Russia explores new ties with Egypt

S P SETH

The recent visit to Egypt of a Russian delegation, including its foreign and defence ministers, Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Shoigu, is potentially of great significance not only for their bilateral relationship but also for the Middle Eastern region. The inclusion of the Soviet defence minister in the delegation raised all sorts of speculations, from Russia seeking a naval base in Egypt to a possible deal on the sale of Russian weapons. Which naturally has led some to speculate that Egypt might come to lean on Russia over time as a substitute for the US in a wide ranging relationship to include economic, trade, military and other aspects. Such a development, if forthcoming, will not happen overnight and that too in a region subject to sudden and volatile changes, as we have been seeing in Egypt. After all the flurry and welcome of the high level Russian delegation, there was subsequently an effort to underplay its significance as a possible counterweight/substitute for Egypt’s special relationship with the United States.

A close relationship between Egypt and the US was forged under President Anwar El Sadat in the seventies after he broke up with the Soviet Union. It was reinforced with the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979 under US sponsorship. After Sadat was gunned down in 1981 at a military parade by an army officer, believed to be from the Al Jihad movement, his successor, Hosni Mubarak, further cemented these ties and became the US’ trusted regional ally underwriting, with the US, the security of Israel. Mubarak’s antipathy to the Palestinian leadership, trying to rock the boat in the region, was quite extraordinary which endeared him to the US and brought dollops of aid. But Egypt continued to go backward economically and politically. At times, the US gently prodded him towards democracy but when told that the choice was between him (his regime) and the Muslim Brotherhood (in the event of free and fair elections), the US always chose the devil they knew, as the phrase goes.

And it went on until the advent of the Arab Spring springing from Tunisia and soon enveloping Egypt. Faced with the seething anger and mobilization of the Egyptian people against their hated dictator of more than 30 years, the US had no option but to ditch him and hope that Egypt and the rest of the Arab world would be restructured along a stable democratic order for a new compact with the United States.  But the resultant chaos and instability engendered by people’s revolutions was sending shivers through some regional countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf kingdoms— Bahrain just surviving when Saudi Arabia sent its troops and tanks to crush the rebellion by its majority Shia population.

Not surprisingly then that Israel, which regarded Egypt as the bedrock of a relatively stable Middle East for its security, interceded strongly with the United States to save the Mubarak regime but without much success. Saudi Arabia did the same to save Mubarak to stem the tide of people’s power reaching the kingdom. There was another important consideration for Saudi Arabia. Riyadh feared that the revolutionary chaos in the Arab countries might provide Iran an opportunity to stir up trouble among the majority Shia population in its oil bearing eastern province. Whether or not Iran was involved, the whiff of the Arab Spring also reached there but the unrest was crushed.

At another level, Saudi Arabia is gravely worried about the nexus between Iran, Syria under Bashar al-Assad regime and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and is disappointed, indeed angry, with the US for giving the regime political oxygen by getting involved in the disposal of Syria’s chemical weapons rather than finishing off the Assad regime with a sharp and swift missile attack as was planned. Within the kingdom, its rulers took precaution to buy off their Sunni population with more financial benefits/rewards to insulate them from the prevailing ‘spring’ winds. Still, Saudi Arabia is having trouble managing its foreign workers and, at a deeper level, to ease up its socially conservative policies and still keep the country’s religious (Islamic) establishment on side.

Saudi fears about Egypt’s chaotic politics were validated, in their view, with the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in the country’s first ever-free elections and thus setting ‘unhealthy’ standards for the region. President Morsi’s government appeared in terrible hurry to entrench itself in power by suppressing dissent and going after its political enemies. Which brought about a popular movement seeking their overthrow, seized on by the military as an excuse to remove and imprison Morsi and other leading Brotherhood leaders thus plunging the country into further chaos. The commander of the armed forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, set up an interim civilian administration, and called the military coup against the Morsi’s regime as an act of restoring democracy. The US went along with this description but never felt quite comfortable about the overthrow of Egypt’s first elected government in what, for all intents and purposes, was a military coup. And when the Obama administration started to pressure the army-led regime to work out some sort of a political modus vivendi with the Brotherhood leadership to restore a semblance of an ongoing democratic process, Commander Sisi’s regime reacted angrily expecting unqualified support from the United States. But instead the US significantly curtailed its military aid, further fuelling the Egyptian regime’s disenchantment with the US.

It is against this backdrop that the high-level Russian delegation landed in Cairo among great fanfare, bringing back the memories of the Cold War era when Egypt under President Nasser was a virtual Soviet ally. Things are different now. Russia is a much-diminished power and the Cold War is over. The United States, though still a superpower, is on a downward trajectory and its annual aid of $1.5 billion, much of it for the military, is not all that impressive. The Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners have more than made up the loss, with $12 billion in aid to the military regime. And more should be available to buy military hardware from Russia in case the US were to continue its suspension, though it will not be easy to replace the US as an arms supplier with Egypt’s arsenal predominantly equipped with US weaponry.

In any case, the presumed Russian alternative, at this stage, looks more like a diplomatic leverage to bring the US around to moderate, if not change, its ambivalence between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. And it already seems to be working. During his recent Cairo visit, John Kerry reportedly said that Egypt was on track towards democracy. But the visit of the Russian delegation was still significant as providing a framework for exploring multifaceted cooperation between the two countries. More importantly, it gives Russia a toehold in probably the most important country in the Middle East. And by virtue of changing regional dynamics, with the US losing some of its shine and influence in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region, there are new possibilities for Russia to explore and expand. Among them, the sale of Russian weapons is a lucrative proposition both strategically and economically. 

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au           

Iranian nuclear deal

S P SETH

The recent interim nuclear accord between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, has been commented upon from being an important breakthrough to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions to virtually legitimizing its existing program as a foundation for eventually graduating into a full-fledged nuclear power.  The reality probably is somewhere in between. But it still is not certain that the concerned parties will be able to make it to the stage of a comprehensive deal within the stipulated six-month period. In the meantime, though, there are already some angry losers. And the angriest is the Israeli government and its Prime Minister Netanyahu who mounted a crusade to sabotage it by personally warning leaders of the participating countries against entering into a bad deal and called it a “historic mistake.” He was against any deal short of requiring Iran to dismantle its nuclear programme, whether or not it was peaceful. Netanyahu likened it to giving Iran an “unbelievable Christmas present—the capacity to maintain this [nuclear] breakout capability for practically no concessions at all”

Another loser is Saudi Arabia, a close US friend and ally like Israel, which has made its mission to thwart presumed Iranian threat to Sunni Arab countries, more so if it were to go nuclear. And Riyadh is making no secret ‘unofficially’ that such ‘validation’ of Iran’s nuclear program might push Saudi Arabia into the nuclear path, thus creating a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Such criticism was expected, and it would become even shriller to mobilize opposition in the US to wreck any agreement---interim or otherwise.

At this point one might ask what the fuss is all about? Under the interim deal Iran has agreed to virtually freeze its nuclear programme, limit uranium enrichment up to 5 per cent for peaceful medical and sundry uses, dilute its 20 per cent enriched uranium to dispel any fear about bomb making which in any case requires enrichment to 90 per cent plus, and subject its nuclear facilities to frequent monitoring and inspections. In other words, Iran will have virtually no way of advancing its nuclear programme by stealth. The fuss, therefore, is that Iran simply can’t be trusted, or as Netanyahu has said about Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani characterizing him as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. The irony is that while Iran is ‘duplicitous’, Israel of course can be trusted with its substantial nuclear arsenal, which was conceived in stealth and to date is neither confirmed nor denied, though it is universally known to exist. And Netatnyahu still calls the interim deal on Iran a “historic mistake”. His Intelligence Minister, Yuval Steinitz, said that the deal was based on “Iranian deception and self-delusion.”

President Obama and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, will come under even greater criticism and attack in the US with Netanyahu and his supporters mobilizing all the forces they can to scuttle the deal. President Obama has taken calculated political risk of exploring the diplomatic path lest, at Israeli insistence, the United States plunges itself into another Middle East military adventure to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. As he said, “ I have a profound responsibility to try to resolve our differences peacefully, rather than rush towards conflict.” And: “For the first time in nearly a decade we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear programme…” He added, “Simply put, they [US and its partners] cut off [with the deal] Iran’s most likely paths to a bomb. Meanwhile, this first step will create time and space over the next six months to fully address our comprehensive concerns about the Iranian nuclear programme.”

Now he has the difficult task of persuading the Congress not to jeopardize the interim accord by going ahead with new and even more severe sanctions against Iran. Should that happen, Iran might simply walk away and that will be a major setback to bring it back into multilateral diplomacy on the nuclear question. For the time being, at least, there is reason for some cautious optimism not only on the nuclear issue but also that this might tap into Iran’s great potential to play a constructive and positive role in the distraught and destructive politics of the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Lebanon where sectarian conflict is destabilizing much of the region. The diplomatic breakthrough with Iran breaks more than thirty years’ long   subterranean, and some time not so subterranean warfare, like the US-backed Iraqi invasion of Iran under Saddam Hussein lasting eight years.  A normal diplomatic discourse, if it starts, has great potential for the region.

Iran has suffered greatly under probably the severest sanctions’ regime ever but has largely managed to maintain its dignity and national cohesion. And the easing of sanctions and resumption of some semblance of normalcy should help the country. Economically, militarily and geopolitically, Iran has been in a virtual state of seize with threats hurled at it from the US, Israel and others in the region. Israel, for instance, has been and is threatening a pre-emptive strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. Obama has continued to keep all options open against it, including military strikes. Saudi Arabia is marshaling the Sunni Arab world against Iran and so on. In the midst of all this, Iran has managed not to buckle under such pressure. 

But it has affected the country badly by way of rising inflation, increased unemployment, falling oil exports and revenues; with people expecting their government to ease the situation. This is where Hassan Rouhani’s message of breaking the logjam with the US and other countries on the nuclear question made him popular with his people. Iranian Foreign Minister and chief negotiator, Javed Sharif, called it an “unnecessary crisis “ and has sought to remove doubts about the “exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme”, though insisting that his country retained the right to enrich uranium. The two sides to the interim accord seem to have a slightly different take on this, but the deal does allow Iran to enrich uranium to 5 per cent, which is nowhere near bomb making.

       

The agreement has been largely received well in Iran. Even though the financial relief from it is a very small part of Iranian economy, but if (and it is a big if) it leads to a comprehensive settlement it is likely, in due course of time, to create conditions for lifting of the US-led and Israeli-instigated state of siege against Iran. And Iran can play a useful and constructive role in the Middle East. Making Iran into a pariah state is only adding to the region’s problems.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au

Israel: will Kerry’s admonition make a difference?

S P SETH

It is rare for an American politician to express his frustration with Israel publicly over Palestine. But it can be frustrating and annoying dealing with Israel when it simply wants the United States to simply do its bidding. The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, recently found himself in that situation when spending a lot of time and energy engaged in shuttle diplomacy to promote a two-state solution to the Palestine-Israel issue, but then finding that Israel wasn’t really interested in it. And he let go his frustration during a television interview with Palestinian and Israeli reporters when he said that, “Does Israel want a third intifada? The alternative to getting back to the talks is the potential of chaos.”

Highlighting the contradiction between Israel’s continued settlement policy in the occupied West Bank and commitment to a peace agreement, Kerry reportedly said, “If you say you are working for peace and you want peace and a Palestine that is a whole Palestine that belongs to the people who live there, how can you say we’re planning to build [even more settlements] in the place that will eventually be Palestine?” He went on to caution Israelis against growing complacent when he said, “Well, I’ve got news for you. Today’s status quo [that favours Israel] will not be tomorrow’s or next year’s,” as Israel will find itself increasingly isolated.

Nobody could have better spelt out the Israeli hypocrisy on peace. Which doesn’t mean that the United States is wavering in its support for Israel. In some ways, Prime Minister Netanyahu has a more powerful constituency in the US Congress and among people that matter in the US than even the US president. Therefore, while John Kerry’s candor is welcome in defining the situation, it doesn’t make the task of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine any easier.

The more important question though is: does Israel want a peace settlement based on a two-state solution? On the face of it, it doesn’t. And that is clear from the fact that it keeps building more and more houses in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. This is in utter disregard of international law when a state (Israel, in this case) continues its territorial expansion in gross violation of the UN resolutions and gets away with it. Interestingly, even some seemingly empathetic (to the Palestinians) Israeli analysts simply believe that Israel really has no option but to keep gobbling up rest of the Palestine for Israel’s security.

For instance, writing in the New Yorker, Ari Shavit, a columnist for Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reconstructs the massacre in 1948 of about two hundred and fifty Palestinians in the Lydda valley in thirty minutes, and the deportation by evening the same day of 35,000 of the town’s Palestinian residents  (fearing a bigger massacre), at the direction of the then prime minister Ben-Gurion. Conceding that, “Lydda is the black box of Zionism”, Ari Shavit, however, is of the view: “The truth is that Zionism could not bear the Arab city of Lydda. From the very beginning, there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda… [because  a Palestinian Lydda] could not exist at its centre. ” Subsequent to the massacre, and expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda in 1948, that logic of Israel’s security has been applied and is being applied to other massacres and expulsion of Palestinians from elsewhere in their homeland.

 Shavit  opines: “…the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda’s population were no accident. Those events were a crucial phase of the Zionist revolution, and they laid the foundation for the Jewish state.” And he adds, “Lydda is an integral and essential part of the story [of Israel]. And, when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda or accept Zionism along with Lydda.”  Extrapolating it to the direct and creeping annexation of more and more of what is left of Palestine would seem to be the extension of the same logic. Which is that Palestine must be obliterated to make Israel secure. In other words, the story of the massacre at Lydda and expulsion of its people in 1948, and many more Lydda-like stories since, leads Shavit to forecast that, “the chances to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the foreseeable future are hard to envision.”  

It is important to understand that Shavit’s logic is woven into the story of the rise of Zionism to reclaim the old Jewish homeland, as Jews believe, of Judea and Samaria. Hence, all this talk of a two-state solution is a smokescreen for the real goal of annexing all of the West Bank by pushing out the Palestinians. Not surprisingly, Netanyahu’s response to Kerry’s criticism reportedly was a resounding assertion that, “No amount of pressure will make me or the government of Israel compromise on the basic security and national interests of the State of Israel.” And that demands the building of more and more Israeli settlements in West Bank and Jerusalem to encircle the Palestinians and make their life so miserable that, over time, they might feel lucky, like the thirty-five thousand people of Lydda, that they simply managed to escape with their lives intact.

The sad thing is that it is the Jews--- persecuted in Europe, exterminated by Hitler in Germany and, otherwise shunned and shunted around by their strongest supporters today when seeking asylum from Nazi Germany--- that are the perpetrators of such inhumanity on the Palestinians, who are simply seeking to stay in their homeland against all the violence and indignities heaped on them. Indeed, some of Israel’s top leaders of the past and present have even sought to deny the existence of the Palestine and its people.

As Peter Beinart wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2010, citing Netanyahu’s 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations, “... Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, “he [Neitnyahu} repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism.” In his view, Israel has already made territorial concessions by abandoning its claim to Jordan, which by rights (of mythical past) should be part of the Jewish state.

In a recent article in the same journal called, The American Jewish Cocoon, he highlights the total indifference of the American Jewish establishment to the plight of the Palestinians, sometimes even calling them “animals”. It is uncannily similar to what the Nazis portrayed the Jews and much more. Beinart concludes his article with this poignant sentence: “By seeing Palestinians--truly seeing them [in Palestine]—we glimpse a faded, yellowing photograph of ourselves. We are reminded of the days when we were a stateless people, living at the mercy of others. And by recognizing the way statelessness threatens Palestinian dignity, we ensure that statehood doesn’t rob us of our own.”

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au

Where to for Egypt, S P SETH

Where to for Egypt?

S P SETH

While Egypt is burning, metaphorically speaking, the debate goes on about whether the military takeover was a coup or an exercise in restoring democracy.

The trial of the deposed President Mohamed Morsi and 14 other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, adjourned till January 8, appears to be only making things worse. But the debate goes on.  John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, while he was recently visiting Pakistan, said that the army was simply restoring democracy. However, the curtailment of the US military aid to Egypt would seem to suggest some serious doubts about the democratic credentials of the new order in Egypt. It is patently clear that Abdel Fattah El-Sissi, Egypt’s military commander, calls the shots in Egypt, and the interim civilian government is simply a front for military rule.

Which is not to suggest that the Freedom and Justice Party, the political offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, didn’t try to ride roughshod over their political opponents and media critics to create a virtual dictatorship. But the army coup was no solution and sought only to replace one dictatorship with another. In the process, they have killed more than one thousand Muslim Brotherhood supporters, put in jail the entire Muslim Brotherhood leadership, and have banned the organization and its political, cultural and social activities. The country is now more polarized than ever, with virtually no middle ground. It is either Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned any way, or General Sissi backed by the military, and their civilian supporters.

One of the most forceful defence of the coup is mounted by Yasmine El Rashidi, who lives in Egypt, in her article, “Egypt: the Misunderstood Agony”, in the New York Review of Books. She has traced the trajectory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s misrule since Morsi’s presidency with ”efforts to create an Islamist monopoly of power that came to resemble Mubarak’s era, … perhaps even worse.” Which led the army strongman, El-Sissi to issue a 48-hour ultimatum to President Morsi to sort out the political mess or else face removal as demanded by a popular movement with the biggest ever demonstrations backed by 22 million signatures.

Since the Muslim Brotherhood supporters staged sit-ins demanding Morsi’s release and his re-installation as legitimate president, and refused to go quietly, the army and police used disproportionate force killing hundreds. In El Rashidi’s account, the use of force was, by and large, defensive, to counter violence and clear the pro-Morsi sit-ins. However, according to local human rights groups, the use of violence by some pro-Morsi protesters certainly didn’t give “the security authorities a license to impose collective punishment and use excessive force when dispersing the sit-in, according to international standards for the right of peaceful assembly”.

Indeed, the first high level defection from the interim administration was by its vice president, El Baradei, who in his public letter of resignation (quoted in the article) said, “… It has become difficult for me to continue to carry my responsibility due to decisions [of the interim administration] I do not agree with…” But Rashidi believes strongly that the army had the support of the people and: “Faced with the choice between armed militants [Muslim Brotherhood] and armed men in uniform, Egyptians, by a large margin, are choosing the latter.” It would appear that they did initially support Morsi’s removal, but as events have unfolded and the army is cracking down even on some of the pioneers of the anti-Mubarak movement for daring to criticize the army as going too far, the fascist nature of the army takeover is becoming all too apparent.

In a long review article of several books on the Arab Spring in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, Hugh Roberts, a professor of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University in the United States, has an entirely different take on the subject. Writing in the London Review of Books, he questions accounts of the popular nature of the Tamarrod (revolt, rebellion) movement that the army used for its coup as an exercise in ‘restoring’ democracy in Egypt. He challenges the figures of 15 million signatories for the petition against Morsi , as well as the 14 million (increased to 17 and even 22 million) who marched against Morsi on June 30. According to Roberts, “ These figures were fairly tales, the tallest of tall stories.” In his estimate, the number of [anti-Morsi] protesters, all over Egypt, numbered “may be a million, or at the very most two million across the country as a whole…” This is where his account hits a snag unless one were to believe that almost all the media of the world, reporting from within and outside Egypt, were duped by the Tamarrod and General Sissi and his newly-installed interim government. It is possible that the figures were exaggerated but by a factor of several millions is hard to believe.

The question is where to now for Egypt?  General Sissi seems determined to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, both as a political movement as well as its vast network of social services that benefit many people. Indeed, Mubarak tolerated their social services network as the state was deficient in that role. And, at times, he even tolerated their minimal presence in the national assembly as independent members. Realizing that the Muslim Brotherhood derives much of its grassroots support from that kind of national network, General Sissi is keen to destroy that as well. But they don’t seem to have worked out yet what will they replace it with? The state is already in crisis, with the country’s economy and general governance going from bad to worse.

And it doesn’t look like that they are really getting anywhere with rooting out Muslim Brotherhood. It survived through all the military regimes from Nasser to Mubarak. It has survived since its founding in 1928. As Peter Hessler writes in the New Yorker, after investigating the situation on ground in Egypt, “The organization is deeply hierarchical, and, in the past, it has had trouble finding direction when the top no longer functions---” with its leaders behind bars.  “But all Brotherhood members also belong to cells called usra, or ‘family’, which have traditionally made it possible for the organization to survive oppression.”

That is why there is so much polarization between and across families of pro and anti-Brotherhood elements hating each other. In the circumstances, General Sissi’s crusade to crush Muslim Brotherhood could only bring more trouble, descending possibly into a civil war. Not long ago, in the nineties, a similar situation had plunged Algeria into a bloody civil war with an estimated 200,000 killed. And its embers are still burning, an example of which was an attack on an Algerian gas-processing plant by the al Qaeda-linked elements involved in the Mali insurgency. The only solution, therefore, would be to release the Brotherhood leaders and seek a political dialogue to find a way out of Egypt’s misery.

Note: this article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au