Egypt facing a civil war

S P SETH

When is a coup a coup? Apparently, when the US says so. And so far (at the time of writing) the US has refused to call the removal from power of President Morsi by the military on July 3 a coup. The chain of events unleashed since then has led to an orgy of killings of Muslim Brotherhood supporters wanting their leader back as the country’s president. Though the US has condemned the recent use of military force, it was not prepared to call the military coup a coup.  Indeed, during his recent Pakistan visit, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, justified the military coup in Egypt when he said that the Egyptian generals had acted to restore democracy.

Kerry was not entirely wrong to point out that the Morsi administration had indeed incurred the wrath of many Egyptians’, probably a majority, in trying to hijack a broad based revolution to rid the country of the Hosni Mubarak regime. For instance, the youth movement, Tamarrud (the rebellion) had collected 22 million signatures urging Morsi to resign, and had indeed organized the largest demonstrations to support their campaign.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its political wing, Freedom and Justice Party, simply couldn’t wait to use their political power to push their own agenda by riding roughshod over their opponents. Worse still, they even alienated some of their own political partners, like the radical Islamic outfit, the al-Nour Party, which supported Morsi’ removal. With power in their hands, the Brotherhood conveniently forgot what had won them the election; and that was to remain part of an inclusive national movement without seeking domination. They had, for instance, undertaken not to nominate for the country’s presidency. They had also undertaken not to run candidates in all parliamentary constituencies. In both cases, they backtracked.

These assurances were meant to assure the secular and youthful pioneers of the revolution that the Brotherhood would be real partners in the unfolding revolutionary enterprise. But when they won the presidency and a large number of parliamentary seats, they decided to push through a constitution that seemed very much like an Islamist document, ignoring the rights of women, minorities, secular and liberal elements of the country’s new revolutionary political spectrum.

Indeed, even Sheikh Mohamed Abdel Zaher, one of al-Azhar’s leading clerics, was not impressed with Morsi’s attempts to refashion Egyptian society along more rigid Islamic lines. He reportedly felt that, “ He [Morsi] was guilty of bad behaviour.”  He added, “He and his people tried to take all the important positions of Egypt for themselves and the people rejected this.  He became like something of the old regime.”

The problem with the Muslim Brotherhood in government was that they had never been in power before. Ever since its formation in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna with a view to refashion Muslim society, on a global scale hopefully, to follow the Islamic scriptures and precepts, it struggled to make  headway clashing with established political order and system. As a result, they found themselves hounded, persecuted and proscribed, while trying to survive under the most difficult circumstances, whether it was in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia and elsewhere.

Indeed, in the early nineties when Islamists were about to win elections in Algeria, the country’s military annulled the vote leading to a bloody civil war costing nearly 200,000 lives. Within Egypt too, the country’s military regime from Nasser down to Mubarak persecuted and tortured them, banning them from any overt political role. But the movement still survived and lived to win an election in revolutionary Egypt when Morsi was elected the country’s President in 2012.

But without any political experience of governing and lacking the art of political consensus and compromise, they took their election win as a holy edict of sorts, quoting ad infinitum from their new political bible of democracy. And they felt terribly wronged when President Morsi was unceremoniously removed from power. In this situation, the only vindication for them of their principled position would be the restoration of Morsi to the country’s presidency. As against this was the army’s position that they were only following the people’s will to remove Morsi and his regime from power. In other words, both the Brotherhood and the army had reached an irreconcilable situation.

 At this point it is important to examine the role of external forces. The first overt sign of US displeasure with the Morsi regime came when President Obama said last year that the US considered Egypt neither an ally nor an enemy. Which, in simple language, meant that the Morsi regime was not reliable. But, at the same time, they didn’t want to cut them off completely. In other words, the US was sending confusing signals to both the military and the Morsi regime. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the army chief, bolstered up by popular and widespread demonstrations against the Muslim Brotherhood, preferred to read US signals, however confusing and ambivalent, as signs of US support. And when the 48-hour ultimatum for a political resolution of the crisis expired, el-Sisi felt confident, both domestically and internationally, about the popular and political correctness of his decision to depose Morsi as the country’s president, replacing him with an army-appointed interim president and a new government with himself as defense minister and deputy prime minister.

By refusing to call the coup a military coup, the US seemed to be showing some preference for the army’s interim solution. But, at the same time, it was working for some kind of political reconciliation between the warring parties. Which didn’t impress the Brotherhood. While in Pakistan, John Kerry clearly expressed US preference for the military’s removal of President Morsi by calling it an exercise in restoring democracy backed by popular demand.

Still the army was not terribly happy as General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi blasted the US government for its lack of support. And it is even more unhappy now when President Obama has condemned the army’s killing of civilians, and announced the cancellation of a joint military exercise next month; though the $ 1.5 billion annual US aid, much of it for the army, will continue as usual. The fact is that the US can’t afford to cut off the Egyptian army, which is the lynchpin of its strategy of maintaining Israel’s security, an important component of which is the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

All the efforts of the US, European and Arab envoys to mediate and prevent a bloodbath in Egypt having failed, the military let loose its fire power and went on a killing spree. The way things are in Egypt, the country looks like descending into a civil war, like the one in Algeria when that country’s elections in 1992 were annulled by the military to prevent Islamic Salvation Front gaining power. If that happens, it will have catastrophic effects for the entire region.

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

Contact: sushilpseth @yahoo.com.au