January 25: Egypt's Revolutionary Legacy

It was five years ago today that an unprecedented mass uprising against then president Mubarak of Egypt sent shock waves across the region. The Tunisian revolution was one thing, but a similar revolution in Egypt was quite another. Given Egypt's sheer size, population, strategic position and regional and global weight, the Arab Spring was launched in earnest on January 25. 

That date was not chosen at random by the young Egyptian revolutionaries. January 25, known as "Police Day", was meant to commemorate the heroism of a particular unit of Egyptian police against the British occupation of the Suez sixty years earlier; on the other hand, in 2011, the Egyptian police  was feared and reviled as the heavy-handed arm of a police state. 

Five years after the 2011 revolution, the legacy of January 25th is more complicated than ever, and celebrating it is a delicate matter for the current regime. On the one hand President Sisi and his military-backed regime seek to publicly embrace the ideals of the 2011 revolution, at least in principle, while upholding the legitimacy of the June 30th 2013 mass uprising that, in their view, superseded and supplanted 2011, and endorsed the return of the military to power. That many, if not most, Egyptians support that position is a testimony to the general disillusionment with the principle of revolution itself, after the bitter experience of four years of successive upheavals, the hijacking of the revolution by the Muslim Brotherhood, the death spiral of the economy, the rise in terrorism, and the state of insecurity.

The desire for security is key here to understanding the mood of the general public. Revolution fatigue has set in. The young revolutionaries who originally launched January 25th are generally  regarded, at best, as naive idealists who knew how to launch a movement and upend a regime but had no plan for the day after; or, at worst, as witting or unwitting pawns of a foreign conspiracy to create the kind of chaos that would fling Egypt down the path of the failed states surrounding it: Libya, Syria, Iraq. A return to stability seems to be the immediate priority of the majority of Egyptians, and no price, in civil liberties or parliamentary democracy, is too high to pay.

But to be fair, Egyptians are hardly the only people who seem willing to trade liberties for security, a famously unprofitable exchange according to Benjamin Franklin. It took two serious terrorist attacks in one year for the French, with a far more established tradition of civil liberties, to abandon liberté and égalité in favor of an indefinitely extended state of emergency powers and the creation of two-tier citizenship.

In French, the grapevine of rumors and information is called "le téléphone arabe." Today, Facebook and Twitter are the new  "téléphone arabe" of protests. The Egyptian government is taking no chances ahead of the fated anniversary of January 25. Schools and universities have been put on mid-year vacation for a month to preempt campus protests. A newly-elected, safely rubber-stamp parliament held its first session earlier in January, for the first time in three years. The Ministry of the Interior, associated in the Mubarak years with overreaching police powers, has been moved to new headquarters out in the suburbs, away from the center of Cairo. The artists' studios have been shut down around Tahrir Square, historically the hub of protests. Tahrir square itself is undergoing a much-needed makeover, after years of disruption and degradation.

The first anniversary of Tahrir was a peaceful, largely still-hopeful celebration. But it was downhill from then on. The slogans changed from from year to year, from "down with the military" to "down with the Brotherhood" to "down with the military" again. This year may be back to the future, again.

A Time to Kill: Egypt's Tragic Ramadan

Rarely has Ramadan come at a more tragic time for Egyptians, or for that matter for Syrians. The spirit of the season is intended to be a holy month of peace and worship; of turning away from the material world and tuning in to the spiritual; of seeking forgiveness and redemption through fasting and self-abnegation. And yet the new moon that announces the advent of this year’s Ramadan shines a grim light on Egyptians killing Egyptians in the streets.

The elation was short-lived for the millions who marched to oust Morsi and his catastrophic administration on June 30^th. First there was the backlash from the Muslim Brotherhood, echoed by a chorus in the international media accusing 'a coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president.' The fact is that the Islamists, notably the Brotherhood and the Salafis, cannot lay claim to the Revolution of January 25^th , a revolution they initially boycotted, and whose ideals they neither subscribed to nor sacrificed for. If anyone stole the revolution, they did. Similarly Morsi supporters’ mantra of ‘legitimacy’ rings hollow: he acted illegitimately in office from the day he was elected, grabbing power, riding roughshod over the institutions of government, putting himself above the law, and stuffing his administration with incompetent cronies.    

On the other hand, the liberal/secular camp- for want of a better catch-all designation for the diverse factions forming the opposition to the Islamist parties- the liberal camp exaggerates the role U.S. foreign policy played, or could have played, or should have played, during the past year and in the days leading to the June 30^th uprising. Had American policy openly supported an uprising backed by a military coup against Egypt’s first democratically-elected, Islamist president, how would that American support have played domestically in Egypt and in the Arab/Muslim world? It is hard to imagine that the Muslim Brotherhood camp would have failed to make propaganda of the fact that the Egyptian military is the United States closest interlocutor, and that the ousting of an Islamist regime in Egypt is welcome news in Israel.

There has been much criticism of how the aftermath of the ‘coup’ was handled, with house arrest of leading Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and taking Islamist television channels off the air. But these media were being used to enrage and incite the mass of Morsi supporters, who shouted into the cameras blood-curdling threats of revenge and killing, particularly against the Christian minority. By any measure, in any country, these threats constitute hate speech and incitement to violence, and would have been taken off the air.

Nevertheless, the deaths of fifty-plus Morsi supporters demonstrating before a mosque at dawn on Monday is a sickening and tragic development. It should never have happened. Even if there had been provocation on the part of the Brotherhood supporters, the military should have been ready to control and contain a confrontation, not overreach with lethal force. The same use of deadly military force against protesters resulted in the deaths of more than 25 protesters, mostly Coptic Christians, during the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces' eighteen-month rule in the transition from Mubarak to Morsi. It was such incidents that turned public opinion against the military and brought thousands into the streets chanting ‘Down, down with Military Rule’. How could that lesson have gone to waste?

The path to a positive future for Egypt is anything but straightforward. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties cannot and should not be excluded again from political life, but it is not at all clear that their participation, now or in the near future, can take a constructive turn. Egypt’s Islamist parties have shown that they do not subscribe to the spirit of democracy, as opposed to the ballot box. In fact they do not even claim to subscribe to it. For them, the separation of politics from religion is illegitimate, and a plurality of opinion is heresy. For them, the ballot box is only a means to an end, and once that end is achieved, the box is to be discarded once and for all.

Egypt: The Most Dangerous Moment of a Revolution

The most dangerous moment in a revolution, history teaches us, is not when the new rulers first come to power, but later when they are faced with their first serious opposition. That is when the new ruling forces are likely to turn most violent in repressing dissent, and often give way to more radical, bloodier elements. The French Revolution, the Russian, all followed that seemingly inexorable dynamic, leading to their form of ‘the Terror.’ Right on time, right on target, two and a half years after the January 25^th revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is set to face a major attempt at a countercoup. This time, the revolution will be televised. The Vendee is on!

June 30^th has been announced, for weeks now, as the date when fifteen million Egyptians who have signed the ‘Tamarod’ (Rebellion) petition have vowed to take to the streets to force the ouster of President Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party rule. Whenever you talk to anyone living in Egypt today, you get the impression that their lives are on hold as they brace for the fatal day. June 30^th marks a year to the day when Morsi was inaugurated, the first president elected in relatively free elections against actual opposing candidates. His narrow margin of victory in that election is largely attributed to the anathema that prevented the secular/liberal revolutionary forces from voting for Morsi’s opponent, Mubarak loyalist and hardliner General Ahmed Shafiq. 

In an ironic reversal, today that same secular/liberal coalition that had organized the January 25^th uprising, toppled Mubarak, and- holding its nose- voted for Morsi over Shafiq, is preparing to attempt to force the resignation of Morsi and his cohort. The way the secular opposition see it, they are trying to win their revolution back from the Islamist forces that hijacked it. But as Doctor Frankenstein could attest, second thoughts may come too late.

It may or may not be too late already, the opposition forces argue, but it will certainly be too late if they wait until President Morsi comes up for re-election in another three years, and try to oust him at the ballot box. By then, the opposition believes, not only will the power-grabbing, judiciary-gutting Islamist party be too firmly entrenched to dislodge by peaceful means, but the deterioration of the country will be too far advanced to stanch the bleeding and reverse course. The economy is in free fall, and the daily life of the average citizen is plagued by power and water shortages, traffic nightmares and rampant insecurity. The boiling discontent will be harnessed, the organizers of June 30^th hope, to put pressure on President Morsi to resign.  

Beyond that point, the plans are not clear for the post-Morsi transition until a new round of early presidential elections yields a new president. The interim government, according to the opposition, might be a council broadly representing the opposition coalition but also the Islamist elements in the country, a sort of Directoire, headed by the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court. To ensure that this governing council oversees free and fair elections, any member who agrees to serve on the council forfeits his right to run for presidential election, and that includes Nobel Prize winner Mohamed Baradei.

But even the most optimistic are not counting on Morsi resigning in response to street pressure alone, so the intervention of the army and police will be crucial, particularly since the Islamist parties have also vowed their own counter-demonstrations, so violent clashes between opposing street protests are guaranteed. At the moment the roles of the army and police, those two historically quasi-independent forces, are unclear. The minister of the interior, responsible for the police, has made ambiguous pronouncements about who and what the police will protect. The Muslim Brotherhood has vowed to take into its own hands the protection of the president and the party headquarters. The military is known to have serious issues with the Islamists in power, and might intervene, but on the other hand, it might choose to stand on the sidelines.

If June 30^th sounds like January 25 redux, it is because the same scenario seems to be preparing to play out, with changes in some of the principal actors. Except that this time, after the success of the first revolution, the hopes may be higher, but so are the stakes, and, in the current desperate state of national polarization and economic meltdown, the danger is even greater.

Tahrir Square: Anatomy of a Middle-Class Revolution

Tahrir Square: Anatomy of a Middle-Class Revolution.

Yesterday was the biggest day yet for the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, and around Egypt. Hundreds of thousands poured into the center of Cairo, and traffic came to a near-complete standstill between the hours of 1 and 7 pm. This time, the aim was to oust, not just Hosni Mubarak but his newly-appointed V-P, Omar Soleiman, and his whole cabinet. It was to be expected: Soleiman has announced that he would not lift emergency laws, the same laws under which, for the past thirty years, Mubarak and his regime have squashed all dissent with draconian measures. Soleiman added insult to injury: Egyptians, he declared, were not yet ready for democracy.

Mubarak needed these emergency laws, he has claimed for thirty years, to hold Islamic extremists in check. But it wasn’t only the Islamists that Mubarak’s dread police could arrest, detain, and brutalize with impunity. It was anyone and everyone, and when the sons and daughters of the middle class were brutalized in turn, the seeds of revolution were laid.

A few years ago, a young man and his fiancée, traveling to a Red Sea vacation resort, fell afoul of a police checkpoint. The boy was dragged out, beaten and sexually humiliated before his fiancée and his friends. Then he was forced to crawl, on hands and knees, and lick the boots of a circle of police officers standing over him, while he begged for mercy. Meanwhile the police video-taped their own brutality, and threatened the boy, if he complained, to post the video on youtube. Threatening their victims with public shaming is a regular tactic of the police to ensure silence.

But in this case, the boy’s father convinced him to report his ordeal. The police promptly posted the video, thereby incriminating themselves. The story had both a happy and a tragic ending: on the one hand the boy survived the public shaming, his fiancée stood by him, and he celebrated his wedding a few months later. On the other hand the police officers incriminated in the video were sentenced only to a couple of months suspension, after which they returned to duty.

That incident was the precursor to the death of Khalid Sa’eed, a young Alexandrian who criticized the regime on his blog, and who was arrested and died under interrogation. His case gave rise to mass demonstrations, and eventually to the Facebook page “We are all Khaled Sa’eed,” which was one of the main organizing tools of the original demonstration on January 25. A generation of young Egyptians had reached a boiling point. It is no coincidence that Police Day, January 25^th, was the date chosen to launch the uprising.

Anyone watching Egypt knew that it must blow up, and blow up soon. The revolution this time is a revolution of middle-class young people fed up with a police state and empowered by internet and media. It is not a revolution of Islamists or Communists, but if this one fails the next one could well be. 

Notes from Cairo: Revolution or Uprising?

I watched from my balcony overlooking the Nile yesterday evening- well after curfew- as Mubarak's NDP thugs streamed down the opposite shore, trucks blaring loud chants, horses and camels in the forefront, and crossed over and made their way to Tahrir Square to wreck havoc and turn a peaceful sit-in into a bloodbath. Anyone who still believes Mubarak should oversee a peaceful transition should be convinced. He has had thirty years to affect a "transition"- and all he knows is to resort to the same thuggery tactics that he and his party deploy every election season. Mubarak must go. If he stays, the events of the past ten days will be referred to as "the uprising of January 2011"; if he goes, we will talk of a revolution. We owe it to these brave young protesters to make it the latter.

The young have been the great revelation of this revolution. A generation accused of being alienated, apathetic, materialistic and unpatriotic, has proved to be responsible, involved, and ready to spring into action and sacrifice. They are everywhere, handling everything from traffic to trash to security check-points, calmly and politely.

When the looting was at its worst at night- when the government withdrew the police and let loose the criminals in the jails- the citizens guarded their homes themselves. After curfew every building and alley set up its own night watch from among the residents and doorkeepers. Most were armed with only a stick or a baseball bat, some had guns and chains to form road blocks. Creative would-be looters even tried coming across the Nile in small boats to residential island neighborhoods like Zamalek, but they were caught. During the day, people went about their business almost normally, quite calmly and civilly. That is the spirit of January 2011 that Egyptians can be proud of and must be remembered, in spite of the dismaying images that came out of Tahrir Square last night.

For more, here is the link to a radio interview I gave: http://ianmasters.com/sites/default/files/mp3/bbriefing_2011_01_30b.mp3