Beyond the worst violence of the revolution of January 25th,
beyond anything in living memory, what is going on in Egypt today is shocking,
horrifying, catastrophic. Beyond words. Egyptians killing Egyptians- over what?
A year after the Port Said soccer massacre in which seventy-some
supporters of the Cairo-based Ahli team lost their lives a year ago, Egypt
braced for the verdict of the court trying the Port Said hooligans who were
allegedly behind the violence. If they were acquitted, the Ahli ‘Ultras’-
diehard fans- threatened massive disruption and violence. When twenty one of
the Port Said accused were sentenced to death, their families and friends saw
the verdict as bowing to the pressure of the Ahli and vowed in return to show ‘Cairo’
the mayhem that Port Said could wreck. The numbers of the dead in the ensuing
fighting between natives of those three cities and the police has nearly equaled
the number of original victims of the soccer massacre. Meantime other cities
far and wide in the country are up in arms, and Cairo itself is the scene of
rioting and traffic-stopping street protests.
How can this be happening in a country where civil war is
unknown, where regionalism and secession are unheard of, where the control of
the central government has been the overpowering paradigm of the past five
thousand years? Three eastern port cities with a history of patriotism against
invaders- Port Said, Ismailiya, Suez- are in bloody revolt against ‘Cairo’, and
the Morsi government has called in the army and imposed a thirty-day martial
law and curfew crack down.
To complicate matters, no one really knows who or what is
behind the scenes, or who is being manipulated and by whom. Is this the
counter-revolution so long threatened or promised? Is this chaos a calculated,
necessary preliminary to the intervention of the military and a military
take-over, this time for good, openly, and with no opposition? Is it a repeat
of the scenario of January 26, 1952, when Cairo was set aflame, and Colonels
Nasser and company staged their coup the following July, setting the stage for
uninterrupted rule by military men for the next sixty years? January 25, 2011,
was in a sense a revolution against the regime that came to power in 1952. Two
years later, in 2013, is it back to the future? For so many Egyptians disgusted
and terrified by the power grab of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government, that
scenario may be the lesser of two evils.
Regardless. Enough. Enough is enough. Enough of the madness
of Egyptians destroying each other, destroying their country, destroying their
revolution, destroying their economy. Enough. They should take a step back to
sanity and behold what they have wrought.
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ReplyDeleteMy friend Marilyn Strothers asks what has kept the center from falling apart in Egypt for any length of time, and suggests various factors, including territorial imperatives. That is of course very important. A historically agrarian society linked by a lifeline river Nile could best be governed by a central authority. Moreover, the Nile itself facilitated communication and the lack of natural barriers like impassable mountain ranges made it difficult for autonomous movements to find refuge and survive. Beyond that, Egyptians prided themselves on their sense of identity, the legacy of thousands of years, as opposed to the more tribal allegiances of neighboring countries in the region. The relative homogeneity of the people was another factor: apart from the broad Muslim/Coptic divide- religious and not ethnic- there was barely an awareness of sectarian or ethnic differences. Over the past decade, centrifugal forces seem to be pulling Egyptian society in different directions.
ReplyDeleteBut the civil disobedience and rejection of government authority displayed today in the cities along the Suez, like the parallel rejection in Cairo and elsewhere, denotes an alarming rejection of the legitimacy of the state. In a sense, we shouldn't be surprised: the legitimacy of the state was destroyed with the fall of Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, and the government that succeeded him, democratically elected or not, has not managed to convince a large swathe of the population of its legitimacy.