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.

Despair is betrayal to that, or at least doing nothing out of despair is a betrayal to all who have fallen. Feeling despair within is another matter and frankly par for the course. 

And so imbued with some semblance of optimism finally I was able to recognize that the irreversibility of events still existed in the midst of all the madness, and then came the realization that the old ways simply just won’t work anymore.

The Interior Ministry can kill, maim, torture scores more as it has been doing a lot of recently and that will not restore it’s corrupted luster or sense of power. It’s just not going to happen. The same applies to the army, or the government. The top officials from Morsi downwards can bleat on all they want about dealing with events with a firm hand, an iron will and a callous heart, it will not restore whatever it is they deem worthy of restoration.

2011 was an uprising against a failed state, with its failed institutions and the small-minded, heavy-handed application of its failed machinations. A state unremittingly hollow and pathetic to the absolute fucking marrow, staggeringly inept, brutal and malicious. To attempt to keep this sunken ship afloat in the debris of its failure is even more pathetic, and bound to end in more of the same.

And yet that is what they seem intent on doing, which is resulting in little else aside from a mounting death toll, from 30 killed in Port Said in a matter of hours to the 8-year old boy killed on the Corniche clashes yesterday. The bloodshed is truly staggering.

Morsi has not finished his first year in office and it is already clear that from him and the Brotherhood – and their cheerleaders both domestic and foreign – there is not just an absolute failure of vision, of leadership and of any morality whatsoever but also a disconcerting comfort with all this death. They join the ranks of Mubarak’s coterie, the military and the police as ones who have betrayed this country and its people.

Yet it is not in the realm of politics that any actualization of that 2011 wisp of a dream will be reached. It’s probably in almost every other avenue besides, be it social, economic, the arts, culturally, in young people’s minds and maybe more pertinently, ideas. Keeping up the pressure on as many fronts as possible, offering alternatives, resistance everywhere. Despair is betrayal.  

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.

At this point if you’re even the most dispassionate of observers, you’re thinking this is a bit worrying. Trust me, Morsi says, this is to defend revolutionary gains from the Mubarak cronies in the judiciary, it’ll be gone before you know it, after I pass my constitution. At first he tries a little arm-twisting, either pass my constitution or I keep my powers. He eventually drops this after much pressure, but not before calling for the referendum.

The Muslim Brotherhood love democratic catch phrases. One of their favorites is ‘checks and balances’. With Morsi holding executive and legislative powers, and making himself unassailable to legal challenges, there are no checks, no balances. The only check, the only balance, is the street. So people march, they demonstrate, street action is the only available recourse to the democratically elected leader who has usurped powers that your friendly tin-pot despot can only dream of. But no, they’re undemocratic, they want to overthrow the country’s legitimate ruler. Because protest is not permissible in a democracy it seems.

What’s ironic is that Morsi, his brotherhood and its political arm the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) have only themselves to blame for the situation they are in. By aiding and abetting a botched transitional period, supporting the SCAF roadmap to stability (and electoral gain) has left them open to the myriad legal wranglings that have engulfed the country post-Mubarak. No stability, just judicial pain. They have it all now but in reality their hold on it is extremely tenuous. If only a civilian transitional government with the amended 1971 constitution in temporary effect until a new one was drafted, with both presidential and parliamentary elections held under that auspice. If only.

And then the bloodshed December 5.

The FJP sent supporters to disperse the opposition protesters from the perimeter of the presidential palace. It was sanctioned. Morsi must have known, if he didn’t then he should resign immediately because he didn’t condemn it. And if he knew then he should be brought before a court. There is no excuse. The president, the head of state, knowingly allows his supporters to come and disperse protesters. Not his police forces, not his army, his brotherhood. It beggars belief. The Brotherhood helped defend Tahrir Square during the Battle of the Camel when Mubarak’s cronies did the same, how could it come to this? Nine people are dead, many of them from the Brotherhood. During the fighting Morsi supporters detained and tortured people, in the presence of the police. December 5 was a watershed, now there is blood with the Brotherhood as well as with the Mubarak coterie, the police and the military.

Seemingly the Brotherhood believes it is under attack, that there is a plot, a conspiracy to unseat it from power. This is cemented by the attacks on Brotherhood and FJP headquarters across the country. It is this belief that has them reacting in such an erratic manner. And some Western commentators have bought this reasoning hook, line and sinker. But they should tread carefully, the Brotherhood has been accused of burning down police stations on January 28, 2011. They were even more recently accused of being behind the Battle of the Camel. Zany conspiracies with little evidence are a dime a dozen here in Egypt.

The Brotherhood have been scathing about the role of the police in all this, its failure to secure the headquarters, even though police forces were – when involved – usually tear gassing the opposition December 5. Mubarak believed the revolution was a conspiracy, the military junta thought everything was a conspiracy, and now we have the Brotherhood thinking there is a conspiracy against it by the deep state. The deep state, lest we forget, that it shook hands with for the sake of political expediency. You shook hands with the devil, and you didn’t try and reform it, and you will cement its privileges in the draft constitution.

What grates about the willingness to buy into fanciful conspiracies is the insinuation that Egyptians – all of them – have no agency and are mere puppets of surreptitious hands that control them at will. It is grossly insulting and demeans incredible sacrifice willingly given through incredible conviction since January 25, 2011 and even before.

The opposition on the streets is real, it is broad and it represents a wide cross-section of Egyptian society. And yes they don’t like what Morsi has been doing. Accept that, for the good of the country. Besides, Morsi has already set a dangerous precedent by displaying a willingness to resort to extraordinary measures if he feels the need. How reassuring for the future of our nascent democracy.

A Salafi protester made a fair point to me during the pro-Morsi rally at Cairo University. He said that if it was a secular president in the palace who was ignoring a prominent section of society, then Islamists would be filling Tahrir Square. After all that has happened in the past two years, it’s obvious that in current circumstances you can’t go it alone, and issuing surprise decrees with all-encompassing powers will not bridge that divide.

When he assumed the presidency, Morsi had a choice between aligning himself with the deep state which the Brotherhood now feel has betrayed them and the revolutionary base that could have offered something different. Sadly, Morsi and the Brotherhood made their choice some time ago, and Egypt is paying for it.

And here’s some truth. No one has ever really run Egypt, no one can control it. Mubarak ruled with a perception of power in people’s minds that crumbled in a mere 18 days, his power, his despotism, his vile security apparatus, everything. The army didn’t control Egypt either, and nor do the Brotherhood, that’s why they see conspiracies everywhere. No one does, and no one will until there is a time when the rule of law is truly entrenched and implementable and no one – least of all the president – can see fit to undermine 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.

Eighteen months on, the turbulence of post-revolution Egypt did not abate. The first of the clashes took place on 28 and 29 June 2011. The violence was sparked by a clash between families of the revolution’s martyrs and police forces. What sparked it remains unclear to this day.

The fighting began in front of the Balloon Theater in Agouza, where the families were supposed to commemorate their deceased children in a ceremony. Instead — for some inexplicable reason — they were beaten outside the theater. They were then chased back to Tahrir Square, where the fighting continued overnight and into the next day, as more and more people joined.

One of those people was Sambo, a young ceiling carpenter from the Cairo neighborhood of Sharabiya. He had never felt the urge to attend any of the protests in Tahrir, but this time, he saw Central Security Forces officers beating the families of the martyrs on television.

“The images moved me. I had never been to Tahrir before,” he explains.

And so Sambo went to the site of the fighting. No shrinking violet, Sambo responded to the police attacks by throwing stones, and at one point managed to wrestle a pellet shotgun from a policeman — the type that police were using and would later use to great effect against protesters, blinding many.

Sambo used the gun, and later handed it to central security officers at Omar Makram Mosque. When the fighting subsided, he went back home.

He didn’t know that a reporter from Al-Dostour had filmed him. “A few days later, I was sitting in my neighborhood coffee shop and got arrested right there and then,” he says.

He was branded a thug, someone who preemptively attacked the police. In response, revolutionary forces saluted his bravery and heroism. Last September, he was sentenced in a military court to five years imprisonment for assaulting police officers and stealing the gun. He soon became one of the poster boys for civilians subjected to military trials.

He was to spend almost a year in jail, being released in August as one of the 57 civilians given presidential amnesty after being detained by the military. While in prison, his son, Gad, was born. “Prison is not a cafeteria,” he says while standing in Mohamed Mahmoud Street.

On that street, there had been a huge graffiti artwork of him carrying the gun, surrounded by balloons — depicting the savior of the martyrs’ families who had been attacked outside the Balloon Theater.

It was recently painted over by the state’s incessant need to whitewash recent history as expressed in graffiti, but, as he stands there in the street, graffiti artists have already repainted and resprayed new ones.

“The government treats prisoners like animals. I was humiliated and beaten. But it’s not just me, they treat everybody bad. They’re not human, they treat each other badly. No animal would stand this, let alone a human being,” he says.

But he adds that it was “reassuring” that groups such as the No to Military Trials Campaign were chasing his case. “It helped to know I hadn’t been forgotten,” he says.

Mona Seif, one of the founders of No to Military Trials, says Sambo’s case was different. “He had been charged with a criminal offense, but his actions had been removed from its context. At that time, the military and the Interior Ministry was using the term ‘thugs’ against the working class and those from poorer backgrounds,” she says.

In the wake of his arrest, a furor ensued over whether he was right to wrestle the gun to use it in self-defense, and whether that meant a paradigm shift in how protesters were reacting to state violence. Some said it was only fair to defend oneself from tear gas, guns and swords, while others felt that protesters should stay faithful to the chant of “selmeya,” or peaceful.

Seif feels “selmeya” is sometimes misunderstood. “This is my personal opinion but I’ve always been upset by the presentation of revolutionaries as pure and glossy and don’t resist. The understanding of selmeya is wrong; for many it means to not respond to violence and to die in silence. Rather, peaceful resistance is to not instigate violence, but to defend yourself from it.”

The argument is especially relevant in light of the many deaths and injuries in the transitional period. Those who studiously monitor events can also be mindful of which narrative they might be playing into and whether they’re creating icons, says Sherief Gaber of the Mosireen video collective, which was heavily involved in documenting the violence that followed the 18-day uprising.

“It’s something we’re aware of, and we do make a conscious decision to avoid filming known activists or figures of the revolution, and find voices that would give plurality to the revolution,” he says. “We don’t attempt to produce icons because individuals can and have been brought down. It’s about the collective strength of numbers.”

He says the collective has done videos on individuals, but attempts to connect them to the larger struggle. “You don’t want to conflate the individual with the bigger picture,” he explains. Gaber adds that “resistance is justified and legitimate. We’ve always tried to put that argument forward — that it’s not a crime to resist state violence.”

As the man at the center of the debate, Sambo tends to agree. “Are you going to look at whether I used the gun and not look at the people who were dying, who were being fired at and attacked by the police? … I saw people dying. What do you expect me to do?” he says. “Who’s going to hold the police that killed these people accountable? They’ve gotten away with it. I fired a gun and was labeled a thug, yet the regime kills Egyptians and no one holds them accountable.”

Even as a reluctant participant in part of the narrative of events, he feels cast aside, like so many from his neighborhood. “I got five years, and now I can’t find a job. Was what I did so wrong? The media chased me, but nobody else does,” he says. “Conditions are worse after the revolution. There are so many youth out of work. I can’t eat freedom.”

And that is a message he hopes the media attention surrounding him will get through to President Mohamed Morsi.

“I hope Morsy thinks of the many young people in the poor neighborhoods, the blood that has been spilled with no justice, and the many who were tried in military courts,” he says.

Initially published here.

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.

Rady Hassan, an anti-Morsi protester in the square said, “These are clashes between Egyptians, which is terrible. But the Brotherhood don’t want Tahrir to be a thorn in its side. They don’t want opposing voices in Tahrir because that’s how Mubarak was removed, and they’re acting just like Mubarak did.”

In the absence of security forces for the entirety of the incident, the two sides clashed for hours, throwing rocks, stones, fireworks and eventually Molotov cocktails. Injuries were numerous, mainly to the head from the thrown rocks. People carried the injured as blood flowed freely from their wounds.

And confusion reigned, when sometimes two disparate groups from the same side would attack each other, not since the Battle of the Camel, 2 February, 2011 has clashes not included security forces. At one point on Talaat Harb, Mary Daniel, sister of Mina who was killed in the Maspero massacre 9 October, 2011, was hit by a bag full of water thrown from an irate resident in the building above.

Friday’s protest was organized by secular forces to protest Islamist hegemony of the constitution. In the interim a Cairo court acquitted the 24 defendants in the Battle of the Camel trial. In response, Morsy attempted to remove the public prosecutor Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud from his post, but Egyptian law prohibits such an act and Morsy’s justice minister backtracked after Mahmoud refused to vacate his post.

Add in Morsy reaching the 100-day mark in office with a record nowhere near what he had boasted in his program and a march to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Maspero massacre last Tuesday in which chants rang out just as strongly against the Brotherhood as against the military, and it’s been a week in which there have been constant reminders of where Morsy is not delivering when it comes to the revolution.

For the Brotherhood, Tahrir is the place from which they claim legitimacy, which kick started their success in first the parliamentary and then the presidential elections. To hear anti-Brotherhood chants in Tahrir is anathema to them, and also a knock to the legitimacy they perceive to have, that of the square.

A store attendant on Talaat Harb, Ashraf, said this isn’t the first time anti-Brotherhood protesters attempted to be heard amidst the throngs, but on Friday “they are more numerous and so could get into the square.” He contends, “This is what the Brotherhood does, they allow no space for different views.”

And the ferocity of Friday’s clashes were testament to that defensiveness over who controls the narrative of the square. Since winning a parliamentary majority and the presidency, the Brotherhood feel that the square ousted Mubarak and put them in his place.

But members of the Brotherhood didn’t see it like that, insisting that they were the ones provoked. Mohamed Ibrahim, a Brotherhood member from Mansoura said, “We are Muslims together, I would never throw a stone but I will protect myself. We didn’t come to rain on anyone’s parade, our intentions in coming here were pure and guided by Allah.”

Countering claims of blind obedience to the Brotherhood he said, “When I die, God will judge me, not anyone from the Brotherhood. I want the world to see us disagreeing but together in the square peacefully.”

Despite the belief of the Brotherhood supporters, the once banned group and its president will have to deal with growing discontent at the slow pace of change and the delay in attempting to achieve revolutionary goals, much to the chagrin of all the others who populated the square during the 18 days that ousted Mubarak and beyond.

First published in modified version here.

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.

“When the march turned the corner towards Maspero, to be met with gunfire and the APCs, it was the families, the women and children who were at the front,” recounts Noov Senary, who was present that day, “The march was for many like a day out, no one imagined that it would end like this.” Senary insists that the army opened fire preemptively and without provocation.

The then ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) went into damage limitation mode, and in a sickening twist to the tale, used the very same footage that indicted them to exonerate themselves. Panicked drivers, they claimed.

A march was organized from exactly the same starting point – the neighborhood of Shubra – to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the massacre. The mood was diminished; there was a palpable anger but also a sense of unfinished business. Again protesters marched to Maspero to challenge a state media that has not been restructured or cleansed. The SCAF generals have since been removed from their posts in a gracious manner and given medals for their service. The safe exit people warned against has happened.

Even though the Maspero massacre came as part of a series of violent incidents against Christians both pre- and post-revolution, it was a turning point in the road map of the post-revolutionary period and what it meant was that the guidelines of the post-Mubarak era had been set – in blood – and would sadly be very similar to the guidelines of the regime it overthrew. Murder of civilians by the state, limited or no accountability, no justice for those killed. Meet the new state, same as the old state. The setback was not just in real terms of lives lost, but in the course of the country’s future, which had by then definitively diverged into a dead end.

Sherif Azer of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights wrote in al-Badil newspaper that Maspero was the first incident in Egyptian history and the history of discrimination against the Copts that the “institutional army of the state committed a massacre against a specific sect.” According to international law, Azer contended, the Maspero massacre could be considered ethnic cleansing.

Azer also stated that “for those who don’t know how armies are run and especially the Egyptian army, not one bullet can be fired without a direct order from a commanding officer, who takes his orders from his superior and so on, up the chain of command. That makes the massacre the responsibility of those at the top, which is SCAF. And since SCAF was the actual ruler of the country at that time, that makes the Maspero massacre the only incident in the history of contemporary Egypt that Copts were killed on orders from the rulers of the state and carried out by its army.”

A year on, and the chants are just as urgent against the now-ruling Muslim Brotherhood as much as the military. It wasn’t the Brotherhood that committed the massacre but involving it in some sort of culpability is possible for two interconnected reasons. First, now that they hold the reins of power they have still not sought justice for the martyrs who died on the Brotherhood’s path to power, and secondly – and more pertinently – because it had been decided even back then that the Brotherhood would play the political game within the parameters set by SCAF, the parameters of no accountability and business as usual.
That’s why the Brotherhood is considered complicit by the protesters; that is why the chants ring out against them with as much venom as against the generals. The Brotherhood aided and abetted and this would be more apparent in the following Mohamed Mahmoud clashes of November 2011 which the Brotherhood helped shut down – also with no accountability – to save their parliamentary elections.

And so when the protesters made it to Maspero, there was little sense of accomplishment. The building remains, all that it symbolizes remains within it and the killers have walked away with medals. That’s why there is still a sense of anger, and yes, failure. For justice has not yet been attained. What remains are fragments in tortured memories of the people who witnessed that day first hand.

Head of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights Hossam Bahgat had written the day before the anniversary, “I advise myself and you. Try and remember the martyrs of Maspero without reliving the events. Resist the flashbacks. Don’t sit alone. Don’t blame yourself. Don’t blame the revolution. Blame the murderer. The revolution continues.”

Originally published here.

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.”

The Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), which assumed power following the overthrow of Mubarak and promised a swift transition to civilian government, was finally relieved of its formal executive role in June this year when Mohamed Morsi became Egypt’s first democratically-elected president. Morsi moved quickly to impose his authority by forcibly retiring some of the junta’s most senior generals, but in a remarkable broadside, Amnesty – which previously aided the former Muslim Brotherhood member when he was a political prisoner under the Mubarak regime back in 2006 – said that a memorandum on human rights sent by the organisation to the new president had been ignored.

“President Mohamed Morsi has a historic opportunity to tackle the bloody legacy of police and army and guarantee that no one is above the law in Egypt,” said the organisation in a statement. “Without bringing to justice security forces responsible for human rights violations, justice for the victims will remain elusive.”

The reports have been launched just days ahead of the first anniversary of Egypt’s ‘Maspero massacre’, one of the most brutal atrocities carried out by security forces under army rule. The incident, which resulted in the deaths of 27 mostly Coptic Christian protesters from live ammunition and being run over by APCs in downtown Cairo, was a turning point in popular attitudes towards the junta.

Mina Daniel was one of the demonstrators shot and killed at the Maspero protest. His sister Mary said, “We set off on a peaceful protest that turned into a war zone. Mina has been dead a year, and what he fought for hasn’t been achieved, those who killed our children are being rewarded.”

The Amnesty reports target both police and military security personnel. Amnesty’s Egypt researcher Mohamed Lotfy said, “While both [sets of forces] committed unlawful killings, sexual violence against female protesters, using live ammunition, using people in civilian clothes to attack protesters and violating international standards by not using reasonable force, the [state] media distorted the image of the victims. The truth is lost and these victims deserve justice.”

One of the most notorious attacks on protesters under SCAF came during clashes outside the cabinet building in December 2011, when a protester who became known as the ‘woman with the blue bra’ was dragged and beaten by soldiers in the street until her underwear was showing. A nearby cameraphone recorded the incident as soldiers continued to stomp on her chest.

Another woman who tried to stop the soldiers beating her that day and got beaten up herself was Azza Hilal. “I was severely beaten and stayed in a coma for a week with a fractured skull,” recalled Hilal. “How could the same things that happened under Mubarak still happen now?”

The reports highlight the total impunity enjoyed by police forces even after the toppling of Mubarak and focuses on three key events: the violence on Mohamed Mahmoud street near Tahrir Square in November 2011 where police officers aimed shotgun pellets at protesters’ eyes, the second wave of clashes in the same area in February 2011 in the wake of the Port Said football stadium disaster where 76 fans lost their lives, and police violence during clashes in front of the swanky Nile City towers on the Nile Corniche in August 2012 during which residents of a nearby poor neighbourhood were shot and tear-gassed.

The report sheds light on the ‘brutal’ and incommensurate response of police forces to protests as well as ‘longstanding patterns’ of detainee torture and the state’s ‘brazen disregard’ for the rule of law.

Riot police have routinely responded to peaceful protests with “excessive and lethal force, including disproportionate use of tear gas, beatings and arbitrary arrest.” Amnesty also criticizes the US for continuing to supply Egyptian police with tear gas and shotgun ammunition, without guarantees that it will not be used against protesters.

The litany of abuse and torture seems to have continued into Morsi’s reign, with a case of death by torture in a police station in the governorate of Daqahlia occurring as recently as September 16. The death of a civilian who was inside the station to file a report regarding an earlier incidence of police brutality led to clashes outside the station and the death of yet another man who was shot by police.

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.

Moving on and other newspapers place the spotlight on events that are actually happening in the country. First and foremost are the numerous sector strikes and the heavy security crackdown on them. Al-Shurouk reports that the government “has lifted the security stick to face the strikes” reporting that security forces failed to forcefully disband the teachers strike but was rather more successful in ending the strike of the Nile University students by force, arresting five in the process.

However, lest one think that today’s papers are out of the Al-Watan type territory, the stalwart of skewed reporting Al-Ahram leads with the frankly provocative headline of “Popular rage after increase in transport sector strikes”. Displaying a new design layout that makes one almost pine for the Mubarak-era Ahram, the newspaper ignores the crackdowns on the various other strikes to report on the anger and inconvenience citizens suffered at the hand of the public transport sector strikes. Not to dismiss the inconvenience that was certainly suffered by regular citizens, but to make no mention of the crackdowns on the other strikes and highlighting the one strike that inflamed your average citizen in the street is typical of the nation’s highest circulation newspaper.

One newspaper that looks like Al-Ahram more and more every day is the unofficial government newspaper and official newspaper of the Freedom and Justice Party. The Freedom and Justice newspaper leads with the visit of Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir in Cairo, extolling it as the widening of the horizons of the “Nile Valley Renaissance”. Renaissance is the favored word of the Muslim Brotherhood, and attempts to shoehorn it into everything that President Morsy does is on some level quite impressive. Naturally, there is absolutely no mention of the international arrest warrant out for Bashir for crimes in Darfur, and that Egypt is required to arrest him, rather than host him. Maybe next time then.

You needn’t go far for some Brotherhood bashing however, as Ibrahim Eissa uses his front-page column in Al-Tahrir newspaper to criticize their monopoly on the constitution. Calling it the constitution of the one percent, Eissa writes that the brotherhood are preparing a constitution that will “pass their vision of the state filled with ideas some of which are contrary to civilization. And the Salafis want a constitution that will not bother their minds that reside in the middle-ages for most hours of the day.”

Eissa contends that the civil forces in the constituent assembly are mere window dressing and the constitution will not pass before being signed off by the Brotherhood’s guidance bureau and the large looming shadow of Khairat Al-Shater after approval from their Salafi mates.

Originally published in slightly modified form in Egypt Independent

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.

Member of the Brotherhood’s political arm the Freedom and Justice party (FJP) Sameh El-Essawi said, “This move was going to happen eventually but was expedited by the Sinai attack. It was a huge technical error, this was an attack against armed men and Israel had been on high alert for three days prior yet no steps were taken on this side of the border. Morsi was very upset.”

“It’s a big enough move that makes it hard to believe that Morsi acted as a solo player,” Attalah said.

There has been a tug of war between Morsi and the military since he assumed the presidency, a grapple that has played out mainly in the courts and the media. An eleventh-hour constitutional supplement that gave the military executive and legislative powers was rescinded by Morsi as part of Sunday’s decrees. However, Tantawi’s replacement is someone who can be accepted by all.

“El-Sissi spent a year of training in the US and has good relations with them, as well as contacts with Israel, he is not an unknown,” El-Essawi said, “and this is not a coup. These people (Tantawi and the other retired generals) have loyalty to Egypt but there is also an issue with political loyalty, and this affected how they ran the country.” El-Sissi was also the Scaf general who admitted to Amnesty International that virginity tests against female protesters detained by the army had taken place, defending it as a move to protect the army from allegations of rape.

Yet until Morsi’s surprise move it seemed that the military had the upper hand in this contesting of power due to its influence on the Egyptian judiciary, as evidenced when Morsi tried to reinstate the FJP-majority parliament that had been dissolved by Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC). Him and his party had to back down from that fight despite “the fact that in no country in the world can the judiciary dissolve the sitting parliament,” El-Essawi contended.

“The Morsi move is well calculated in that it’s not a hard coup against the military nor an attempt to end the military legacy in Egypt,” Attalah said, “It’s the replacement of a critical rank, the kind of personnel who are in charge of critical elements in the military such as weaponry and intelligence. It’s a very tactical move.”

Now that the military apparatus has been consolidated under Morsi, the next battle for the Brotherhood seems to be with the Egyptian judiciary, which appeared aligned to the generals. Already, legal experts have cast doubt on the legality of Morsi’s many decisions. There is also a current constituent assembly at work drafting the country’s post-revolution constitution. That is why the appointment of senior judge Mahmoud Mekki – who has fought a long battle for judicial independence – as vice president seems a move to counter judicial opposition.

“Egypt needs a new legal and constitutional framework,” said El-Essawi, “Morsi’s constitution comes after a revolution and eradicates all constitutions that came before it. in the next four years we will face difficulties in interpreting the constitution and Morsi will need instant evaluation, that is Mekki’s role.”

For her part Attalah said Morsi will now be “facing strong judicial opposition from the SCC and [other parts of the judiciary] so he needs judicial figures on his team. He needs someone with the capacity and experience of Mekki to spar with the judiciary that will react to his scrapping of the constitutional supplement.”

Morsi had promised that the first two appointments of his presidency would be female and Coptic Christian vice presidents, and though there has been a female and Coptic Christian added to his presidential team, it seems Mekki will be the sole vice president because according to El-Essawi it was found that to have more than one deputy was “unconstitutional and that wont change in the new constitution.”

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.

The interior ministry and its nefarious police force remains as is, the name change of State Security not withstanding. So does the propaganda state machine housed in Maspero. And of course there is the military. When the army’s director of operations waffled on at the Haykestep ceremony about military actions from January 25 onwards, it might as well have been Mubarak rather than Morsi in attendance for all the difference it made.

The new ascendency of the Muslim Brotherhood must assimilate into the existing paradigm of the state and how it functions and views itself. This was going to be the case anyways – bringing change to entrenched bureaucracy is not an overnight thing – but there is no indication that steps will be made to restructure existing institutions going forward in any meaningful way.

Since the military assumed power there has been no violent confrontation between it and the Brotherhood. The violence has been saved for revolutionary forces, which has been less willing to accept the de facto state even without the head. The Brotherhood has been more wiling to engage Scaf behind closed doors, its self-interest dictating the scope of its ostensibly reformist approach. Therefore, it is perfectly content with assuming power within the existing structure.

Mubarak, along with the possibility of his son’s succession, had caused a pressure pot situation. Naturally, resistance builds over three decades in power and tying the fate and future of an entire nation so inextricably to the health of one ailing despot was bound to create disturbances.

That is why a Morsi presidency works best for the “stability and wheel of production” camp, all the pieces are back in place with minimal disruption. A Shafik victory would have caused further turbulence, obviously, and the state desires stability above all else.

So what we’re going to get is a series of populist PR-friendly moves in tandem with the novelty of having such a different form to the presidency. Already, Morsi has announced that 750,000 government employees hired on temporary contracts for years will be given permanent contracts from this month. This is an important issue, I don’t intend to belittle longstanding grievances that need to be addressed, but there was a hope that underlying issues pertaining to employment would see a significant overhaul.

One sector of government employees who have long complained of their temporary status are ambulance workers. Their work has come to the fore since the revolution for obvious reasons, and they’re usually in the thick of things when there are clashes, ferrying wounded protesters from the front lines amid the noxious tear gas fumes and flying bullets.

Every ambulance has three people assigned to it, the driver, the medic and an assistant. Disparity in pay between them is problematic, sometimes assistants getting paid more than the medics because they tend to be college graduates. Additionally, they have no insurance, and are often stationed in areas far from where they live, having to cover huge swathes of territory on their shifts. So while handing them permanent contracts is a vital step, it doesn’t alleviate all issues they face.

Yes, it’s only day one for Morsi, and there will be some bickering, but a marriage of convenience has already been arranged, marking the birth of a hybrid state that now incorporates an organization that was as part of the old Egypt as much as it will be part of the new one.