Ref: AD-3018
Summary: on 4 July Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi inaugurated the Strategic Command Headquarters in his New Administrative Capital as a powerful statement of the extent to which the Egyptian state has become a militarised force that defines civilian society as a hostile terrain.
This content is locked
Login or Register To Unlock The Content!
There is a precedent to this and the precedent is Riyadh.
As Pascal Ménoret described in his excellent book “Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt” Doxiadis Associates, a Greek urban planning consultancy firm of the highest calibre, designed Riyadh to be immune to revolts, disturbances or civil strife. This was consciously done and the result is there for all to see. Quite an extraordinary thing to do. There is no other precedent to this.
Read the regime’s own explanation and the argument makes itself. Sisi told the country the state had to leave Cairo so that 2013 could never return, the year crowds besieged the Constitutional Court and the state media complex. The Octagon’s founding purpose is insulation from the population. The enemy it is built to withstand is not across a border. It is the street.
So it sits in the desert, a fortified complex larger than the Pentagon, opened on the anniversary of the takeover that made him. Inside the eight towers of military command stand two buildings for the civilian leadership. The republic is now a tenant of the army.
Egypt has long lived with a dual economy, one formal and civilian, the other military, opaque, privileged and shielded from public scrutiny. Under Sisi, that military economy has fused with the political order itself. The officer class does not merely defend the state, it owns, builds, contracts, governs, audits and disciplines it.
This is what guarding the state’s “civil status” means, military tutelage dressed as constitutional care. The officer does not govern the civilian order. He holds it in trust, convinced that the people cannot be trusted with it themselves.
The Octagon is the monument to that distrust, and its confession.