UPDATE: I was honored to speak with the author of the study, in a Zoom meeting.

One of the things I asked Qutri about was the 1986 intifada of the Central Security Forces’ conscripts. I wanted to know his opinion in particular regarding a widely popular conspiracy theory that it was drug dealers in collaboration with elements within the security establishment who were behind instigating the conscripts’ mutiny, as a way to get rid of General Ahmad Rushdi, then the interior minister credited with limited security reforms when he was in office.

Qutri strongly denied these allegations, and also rejected the theory that Islamist militant groups were behind the events, affirming it was a spontaneous uprising by the conscripts, caused by the ill-treatment on the hands of their officers.

“I call them the ‘Interior (Ministry) slaves,'” said Qutri of the CSF conscripts. “They receive the worst treatment among the conscripts. It was even worse before 1986. They used to get paid LE3 a month then. It was common for the soldiers to get beaten up by their officers brutally. In one case I learned of for example, an officer punished one of his conscripts, by stripping him of all of his clothes except for the underwear, covered his full body in molasses, and left him to burn under the sun for a day.

“Rumors spread that the three-year conscription service was to be extended by an additional year… The soldiers exploded. They attacked, killed their officers in the camps. It wasn’t all over the republic. It was mainly in Cairo and Giza. The army had to be called in.”

More interestingly, Qutri said “The army conscripts obeyed the orders and shot at the CSF conscripts. But they also shot several police officers deliberately. In my view there were two reasons: One is army troops hate the police as a whole, and vice versa. Secondly, police officers in specific are hated by the public. Those army conscripts were after all part of the people, and had some brother or cousin mistreated in a police station, so they decided to take revenge while quelling the riots.”

It was the third time in modern Egyptian history that army tanks swarmed through the capital, after the 1952 coup and the 1977 Bread Intifada.

Yes, Mubarak’s tools of oppression are on strike, according to news trickling from the Nile Delta town. The conscripts, say today’s Al-Midan and Mooga website, started a hunger strike yesterday (or the day before–I haven’t confirmed the date yet), after a colleague of theirs, 22-year-old Amir Mustafa Hassan, committed suicide by shooting himself as he couldn’t put up with the officers’ abuse anymore.

In 1986, thousands of CSF conscripts went on strike in Giza and Cairo, after rumors spread the government was planning to extend the conscription period by one year. The soldiers occupied their camps, attacked their officers, and cut the roads into Cairo. Mubarak sent his army tanks and choppers on the conscripts as militancy spread to the slums, with the urban poor descending on El-Haram St., burning the Five-Star hotels and the elite nightclubs.

I’ll update this posting whenever I get more news, but in the meantime, I’ll leave you with this leaked video of a CSF conscript being mocked by his police officers.

UPDATE: Check out this article in Arabic by Ibrahim el-Sahary.