By John Green
For anyone wishing to understand recent Egyptian history, this book offers invaluable insights. Although based on Hossam El-Hamalawy’s doctoral dissertation, its perspective is not one from the ivory tower of academia. As a student, Hamalawy was active in leftist circles in Egypt during 2000, when he was arrested, tortured and spent time in prison, so his account is also based on lived experience of the Egyptian security state.
Hosni Mubarak’s “War on Terror”, a defining feature of his thirty-year rule (1981–2011), characterized by a relentless, state-led crackdown on Islamist militants and political opponents under a near-permanent state of emergency, was long hailed as a success by local media and Western officials and was a key rationale for obtaining international support, despite all its failings of governance.
Following British colonial occupation under the fig leaf of a “protectorate” with a puppet king, from 1882, the “Free Officers’ coup” in 1952 led by colonel Nasser promised a new era of freedom and national self-determination. Unfortunately, Nasser soon imposed a structured labyrinth of security agencies, counterbalancing one another with overlapping mandates, in order to forestall any countercoup.
It appears to be a truism that even successful revolutions and progressive coups tend to adopt the oppressive tactics of previous autocratic regimes and often maintain or reimpose the same oppressive structures of oppression and surveillance. Nasser’s regime was no exception, leaving in place much of the British colonial structure.
The Nazi regime is often seen as a model for a totalitarian repressive state, but we have to remind ourselves that the Nazis did enjoy a high level of support from the German people. The Egyptian state differs significantly in that, today, it enjoys virtually no support among Egyptians; in fact it is a state apparatus at war with its own people.
One of the main oppressive institutions in Egypt was the GID (Interior Ministry’s General Investigations Department), created in 1952. It was set up following the officers’ coup and was staffed by officers from the dissolved colonial apparatus, together with recruits from the police and military. It was tasked, primarily, with targeting domestic dissent but many of its missions overlapped with the MI and the later founded GIS, including counter-espionage.
The Free Officers were initially keen to enlist the help of the CIA and former German Nazis in training and modernising the GID. Later they sought support from the Soviet KGB and the GDR’s Ministry of State Security.
Nasser’s popularity in Egypt and the Arab world was boosted after his nationalisation of the Suez Canal and his political victory in the Suez Crisis, known in Egypt as the Tripartite Aggression. Calls for pan-Arab unity under his leadership increased, culminating with the formation of the United Arab with Syria from 1958 to 1961.
Anwar Sadat, who became president, after Nasser’s death, had been a senior member of the Free Officers who overthrew King Farouk I in 1952. He was a close confidant of President Nasser whom he succeeded as president in 1970. Sadat overhauled the MOI which had been the junior partner in the coalition under Nasser, renamed the GID as SS, allowing it to play a bigger role in domestic security and governance, at the expense of its partners in the repressive apparatus.
After the Free Officers’ Coup, the regime engineered new security organs and restructured the police, which became fully militarised. From the 1980s onwards, US security assistance programmes to Egypt actively promoted military policing.
After Sadat’s assassination in 1981, Mubarak became president and despite early hopes of a positive change, he became even more autocratic.
A mutiny in 1986 became a scandal for the Ministry of the Interior, and a setback to Mubarak’s efforts to contain his powerful defence minister. He fired his interior minister and replaced him with Zaki Badr. The latter enjoyed a long career in the Police Criminal Investigations Department and gained notoriety for his brutality in suppressing the Islamists, paving the road to the 1990s War on Terror.
Under Mubarak, there had been a surge in assassinations which provoked reprisals from Islamist militants, culminating in a full insurgency by 1991, and police militarisation intensified. Hamalawy writes that , “Living in Cairo during the 1990s, I felt under occupation. Everywhere, CSF armoured vehicles, soldiers, and officers searched and detained citizens. CSF vans marked ‘SPOP’ (special operations) appeared daily at government sites, public spaces and institutions. Night checkpoints inspected cars, extorted money, and arrested passengers. Police adopted colonial tactics; emergency laws were tightened and arrests soared and collective punishments were meted out.”
The military in Egypt has dominated not only the security scene but also the economy. The military own many large companies. There is also endemic corruption and nepotism. The impact of this on the economy as a whole has been devastating and even the IMF, despite years of funding Egyptian governments, was becoming increasingly annoyed. Egypt’s system does not fit the “Free market” template so beloved of the IMF.
In arguably its bluntest report to date, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that Egypt’s military-controlled economic model was crippling private sector growth, deterring investors and keeping the country in a cycle of debt and underperformance.
In its 2025 report, the IMF notes: “The economic landscape is dominated by public-driven investments, an uneven playing field, and state-owned entities, including military ones.” It further warned that military-owned firms continue to enjoy “preferential treatment”, including tax breaks, cheap land and privileged access to credit and public contracts. Such privileges, the 202-page report notes, have continued to sideline private sector competitors and distort the market.
Following the Luxor massacre in November 1997, in which Islamic militants killed 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians, an enraged Mubarak publicly humiliated and dismissed his interior minister and purged the police high command. Major General Habib al-Adly, then head of the SS and a veteran of perpetual turf wars among the security services, survived the purge. He underwent training in the USA, and became Minister of the Interior, serving for 13 years. He was feared throughout the country, and by all other ministers. When Adly joined the cabinet in November 1997, the Islamist insurgency in the Nile valley had already been defeated. By April 1994, three years into the insurgency, large sections of both military wings of the insurgency had been wiped out by the police.
Adly continued his “war on terror” throughout the 1990s. Checkpoints across Egyptian cities remained in place, militarised police in Cairo and beyond were a constant presence. Torture became systemic in both political and criminal policing. The Emergency Law was ritually renewed every three years. By 2005, the estimated number of political detainees reached as high as 30,000.
Hamalawy argues that the unprecedented and widespread torture of the political opposition was due to two main reasons. Torture had been regularly used even before Mubarak, directed against political dissidents. “This practice,” he writes, reached such a nightmarish level, that it eventually provided the trigger for the 2011 revolution, which ousted Mubarak.
With Mubarak’s fall, the Egyptian people once again had their hopes raised of radical change and an end to oppression. This popular uprising shook the Egyptian elite to its roots and also sent shock waves through Western governments. Egypt was a key ally and recipient of huge quantities of arms. A genuinely independent Egypt would also be perceived as a grave threat to Israel. It had to be stifled.
Minister of Defence and Commander in Chief, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was engineered into the presidency. He successfully suppressed the uprising and restored the status quo. The Tahir Square revolution had achieved nothing. Under Sisi, the suppression of dissent, the arrests and torture continue unabated. He remains firmly in undisputed power.
During Sisi’s first presidential term, debate persisted over the nature of the post-coup order, with many viewing it as a mere restoration of Mubarak’s regime. But today, “few observes or ordinary Egyptians doubt that Sisi’s rule is fundamentally different”, while the scale of repression is undoubtedly worse.
The outbreak of war in Gaza and the Israeli genocide demonstrates once again how relevant Cairo is in regional politics, due to its geographical proximity to the conflict and because it is “too big to fail”. In March 2024, the IMF, World Bank, EU and UAE all rushed to bail out the Sisi regime with more than $50 billion, at the same time voicing concerns about regional instability. The flood of money, however, has not changed the economic model or ameliorated the situation for ordinary citizens.
Egypt continues to be a pressure cooker, with the lid firmly held down by a system of brutal military control. There is unlikely to be another popular uprising unless the elite is brought down by its own internal contradictions or the international climate changes radically.
While this book goes into perhaps too much detail for the average reader, it does provide vital and well-researched information about the workings of a corrupt and bankrupt regime ripe for collapse.
Counter-Revolution in Egypt – Sisi’s New Republic. By Hossam El-Hamalawy. Verso. Pbck
John Green is a former trade union official, a journalist and former documentary film-maker, which in the 1970s involved clandestine filming assignments in South Africa in the 1970s aimed at helping bring the abhorrent practices of the apartheid regime to world attention. He is the author of numerous books, including Ken Sprague, People’s Artist, A Revolutionary Life: Biography of Friedrich Engels and Britain’s Communists: The Untold Story.
Interested in a reviewing a book for us? Or a film, play or exhibition? Get in touch at info@liberationorg.co.uk
The views expressed in the articles published on this website do not necessarily represent those of Liberation
Support our work – donate, become a member, affiliate your local organisation’s branch or volunteer
