The Skeptic الشكاك

1197 Egypt Adrift

Elijah Zarwan, the Middle East Institute, 14 May 2013

The main streets of Manshiyat Abdel Moneim Riad, a choked grid of hastily constructed apartment blocks spreading out from a power station at Cairo’s northern edge, are organized according to a simple principle: shops and cafes on the edge, mounds of waste, animals, and rough teenagers from the narrow tributary streets in the middle. Rickshaws and trucks battle for position and skirt potholes in between. Men in search of a bit of air brush away flies at sidewalk cafes and survey the scene with contempt.

The line at two free health clinics run by the Muslim Brotherhood stretches out the door. Around the corner, at a stand by the local mosque, a recorded voice blares from a tinny loudspeaker advertising meat and butter subsidized by the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. A small crowd gathers. Even at US$3 a pound, roughly 30 percent off the price at the local butcher, meat is beyond the reach of many families here.

That the Brotherhood had been doing this sort of charity work here for years before the 2011 uprising perhaps helps explain why Manshiyat Abdel Moneim Riad turned out so strongly in support of senior Brotherhood politician Mohammed al-Beltagi in the November 2011-January 2012 parliamentary elections. Yet, if the diverse remains of campaign posters from the May 2012 presidential election now peeling off the walls of shops are any guide, Manshiyat Abdel Moneim Riad is not the “Muslim Brotherhood stronghold” Western reporters invited to attend Brotherhood rallies here have dubbed it.

The Brotherhood wins here and in similar neighborhoods across the country not because it is overwhelmingly popular, but because it has a disciplined and motivated base and because, in contrast to much newer parties, it is there. A year ago, Hosni Mubarak’s former ruling National Democratic Party was dissolved, its members licking their wounds after protesters burned their local offices across the country, its patronage networks in disarray. The fledgling secular parties cried for social justice from television studios, but did not have the funding or the roots in neighborhood alleyways to compete. A year ago, enough Egyptians, perhaps hoping the Brotherhood’s charity work in places where Mubarak’s state had been largely absent might translate into a more charitable government, were willing to give the group a chance.

But now another senior Brotherhood politician, Mohamed Morsi, is the head of state, and the state appears more absent than ever. Government services—electricity, trash collection—are slipping. Ruthless vigilantism and mob justice are replacing brutal policing. To many here, the country appears dangerously adrift, the president not up to the task. The government may be paddling furiously—traveling the world in search of trade and investment, urgently negotiating an IMF deal to unlock aid—but some politicians privately fear it is too late: the ship, they say, capsized long ago.

Meanwhile, the Brotherhood is still on the corner, selling discounted meat and offering free medical consultations. But such charity efforts do little to mitigate the reality that most Egyptians’ daily lives are more difficult by any measure than they were two years ago. Disillusionment and frustration with Brotherhood rule have turned to a visceral anger in many quarters, as repeated mob attacks on Brotherhood offices have showed. Protesters angry at Morsi’s November 2012 arrogation of extraordinary powers to ram through the country’s current constitution still chant “illegitimate,” as they did in 2005 protests against Mubarak’s amendments to the former constitution. But that familiar refrain has now been joined by a more damning verdict: “failure.”

The verdict, in some respects, is unfair. The Brotherhood inherited all the thorny, complex problems that contributed to the uprising, plus dire new problems the uprising created, and was left holding the bag. Whoever was so unfortunate as to be elected president of Egypt at such a time would have struggled to reverse the country’s descent in the space of a year. Others might perhaps have worked harder to pursue consensus and to share power, others might have met less resistance from the very levers of government, others might have taken more quick, even if largely symbolic, steps to court popularity. But the challenges facing Egypt were, and remain, so overwhelming that no cash-strapped government could possibly hope to meet them in a year’s time.

Yet widespread disenchantment with Brotherhood rule need not immediately translate into a Brotherhood defeat at the polls. For the moment, the opposition appears more comfortable watching the Brotherhood fail at governing than sharing the blame. Certainly, the Brotherhood has given them little incentive to do otherwise. Buoyed by their success in every national electoral contest Egypt has seen since Mubarak fell, the Brotherhood has viewed the defeated opposition’s conditions for cooperation as galling, street protests as the work of counterrevolutionary saboteurs. Many Egyptians may see the country as dangerously adrift, but the Brotherhood does appear to have set a course: to rely on its political machine, and the formal opposition’s talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, to deliver a new parliament that can legislate its (Islamist) agenda and to embed itself in as many state and business institutions as possible—and in the meantime to do what it can to avert an economic crisis of a scale that could upend that program.

Assembling the chaos, murky rumors, and misinformation that have marked the last two years into some sort of sense, by way of elaborate conspiracy theories or reductionist narratives, is a national pastime now growing old. Café patrons, fishmongers, and unemployed engineers still theorize that the United States is supporting the rise of “pragmatic” Brotherhood regimes in the Arab world to lay the groundwork for an Israeli-Arab peace deal, a U.S.-Israeli strike against Iran, or a pivot to Asia; that the military is preparing a coup; that Egyptian or foreign security services are fostering chaos to pave the way for a revanchist regime, either before or at the end of Morsi’s term. Sometimes, the theory goes, it is all of the above. But more seem tired of trying to make sense of the mess, more willing to posit that if there is a narrative, it is that there is no narrative: the country is descending into chaos.

Given time, Egypt will almost certainly emerge from its current troubles. When it does, it will probably not resemble any of the utopias the liberals, Islamists, leftists, farmers, and dissatisfied urban poor who stood shoulder-to-shoulder in Tahrir Square two years ago imagined. With luck, patience and perseverance, it may still emerge healthier, stronger, and more free than it was before the uprising. In the meantime, the people of Manshiyat Abdel-Moneim Riad wait patiently for free medical advice at the Brotherhood’s clinics. But all patience has a limit. The challenge for the Brotherhood, and for Egyptians in general, is to reverse the country’s downward drift before that limit is surpassed.

1114 The Streets of Egypt Are Changing

Elijah Zarwan, Foreign Affairs, 5 February 2013

Last week, on a public bus near Tahrir Square, passengers were trapped, pressed tightly together and choking on teargas as the vehicle struggled to maneuver around a standoff between hapless police conscripts and a crowd of young men making a stand along the bank of the Nile. The commuters, understandably, were furious. “Who are these people?” they asked with disgust as they wheeled passed stunted teenagers throwing rocks and making obscene gestures.

That is a question heard again and again over the last two years, as near identical scenes have played out with numbing regularity. Most Cairenes, President Mohammed Morsi, his cohorts in the Muslim Brotherhood, and the generals who ruled the country before them have agreed on a quick verdict: “these people” are paid thugs, the pawns of shadowy remnants of either the old regime or unnamed foreign governments. As Morsi charged last week, they are “the counterrevolution incarnate.”

Some among the rock-wielding crowd might indeed be paid agents. Sometimes, they arrive in the city center together on the backs of mini-pickup trucks. Sometimes, they appear to take direction from bald men with mustaches and bad leather jackets. Sometimes, their faces bear knife scars, broken noses, and other telltale signs of lives spent in Cairo’s dark underworld. Often their eyes are glazed and their speech erratic from cheap pills. That — and the fact that the Mubarak regime cultivated an auxiliary militia of drug addicts and criminals in poor neighborhoods for use when it was more convenient for civilian forces to carry out oppression — suggests that some of the chaos might, in fact, be organized.

But it would be a mistake to believe that is the extent of the problem. And it would be a further mistake to reduce the young men to paid thugs, or to blame the unrest on revolutionary anniversary pangs, Muslim Brotherhood misrule, or a court’s verdict — although those are all elements of it. True, it is difficult to systematically track the demographics of a stampede, but what most of those rushing to escape birdshot and teargas canisters have in common is that they are male, urban, young, unemployed, have very little to lose, and even less confidence in a political class that does not represent them. For them, the mantra of the uprising that began two Januarys ago — “Bread, freedom, social justice” — remains an urgent and unanswered demand.

If anyone doubted that Egypt’s unrest would continue until the urban poor saw a concrete improvement in their daily lives, the events of the last weeks should have convinced them otherwise. For the majority of the Egyptian population that grew up poor and has known no other president than Mubarak, life has been hard and has only gotten harder. The narrow streets of the urban slums admit little air. Decent work, already scarce, has become scarcer. Prices have continued to rise. Prospects for a dignified life — a steady job, marriage, and escape from the family home — have grown steadily more remote.

Before the 2011 revolution, some of the poor had turned to the streets, to pills, to hashish, to brawling, to fun. With the army out of domestic politics and the opposition in disarray, that street culture is likely the biggest check on the Islamist project. The dispirited urban population is perhaps now more heavily armed than at any time in modern history. Families –“honorable people,” as onlookers describe them — still join protests by day, but they melt away by night, and a leaner, angrier group takes their place.

The violent protests are still sporadic, yet to merge into a new revolution. In the meantime, though, the young, urban poor are already changing the streets. Since 2011, that population has rushed to fill whatever space the state’s contraction and the police’s retreat have left open. Soon after Mubarak’s departure, minibus stations popped up on snarled street corners where police once stood. Stoned and rowdy street vendors have gradually taken over Cairo’s Talaat Harb (formerly Suleiman Pasha) Street, an avenue that Egyptians of a certain age remember as “the most elegant in the Middle East,” or as “more beautiful than Paris.” Unemployed young men have repeatedly blocked major traffic arteries in the capital and have destroyed the lobby of a five-star hotel. City streets and alleyways are harder and more lawless, as more people compete for fewer resources. Tempers fray, and manners are forgotten. The level of street crime, which was always miraculously low for a city of more than 20 million, has risen.

For years before the 2011 uprising, many anticipated a “revolution of the hungry.” Many still do, as twin economic and political crises combine. When Mubarak fell, many poor Egyptians believed it had already happened, and expected Mubarak’s fabled billions to return to the country and fund apartments for everyone. At the time, a rich Cairene, a woman accustomed to speaking sharply to those she considered beneath her, was shocked when a worker she had hired refused to obey her instructions. “You must understand that you had your time,” he told her. “This is ours.”

But when Mubarak’s imagined billions did not return, and when his ouster did not immediately usher in a new age of prosperity and freedom, disillusionment set in. The middle class and the middle aged might have the patience to give electoral politics and stability a chance to work their magic. The unemployed youth do not. For them, the flux of the current revolutionary moment represents their last chance to salvage a better future for themselves and the country. The long-anticipated and feared “revolution of the hungry” may have already begun, albeit in slow motion.

Egyptians have shown a talent for retreating from the brink at the last minute. Despite regular bouts of unrest and civil strife, the country has limped onward. But given the dire economic outlook, the toxic political atmosphere, and the increasing impatience and desperation on the street, it might not always. Those who gave their lives in the uprising did not do so for Egypt to enter a limping race to the bottom, and those who continue to fill the streets will not stay quiet for long until that course is reversed, or until the government can restore at least some hope that their demands for bread, freedom, and social justice will be met.

1143 In an Islamist Egypt, Can Diversity Survive?

But now that Morsi has apparently settled the question of whether he or the generals run domestic affairs, Egypt’s non-Islamists and liberals can no longer hide behind the military. Their strategy of making Faustian bargains with the generals, of sacrificing “some” democracy in exchange for a “civil” (non-religious) state, has been shown to be as ineffective as it was morally bankrupt.

Preaching to Muslim Brotherhood politicians that they should be less Islamist or less politically self-serving has proved to be naive and ineffectual. The conduct of these politicians since the fall of Mubarak makes it clear that they seek to consolidate power and to implement their agenda — an Islamist agenda.

Furthermore, with significant pressure from more rigid Salafist elements to his right, as was vividly on display in aspects of last week’s demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Morsi will face stiff challenges if he does shift course and seek a more inclusive approach to governance.

In the meantime, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are carving out control of as much of the state as they can. No doubt they see these steps as necessary for implementing their plans for reform and delivering on their promises of a better life for Egyptians. Be that as it may, there is currently no credible institutional check on their power to make domestic policy.

It would be foolhardy for Egyptian opposition leaders, however, to again place their faith in the ability of the military to serve as a check on the ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood. Such authority, to the extent that it might exist, is inherently undemocratic and lacks transparency. Similarly, the opposition should take no great comfort in the ability of bottom-up pressure generated by mass mobilization and public protest to serve as a barrier to the monopolization of power and the abuse of authority. In a weary society craving a modicum of stability, such public shows of force may never again be re-created.

But despite its dominant position in Egyptian politics today, the electoral strength of the Muslim Brotherhood should not be taken as a given. The demands of leadership, the magnitude of Egypt’s challenges and the high expectations of the populace have already begun to erode its widespread popularity. The fluidity of political dynamics and the shallowness of party allegiances were clearly on display in the first round of the presidential elections, when Morsi won only a quarter of the vote.

While not losing sight of longer-term efforts to expand their popular appeal and to establish nationwide political organizations, the Egyptian opposition must take immediate steps to counteract the president’s de facto monopoly on formal political power. Liberals must cohere around a core set of constitutional demands: equal rights for all citizens, religious freedom, separation of powers, rule of law and issues of due process.

At this sensitive moment in Egypt’s history, consensus-driven decisions taken by a broadly inclusive coalition stand the best chance of enduring and ensuring the political stability Egypt needs to recover economically.

Toward that end, Morsi would do well to remember his promises to be “a president for all Egyptians,” mindful of the fact that a majority of those who voted for him in the runoffs preferred someone else in the first round. His political rivals would do well to cooperate with him and the Brotherhood to meet the serious practical challenges Egypt faces, to present themselves as credible alternatives rather than only as armchair critics, and to keep the agenda focused on solving the country’s problems. To the extent opportunities arise, Morsi’s opponents should meet him halfway, cooperating on those issues on which they can agree while articulating a positive alternative on those issues where they do not.

1134 What Europe Should Tell Mohammed Morsi

By Elijah Zarwan and Issandr El Amrani, The European Council on Foreign Relations

The inaugural European trip of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, should be an occasion for reflection. The relationship between Europe and Egypt is one complicated by colonial history, silence on and even complicity with many of the abuses conducted by Hosni Mubarak’s regime, unease at the rise of Islamists as a dominant political power, as well as many binding cultural, economic and political ties. Mr Morsi’s visit is thus an occasion to clear the air and reset the relationship.

The basis of that relationship should be a frank and open conversation between partners with a shared interest in Egypt’s stability and prosperity. Europe should make clear that it believes decisions taken by an inclusive democracy based on broad consensus and respect for each citizen’s equal rights stand the best chance of enduring to produce the stability Egypt needs to rebuild its economy.

The message is particularly timely as tear gas clears in Tunis and the families of the US ambassador to Libya and three of his staff grieve following violent protests that began in Cairo after Egyptian hosts of a religious talk show on a Saudi-owned satellite channel took exception to an amateur YouTube clip that defamed Islam.

Morsi’s visit affords an opportunity to have a quiet, frank conversation about whether he and the Muslim Brotherhood intend to cede the far right to the Salafi Nour Party, potentially alienating an important part of the president’s electoral base, including within the Brotherhood, to govern from the centre and to be a “president for all Egyptians”, as he put it in a campaign speech, or whether he will try to maintain an alliance of religious parties. The question is above all relevant as critical constitutional questions are being settled. Constitutional articles are more enduring than campaign promises.

European foreign policymakers such as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who had the luxury of being part of a newly elected government, have expressed regret at past European complacency towards Arab dictatorships. His country, France, was alongside Italy and the United Kingdom among those who had the closest ties with Mr Mubarak and were the least inclined to take positions against the excesses of his rule. Others have expressed similar contrition, and have spoken of a need for change and even atonement, and voiced the hope of helping a fledging transition to democracy.

The question is now, as the head of state of the Arab world’s most populous and most influential country visits, what will Europe do about it?

Mr Morsi is making this trip to signal – as he recently has to GCC countries and China, and will shortly do with the United States – that Egypt needs help to get its economy back on track. Pledges from the May 2011 Deauville summit remain unfulfilled, and Europe like many potential donors (or debt-relievers) and investors has remained cautious about proceeding while chaos prevailed under the military-led transition. But that situation is changing, even if Egyptians still have some way to go, as Mr Morsi’s recent assertion of his power and the forced retirement of military leaders has shown. He and his new government are sending the message, in every way they can, that Egypt is once again open for business.

With Egypt soon set to ink a deal with the IMF, which should commit it to greater fiscal prudence in exchange for budgetary support, international donors should move to disburse their own loans and aid packages. Of course, Europe going through its own economic pain – governments may not feel so generous as they did in early 2011. Yet there is money in the pipeline – the €6.9bn earmarked for the European Neighborhood Policy for 2011-13 is one source, another are the promising infrastructure programmes envisaged under the politically damaged, but essentially sound infrastructure programs of the Union for the Mediterranean.

In addition to funds, Egyptians are also looking for a vote of confidence – trade missions to encourage investment in their country, a thumbs-up as a tourist destination, and a roadmap for greater trade integration into the eurozone, Egypt’s first export destination. There is no better way to help stabilise post-revolution Egypt than helping the new government generate jobs and growth.

A second question Europe must deal with is that Mr Morsi is an Islamist. For much of Europe’s political class – which until recently frequently backed dictators precisely because they feared their alternatives would be religious – this is a source of concern. But it is more important to see Mr Morsi as a democratically elected leader – and a politician who has pledged to be a democrat in more than a strict, majoritarian way.

In the past, Europe often bowed to the Mubarak regime’s wishes and demoted human rights concerns in its relationship with Egypt. Mr Morsi may have been democratically elected, a fact that should be celebrated. But there is no reason to give him a free pass on those issues where Europe, and many Egyptians, have concerns – today or in the future.

Finally, Europeans should be aware that as the Middle East is changing, so is Egypt’s position within it. Mr Morsi, in his early foreign policy forays, has signaled his desire for good relationships with multiple actors, moving away from the single-minded focus on the US-Egypt relationship that existed under Hosni Mubarak. His most innovative initiative thus far in regional affairs – creatinga channel, alongside Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to engage Iran on the Syrian crisis – is worth heeding.

The new Egyptian president, in other words, is not merely visiting foreign capitals to ask for help to face his country’s immediate problems. He is also reforging his country’s relationship with its traditional partners. Mr Morsi now presides over a fast-changing country in a region undergoing its biggest strategic transformation in decades. To hesitate now, to play a game of wait-and-see, to hedge one’s bets — to be satisfied, as Europe has all too often been towards a part of the world with which it has rich ties, with playing second fiddle – could very well be to miss a historic opportunity.

1130 Egyptians Making History

Elijah Zarwan, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, 8 June 2012

On Thursday, Egyptian politicians did something astonishing: they reached an agreement. A military ultimatum—agree within 48 hours on a formula for choosing the 100 people who will write the country’s next constitution, or expect a fresh constitutional declaration, the contents of which you may dislike—ended a long impasse. But the outcome sadly reinforces the narrative that only the military can press self-serving civilian politicians to fulfill their duties to the nation. More importantly, the “thirteenth-hour” agreement (the politicians actually missed the deadline) nonetheless throws Egypt’s already contorted transition deeper into confusion and uncertainty.

The original plan was for the constitutional assembly to finish its work and put a constitution to a referendum ahead of presidential elections. When that failed, many political actors expected the military to issue an updated constitutional declaration before the presidential vote. The military has now asked parliament to convene to choose the assembly members on June 12. Few expect the assembly to finish its work, or for a new interim constitutional declaration to be issued, before a president is elected in the runoff scheduled for June 16-17. But as one participant at Thursday’s meeting said, “The only thing certain now is that absolutely nothing is certain. Anything can happen.”

Particularly on questions where there is little agreement, a little ambiguity can be useful. And leaving the future constitutional assembly time to debate seems wise. But that the generals appear willing to conclude the presidential election, and their direct rule, under such constitutionally ambiguous circumstances is perhaps a sign of how confident they are that former Air Force Commander Ahmed Shafik will win.

Had the military attempted to isolate itself from presidential and civilian control, perhaps even under the guise of retreating from politics, and to assert that this arrangement must be enshrined in future constitutions, or supersede them, as its legal minds first attempted to do one year ago, this might have signaled that the military was willing even to prepare for the possibility of a victory for Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi.

The military might yet be able to countenance a Brotherhood win provided the military is insulated from the president, parliament, and civilian courts. Such a deal, includingthe presidency, the cabinet (though perhaps with restrictions, such as on civilian ministers of interior and defense), and the parliament—in effect, all the levers of government—would perhaps be too sweet for the Brotherhood to resist. The military, in that scenario, would perhaps hope that they were giving the eager Brotherhood all the rope it needed, that if the Brotherhood could take the fall for the next five rotten years, the country might at last be rid of them. Former Supreme Guide Mohammed Mahdi Akef, in a sentiment shared by at least some middle managers, said he prayed the Brotherhood would lose.

For the moment, there is no indication that the Brotherhood or the military are moving toward such an arrangement. Even the current, Brotherhood-dominated parliament is on thin ice, awaiting a verdict on whether the law governing the elections that produced it is constitutional.

For the military, such an experiment would entail risks for an institution that is naturally particularly risk-adverse when it comes to its own future—which it conflates, with some justification, with that of the state. For should the Brotherhood be handed all the rope it needs to hang itself, it could just as easily fashion the noose with someone else in mind. “The Muslim Brotherhood are not idiots,” former intelligence head Omar Suleiman recently told a columnist for a Saudi daily.

If the military does not yet try to score an end run ahead of the polls by attempting to cement its immunity, independence, and, perhaps, decision-making role, by fiat, or with the hurried imprimatur of a constitutional assembly, it will signal that it views Shafik as a shoo-in. Indeed, Shafik might win even a fair election—he appears to have so far managed to pick up more of the center than has his opponent in their respective second-round pivots from their respective bases, though a great many, perhaps an absolute majority of, demoralized voters will abstain or spoil their ballots.

Morsi and the Brotherhood tentatively threw in their lot with the mass protests in Cairo, Alexandria, and elsewhere that erupted following the June 2 verdict in the trial of Hosni Mubarak, his sons, and various of their henchmen. But those protests found their wellspring first in the disenchantment of an urban electorate that wants neither someone from the old regime nor someone from the Brotherhood, and so are difficult for the Brotherhood to exploit for electoral gain.

In Cairo, after it was announced that he won the first round of elections in the city, almost everyone said they voted for charismatic Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahi—whether or not, one suspects, they had. Some of Morsi’s billboards have also been torn down. His painful flirtation with both Sabahi and Brotherhood defector Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh has not yet been consummated. Brotherhood members and those urging a boycott scuffle amid the tea-vendors of Tahrir.

Running the numbers on hypothetical electoral outcomes is now a favorite sport for Egypt-watchers. Both candidates won roughly a quarter of votes in the first round, and can count on their respective bases. But the decisions of the other roughly 50 percent of the voters who voted for neither candidate are difficult to predict. Shafik has picked up endorsements from small political parties, the former loyal opposition, and the tourism-worker association, and he can reasonably expect many who voted for former foreign minister Amr Moussa as a less divisive alternative to vote for him in the second round to keep the Brotherhood out. But much of the center was shocked by the recent acquittal of senior security officials and Mubarak’s sons, and by the judges’ conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that police killed protesters in January 2011.

By the same token, much of the center is alarmed by the prospect of the Brotherhood controlling both the presidency and parliament, and Morsi has not persuasively made his case to the dyed-in-the-wool opposition, some of whom have even said they will vote for Shafik, in order “to hasten the revolutionary dialectic,” or “to spark a second revolution.” Many, looking at the events of the last year, believe the Brotherhood would be happy to strike a deal with the military in exchange for power. As one disheartened first-round voter recently put it, the question is now “whether one prefers one’s dictatorship straight-up, or with a bit of religion mixed in.” Faced with such a choice, many will choose neither. Some will act on the streets.

Either way, the generals are perhaps banking on the notion that the battle for Egypt’s future will be fought on the terrain of institutions and laws, not on the pavements of Tahrir, that protests will eventually die down following concessions, crackdowns, fatigue, and despair. The Egyptian regime has survived similar periods in the past in similar ways.

If so, it is a tragic miscalculation: tragic for those who will yet lose their eyes, for the bereft mothers, for millions of poor people who will not find enough to eat, and for a new generation of disillusioned millions, who, like their parents had in the 1970s, dreamed of, fought for, and failed to secure a better future. But also tragic for the lasting damage to the prestige of perhaps the last two institutions in Egypt that had any: the military (a preoccupation a top general not long ago confided to the press he harbored) and, now that the courts have been drafted into the political fray, perhaps the judiciary.

In a way, Egypt is left where it was after the initial 18-day uprising, on the verge of a terrifying period of chaos—and perhaps, as many said they feared after the first-round elections, of killing—hoping the army’s intentions are pure. In the halo of the national catharsis and jubilation that erupted when the army did the right thing then and saved the country from chaos, some of those who are now among the generals’ most outspoken adversaries said they would give the military more than it dare ask for now. After a year of disappointment, mistakes, mismanagement, and, in extreme circumstances, soldiers’ use of force against protesters, fewer are willing to give the military the benefit of the doubt, a fact reflected in the recent resurgence of mass protest.

If Shafik makes good on his campaign promises to endeavor not to imprison people for their opinions and to achieve the goals of the youth’s revolution, rather than his campaign promises to use lethal force to disperse protests, Egypt will not be a utopia, but it will be better at the end of his term. The same, one hopes, might hold true if he makes good on his more surly promises (he praised the use of lethal force to clear a May protest in front of the Ministry of Defense, saying it was a small taste of what to expect under his rule, for example). It will just take more wasted blood to get there.
In such a situation, there is little Europeans and other foreigners who wish Egypt well can do. The challenge will be to maintain good relations with Egypt, the nation and the people, without entering into what will and should be an Egyptian struggle over the country’s future.

Egypt is in crisis. The best donors can do is try to minimize the suffering that crisis causes, by, for example, shoring up the currency, or by helping to ensure citizens have access to healthcare, clean water, and electricity. If Egypt’s next government backslides on human rights—on freedom of opinion or assembly for example—foreign governments can and should speak out clearly and publicly, but always as a frank disagreement among equals with a shared interest in Egypt’s prosperity and stability.

The stakes of the unfolding Egyptian drama are highest for Egyptians, and they are the only ones who can and should determine its outcome. But the actual economic and security costs, as well as opportunity costs, of an unhappy outcome in Egypt are too high for the rest of the region and the world to bear, at a time when both can least afford them.

1122 Contesting Egypt’s Future

Elijah Zarwan, Foreign Policy, 23 May 2012

In Egypt, on every street and in every alleyway, there has been one topic of serious debate over the past few weeks: today’s presidential elections, the country’s first of any suspense or consequence. Figures from Egypt’s formerly quasi-underground opposition stare down from billboards blanketing the country. Leading civilian candidates debate on television for the first time in Egypt and the Arab world. It is not quite a democracy — Egypt remains a military dictatorship, albeit one in flux — but it is a bumptious mirage of what Egyptian democracy might look like in 2016 or 2017, if there are free, peaceful elections at the end of this next president’s term. Charges and recriminations will begin soon enough, and everything will look inevitable in hindsight. But the days ahead of the polls were memorable for their mix of resurgent hope, pride, and the anxiety of real suspense.

To be sure, some election results would be more polarizing, and therefore more dangerous, than others. The military has often publicly insisted it is not backing any candidate. But Ahmed Shafiq — the man whom Hosni Mubarak reportedly called his “third son,” and who served under the former president as head of the air force, as civil aviation minister, and, briefly, as prime minister — has quietly presented himself as the military’s candidate and as the face of stability. Officers privately bristle at the notion of taking orders from or entrusting the country to any of the civilian politicians, whom they view with scorn. Amid the noise and fatal violence that followed last month’s exclusion of other leading candidates (spy chief Omar Suleiman, Muslim Brotherhood powerbroker Khairat al-Shatir, and avuncular televangelist Hazem Saleh Abou-Ismail), Shafiq, who had methodically campaigned for a year, slipped quietly back into the race after the law passed in part to exclude him was tied up in legal challenges. When the furor had died, he topped a government-commissioned poll. Blue billboards across the country that had previously read only, “The President”, were replaced with his image and the slogan, “Deeds, not words.” Suddenly he seemed a more plausible candidate, and protesters began dogging his campaign events. At a rally in southern Egypt last week, one man in the audience threw his shoe at the candidate (police and soldiers looked on idly as pro-Shafiq partisans dragged him out of sight).

Yet the military probably does not need to engage in widespread rigging or fraud on voting day to remain autonomous and immune from civilian prosecution. The most unacceptable candidates have been removed. Mubarak-era judges have defined the contours of the competition, and an unreformed, influential state media machine has tilted the field. A large segment of the population was never sold on the “revolution” — as it is almost universally called here — in the first place. Afraid of chaos, economic hardship, bloodshed, and religious zealotry, they sat out the 18-day uprising, watching state television. They have found little in the events of the past year to allay their fears. A few had a stake in the status quo. Far more, raised in an educational system that rewards verbatim regurgitation of authoritative sources, take their opinions from the broadcasts and pages of the state media. Moreover, as one senior Egyptian politician recently observed, an overlapping segment of the population can easily support the Islamists and the military. That was an easy stance in the parliamentary elections, when the two were aligned. But now that the two are in conflict, their greater loyalty is to the military, to the state, and to stability.

Shafiq’s nearest non-Islamist, civilian rival, former foreign minister and Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa, is also a creature of the old regime and has a realist diplomat’s record of compromise. Egypt’s current military leader, Field Marshall Mohammed al-Tantawi, reputedly bears an old grudge against Moussa. Mourad Mouwafi, the head of intelligence and a self-seen contender to replace Tantawi eventually, would likely view Moussa suspiciously as well, fearing he might try to take Egypt’s most vital foreign-policy portfolios away from Intelligence and give them to the ministry of foreign affairs. The military meanwhile can likely count on Moussa to strike an acceptable deal on civilian oversight of the military.

The “pro-revolution” camp will likely boycott or divide their votes between Moussa, Brotherhood-defector Abdel-Menem Aboul Fotouh, Nasserist Hamdeen Sabbahi, and human-rights activist Khaled Ali, more or less neutralizing themselves as a unified electoral force.

Better still for the military, the Muslim Brotherhood enters these elections divided and isolated. An unknown number of their cadres will break for the defector Aboul-Fotouh. Ultraconservative Salafi voters who might otherwise have backed the Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, as the nearest-best-thing to a Salafi candidate, will likewise split between Aboul Fotouh and Morsi. Cairo and Giza — the country’s biggest electoral prizes, but not necessarily a barometer for the rest of the country — are in the midst of a strong anti-Brotherhood backlash, following their premature and failed bid to control the parliament, the cabinet, the constitutional assembly, and the presidency.

This election will test the effectiveness of the political machines of the regime and the Islamists, the same two forces that have defined Egyptian political life for decades. Though the Brotherhood will probably lose votes to Aboul Fotouh, it can likely count on the support of much of its base, especially in the Nile Delta. If the non-Islamist vote splits between abstention, Shafiq, Moussa, and the handful of former opposition figures, that base might still be enough to propel Morsi to the run-off. But it would likely not be enough to carry him to the presidential palace.

Those who fear the destabilizing effects of a sustained Islamist-military confrontation can take some comfort from the fact that, current bluster notwithstanding, neither side has an interest in such a prolonged fight. And, following the exclusion of former spy chief Suleiman and Shatir, the man most often identified by members as “the most powerful in the Muslim Brotherhood,” both the regime and the Brotherhood are fielding their “B teams” (the Brotherhood initially proposed the relatively unknown Morsi as a “backup” candidate in case Shatir was disqualified for the multiple verdicts against him from Mubarak’s military tribunals, as he was). This protects both institutions to a degree and may make an eventual compromise easier to strike.

Moreover, few Egyptians I met in the weeks running up to the polls seemed to support any candidate very strongly. The overwhelming sentiment was a desire for calm, consensus, better economic conditions, and for a regular rotation of power. The current mood is of optimism and anxiety. But it will not last. Whoever is so unfortunate as to become president of Egypt during these difficult times will have a very brief honeymoon indeed. Soon he will have to deal with the thorny economic and institutional problems that contributed to the uprising in the first place, plus new ones created by the uprising. Unrest will likely continue so long as Egyptians do not feel an improvement in their daily lives.

The real test for Egyptian democracy will be the government and the people’s success in addressing those problems — in reversing the economy’s slow-motion collapse, in carrying out sweeping reforms of a host of institutions while preserving their institutional integrity, and in addressing thousands of local complaints — while ensuring that the next presidential elections are peaceful, fair, and truly competitive. As veteran Egyptian commentator Mohammed Hassanein Heikal recently said, the next president “will need a miracle”. For the moment, the open, lively, and serious electoral debate on the streets of Egypt these last weeks has been such a miracle, one to be savored and celebrated.

1082 Amitav Ghosh on Egypt and Xenophilia

Amitav Ghosh, writing in Outlook magazine, fondly remembers his time spent in the Nile Delta as a young man, reflects on the non-aligned movement, and hopes that people from far-away lands will meet each other face-to-face more often:

The other principal association that rural Egypt had with India was the matter of water-pumps, which were of course very important in rural communities. In those days Egypt imported so many water pumps from India that in some areas these machines were known as makana Hindi – or simply as Kirloskar, from the name of a major pump-manufacturing company. The purchasing of a water pump was a great event, and the machine would be brought back on a pick-up truck, with much fanfare, with strings of old shoes strung around the spout to ward off the Evil Eye. Long before the machine made its entry into the village, a posse of children would be sent to summon me: as an Indian I was expected to be an expert on these machines, and the proud new owners would wait anxiously for me to pronounce on the virtues and failings of their new acquisition.

Now it so happens that I am one of those people who is hard put to tell a spanner from a hammer or a sprocket from a gasket. At first I protested vigorously, disclaiming all knowledge of machinery. But here again, no one believed me; they thought I was withholding vital information or playing some kind of deep and devious game. Often people would look crestfallen, imagining, no doubt, that I had detected a fatal flaw in their machine and was refusing to divulge the details. This would not do of course, and in order to set everyone’s fears at rest, I became, willy-nilly, an oracle of water-pumps. I developed a little routine, where I would subject the machine to a minute inspection, occasionally tapping it with my knuckles or poking it with my fingers. Fortunately no machine failed my inspection: at the end of it I would invariably pronounce the water-pump to be a makana mumtaaza – a most excellent Kirloskar, a truly distinguished member of its species.

Yet, even as I was disclaiming my relationship to those water-pumps, I could not but recognize that there was a certain commonality between myself and those machines. In a way, my presence in that village could be attributed to the same historical circumstances that introduced Indian pumps and Indian films to rural Egypt. Broadly speaking, those circumstances could be described as the spirit of decolonization that held sway over much of the world in the decades after the Second World War; this was the political ethos that found its institutional representation in the Non-Aligned Movement. We are at a very different moment in history now, when the words Non-Aligned seem somehow empty and discredited; today the movement is often dismissed not just as a political failure, but as a minor footnote to the great power rivalries of the Cold War.

It is true, of course, that the movement had many shortcomings and met with many failures. Yet it is also worth remembering that the Non-Aligned Movement as such was merely the institutional aspect of something that was much broader, wider and more powerful: this, as I said before, was the post-war ethos of decolonization, which was a political impulse that had deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonances. In the field of culture, among other things, it represented an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance. It was, in this sense, the necessary and vital counterpart of the nationalist idiom of anti-colonial resistance. In the West, Third World nationalism is often presented as an ideology of xenophobia and parochialism. But the truth is that many of these movements of resistance tried very hard, within their limited means, to create an universalism of their own. Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers – a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism.

These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased. Even in the 19th century, the high noon of Empire, people from Africa, Asia and elsewhere, sought each other out, wrote letters to each other, and stayed in each other’s homes while traveling. Lately, a great number of memoirs and autobiographies have been published that attest to the depth and strength of these ties. It was no accident therefore that Mahatma Gandhi chose to stop in Egypt, in order to see Sa’ad Zaghloul before proceeding to the Round Table Conference in London. This was integral to the ethos of the time. [Full Essay…]

Thanks, SP

1080 The Truck Driver and the Atom Bomb

I’m enjoying this, from the latest New Yorker:

The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior understandings of the visible world. Yet for more than sixty years the technology behind the explosion has remained a state secret. The United States government has never divulged the engineering specifications of the first atomic bombs, not even after other countries have produced generations of ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In the decades since the Second World War, dozens of historians have attempted to divine the precise mechanics of the Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, and of the bomb that fell three days later on Nagasaki, known as Fat Man. The most prominent is Richard Rhodes, who won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1988, for his dazzling and meticulous book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” But the most accurate account of the bomb’s inner workings—an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents—has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree. [Read on…]

1065 Give Nagla the Attention She Deserves

…Which is to say none at all. Perhaps if everyone pretends Nagla al-Imam doesn’t exist, she’ll go away. In the meantime, she’s shooting her mouth off to anyone who’ll listen.

Nagla was sent by a women’s rights organization to fly the flag at the trial of the man who sexually harassed Noha Rushdie. After the trial she falsely claimed Noha was Israeli (she’s not; she’s Palestinian, born in Libya and raised there and in Egypt), and proclaimed she was going to work for the convict’s release. I understand Nagla lost her job because of the controversy she caused.

Then, speaking on Al-Arabiya on October 31, she called on Arab men to sexually harass Israeli women as “a form of resistance.” (leave it to MEMRI to feature the stupidest, ugliest things said on TV in Arabic, ignoring the condemnation). I tried to ignore this offensive idiocy (have Arab women and men and “resistance” really fallen so low?), hoping it was her last cry for attention before she faded into obscurity.

No such luck. Now she’s telling Youm al-Sabaa that the convicted man’s name was on President Mubarak’s list of people to pardon this Eid. Youm al-Sabaa quietly acknowledged at the bottom of the article that it has no source for this story save a phone call to Nagla, and that the president traditionally pardons only convicts who have already served at least nine months in jail. But that didn’t stop the paper from calling Nagla and running her claims under the alarming headline, “News of the Release of the Man Who Molested Noha Rushdie.” The following day, Youm al-Sabaa ran another story saying the rumor (they started) was not true.

Only Noha comes off well in this whole sorry tale. The man who harassed her comes off like a sleaze. Nagla comes off as unhinged. And the journalists who give her a platform look so desperate for news over the holiday that they’ll call up any loon with something inflammatory to say, dress her rants up as fact, and then get a second story out of saying their previous story was untrue.

There are millions of stupid people with inflammatory things to say in this world. Let’s not neglect them. If Youm al-Sabaa‘s journalist will send me his email address, I promise I will supply him with one inflammatory and inaccurate quote collected from someone on the streets of Cairo a day, so long as he stops calling Nagla.

1060 Free Hoder

Iranian bloggers are reporting that Hossein Derakhshan‘s family says he is detained. Online activists have set up a Farsi blog calling for his release.

Free Hoder. Since Hossein first told me he was thinking of going back to Iran, I have feared I would have to say that one day. Now I think we all must. The people who write about Iran professionally will have to verify, but I have no reason to disbelieve the bloggers’ reports.

Hossein, if you read this when you get out (may it be soon), sorry for calling for the authorities to release you. I know you asked people not to do so. But I can’t sit on my hands while you’re in jail.

Update: The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has confirmed the bloggers’ reports. Hadi Ghaemi, who runs the project, is a thoughtful, careful and knowledgeable researcher, and I respect his work:

(11 December 2008) The family of Hussein Derakhshan, an Iranian blogger whose whereabouts have been a mystery for more than a month, has confirmed his detention, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said today.

The Campaign called on the Iranian Judiciary to either immediately release Derakhshan or to charge him with a recognizable offence under the law and provide for due process and a fair trial.

“We are extremely concerned for Derakhshan’s health and safety. His family should have immediate access to him,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the Campaign’s spokesperson.

Derakhshan, known by his blogging name Hoder, is a controversial figure who wrote in both Persian and English. He returned to Iran a few months ago after several years of living abroad.

The Campaign has confirmed that security agents from the office of Tehran’s Prosecutor General, Saeed Mortazavi, raided his home in Tehran on 1 November 2008, detaining him and confiscating his personal belongings. For several weeks, rumors have circulated on the internet about his detention, but Iranian authorities have provided no information about his situation.

Since his detention, Derakhshan made four brief phone calls to his family, each lasting no more than a minute. His family has not been allowed to visit him and does not know where he is being held. Phone calls from Derakhshan to his family stopped two weeks ago, raising serious concerns for his health and safety.

“It is heartbreaking for any family not to know where their son is, what the charges against him are, and have no official explanations,” Ghaemi said.

“In this, as in many other cases, authorities are exercising raw power over citizens with no explanation, no accountability, and no transparency,” he said.

The Campaign called on the Iranian Judiciary to fully respect Derakhshan’s rights under international standards and Iranian law and allow his family and lawyer to visit him.

(Thanks PH)

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