Ten years ago, the combination of a military coup and a popular uprising overthrew Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi.
The Egyptian military had long been the country’s most powerful force behind the scenes. But in its takeover of the government, it stepped out from behind the curtain and has essentially been running the country ever since. There is a Parliament and elections in the country, but there aren’t really politics.
In June 2013, Morsi had only been in office a year to the day — his election followed the 2011 uprising that overthrew longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. The revolution sparked tremendous hope in Egypt and around the world. But now, the country is more repressive than ever. The military’s takeover in July 2013 was met by a protest movement of Morsi’s supporters from the Muslim Brotherhood as well as other political activists. Egyptian security forces crushed their protest camps that summer; the most catastrophic date was August 14, 2013, when over a thousand demonstrators were massacred. Human Rights Watch said it likely constituted crimes against humanity. Hundreds of others were sentenced to death, and Morsi himself ultimately died as a prisoner of what could only be called negligence at the hands of the Egyptian state, collapsing after speaking in court in 2019.
Today, the former general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who served as Morsi’s defense minister, is the president. He won a basically uncontested election in 2018 with 97.08 percent of the vote, and a constitutional referendum extended his rule to 2030.
The military has arrested some 60,000 political prisoners, according to human rights monitors, but sources have told me that the number may be considerably higher.
Yet political expression endures, and Egyptians have carved space in other realms beyond electoral politics. Literature is a tool of rebellion, graphic novels capture social change, and brave journalists continue their important…
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