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