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Despair is betrayal
I have long since given up on attempting to recapture that euphoric sense of almost limitless potential in the wake of Mubarak’s ouster some two years ago. In my mind’s eye at the time, the possibilities for what might come next were truly exhilarating. After decades of enforced torpor, people rose up and … well you know the rest.
Then matters got exceedingly messy. It was expected to a degree of course, but the extent of how things went wrong was quite devastating for those who were lucky enough to witness that initial jolt of an irrevocable turning of the tide. In the fallout, a palpable sense of despair weighed heavily.
I was knocked out of my stupor by a slogan ubiquitous in recent protests. “Despair is betrayal,” it said. Indeed. Sometimes a pithy remark is all it takes. There has been too much sacrifice, too much loss, to just wash our hands off the whole thing.
The Morsi omnishambles
Events of the past few weeks since Morsi issued his November decree can be described as – to appropriate British parlance – an utter ‘omnishambles’. Midnight decrees rescinding previous ones, 2am about-turns on decisions taken hours before, all add to the farcical turn of events that is supposed to culminate in a referendum on a hatchet job of a draft constitution so littered with vagaries it will only sustain this imbroglio for years to come.
Rather interestingly is the tack of some (many) who read all this as an attack on democracy. No not the Morsi madness, but the opposition to it. The reason? Morsi is a democratically elected leader. He has a democratic mandate. Those who oppose Morsi are sour undemocratic cretins infiltrated by regime remnants to overthrow legitimacy.
Absolute rubbish.
Let’s begin at the beginning. Morsi currently holds both executive and legislative powers. Not content with that he decides that he needs to ensure that the one remaining branch of governance not directly under his control does not pose a threat to him, and by extension his constituent assembly and the Shura Council. Embalming it in the glory of protecting the revolution (because he’s oh so obviously fixated on reforming the Ministry of Interior for example) Morsi includes a catch-all clause that grants him the right to take whatever measures he sees fit to safeguard the revolution, national unity and national security. Whatever. The. Hell. That. Means. Read more…
Sambo the unwitting revolutionary icon
Mohamed Gad al-Rab, more commonly known as Sambo, was not a committed revolutionary. He did not participate in the 18-day uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak nor the immediate events that followed it.
Inadvertently, he became something of an icon in events that followed later, having been caught up in the struggle between revolutionaries and the regime over the country’s future post-Mubarak. He also inadvertently became the center of the discourse over how best to respond to state violence, in kind, or by turning the other cheek.
The violence did not end after Mubarak was overthrown; it ascended toward an upward trajectory of even more bloodshed through clashes between protesters and, at times, police or army forces. The names are known: the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes (which took place at two different times), the Cabinet clashes and the Abbasseya clashes. Read more…
Brotherhood on the back foot after Friday clashes
Senior Muslim Brotherhood members took to the press to condemn attacks on their followers in Tahrir Friday, after finally admitting they were actually there, but no amount of spin will hide the fact that there is a deepening resentment towards the organization that rules Egypt by proxy.
What happened in Tahrir Friday may potentially be taken as a microcosm of a pervasive anger against the Brotherhood across the country, if one is to bear in mind the attacks on Brotherhood offices in the governorates that also occurred on Friday. But of course Tahrir has special resonance.
The story of what sparked the clashes on Friday is that supporters of president Mohammed Morsy tore down the stage of the Popular Current movement after anti-Morsy chants had been sung. However, the story doesn’t start there, for months now there has been resentment by secular forces at the appropriation of Tahrir by the Brotherhood dating back to the one year anniversary of the revolution, when the Brotherhood stage blared Quranic verses at a loud volume to drown out anti-Brotherhood chants or even prior to that when Brotherhood supporters attempted to end the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes of November 2011 without calling for accountability so that the parliamentary elections could go through. Read more…
Maspero massacre a year on from the terrible turning point
Of the many dark days Egypt has witnessed post-revolution, because of an archaic, failed state whose back is to the wall, lashing out at all and sundry, the Maspero massacre would most probably count as the darkest of them all.
28 mainly Coptic Christian protesters were killed on October 9, 2011. The manner in which they were killed speaks to a brutality and callousness that still leaves one shell shocked a year on. Besides the use of live ammunition, military APCs ran over protesters in front of the radio and television building in Maspero.
It didn’t end there, state television then proceeded to incite people against the protesters, claiming that they had attacked the army troops guarding the building, killing 3 it falsely stated, and exhorted honest and honorable citizens to defend the army. This led to attacks on Christians throughout the city for the rest of the night, including a siege on the Coptic Hospital in Ramses where the wounded and killed were taken. The irony was that the march was heading to Maspero to protest this very manner of skewed coverage towards Egypt’s Copts. Read more…
Amnesty reports on persistant SCAF and police violence
(With Jack Shenker)
Egypt’s military generals rode roughshod over human rights and instigated violence against the Egyptian people during the post-Mubarak ‘transition period’, according to a damning pair of reports released by Amnesty International last week.
In the sixteen violent months of army rule that followed Hosni Mubarak’s downfall in February 2011, security forces killed and tortured with impunity – subjecting thousands of civilians to arbitrary arrest and unfair trials, and targeting women activists through a programme of sexual intimidation.
“Unless the soldiers responsible for killing, maiming and abusing protesters are put on trial in front of an independent, civilian court, there is no hope that the victims will see justice or that soldiers will fear punishment if they repeat such crimes,” said Hassiba Sahraoui, deputy director of Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa programme.
“Male and female protesters were subjected to severe beatings, given electric shocks, sexually threatened and abused by military troops. Thousands were tried or face unfair trial before military courts. Women protesters were singled out for abuse, and months later have been left with mere excuses by the SCAF, instead of independent investigations and redress.” Read more…
Text yourself: a look at the papers for a day
Of the many failings inherent in the Egyptian media, the ability to plaster ambiguous, conspiracy-laden information as front-page fact is right up there at the top of the list. Case in point is the infamous “spy ad” Egyptian television in its infinite wisdom deemed fit for broadcasting, cementing telephone texting as a threat to the nation, and pushing the xenophobia meter into overdrive.
So more of the same then in last Tuesday’s Al-Watan newspaper, it’s main headline screaming that “sovereign entities” (unidentified as usual) are on the lookout for a Jihadist cell in Sinai that is texting its members military movements in Sinai. This cell naturally is comprised of foreigners, this time Afghanis, Pakistanis, Arabs and (specifically) Tunisians who were seen in a market some time back wearing Afghani/Arab/Tunisian garb and speaking an unidentified Western language (might it be Dutch? Spanish? It could be anything).
A source from this sovereign entity told Al-Watan that not one of them had been taken into custody, nor seen again since their cameo in the market in a small town 25km from Al-Arish. Meanwhile clashes continues in Sinai from the fallout of the August 5 attack that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers. Two days ago security forces had arrested ten people purportedly linked to the attack in a raid that saw a retaliatory attack that lasted for hours. The “sovereign” source told Al-Watan that five of the ten had been released because they are not connected to any of the recent attacks in Sinai in any way. It wasn’t indicated if the two Al-Watan reporters behind this story texted any of the information relevant to the piece to their editors’ phones prior to publication. Read more…
The Morsi Maneuver
There was Sadat’s corrective revolution in 1971, and 2012 gives us the Morsi maneuver, where in one fell swoop the Muslim Brotherhood president removed the country’s top two military generals, cancelled their constitutional addendum and appointed a senior judicial figure as his vice president.
With no discernable reaction to the spate of decisions, Mohamed Morsi seems to have consolidated his power after a month and half in the presidency where it seemed that there was two distinct powers in Egypt, the military and the presidency.
“Egypt’s strategic partners were certainly concerned about the duality of power in Egypt, so there had to be a consolidation of power within one institution and normally it had to be the elected one,” said chief editor of the Egypt Independent Lina Attalah, “I imagine the move was well supported if not blessed by strategic partners because it has been so messy in Egypt amidst two contesting powers and what happened in Sinai served as an index for this state failure.”
Morsi removed head of the supreme council of the armed forces (Scaf) Hussein Tantawi, replacing him with head of the military intelligence Abdel-Fatah El-Sissi. Things seem to have come to a head however after an attack in Sinai 6 August that resulted in the death of 16 Egyptian soldiers. Read more…
Morsi loves you: the birth of the hybrid state
If it was a salute to seal the deal, the Scaf chimera of Tantawi and Anan willingly gave it in greeting to president-elect Mohamed Morsi as he stepped out onto the tarmac of the Haykestep, there to be officially handed power by the military. It was a cursory salute mind you, not the official salute they often gave Mubarak, but it would have been more appropriate for them all to sign on the dotted line, bringing to an end the 18-month long negotiation process on the new state.
Meet the new state, same as the old state, just with the avuncular Morsi in the middle. What the Haykestep ceremony indicated was that the old state has succeeded in absorbing the dominant external force in Egyptian politics, the Muslim Brotherhood, into its bulletproof bosom. Through blunt and crude machinations, the deep state as well as the not-so-deep-state has managed to emerge unscathed from a season-long revolt, its functioning bodies more or less intact.
Morsi can riff all he likes on the revolution and its goals to Brotherhood throngs in Tahrir, but with the exception of the 1979 NDP machine and its patronage network of quid pro quo interconnections, the dismantlement of the corrupt embedded state has not happened. Even the NDP stalwarts will survive – and potentially thrive – in a new guise. Read more…
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