The army chief came to President Mohammed Morsi with a simple demand: Step down on your own.
“Over my dead body!” Morsi replied to General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi on Monday, two days before the army eventually ousted him after a year in office.
In the end, Egypt‘s first freely elected president found himself isolated, abandoned by allies and no one in the army or police willing to support him.
Even his Republican Guards simply stepped away as army commandos came to take him to an undisclosed defence ministry facility, according to army, security and Muslim Brotherhood officials, who gave the Associated Press an account of Morsi’s final hours in office.
The Muslim Brotherhood officials said they saw the end coming for Morsi as early as 23 June – a week before the opposition planned its first big protest. The military gave the president seven days to work out his differences with the opposition.
In recent months, Morsi had been at odds with virtually every institution in the country, including leading Muslim and Christian clerics, the judiciary, the armed forces, the police and intelligence agencies. His political opponents fuelled popular anger that Morsi was giving too much power to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, and had failed to tackle Egypt’s mounting economic problems.
There was such distrust between Morsi and the security agencies that they began withholding information from him – deploying troops and armour in cities without his knowledge.
Police also refused to protect Muslim Brotherhood offices that came under attack in the latest wave of protests.
Therefore, when Morsi was fighting for his survival, there was no one to turn to, except calling for outside help through western ambassadors and a small coterie of aides from the Brotherhood who could do little more than help him record two last-minute speeches.
In those remarks, he emotionally emphasised his electoral legitimacy – a topic that Morsi repeatedly raised in the talks with Sisi.
Early this week, during two meetings in as many days, Morsi, Sisi and Hesham Kandil, the prime minister, sat down to discuss ways out of the crisis.
But Morsi kept returning to the mandate he won in the June 2012 balloting, according to one of the officials. He said Morsi wouldn’t address the mass protests or any of the country’s most pressing problems – tenuous security, rising prices, unemployment, power cuts and traffic congestion.
A Brotherhood spokesman, Murad Ali, said the military had already decided that Morsi had to go, and Sisi would not entertain any of the concessions that the president was prepared to make.
“We were naive … We didn’t imagine betrayal would go this far,” Ali said.
“It was like, ‘either we put you in jail, or you come out and announce you are resigning,'” Ali added.
Brotherhood officials said they saw the end coming.
“We knew it was over on 23 June. Western ambassadors told us that,” said another Brotherhood spokesman. US ambassador Anne Patterson was one of the envoys, he added.
Morsi searched for allies in the army, ordering two top aides – Asaad el-Sheikh and Rifaah el-Tahtawy – to establish contact with potentially sympathetic officers in the 2nd Field Army based in Port Said and Ismailia on the Suez Canal.
The objective was to find a bargaining chip to use with Sisi, security officials with firsthand knowledge of the contacts said.
There were no signs that Morsi’s overtures had any effect, but Sisi, on learning of the contacts, took no chances. He issued directives to all unit commanders not to engage in any contacts with the presidential palace and, as a precaution, dispatched elite troops to units whose commanders had been contacted by Morsi’s aides.
The end nears
On the surface, Morsi wanted to give the impression that the government was conducting business as usual.
His offices released statements about meetings with cabinet ministers to discuss issues such as the availability of basic food items during Ramadan when Muslims feast on food after a day of dawn-to-dusk fasting. He had four cabinet ministers talk to TV reporters in the presidential palace about fuel shortages and power cuts.
The opposition had set its first mass protest for 30 June, the anniversary of his inauguration, but the demonstrations began early, and Morsi had to stop working at Ittihadiya palace on 26 June.
The next day, he and his family moved into the Cairo headquarters of the Republican Guards, an army branch that protects the president.
Morsi worked at the Qasr El Qouba palace and continued to do so until 30 June, when the Republican Guards advised him to stay put at their headquarters.
His foreign policy aide, Essam el-Haddad, telephoned western governments to put an optimistic spin on events, according to a military official. Haddad was also issuing statements in English to the foreign media, saying that the millions out on the streets did not represent all Egyptians, and that the military intervention amounted to a textbook coup.
According to the usually authoritative newspaper Al-Ahram, Morsi was offered safe passage to Turkey, Libya or elsewhere, but he declined. He also was offered immunity from prosecution if he voluntarily stepped down.
Morsi gave a speech late on Tuesday in which he vowed to stay in power and urged supporters to fight to protect his legitimacy.
Soon after, Sisi placed him under “confinement” in the Republican Guard headquarters. The next day the military’s deadline to Morsi expired. At 5am troops began deploying across major cities and the military posted videos of the movements to its Facebook page in a bid to reassure the public. Republican Guards assigned to the president and his aides walked away at midday and army commandos arrived.
There was no commotion and Morsi went quietly. That evening, Sisi announced Morsi’s removal.
In Egypt, long road to military coup
By Michael Birnbaum, Published: July 5
CAIRO — Less than a year ago, then-President Mohamed Morsi swept out the highest ranks of Egypt’s powerful military and installed new top brass that many expected would be loyal to him.
The Islamist leader enjoyed a three-month honeymoon with his armed forces as a new generation of officers undertook long-delayed modernizations and appeared — for the first time — to be solidly under civilian control. But the relationship soured as Morsi’s rule increasingly challenged the core interests of the military, which functions as a major business power in Egypt in addition to its more traditional role ensuring the security and stability of the nation.
The disagreements started after Morsi’s decree, late one November night, that he had near-unlimited powers over the country and escalated as Egypt’s economy stumbled. The struggles peaked in June, when Morsi stood by twice as officials around him called for Egyptian aggression against Ethiopia and Syria, threatening to suck Egypt into conflicts that it could ill afford, former military officials said.
Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a U.S.-trained Islamist sympathizer who was Morsi’s handpicked man for the office, informed the president on June 22 that he needed to do more to unite the country. The military’s decision to step in was sealed after millions of anti-Morsi protesters took to the streets eight days later, Sisi said in a nationally televised speech announcing the takeover on Wednesday.
Now, with fighter jets performing maneuvers in the clear Cairo sky and armored personnel carriers patrolling the streets, the military is again explicitly in control of an Egypt that it led — either directly or from behind the scenes — for almost six decades before Morsi’s 368 days in power. But for all the military’s might, it appeared unable to restore peace to the streets of Egypt as clashes erupted Friday and continued into Saturday around the nation between Morsi’s supporters and his opponents, leaving at least 30 people dead, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Health.
“The dangers of Morsi’s rule have been apparent for some time now, from the decisions that he has taken and the way he managed the country,” said Talaat Mosallam, a retired major general in Egypt’s army. By June 30, he said, “it was perfectly clear that Morsi’s continuation would cause a very violent conflict between the opposition and his supporters. At that point the armed forces knew they had to move.”
Egypt’s military establishment has long held paramount power over the country, with generals turning themselves into business tycoons over the three decades that President Hosni Mubarak was in office. The army’s business holdings are shadowy and vast, estimated at anywhere between 10 and 30 percent of the economy, and top leaders socialize with each other in manicured country clubs a world away from the vast, smog-filled streets where most people scrape by on just dollars a day. Military officers had run the country since the 1952 revolution, and their leadership has long been willing to go to great lengths to ensure the stability of both their own insular society and Egypt as a whole.
“Their rhetoric has always been the same: that they are there and that they won’t allow Egypt to slip into the dark tunnel,” said Michael Hanna, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Century Foundation in New York.
‘Many governing errors’
The two events in June, in which officials close to Morsi called for aggression in Ethiopia and Syria, put new strains on an already tense relationship between the leader and a military that believed the country could ill afford to involve itself in conflict.
On June 2, politicians meeting with Morsi — unaware that they were on live television — suggested sabotaging an Ethiopian project to build a dam on the Nile by arming Ethiopian rebels, launching a campaign to boast of Egypt’s military might and finishing the job with Egyptian fighter jets. Morsi refrained from giving them explicit support, but he also said later that “all options are open” to defend Egypt’s water supply.
Then, on June 15, Morsi participated in a pro-Syrian-rebel rally at which Sunni clerics repeatedly called for “holy war” in Syria — an implicit push for sectarian violence against Shiites and Alawites. Morsi himself did not call for violence, but he spoke immediately after an ultraconservative Salafist preacher who called Shiites “infidels,” and he said nothing to distance himself from the remarks. Instead, he asserted that the Egyptian “nation, leadership and army will not abandon the Syrian people,” according to Egypt’s flagship state-run al-
Ahram newspaper.The remarks spooked the military, several analysts said, with many top officers conditioned to be concerned about Islamist sectarianism after decades in which they had worked to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood.
“It was quite clear throughout the past year that Morsi was incompetent and there were many governing errors carried out,” said Mohamed Kadry Said, a former major general who is an analyst at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo and whose remarks echo those made privately by several military officers.
Forming a new leadership
But the final straw, many analysts said, was the Sunday protests that turned millions of Morsi opponents into the streets.
“Had protests really fizzled, I’m not sure the military would have been prepared to intervene,” said Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “It brought together the civilian opposition. For the first time they were really singing off the same hymn sheet. Suddenly everyone was together” against the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now the military’s decisions will have a crucial role in shaping the weeks and months ahead, analysts say, as a fragile interim civilian government scrambles to follow a publicly announced road map and reassemble the basic components of a constitutional democracy. In the back of future leaders’ minds will be the fate of politicians who came before.
The potential for conflict is great — and it has already started, with security forces rounding up Muslim Brotherhood leaders at the same time Egypt’s new interim president was calling to include Islamist representatives in a unity government. And a conflict exists within the military’s own rhetoric, as it has struggled to balance law-and-order principles with the right to protest.
“Freedom of expression and speech is guaranteed for everyone,” a military spokesman said on the military’s Facebook page Thursday. But “the excessive use of this right . . . could represent a threat to social peace and the country’s best interest,” it said
Sharaf al-Hourani and William Booth contributed to this report.
July 6, 2013Morsi Spurned Deals, Seeing Military as Tamed
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAYY EL SHEIKH
CAIRO — As President Mohamed Morsi huddled in his guard’s quarters during his last hours as Egypt’s first elected leader, he received a call from an Arab foreign minister with a final offer to end a standoff with the country’s top generals, senior advisers with the president said.
The foreign minister said he was acting as an emissary of Washington, the advisers said, and he asked if Mr. Morsi would accept the appointment of a new prime minister and cabinet, one that would take over all legislative powers and replace his chosen provincial governors.
The aides said they already knew what Mr. Morsi’s answer would be. He had responded to a similar proposal by pointing at his neck. “This before that,” he had told his aides, repeating a vow to die before accepting what he considered a de facto coup and thus a crippling blow to Egyptian democracy.
His top foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, then left the room to call the United States ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, to say that Mr. Morsi refused. When he returned, he said he had spoken to Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and that the military takeover was about to begin, senior aides said.
“Mother just told us that we will stop playing in one hour,” an aide texted an associate, playing on a sarcastic Egyptian expression for the country’s Western patron, “Mother America.”
The State Department had no comment Saturday on the details of the American role in Mr. Morsi’s final days.
The abrupt end of Egypt’s first Islamist government was the culmination of months of escalating tensions and ultimately futile American efforts to broker a solution that would keep Mr. Morsi in his elected office, at least in name, if not in power. A new alliance of youthful activists and Mubarak-era elites was driving street protests. A collapsing economy put new pressure on Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, the once-outlawed Islamist group that had finally come to power after the ouster of the former president, Hosni Mubarak. And an alliance between Mr. Morsi and the nation’s top generals was gradually unraveling.
Senior Brotherhood officials said Mr. Morsi’s adamant response to the last proposal — a combination of idealism and stubbornness — epitomized his rule. It may also have doomed his presidency.
As long ago as the fall, he had spoken fatalistically of the possibility of his own ouster, his senior advisers said. “Do you think this is the peak?” he asked a visibly anxious aide during his first major political crisis. “No,” Mr. Morsi said with resignation, “The peak will be when you see my blood flowing on the floor.”
That was just after what his advisers and Muslim Brotherhood leaders now acknowledge was the defining blunder of his one-year presidency. After Mubarak-appointed judges dissolved the Islamist-led Parliament, Mr. Morsi in November declared his own authority above the courts until a constitutional convention could finish its work.
Tens of thousands of protesters denounced his tactic as authoritarian, setting off the first major street fighting between his supporters and opponents. Even some of his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood were angered, the group’s leaders and presidential advisers said. They complained that he had not consulted them, but still expected them to defend him in the streets.
“If I were not in my place, I would think he wants to be a dictator,” one Muslim Brotherhood leader said when he heard the news on television, a colleague recounted on condition of anonymity.
Mr. Morsi, though, feared he would appear weak if he backed down, his advisers said. “The president is headstrong,” lamented another Brotherhood leader.
Through it all, Mr. Morsi never believed the generals would turn on him as long as he respected their autonomy and privileges, his advisers said. He had been the Muslim Brotherhood’s designated envoy for talks with the ruling military council after the ouster of Mr. Mubarak. His counterpart on the council was Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi.
The Brotherhood was naturally suspicious of the military, its historical opponent, but General Sisi cultivated Mr. Morsi and other leaders, one of them said, including going out of his way to show that he was a pious Muslim. “That is how the relationship between the two of them started,” said a senior Brotherhood official close to Mr. Morsi. “He trusted him.”
The two grew so close that Mr. Morsi caught his advisers by surprise when he promoted General Sisi to defense minister last summer as part of a deal that persuaded the military for the first time to let the elected president take full control of his government. Mr. Morsi kept relations with the military as his “personal file,” and worked out the deal without consulting his aides, one adviser said.
But the generals’ exit, however, only redoubled the criticism from Mr. Morsi’s opponents that the Islamists were monopolizing power.
Mr. Morsi failed to broaden his appeal among the sectarian opposition, and amid complaints that he and the Brotherhood were monopolizing power. And when the protests took off last fall, General Sisi signaled that his departure from politics might not be so permanent. Without consulting Mr. Morsi, the general publicly invited all the country’s fractious political factions — from social democrats to ultraconservative sheiks — to a meeting to try to hammer out a compromise on a more inclusive government. Mr. Morsi quashed the idea, advisers said, to avoid drawing the generals back into politics.
General Sisi said publicly last week that he continued to try to broker some compromise with the opposition and to ease the political polarization. It was at that point, Mr. Morsi’s advisers say, that they first suspected General Sisi of intrigue.
Mr. Morsi, they say, often pressed the general to stop unnamed military officials from making threatening or disparaging statements toward the president in the news media. General Sisi merely said that “newspapers and media exaggerate,” and that he was “trying to control the tensions toward the president inside the military,” one adviser said.
Yet Mr. Morsi insisted to his aides that he remained fully confident that General Sisi would not interfere, almost until the end of his presidency. He was the last one in the inner circle to acknowledge last week that General Sisi was ousting them.
United States officials had repeatedly urged Mr. Morsi to compromise with the opposition and include it in government. In December, President Obama met with Mr. Haddad, Mr. Morsi’s foreign policy adviser, in the Oval Office to deliver the message, Mr. Morsi’s advisers said. At one point, they said, Mr. Obama offered to intervene with the opposition leaders, either Mohamed ElBaradei, the former United Nations diplomat, or Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister under Mr. Mubarak. But Mr. Morsi declined.
Embassy officials tried to act as intermediaries, Morsi advisers said. They said Secretary of State John Kerry suggested naming Mr. ElBaradei as prime minister. But this year, Ms. Patterson pointedly told Mr. Morsi’s aides that some in Washington were running out of patience with her defense of Egypt’s new Islamist leaders, his advisers said.
By June, the economy was sputtering, with gas shortages and blackouts. Young organizers tapped into the growing discontent with a petition drive calling for Mr. Morsi’s removal, and it was set to culminate in a demonstration on the anniversary of his inauguration, June 30.
The first alarms went off in Mr. Morsi’s inner circle on June 21, when General Sisi issued a public statement warning that the growing “split in society” between Mr. Morsi’s supporters and opponents compelled the military “to intervene.”
Mr. Morsi was given no warning, his advisers said. But when Mr. Morsi called the general, General Sisi told the president that “it was to satisfy some of his men” and that “it was nothing more than an attempt to absorb their anger,” one of Mr. Morsi’s advisers said. “So even after that first statement, the president didn’t think a coup was imminent.”
The day before the protests, General Sisi called Mr. Morsi to press him for a package of concessions, including a new cabinet. But Mr. Morsi refused, saying he needed to consult first with his Islamist coalition.
When the protests came last Sunday, demonstrators were energized by the general’s suggestions of a possible intervention. Millions poured into the streets.
Inside Mr. Morsi’s office. Mr. Morsi’s team checked the official crowd count, sent its own observers, monitored the gathering on Google Earth, and even compared the numbers of mobile phone signals in various public squares, one adviser said, and mistakenly concluded that the pro-Morsi rally in Cairo outnumbered the protests against him.
“We felt a sense of relief,” the adviser said.
The next day, on Monday, General Sisi gave political leaders a 48-hour ultimatum to reach a compromise. A shaken Morsi adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said at the time the president’s team considered it “a military coup.”
Mr. Morsi’s advisers had meetings with Ms. Patterson and her deputy as well as a phone call with Ms. Rice, the national security adviser. Mr. Morsi’s advisers argued that ousting the president would be “a long term disaster” for Egypt and the Arab world because people would “lose faith in democracy.” They said it would set off an explosion in the streets that they could not control.
And they argued that the United States was implicated: “Nobody who knows Egypt is going to believe a coup could go forward without a green light from the Americans.”
At a meeting with General Sisi at 2 p.m. the next day, Mr. Morsi’s advisers said that they had their coalition’s blessing to accept the earlier concessions the general had suggested before the protest.
But when the general returned to the Republican Guard building at 6 p.m., he said “the opposition” had balked, the advisers said.
Mr. Morsi’s team did not know who the general actually consulted and the young protest leaders and some other opposition leaders said they did not know either. But that night Mr. Morsi delivered a fiery address denouncing his opponents as traitorous conspirators.
General Sisi later publicly cited the speech as a turning point in his decision to act.
On Wednesday, the generals convened a four-hour meeting at military headquarters with protest and opposition party leaders. The head of Mr. Morsi’s Islamist party, now jailed, was invited but did not attend.
In Washington, officials stepped back and said little.
Mr. Morsi had been working out of his guards’ house for his own security during the protests. As he waited to be arrested, he told stories about the politicians of his youth. “He was as relaxed as I’ve ever seen him,” one adviser said.
As the last aides to leave walked out, one heard a general tell his guards: “Lock the gates.”
Tahar-LSW
laseptiemewilaya 
This is great. This is the first time i read some of the details of this uprising or coup…i don’t know anymore. I live in Cairo and i am not sure what is going on anymore. All i know is that the situation is scary and dangerous and Masser has gone. We will live to regret the decision of removing Morsi. What were we thinking really? Someone stupid idiots thought that alikhwana will go underground and disappear. We were high on something, but definitively we were not thinking straight. Now, i am really scared, honest to god i am scared of civil war. We have gone tooooooooooo far and we need to back off nowe before it’s too late.
Salim Mouhendesse, from Cairo, Egypt.
Mr. Mouhendesse, please do not hesitate to comment on anything that you might see as wrong. You are on the ground in Cairo and it would be great to have your input directly. If you wish to write entire post in Arabic, please do–in fact, any language will be fine with me. If you just wish comment, please do.
Good luck to you over there, and keep calm and carry on as the Brits would to say.
I love what you have up too since the state of the Egyptian crisis/coup. This is a very clever work that compiles articles that might fall through the cracks.
Thanks
Top post. I look forward to reading more. Cheers
WOW, the details of his ousting and the story behind it is getting uglier by the day. From these 3 articles, it seems that the military wanted him out no matter what. This is just ugly. I am certain that we will learn more details about this coup in the next a few weeks or months. I agree with you that the military plunged egypt into a civil war. I don’t see how they can avoid that. The cats are out of the bag so to speak.