’d died
in the violence at Tahrir Square, the global community was expressing
fears that the rift within the armed forces between Mubarak’s allies
and his opponents might lead to total anarchy in Egypt. British prime
minister David Cameron, in a speech given before the House of Commons
on February 16th, told his colleagues: “There is a genuine danger Egypt
may degenerate into utter chaos unless constructive action is taken to
restore domestic peace there.” President Barack Obama, speaking at a
White House press conference on the events in Tahrir Square, told the
assembled reporters: “As our own history demonstrates, the most tragic
wars of all are the wars in which brother fights brother. The critical
imperative before us is to make sure that Egypt doesn’t sink into the
abyss of civil war.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin, alluding to the long-standing
friendship between Russia and Egypt that had existed for decades and
predated the Communist regime of the Soviet era, phoned the Egyptian
ambassador in Moscow shortly after Obama’s press conference and made
a proposal to have the Kremlin mediate negotiations between Mubarak’s
government and the dissidents with the goal of achieving a compromise
which would enable Mubarak to exit gracefully while at the same time
bringing an end to the violence racking Cairo. Unfortunately for him,
and for that matter anyone else wanting to stem the bloodshed rapidly
overtaking the Egyptian capital, neither Mubarak nor his foes were in
a mood to talk...
******
A prominent military affairs expert and consultant for NBC
News had predicted at the time of the Tahrir Square massacre that what
happened in Cairo would quickly spread to other parts of Egypt, and as
it turned out his dire warnings would be proven all too right. Just 48
hours after the bloodshed in Cairo, gun battles erupted in Alexandria
as troops still loyal to the Mubarak government fought soldiers who’d
defected to the rebel side. Twenty-four hours after that Port Said was
the scene of a bloody mutiny as seamen about an Egyptian navy cruiser
arrested and executed their pro-Mubarak officers. Within a week of the
Tahrir Square massacre there were skirmishes between anti-Mubarak and
pro-Mubarak forces going on in every major city in Egypt, and foreign
tourists were fleeing the country as fast as they possibly could...