JUDY WOODRUFF: In Egypt this week, a top trending hashtag on social media asks, does Egypt have
any hope left? That question reflects the dramatic changes in Egypt since the heady
days in Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution.
Nick Schifrin recently sat down with the author of a new book on what happened to all that
hope.
NICK SCHIFRIN, PBS NEWSHOUR FOREIGN AFFARIS AND DEFENSE CORRESPONDENT: It's been five
years since the largest state- sponsored massacre since Tiananmen square, and possibly larger
than Tiananmen. On August the 14th, 2013, Egyptian security forces opened fire on a
protest tent city in the Rabaa Square area of Cairo. At least 800 were killed.
What led to that day was an extraordinary
tumultuous few years in Egypt: the Arab Spring, the coming to power of a Muslim Brotherhood
president, a coup, and the emergence of a new soldier strongman, Abdul Fatah al Sisi,
who clamped down on all aspects of Egyptian society. What "New York Times" reporter
David Kirkpatrick has called, "Into the Hands of the Soldiers." That is the name of his
new book.
And we are pleased to have David with us here today.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK, AUTHOR, “INTO THE HANDS
OF THE SOLDIERS”: Pleasure to be here.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Thanks very much.
You spent five years in Egypt. You arrived just before the 2011 revolution. It’s
interesting to read you admit actually, you got caught up a little bit in the revolution.
Do you think the U.S. got caught up in the revolution a little bit and failed to understand
some of the long-term consequences?
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: It's important to note that the revolution was real. There was
actually a change in power, and for a while in 2011, the military, which had run Egypt for
the previous six decades or so, was clearly back on its heels. It was defensive. It
was responding in almost a frightened way to public will.
In retrospect, we tend to forget -- you know,
we say, oh, we fell for the romance of the square. It was all a mirage. It wasn't
quite a mirage.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Do you think the U.S. administration understood that? Do you think the U.S. administration
understood at the time what to do?
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: I don't think you could ever speak about a single American policy.
I think there was always a tug-of-war inside the administration, and a good part of the
administration was very, very skeptical of what was happening in Tahrir Square. It
didn’t really fall for it at all, and was acutely anxious to see Hosni Mubarak leave
power.
NICK SCHIFRIN: The lack of unity on U.S. policy continued, of course. And you had a Muslim
Brotherhood. You had an election.
Was there disunity in terms of whether to support Mohamed Morsi, who became president
of Egypt?
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: Disunity is putting it mildly. I think there was a great deal of
anxiety to see a Muslim Brotherhood elected president of Egypt, which is the cornerstone
really of the American-backed order in the region, especially in the Pentagon. But
it’s worth knowing that, you know, a few months into power, he stepped in to broker
a peace agreement between Hamas and Israel, and at that point, I think he had really won
over the administration and showed that he could work with President Obama, that he was
not hostile to Israel, and that he could advance the interests of stability around the region.
That was probably his apex in American eyes.
NICK SCHIFRIN: As Mohamed Morsi was winning over some U.S. officials, obviously there
was some planning going on for a coup. So, talk about what was happening in Egypt in
terms of the plan for the coup and the mixed messages that the U.S. delivered when it
heard about those plans.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: Certainly a lot of the bureaucracy in Egypt was hostile to President Morsi,
the elected president. That includes all the police, who basically were not doing their
job in any respect and watching public security deteriorate. On the American side, as you
say, it’s mixed messages is really what emerged. When this book gave me a chance
to go back and report on what America, what Washington had been doing in the run-up to the coup, you
find wildly discordant voices.
President Obama as late as two days before Morsi was removed from power was on the phone counseling
him in an earnest and sincere way about how the stay in office. At the same time, Secretary
of State John Kerry made it clear to many in the region that he had pretty much given
up on Morsi. Secretary of Defense Hagel who was assigned by the White House to give stern
messages to Sisi not to depose the elected president, was really focusing mainly on building
up Sisi and building his trust and reassuring him that America would always have his back.
NICK SCHIFRIN: It may sound like a naive
question, but surely when the president gives an order, the administration falls in line.
Why the disarray?
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: I think historians will take a hard look at Obama's leadership style
in that respect.
NICK SCHIFRIN: The emergence of military rule that happened was most obviously in the Rabaa massacre.
Describe exactly what happened and what led to that.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: There was a six-week
period between the coup and the massacre at Rabaa, and I still struggle to explain to people
what the atmosphere in Egypt was like at that time. It was a hyper-nationalist hysteria
like you've never seen. It reminds -- it’s what I imagine it must have been like during
the rise of fascism in Europe in the early part of the 20th century, the demonization
of this internal enemy.
After the removal of President Morsi, his supporters, mostly Islamist began a sit-in
on the model of the Tahrir Square sit-in that forced Hosni Mubarak from power. And
they thought through non-violent civil disobedience they thought they could stop the military
from taking over, and I believe they sincerely believed that Egyptians would rally to their
cause, which they did not. So they had a community with families even, children, swimming
pools, amusements, all through the Ramadan holiday that summer.
The massacre was extremely bad. It was the kind of bloodshed that’s hard even to wrap
your mind around. I struggled to try to measure it at the time. There were so many
people dying all around me, and I had found my way into one hospital at the corner of
the square where bodies were coming in. And I thought, how am I possibly going to
make sense of this?
If I was a better journalist, I probably would have been making note of where they were shot,
you know, was the army shooting to kill or not. I decided that I would just make checkmark
each time a body came in so I could track the velocity of the bodies, which, of course,
was hopeless, because there many different places were the bodies were coming in.
And when I left I had a notebook full of checkmarks,
and it was almost no use to try to convey the magnitude of the bloodshed that day.
You said 800. The interim prime minister at that time estimated about 1,000. There’s
a lot of dead bodies in the space of a day.
NICK SCHIFRIN: I wonder if you can zoom out a little bit and look at the arc of Egypt
from the hope that so many, including you, including all of us who were there felt in
2011, to today, to the kind of police state tactics that we've seen the last time I was.
There I couldn't even take out an iPhone and film publicly.
What do you make of what's happened to Egypt since
2011?
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: I personally find it heartbreaking. As we just discussed, I believe
a real revolution took place in 2011. I believe it was subsequently crushed.
And for the West, I think it's a real lost
opportunity, a lost opportunity to have a more stable government in Egypt, a lost opportunity
in terms of political Islam, as well, because there was a real debate within the movement
and against the movement that was allowed to flourish during those 30 months of freedom
that was choked off, and so in many ways, I felt that we will be suffering the consequences
of this for a long time to come.
NICK SCHIFRIN: The book is "Into the Hands of the Soldiers." David Kirkpatrick, thank
you very much.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: Good to be here.