Egypt: When people turn against selves
Friday, 05 July 2013 00:00
John Fiske
BOTH sides may wave the Egyptian flag, which is red, white and black. The
colour of khaki is no substitute. The armys in charge. Call it a coup, if
you like. But the Egyptian military or the infamous Supreme Council of
the Armed Forces as we must again call it is now running Egypt. By threat
at first then with armour on the streets of Cairo. Roads blocked.
Barbed wire. Troops round the radio station. Mohamed Morsi at the time
still the President may have called it a coup and claimed the old moral
high ground (legitimacy, democracy, ) but long before we saw the soldiers
in the city, he was pleading with the generals to return to barracks.
Ridiculous; the generals didnt have to leave their barracks to put the fear
of God (metaphorical or real) into his collapsing administration.
Morsi talked of shedding his blood. So did the army. This was grim stuff.
Miserable was it to behold a free people applaud a military intervention,
though Morsis opponents would claim their freedoms have been betrayed.
But they are now encouraging soldiers to take the place of politicians. Both
sides may wave the Egyptian flag, which is red, white and black. The colour
of khaki is no substitute.
Nor will the Muslim Brotherhood disappear, whatever Morsis fate.
Risible he may have been in power, lamentable his speeches, but the best
organised political party in Egypt knows how to survive in adversity. The
Brotherhood is the most misunderstood or perhaps the most deliberately
misunderstood institution in modern Egyptian history.
Far from being an Islamist party, its roots were always right-wing rather
than religious, its early membership under Hassan al-Banna prepared to
tolerate King Farouk and his Egyptian landlords providing they lived behind
an Islamic façade.
Even when the 2011 revolution was at its height and millions of anti-Mubarak
demonstrators had pushed into Tahrir Square, the Brotherhood was busy trying
to negotiate with Mubarak in the hope they could find some scraps on the
table for themselves. The Brotherhoods leadership never stood alongside the
people during Egypts uprising.
This role was fulfilled by Egypts strongest secular base the trade union
movement, especially the cotton workers of Mahalla north of Cairo.
Even Nassers war with the Brotherhood was less about religion than it was
about security; the leadership of the original Free Officers Movement found
that the Brotherhood was the only party able to infiltrate the army a
lesson which todays Egyptian generals have taken to heart.
If the Muslim Brotherhood is banned again as it was under Nasser and under
Sadat and under Mubarak it will not lose its support within the armed
forces. Sadat was assassinated by a non-Brotherhood Islamist called Khaled
el-Islambouli but he also happened to be a lieutenant in the Egyptian
army.
Sayyed Qutub, the Brotherhoods leader, attacked Nasser for leading his
people back into a pre-Islamic age of ignorance (jahiliya) but the party
was more exercised by Egypts growing relationship with the atheistical
Soviet Union.
Qutub was hanged. But persecuted, officially banned, the party learned
like all underground organisations with an ideology how to organise,
politically, socially, even militarily.
The army, as they say, belongs to the people. Mohamed el-Baradei, the former
UN nuclear inspector and Nobel laureate and now opposition leader, told me
during the 2011 rising that ultimately, the Egyptian army will be with the
people . . . And at the end of the day, after anyone takes off his uniform,
he is part of the people with the same problems, the same repression, the
same inability to have a decent life. So I dont think they are going to
shoot their people.
But that was then, and this is now. Morsi may have adopted the
pseudo-trappings of a dictator he certainly talked like Mubarak on
Tuesday, complete with threats against the press but he was legally
elected, as he kept telling us, and legitimacy is what the army likes to
claim it is defending. In 2011, the people were against Mubarak.
Now, the people are against each other. Can the Egyptian Army, the heroes
of the 1973 crossing of the Suez Canal, stand between the two when they
themselves now come let us face it from the people on both sides?
The Independent.
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni and Dr. Kiiza Besigye Uganda is in anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni na Dk. Kiiza Besigye Uganda ni katika machafuko"
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