History by the Numbers: Applying Cliodynamic Theories to Republican

Abstract is a recently developed field which seeks to describe long term patterns in using rigorous computation and “big data”. Quantitative explanations in history are not new, yet the popularity of Cliodynamics and similar quantitative efforts cannot be disregarded. In this piece, I test three quantitative stability models—the Structural-Demographic model, the Global Conflict Risk Index, and the Selfish Elite Model—by applying them to two instances of instability in Republican Egypt: the 1977 Bread Riots and the 1986 Conscripts Riots. I then provide my own qualitative account for these events, utilizing secondary sources, economic data, and articles from the Egyptian and Western press. I conclude that the Structural- Demographic and Selfish Elite models inform the understanding of the two riots by providing a framework which instances of instability can be generally understood. The Global Conflict Risk Index fails to anticipate the two riots. I argue further that the 1977 Bread Riots were, in addition to the quantitative conditions described in the models, a result of a failure of Egyptian government to uphold its “moral economy”. Similar public sentiment fueled the Conscripts Riots, along with economic anxiety and national humiliation.

Keywords: Cliodynamics, Structural-Demographic Model, Global Conflict Risk Index, Selfish Elite Model, 1977 Bread Riots, 1986 Conscripts Riots, Infitah, Moral Economy

History by the Numbers - 2

Introduction It happened again.

The arrogance of humanity, knowing no bounds, have led a group of scholars to attempt to describe social phenomena, history, and the human in terms of law-like or patterned explanations. Again. Cliodynamics is the emerging field of quantitative history. By using “big data”, rigorous computation, and new developments in social evolutionary theory, cliodynamic scholars hope to provide models, equations, and not-quite-laws to inform the field of history. A seemingly dubious endeavor, the field has its own dedicated journal, producing sensational articles such as “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing gods throughout World History” (Whitehouse, et al. 2019) and “Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization.”1 As , we cannot disregard this umpteenth endeavor of law-like explanations in history. It is crucial to confront this field sooner, rather than later, to identify it as sensationalist or revolutionary. The implications of cliodynamics are tremendous.

The purpose of this thesis is to qualify three cliodynamic or quantifiable models: the Structural-

Demographic model, the Global Conflict Risk Index (GCRI), and the Selfish Elite model. Each of these models offer some argument regarding the causal forces to instances of instability, such as protests, riots, revolutions, or civil wars. I aim to accomplish this by applying these models to two instances of instability during Republican Egypt: the 1977 Bread Riots and the 1986 Conscripts

Riots. These two events are critically understudied in English-language scholarship. I anticipate that the role which cliodynamic methods provide is one of helping focus the “noise” of an event.

In other words, cliodynamics assists in deciphering what are the fundamental causes of the event

1 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144 Burgos-Herrera - 3 when an investigation remains in the preliminary stages. I also chose these events because they are worth examining in their own right. I found that the Egyptian Bread Riots directly shifted President

Anwar Sadat’s (served 1970 – 1981) economic and security policies, shaping those of his successor, Hosni Mubarak (served 1981 – 2011).

This thesis is organized into three chapters. First, I will outline the methodology and apply each of the three quantitative techniques. We will go in largely “blind,” without a deep understanding of the riots, in order to see how well the models anticipate instability without my own of the event. Thus, we will only have a brief description of each event following this paragraph. I conclude that the Structural-Demographic and Selfish Elite models inform the understanding of the two riots by providing a framework which instances of instability can be generally understood The next chapter then provides qualitative analysis of the 1977 Bread Riots. I will compare extant theories by Adel Abdel

Ghafar, Hossam El-Hamalawy, and Marsha Pripstein regarding the causes of the event, qualifying them with primary source data. I find that Pripstein’s “moral economy” hypothesis explains the

Bread Riots more powerfully than El-Hamalawy and Ghafar’s work. Finally, the third chapter will apply Pripstein’s “moral economy” hypothesis to the 1986 Conscripts Riots and reconstruct the event utilizing the Egyptian press.2

On January 17th, 1977, the People’s Assembly of Egypt was presented with the yearly budget, which proposed the rescinding of subsidies on cereals, sugar, cooking oil, and other primary goods.

On January 18th, the entire country of Egypt took to the streets in protests numbering in the tens of thousands. Rioting continued into January 19th, when the Central Security Force (CSF)—

Egypt’s anti-riot paramilitary—and conventional military wrestled back control of Cairo,

2 Throughout this piece, I translate the Arabic newspapers Al-Jumhuriya and Al-Ahrar. I accomplished this by using my own knowledge of Arabic and validating such with the Hans Wehr English-Arabic Dictionary and finally Google Translate.

History by the Numbers - 4

Alexandria, and the whole of Egypt. For two days, President Anwar Sadat was at the mercy of the people, and the food subsidy would remain in place for decades to come.

On February 25th, 1986, 17,000 CSF conscripts attacked hotels, nightclubs, and private vehicles, outraged at a rumor that their three-year long, mandatory conscription was to be extended by a fourth year, without any additional compensation or pay raise. Again, urban centers throughout

Egypt saw vandalism and arson, though this time at the hands of the government’s own CSF.

Military intervention had to be called in to quell the demonstrations. While the rumor proved false, the conditions which the CSF conscripts worked and lived under were deplorable, and following the riots, President Hosni Mubarak made efforts to improve their lifestyle, though not without laying off tens of thousands of conscripts.

Burgos-Herrera - 5

Chapter 1: Quantitative Modelling

On Law-like Explanations in History and

Qualifying a cliodynamic model involves satisfying two concerns. First, the result of the theory must reflect the real world. Second, the cliodynamic theory itself, the cause and effect relationship it purports, must also reflect the real world. By this I mean that each “step” or “part” of the theory tracks a real-world event. Whether or not the two riots were expected in such and such time and place (the result) is not the only determinant of the theory’s value. Its inductive prowess is only half of the benefit. The theory acts also as an argument. Cliodynamic theories argue what factors are more critical for historians to consider, or what is sufficient in explaining some subject. The

Structural-Demographic model for instance, predicts a range of years within which a society experiences demographically driven tension and thus a propensity for conflict.3 That is valuable if true. The Structural-Demographic model also describes a step-by-step process to identify a pattern in history. This is valuable particularly in the field of history, wherein the narrative preceding an event is just as important as the event itself. If an early portion of the cliodynamic theory obtains, such as the escape from the Malthusian trap which the Structural-Demographic model describes, then historians have an intuition towards the next “step” in the narrative before it is even examined.

This is the ultimate ambition of any law-like explanation: prediction and induction.4

3 Throughout the paper, I will use “state” and “society” interchangeably. 4 There are other scrutable elements of a cliodynamic or quantitative model, however they are beyond the scope of this piece.

History by the Numbers - 6

Structural-Demographic Model

The first model I will examine is the Structural-Demographic model as presented by Andrey

Korotayev. This model argues that, when a state industrializes, its demographic structure develops in a way which foments conflict within that state. Figure 1 illustrates the cliodynamic theory of the Structural-Demographic model.

Figure 1. The cliodynamic theory which relates proxies for industrialization to a period of likely violent conflict. (Korotayev, Zinkina and Kobzeva 2011) Part one of the model roughly describes a society escaping the “Malthusian Trap”: when a society moves from high birth and death rates, to a logistically growing population. This is a well-accepted process in the field of human geography. The second part connects the state of industrialization to Burgos-Herrera - 7 the agent and the climate of structural-demographically driven conflict: the youth and the stressed urban center. The Structural-Demographic model states that, as the population grows, a “youth bubble” develops (a generation significantly larger than the ones directly preceding and following it). Improved agricultural productivity, which drove population growth, undermines the labor market in rural areas, promoting rapid urbanization. The third portion connects the demographic change with social tension. The large, young population migrating to urban centers experience unemployment and poor living conditions (specified as “housing” by Korotayev). Discontent with their situation, he youth drive unrest as they, are, according to Korotayev, a population “most inclined to radicalism [and aggression]”.5 (Korotayev, Zinkina and Kobzeva 2011, 286) Their concentration in urban squalor generates a period of time—equal to the range of years included in the cohort—during which a state is particularly prone to conflict due to structural-demographic stress.

Qualifying this model is simple. First, we ask, “does Egypt escape the Malthusian Trap in the period surrounding 1977 and 1986?”6 The answer is yes as shown by the two metrics used to gauge this: infant mortality and agricultural output.

5 Korotayev, et al. do not provide an account for why the youth are most inclined to rebel. One work which goes over the psychological and economic reasons why this age cohort is particularly likely—especially in the context of an industrializing country—is Edward Sayre’s chapter on the role of demographics and labor supply in the 2011 Arab Uprisings. (Sayre 2016) 6 Korotayev et al. do refer to the 1977 Bread Riots in their appendix, however they only use it as a proof of the model. Their analysis of fitting the model to the narrative of the Bread Riots is severely lacking, only observing the growth in GDP, population, and GDP per capita.

History by the Numbers - 8

Figure 2. Infant Mortality Rate in Egypt and Food Production Index of Egypt (World Bank 2019) Figure 2 shows that from 1960 to 1986, the capacity of Food Production as estimated by the World

Bank more than doubles, and the 1986 level of infant mortality is only a third of that in 1960. The second qualification is: “does Egypt experience a Youth Bubble, rapid urbanization, and of unemployment and urban squalor? The answer again is yes. Burgos-Herrera - 9

Figure 3. Youth proportion, Urban proportion, and Unemployment in Egypt (World Bank 2019) We see in Figure 3 that 1977 and 1986 are well into a plateau of a youth bubble which began in

1970. Urbanization rapidly increased until plateauing in 1976 and finally peaking in 1986. Rural-

History by the Numbers - 10 to-urban migration was driven by a high concentration of labor in urban centers and in Cairo in particular. Inadequate housing is evinced by state measures to increase housing projects “at a rate which exceeded […] or matched the rate of population growth”. New projects, however, had rents

“more than three times as much as a proportion of income than occupants of units built before

1960.” (Egypt First Urban Development Project 1986) While the Egypt First Urban Development

Project shows housing needs eventually fulfilled, real additions to the housing supply in from 1971 to 1981 were mostly informal (i.e. slum housing), with 80 percent of housing expansion in Cairo being informal in that period. (David Sims 2003)

Unemployment among all age groups does not peak in 1977 but certainly rose throughout the period. Data for 1986 are missing, as are data on youth unemployment during the period. However, as detailed in later sections, even if 1986 does not fit the upward trend of unemployment, the collective memory of better economic conditions in the Nasser era instills discontent in the 1977 and 1986 levels. For example, the number of university graduates in Egypt had grown from

177,955 to 558,527 from 1970 to 1980. These graduates were implicitly promised government work, but as public sector jobs fell behind graduate growth, wait times for such positions could reach as long as ten years for the graduating class of 1985. (Ghafar 2016) Older employed under the Nasser era held their jobs with little risk of being fired. In an interview with

CBS News in 1977, Egyptian undergraduate Adel Sadiq remarked the stagnation of public sector jobs in Egypt:

“There is not [enough work]. What happens is that you employ people, whether

you need them or not they are employed, for the sake of employment. […] They

push papers, the read newspapers, they chat a little bit. And then the end they go

home, take their salary and that’s it.” (CBS News 2011) Burgos-Herrera - 11

This lack of opportunity would apply to the conscripts in 1986 as much as to the youth of 1977.

As the Central Security Force was composed of illiterate youth from poorer, rural communities, their social mobility proved even more limited than the students of 1977, and their living conditions worse. (Abul-Magd 2016)

The quality of urban housing is not as easy to quantify by any available metric. However, following the 1977 Bread Riots, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was questioned regarding the quality of life in the cities. He remarked:

“I have great difficulties in services, as you see, in telephone systems, water

systems, communication, drainage, I have lots of problems . . . What I am telling

you is this: we are really suffering from a very acute economic problem. This is a

fact.” (CBS News 2011)

Again, government efforts led to an improvement in general conditions, however public utilities, especially waste collection and disposal continued to plague urban centers. (Egypt First Urban

Development Project 1986)

The final portion of the cliodynamic theory argues that this discontent youth would form the bulk or the instigators of conflict. The two most complete accounts of the 1977 Bread Riots are

Adel Abdel Ghafar’s chapter on the Sadat era and a self-published, self-translated excerpt from

Hossam El-Hamalawy’s master’s thesis. (Ghafar 2016) (el-Hamalawy n.d.) Ghafar states that, not only did students join labor movements in the protests, but also formed a body of protestors and state critics in the preceding years of Sadat’s term. Both Ghafar and El-Hamalawy cite a number of riots, protests, and strikes in the years before 1977, including a student protest in 1972, (Ghafar

2016) a 1975 “Mahalla strike,” a violent clash between workers and police in Damiette in March of 1976, a strike in May 1976 in an unnamed military factory, a June 1976 strike in an automotive

History by the Numbers - 12 plant which spread from Helwan to other neighborhoods in Cairo, and to Alexandria and Port Said, and an accompanying anti-police torture strike in Manzallah. (el-Hamalawy n.d.) In the context of the Bread Riots themselves, El-Hamalawy places the youth in two categories: students and politically unconscious vandals. Students organized their own protests which joined popular demonstrations. Younger Egyptians took advantage of the chaos and somewhat senselessly attacked private cars, tanks, and military vehicles, along with vandalism against factories and poorer communities. In both groups, the youth acted as independent sources of rioting in 1977. No scholarly account exists for the Conscripts riots in English. The conscripts were made up entirely of Egyptian youth, however, so it can be certain that the 1986 case fulfills this portion of the

Structural-Demographic model.

The Structural-Demographic model has proved useful in this case study of the two riots. In these understudied events, the model provided a step-by-step narrative acting as a skeleton for the development of latent tension within Egyptian society. While relating instability in society with demographic change and economic strain is nothing new, and while using “the youth” as an actor may be too broad a category to be useful, the Structural-Demographic model presents two utilities.

First, through its cliodynamic theory, the Structural-Demographic model identifies causes of demographically driven conflict. In this case, I have not found an argument in my literature review for the insufficiency of urban housing and public utilities as a cause for the tension throughout the

Sadat and early Mubarak period. This period—considered the “heyday of urban residential informality” characterized by acute rent inflation on newer developments—has remained understudied in this regard, and only uncovered through the model. Second, its result—the range of years when demographically driven conflict is more likely—points to a period which historians may wish to look more closely for youth activism, demonstration, and conflict. Already, there are Burgos-Herrera - 13 unstudied strikes and riots in the period as mentioned earlier. The Demographic-Structural model, then, may be used to identify unrecorded events in history.7

The Demographic-Structural model uses largely uncontroversial assumptions regarding demographic transition and the origin of political demonstration. It is, however, bound in its scope.

It only applies to countries experiencing a youth bubble where rural areas have low supplies of labor and urban centers have low capacities for a dramatic migration. The migration must be internal, must be rural-to-urban, and must be composed of youth. These restrictions do not deny the Demographic-Structural model of its potency and in fact aid it in its validity, as seen by the multiple case studies provided by Korotayev.

Global Conflict Risk Index

The Global Conflict Risk Index (GCRI) proxies the relative stability of a country compared to other countries on a scale from one to ten, with one being most stable, and ten being most unstable.

This is done by fitting twenty metrics to a linear regression model. These twenty metrics proxy the economic, social, political, and demographic climates of a country. In its intended use, the GCRI is not a cliodynamic model. It is a stability index, one of many in the field of . The

GCRI was intended to provide a comparable metric across countries of their internal well-being.

It does not seek to identify a pattern in history or explain changes over time.

However, I chose to examine the GCRI for the following reasons. First, what the GCRI does provide is an effective result statement. It weighs the twenty proposed correlates to calculate a relative level of stability. This “weighing” is the cliodynamic theory; through computation, the

GCRI implicitly states some relationship between these indicators and stability. Regression

7 Using quantitative, economic data in a model which uncovers the likelihood of social phenomena is not without precedent. A distantly related example is (Barjamovic, et al. 2017) which utilizes geographic and economic data to find areas of high-likelihood of having an urban center.

History by the Numbers - 14 modelling is one of the most prevalent means of correlating “big data” with one response variable and will undoubtably be used by cliodynamic theorists as historical databases are developed. In this case, it is important then, to include a representative of a regression model in this survey of quantified approaches to explaining history.

While intended to explain contemporary and not past phenomena, the GCRI still applies fundamentally towards explaining phenomena over time. The metrics it uses to proxy for stability should hold regardless of whether they are applied currently or in the past. The values for the GCRI will vary more with a wider dataset (of all countries from 1960 to 1970). Because the values are relative, one can still compare year-to-year values relatively and ignore their absolute values.

Notably, the GCRI’s methodology and data used is open source, meaning that, even if other models may have appeared more robust or complete, the GCRI is the only which I may practically apply.

Figure 4. My estimate for GCRI values for Egypt from 1960 to 2012 relative to the all other countries for the same period. Figure 4 shows my resulting marginal regression output when applying the GCRI to Egypt.

There is a significant peak in 1986, a significant plateau from 1967 to 1975, and a general decrease in instability following. The 1967-1975 plateau is caused by the indicators “Years since HVC

(highly violent conflict)” and “Regime Type”. Starting in 1967, a series of wars occurred between

Israel and Egypt and were recorded as “highly violent conflicts” by the Uppsala Conflict Data Burgos-Herrera - 15

Program (UCDP), the source for conflict data for the GCRI. These wars ended with the 1973 Yom

Kippur War. The “Years since HVC” indicator simply records the years since a conflict recorded by the UCDP occurred, with more years since a conflict correlating with decreased instability. So, this period experienced particularly high “Years since HVC” values. After 1973, a gentle decrease in instability occurs, until 1975, when a sharp drop off occurs. This is due to the “Regime Type” of Egypt shifting from “0” or “Full Autocracy” to “1” or “Partial Autocracy”, coinciding with efforts by Sadat to increase political freedoms and reduce press censorship, signified by the 1974

“October Papers”. (Cook 2016, 137) In the context of the GCRI, this change alone signified a drop by 0.046 points, a relatively large amount.

Unfortunately, the significant peak in 1986 along with a minor uptick in 1977 is also only explained by “Years since HVC”. Originally, the 1977 Bread Riots and 1986 Conscripts Riots were not included in the UCDP. As the UCDP includes intrastate conflict including riots, I felt justified in including them. This accounts for nearly all the variance of these years, and if not for my own imputation, 1977 and 1986 would be lost in the general trend of decreasing instability in

Egypt throughout the second half of the 20th century.

History by the Numbers - 16

Risk Area Concept Indicator Coefficient Weight Industrially Improved? Political Regime Regime Type -0.016 0.016 Not affected Type Lack of Democracy -0.006 0.006 Not affected Regime Government Effectiveness 0.039 0.039 Not affected Performance Level of Repression 0.009 0.009 Not affected Empowerment Rights 0.022 0.022 Not affected Security Current Recent Internal Conflict -0.009 0.009 Not affected Conflict Neighbors with HVC -0.008 0.008 Not affected HistorySituation of Years since HVC Conflict 0.026 0.026 Not affected Social Social Corruption 0.037 0.037 Not affected Cohesion and Ethnic Power Change 0 0 Not affected Diversity Ethnic Compilation 0.053 0.053 Not affected Transnational Ethnic Bonds 0.041 0.041 Not affected Public Homicide Rate 0.014 0.014 Not affected Security Infant Mortality 0.136 0.136 Yes Economy Developmentand Health GDP per Capita 0.078 0.078 Yes and Income Ineqality -0.132 0.132 Worse Distribution Openness -0.015 0.015 Yes Provisions and Food Security 0.063 0.063 Yes Employment Unemployment 0.052 0.052 Worse Geography Geographic Water Stress 0.018 0.018 Not affected and Challenge Oil Production 0.004 0.004 Worse Environement Structural Constraints -0.128 0.128 Yes Demographics Population Size 0.056 0.056 Worse Youth Bulge -0.043 0.043 Worse Table 1. The twenty correlates of state stability as grouped by "risk area" and "concept" by Stamatia et al. Along with the coefficient of each indicator in the regression model and the indicator's weight— the coeficcient’s absolute value—and whether the metric was “improved”, “worsened”, or “not affected” by industrialization. (Conflict Risk Indicators: Significance and Data Management in the GCRI 2017) (The Global Conflict Risk Index (GCRI) Regression Model: Data Ingestion, Processing, and Output Methods 2017) Why does the GCRI fail to account for the instability surrounding the riots, and why does it argue that political condition in Egypt gradually bettered over time? The failure of the GCRI lies in the regression model itself. Table 1 shows the “weight” each indicator has upon the model—the size of its coefficient. Each indicator can be separated into three categories: those which describe conditions which improve following industrialization, those which become “worse” following industrialization, and those which should not be directly affected by industrialization. The sum of all weights is 1.005, the sum of “worse” weights is 0.287, the sum of “not affected” is 0.298, and Burgos-Herrera - 17 the sum of “improved” is 0.42. What this means is that those metrics which improve due to industrialization have the most influence on the model, and the sizable “not affected” portion would remain constant throughout the process all else held equal. Egypt, a developing state, sees dramatic improvements in “improved” and “not affected” metrics throughout the period, especially beginning in the first drop following the 1967-1975 plateau. The aforementioned October Papers also included early proposals of economic reform, which would later take the form of Sadat’s infitah, which led to rapid nominal economic growth. (Cook 2016) Both the weight of these metrics along with their absolute improvements are dramatically larger than other metrics which may have indicated a worsening social condition of Egypt.

Quantifying subjective indicators presents another weakness of a data-agglomerative model such as the GCRI. Subjective indicators—such as Regime type, Openness, and level of Repression— are derived through surveying experts in political science and international study. These indicators are discrete; it would be meaningless to say that Egypt is 0.01 higher in “Lack of Democracy” in one year than the next. Subjective indicators are much more inert, then. Continuous “objective” indicators, such as GDP per capita, infant mortality rate, population, and income inequality, change constantly, and thus their effect on the GCRI is constantly present. Further, subjective indicators would need a more consistent methodology to succeed in induction. Subjective indicators used by the GCRI come from a host of surveys and think tanks. Not all indicators have ten categories, and so the “step” from one to another represents a huge change in value, a problem seen in the change caused by the categorical values of “Regime Type”. A solution to this would be to proxy all indicators with objective metrics. “Lack of Democracy” for instance, could be represented as a ratio of similarity between expected results of an election derived from polls and the actual election

History by the Numbers - 18 results. This creates a continuous and responsive metric, which can then counteract the dynamic objective indicators.8

The GCRI is not applicable to Egypt in the Sadat and early Mubarak eras. Indices structured similarly to the GCRI—a model incorporating many separate indicators which correlate with some macro-social phenomenon—may inform historical work. However, the model must take care to understand the economic, social, and other general developments in the type of society it seeks to describe. It may require predicating some traditional historical work. If one wishes to derive this purely from data, then more rigorous work would have to be done to collect data points from societies across time. Either result would need to categorize societies so that they may become bound terms, rather than the open term of “state” which the GCRI attempts to describe.

The GCRI is implicitly “bound” to rapidly developing and industrial states and, fails to describe states outside of that category.

The primary problems are that of not properly binding terms. The “state” which the GCRI describes is purportedly universally applicable, but not so for the case of Republican Egypt.

Subjective indicators require continuous proxies if they are to be paired with continuously changing indicators. If these issues are ever resolved (and they may, given the accumulation of more and more data which may serve as better correlates) then an index like the GCRI could facilitate cross-societal comparisons or provide a means of understanding a change in society over time. 9 While such an indicator could never replace the descriptive power of a traditional, qualitative historical narrative, the utility of a metric to compare the well-being of a society holistically across time or with other societies, cannot be ignored.

8 This solution is by no means perfect. It simply serves as an example. 9 An example of a developing database with the aim of supplying datapoints for societies over time is the Seshat: Global History Databank. http://seshatdatabank.info/ Burgos-Herrera - 19

The Selfish Elite Model

The final model I examined is the Selfish Elite Model. Whereas the GCRI focused entirely on utilizing existing metrics and deriving a quantitative model around those metrics, the Selfish Elite model describes a set of relationships and causal forces. As such, the Selfish Elite model utilizes heavily abstracted bound terms. Its stated goal is to uncover the source of latent instability in societies and how this latent instability develops into instantiations of instability—protests, riots, revolutions, or civil wars. The scope of this model is the broadest of the three discussed in this paper, a quality reflected in its cliodynamic theory. While quantitative proxies are given for most of the bound terms, they are not scaled, and the resulting values are not standardized. The Selfish

Elite model is not yet at the stage of producing meaningful numerical results, due in part to its tremendous scope. There is no result to qualify. Rather, I will examine the model as an argument of how latent instability develops and results in instances of instability, such as the Bread Riots and Conscripts Riots.

The Selfish Elite model divides society into three actors: the Elites, the State, and the

Commoners. These groups are defined by their position in a transfer of wealth relationship.

Commoners are the source of all wealth in society and compose the vast bulk of the population.

The Elites tax the Commoners, garnering wealth, which serves as a proxy for power in this model.

The State receives wealth exclusively from the Elites and exists to maintain this relationship of taxation between the Elite and the Commoners. This relationship is described in the form of three equations:

History by the Numbers - 20

Figure 5. The three "power" equations of the Selfish Elite Model. From top to bottom: The equation for Commoner power, the equation for Elite power, and the equation for State power. (Turchin, Gavrilets and Goldstone 2017)

The three “power” equations make the following claims. First, when the term S representing the state’s power equals zero, “elite disappearance”, the term δeE, is maximized. Without the State, the Elite class cannot perpetuate its taxation of the Commoners.10 Second, the left terms of the

State and Elite equations represent their power in the form of wealth, however the left term for

Commoners represents their power through population size alone. These are the broad assumptions upon the dynamics of the three acting groups which compose a complex society. This is also how the Selfish Elite model binds the actors into quantifiable units.

Using the understanding of this power framework, Turchin presents the next step of the Selfish

Elite model: the Political Stress Indicator (PSI). The PSI describes latent instability by combining

“Mass Mobilization Potential,” “Elite Mobilization Potential,” and “State Fiscal Distress.”

10A complete explanation of the terms within the equations I include throughout this section is provided by Turchin. (Turchin, Gavrilets and Goldstone 2017) Burgos-Herrera - 21

Figure 6. From top to bottom: the Political Stress Indicator, Mass Mobilization Potential, Elite Mobilization Potential, and State Fiscal Distress. (Turchin, Gavrilets and Goldstone 2017) This equation unveils the latent instability society experiences. Mass Mobilization Potential mirrors the Structural-Demographic Model; it states the people are more likely to revolt as the size of the youth population and urbanization increases, and as the relative wages of the youth compared to the whole country decreases. Elite Mobilization Potential argues that the growth of the Elite population will outpace the growth of meaningful political positions, which elites desire to maintain (Elites are similarly affected by the impact the proportion of youth have on society), and that in general as population increases, Elite “wages” decrease as well. This leads to the development of factions among the elites, ready to seize the opportunity of instability. The term

E/sN is a proxy for inter-Elite competition and is a product of the size of the Elites (E) and the inverse amount of political positions (sN). Finally, state weakness is measured by the ratio between its total debt and GDP, signifying fiscal stress, which is scaled to the amount of trust the population has in state institutions. The PSI argues that the two sources of latent instability are tension among the Elites and the Commoners for employment. Latent instability gives rise to instances of instability if the State exhibits significant weakness; since State power is proxied through wealth, the weakness is measure by the state’s fiscal situation. This contributes to latent instability, but how does the Selfish Elite model explain the instantiation of instability from latent instability?

History by the Numbers - 22

The material conditions outlined in the PSI enable a certain political-psychological climate to develop. As the PSI increases, “sudden events that change humans’ attitudes and behaviors

[apropos the structure of their society] [. . .] have the potential to push societies out of equilibrium.”

(Turchin, Gavrilets and Goldstone 2017) These events, known as “transient causes” or “triggers” are tragedies which hold particular salience to those discontent with their society. Triggers, such as “a spike in inflation (e.g. growing food prices), defeat in war, a successful revolution in a nearby country, broad and inconsistent repression, or a symbolic act [of defiance]” symbolize the strained conditions of the society. These triggers change the cost-benefit analysis Commoners or Elites conduct when considering usurping the system. The Selfish Elite model quantifies this emotional change through the Individual Utility function.

Figure 7. The Individual Utility function. The function R(q) equals the proportion of the population expressing some opinion x, x = 0 representing support of the establishment and x = 1 representing opposition support. The function M(x,y) is the “moral integrity component” and represents the reluctance individuals have towards change. (Turchin, Gavrilets and Goldstone 2017) This function gauges the likelihood of an individual (from the Elite or Commoner group) inciting a destabilizing event. It is composed of R(q), which scales with how popular the public opinion expressed by the individual is and M(x,y) the number of individuals who “hide” their held opinion x and express some false opinion y instead. A high R(q)—well shared opinion—would mean that activism by the individual would be more well received. Individuals, though, have private and public opinions, and a great difference in public and private opinion would decrease the perceived utility of activism for a different public opinion. M(x,y) decreases as the difference between public opinion x and private opinion y, |x-y|, increases. If the utility of expressing oppositional opinions

(if R(q) when x = 0 > R(q) when x = 1) greatly outweighs M(x,y) or if |x,y| decreases significantly Burgos-Herrera - 23 due to a change in x or y, then an individual would be inclined to participate in an active demonstration. A trigger is the event which effects this change.

The two actors which may mobilize following a trigger are the Commoners and the Elites. The

Commoner mobilization would be geared towards usurping or supporting some established order.

The Selfish Elite model identifies the establishment and the opposition which Commoners align with by a division within the Elites. Establishment Elites are those which have access to meaningful political positions; opposition Elites are those which do not, but still retain a significant amount of wealth and the relationship of taxing Commoners.11 Opposition Elites, according to the utility function, possess a negative attitude towards the establishment (x = 1). If they sense that many other Elites share x = 1, then they are more inclined to rebel. If other Elites suppress their public opinion, then Elites are discouraged from acting upon their negative attitude. However, when R(q) does outweigh M(x,y) significantly, and a trigger does occur, then a much larger portion of the Elites would support the opposition than expected, as Elites who hide their true opinions come out of the fray. The M(x,y) explains, according to Turchin, why revolutions have much larger participation than simply the vocal opposition.

The Selfish Elite explains the development of latent instability as either the Elites, the

Commoners, or both growing discontent due to a decrease in economic opportunity as population growth outpaces wage growth. The State’s inability to suppress disruptive movements due to fiscal stress further contributes to latent instability. Commoners and opposition Elites constantly assess the utility of instigating open revolt against establishment Elites, measured by how many other individuals share this oppositional attitude subtracted by how many withhold such opinions.

11 Turchin also identifies a third group, aspirational elites, composed of Elite youth and Commoners who have collected enough power to compete with other Elites. This group, however, collapses over time into becoming members of establishment Elites, opposition Elites, or Commoners again.

History by the Numbers - 24

Triggers cause many individuals to switch their expressed opinion, increasing the utility of activism. The success of these movements is determined by the power of each group.

To qualify this model, we must identify: 1) that there was fiscal State weakness, 2) that the Elites,

Commoners, or both were in a state of discontent, 3) that if Elites were active, it is explained by tension between establishment and opposition Elites, and 4) that there was some trigger or triggers.

The triggers for the riots are, at least superficially, known: the food subsidy cut for 1977 and the rumor of conscription extension for 1986. However, if there was elite involvement in these events, then the triggers for such would need to be uncovered.

Figure 8. Egyptian External Interest Debt Payments (World Bank 2019) With regard to the first qualification, there was absolutely state weakness. The portion of

Egyptian Gross National Income made up of interest payments external debt reached all-time highs by 1977, and reached nearly 4.4 percent by 1986, as shown in Figure 8. The other metric representing State weakness, public distrust in institutions, was also present, in the form of dissatisfaction in both the political liberalization promised by Sadat and the lack of institutionalized dissent through labor unions. Parliamentary elections became open to parties other than the Nasserite Arab Social Union (ASU) for the first time in 1976. Sadat dissolved the

ASU but effectively replaced it with the National Democratic Party (NDP), which dominated elections winning nearly 80 percent of all seats in 1976. (Ghafar 2016) These elections would Burgos-Herrera - 25 inspire a general strike by public transit workers which lasted for two days. (el-Hamalawy n.d.)

Other parties, such as the communist Tagammu’, saw their public events and demonstrations banned. Nasser consolidated all workers unions into the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union

Federation (ETUF) in 1957 and forbid the creation of non-state unions. The ETUF rarely lobbied for improved working conditions; its leadership was effectively composed of politically approved members. Its ineffectiveness “The national ETUF leadership could not be moved by pressure from its base. It opposed all but one strike during the entire Mubarak era and became ever more closely identified with the regime and the ruling National Democratic Party.” The establishment alignment of the ETUF is particularly salient in its pro-government stance throughout the Bread Riots and during a general strike in 1986. (Beinin 2016)

The discontent of the Commoners as measured by Mass Mobilization Potential was already covered in my qualification of the Structural-Demographic model, covering the youth bubble, unemployment, and urbanization.12 Elite Mobilization Potential relies upon the growth of the Elite and a decline in Elite wealth.13 Data on wages is lacking, however a World Bank study provides the “distribution of annual consumption expenditure” in urban centers. Two separate studies conducted by the World Bank reveal that the proportion of consumption accounted by the top decile in Egyptian urban centers decreased from 30.38 percent in 1959 to 25.9 percent in 1982, and in rural areas from 28.02 percent to 23 percent in the same period (see Figure 9). (Verme, et al. 2014) Not only was Elite wealth diminishing, but the size of the Elite grew as well. Sadat’s

12 This is no coincidence. Both the Structural-Demographic model and the Selfish Elite model build upon a general demographic cliodynamic theory developed by Goldstone. (Goldstone 1991) 13 The number of available meaningful political positions is also a factor. However, collecting information on the composition of the Egyptian government, as well which positions are meaningful, is outside the scope of this paper. It is known that from 1974 to 1986, the number of public employees grew from 1 million to 3.5 million. (Kandil 2012, 213) The population of Egypt grew from 39.26 million to 51.9 million in the same period. (World Bank 2019)

History by the Numbers - 26

Figure 9. Percentage of the Total Annual Consumption Expenditure consumed by the Top Decile in Egypt, separated by urban and rural populations (Verme, et al. 2014) Infitah had generated a new Elite class, composed of landlords and contractors benefiting from higher rent due to urban migration and merchants benefitting from lax currency exchange and import laws. (CBS News 2011) Egypt witnessed the rise of 500 new millionaires by 1975. (Ghafar

2016, 90) Despite vocal condemnation of the gross inequality of post-Infitah Egypt by Mubarak, the parliamentary elections of 1984 and 1987 were riddled with businessmen as candidates, many of whom succeeded through blatant election fraud. (Ghafar 2016, 122)

This new class of Al-Qattat As-Siman, “fat cats”, would represent a challenge to the old military elite established after the 1952 revolution. In fact, Turchin et al. described this dynamic between the new merchant elite and the old military elite in their own case study of the 2011 Arab Uprisings in Egypt, citing this intra-Elite competition as the reason why the army “failed to act against the

Tahrir demonstrators in the Winter of 2011.” (Turchin, Gavrilets and Goldstone 2017, 173) This

“failure” occurred in 1977 and 1986 as well. When the Prime Minister requested the Army confront the protestors in the street in 1977, “[the Minister of War Abdel-Ghani] El-Ghamasi initially rejected the idea of the army participating in suppressing the demonstrations.” (el-Hamalawy n.d.)

Sadat had ordered high-level security officers to track army vehicles and officers throughout the Burgos-Herrera - 27 riots, suspecting a coup in the pandemonium. (Kandil 2012, 180) Preceding the riots, beginning in

1974—the first year of the Infitah—were a series of planned coups, mass resignations, mass arrests, and violent rebellions by and of army officials and soldiers. (Kandil 2012, 152) While the competition between the military and merchant elites was apparent, it did not serve a prominent role in the 1977 riots. The Bread Riots were much more aptly explained by Mass Mobilization

Potential instead of Elite Mobilization Potential, considering its trigger.

Evidence supports the Elite Mobilization Potential explanation for the Conscripts Riots. In reaction to the 1977 Bread Riots, and the realization that the government had been totally at the army’s will throughout them, Sadat began an expansion of the Central Security Force, tripling its size by the end of 1977. (Kandil 2012, 181) Sadat also relinquished his personal security matters to the Ministry of the Interior—the body which headed the CSF. Once this paramilitary force rejected its yoke, Mubarak found himself in a dangerous position. As Western reporter Ann Lesch observed while living in Egypt during the riots:

“A rumor spreads that Mubarak is not really in charge, since he gave the address

[regarding the Conscripts’ Riots] from his home in Heliopolis. Perhaps the military

will not let him move freely. The President had to dispel this rumor by driving to

[another] TV studio where he re-recorded the statement.”

She goes on to report that:

“Some believe that if the military had not acted swiftly to contain the situation the

unrest could easily have spread. The regime’s vulnerability and dependence on the

army are suddenly very apparent. […] Today [February 27] Mubarak called an

emergency cabinet session and then met with the heads of all the political parties,

apparently trying to balance the military pressures with civilian political forces.

History by the Numbers - 28

[…] In fact, the party leaders join him in denouncing the violence, evidently fearing

social chaos or a military if the government’s fragility is further exposed.” (Lesch

1986)

What truly embodies the perceived competition between Mubarak and the military is the Rushdi

Conspiracy. In August 18, 2011 al-Wafd News, the news outlet of the liberal party in Egypt, released a story arguing that the rumor which instigated the Conscripts Riots were insinuated by the Army in an attempt to oust Minister of the Interior Ahmed Rushdi, a particularly active and draconian figure. (Al-Wafd News 2011) In February 26, 2012, Egyptian political blogger

“Zeinobia” posted a similar narrative. (Zeinobia 2012) Both sources say that Rushdi’s policy focused on eliminating bribery and police corruption and combatting drug trafficking. According to Zeinobia, the trigger for the “corrupted [sic] police generals” to spread the rumor was that

Rushdi apparently planned a purge of the Ministry of the Interior, with special attention placed on the anti-drug trafficking sector; the end of these corrupt officials’ reign was imminent. The al-

Wafd article confirms that rumors were spread within the police force regarding Rushdi’s unwavering stance on combatting corruption, and that senior officials in particular would be targeted.

Al-Wafd alternatively identifies the trigger for spreading the rumor to be the trial and attempted arrest of four men charged with bribery, one of whom being Rifaat al-Mahjoub, the brother of the

Speaker of the People’s Assembly. Al-Mahjoub and another man escaped before their conviction, due to Rushdi’s strict interpretation of the freedom of movement before a court case. Al-Wafd then reports that “the People’s Assembly questioned [. . . ] the Minister of the Interior regarding how the [Al-Mahjoub] [. . .] escaped and set a session on February 5, 1986 to consider the interrogation

[of the Al-Mahjoub].” (Al-Wafd News 2011) A February 9th article in the Egyptian Gazette Burgos-Herrera - 29 confirms the existence of this case and the questioning of Rushdi. (Figure 10) Rushdi showed no mercy towards corruption even at the highest and most well-connected level; Rushdi posed a direct threat towards both military Elites as Minister of the Interior and bureaucratic Elites as an activist against corruption. This group of police and military officials possessed the crucial strategic intelligence regarding both the attitudes of the Conscripts and the locations of camps, as well as the ability to communicate to each other across the country quickly. While the validity of these rumors remains unconfirmed (the Al-Wafd article claims that Rushdi himself relayed this narrative) they do account for the origin and rapid spread of the rumor among conscripts. Rushdie was in fact replaced by the “notorious Police General Zaki Badr”. (Zeinobia 2012) The goal of ousting Rushdi also explains why the army did not take advantage of its dominant position over

Mubarak during the riots. With the triggers identified throughout the Rushdi conspiracy, intra-

Elite tension is fully realized, and cliodynamic theory of the Selfish Elite model validated.

Figure 10. Egyptian Gazette articles regarding Rushdi's confrontation with the People's Assembly following the Al-Mahjoub case, (Opposition hails police role

History by the Numbers - 30

1986) and the replacement of Rushdi with Badr. (Mubarak Orders Swift Reconstruction of Damaged Hotels, Sites 1986)

Conclusion

The advantage of the Selfish Elite Model is, in its current state, not its predictive power. Rather, it serves as a narrative backdrop for understanding the development of instances of instability.

Indeed, that is the general advantage of all of these models; they provide a framework from which to begin uncovering understudied events. In the case of the Structural Demographic Model, we can identify periods of instability following industrial development. The model leads me to believe that there are other instances of instability within that youth bubble plateau. The Global Conflict

Risk Model, while ineffective in this case, still serves in identifying which metrics are most useful for understanding the well-being of a society. For instance, in some other case, all other metrics but “Years since neighboring conflict” may remain stable, while that metric changes dramatically.

Then, historians approaching a new topic would have at least a hint of where to look. Finally, the

Selfish Elite Model provides an extremely abstract model for which to apply—seemingly—any revolt, civil war, riot, or rebellion. These conclusions are ambitious. This is merely three case studies of two events. However, the field of computational history will continue to grow, and we as historians must be prepared to qualify, reject, or if lucky, accept these developments. Burgos-Herrera - 31

Chapter 2: 1977 Bread Riots and the Moral Economy

A Return to the Narrative

The cliodynamic models presented exclude two sorts of historical explanation: the unique historical narrative and the bottom-up perspective. In the case of both the 1977 Bread Riots and the 1986 Conscripts Riots, these matters are of the upmost importance; this chapter will focus on expanding these for the 1977 Bread Riots. Three paradigms exist to explain the wave of rioting which plagued Sadat’s term: an account of economic strain by Adel Abdel Ghafar, of class struggle by journalist Hossam El-Hamalawy, and of psychological entitlement by Marsha Pripstein

Posusney. The historical narrative of the Bread Riots itself is understudied.14 Reference to the event typically serves as an example of the discontent resulting from Sadat’s Infitah and the worsening political and economic situation for Egyptians under his administration or as an impetus for the expansion of the Central Security Force in the face of the government’s total dependence on the military for sequestering the demonstrations.

It through the former paradigm that Ghafar describes the Bread Riots: “The 1977 uprising was spontaneous in nature: student and worker grievances against the regime had been building up over the decade, when the socio-economic conditions did not improve as Sadat had promised.”

(Ghafar 2016, 107) Ghafar’s narrative is preceded by accounts regarding the Infitah and general worsening economic conditions for Egyptians. However, while his summary of the situation in

Egypt is virtually complete, he fails to connect the societal problems to the 1977 Bread Riots.

14 The most complete existing work on the Bread Riots is a ten-page excerpt from the master’s dissertation of Hossam El-Hamalawy. (El-Hamalawy n.d.) His full dissertation has yet to be translated or published in English. I attempted to contact El-Hamalawy through email, however I never received a response. The second most complete explanation is a four-page case study by Adel Abdel Ghafar used to validate his description of the economic and political climate under Sadat. (Ghafar 2016, 104-108) A host of other sources mention the Bread Riots only in paragraph-sized overviews as an example of instability during the Sadat Era. (Kandil 2012, 180-181) (Albrecht 2013, 85) (Abul-Magd 2016, 54) (Blanga 2014, 370-371) (Ibrahim 2002, 49-50) (Beinin 2016, 36) (Cook 2016, 160) (Osman 2013, 65) (Wickham 2002, 41)

History by the Numbers - 32

For example, Ghafar presents Sadat’s reorientation towards the United States and cooperative relationship with Israel without precise commentary regarding its impact on the psyche of

Egyptians. (Ghafar 2016, 81) He also recounts the waning economic autonomy of Egypt at the hands of its debt to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. (Ghafar 2016, 92)

His account of the Bread Riots, however, reveals that the target of Egyptian angst was not a capitalist class or Western influence. If the Bread Riots were truly caused by the whole socio- economic condition of Egyptians, set off by the trigger of a policy which would affect the broadest swath of Egyptian commoners, then why were the vandalism and slogans directed at the state and Sadat and not the fat cats or landlords of the Infitah? Ghafar presents five slogans targeted at Sadat, his family, or the state in general:

“Abdel Nasser always said it, take care of the workers!” “A kilo of meat now costs

a pound.” “She [Sadat’s wife Gihan] wears the latest fashions and we live ten in a

room!”15 (Ghafar 2016, 105) “We are the people united with the workers, against

the exploitative government!” (Ghafar 2016, 106) “We will not fear, we will not

fear for Citadel Prison.”16 Reply: “Youth Youth! We are not afraid of terror.”

(Ghafar 2016, 107)

The only non-state targeted chant he presents is: “You who live in palaces we live in tombs!”17

(Ghafar 2016, 105) Ghafar takes advantage here of the ambiguous “you” to imply that this chant

15 In 1977, a list of “new millionaires” had been printed in a Cairo newspaper which included Sadat’s wife. He responded in an interview: “I am sorry to tell you that you are misinformed one hundred percent. What you are seeing now is the propaganda of the Tripoli Radio [. . .] and the communists!” (CBS News 2011) An alternative version of this chant directs it to one of Sadat’s daughters. (Blanga 2014, 371) One daughter had a wedding sometime “recently”, and Sadat stressed that “only sandwiches be served [at the reception]”. (How High Life and Scandal Rocked Sadat 1977) It is difficult to interpret this stunt without knowing the precise date of the wedding, however. 16 I only found one reference to a Citadel Prison: (Booth 1987) 17 Apparently, squatting in tombs was a stereotype of Cairenes. However, this is a rare phenomenon. (David Sims 2003, 6) Burgos-Herrera - 33 was directed against the upper class. Indeed, as referenced in the previous chapter, landlordism was a source of the fat cats, and many Cairenes felt this directly through the spiraling rent.

However, I argue it is far just as likely that this chant is directed against President Sadat and then

Vice President Mubarak. Rioters in Alexandria burned and looted Mubarak’s coastal summer home there. (Central Intelligence Agency 1977) During the riots, Sadat was preparing for a diplomatic reception in his winter home in Aswan, completely unaware of the riots until the smoke was visible from his abode, almost intentionally symbolizing the preference for internationalism over his people at home which the rioters perceived. (Ghafar 2016, 106)

With the evidence which Ghafar presents, his case that the agitation which spurred the Bread

Riots related solely to the economic struggle of the Egyptians seems incomplete. There are, in his work, no attacks against the West, or against the Fat Cats. Ghafar fails to explain the rioters’ focus against the Sadat regime. By calling the riots spontaneous, he reduces the dynamic between the Egyptian and their state during the Bread Riots to reactionary—that it was only their focus because of the administration’s faux pas—and that it could have just as easily been directed against the West or the general elite.

In his conclusion, he begins to hint at an answer. He acknowledges that Egyptians under Sadat remembered their improving conditions during the Nasser era. He further acknowledges that “the middle class [and the poor] would see [the rising inequality] as an attack on their economic rights.” (Ghafar 2016, 104) (My emphasis) But he fails to elucidate what these economic rights were perceived to be, and how Egyptians understood Sadat and his predecessor in terms of these rights.

El-Hamalawy offers an alternative, Marxist paradigm to the riots. The Bread Riots were the outcome of increasingly tense class struggle, a culmination of years of growing inequality and

History by the Numbers - 34 increasingly militant workers’ strikes. Early into the Bread Riots, this theory holds: the primary instigators of the riots were students and laborers from Alexandria and Helwan, which had seen strikes throughout the Sadat era and as recent as the Summer of 1976. A few of the chants he cites support the case for class consciousness:

“My brother army soldier, your people are barefooted and wearing coarse clothes!”

“Hey thieves of Infitah; the people are starving and are not comforted.” “We are

the people with the workers; against the alliance of Capital.” (El-Hamalawy n.d.)

As his narrative of the riots develops, the targets of vandalism and sources of violence become more and more ambiguous and El-Hamalawy struggles to explain the actions of the rioters. El-

Hamalway divides the sources of vandalism into three groups: 1) those driven (and justified) by inequality and state oppression and 2) those committed by “‘outsiders’ such as minors and elements from the lumpen proletariat, those who do not occupy a position within the production process, and lack industrial discipline”.18 Figures 12 and 13 support the dichotomy, with women and children targeting small businesses while a group of adult males target power lines near the Ministry of Electricity. Many of the demonstrators who stoned police and shops, contradicting targets, were described as “young men” in at least one other report. (Central

Intelligence Agency 1977) El-Hamalawy cites Ghali Shoukri’s work Revolution and

Counterrevolution in Egypt which claims:

18 The timeline of vandalism is unclear—knowing that the targets of the conscious proletariat were attacked before the swelling of the riots by the masses and the looting began would support his dichotomy. Burgos-Herrera - 35

Figure 13. The text reads: “Stones thrown to break power lines.” (They Burned the Banks and Government's Property and Looted the Governor's Residence! 1977) Figure 11. A picture of a trolly “set on fire at Bab El- Sharia district in Dairo during Wednesday’s [January 19] sabotage actions. (P.A. Budget Committee Cancels Price Rises 1977)

Figure 14. The text reads: “In Opera Square, Figure 12. A woman attacking a storefront during demonstrators occupied a traffic tower and raised the [January 19] acts of sabotage. To her left is a boy of Egypt.” (Demonstrations Turned into Tools of attempting to loot items on display at another shop. Destruction at the Hands of Communism 1977) (Implementation of Price Rises Suspended 1977)

History by the Numbers - 36

“Not a single national university, institute or a school [in the industrial centers of

Cairo/Helwan and Alexandria] was sabotaged. No factory was sabotaged, and no

machine was destroyed […] Demonstrators even found time to move a simple

wooden carriage that belongs to a food-seller into a safe sub-street for fear of

damage.”

In contrast, grocery stores in poorer neighborhoods of Cairo were looted. (Blanga 2014) In the series of trials which would follow the Bread Riots, most of those accused of vandalism, looting, and assault were between 15 and 18-years-old. (Sadat, Top Aides to Probe Situation Today 1977)

El-Hamalawy’s work provides an account for the vandalism which occurred in the Bread Riots, as well as the initial organization of the event by workers and students. However, his reduction of the majority of the rioters to “lumpen proletariat”, simplifies the situation. He disregards their motivations, writing them off as the opportunistic poor and young. In his paradigm, he excludes the factors which Ghafar mentioned: Sadat’s alignment away from the Arab World and the failure of Sadat’s political liberalization.

A third paradigm is given in Posusney’s Labor and that State in Egypt, which argues that

Egyptian commoners viewed the economy as moral, and the state’s management of it as a moral situation. (Posusney 1997, 140) Unfortunately, Posusney’s focus is not on the Bread Riots, but the worker’s movements which occurred throughout Republican Egypt. (Posusney 1997, 143)

Posusney’s conception of a moral economy can still be extended to a holistic account of the Bread

Riots. The Egyptian people believe that there is a social contract between them and their state. One in which Egypt is the leader of the Arab world, in which it does “take care of the workers” who believed “in a moral economy in which their wages and benefits came to be viewed as entitlements Burgos-Herrera - 37 in exchange for their contribution to the cause of national economic development.” (Posusney

1997, 4) It will be through Posusney’s perspective which I will analyze a selection of articles from the Egyptian press (specifically Egyptian Gazette, and Al-Jumhuriya, both government run) from

January and February of 1977. I synthesize this with primary evidence collected from declassified government documents, the Western press, and other secondary sources to present a narrative of the event itself, beyond the purpose of a case study.19

Thieves on Both Sides: the Narrative

Figure 15. "The government submitted the new national budget to the People's Assembly yesterday . . . The government is confident in this budget, and has considered the entire population and all aspects of the economic situation." ("The Budget is 7,050 Million Pounds" 1977) On the morning of January 18, 1977, Egyptians would wake up to find that—under the new budget proposed the night before—L.E. 205.6 million of subsidies on wheat, flour, maize, tea, sugar, rice, oils, yarn, soaps, and other basic goods have been cut, along with a new tariff on petroleum and electronics. What would amount to extra pennies a day would burden the struggling

Egyptian urban middle class, and choke its millions living in poverty. Workers well experienced in demonstration in Alexandria and the industrial neighborhood of Helwan were the first to organize; Helwan had witnessed a strike of 30,000 steelworkers six years prior, and it saw strikes in traffic light and military factories, and Alexandria in a naval arsenal in June of 1976. Sadat tended to meet the demands of the protestors, promoting the system of leftist organizers to flourish and grow militant (Posusney 1997, 156, 160) (El-Hamalawy n.d.) The same Naval Arsenal

19 I am extremely aware that the initial structure of this thesis treated the 1977 Bread Riots as a case study. The hypocrisy is not lost on me.

History by the Numbers - 38 workers lead demonstrations in Alexandria, soon joined by students from University of

Alexandria. (Blanga 2014, 371) While the New York Times reported that “demonstrators tried to persuade [Ain Shams University in Cairo] students to join the protests”, El-Hamalawy reports instead that those students “held a conference denouncing the price increases, and started a demonstration, […] heading to the parliament to express their rejection of the new economic measures.” Students were just as instrumental to the initial leadership of the riots as the workers.

These demonstrations began peacefully, and sources diverge regarding the origin of interpersonal violence. Vandalism and threatening slogans, though, were always a central component to riots. Objects of the rioters’ aggression fell into three categories. The first were symbols of wealthy tourists, international influence, and remnants of colonialism. Businesses which served tourists from the West and from wealthy, Islamic fundamentalist Arab states would receive the bulk of these attacks. In Giza, seven nightclubs on Pyramid Street known to cater to wealthy Libyan and Saudi tourists were burned. (Cairo Eases Prices, but Rioting Goes on 1977)

An article in Al-Jumhuriya reports:

“A large number of demonstrators gathered in Ataba Square and Opera Square.

They set fire to the Sofia Helmi Casino.” (Demonstrations Turned into Tools of

Destruction at the Hands of Communism 1977)

Those same protestors in Opera Square would go on to publicly display their nationalism, raising a flag atop a traffic tower, defiant in the face of the subordination of Egypt. (Figure 14) Under the

Sadat regime, Egypt had drifted away from its paternal role in the Arab world under Nasser, realigning Egypt with the United States and Israel. El-Hamalawy records one particularly salient chant: “America! Take back your money; tomorrow the Arab people will step on you.” (El-

Hamalawy n.d.) Burgos-Herrera - 39

Egyptians were aware that their own economic independence had been undermined through prescriptions by the International Monetary Fund and overdependence on remittances from the

Gulf states. Its economic success under Nasser—again, the reason why Egyptians believed they have sacrificed so much—was humiliated by Sadat’s incessant requests for more loans and foreign aid. One article in the Egyptian Gazette cites such reasons as the exact cause of Egypt’s economic troubles the day before the riots to justify the price increase. ("The Budget is 7,050 Million Pounds"

1977) Following the Bread Riots, the Egyptian Gazette replied to an article in the Jerusalem Post, which argued that inequality and economic failure were the causes of the riots. The Egyptian

Gazette replied:

“At the moment, Israel is receiving something in the range of $3,000 million in

economic [in aid] from the U.S. government alone […] That should provide a deep

enough cushion to operate at a loss for a long time. […] President Sadat’s requests

[…] have so far fallen on deaf ears.” (Sadat, Top Aides to Probe Situation Today

1977)

The second group of targets was symbols of the inequality created during the Infitah. Private cars, business storefronts, billboards depicting luxury items, and company cars were all attacked by rioters. (Blanga 2014) (They Burned the Banks and Government's Property and Looted the

Governor's Residence! 1977) The aforementioned looting of grocery stores in poor neighborhoods and of Mubarak’s vacation home in Alexandria fall into this category as well. Numerous slogans in addition to those previously provided mention inequality:

“With blood and lives we will bring prices down.” (Thousands in Egypt Riot Over

Price Rise 1977) “Down with the Khedive!” (Blanga 2014, 371) “More increases

in prices for more hunger and impoverishment” (El-Hamalawy n.d., 2)

History by the Numbers - 40

Again, the existence of this inequality was not seen as something natural, but as a failure and betrayal by the Sadat administration to the people of Egypt. This was understood by the Egyptian

Press and government who, in their actions, attempted to repair the moral economy. In the same reply to the Jerusalem Post, the Egyptian Gazette took care to note:

“The January 10 issue of Time Magazine noted some hard facts about Israel’s own

crisis […] Inflation during 1976 ran at a rate of 42 percent, […] and the foreign

debt reached $10,700 million.” (Sadat, Top Aides to Probe Situation Today 1977)

Following the Riots, the government would rescind the price increase and supplant the budget with new duties on luxuries instead. (P.A. Budget Committee Cancels Price Rises 1977)

Figure 16. The text reads: “Masses of the 18th and 19th of January; The plot of Sadat will fail!” The text in the bottom left reads: “The National Student Union of Egypt” (Youssef 2017)

The final category target of vandalism during the Bread Riots were symbols of the Sadat Regime and of the state’s failure of fulfilling its paternal role established by Nasser. Posters of Sadat were torn down. (Central Intelligence Agency 1977) The headquarters of the Arab Socialist Union—the Burgos-Herrera - 41 former state party dissolved the November prior as part of Sadat’s political liberalization efforts, then the host of three of the four political parties in Egypt—was set fire to. (Cairo Eases Prices, but Rioting Goes on 1977) Public transport and other public institutions were also targets of arson

(see Figure 11). Twenty-two police cars in Giza were damaged, (P.A. Budget Committee Cancels

Price Rises 1977) along with police cars and stations in Alexandria and Cairo. These symbols did not simply represent the failure of the state in the economic sense, however. They represented the fact that Sadat and the state—through the farcical political liberalization, through consolidating labor unions and student syndicates as tools of the state—had confined the Egyptian people in their means of political expression. If there is only one party, one leadership, then dissent would be channeled against that party, against Sadat. Chant after chant singled Sadat out as the antithesis of the cooperative relationship established by his predecessor:

“Down with Sadat! Long live Nasser!” “Nasser Nasser Nasser!” (Tanner 1977)

“The Egyptian people are not in need of a government which steals their bread!”

(El-Hamalawy n.d.)

Once again, a response was ready in the Egyptian Press. The day following the riots, the Egyptian

Gazette reported that:

“The Chairman of [an association of public sector unions and syndicates]

condemned the rioting and [any attempt at undermining the rule of law] [… and

concluded] that [the budget] is being discussed by the People’s Assembly’s

Committees and will not be final unless it is passed by the Government and the

Assembly.” (Implementation of Price Rises Suspended 1977)

This statement reoriented the narrative of the price increase. Instead of a people expressing their discontent towards damning price increases, the press records a trigger-happy rabble ready to take

History by the Numbers - 42 advantage of any excuse to undermine the progress of the Egyptian state and those citizens who remained loyal. This fictional mob would compose what Sadat would call the “Intifada al-

Haramiyya”, an Uprising of Thieves. (Abul-Magd 2016, 54) A crowd which would instigate

“bloody clashes [with] Central Security Forces […] after the demonstrations turned into widespread vandalism.”, whom “Exhausted troops have to confront [in Bab al-Sharia, and were] forced to fire bullets, causing a large number of injured.”20 (Al-Jumhuriya 1977)

This narrative pushed by the state-run press would not persist once the administration began to realize the scale and plurality of the riots; to castigate the rioters would be to castigate 30,000

Egyptians from nearly every major urban center in Egypt. (Cairo Eases Prices, but Rioting Goes on 1977) The regime would shift blame, then to the Egyptian Worker’s Communist Party or al-

Tagammu’.

On January 21st, Councilor and public prosecutor Ibrahim El-Kaliuby ordered the questioning of Tagammu’ members regarding their involvement in insinuating the riots. Leaflets were supposedly found in Cairo, Tanta, Alexandria, Mansura, and in other urban centers, and accused party members of instigating students to start fires in front of “every building they wanted to burn.”

The Egyptian Gazette then went over the clandestine “plan” of the Tagammu’: to target police stations first and continue the riots well into the night to exhaust the Central Security Forces. Four students from post-secondary institutions—Yehia Mabrouk, Talaat Maaz Ruheim, Taymour El-

Halawany, and Mohamed Farid Abdul Kawy Zahran—were named for possessing leaflets and

20 Reports diverge on when or how violence began, and who was responsible. The New York Times reported that “The demonstrators hurled stones and bricks at riot policemen, who retaliated by throwing the stones and bricks back and by firing volleys of tear gas”. (New York Times 1977) A CIA cable reporting on the riots noted that the protests began peacefully, but that somewhere down the line violence had started, implying the fault lying with the civilians. (Central Intelligence Agency 1977) One eyewitness account stated that not until around 7 p.m., when the Central Security Force (CSF, the Egyptian conscripted police force), arrived, leading to clashes and eventual arson. However, two other accounts of a French Journalist and a leftist note that Egyptian minors instigated violence against armed forces, including throwing rocks at police and in one case a Molotov cocktail at an Egyptian tank. (el- Hamalawy, 1977, p. 3, 6) Burgos-Herrera - 43 pro-communist material. The evidence against Mabrouk—possession of sketches of police stations and printing equipment and sending inflammatory material to other student bodies—and against

Ruheim—possession of 1,200 leaflets calling for open revolt against the government, is damning if true. However, El-Halawany and Zahran were only caught with “some leaflets”, hardly a case for leading insurrection.

Nonetheless, thousands were arrested,21 and the narrative of Communist agitators persisted, to the point where the Gran Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Dr. Abdul Halm Mahmoud, claimed that:

“the storm that blew over Egypt recently was not the making of its own good people. The rioting is the work of a handful of Communists who wanted the country to be torn.” (Sadat, Top Aides to

Probe Situation Today 1977)

It largely agreed upon, however, that the Egyptian institutional Left did not have the organizational capacity to coordinate a demonstration on such a nationwide scale. (El-Hamalawy n.d.) (Posusney 1997, 153) (Ghafar 2016, 107) It is clear that the regime needed to villainize those who resisted the Infitah and isolate the blame to some concrete group, instead of the amorphous collective of workers and students, joined by the poor, the young, and the women of Egypt. The

Bread Riots must have been an overreaction, and not the people bringing the state to its knees after the final straw of half a decade of offending more and more of the social contract and the moral economy.

21 The precise number of those arrested, as well as the number for dead, vary. The highest estimates are 5,000 arrested and 160 killed. (Kandil 2012, 181) More realistic numbers are about 73 killed and 1,250 arrested. (Beinin 2016, 36) (Blanga 2014, 371) The estimate for those wounded is consistently 800.

History by the Numbers - 44

Chapter 3: 1986, Lasting Scars, and a Stab in the Back

“The Longest Night”

Literature on the 1986 Conscripts Riots is nonexistent compared to the already sparsely covered

1977 Bread Riots.22 In this chapter I will continue to apply Posusney’s conception of the moral economy and social contract, with a particular focus on the psychological condition of the

Conscripts themselves.

Similar to the Bread Riots, the Conscripts riots occurred throughout Egypt, with demonstrations numbering in the thousands of Central Security Force (CSF) troops in reaction to a betrayal of the social contract.23 Conscripts believed that the mandatory conscription applied to all Egyptian youth would be extended from three years to four, without any increase in pay or compensation.24 Unlike the Bread Riots, this belief turned out to be a rumor. Unlike the Bread Riots, the CSF forces were homogenous and all public servants, meaning that their intimacy with the state, its failings, and its corruption was particularly salient. I argue that—in addition to the psychological motivations of the moral economy—that two other social perspectives drove the CSF forces to rioting: 1) the deplorable conditions and treatment of CSF and 2) the humiliation of the Egyptian homeland by foreigners which CSF forces regularly met.

A final divergence in the of the Bread Riots and the Conscripts Riots was its success.

Students and workers who initiated the Bread Riots succeeded in galvanizing a wide swath of urban populations across Egypt. No evidence shows participation by non-CSF troops in the

22 In my survey of the literature, the references to the Conscripts Riots are these: (Kandil 2012, 190) (Abul-Magd 2016, 74) (Ibrahim 2002, 130, 256) (Wickham 2002) 23 Estimates of the number of police rioters show high variance. The New York Times and Egyptian Gazette initially cite 2,000, but later the New York Times cites over 10,000 (March 3) the native Egyptian Gazette provides a final count of 17,000 participants in the riot. 24 The specifications for the conscription was that all Egyptian males between 18 and 30-years-old must serve in the Central Security Force for a period of one to three years, with a shorter conscription for those with demonstrated skills or education. Burgos-Herrera - 45

Conscripts Riots, excluding the possibility of those released by CSF troops in Tora Prison. The

Bread Riots resulted in the change of a monumental change to the Egyptian state welfare system; the Conscripts Riots resulted in “40,000 layoffs and the relocation of camps, […] “treatment is improved in the camps, but every family wants to see their son.” (40,000 Layoffs 1986) This, combined with a relentless condemnation of the troops in the state-run press, made for a bittersweet consolation considering the purported 107 dead, 700 wounded, 1,324 arrested, and $105 million in total damages. (New York Times 1986) Utilizing the same newspapers, secondary sources, and data as before—with the inclusion of Al-Ahrar, an opposition newspaper run by the Egyptian liberal party—I uncover the difference in how the government responded to the Conscripts Riots, both in the papers and in the streets.

Scars of the Bread Riots

The memory of the Bread Riots never escaped the Egyptian people and government. The Bread

Riots redefined the economic and security policy of Egypt through the end of the Sadat era well into Mubarak’s presidency. Scholars and contemporary political analysts agreed that the 1977

Bread Riots had redefined the approach the Egyptian administration would take regarding economic liberalization. (Cook 2016, 160) As observed in a CIA report:

“Effective economic solutions will entail political choices that any government

would be reluctant to make, but Mubarak’s shaky political position would make

certain aspects of an austerity program double dangerous. An increase in food

prices in 1977 immediately caused widespread rioting […] We believe that a

similar increase today would prove even more destabilizing” (Egypt: Prospects for

the Mubarak Regime 1986)

History by the Numbers - 46

Indeed, Mubarak would retain the food subsidies in particular despite their costs amounting to 20 percent of Egypt’s GDP. (Wickham 2002, 41) He would attempt a “productive infitah”, slowly undoing the Nasserist state welfare system. While he was generally considered successful in this regard—in that the reforms were undid—the balance between the entitlement of the people and the mounting debt and prescriptions to international institutions generated an anxiety of another food subsidy cut and ensuing riot. (Ghafar 2016, 117)

Regarding the change in security, as discussed in Chapter 1, in the wake of realizing that the

1977 Bread Riots had put the government at the will of the Army, Sadat began a rapid expansion of the Central Security Forces as an alternative security measure, increasing its numbers from

100,000 to 300,000 in 1977. The United States, recognizing the instability of Egypt and the need for a force to balance the Egyptian military, provided ammunition, weapons, and vehicles to this end. (Kandil 2012, 181)

Figure 17. CSF troops beating student at a demonstration at Ain Shams University in October 1985. The CIA notes “The army does not become Figure 18. (Security Situation involved in quelling civil disturbances unless other Under Control, Rioters Arrested public authorities will not or cannot do so. (Central 1986) Intelligence Agency 1987) Burgos-Herrera - 47

Mubarak’s strategy towards curtailing the military influence in politics was more carrot than stick compared to Sadat.25 Mubarak would meet many of the budgetary demands of Defense

Minister Abu Ghazala and turn a blind eye towards the money corruption, money laundering, and labor abuses of paramilitary forces. As reported by the Western analysts of the Egyptian political- military dynamic, these consolations kept the military satisfied with a passive sort of power over the Egyptian government. (The Egyptian Military: Its Role and Missions Under Mubarak

[Redacted] 1987) Mubarak’s strategy worked, as revealed in an interview with Abu Ghazala, who ominously states:

“‘The presidency never crossed my mind,’ asserted the field marshal. ‘I know the

country’s [dire] situation and I am happy where I am. If I wanted the presidency …

then during the events [the CSF mutiny] when my tanks were stationed everywhere

in the capital, taking power would not have required more than dispatching one

officer, no more (even a lieutenant), to the [state] television and radio studios to

deliver a communiqué on my behalf. The whole story would have been over in five

minutes. And the people would have welcomed [my coming to power].’” (Kandil

2012, 191)

While this granted him the crucial loyalty of the military in the Conscripts Riots, it also created the deplorable conditions which contributed to them occurring in the first place.

Defending the State; Milking the Cow

The Bread Riots indirectly caused the inflation of the Central Security Forces. The demand for such expansion led to a lack of work for every conscript and the recruitment of “largely illiterate

25 As cited in Chapter 1, Sadat’s term was plagued with his administration and high-level military officials conspiring against each other. (Kandil 2012, 152)

University of Florida | Journal of Undergraduate | Volume 21, Issue 3 | Spring 2019 47 History by the Numbers - 48 rural youths who did not qualify for regular military duty.” (Lesch 1986) This overabundance of labor coupled with Mubarak’s aim-to-please relationship with the military enabled the labor abuses experienced by the conscripts. These labor abuses imprinted far more onto the psyche of the young conscript than meaningless work, substandard wages, and clear corruption. The completely unraveled the idealized perception of the state as a paternal figure. The transformation of the image of the which these uneducated rural youth must have had, from that which produced Nasser, liberated Egypt, and won the great Egyptian victory in 1973, into an institution of menial labor and the upmost disregard of Egyptians by the state, cannot be overstated.

Under the guise of supplying Egypt with food and equipment which its military desperately lacked, Abu Ghazala had begun to relegate its armed forces towards traditionally private sector practices. (Kandil 2012, 194) Tariff exemptions not only on strategic goods, but on machinery, transportation equipment, and medicine, as well as additional millions in subside gave the military an advantage in competing in private industries. The military also had the benefit of early access to government contracts and, of course, a nigh-endless supply of rotating labor. (Miller 1985)

Dairy farms, bakeries, construction, military and optical equipment were all included in the military industrial complex, along with joint-ventures with international businesses, such as

General Motors. (Abul-Magd 2016, 68) Remarking on these practices, General Issam Goher, Chief of Staff of NASPO’s Food Security division stated:

“The private and public sectors complain about our 'slave labor' and the fact that

we own thousands of acres of land on which we can expand, [. . .] But the private

and public sectors need competition. For Egypt's sake, we're going to give it to

them.” Burgos-Herrera - 49

Despite the Army’s “good competition”, CSF forces were paid $4 in 1986 USD per month, along with two meals a day. (Bartholet 1986) Living conditions and benefits were noticeably lacking.

Conscripts were housed in tents or tin shacks in informal camps outside urban centers. (Kifner

1986) In response accusations of disregarding Conscript conditions while hoarding profits,

Mubarak stated that the entire earnings were spent on the soldier’s maintenance. (Kandil 2012,

194) The roles of CSF troops would be expanded to service roles, used to greet dignitaries, guard embassies, diplomatic residences, and hotels, and even serve as house servants. For the first time, rural Egyptians would witness the opulence of both foreign and native wealth. Recognition of this contrast shows in one of the chants heard in the wealthy neighborhood of El Maadi during the riot:

“they eat meat while we eat bread!” (Kifner 1986) Foreign wealth, however, proved a greater symbol of the unfairness of the conscript’s plight. Some of the very first targets of the conscripts during rioting were hotels and nightclubs, which, just as in the 1977 Bread Riots, represented the humiliation Egypt bared as a poor country. (Clarity, Freudenhelm and Levine 1986) The Jolie Ville and Holiday Inn of Cairo were burned to the ground, with two more hotels being looted and lit aflame in the first night of the rioting on February 25th. (Pyramids Hotels Ransacked 1986)

Figure 19. Central Security Forces board a transport vehicle to be relocated to new camps. (40,000 Layoffs 1986)

University of Florida | Journal of Undergraduate Research | Volume 21, Issue 3 | Spring 2019 49 History by the Numbers - 50

Figure 20. The text reads: “Hotel Vandum, or what became of it after the fire.” (The Longest Night in Egypt 1986)

Agitation among CSF forces against foreign humiliation reached a boiling point just before the

February 25th. On October 5th, 1985, CSF soldier Sulaiman Khater stood at his post in Ras Barqa in Southern Sinai, when he saw a group of 12 Israeli tourists entering his perimeter. He warned them in English and fired warning shots. After no response, he gunned down the tourists, killing seven total, including four children. Khater turned himself in later, and he hanged himself in his cell following his trial. His apparent suicide would arouse national interest, with his mother remarking that “My son was killed, by the government, for the sake of America and Israel, so that they will be satisfied.” (Murderpedia 1985) Egyptians saw his suicide as dubious—an easy way out for the Egyptian government which knew that it could not please both Israel and its people.

Khater’s brother claimed that he was raised well and would never commit suicide. Protests occurred in his home village and in Zagazig soon after. (Lesch 1986) For Egyptians, especially those in the CSF, the Khater case was concrete evidence of where the priorities of the Egyptian government lied. The fact that they would even consider trying a soldier defending his perimeter, much less cover up the case through suicide, all for the sake of Israelis breaking the law and crossing the border, embodied the breach in trust that the Egyptians had with their government. Burgos-Herrera - 51

Anxiety and a Four-Factor Economy

The Bread Riots of 1977 defined Mubarak’s economic strategy, one of cautious economic liberalization. The Bread Riots also permanently tied Egypt’s economic situation with a specter of potential insurrection. Despite Mubarak’s best efforts, anxieties over Egypt’s economic frailty and lack of autonomy pervaded through the Egyptian people, as revealed through an endless barrage of economic commentary provided in the Egyptian Gazette.

Egypt had laughable economic diversity. A myriad of sources concentrate Egypt’s incoming wealth in four categories: remittances from oil-rich countries, Egypt’s own oil production, tourism, and the .26 Remittances of Egyptian laborers in oil-rich Gulf countries contributed $3.2 billion earned by 3.5 million Egyptians abroad in 1988, easily the largest single source of income for Egypt. (Beinin 2016, 24) Following is its domestic petroleum industry; oil generated $2.2 billion to the economy in 1986. The Oil Boom crashed in 1982, affecting both domestic and foreign markets, and in turn Egypt’s two largest industries. Egypt’s own oil reserves diminished quickly, and by March 9, 1986, the government estimated an annual loss of

$700 million in oil revenue after the price collapse, falling from contributing over a quarter of the Egyptian GDP to 6.7% in 1986. (Mubarak Urges Swift, Radical Measures to Bolster

Economy 1986)

26 (Wickham 2002, 38) (Osman 2013, 66) (Egypt First Urban Development Project 1986, 2-3) (CBS News 2011)

University of Florida | Journal of Undergraduate Research | Volume 21, Issue 3 | Spring 2019 51 History by the Numbers - 52

Figure 21. “Oil Rents” as a percentage of Egyptian GDP, Oil Rents simply being the World Bank’s approximation for petroleum profit. (World Bank 2019) The government needed to make up for such a recession and decided the source of new revenue to be tourism. Secretary General of the leading National Democratic Party Dr. Yousef

Wali moved to promote tourism in January 22, 1986 at a conference titled “Tourism for the Sake of Egypt”, wherein he emphasized Egypt’s potential due to containing “one sixth of the world’s tourist sites.” (NDP Move to Promote Tourism 1986) Multiple mentions appear in the Egyptian

Gazette of efforts to promote tourism in the Sea area (Tourism Promotion 1986) and the

Suez, invite foreign media and tourism officials (Tourism Revenue 27.4 Percent Up 1986), increase taxes on tourists, and protect smaller hotels all within a month of the NDP conference.

(Move to Raise Tourist Revenue 1986) (New Move Meant to Protect Small Hotels 1986) These efforts proved inconsistent. A long time focus on tourism lead to a reported 27.4% increase in revenue from 1984 to 1985, however the growth could not compensate for the loss in oil and remittance revenue. While private sector had grown well, but the effects did not translate to the massive portion employed in the public sector. As Wickham notes, clerical government workers saw a decrease in wages by 8% from 1974 to 1984. (Wickham 2002, 40)

This editorial onslaught of efforts to promote one of the four sectors to make up for losses in another would have impressed upon the Egyptian people. They would have realized that these Burgos-Herrera - 53 four factors were also entirely dependent on the whims of the global economy.27 Mubarak could not, not for lack of trying, force more ships to go through the Suez, or more Arab states to hire

Egyptian workers, or more tourists to come. This constant reiteration of an economy independent of the effort of the Egyptian people once again severed the social contract; Egyptians were no longer the workers valued under Nasser, contributing to an emerging regional power. They were servants, manual laborers, and maintenance keepers to the West and Israel. This perception compounds the already humiliated condition of the CSF soldier. Now, not only were they serving the wealthy tourists and diplomats, not only were their brothers convicted for defending their homeland, but their families, their cities, their monuments, and their homeland served as the plaything of forces of the developed world.

A Stab in the Back

The Conscripts did not have the benefit of the Bread Rioters of a diverse mass of Egyptians.

They were a homogenous group, not joined by civilians in their struggle on the streets.

Following the riots were nationwide reconstruction efforts. The result is that the Egyptian press could easily separate the conscripts from the civilians, as they initially tried to do in the Bread

Riots, before deferring to blaming Communists. In a television address, Mubarak framed the event as:

“This is a treacherous blow to the march of this people struggling for its

livelihood and its future, this happened at a time when Egypt was making every

effort to develop and build on every field and to confront difficult economic

conditions.” (Rogg 1986)

27 And if they did not reach this conclusion on their own, Al-Jumhuriya was happy to oblige: “As [debts and the decline of oil prices and Suez Canal revenues] are [problems] mainly due to international circumstances, we should now strive to achieve greater self-sufficiency.” (Al-Jumhuriya 1986)

University of Florida | Journal of Undergraduate Research | Volume 21, Issue 3 | Spring 2019 53 History by the Numbers - 54

The tactic is obvious: key into the economic anxiety and ideal of a moral Egyptian contributing to their homeland’s development and cast the conscripts as vandals whose selfishness undid years of work. The Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF)—the state-run consolidation of worker’s unions—condemned the Conscripts for not utilizing the ETUF to channel dissent28 and remarked that:

“Egypt’s workers are keen on carrying out their task by participating in construction

and development activities in the light of the difficult circumstances.” (Security

Situation Under Control, Rioters Arrested 1986)

In the same issue, Mubarak’s statement to the nation called the event “A stab in the back of the people who are fighting to build a future for themselves and the country in general. This must be a hard fight at the best of times since Egypt’s economy—for reasons almost entirely beyond its control—is through a difficult period.” These statements show an understanding of the moral economy and emphasized the virtues of the Egyptian people coupled with the state trying its best to care for them. Mubarak maintains this paternalist visage by granting the conscripts with better conditions. (Mubarak Urges Swift, Radical Measures to Bolster Economy 1986)

However, even in the moral economy, the CSF troops could not bear their situation any longer.

Hopeless, humiliating, and—at the hand of a potential extension of a further year—practically bondage, the conditions of the CSF drove them to follow in the footsteps of their older brothers and sisters of the Bread Riots, in the faint hope for enacting change in a society where the street is the only avenue of dissent.

28 Recall that, in Chapter 1, page 28, the ETUF had failed to act as a voice for the workers, and that its leadership was composed of businessmen and favored political appointees. Compared to the success of the Bread Riots and other strikes and protests, dissent through the ETUF would seem like a null effort in Mubarak’s Egypt. Burgos-Herrera - 55

Conclusion

I cannot say how many case studies it would take to qualify a cliodynamic theory. However, the success of the Structural-Demographic and Selfish Elite models is impressive. The Structural-

Demographic model identified a period of particularly high amounts of workers’ strikes, student demonstrations, and of course two of the largest riots in Egypt’s history. The Selfish Elite model also held its ground, deducing intra-elite tension from a fall in proportional Elite wealth and population growth. While it could be argued that its heavy abstraction gives it the flexibility needed to readily apply to the Selfish Elite model any scenario, it must be remembered that: 1) those quantitative metrics which were provided were still qualified and 2) even under heavy abstraction, the ability to induct the narrative of the Conscripts Riots, which has no devoted literature, is a feat.

The GCRI despite its failure, still describes what it believes to be its description of stability.

However, its applicability is greatly limited by the developmental stage of the polity it describes.

Its utility is further hampered by its mixed use of subjective and objective metrics.

In the scope of the 1977 Bread Riots and the 1986 Conscripts Riots, the Structural-Demographic and Selfish Elite models are useful. They fail, of course, to describe the nuances regarding the motivations of each group of rioters, as well as the narratives of the events, and how the Bread

Riots impacted the development of the Conscripts Riots. The Bread Riots were in part economic discontent, in part the realization of a class struggle, and in part a failure in a complex relationship between Egyptian and state. This event traumatized Sadat and Mubarak’s policy, stifling absolute economic growth and incentivizing the development of a larger Central Security Force. Mubarak, anticipating a repeat of the Bread Riots and attempting to satiate the political appetite of the

Egyptian military, created the conditions of a large, abused labor force of rural youth, disenchanted

University of Florida | Journal of Undergraduate Research | Volume 21, Issue 3 | Spring 2019 55 History by the Numbers - 56 with the state of their homeland. When they believe that the state planned to abuse them again, they took to the streets.

Cliodynamics, at this stage, serves to unlock an event. It assists in identifying the general causal forces behind social phenomena, and how these forces interact. But the human narrative, the passions and betrayals, the relationship between a people their leader, their homeland, and their world, may never be surmised by even the greatest computational power. Burgos-Herrera - 57

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David Sims, Marion Sejoume, Monika El-Shorbagi. 2003. The Case of Cairo, Egypt. Case Study, London: University College London. Egypt, Government of the Arab Republic of. 1977. "Egypt: Foreign Investment Law, As Amended." International Legal Materials, Vol 16, No. 6, November. Accessed December 12, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20691807. Egyptian Gazette. 1977. "Implementation of Price Rises Suspended." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, January 20. —. 1977. "L.E. 7,050 Million Budget for 1977 Before P.A." January 18. —. 1986. "Move to Raise Tourist Revenue." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, February 7. —. 1986. "Mubarak Orders Swift Reconstruction of Damaged Hotels, Sites." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, March 1. —. 1986. "Mubarak Urges Swift, Radical Measures to Bolster Economy." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, March 9. —. 1986. "NDP Move to Promote Tourism." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, January 22. —. 1986. "New Move Meant to Protect Small Hotels." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, February 19. —. 1986. "Opposition hails police role." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, Fabruary 9. —. 1977. "P.A. Budget Committee Cancels Price Rises." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, January 21. —. 1977. "Sadat, Top Aides to Probe Situation Today." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, January 22. —. 1986. "Security Situation Under Control, Rioters Arrested." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, February 28. —. 1986. "Tourism Promotion." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, January 23. —. 1986. "Tourism Revenue 27.4 Percent Up." January 24. —. 1977. "Widespread Riots in Cairo and Giza." Cairo: Egyptian Gazette, January 20. el-Hamalawy, Hossam. n.d. 1977: The Lost Revolution. Master Dissertation, n.p. El-Hamalawy, Hossam. n.d. 1977: The Lost Revolution. Master Dissertation, n.p. Ghafar, Adel Abdel. 2016. Egyptians in Revolt: The Political Economy of Labor and Student Mobilizations 1919–2011. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge. Halkia, Stamatia, Stefano Ferri, Ines Joubert-Boitat, and Francesca Saporiti. 2017. Conflict Risk Indicators: Significance and Data Management in the GCRI. Report, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Burgos-Herrera - 59

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Turchin, Peter, Sergey Gavrilets, and Jack A. Goldstone. 2017. "Linking "Micro" to "Macro" Models of State Breakdown to Improve Methods for Poltical Forcasting." Cliodynamics 8 159-181. Verme, Paolo, Branko Milanovic, Sherine Al-Shawarby, Sahar El Tawila, May Gadallah, and Enas Ali A.El-Majeed. 2014. Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt: Facts and Perceptions Across People, Time, and Space. Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Whitehouse, Harvey, Pieter François, Patrick E. Savage, Thomas E. Currie, Kevin C. Feeney, Enrico Cioni, Rosalind Purcell, et al. 2019. "Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history." Nature 226-229. Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky. 2002. Mobilizing : Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt. New York: Columbia University Press. World Bank. 1986. Egypt First Urban Development Project. Audit Report, World Bank. World Bank, Open Data. 2019. Egypt. https://data.worldbank.org/country/egypt-arab- rep?view=chart. Youssef, Adham. 2017. "The Uprising Will Not be Filmed: Cinematic Representations of the 1977 Bread Riots." madamasr.com. January 31. Accessed September 19, 2018. https://madamasr.com/en/2017/01/31/feature/culture/the-uprising-will-not-be-filmed- cinematic-representations-of-the-1977-bread-riots/. Zeinobia. 2012. Egyptian Cronicles. February 26. Accessed December 12, 2018. https://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2012/02/csf-riots-anniversary-and-enemy- within.html.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to take this moment to thank my mother and father, because they must always be acknowledged first, though in all seriousness, what could I be without them. This work of hubris and passion could not have been done without the grace and guidance of the University of

Florida History Department, especially my mentor Dr. Michelle Campos, who gave me the independence and support necessary to accomplish this piece. I also need to thank Sabrina and

Anthony, for listening to my incessant ramblings about “predicting history”. I finally must thank

Jack, Maggie, Nicholas, Alex, Caroline, Eric, Morgan, Chris B, Chris T, Sebastian, and anyone else who lent me their energy and support throughout the hundreds of hours of work which went into this piece.

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