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NY Times July 10, 2013
Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi
By BEN HUBBARD and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — The streets seethe with protests and government ministers are on
the run or in jail, but since the military ousted President Mohamed
Morsi, life has somehow gotten better for many people across Egypt: Gas
lines have disappeared, power cuts have stopped and the police have
returned to the street.
The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy shortages, and the
re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions of personnel
left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011
played a significant role — intentionally or not — in undermining the
overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi.
And as the interim government struggles to unite a divided nation, the
Muslim Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s supporters say the sudden turnaround
proves that their opponents conspired to make Mr. Morsi fail. Not only
did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies
responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed
so fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread
anger and frustration.
“This was preparing for the coup,” said Naser el-Farash, who served as
the spokesman for the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade under Mr.
Morsi. “Different circles in the state, from the storage facilities to
the cars that transport petrol products to the gas stations, all
participated in creating the crisis.”
Working behind the scenes, members of the old establishment, some of
them close to Mr. Mubarak and the country’s top generals, also helped
finance, advise and organize those determined to topple the Islamist
leadership, including Naguib Sawiris, a billionaire and an outspoken foe
of the Brotherhood; Tahani el-Gebali, a former judge on the Supreme
Constitutional Court who is close to the ruling generals; and Shawki
al-Sayed, a legal adviser to Ahmed Shafik, Mr. Mubarak’s last prime
minister, who lost the presidential race to Mr. Morsi.
But it is the police returning to the streets that offers the most
blatant sign that the institutions once loyal to Mr. Mubarak held back
while Mr. Morsi was in power. Throughout his one-year tenure, Mr. Morsi
struggled to appease the police, even alienating his own supporters
rather than trying to overhaul the Interior Ministry. But as crime
increased and traffic clogged roads — undermining not only the quality
of life, but the economy — the police refused to deploy fully.
Until now.
White-clad officers have returned to Cairo’s streets, and security
forces — widely despised before and after the revolution — intervened
with tear gas and shotguns against Islamists during widespread street
clashes last week, leading anti-Morsi rioters to laud them as heroes.
Posters have gone up around town showing a police officer surrounded by
smiling children over the words “Your security is our mission, your
safety our goal.”
“You had officers and individuals who were working under a specific
policy that was against Islamic extremists and Islamists in general,”
said Ihab Youssef, a retired police officer who runs a professional
association for the security forces. “Then all of a sudden the regime
flips and there is an Islamic regime ruling. They could never
psychologically accept that.”
When Mr. Mubarak was removed after nearly 30 years in office in 2011,
the bureaucracy he built stayed largely in place. Many business leaders,
also a pillar of the old government, retained their wealth and influence.
Despite coming to power through the freest elections in Egyptian
history, Mr. Morsi was unable to extend his authority over the sprawling
state apparatus, and his allies complained that what they called the
“deep state” was undermining their efforts at governing.
While he failed to broaden his appeal and build any kind of national
consensus, he also faced an active campaign by those hostile to his
leadership, including some of the wealthiest and most powerful pillars
of the Mubarak era.
Mr. Sawiris, one of Egypt’s richest men and a titan of the old
establishment, said Wednesday that he had supported an upstart group
called “tamarrod,” Arabic for “rebellion,” that led a petition drive
seeking Mr. Morsi’s ouster. He donated use of the nationwide offices and
infrastructure of the political party he built, the Free Egyptians. He
provided publicity through a popular television network he founded and
his major interest in Egypt’s largest private newspaper. He even
commissioned the production of a popular music video that played heavily
on his network.
“Tamarrod did not even know it was me!” he said. “I am not ashamed of it.”
He said he had publicly predicted that ousting Mr. Morsi would bolster
Egypt’s sputtering economy because it would bring in billions of dollars
in aid from oil-rich monarchies afraid that the Islamist movement might
spread to their shores. By Wednesday, a total of $12 billion had flowed
in from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. “That will
take us for 12 months with no problem,” Mr. Sawiris said.
Ms. Gebali, the former judge, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday
that she and other legal experts helped tamarrod create its strategy to
appeal directly to the military to oust Mr. Morsi and pass the interim
presidency to the chief of the constitutional court.
“We saw that there was movement and popular creativity, so we wanted to
see if it would have an effect and a constitutional basis,” Ms. Gebali said.
Mr. Farash, the trade ministry spokesman under Mr. Morsi, attributed the
fuel shortages to black marketers linked to Mr. Mubarak, who diverted
shipments of state-subsidized fuel to sell for a profit abroad. Corrupt
officials torpedoed Mr. Morsi’s introduction of a smart card system to
track fuel shipments by refusing to use the devices, he said.
But not everyone agreed with that interpretation, as supporters of the
interim government said the improvements in recent days were a
reflection of Mr. Morsi’s incompetence, not a conspiracy. State news
media said energy shortages occurred because consumers bought extra fuel
out of fear, which appeared to evaporate after Mr. Morsi’s fall. On
Wednesday, Al Ahram, the flagship newspaper, said the energy grid had
had a surplus in the past week for the first time in months, thanks to
“energy-saving measures by the public.”
“I feel like Egypt is back,” Ayman Abdel-Hakam, a criminal court judge
from a Cairo suburb, said after waiting only a few minutes to fill up
his car at a downtown gas station. He accused Mr. Morsi and the Muslim
Brotherhood of trying to seize all state power and accused them of
creating the fuel crisis by exporting gasoline to Hamas, the militant
Islamic group in the Gaza Strip.
“We had a disease, and we got rid of it,” Mr. Abdel-Hakam said.
Ahmed Nabawi, a gas station manager, said he had heard several reasons
for the gas crisis: technical glitches at a storage facility, a shipment
of low-quality gas from abroad and unnecessary stockpiling by the
public. Still, he was amazed at how quickly the crisis disappeared.
“We went to sleep one night, woke up the next day, and the crisis was
gone,” he said, casually sipping tea in his office with his colleagues.
Regardless of the reasons behind the crisis, he said, Mr. Morsi’s rule
had not helped.
“No one wanted to cooperate with his people because they didn’t accept
him,” he said. “Now that he is gone, they are working like they’re
supposed to.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 12, 2013
Because of editing errors, an article on Thursday about suspicions among
some Egyptians that the end of gas and electricity shortages since the
ouster of President Mohamed Morsi was evidence of a conspiracy to
undermine him rendered incorrectly a description of the military’s
transition plan for Egypt given by Tahani el-Gebali, a former judge on
the Supreme Constitutional Court; misidentified the interim president;
and misstated his position before being appointed. Ms. Gebali discussed
the plan only in broad terms and said that whoever was chief of the
constitutional court would become interim president; she did not name a
specific individual. The interim president is Adli Mansour, not Hazem
el-Beblawi, and when he was named he was chief of the constitutional
court, not the former chief. (Mr. Beblawi is the interim prime minister.)
The article also included an outdated reference to a television network
that publicized the drive to oust Mr. Morsi. The network was founded by
an Egyptian billionaire, Naguib Sawiris, but he no longer owns it; it is
not “his” network.
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