ARIS ROUSSINOS: Two and a half years ago, millions of
protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square celebrations celebrated
the success of their 18-day revolution to overthrow the
dictator Hosni Mubarak.
After a second revolution against the generals who'd
taken power, Egyptians chose Muslim Brotherhood leader
Mohammad Morsi as the first
democratically elected president.
MOHAMMAD MORSI: [SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: Everything looked so hopeful.
But on June 30 this year, millions of protesters flooded
back into Tahrir Square, begging the army to come back
and overthrow Morsi.
The protesters accused the Muslim Brotherhood of trying
to grab too much power, of stoking sectarian tensions,
and destroying Egypt's economy.
Defense minister General Abdel Fattah El Sisi promptly made a
speech, giving Morsi 48 hours to listen to
their demands or else.
On the night of July 2, 16 people, mostly Morsi
supporters, were killed in bloody clashes at Cairo
University.
So what was going on?
Was it a coup?
A revolution?
Or the beginning of a civil war?
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
-As the countdown to the end of the ultimatum ticked down,
we went to Cairo to find out.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: If Tahrir Square is the center of the
opposition to Morsi, this is the exact opposite.
This is the ground zero of his supporters.
It's an Islamist stronghold in central Cairo.
All of these people are gathered here to show their
support for the president.
They're vowing to defend him to the last, bitter end.
-Seculars across the Middle East always lose elections.
Yet they come and they say to Islamists, you won, you have
no right to win.
Just because they're Islamists.
They think they have no right to rule because they don't
have money.
Or they're not from the upper class.
Or they're not elitists.
ARIS ROUSSINOS: Do you think outside Cairo, the Islamists,
the Brotherhood, they represent more of the Egyptian
people?
-They represent the people.
Look around you.
You have upper class, middle class, lower class.
Everyone.
So there isn't a single political party in Egypt
that's distributed across the nation like the Muslim
Brotherhood.
They are the only ones who [INAUDIBLE].
For 80 years they've been imprisoned.
And now they come out and they give the people their best.
And some elitists go and tell them, we'll take power from
you just because President Morsi made a few mistakes?
ARIS ROUSSINOS: What mistakes did he make?
-Mistakes that he focuses with people from the old regime
instead of focusing with the seculars.
However, he gave them every chance he can.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: For all the sticks and clubs the Brothers
were waving around, there's a strange and carnival
atmosphere to the demo, like a male-skewed, Islamist
Glastonbury.
Their president had been democratically elected.
And they saw the struggle to come as a battle for both
Islam and democracy.
-We want justice and Islam to come back.
We want the [ARABIC]
or Islamic institution and their religion to control us.
It's our right.
And that's why we elected Mohammad Morsi.
We elected him to stay four years.
To show exactly what he can do to change
our horrible situation.
So you can't cut him off because just you want this.
You can't ignore our choice.
So we are going to die if they are not going to stop what
they are doing.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
-Mohammad Morsi standed yesterday and said that, I'm
not going to leave the ruling except on my butt.
That's what we are doing here.
I'm not going to go home.
It's my place.
So we just waiting for his order to go home.
[INAUDIBLE]
this, it will be civil war.
ARIS ROUSSINOS: But they have guns and you have sticks.
-We have hearts.
It's so spiritual to us.
It's my religion.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
-The army said that we will protect justice,
constitution, and so on.
But we don't trust them at all.
Because 60 years, they have controlled us.
We think that after many hours, they will give us some
kind of statements.
What side they will support.
ARIS ROUSSINOS: The Brotherhood's arguments all
sounded perfectly reasonable to me.
But I wanted to see what the other side was saying.
Only a kilometer away, a small demonstration of anti-Morsi
protesters had gathered outside the Republican Guard
Officers Club where Morsi's being held by the army.
[CROWD SHOUTING IN ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: Who were these people, and why
did they want a coup?
-America is supporting Morsi.
And more so the Egyptian people, they don't want Morsi.
-Morsi, actually, he is discriminating the people
around Egypt.
He is separating, that's our people, that's not our people.
That's the real Muslims, that's not the real Muslims.
That is the minority, that's the Coptic in Egypt.
He is not gathering the people.
He just would like to make a religious country.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
-We are rescuing the world from another Hitler.
That's another Hitler.
[INAUDIBLE] is a fascist.
ARIS ROUSSINOS: It was all very strange.
This was meant to be the secular, liberal crowd.
But they seemed more irrational than the Islamists.
While the Brotherhood were talking about democracy and
the constitution, these guys were ranting crazy,
anti-Western conspiracy theories at me.
But more people voted for Morsi than voted against him
in the election last year.
-If you count them, you will find them 1/10 of
the Egyptian people.
They are terrorists.
They come from Afghanistan, and from
Shishan, and whatever.
America collect them and put them here in Egypt.
Why?
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: Unlike the Brotherhood demonstration,
this crowd is being protected by plainclothes military.
I began to suspect the army had organized this demo.
And this wasn't so much the next stage of the revolution
as the carefully managed comeback of the old military
regime.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: When you look at the crowds here in their
pressed polo shirts and glossy blond highlights, you can't
help but sense, this is the secular, middle class elite
who ruled Egypt for 60 years, taking their country back from
the urban poor.
The [INAUDIBLE] is down there.
And the Islamist president trapped in there.
Emotions were running high and security was tight.
Suddenly, the crowd accused a bystander of being an Islamist
spy, and armed cops rushed forward to drag him away.
The coup was only a matter of time now, and everyone's
waiting for the announcement.
Everyone outside the Officers Club, where Morsi's
essentially trapped by these protesters, have been
clustering around this car.
This dude here says he's an ex-army general.
He says he's got inside information that the army's
about to depose Morsi.
When will Morsi leave power?
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: Officially, Morsi was still president, but
these guys were already celebrating the coup.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: I wanted to see how the Brotherhood would
take the news when it came.
This was the moment they'd been dreading.
If you switch on the radio now, all you hear
is patriotic music.
If it isn't a coup yet, it's looking very
much like one soon.
We're trying to go back to the Morsi supporter's camp.
The military have closed the roads.
We're trying to find back streets to go down.
They don't want us to go down there.
They say they're trying to protect the anti-Morsi crowd
from Islamist retaliation.
Something is going down in Cairo right now.
No one knows what.
We'll see.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: The Islamist demo is only five minutes down
the road, but it looked like a different planet.
A terrifying world of chaos and confrontation.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: The army had turned up in force, right to
the edge of the Brotherhood's protest.
And everyone was gearing up for a fight.
We're at the Islamist camp.
The army have just turned up in APCs.
Everyone's confronting them.
They're trying to stop them coming here.
So they're starting to break up the protest camp with the
pro-Morsi supporters.
This is turning pretty ugly.
The army may or may not have arrested Morsi by now, but the
Brotherhood weren't going to go down without a fight.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: More Morsi supporters have jumped to the
top of these APCs to tell them to go away.
They say, down with the coup.
No one in Egypt knows what's going to happen next.
It could go any way.
There's firing now.
Firing, presumably from the APCs.
Presumably, hopefully, the soldiers are firing into the
air, trying to scare away protesters who are climbing on
top of their APCs.
The army's vehicles pull back slowly.
But this wasn't the end of the confrontation.
Armed soldiers in plainclothes filed onto the rooftops
overlooking us.
In the side streets, the Brotherhood were forming up
into units, preparing for battle, and saying their last
prayers before martyrdom.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: Mustafah, what do you think will happen now?
-I don't know, exactly.
I'm not sure.
There's two options we have here.
One option, that he's trying to scare us, because what
happened yesterday in front of the University of Cairo.
And other option that he's trying to push on us to go
away, which is not going to happen.
So, that's what I think.
I'm going to stay up here.
And all those people just have written their own will.
And if it death, so be.
ARIS ROUSSINOS: Are you ready to die here?
-Yeah, why not?
I'm not going to live without liberty, without my freedom.
And my freedom, it's my religion to me.
ARIS ROUSSINOS: The army's statement would be
made any time now.
Ranks of Brotherhood militia were already marching to the
edges of the protest camp to set up lines of defense for
the expected battle ahead.
-I'm not related to any Muslim brothers.
I don't know anything.
This is the first time to see them.
I'm with my president.
I voted to him, OK?
That because he's an Islamic person, they
want to destroy him.
He did nothing.
Please believe us.
-Now the army came here to put control on the perimeters.
If he need actually to secure us, why it can't be from the
very beginning, from the first day?
Why now?
We need the Islam's controls.
Maybe it's not understandable for other people, but it's
understandable for those people.
And let me tell you, it's just the beginning.
ARIS ROUSSINOS: It's been two and a half years now.
How long is Egypt going to look like this?
-We don't know.
If you can't hold your legal elections.
So don't ask me for logical actions.
Don't ask me to be democratic or such things.
Because I will fight for my opinion.
You didn't respect it in the first place, so don't ask me
about my action.
I don't know what will happen next.
But all I know that I will fight for what I believe.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: At the center of the the protest, a vast
crowd had gathered in hear the army's statement read out.
Tempers were already boiling.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: This was the moment all of Egypt had been
waiting for.
The Brotherhood's leadership read out the army's statement
to a furious crowd.
Morsi had been arrested.
The army were back in control of Egypt once again.
Instantly the mood changed.
An angry protester threatened us with his club, accusing us
of being anti-Morsi spies.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: As we tried to leave the protest, unseen
snipers started shooting into the crowd from the
rooftops above us.
[GUNFIRE]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: We ran for cover and tried to work out
how to escape.
That is live rounds.
Around the side of this, hard cover.
We've just been in the crowd, where the army's statement
abandoning, canceling the constitution was read out.
Live gunfire echoed out, the crowd are scattered.
This is looking very, very, very bad for Cairo.
Casualties were dragged away from the square, bleeding.
One protester was killed.
He'd been shot in the head.
Literally a few meters away, on the other side of the
barricades, the army's supporters were celebrating,
waving flags, and handing out sweets, as fellow Egyptians
lay bleeding in the streets nearby.
Even the police are out here celebrating the fall of Morsi.
-[SPEAKING ARABIC]
ARIS ROUSSINOS: The army is back in charge for now.
But there is no way the Brotherhood will take this
coup lying down.
Everyone is talking about civil war now.
And this was just the beginning.