Young Justice Subtitles

[Rodney Liuzzo]

CHARLESSENNOTT: It was a time of incredible hope and high expectations. But I had come on a specific mission. I had come to understand the role of the long outlawed Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood.

[voice-over] On Tahrir Square, I found Mohammad Abbas, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood's youth wing. Abbas had been working alongside secular activists to help organize the revolt. He was eager to show us what he and his fellow Brothers had contributed.

CHARLES SENNOTT: Abbas pointed out how the Brothers were in charge of the security checkpoints, serving hot tea, distributing blankets, printing posters and running an emergency health clinic. They were holding the revolution's infrastructure together.

CHARLES SENNOTT: [voice-over] At that time, it wasn't at all clear what direction the country would take or even if Mubarak would fall. But you couldn't help but notice that the most powerful player in Egypt, the military, was watching and waiting, contemplating their next move. For revolutionaries, the military was a kind of unholy ally.

MONA ELTAHAWY, Political Activist: The military are not our friends. But I think what the military began to realize when millions of people protested against Mubarak's regime and demanded his ouster was that this power, this power among the people, was a real force to reckon with.

But they didn't see what happened next. A few hundred revolutionaries had remained, camped on the square, demanding that Mubarak's regime be prosecuted for human rights abuses and corruption. They trusted the military would to continue to protect them.

MONA ELTAHAWY, Political Activist: On March 9th, you know, very infamously, the SCAF cleared Tahrir Square and took female and male revolutionaries to military prison, where many of them were tortured.

KHALED FAHMY, American University in Cairo: It was discovered what we had all as revolutionaries suspected was happening, that the army and the military police had been rounding up activists, interestingly enough, in the Egyptian museum, and torturing them, that they had been establishing checkpoints on Egyptian highways and rounding up, again, activists and torturing them.

RAMY ESSAM: [through interpreter] They took me into the museum with 200 other people. I was tortured for four straight hours. They used different methods, like hitting me with wooden sticks or iron bars. I was tied up the whole time. They also took off my clothes and things got more violent. There is no part of my body that they did not electrocute.

The people who were torturing me were not just ordinary soldiers. There were senior officers, as well. They tried to humiliate us and taunt us with names while they tortured us, trying to destroy our dignity. They would say, "Are you happy with your revolution now?"

HESHAM SALLAM, Jadaliyya Blog: The Brotherhood steered away from protests against the military. The few times when they participated in mass protests, they were always very keen and eager on avoiding criticism of the military and silencing voices that say things like, "Down with military rule" and that kind of stuff.

MONA MAKRAM EBEID, American University in Cairo: The Muslim Brothers were the cleverest, and they were the first ones to go to the army and say, "Here, we are at your service. We can work with you."

KHALIL EL-ANANI, Author, The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: I think we need to understand that the Brotherhood doesn't have any revolutionary ideology. They don't believe in revolution at all. They believe in what they call gradual reform.

CHARLES SENNOTT: Throughout 2011, the Brotherhood kept talking to the military, kept off the streets and outmaneuvered its political rivals. Revolutionaries, liberals and minorities were nervous about the Brotherhood's ambitions.

Egypt's Coptic Christians were especially fearful. Members of Egypt's largest minority religious group, around 10 percent of the population, the Copts have survived here since the beginning of Christianity. But in recent years, Coptic Christians have seen a steady rise in attacks by ultra-conservative militant Islamists. Christians expected the government to protect them.

MONA ELTAHAWY: There've been many attacks against churches, and SCAF was doing nothing, just as the Mubarak regime did nothing, to protect the Christian population. And so this massive protest began outside the TV and radio building because many people felt that the state-run TV was inciting people against minorities and against revolutionaries.

HEBA MORAYEF, Human Rights Watch: I think Maspero in October 2011 was a huge turning point. I think it was a traumatic event for the Christian minorities, for Christians in Egypt. This was the first time that the military had used excessive lethal force in that way. Twenty-seven protesters were killed.

MARY DANIEL: [through interpreter] We came under gunfire and were pursued by armored vehicles crashing into parked cars. Tear gas bombs were flying. It was a horrible scene. I could not find Mina. I kept calling him, but his mobile was turned off. Then someone told me that he been taken to the Coptic hospital.

There I found Mina in the morgue. He looked like he was sleeping, with a smile on his face. I saw a lot of dead bodies around Maspero. I saw one person shot in the neck and the bullet hole was still visible. I saw a lot of blood. I will never forget that day.

Abbas was now running for a parliamentary seat, but he was at a disadvantage. He had criticized the Brotherhood's leadership for its failure to speak out against military repression, and he had been expelled from the party. But he remained optimistic about the process.

MOHAMMAD ABBAS: [subtitles] I think this is the freedom and democracy that we worked for. Whatever the choice is, and whether we agree with it or not, I think it's the best choice for Egypt.

CHARLES SENNOTT: But for some Brothers, the ultimate goal was the establishment of an Islamic state. In the 1940s, they began a campaign of violence against occupying British troops. Then a Muslim Brother attempted to assassinate Egypt's secular president. Gamal Abdel Nasser cracked down.

CHARLES SENNOTT: In the 1970s, President Anwar Sadat also kept up pressure on the Brotherhood. But the movement split over the use of violence. Some members left and joined groups, like Ayman al-Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad, responsible for Sadat's 1982 assassination.

CHARLES SENNOTT: Al-Zawahiri would later join forces with al Qaeda, but the mainstream leadership of the Brotherhood rejected violence and committed itself to the democratic process. In 2005, their candidates had won 20 percent of Egypt's parliamentary seats.

MONA ELTAHAWY, Political Activist: I don't believe the majority of people voted for Mohamed Morsi because they wanted him as president. I believe it was a false choice. The majority of people who voted for him, voted for him because they didn't want the other choice, who was the military junta candidate, Ahmed Shafik.

WAEL HADDARA, Sr. Morsi Campaign Adviser: It felt incredible. Here we are, the first democratically elected president in the entire history of Egypt, the first civilian to ever head Egypt in the modern era. And it was like stepping into the warm sunshine after a long, long, cold winter.

AMR DARRAG, Muslim Brotherhood: He got elected by the people, 52 percent of the people, of the Egyptian people. I don't care why they were voting against his opponent. But I mean, they elected him. Why don't people just accept it?

He had won, but he was already facing powerful opponents. Just a few days earlier, Egypt's supreme court, packed with Mubarak-era judges, had declared January's parliamentary elections invalid and ordered the parliament shut down. Islamist parties, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, had won nearly 70 percent of the seats.

GEHAD EL-HADDAD, Spokesman, Muslim Brotherhood: They destroyed parliament two days before the presidential election. And they knew that if a president comes with a parliament that's been electorally voted in, these two institutions can literally start dismantling the old dictatorship bit by bit. And they had to dysfunction one element of that.

CHARLES SENNOTT: Egyptians often talk of something they call the "deep state," an expression that refers to elements of the Mubarak regime embedded deep inside Egypt's government. The deep state includes the supreme court, all state-run media, the police, and at the very top, the army.

NATHAN BROWN, George Washington University: The term "deep state" I think originally comes from Turkey, the sense that the military is not necessarily ruling directly, but what you have is kind of underneath the surface of politics, this underlying set of structures that's running things.

AMR DARRAG: It is much deeper than what everybody thought. It is really very deep because it's a result of 60 years of bad governments and corruption. So you need some time, and you need real drastic measures in order to be able to get rid of that.

NATHAN BROWN: One of the big demands of the Egyptian revolution was to say, "We don't want any more torture. We don't any more abuse by the security services. We don't want any more civilians being tried in military courts," and so forth and so on.

KHALED FAHMY, Author, Anatomy of Justice: We wanted to have something in the constitution against torture. We wanted to have something in the constitution against police brutality. We wanted to have something in the constitution that would limit the power of the military. But rather than curb the power of the military, the constitution gave the military everything they wanted.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Basically, what the constitution guaranteed for the military was safe passage, so that none of them were held accountable for their violations of our rights during the junta rule, the SCAF rule, left the military budget untouched, left any kind of civilian oversight of that budget, and allowed the military to continue to put civilians before military tribunals, which were all things that, you know, we, the revolution, wanted to fix.

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