Interview| Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour: June 30 won against political Islam, then lost politics
“We marginalized the forces of political Islam. We marginalized the idea of linking religion to politics and the state, and I believe that is a major achievement in and of itself. But a secular state? That’s a question mark. A democratic state and freedom of expression? That’s a question mark.”
That is how Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour, a senior figure in the Wafd Party who held two ministerial posts in the years following the 2011 ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, sums up the legacy of the June 30, 2013 protests. In his telling, the uprising succeeded in only one respect: removing the Muslim Brotherhood from power. The broader demands of the January 25 Revolution — freedom, social justice, democracy — remain unmet.
Egypt’s 2014 constitution treats the mass protests of January 25, 2011, and June 30, 2013, as a single, continuous uprising — the “January 25–June 30 Revolution” — and describes it as without parallel among the “major revolutions in the history of mankind.” But the 13 years since, marked by the sidelining of politics and the absence of free expression, democracy and competitive elections, have drifted further and further from the path charted in January.
Al Manassa sat down with Abdel Nour to walk through that history. He served as minister of tourism in the governments of Ahmed Shafik, Essam Sharaf and Kamal El-Ganzouri from February 2011 through June 2012; as secretary-general of the National Salvation Front, the coalition of civilian opposition forces formed in November 2012 in response to the constitutional declaration issued by the late President Mohamed Morsi; and finally as minister of trade and industry from July 2013 to September 2015, under Prime Ministers Hazem El-Beblawy and Ibrahim Mahlab.
He spoke about the Front, the opportunities Morsi squandered in the run-up to June 30, the bloody dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in, and the gradual erosion of politics in Egypt that brought the country to where it stands today.
2012: The road to June 30
The political opposition had no choice, Abdel Nour says, but to confront Morsi from the very start of his presidency, not out of hostility toward the Muslim Brotherhood, but because “he made mistakes from the very first day he took office.”
He recalls Morsi’s oath of office on June 30, 2012: first at the Supreme Constitutional Court, then at Cairo University, and then, he stresses, at an evening inauguration ceremony at Haykstep, where Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi saluted him as commander-in-chief. Within days, Morsi moved to reconvene parliament — the same parliament the Constitutional Court had already ruled unconstitutional. To Abdel Nour, the move signaled contempt “for the Constitution, its principles, and the Constitutional Court itself.”
The court had ordered parliament dissolved in June 2012, just before Morsi took office, ruling that the law governing its election was unconstitutional. Within his first month in power, the new president nonetheless ordered the chamber reseated, triggering a constitutional crisis that drove ten ministers, Abdel Nour among them, to resign from Kamal El-Ganzouri’s cabinet, before the resignations were rejected.
“Half the cabinet met to submit our resignations. I was one of them. Ambassador Fayza Abu El-Naga was leading that effort. But El-Ganzouri called Field Marshal Tantawi and tried to find a way out, and the Field Marshal said the parliamentary session would last exactly one hour and then disperse. And so it did.”
The will of the Egyptian people, across all their factions, converged with the will of the security apparatus
What followed, Abdel Nour says, set the stage for the National Salvation Front. “Starting with the October 6 anniversary celebrations, where President Sadat’s assassins took center stage, then on October 11, when he dismissed Prosecutor General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud in violation of the Constitution and the immunity the post carries. Then, on November 22, came the constitutional declaration, which shielded all of Morsi’s decisions from judicial review and let him effectively control all three branches of government. With parliament absent, he was the legislature; he headed the executive; and his decisions were immune from any judicial oversight.”
The National Salvation Front was founded that same day, November 22, 2012, as a direct response to the declaration: a coalition of some 35 parties and political movements spanning liberal, leftist and Nasserist currents, led by figures including Mohamed ElBaradei, Amr Moussa, Hamdeen Sabahy, Mohamed Aboul Ghar and Abdel Nour himself.
The will of the people, or SCAF?
The Front’s immediate demands were the repeal of the constitutional declaration, the rejection of the draft constitution produced by the Constituent Assembly, the formation of a new assembly representative of all segments of society, the dismissal of Hisham Qandil’s government, and the formation of a national salvation government.
Were these demands designed to be rejected? Abdel Nour pushes back firmly. All the Front wanted, he insists, was for the Brotherhood to grasp the danger of disregarding the constitution and trying to seize control of every institution. “Unreasonable? Is abiding by the constitution unreasonable? ‘Unreasonable’ was his response: to lay siege to the Supreme Constitutional Court in early December, blocking it from ruling on the constitutionality of the Shura Council elections and of the Constituent Assembly that was drafting what became the Brotherhood’s constitution. Then they laid siege to state television and Media Production City.”
The Front, Abdel Nour maintains, genuinely sought dialogue with the Brotherhood; none of the overtures from the other side, he says, were sincere. Nor does he deny that the Front drew confidence from signals of support coming from the security establishment. He points to one moment in particular: in December 2012, shortly before the December 4 protests outside the Ittihadiya presidential palace, then-Defense Minister Abdel Fattah El-Sisi declared that security in Egypt depended on cooperation between the army and the police, and that the Egyptian people would not be intimidated as long as that cooperation held.
“The will of the Egyptian people, in all its factions, converged with the will of the security apparatus,” Abdel Nour says of that period — and of June 30 itself in its earliest stages — “to rid the country of Brotherhood rule.”
That convergence, he says, evolved over time. “To be precise about the position of the police and the military in December: it encouraged protest in the hope that it might push the Brotherhood toward reform. The goal wasn’t necessarily to remove Morsi. But the closer we got to June 30, the clearer it became that their aim was his removal because we were on the edge of the abyss. We were heading toward civil war. The Brotherhood had taken up arms and used them, and the streets were ablaze with people demanding civilian rule, democracy, social justice. It was obvious those goals would never be met under that government.”
Abdel Nour rejects the suggestion that the Front was a creation of the security services, or that it coordinated with them directly. “To the best of my knowledge, there was no coordination between Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the Front’s core leadership. But the Front was a broad and diverse body, and it’s possible contacts took place that I wasn’t aware of.”
The surprise of July 3
By his own account, the Front recognized — despite its broad popular backing — that military intervention had become unavoidable. “During our meetings in April, May and early June, we felt we had the full weight of public support behind us. But that support wasn’t enough on its own to change the regime. Call it a lack of confidence in ourselves, or in the street’s capacity to force change, but we came to believe we needed the military to step in.”
The SCAF gave Mohamed Morsi more than one opportunity and more than one way out, but the man refused
Even so, Abdel Nour says, the Front was caught off guard by the July 3 statement in which the defense minister announced Morsi’s removal, flanked by political and religious leaders. The substance, he argues, was no surprise: the military had already given all sides 48 hours, starting July 1, to resolve the crisis. Morsi’s response, delivered in a televised address on the evening of July 2, ignored the ultimatum entirely. “SCAF gave Morsi more than one chance, more than one way out, and the man refused out of confidence in himself, in American and European backing, and in the strength of the Brotherhood’s organization inside the country.”
What blindsided the Front, Abdel Nour says, was the statement’s timing and form, not its content. ElBaradei himself was summoned to stand alongside El-Sisi that day “but was sidelined — he had no idea what was about to happen. Still, the statement achieved exactly what the Front had been formed to achieve. Before June 30, our position was simple: Morsi must go. Who comes next? We said: the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court as an interim president, followed by elections. That was the framework we were operating in, and on that, everyone agreed.”
Abdel Nour joined El-Beblawy’s transitional government as minister of trade and industry. In the run-up to the cabinet’s formation in July 2013, speculation had centered on ElBaradei as the likely prime minister. According to Abdel Nour, ElBaradei was relieved when the job went to someone else, unwilling to be consumed by the details of a collapsing economy. “I can attest that Mohamed ElBaradei is an honest, principled man. But he is not, at heart, a politician. He speaks about Egypt, about principles, about lofty goals, and I believe him when he does. But the rough work of politics? He has no taste for crowds, for the street, for the grind of it.”
Rabaa and after
Just as the Front had been kept in the dark about the July 3 statement, Abdel Nour says he himself, as a sitting minister, was not informed in advance that the defense minister intended to seek a popular mandate to confront “terrorism and violence” — the call El-Sisi issued at a military academy graduation ceremony on July 24, 2013.
“I didn’t understand that mandate,” he says simply, adding that the call for protests, and the mandate it sought for the military, was never discussed in cabinet. “I was sworn in as minister on July 17. I was removed from what was happening in the streets. I took office under very difficult circumstances, with heavy and significant responsibilities. I didn’t even have the time to weigh in on events like these.”
Days after the mass protests of July 26 delivered that mandate, negotiations — led by domestic and foreign parties alike — were underway with the Muslim Brotherhood to end its sit-ins. The government then formally directed the interior minister to take all necessary measures to disperse the encampments at Rabaa and Nahda squares, where Brotherhood supporters had gathered for weeks demanding Morsi’s reinstatement and denouncing his ouster as a coup.
The dispersal of Rabaa was a painful event... people were killed who shouldn’t have been
Facing that pressure, Abdel Nour believes the security services had little choice but to take charge of ending the sit-ins. He does not dispute that ElBaradei led efforts to reach a negotiated, peaceful resolution, or at least to de-escalate. “A great many people tried to convince the Brotherhood to disperse on their own — foreign parties including Qatar, the UAE and the European Union, and Mohamed ElBaradei personally. That became one of the points of disagreement within the cabinet.”
ElBaradei, who served as vice president under interim President Adly Mansour, had proposed releasing several jailed Brotherhood leaders in exchange for thinning the crowds at Rabaa, Abdel Nour says. “He was upset, because he kept saying: I negotiated this, I was party to it, and we reached a solution. So I’d ask him: what was the solution, Dr. Mohamed? He’d say: release El-Katatni and Abu El-Ela Madi, in exchange for clearing out some of the protesters. Clearing out some? What does that mean? A hundred people leave? That’s not how a security arrangement works. It needs precision — a thousand leave, half leave, a quarter leave. Something specific.”
Abdel Nour describes the bloody dispersal of Rabaa as a human tragedy, while declining to assign responsibility to any one party. “It was a deeply painful event. There’s no question people were killed who shouldn’t have been. But let me tell you what the scene actually looked like, and what people were saying at the time.”
He maintains that everyone involved wanted the sit-in dispersed without bloodshed, and recalls the morning itself. “El-Beblawy, who was prime minister then, called me that morning and asked me to come sit with him at the cabinet headquarters. I went. By 9:30, he was in very good spirits because the Nahda sit-in had just been cleared without incident. He was hopeful Rabaa would go the same way. It didn’t.”
Between 600 and 900 people were killed in the dispersal, which began with the promise of safe exit corridors and rapidly turned into what witnesses described as a killing field. A June 2014 report by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) found that security forces “failed to plan the operation in a way that gave due weight to minimizing loss of life,” and that they “showed extreme disregard for the lives of those present at the sit-in, amounting to collective punishment of everyone in the area.” The report concluded that “unlawful lethal force was used in more than one instance,” that “many protesters were targeted while fleeing, with no evidence they were armed,” and that security forces “failed to secure genuinely safe exits” for those trying to leave, even as residents of nearby buildings attempted to assault them.
Not the change he had hoped for
Abdel Nour is careful to absolve the Salvation Front, and its members, of responsibility for what followed June 30 — and he defends several of the transitional government’s most consequential decisions, even those that helped empty Egypt’s public sphere of genuine opposition.
He points, for instance, to the original protest law. “When it was first passed, before it was amended, it was actually a good law — modeled closely on the French and Swiss systems, which require only advance notice of a protest, not permission. I’ll set the punitive provisions aside; the procedural side is what mattered. It built in a safeguard: if the security services believed a protest posed a genuine threat, they had to go to court, and the court’s ruling was final. There was judicial oversight. You assume an independent judiciary will rule fairly. That safeguard was stripped out in the later amendment.”
Interim President Adly Mansour issued the protest law by presidential decree on November 24, 2013, in the absence of a sitting parliament, and the transitional cabinet approved it over the strong objections of civil society groups and human rights organizations. Two days after it took effect, the law was used against a protest staged to oppose it. A number of activists who had helped drive the movement against Morsi, including Alaa Abdel Fattah, Ahmed Maher, Mohamed Adel and Mahienour El-Massry, were arrested under its provisions and later sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
Abdel Nour also rejects holding June 30 itself responsible for where Egypt finds itself today. “Our hopes were nothing like where we’ve ended up, and nothing like what followed from the political, economic and social changes of the past decade. There’s no question that those goals — a substantial part of what January 25 stood for — were not achieved.”
He traces much of that failure to the steady removal of politicians from public life, a process he says was complete by the time Ibrahim Mahlab formed his government in 2014. “I want to describe how gradual that shift really was. When El-Beblawy’s cabinet was formed, the intent was for it to reflect the range of political currents active in Egyptian society at the time. Look at its composition — it’s obvious. That was deliberate, and it came from the prime minister and the people around him. There was no outside interference.”
“That cabinet held until Mahlab was appointed,” he continues. “Under his government, the political character of the cabinet was lost entirely. All of that gave way to a cabinet of technocrats, as if politics itself had become something shameful.”
On July 17, 2013, the Wafd Party announced its withdrawal from the National Salvation Front, judging that the coalition had achieved its purpose. The months that followed brought repeated disputes among the parties that remained, until the Front’s dissolution was formally announced after the constitutional referendum of January 2014. With it went the role of most of the opposition currents that had been driving ideas and plans in Egyptian politics since the January Revolution.
Asked whether the events of June 30 still shape Egypt’s present, Abdel Nour answers without hesitation. “No, of course not. The defense minister who announced that statement is the president today, but that’s just it. What you’re facing now is a regime that created itself.”
It is not the future he had hoped for on July 3, 2013 — nor, perhaps, what his grandfather, Fakhry Abdel Nour, a Wafd Party stalwart and a leading figure in Egypt’s 1919 Revolution, might have envisioned for the country.
“Personally, I was full of hope. I was as optimistic as I have ever been. I thought we were heading into a completely different world,” Abdel Nour says. “And it is completely different — just not the kind of different I was looking for, and hoping for: more freedom, more democracy, more national unity.”