Egypt: Seeking a Way Out

A friend asked me recently what Egyptian liberals were thinking these days, and I replied ruefully that I imagined it felt like scrambling back into the frying pan to get out of the fire. That is, if post-Mubarak military rule was the frying pan, then Muslim Brotherhood rule was the fire. He also asked if, given the roiling polarization in Egyptian society between secularists and Islamists, and the stalemate between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and the military, civil war loomed on the horizon. The state has a monopoly on force of arms in Egypt, unlike in Syria or Iraq, and the Muslim Brotherhood has no militias at its command- yet- so civil war in the classic sense is not imminent, but if the situation continues to deteriorate and foreign powers intervene to arm factions, it will be a very real threat.

So is there any way to pull back from the brink, to diffuse the crisis without more bloodshed? 

For the past month, there have been hundreds of thousands of Morsi diehards camped out in front of a mosque in Cairo’s Nasr City neighborhood. All efforts to dislodge them have failed so far, in spite of clashes with the authorities that have led to a hundred killings. They are digging in, literally digging up sidewalk bricks to build a wall around the perimeter of the mosque. The unsanitary ad hoc tent-living conditions have become a serious health hazard, not to mention the traffic impasse and total disruption of the lives of the hapless, infuriated residents of the neighborhood, who are hardly mollified by some protesters’ offers of flowers and apologies.

The military authorities have warned that they will ‘soon’ move to dislodge the encampments. It is a necessary step, most Egyptians believe, to clear, not just the Morsi supporter mosque sit-in, but also Tahrir and all the other offshoot sit-ins as well. The right to free speech and assembly, even in a democracy, means the right to march and demonstrate, with the prerequisite permit, and police protection- after which everyone goes home. It does not mean the right to take over every public space and turn it into a permanent, lawless, tent city cum soup kitchen cum street fair populated as much by the homeless, the hungry, or the jobless as by committed activists. Egyptians want, need, and deserve a return to civility, to patrolled city streets, to functional city squares, and to law and order.

On the other hand, it would be a serious mistake for General El-Sissi and the military to interpret the massive turnout in their favor as a mandate to massacre. Moral issues aside, there is more appetite on the Muslim Brotherhood side to create martyrs than there is on the military’s, and for good reason. The Muslim Brethren are a minority, unquestionably, but their support runs deep. For every Morsi supporter camped out in front of the mosque, for every card-carrying Muslim Brotherhood member, there are multiple sympathizers in the society at large, and that is true across the socio-economic divide. I can think of one example of twin sisters, thirty-something young women whose father, on their eighteenth birthday, bought each a matching Mercedes sports car to drive to college. One marched in support of the Military takeover, and one supported the Muslim Brotherhood. Families are divided on the issue, brother against sister, and husband against wife.

The hope, therefore, is to diffuse the crisis through negotiation, and not by forcible eviction of the encampment. There are signs of political will on the part of Western powers to find a peaceful solution. The European Union has sent its Foreign Policy chief, Catherine Ashton, to Egypt to try to broker a deal, officially at the behest of the stakeholders. On the Egyptian government side, she will find competent, experienced interlocutors in Vice-President Mohamed Baradei, former chief of the U.N. Nuclear Agency, and Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmi, former ambassador to Washington. On the MB side, president Morsi is held incommunicado and other leaders are under arrest, but there are other prominent heads of the movement to negotiate through. Intriguingly, a group of younger cadres who call themselves the “Brethren Without Violence” have dissented from the MB leadership and may lead the way out of the mosque encampment.

For its part, the Obama seems to grasp the wider implications of the crisis for the stability of the region and has charged Foreign Secretary Kerry to broker talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders with a view to re-launching the peace process. It truly is the eleventh hour, but the hope seems to be that Israel might recognize the urgency for stability in an increasingly unstable region, and that the Abbas administration in the Palestinian Territories might recognize an opportunity when its rival, Hamas in Gaza, is weakened by the loss of the Morsi administration’s support.

For the U.S., Israel and the world, not only Egypt but also Gaza and Syria are in play. The Brotherhood were to all evidence supporting Islamist radicals in an increasingly lawless Sinai, as well as supporting Hamas in Gaza and the Islamist insurgency in Syria against Bashar Assad. Egyptian volunteers were allegedly travelling to Syria for jihad, and might come back radicalized and pose a threat to their own society and beyond.

Pursuing a peaceful solution to the impasse in Egypt that allows the MB to save face is worth every iota of patience and self-control the military can muster and the civilian authorities can urge. The alternative is a bloodbath and the creation of martyrs that will serve as a radicalizing myth to inspire generations of terrorists, and cleave a fractured society irreparably in two.

Egypt: Making a Hero of the Military- Again

Almost everyone I know personally in Cairo is celebrating the massive turnout Friday to support General Sisi’s call for a mandate to quash ‘terrorism’, which in Egypt is a euphemism for the Islamists. Coptic church bells rang in sync with the call from the minarets announcing the breaking of the Muslim Ramadan fast at sunset. Friends posted defiantly ‘Egyptian and proud, no matter what the rest of the world thinks.’ Some of them had left their comfortable summer resort homes to drive back four hours to Cairo to take their place among the sweltering masses at Tahrir- without breaking their fast.

So I feel like the Grinch with my caveats: We don’t need another hero. Don’t make a savior of General Sisi. Remember the history of military ‘strongman’ regimes, and I don’t mean just in Egypt or even the Arab world. Remember how quickly, after the coup of 1952, Naguib proved to be a mere figurehead who was ruthlessly shunted aside by Colonel Nasser, ushering in a sixty-year regime of successive military rulers in civilian clothes. Hold Sisi and the military to their promises to hold elections and give civilian, secular democracy a chance- or be prepared to take to the streets again if they don’t. But remember that the military have proved how brutally they are capable of squashing protests- does anyone remember the blue-bra girl?

But I understand. Roughly half of Egypt, give or take, including almost everyone I know, doesn’t want to hear it. It has come down to a secular/Islamist divide in Egypt, with the secularists now overlooking their differences, Wafdist liberals embracing Nasserites, capitalists cozying up to socialists. This unprecedented solidarity, while highly commendable, is likely to prove ephemeral, and more workable, in practice, on the street than in a Cabinet or Parliament. This may be one reason why so many, today, put their faith in the Army, rather than a civilian coalition government, to face down an Islamist challenge.

While this half of Egypt rejoices, roughly the other half of the population, give or take, turns out to call for the re-instatement of deposed president Morsi, now under arrest and accused of controversial charges of treason. At the time he was deposed on July 3^rd, I was as relieved as anyone to see the end of the disastrous, rogue Muslim Brotherhood regime and the damage it wrought in barely a year. But today, I can’t help feeling that it was the place of the head of the civilian government, or of a liberal party, not a General, to call for demonstrations. The Military should be above partisan politics. And I can’t help feeling queasy about giving the Military carte blanche to crack down on anyone, even the Muslim Brotherhood. So at the risk of antagonizing the half of Egypt whose secular, liberal values I share, I will continue to dampen the parade, all the while hoping my reservations turn out to be unfounded. Perhaps this time, the Military will keep in mind that the masses might take to the streets again to hold them to their promises.

A Clash of Two Egypts: Tamarod Tomorrow

Tomorrow, June 30^th, is the fateful day for the showdown between the Islamists, and the rest. The stakes couldn’t be higher: a battle for the very soul of Egypt. Who speaks for Egypt?

The Tamarod, or Rebellion, movement claims to speak for the real Egypt: an Egypt of all Egyptians, regardless of sect; perhaps pious in private but secular in politics; moderate, forward-looking, eager to rejoin world economy and culture. Their critics say they speak only for the Egypt of tourist resorts and gated communities; megamalls and ballet at the Opera House; and Jon Stewart on the Bassem Youssef show. Not so, retort their defenders, they also speak for the millions of Egyptians whose livelihood depends on work in the tourism sector and on the construction sites, for the increasingly desperate man in the street who is suffering most from an economy in free fall. Tamarod is counting on them to flood the streets and the squares tomorrow; twenty million Egyptians are reported to have signed the petition withdrawing confidence from the Morsi administration and demanding that the president and his cabinet step down, paving the way for new elections as soon as possible. 

On the other hand, Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood Party, along with their extremist allies the Salafis, have mobilized massive demonstrations of their own, to bolster their claim to speak for the real Egypt. An Egypt of bearded men and veiled women professing an ideology that rejects the separation of state and religion and demonizes westernization, secularism and all sects and religions other than their own. It is an ideology, their defenders say, they share with millions of like-minded fundamentalists across the Islamic world; and a party, the Muslim Brotherhood, that came to power through relatively legitimate elections and has no intention of ceding that power to pressure from the street.

In other words, what we are witnessing is an immovable object confronting an irresistible force. The resulting confrontation can only be brutal. Already, the day before the scheduled June 30^th protest, thousands upon thousands of demonstrators have flooded public spaces in cities across the country, both in revolt against Morsi and in his support. Clashes between them have already led to several deaths, including the tragic, senseless stabbing of an American college student who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on a street in Alexandria.   

The two sides of the conflict have this in common: both sides profess not to trust the role of the U.S. Rumors and counter-rumors abound, about American policy directives in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. The Morsi administration does not trust the police, with good reason; it has officially devolved police peace-keeping duties to the armed forces. But what role will the military play? That is the real question. Who speaks for Egypt? Perhaps, in the final analysis, the tank does.

Egypt's Last Chance Revolution: June 30th

When I told an American friend recently about the millions-strong revolt against President Morsi’s Islamist administration planned for June 30^th, she asked: “And does the regime know about it?” “Of course,” I retorted, “it’s been advertised for weeks!” In Egypt as elsewhere these days, revolutions are not only televised, they are advertised weeks ahead on social media to build momentum and pressure. The entire strategy is built on mobilizing a public response so massive it would overwhelm any attempt by the regime in power to thwart it.

That strategy worked in ousting Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, and many of the same elements that organized that successful revolt are now making a last ditch effort to reclaim their revolution from the Islamists who seem to have hijacked it when Muslim Brotherhood candidate Morsi was elected president a year ago on June 30^th.  Fifteen million people, by some counts, have pledged to participate in the demonstrations to force the abdication of President Morsi. The plan has already been released on social media: sit-ins are to begin two days earlier, on Friday and Saturday, and Tahrir Square is no longer the focus, the Presidential Itihadiya Palace is. Other key locations for launching demonstrations- Egypt’s Supreme Court, the Ministry of Defense, and the syndicate headquarters of the Judges, Lawyers, Journalists, and Police- represent groups with long-standing antipathy to the Muslim Brotherhood in general and more recently inflamed conflicts with the Morsi administration in particular.  

Marching orders are clear: protest only against Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood Party, and its ideological ‘Guidance Bureau’. Protest in the name of Egypt only, not in the name of any person, party, candidate, sect or group. Peaceful protest only: no incitement against police or military or engagement in any altercations with either or with any opposing demonstrators. Women to march only in the center of a demonstration, where they can best be protected. That last instruction is necessary given the alarming record of increased assaults on women demonstrators during the past two years. This time, the call-to-arms on Face Book stresses, this is the Last Chance Revolution. We must dig in for the long-haul; we must go into it with the mindset of ‘in it to win it.’ Failure means rule by the Muslim Brotherhood, forever and ever.

To an outside observer in the West, this might seem like hyperbole. Morsi was elected in a relatively free election, these observers point out, and ‘elections have consequences’ if democracy is to be respected. And yet, the notion of post-election, postmortem protest seems to be gaining ground right here in the United States, indeed right here in my backyard of North Carolina. The ‘Moral Monday’ movement  protests against what it perceives as regressive social and economic policies launched by the conservative Republicans who were elected in 2012 and now control the state- from the Governor’s mansion to the Legislature. ‘Moral Monday’ stages civil disobedience every week in which as many people as possible, and as many public figures as possible, try to get themselves arrested protesting against the reversal of civil rights and other issues.

Granted, trying to get arrested is not a problem for the Egyptian protesters taking their lives in their hands when they take to the streets on June 30^th. But the analogy holds: in some cases, election results, and their consequences, are deemed to be too disastrous to wait for the next round of elections. The stakes are infinitely higher in Egypt, where the consensus seems to be that the next elections, if they take place with the Muslim Brotherhood in power, will be a sham.

The big question, of course, is whether Morsi will resign in response to public pressure, however intense. And the answer seems to be that he will not, unless the military intervene to force his hand. That intervention, even a few months ago, would have been seen as a regression to the military dictatorship of the past sixty years; today it is seen by many as the lesser of two evils. The last straw, for many, was the shocking Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence two days ago that left four Shiite men dead. Shiites are so rare in Egypt today that most Egyptians are unaware of their existence, even if the more educated remember from their schoolbooks that the Fatimid Caliphate that ruled Egypt for two centuries, a thousand years ago, was Shia. Such sectarian conflict is unprecedented, and signals an extremist Salafi mindset that makes ‘infidels’ not just of Egyptian Copts but Shia Muslims as well.   

The fact that President Morsi tolerated a tirade against the Shia by a Salafi extremist during a recent rally days before the murderous attack adds fuel to the fire of the opposition in Egypt, already banking on despair over the worsening living conditions of the average man in the street. On the other hand, the plight of Coptic Christians seems to have turned the tide of Western public opinion against Morsi’s administration abroad.  With internal and external pressure mounting against the Islamists in power, it remains to be seen if June 30^th turns out to be the Chronicle of a Coup Foretold, or a bloody mess.  

Any minute now!

Rumors have been flying all day, and you could cut the tension with a knife. Mubarak is set to give a speech any minute now, and the army is televising bulletin no 1 (it's the numbering that is sinister) about being in constant session and deliberating how to protect the people's interests. A military coup to follow? Suleiman side-lined?

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. 

Whose Revolution? And a Coptic-Muslim Mass.

On the surface, there is a semblance of normality on the streets of Cairo today. The rowing crews were out on the water early again. Yesterday the banks re-opened for three hours; there were short queues of 8 people or so, but no scramble. Cars were double-parked all over the streets as usual. People went to work, went to lunch; traffic was as its normal busy self till curfew at 7 pm.
This comes as a relief to many, even irreducible critics of the Mubarak regime. As one businesswoman- a recent widow who has taken over the running of her husband's factories on top of her own legal practice- told me: "I am meeting payroll for 500 families, and no one can come to work. How much longer can I keep paying their salaries with no revenue? And what will they do if I have to shut down the factories indefinitely? Already the day workers who are hired by the day to load and unload trucks and so on, they are out of a job, and their families live hand to mouth."
Only the demonstrators in Tahrir Square bunkered down for another night under a light drizzle, after an inspiring day: a Coptic mass was held in the square, attended by Christians and Muslims alike. In contrast, on television, Coptic patriarch Shenouda declared his support for Mubarak.
During the past three days, Tahrir Square has seen less bloodshed and more entertainment; it has become quite the thing for a succession of political, military and media figures to make an appearance: Chief of Staff Tantawi, opposition party leaders, Shorouk publisher Ibrahim el-Mo'allem, writers like M. Salmawy.
But all this has the uneasy feeling of the calm before the storm. It is clear that the multiple tugs of war among the forces of the old regime and between them and the opposition, is from over. The complete breakdown of order: shutting down internet, cell phones, public transport, withdrawing police off the streets and letting prisoners loose- that breakdown of order, it is generally believed, was part of that tug of war. It did not succeed entirely, thanks to the phlegmatic response of the Egyptian people, who took security matters in their own hands and avoided panic.
What some fear, and others welcome, is a military take-over of power. The top men in the new "cabinet" are all military men. Egypt had its first chance at a civilian government in 60 years post-Mubarak. It remains to be seen if the door to that opportunity is still open.

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