Kerdasa: State Policy Toward Rural Egypt and the Reproduction of Local Injustice

CASE ANALYSIS

Hani Awwad | December 2013

Kerdasa: State Policy Toward Rural Egypt and the Reproduction of Local Injustice

Series: Case Analysis

Hani Awwad | December 2013

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1 The Village Where the Memory of Persecution was Born 2 The State as a Guest: Kerdasa Village Narrative and Blaming the Outsider 8 Collective Punishment Against the Countryside: Kerdasa 12 Conclusion 15

KERDASA: STATE POLICY TOWARD RURAL EGYPT

Introduction

The violent break-up of the protest camps at Rabia al-Adawiya and al-Nahda on August 14, 2013 not only has dire consequences for the political process in Egypt, but it also indicates that heavy-handed security measures might open the country up to the possibility of civil unrest that might take on an extreme tribal, regional, or religious form. The Wiki Thawra site, a statistical database of the Egyptian Revolution, lists more than 295 instances of clashes in the month following the break-up of the two protest camps, ranging from clashes between groups of civilians, to others involving the police and army, armed attacks on public facilities, the violent dispersal of sit-ins, sectarian clashes and extra-judicial killings.

During that month, the massacre at the police station in the town of Kerdasa—located in Giza governorate—stood out. A group of armed and masked assailants attacked this police station with live fire and rocket-propelled grenades. They killed 13 policemen in revenge for the breakup of the Rabia al-Adawiya and al-Nahda protest camps, when a number of local people were killed. This was not the only incident of its kind in Egypt. Wiki Thawra lists 68 similar occurrences throughout Egypt in which people took revenge against state institutions in response to locals being shot and killed by the security forces. The sheer bloodiness of the violence in Kerdasa and its subsequent coverage in the media marked it, and led the townspeople to endure a form of collective punishment.

This analysis attempts to understand the reasons Kerdasa was different than other small and medium-sized Egyptian towns that were, until relatively recently, no more than villages. This is done through a reading of the social and historical background to the solidarity found among its people and how this was expressed before and after the July 3, 2013 military coup. Kerdasa is then presented as a paradigm for understanding the Egyptian security forces’ policy for dealing with rural Egypt.1

1 Parts two and three of this article are based on testimonies collected via email and telephone. Apart from Professor Sayyid al-Nazili, all of the witnesses preferred remain anonymous owing to the current security situation in Egypt. These people also provided links to videos on the Internet that document what happened in detail. I wish to thank my friend Mr. Mohammad Abbas, former member of the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth, for his assistance in getting in touch with the people of Kerdasa.

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The Village Where the Memory of Persecution was Born

Kerdasa is situated in Giza governorate and is one of its oldest and largest villages. By the end of Egypt’s monarchy, Kerdasa was a rural center with a range of economic activities, in addition to agriculture. Kerdasa and number of other villages, such as Nahya, Atfeeh and Imbaba, constituted the semi-rural hinterland adjacent to the Greater Cairo metropolitan area. As a result of increasing urbanization these villages became administrative centers for the smaller villages that grew up around them. One could describe them as village centers, though, in fact, they are small towns.

The rural centers adjacent to the city (the near Sa’id), among them Kerdasa, are distinct in being more influenced by and more connected to the social, cultural, and political momentum of the capital than the villages of the far Sa’id due to their geographical proximity to Cairo and their economic connections, which date back to the beginning of the twentieth century. This interconnection was particularly apparent in the 20th century when the people of Kerdasa established family workshops for the manufacture and sale of woven textiles. Increased levels of schooling enabled children to enjoy educational opportunities at college and university, and, consequently, to establish a place for themselves in the rising middle class. At an early period, prior to the coming of Nasserism, they were also able to establish educational, cultural, and political institutions, such as schools and political party offices, like the Wafd and the Muslim Brotherhood, while continuing to reside in the village.2

During Egypt’s monarchy, the chain of villages interposing between the city and the Sa’id enjoyed economic opportunities that were relatively independent of the state by living off the economic surplus of the urban center. They became small towns that were gradually

2 See Hilal, Politics and Government in Egypt, p. 240. According to Hilal, this differs to sections of the middle class in the more distant villages in the Sa’id that were forced to migrate to the city to escape the dominance of large landowners during the monarchy. These people established themselves before others and began new lives in the city. The difference between the kind of village considered by Hilal and villages like Kerdasa is that the latter gained some autonomy from the state via economic activity whereas the more distant villages were obliged to curry favor and form alliances with the authorities to obtain economic positions, as explained by Ahmad Zayid in his study of two Egyptian villages. See al- Zayid, The Political Structure of Rural Egypt, pp. 338-9. All of this took place years before Nathan Brown’s book that reaches virtually the same conclusions based on the village of Bahwat in Daqhiliya. See Brown, Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt, pp. 107-8.

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assimilated into the metropolitan area while maintaining their rural values of social solidarity.3 These villages produced the first “ideological generation” of youth for the Islamic Groups,4 foremost among them what the media termed the “1965 Tanzim” [fighting group] headed by Sayyid Qutb.5

These were the same young people who subsequently found themselves engaged in an ideological battle with the Nasserite regime. During the 1960s and 1970s, Nasserite and leftist movements grew up in the city centers and among students and employees of state-owned companies,6 while the Islamic youth grew out of the family-run or small- scale workshops and enterprises in the villages adjacent and attached to the cities. The young military state under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser targeted these villages as the breeding ground for political Islam. From there, and from inside the prisons, evolved the idea of “persecution” that holds sway over the Brotherhood until today.7

3 On the nature of the small town or urbanized village, see Tamari, “The Oppressive Culture of Small Towns,” pp. 39-40.

4 For example, Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Bashendi and former Brotherhood secretary- general Mahmoud Ghizlan are from Kerdasa. The neighboring village of Nahya was home to Essam al- Erian and to the Islamic Jihad leaders Tariq and Aboud al-Zumr. Hossam Tamam, an Egyptian researcher of Islamic movements, points to the significance of the 1965 Tanzim as marking the birth of the ideological phase of the Muslim Brotherhood. See Tamam, The Muslim Brotherhood, p. 39.

5 Abdel Maguid, “The Brotherhood and Abdel Nasser,” 2006. This is suggested by those who documented the 1965 Tanzim of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ahmad Abdel Maguid states that most of the young people in the organization were “young members of the Brotherhood from various areas, most of which were in the governorates of Cairo, Giza, and Daqhaliya,” meaning the villages. For the following testimony, see al-Sarwi, The Muslim Brotherhood, 2004. The testimony of Abdel Maguid corresponds with that of Mohammad al-Sarwi who states, “Here you see the main spread of the Brotherhood as being in Cairo, Giza, and Daqhaliya, and in limited numbers in Alexandria and the other governorates.”

6 See Diyab, Revolts or Revolutions.

7 For example, we can trace the names of the villages that appear in Gaber Rizq’s book and other works which record the pursuit and uprooting of the Brotherhood Tanzim at the hands of the Nasserite regime. They share the same elements as we described above. These villages (some of which have become substantial towns) are: Mit Ghamr near Daqhaliya, Kafr Shukr and al-Zawamil near Cairo, Ayyash adjacent to Mahalla, and al-Bayda near Mansoura. Distinct from Kerdasa, as will become clear, city dwellers did not pass on a local story, and the names of the villages remained hidden away in the annals of the Muslim Brotherhood.

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From this context arose what the Muslim Brotherhood’s literature refers to as the story of the “Kerdasa disaster,” a story that has been passed on by generations of Brotherhood youth as one of the stories embodying elements of injustice. The story begins in 1965 with plainclothes men from military intelligence making a clandestine raid on the home of Brotherhood member Sayyid Nazili, and ends with the besieging and punishing of most families in the village, including the mayor. The narrator and preserver of the story, Gaber Rizq, starts by introducing himself as “one of the people of Kerdasa, a young member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s, and a member of the 1965 Tanzim.” In order to document the event, he collected testimonies from the townspeople who witnessed the event or were among its victims.

Rizq continues that around sunset on August 21, 1965, eight burly men stormed the house of Sayyid Nazili who, along with other of the town’s youth, was sought by the military police for being part of the Tanzim that had been uncovered in August 1965. The wave of arrests of Muslim Brotherhood figures had begun at the end of July 1965, prior to the uncovering of any Brotherhood paramilitary group. Since the military police failed to find Nazili, they took his brother and his new bride as hostages. Neither the two prisoners nor the townspeople knew the identities of these eight captors. The townspeople tried to rescue them and clashed with the men by throwing stones. A local policeman was able to identify one of the men from his military police ID card after he’d lost consciousness. He shouted out, “You’re done for Kerdasa. A disaster, people of Kerdasa. These men are not thieves but the military police.”

Over the next three days in Kerdasa, the security forces ran wild in an operation attended—according to Gaber Rizq—by then interior minister Abdel Azim Fahmi, head of the army operations room General Ali Gamal al-Din, minister of war Shams Badran, the governor and security director of Giza, and the area police chief. The town was besieged on all sides by tanks, armored vehicles, and cars lining the streets, in addition to an imposed curfew. The security forces searched all the town’s houses, smashing everything possible. They stole all they could get their hands on, and ruined the contents of people’s homes.

Operations to arrest the town mayor and his family (one of the town’s largest), the local religious leaders, the watchmen and their chief began. They were all roped together and “driven along like cattle.” “Half-naked women in their night clothes were wailing while

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children screamed and the men were in utter confusion.”8 All the prisoners were led to the preparatory school which, being in the center of the town, the military police had taken over as their headquarters and turned into a terrifying torture camp. After this chilling display, the detainees were driven away from Kerdasa in armored vehicles to military prison where “a horrific massacre of Egypt’s finest youth and men was perpetrated. A massacre unlike any that had happened in Egypt’s history except for the Roman period when the Christians were being persecuted.”9 Kerdasa experienced around three months of terror. The mosques were closed, the call to prayer was banned, and prayers inside the mosques stopped. Every street and alley was guarded until “food and water ran out. The cattle starved and died of thirst. Mothers’ milk dried up in their breasts and babies died.”10

The exaggerations in the account as given by Gaber Rizq are plain to see, even if in practice difficult to prove. The townspeople who have passed on this account from father to son confirm and support it.11 From the methodological perspective of analyzing historical narratives, exaggeration serves as a mechanism for the socio-psychological return (in the wider meaning of the Freudian term) to emotional events that are necessarily governed by interpretation and additions. Elements such as the death of breastfed babies because a mother’s milk had dried up are examples of exaggeration, and images entirely subject to the mechanism of revisiting an event.

Nevertheless, there is a core of truth that can be inferred after subjecting the account to internal and external critique,and freeing it from the effects of the reproduction methods. A security campaign did target Kerdasa, as happened elsewhere, as part of the security policy applied by the Nasserite regime to track down and suppress members of the Muslim

8 Rizq, Massacres of the Brotherhood, 1986.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid. Details of the story can be found in Part One of this work, which was published in 1976; Riqz delayed publication of part two until 1986, saying, “I was unable to publish part two before these ten years had passed because two of the main butchers remained at the head of the worst security apparatus during this black era of Nasserite dictatorship.”

11 Mr. Ahmad Nazili, son of Sayyid Nazili, interviewed by telephone; he confirmed the event. He did not, however, rule out exaggeration in the account, saying that Gaber Rizq was a writer of stories.

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Brotherhood in 1965. It is difficult to prove whether leading figures in the regime took an interest in inspecting the town themselves.

None of that is of particular importance given that the people of Kerdasa continued to pass on the story of the tragedy until it became a local memory for the town, reinforced by the values of family cohesion in rural society. Subsequently, this led to the spread of claims that the townspeople were excluded from civil service employment or service in the army for the last five decades, a matter that it is impossible to prove. The marginalization claim is refuted by the fact that during the Nasserite period, the state oversaw the creation of an industrial zone in the Abu Rawwash district, a semi-desert zone attached to Kerdasa. Work there continued until the 1980s, and the overall condition of Kerdasa remained better than neighboring local centers, and far better than the teeming slums of Bulaq al-Dakrour.12

In general, since the 1980s, the role of the state in Egypt has changed. Its withdrawal from rural Egypt has led to the creation of a rural middle class not directly linked to the state. This class formed the backbone of the Muslim Brotherhood in the countryside, and built up a community-wide network of charitable and religious institutions that qualified it to represent the people. As Max Weber puts it, through these activities it became the “status group,”13 that is, a parallel elite to that of former president Hosni Mubarak able to gain the respect of the people. In most rural Egyptian villages there were two elites: the first grew out of the state bureaucracy and the local government network, while the second grew out of the economic activity of the Islamists. The relationship between these two elites ranged from complementary to competitive. On the one hand, the former regime recognized the importance of the Islamist rural elite as it helped to fill the gap left by the state’s weakness through its own social and health networks and its charitable work. On the other hand, the regime was alarmed at the cultural role and political ambitions of these networks. Hence, the state took a hard line regarding the relations between these networks and the governorates and the urban centers. At election times during Mubarak’s final decade, competition and conflict dominated.

12 It should be noted that Bulaq al-Dakrour lost its rural character as a result of migration, and was transformed into a belt of poverty as a result of the effect of neo-liberalism on Boulaq al-Dakrour and the relationship between the authorities and the people there, which takes a different form on every level as a result of the dissolution of rural ties, see: Ismail, Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters, 2006.

13 Weber, Economy and Society, p. 306.

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The particularity of Kerdasa stems from the fact that the town’s local memory—as represented by the 1965 tragedy—played a key role in the creation of a defined and active Islamist elite despite the town’s revival under Mubarak when it became a tourist destination for woven textile products, such as clothing and carpets.14 This would have a significant impact on the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mubarak regime at election times from 1987 until 2010. In the neighboring villages, state security insisted on rigging the election results in flagrant fashion. Even though, as is well known, the Mubarak regime permitted the Muslim Brotherhood an electoral margin in some rural areas at the 2005 elections, this did not apply to rural Giza, including Kerdasa, and was a necessary price to be paid by the urbanized countryside surrounding the Egyptian capital.15

Affairs continued in this fashion until the outbreak of the January 25 Revolution. On January 28, the Friday of Rage, mass demonstrations took place in Kerdasa for the first time. The police fired on the revolutionaries, and killed two youngsters. As a result, the townspeople stormed the police station in the center of the town, and destroyed it after kicking out the police. The police did not return to the town for another eight months, following mediation by leading community members, led by Mohammad Nasr al- Ghazalani.16

For a considerable portion of the the military council’s (SCAF) rule, Kerdasa was administered by a popular committee, led by members of the main families who belonged to Islamic groups. For example, Sheikh Mahdi al-Ghazalani was from the Muslim Brotherhood and Dr. Mohammad Nasr al-Ghazalani was a former member of Islamic Jihad. These local leaders acted as mediators to convene a reconciliation meeting between the families of the victims and the police so as to enable the return of the police after promises were given that those responsible would be held accountable. That never happened.17 The Ministry of Interior gave official recognition to the popular committee’s

14 This subsequently became a very large town with a population of several hundred thousand.

15 See the study by the late Egyptian researcher Samer Suleiman, Political Participation.

16 See the report of the release of Mohammad al-Ghazalan: “The Interior Ministry conditionally releases 10 prisoners,” Al-Ahram Online, March 5, 2011. http://gate.ahram.org.eg/News/46277.aspx.

17 See “Saturday evening in Kerdasa,” a YouTube video, July 16, 2011.

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leadership after the latter contributed to the rebuilding of the police station. Official cards were printed for the committee, an indication that they were acknowledged as representatives of the community, and over the course of the following year, relations between the popular committee and the officers of the Ministry of Interior were cooperative, as attested to by one of the people of Kerdasa.18

All of this took place before the presidential elections. In the first round of the elections in the Kerdasa district,19 Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood representative, took more votes than all the other candidates combined. In the detailed breakdown of the votes in the second round, more than 90 percent of Kerdasa’s votes went to Morsi, giving him a sweeping victory over his rival General Ahmed Shafik, the candidate of the old regime.20 Kerdasa was not in the media until the military coup on July 3, 2013, after the breakup of the Rabia al-Adawiya and Nahda protests on August 14, 2013, when the Kerdasa police station was sacked and those inside were brutally executed. About one month later, the state took its revenge, remiscent of the 1965 tragedy.

The State as a Guest: Kerdasa Village Narrative and Blaming the Outsider

Kerdasa was not the only small town or village to witness violent clashes. According to Egyptian rights groups, in the aftermath of the dispersal of the Rabia al-Adawiya and Nahda protests, the country saw the specter of civil war. This spiraling violence comprised 68 incidents, some of which were very similar to events in Kerdasa. Unique to Kerdasa, however, was the viciousness of the clashes and the fact that it had been categorized both by its residents and the authorities as a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood.

18 al-Shami, Ahmad. “Ahmad al-Shami Writes: Kerdasa, between the backdrop of the massacre and the real criminals,” El-Hasad (blog), August 21, 2013. http://www.elhasad.com/2013/08/blog- post_5884.html. See also “Reopening of Kerdasa police station,” a YouTube video, September 27, 2011.

19 The district, in addition to Kerdasa, includes a number of surrounding villages and small towns.

20 For the numbers in detail, see the Electoral Commission’s Website, last updated 2012, http://presidential2012.elections.eg/index.php/round2-results.

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On the basis of the documentation from Wiki Thawra, one can observe that on the day the two major protests were dispersed, the same day as the storming of Kerdasa police station, similar events took place in other rural centers. In Tamiya in Fayoum province, six policemen were killed along with four civilians in clashes around the police station. In Abu Qirqus, Samat, Maghagha, and Malwi in Minya, there were violent clashes around police stations where policemen and civilians were killed. These villages share a clan- based structure and support for the Muslim Brotherhood as is made clear in the results of successive elections.21

On July 3, 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declared the ousting of the elected president Mohammed Morsi. Mass demonstrations headed for the police station in the center of Kerdasa. Efforts by local figures, such as leader of the Freedom and Justice Party Abdel Salam Bashendi, to mediate with the demand that the police leave the station with their weapons failed. Demonstrations continued the following day, and clashes erupted when the Ministry of Interior sent 14 Central Security wagons and four armored vehicles. According to eyewitnesses, the security forces were bent on humiliating the townspeople. Using loudspeakers, they broadcast insults such as, “Listen, town where there are no men.” At the end of that day, seven demonstrators had been shot and killed by the police. Two were from Kerdasa, two from Bani Magdoul, and three from Nahya.

The day the two protest camps were dispersed, the people of Kerdasa awoke to screams and cries for help. Someone from almost every street and alley was present at the Nahda protest, which was only 15 minutes away by car. An eyewitness described the people milling around in panic. A portion of the townspeople joined in the alternative sit-in at Mustafa Mahmoud Square, which the Muslim Brotherhood tried to establish after the dispersal of the two earlier protests. Most people, however, decided to demonstrate and confront the police at the police station. Over the course of five hours, five civilians were killed, accompanied by vengeful taunting and celebrations on the part of the police.

Over the following hours, battle raged. Dozens of masked men, heavily armed with automatic weapons and RPGs, attacked the police station. At the end of the day, most of the police had met a violent death. The media showed images of Central Security equipment and armored vehicles trashed and on fire. While the Egyptian media accused leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood for planning this, the testimonies, collected through

21 To review their documentation, visit: WikiThawra Statistical Data Base of the Egyptian Revolution, WikiThawra (blog), http://wikithawra.wordpress.com.

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detailed phone interviews or compiled and documented on personal blogs, show that the townspeople tried to help the police and that the killers were the masked assailants of unknown identity. Some testimonies accused the residents of the semi-desert Abu Ruwwash area, who were known for “taking revenge and getting justice.”

Such is the account of the massacre that acquits the people of Kerdasa after it became a matter of public interest. The elements of the account as recorded from the testimonies can be summarized as follows: 1) Tens of people were killed in clashes inside the town and at the Nahda protest camp in Giza. 2) This was followed by a violent response directed at the security forces at the town police station. 3) The townspeople claimed that they were not involved, but that it was “unknown people” or those from “a certain village” on bad terms with the people of Kerdasa. The people of Kerdasa even blamed the Ministry of Interior itself for liquidating its staff. It is difficult to obtain an open admission from the townspeople that any family was involved in the massacre, despite the fact that this is the most reasonable scenario.

The people of Kerdasa have a tense relationship with the people of the Abu Ruwwash area. Abu Ruwwash is a semi-desert area adjacent to Kerdasa where the state created an industrial zone in the Abdel Nasser era. This did not take long to expand as a result of light industrial projects. It is worth noting that the people of Kerdasa, without exception, do not intermarry with people from Abu Ruwwash. The reason behind the negative stereotyping toward them is unknown, but in Kerdasa they are viewed as drug pushers, thugs, and police informants. In the urbanized Sa’id, people still view the residents of neighboring areas as “strangers” just as they do the police who come from far away. Perhaps the reason behind the relative sensitivity lies in the fact that the industrial zone forms a narrative that contradicts local memory. Only a few hundred meters from the “memory of the persecution” there is Abu Ruwwash, which belies most of the elements of injustice and shows the state in a positive light, encouraging investment and taking care of the owners of small and medium-sized industrial projects. This is in sharp contrast with the stories of success in Kerdasa, which are constructed in people’s minds as individual success stories despite the actions of the state.22 The narrative and facts of the

22 See the Shafik campaign’s Official Website, “Shafik meets with the tribal leaders of Abu Ruwwash,” March 26, 2012. http://masralaan-ahmedshafik.com/?p=2320. This reflects Kerdasa’s view of Abu Ruwwash but does not reflect the people of Abu Ruwwash’s view of themselves, nor does it reflect the electoral attitudes of the people of Abu Ruwwash since Mohammed Morsi polled 90 percent there in the second round, despite Ahmed Shafik’s having visited the town. This visit would appear to have been part of the strategy focusing on “the wheels of production.” At the time, this visit was viewed as a provocation 10 KERDASA: STATE POLICY TOWARD RURAL EGYPT

Kerdasa event, as well as conjectures with to the perpetrators, all remain within the village frame of reference. Treatment of the police forces, according to the various testimonies, was as follows:

1. Most of those who gave an account were keen to stress that Kerdasa survived without police for the better part of a year. They confirmed that the town got along with the popular committee led by Muslim Brotherhood leaders from the large, respectable families. The police were thrown out during the January 25 Revolution on the basis that they were outsiders. When they returned months later, they did so as guests and on condition that they acknowledged the town elite. A public meeting was held on their return to confirm this condition. Below is a transcript of the invitation sent out to leading townspeople in Kerdasa for the public meeting on the occasion of the return of the police station:

We have the pleasure to invite you to attend the preparatory conference in support of the police’s return to Kerdasa’s police station next Friday, Shawwal 11, 1432 AH at 2:30 PM. This will take place at the rest house of Dr. Sayyid Hussein al-Zanari next to the Balah Bridge, Abu Ruwwash. The agenda is as follows: 1. Opening. 2. Review of the meeting with governorate security chiefs. 3. Address by the Director of Security and his assistants. 4. Questions and proposals from those present. 5. Concluding recommendations.

Please note the following:

The invitation is personal, please do not bring children.

Please arrive on time. Space is available for the afternoon prayer.

2. There is no doubt that this arrangement, deemed satisfactory for the townspeople, was temporary and unacceptable to security officers and their men, who saw their presence as being sanctioned by the force of law and state legitimacy. The testimonies of the people of Kerdasa repeatedly stated that the “senior and cool-

by Kerdasa and its attached villages. It was hinted that the people of Abu Ruwwash were descended from Libyan or Tunisian tribes (that is outsiders) and that they had special privileges, such as exemption from military service and given preferential treatment, which is, of course, untrue.

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headed men of the town” went to the police station a few hours before the massacre to negotiate with the police chief for the officers to leave the village with their weapons, and remind them that their return had been conditional. The police chief, however, insulted the women of the village. This also explains the celebratory display mounted by the police during the suppression of peaceful demonstrations.

The people of Kerdasa created this narrative with its details and actors over about one month. The narrative in all its elements came about as a result of the interplay with the campaign to destroy the village’s reputation from the moment the crime took place until the storming of the town 35 days later. The Egyptian press and satellite channels produced dozens of reports on the criminality of the people of Kerdasa and accused them of dealing in arms, committing acts of terrorism, and embracing armed groups. Over these weeks, the people of the town spent every night awaiting, once again, for retribution and persecution.

Collective Punishment Against the Countryside: Kerdasa

All the features that the people of Kerdasa hold dear and that distinguish them from outsiders (the source of “evil”) were not apparent when the Egyptian Army and security forces decided to restore the state’s presence. From the state’s perspective, there was no difference between Kerdasa and Abu Ruwwash, Nahya and Dalga. Furthermore, in the Sa’id, problems with the security forces are perennial.

When the Egyptian state decides to engage in a security operation against a village in the Sa’id, the only approach is of collective punishment because in the state’s view the town’s basic legal unit is not the citizen as it should be, but the extended family which may comprise tens of families and hundreds of individuals. For this reason, frequently during the course of security campaigns, homes are set on fire, and a number of relatives of the person sought are arrested and abused. A curfew is imposed, likely involving the theft of shops and houses.

In such cases, the Egyptian Army operates alongside another army made up of broadcasters and journalists who paint a black picture of the targeted village, turning its residents into criminals who deserve what is coming. In the case of Kerdasa, the Egyptian press published dozens of stories that described the town as a hotbed of terrorism, a source of violent crime, and a stronghold of takfiri groups. The press went so far as to 12 KERDASA: STATE POLICY TOWARD RURAL EGYPT

accuse the women of incitement to murder. The media behaves as though the Egyptian Army were going to war, rather than going to arrest a citizen or group of citizens, inflaming public opinion with imaginary victories whose victims were most likely innocent.23

The people’s narrative of the police station massacre got lost in the onslaught of printed and televised material in the media over the course of a month or so. They knew that a punishment operation was inevitably coming, only delayed by the country’s situation. This follows from Egyptian security strategy of usually pacifying Cairo and the vital urban centers before turning to the security treatment of the other governorates.24

At dawn on Thursday, September 19, 2013, the operation to storm Kerdasa began, and was broadcast live on television by Egyptian channels in a carnivalesque atmosphere. Tanks and armored cars surrounded Kerdasa and Nahya. Over the course of a few hours, thousands of rounds of live ammunition and tear gas canisters were fired. Throughout the day and into the night tens of homes were raided, their contents smashed and their inhabitants, be they men, women or children, arrested in humiliating fashion. The following day, after Friday prayers, the townspeople of Kerdasa and Nahya came out to condemn the raids. The police and army stationed in these two towns responded with gunfire and tear gas, leading to the asphyxiation of a number of children.

Subsequently, images began circulating of burnt-out homes and the damage caused by the security forces to the houses of respectable local personalities. Anything that could be stolen was taken and the remaining contents trashed. Over the course of one week, the homes of Hasan Ads, Mohammad al-Sayyid al-Ghazalani, Mohammad Bashendi, Abdel Salam Bashendi (Freedom and Justice Party member of the dissolved People’s Assembly), Walid Saad Abu Umeira, Ahmad Muqallad (the town registrar of marriages), Mohammad

23 The following are examples of such coverage:

• “Kerdasa, from tourist destination to terrorist den,” Al-Wafd, September 19, 2013. http://goo.gl/j6WKFq. • “The conquest of the republic of Kerdasa, a new link in the chain of national liberation,” ONA News Agency, September 19, 2013. http://onaeg.com/?p=1172674. • “Egypt liberates Kerdasa,” Al-Watan (Egypt), September 20, 2013. http://www.elwatannews.com/news/details/326462. • “The liberation of Kerdasa,” cartoon, Al Masry Al Youm, September 20, 2013. http://www.almasryalyoum.com/node/2134951. 24 Policy Analysis Unit, “Will protests against the coup,” September 23, 2013.

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Nasr al-Ghazalani, and Ahmad Abul Suoud were raided, and all of these men were all arrested along with some members of their families. Hundreds of the townspeople of various political affiliations were arrested. The value of stolen cash and jewelry was estimated in the hundreds of thousands of Egyptian pounds.

By following the coverage of the Egyptian media, and comparing it with the testimonies of the townspeople, the following observations can be made:

1. The security forces were not content simply to raid the homes of all those known to belong to the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, the homes of most local community figures were raided, trashed, and robbed, while members of their families were arrested. These actions can only be understood as intended to humiliate the town’s elite that had administered affairs following the January 25 Revolution.

2. The storming of the town was represented as a “liberation” despite repeated testimonies denying the presence of any armed elements on the fringes of the town or inside it at the time of the assault. A police major-general was killed during the assault, but, according to the forensic report, his death was caused by a 9mm bullet fired at close range that entered his right side and lodged in the lung wall. This makes it likely that he was killed by friendly fire.25

3. Over the months following the storming of the town, raids continued and took the form of a spectacle. In parallel, the Egyptian satellite channels and private press continued to fabricate totally baseless battles being waged by the security forces to “purge” terrorist strongholds. Fabricated accounts were also given by townspeople who praised the new regime and condemned the Brotherhood leadership in the town.

4. The way the Egyptian security forces arrested people shows that this was not based on information or even intuition, but on preformed attitudes and a tendency for punishment and revenge. The security forces went to raid the home of Sheikh Mahdi al-Ghazalani (a former leader in Islamic Jihad) and arrest him, when his neighbors informed them that he had died seven months previously. On this pattern, arrests were random and those sought came from a range of backgrounds (Islamist, member of the popular committee, etc.).26 This exposes the ignorance

25 al-Iskandrani, Ismail. “Accounts by the people of Kerdasa of mass vengeance,” Al-Akhbar (Lebanon), September 25, 2013. http://www.al-akhbar.com/node/191975.

26 Ismail al-Iskandrani (researcher and legal activist), interview by author, October 4, 2013.

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of the state toward rural Egypt, and its lack of information for dealing with it and the resort to stereotypes for handling its contradictions.

The handling of the Kerdasa crisis shows that the Egyptian state has a security vision toward rural Egypt totally outside the framework of the law. This serves to worsen the relationship with local communities, entrenches their alienation, and, as a result, perpetuates pre-modern structures for the protection of individuals. Regarding Kerdasa, this means only the reproduction of the local folk memory as opposed to going beyond this in the context of the law.

Conclusion

This paper has tried to observe a temporally and spatially defined aspect of the relationship between the Egyptian state and local communities, in particular, following the civil unrest in the country after the July 3 military coup. In the first section, it probed the local social history of Kerdasa in brief. This revealed the tragic memory that has been preserved by the socio- psychological mechanism of return since the days of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. This led to a circumspect position toward the Egyptian state over the past five decades.

Using field data from the testimonies collected for the purpose of this paper or those published on personal blogs, the analysis has presented the townspeople’s narrative of the massacre that took place the day the protests at Rabia al-Adawiya and Nahda were dispersed, and subjected this narrative to internal and external critique. Their narrative stood as a counterpoint to the official narrative provided by the Egyptian media, but did not help save the townspeople from the policy of collective punishment followed by the regime against the countryside. The story of Kerdasa provides an example of the mechanisms used by the Egyptian state to deal with the rural margins, the semi-urban among them in particular. The relationship between them arises from this treatment which sees it as easier to deal with the family or clan as the smallest legal unit. For the most part this leads the people to reject the state and treat it as an outsider. At times of crisis, this entails attacking state facilities and institutions, which are largely represented by police stations and governorate offices.

The case of Kerdasa shows that the behavior of the state and its agencies toward the countryside remains as it was when the military state took power in the 1950s. This only hinders social assimilation, which is predicated on citizenship, and reproduces local injustice and the memory of persecution.

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