A portrait of the Egyptian police

This is another background piece. Earlier I offered a portrait of the Egyptian military, seen through the eyes of Barry Lando, a former 60 Minutes producer. Here I offer a complementary portrait of the numerous Egyptian police forces (there are more than one). The view is through the eyes of Paul Amar, whose Jadaliyya piece we discussed earlier.

About Egypt's various police groups, Amar notes the following (I've added paragraphing, a few notes, and emphasis for clarity):

Western commentators, whether liberal, left or conservative, tend to see all forces of coercion in non-democratic states as the hammers of “dictatorship” or as expressions of the will of an authoritarian leader. But each police, military and security institution has its own history, culture, class-allegiances, and, often its own autonomous sources of revenue and support as well. It would take many books to lay this all out in detail; but let me make a brief attempt here.

In Egypt the police forces (al-shurta) are run by the Interior Ministry which was very close to Mubarak and the Presidency and had become politically co-dependent on him.

But police stations gained relative autonomy during the past decades. In certain police stations this autonomy took the form of the adoption of a militant ideology or moral mission; or some Vice Police stations have taken up drug running; or some ran protection rackets that squeezed local small businesses. The political dependability of the police, from a bottom-up perspective, is not high. Police grew to be quite self-interested and entrepreneurial on a station-by-station level.

In the 1980s, the police faced the growth of “gangs,” referred to in Egyptian Arabic as baltagiya. These street organizations had asserted self-rule over Cairo’s many informal settlements and slums. Foreigners and the Egyptian bourgeoisie assumed the baltagiya to be Islamists but they were mostly utterly unideological. In the early 1990s the Interior Ministry decided “if you can’t beat them, hire them.” So the Interior Ministry and the Central Security Services [Markazi, see below] started outsourcing coercion to these baltagiya, paying them well and training them to use sexualized brutality (from groping to rape) in order to punish and deter female protesters and male detainees, alike.

During this period the Interior Ministry also turned the State Security Investigations (SSI) (mabahith amn al-dawla) into a monstrous threat, detaining and torturing masses of domestic political dissidents.

Autonomous from the Interior Ministry we have the Central Security Services (Amn al-Markazi). These are the black uniformed, helmeted men that the media [erroneously] refer to as “the police.” Central Security was supposed to act as the private army of Mubarak.

[However t]hese are not revolutionary guards or morality brigades like the basiji who repressed the Green Movement protesters in Iran. By contrast, the Amn al-Markazi are low paid and non-ideological. Moreover, at crucial times, these Central Security brigades have risen up en masse against Mubarak, himself, to demand better wages and working conditions. Perhaps if it weren’t for the sinister assistance of the brutal baltagiya, they would not be a very intimidating force.

The look of unenthusiastic resignation in the eyes of Amn al-Markazi soldiers as they were kissed and lovingly disarmed by protesters has become one of the most iconic images, so far, of this revolution. The dispelling of Mubarak’s authority could be marked to precisely that moment when protesters kissed the cheeks of Markazi officers who promptly vanished into puffs of tear gas, never to return.

On the relationship between the police and military, Amar adds:

The Armed Forces of the Arab Republic of Egypt are quite unrelated to the Markazi or police and see themselves as a distinct kind of state altogether. One could say that Egypt is still a “military dictatorship” (if one must use that term) since this is still the same regime that the Free Officers’ Revolution installed in the 1950s. But the military has been marginalized since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel and the United States. Since 1977, the military has not been allowed to fight anyone. Instead, the generals have been given huge aid payoffs by the US. They have been granted concessions to run shopping malls in Egypt, develop gated cities in the desert and beach resorts on the coasts. And they are encouraged to sit around in cheap social clubs.

These buy-offs have shaped them into an incredibly organized interest group of nationalist businessmen.

We referred to these extraordinary "military" activities here.

So for those keeping score at home, the following police groups are part of the game:

• The actual police forces (al-shurta) run by the Interior Ministry and used as an arm of the Mubarak regime
• Individual al-shurta police stations with relative autonomy — some with militant or moral ideology, some doing drug running, some running protection rackets
• Street gangs (baltagiya), completely unideological, who have been co-opted by the police into anti-populist repression
• State Security Investigations, or SSI (mabahith amn al-dawla), also run by the Interior Ministry and involved in torturing domestic political dissidents
• And finally, Central Security Services (Amn al-Markazi), independent of the Interior Ministry, low-paid and non-ideological

So when you read an article like this (h/t hector) and you see phrases like "State Security" and "drug-addled gangs", you'll know he means mabahith amn al-dawla and baltagiya — and not the black-uniformed al-Markazi.

Hope this helps; we're all playing catch-up here.

GP