It is telling that, only shortly after President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi sat down with the U.S. broadcaster CBS, the Egyptian government tried to prevent the interview’s release. Enticed to take part in a “60 Minutes” interview through an appeal to his vanity, Sissi quickly realized that the questions — and his answers — were not the ones he wanted the world to see. It was embarrassing to watch. He was clearly not prepared for the interview, and that his team tried to prevent its release simply made it into an even bigger story.
His claims were astonishing. Throughout the interview, he made assertions widely known to be untrue. He claimed, for instance, that “we don’t have political prisoners” in Egypt. Yet Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and dozens of other organizations have closely documented Sissi’s human rights violations since he took power in 2013. All have found that people from all political backgrounds, as well as the unaffiliated, are represented in vast numbers in Egypt’s prisons — including ex-president Mohamed Morsi (in whose government I had the privilege to serve).
The denials did not stop there. When asked about the massacres in the al-Nahda and Rabaa squares in 2013, Sissi thought he could defend his actions by claiming that the damning Human Rights Watch report on the killings was not “sound.” On his orders, more than 800 people were murdered in cold blood for the crime of peaceful protest. His response to this was to imply that CBS is not “closely following the situation in Egypt” before contradicting himself by saying he “tried every peaceful means to disperse” the protesters.
And having previously denied Egypt and Israel are working together in the Sinai Peninsula, where Sissi’s “hidden war” on civilians amounts to a “looming humanitarian crisis,” he admitted to CBS that they were, in fact, cooperating. In February 2018, as part of his effort to portray himself as a modern, pro-Arab and anti-Israel leader in the mold of General Gabal Abdel Nasser, Sissi had told the New York Times there was no military relationship.
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