Jonathan Wright

Thuggery - From Tahrir Square to Dalston Junction

2011-08-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

It's a long way from Tahrir Square (about ten minutes from where I live in Cairo) to Dalston Junction (about ten minutes from where I live in London), and I never imagined that my summer sojourn in Islington would be punctuated by another outbreak of street unrest, only six months later. Egyptian bloggers have commented rather naively on the violent nature of the English 'protests' (and they are protests of a kind, even if misdirected and very poorly articulated). But it's striking how much of the public discourse in England has been equally naive, dominated by the 'law and order' lobby, the instant resort to security solutions on the part of many commentators and the emphasis on culturally determined explanations for what is largely a political problem with economic roots. Most of the people on British television are talking about discipline, immorality, parental responsibility, entitlement, consumerism, dysfunctional families, disrespect for authority and, here and there, 'black culture' (since they clearly can't pin the looting and vandalism solely on people of African origin, some of them are saying that 'black culture' has penetrated other demographic groups, with the subtext that this has undermined some theoretical upright white culture). The few who emphasize the economic roots of anarchic behaviour by the new underclass are often booed off stage. Politicians who dare to make hints in that direction have to tread carefully, for fear that they will be branded as condoning theft and thuggery.
Prime Minister David Cameron took the 'law and order' line again today. "For me, the root cause of this mindless selfishness is the same thing that I have spoken about for years. It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to feel that the world owes something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities, and that their actions do not have consequences.. We need to have a clearer code of values and standards that we expect people to live by, and stronger penalties if they cross the line," he said.
No doubt that will play well to the new gentry of Chipping Norton or the suits in the City, but as a serious analysis, or even as a means to dissuade potential looters from taking advantage of the next opportunity that arises, it is worthless.
In a sophisticated industrial democracy of the kind Britain claims to be, politicians have a responsibility to set the social and economic parameters that enable parents, schools and employers to bring up, educate and train well-informed and law-abiding citizens who feel they have a stake in their communities and wider society (and ideally the whole world), who are able to contribute and are rewarded fairly for their contributions. If there are thousands of young men roaming the streets without work, without regular incomes, and with no inclination or incentive to improve themselves, then the politicians must share the blame. It may have been the Thatcher government ('there is no such thing as society') or the Blair government, which shared many of Thatcher's emphasis on pleasing the middle classes, but government cannot pass the buck to parents, teachers and social workers. Other governments in Europe have done better, enabling more social mobility and working harder to protect the small minority who, for a variety of reasons, will inevitably not qualify for well-paid employment.
The looters have not helped their cause, with their offhand comments about 'nicking free stuff', taking their taxes back, 'everyone else was doing it', or sticking it to the Feds. It would be reassuring to hear them voice a coherent analysis of their plight and channel their energies into political activism that might ameliorate their circumstances. But that may be a reflection of British society's failure to encourage political participation at the base. Not enough commentators have said much about the elite's condonement of illegal activity by powerful media corporations, members of parliament with their outrageous expense claims, members of the royal family with their dubious money-making schemes, not to mention the bankers who cost the taxpayers many billions of pounds with their reckless lending practices.
To go back to Egypt, the elites in both countries have found a useful word to dismiss those who challenge their cosy world - thugs. In both cases it implies thoughtless apolitical violence by an underclass that does not deserve a hearing. Of course, if we are to live in a state of law, looters and thugs must be arrested and punished. But in the long term, unless we work to create a society without large numbers of people living on the edge, we should not be surprised if the streets erupt from time to time.

Obama's fairly vacuous speech

2011-05-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

I'm glad I'm not a working journalist who has to cover 'events' such as Obama's speech today. I remember that sinking feeling at the end of a 'major' speech when one realises that the speaker has said nothing of great significance, but without stretching the truth here and there there's no easy way to convey that in an interesting manner to a supine audience, or to satisy editors obsessed with the news cycle. As so often with these speeches, it's what's missing, the links that politicians do not make, that often carry the most significance.
    Obama hasn't understood that Palestinians are just as likely to rise up against their masters, and have just as much right to do so, as any of the Arab peoples who have overthrow their old despots. The double standard inherent at so many levels of this stage must surely jump out at any informed listener.
Israeli suffering is clearly physical, that of the Palestinians merely psychological - a strange inversion of reality: "For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them. For Palestinians, it has meant suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own" The 'taught to hate' line is particularly offensive - as if anyone needed guidance to find Israel's behaviour worthy of strongly adverse emotion.
    The future security arrangements would be almost as one-sided as they are today. "Palestinians should know the territorial outlines of their state; Israelis should know that their basic security concerns will be met." The Palestinian state must be "non-militarised", while the United States commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable. Nothing new there, of course.
    The inclusion of democratically elected Hamas representatives in a Palestinian government of national unity "raises profound and legitimate questions for Israel – how can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist." Strange how no one ever imagines a Palestinian veto over the inclusion of rightwing racists and expansionists in Israeli governments.
The United States has now divided the Middle East into five distinct categories of countries facing popular unrest, with different solutions for each:
Israel - full U.S. commitment to its security and international diplomatic cover for anyone who dares to criticise it. The angry Arabs here should recognize Israel, abandon resistance and go back to fruitless talks in which they have nothing to offer but further obeisance to their Israeli masters. If Israel offers them enough scraps of land to make a viable state, they should be very grateful.
Egypt and Tunisia - since they've already overthrown our old allies, we'll have to live with it and put on a brave face. Since Egypt is neighbour to Israel and has a large army, we will give it some debt relief and other economic benefits. A little growth and a show of U.S. largesse might help prevent our enemies winning democratic elections.
Bahrain (home to the Sixth Fleet) - the government here has been quite naughty but we love it really and and we are "committed to its (Bahrain's) security". The government should clean up its act and the opposition should abide by the rule of law, ignore Iranian enticements and join open-ended talks with the government.
Syria and Yemen - President Assad is not completely a lost cause and President Saleh in Yemen "needs to follow through on his commitment to transfer power." In theory, if Assad leads a transition to democracy, he can obtain rehabilitation. An easy position to take, because U.S. policy can be recalibrated at any moment to reflect the latest assessment of how Assad is doing.
    Libya - Gaddafi is a lost cause, it's just a question of time. "When Gaddafi inevitably leaves or is forced from power, decades of provocation will come to an end, and the transition to a democratic Libya can proceed."
As usual, there are three main determinants in U.S. policy in all these cases:

1. What does this regime do to serve or subvert Americans interests in the Middle East? The more the regime serves, the softer the U.S. stance, and vice versa.
2. What are the chances this particular regime will be overthrown by angry Arabs? The more likely it is to fall, the harder the U.S. stance towards the ruler, and vice versa.
    3. If this regime is overthrown, what is likely to take its place and to what extent would the successor regime serve U.S. interests? This is much harder to judge. The conventional wisdom is that this factor has worked in favour of President Assad, whom the Israelis might prefer to see survive.
The other factors, not specific to Arab regime change, are the chronic distortion of U.S. foreign policy by domestic lobbyists and Washington's broader regional alliances, especially with Saudi Arabia and the patrimonial states in the Gulf.

Mustafa el-Fiki as Arab League Secretary General

2011-04-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

Egyptian televisions were saying this evening that Egypt's nominee to replace Amr Moussa at the head of the Arab League is former member of parliament and ruling party 'intellectual' Mustafa el-Fiki. Assuming this is true, it is the most extraordinary choice. Fiki will go down in history as the beneficiary of one of the most outrageous acts of electoral fraud committed in the parliamentarian elections of 2005. After serving in parliament as a member appointed by President Mubarak, the NDP gave him the Damanhour (Beheira province) seat in 2005, on the assumption he would win. In the event, rival candidate Gamal Hishmat of the Muslim Brotherhood won by a margin of about 25,000 votes. No problem: the election officers merely reversed the tallies, giving Fiki all Hishmat's votes and Hishmat all Fiki's votes. The snag was that one of the judges overseeing the count, the brave Noha el-Zeini, went public with a detailed account of what happened. Fiki just brazened it out, as is his style -- essentially a shameless egotist with no obvious priniciples. Since the revolution, he's been posing as an impartial analyst and public intellectual. Come to think of it, maybe he would be good at the Arab League - he could be all things to all men and curry favour with every Arab head of state simultaneously. Does anyone out there know who exactly chose him and on what grounds? Will the Arab states approve such a controversial choice? Maybe here's a chance for a non-Egyptian to jump in and end the long Egyptian monopoly of the position (broken only when the league moved to Tunis after the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, as far as I recall).

Mubarak speaks, worries about hidden wealth allegations

2011-04-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

The statement that former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak released today from house arrest in Sharm el-Sheikh is extraordinary for both its formality and its banality. The old man slips off to the palace that Hussein Salem gave him on the Red Sea coast without so much as a friendly farewell to his people and then pops up two months later with a statement drafted by some libel lawyer! Doesn't he have anything interesting to say after 60 days ruminating over his 30 years in power? No regrets, no apologies, no philosophical musings? Not our Hosni. That was always his big failing - the lack of vision, the failure to understand that running a country of 40 to 80 million people (yes, the population did double over those 30 years) meant more than making sure that the shipments of imported wheat turned up in time, that any possible troublemakers were carefully monitored and that Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia approved of his performance.
In case you haven't read his statement in detail (Arabic text here), Mubarak speaks like a retired civil servant who graciously gave up his sinecure for the public good and now insists on defending himself against allegations that he pocketed some public monies now and then. Nothing about the way he ran the country, nothing about the 800 Egyptians his police force and party thugs killed before he graciously agreed to leave, nothing about the way he allowed State Security to torture thousands of people and stick their ignorant noses into everything that moved across the country all those years. He does at least say that he "gave up the presidency" (that's the first time we've heard from him that he agreed to go of his own free will) and has decided to stay out of politics. But after that it's "all about me" - his reputation and the reputation of his family, and the only affront to their reputation that he can see is the allegations that he had large bank accounts and properties abroad, not that he ran a police state and failed to empower real institutions that might have converted Egypt into a modern functioning democracy. And again, here he is boasting about his service to the country in war and in peace like some old blimp who thinks that wearing a fancy uniform with medals gives him immunity from criticism by some upstart revolutionaries (more of those troublemakers).
The reactions appeared to be overwhelmingly negative, though no doubt there are many Egyptians willing to sympathize with the man in his dotage. Psychologist Ahmed Okasha was on OTV saying Mubarak continues to treat Egyptians as slaves and subjects, rather than free citizens.
It's impossible not to see some connection between Mubarak's statement and the very large rally in Tahrir Square on Friday and the demands that Mubarak face trial or leave the country. The military council is again on the defensive after the heavy-handed and ultimately futile attempt to disperse the crowd in Tahrir by force. I passed through the square this afternoon and it remains in the hands of the protest movement, with barricades on some of the main approaches and no army or police in sight. As long as Mubarak's fate remains undecided in this way, the political forces that brought him down cannot sleep soundly.

Egypt's new new parties law still restrictive

2011-03-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

The military council running Egypt has made some amendments to the draft law regulating political parties as released by the cabinet a few days ago. Unfortunately they add to the confusion rather than clarify the ambiguities. The approach adopted by the military council is reminiscent of the old regime's preference for legislation that was wide open to interpretation (in its case by a pliant judiciary), so that it could finetune its apllication of the law to suit its political preferences.
The new text, available in Arabic on El Shorouk's website, reads:

In their principles, their programmes, their practical activities or in their choice of leaders and members, parties must not be set up on the basis of religion, class, sect, group or geographical region or because of gender, language, religion or belief (sic).

    So the overt ban on parties based on religion appears to stand, though supporters and opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood seem to think that the ban would not apply to the party the Brotherhood plans to set up, simply because the party will not have Muslim in its name, or at least because the party will avoid mentioning Islam in its programme. Maybe the programme will just refer to al-Din, the religion? This is farcical. If the military council intends to let the Brotherhood form a party (which must of necessity have Islam as one of its bases, however carefully disguised), the council should promulgate a law that explicitly makes that possible.
The redrafted arrangements for vetting political parties are also problematic and will no doubt lead to endless legal wrangling. The new law gives the final word, after the parties committee, to yet another body of judges - the Supreme Administrative Court. This is still an improvement on the Mubarak-era law, which vested the power of denial in a political body, but it still falls way short of allowing the free formation of political parties.
As in almost all significant matters, the military council appears to be following the path of least resistance rather than taking a stand on any firm principle. It will not come as a surprise if the council changes its mind on these points at some later stage in the political process.
    Likewise for the phasing of parliamentary and presidential elections. El Shorouk quotes Major-General Mamdouh Shahin as saying parliamentary elections will take place in September and no date has been set for presidential elections. The Daily News version says specifically that the presidentials will come later. There have been changes back and forth on this, so this version may not be definitive.

Egypt's parties law - not so liberal after all?

2011-03-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

The new version of the Egyptian law regulating political parties, approved by the cabinet on Wednesday, was been widely interpreted as a more liberal version of its predecessor, which was in practice highly restrictive. The headline in the state newspaper Al Akhbar said the law made it possible to form parties freely, merely by notification of the authorities, and a widely reproduced Reuters story initially took a similar line. Liberal blogger Zeinobia welcomed the law as "very reasonable", without going into much explanation. But my reading of the law, at least in the detailed version printed in Al Akhbar on Thursday, suggests that the changes are largely superficial and the new law retains many of the flaws of the old.

The main change, and this at least is significant, is that the regulatory authority will be a panel of three judges - the first deputy president of the Court of Cassation as chairman, plus two deputy presidents of the Council of State in the appeal courts. The Council of State, roughly speaking, is the judicial body with jurisdiction over disputes over the powers of the state. Under the old law, the regulatory body was part of the Shoura Council, the upper house of parliament, which was fully controlled by the old ruling party. The chairman was Shoura Council speaker Safwat el-Sherif, an old-style authoritarian who abused his role to withhold recognition of any parties the government did not like.

But it is not true that people are now free to form political parties without restriction. The text states quite clearly that people who set up parties can start operating 30 days after notifying the parties committee “provided the committee does not object”. In other words the committee retains a veto over parties that it considers do not meet the necessary requirements.

The substantial restrictions appear to be largely unchanged. The principles, objectives, programmes, policies and methods of a party must not contradict “the basic principles of the constitution or the need to protect Egyptian national security or to preserve national unity, social and democratic peace”. Parties cannot be set up on a religious or geographical basis or on the basis of discrimination between citizens because of gender, origin, language, religion, belief or any other reason.

The ban on parties based on religion was originally designed primarily to thwart any attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood to form a political party and it will be interesting to see whether and how the Freedom and Justice Party that the Brotherhood now plans to set up will be able to draft a programme that circumvents the ban. I have not yet seen any Brotherhood comment on the new law, which Al Akhbar describes as merely a draft approved by the cabinet.

The other potentially troublesome restriction lies in the apparently innocuous phrase “social peace”, which in the 1970s was clearly understand as directed against any attempt to seek recognition for a communist party, on the strange grounds that communism is more of a threat to “social peace” than other political ideologies.

The ban on parties with a linguistic or regional agenda seems rather authoritarian and unnecessarily restrictive, especially given the unusual homogeneity of Egyptian society. Would the sky really fall in if those who speak Siwi (in the remote western oasis of Siwa) or the various Beja-type languages on the southern stretch of the Red Sea coast campaigned for their native tongues? Europe is awash with regional-based parties (Bavaria, northern Italy, Scotland, Wales, Catalonia, Galicia, Navarre, the Basque country and no doubt more), all within a manageable democratic framework.

If the military council approves this law, the extent of change will depend to a large degree on the good will of the regulatory committee.

Unnecessary polarization over Egyptian referendum result

2011-03-23T10:55:00.001-07:00

It's alarming how badly Egyptian liberals have taken their failure to persuade their compatriots to vote against the constitutional amendments in the referendum last Saturday and how quickly they have jumped to the conclusion that this was the outcome of some conspiracy between the military and the Islamists. The result, of course, was 77 percent in favour and 22 percent against. A common theme is that the Muslim Brotherhood, salafist groups and assorted sheikhs told people that voting 'yes' would be good for stability, law and order and economic recovery, as though trying to promote a point of view and influence people's choices was somehow undemocratic. They seem to have forgotten that the 'no' lobby ran full-page advertisements in national newspapers in the days leading up to the vote, featuring leading politicians and celebrities explaining why they would vote against. The most serious 'accusation' against the Islamists is that they promulgated their message close to polling stations and distributed sweets/candy to people who voted yes. The liberals are showing that they have very thin skins and little confidence in the good judgment of their fellow Egyptians. They are also unwittingly deploying the same elitist argument that Mubarak and the old ruling party used ad nauseam, both to foreign governments and at home in private – that Egyptians are not yet mature enough for democracy and need to be protected from their own choices.

The polarization around the referendum result, driven mainly by the losing liberal side but encouraged by a few salafis here and there, is quite unnecessary and could be counterproductive for the liberals, because it gives credence to the notion that everyone who voted 'yes' was an Islamist sympathizer who wants the Islamists to do well in parliamentary elections and dominate the process of drafting a new constitution. This notion is a fantasy and the liberals are foolish to promote it. Many Egyptians vote 'yes' for purely pragmatic reasons – they wanted to bring an end to military rule, move on to elections as soon as possible and end the uncertainty about the transitional process. They also trusted themselves and their compatriots to vote for a representative parliament that will set up the assembly to draft the new constitution. There's nothing sinister or undemocratic about that. The liberals, on the other hand, offered no convincing proposals for a mechanism to set up a constitutional assembly without national elections.

If liberals want to counter the Islamist alternative, they will have to argue their case on its merits and win people over in free debate. They should argue for universal human rights, including freedom of belief in its widest sense (including the right to change or abandon one's religion at will), gender equality and the sovereignty of the people. They can no longer hide behind the power of the state, as many of them have done for the past sixty years.

That said, there has also been some excessive and divisive rhetoric on the Islamist side. Al Masry Al Youm newspaper, for example, quotes Islamic preacher Mohamed Hussein Yaaqoub as saying that the referendum result was a victory for Islam. “The people said 'yes' to religion, and to those who say 'We can't live in such a country' we say 'You're free. You have visas for Canada and America.' We're not upset with those who said 'no', but now they know how big they are and how big religion is.” Addressing his own supporters, he added, “Don't worry. It's over. Now the country is ours.”

Egyptian referendum result

2011-03-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

All the signs point to a substantial majority in favour of the constitutional amendments on which Egyptians voted on Saturday, with an astonishing turnout of over 60 percent. See ahramonline for the latest details, with preliminary figures from many provinces. I was clearly misled about overall sentiment by my personal exposure to so many 'no' voters. It will be interesting to compare the figures from individual areas but it's not clear how much detail the authorities will provide on that, beyond the numbers for provinces as a whole. For a change we can safely assume that the figures are roughly authentic, despite some reports of abuses here and there. YouTube has footage that apparently shows a clerk filling in the 'yes' circle on blank ballot papers but I've no idea if it is genuine or how widespread such activities might have been or who might have instigated it. From my brief tour of polling stations on Saturday and from media coverage, I concluded that social conservatives and uneducated people in rural areas were most likely to vote 'yes', while educated urban liberals tended to vote 'no'. The latter are a relatively small demographic group, so the outcome is not in fact surprising. For those who have not been following the debate, the difference between 'yes' and 'no' was not that great, making the referendum an easy start for Egyptian democracy in action. A 'yes' majority means presidential and parliamentary elections will take place within six months and the newly elected parliament will appoint a large committee to rewrite the constitution from scratch. A 'no' majority would have meant that a new constitution would have to be written before elections, but it was never too clear how that process would proceed. One major argument of the 'no' camp was that the new political forces need more time to organise before elections, otherwise the well-established forces - the Muslim Brotherhood and local strongmen associated with the old ruling party - will define the country's future. But that argument smacked of elitism and scaremongering about the Brotherhood.

Prognosis for the EuroAmerican intervention in Libya

2011-03-19T09:12:00.000-07:00

EuroAmerican intervention in Libya has started inauspiciously and it will take something like a miracle for the EuroAmerican powers to bring this conflict to a happy conclusion. Having given a commitment to save Benghazi and presumably its eastern hinterland from recapture by Gaddafi's forces, France, Britain and the United States cannot back out until they at least stabilize a front line between the government and the rebels. That's very difficult to do by air power alone and the potential for 'mission creep' is enormous. Assuming that Gaddafi's forces do not collapse and retreat in disarray, the 'Allies' will have to decide where it would be acceptable for such a front line to lie and how long they could accept a stalemate along that line. Would they, for example, ensure that the rebels have full control of the eastern oilfields and of the pipelines and oil export facilities in that part of the country? That would be a logical step, so that the rebels could at least finance their own operations and would not become a financial and logistical burden. Without oil revenue, eastern Libya would soon be impoverished unless the 'Allies' diverted some of the Libyan government's foreign assets to them.
    In the medium term, the EuroAmerican intervention at the minimal level they now envisage is likely to lead to the partition of the country into a rebel-held east and a government-held west, with all the instability that implies. The east would be a proxy entity reliant on EuroAmerican protection, much like Iraqi Kurdistan in the years between 1991 and 2003. If they decide that that outcome is unacceptable (and their rhetoric already includes maximalist 'regime change' elements incompatible with their UN mandate), they might have to go on the offensive, attacking Gaddafi's forces on the ground along the ceasefire line, in the hope that military defeat will provoke regime change from within as military units defect and Gaddafi's inner clique loses patience with his leadership. That strategy did not work with Saddam Hussein, who shares many of Gaddafi's psychological traits. Saddam dug in his heels and survived 12 years of very severe sanctions and political isolation. If anything, Gaddafi is likely to be even more stubborn that Saddam, who at least had moments of clarity.
A major failure of the EuroAmerican initiative is that they have not been able to win over the Tunisians and the Egyptians, where the governments have the revolutionary credentials to offset the impression that this is an imperial venture. The token support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates does not have the same credibility and we have not yet seen any signs that these Arab states are willing to commit their military assets to the campaign.
    Another question mark hangs over the fate of rebel pockets in the west of Libya. Are the 'Allies' planning to protect them as well and, if so, how exactly? In the case of Misurata and possibly Zawya, Gaddafi forces are deployed close to inhabited areas, making it difficult to dislodge them by air power alone.
    The overthrow of Gaddafi is a desirable objective, just as the overthrow of Saddam was desirable in 1991, but the EuroAmerican intervention has all the appearance of a hasty response to domestic public opinion, rather than a considered policy choice. It makes a difference that the intervention follows a genuinely popular uprising in many parts of Libya, but with time that distinction may wear off and the 'Allies' may find themselves tied up in just another open-ended Middle Eastern conflict. I hope I am wrong.

Clinton on Bahrain

2011-03-16T15:10:00.000-07:00

Secretary Clinton's remarks on Bahrain, made to reporters in Cairo today, overlook the reality that protesting and simultaneously setting conditions for dialogue are legitimate aspects of the political process she says she wishes to promote. The protest movement in Egypt, to the acclaim of the world, refused to negotiate with the government of Hosni Mubarak and responded to all his overtures with deafening chants of 'irhal' (go away) and 'yuwa yimshi, mush hanimshi' (HE must go, we won't go). Here's what Clinton said:

I think what’s happening in Bahrain is alarming, and it is unfortunately diverting attention and effort away from the political and economic track that is the only way forward to resolve the legitimate differences of the Bahrainis themselves... We have made that clear time and time again. We have deplored the use of force. We have said not only to the Bahrainis but to our Gulf partners that we do not think security is the answer to what is going on. Now, we’ve also said to the protestors that they have to engage in peaceful protest and they should return to the negotiating table.

But to product long-lasting and harmonious results, a negotiations must be between parties who enjoy roughly equal power and influence. In both Egypt and Bahrain, the protesters have had strength only when they are on the street, visible to the world in whatever numbers they can muster. In other words, their strength is in their numbers, their camaradeirie and their solidarity. As soon as they send a delegation in for negotiations with the government, the delegation is a small isolated group, overwhelmed by the awe and power of a well-entrenched state. When the protest movement is fluid and spontaneous, again as in Egypt and Bahrain, no delegates can be fully representative anyway and in the end any political settlement has to be endorsed by 'public outcry'. If the crowds are satisfied, they will drift away. If they are not satisfied, they will turn up again the next day. That's what happened in Egypt. When Mubarak said he would step down in September, the crowds stayed and grew in numbers. When Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak had handed power to the military council, they cheered and went off to celebrate.
When the Egyptian protest movement was in roughly the same stage as the Bahraini movement is in today, the US position was that Mubarak should go immediately. Their position on Bahrain is markedly different. There's no suggestion that the Khalifa family has lost legitimacy through using brutal force against mainly peaceful protesters or by calling in troops from a neighbouring country, a country overtly hostile to the Bahraini protest movement and to any progress towards democracy or constitutional monarchy in any of its smaller neighbours.
There are several factors at work here:
    * The United States believes for the moment that the Khalifa family has a chance of surviving, even if it has to make some serious concessions to stay in power. The Bahrain protest movement has by no means been uniformly or consistently republican, so concessions by the Khalifas might split and weaken the movement. Although Clinton deplores the use of force in public, she might have calculated that the combined power of the Saudi and Bahrain forces might overawe the protesters. For sectarian reasons, the Gulf forces can at least be expected to be more cohesive and less scrupulous with the opposition than the army and police were in Egypt.
    * The Obama administration, spooked by the Saudi reaction to its position on Egypt, may indeed be less sympathetic towards another Arab uprising against a friendly ruler who provides useful geostrategic services to the United States: a base for the Fifth Fleet in the case of Bahrain, overflights right and quick passage for US warships through the Suez Canal in the case of Egypt.
* The Iran factor is crucial, in the eyes of both the United States and Saudi Arabia. No one doubts that a truly representative Bahraini government would be less hostile towards Iran, even if it does not embrace Tehran wholeheartedly. Any crack in the wall Washington has tried to build around Iran would be interpreted as a strategic defeat, including at home, where anti-Iranian sentiment runs high.
    * The Bahraini monarchy is more important to Saudi Arabia than the Mubarak presidency was, and Saudi views count in the White House. Bahrain has many of the features of a Saudi protectorate, and the disruption of the status quo on its doorstep, within its sphere of influence, is a direct affront to Saudi authority. In this case, the Saudis, and the Bahraini ruling family in their train, may well decide to ignore American and other calls for restraint.

The next step is up to the Bahraini protest movement, which has shown remarkable resilience and seems determined to pursue its campaign. But given the polarization in Bahraini society, unfortunately along mainly sectarian Sunni-Shi'i lines, the country could face a more bitter and possibly more bloody conflict than in homogeneous Egypt. As in other restive Arab countries, the United States will shift its position according to its assessment of the probable outcome.

Towards rejection of constitutional amendments in Egypt?

2011-03-14T14:37:00.000-07:00

** Update - Essam el-Erian of the Muslim Brotherhood, speaking on ON TV just now, said the Brotherhood is telling its members they are free to vote in the referendum according to their personal views. If that is indeed the Brotherhood's official position, it must change the dynamics in favour of rejection **

The debate over the Egyptian constitution has shifted quite dramatically over the five weeks since the military council took power and there's a chance that voters will reject the proposed amendments when they vote on them in a referendum on Saturday. If they do, that would mark a precedent of some significance - in all previous referendums on constitutional changes (and there have been four of them since 1971) a powerful president and the whole apparatus of the state were behind the proposals and made sure they passed. This time the debate has been open, substantial and lively, with many of the contributions hostile to the limited proposals on offer.
    Superficially this might seem surprising, given that the country has been living in a constitutional vacuum since February 11, when the military council took power, an act which was in itself unconstitutional. Attempts to arrange a constitutional transfer of power collapsed because Hosni Mubarak was always one step behind the demands of the protest movement and in the end he ran out of options. The military council then 'deactivated' the existing constitution and asked a committee to draft amendments to make it more democratic, concentrating on opening up the field of possible presidential candidates and on steps to ensure free and fair elections.
    But the experience of the past five weeks has shown that it is possible, if slightly inconvenient, to run a country without a constitution and the idealists who favour a fresh start through a constituent assembly (a 'second republic' as the French would say) have been gaining ground as the revolution advances.
    The objections to the proposed amendments are quite persuasive:
    * If they approve the amendments, the Egyptian electorate will in effect be reactivating the whole of the rest of the old constitution, which gives excessive powers to the president and fails to provide effective checks and balances between the various estates (executive, legislature, judiciary and so on).
* The political groups that took part in the uprising against Hosni Mubarak say the old constitution has lost any legitimacy it ever had and is irreparable. It has been replaced by what they call a 'revolutionary legitimacy', which they want to see enshrined in a document drafted according to a completely different vision of the relationship between the state and the people.
    * Under the amended constitution the president and the next parliament would take on the task of drafting further changes to the constitution. But many Egyptians say that a hastily elected parliament will not be fully representative, because political forces excluded from the political arena for the past 30 years need more time to organise. The main beneficiaries of early elections would be the Muslim Brotherhood and local strong men associated with the discredited National Democratic Party, which dominated parliament from the mid-1970s. A constituent assembly could be more representative, although there is no consensus of how the participants would be chosen. Not surprisingly, the Brotherhood and the rump NDP are the main forces asking their supporters to support the amendments.
* Even the most prominent candidates for the presidency - Amr Moussa and Mohamed ElBaradei - say they would prefer to seek election under a new democratic constitution which has broad popular input and support. To take power under a constitution contested by significant political groups would diminish their authority.
* The military council appears to have chosen the fast-track option because it did not want to stay in power beyond six months. But public sentiment has gradually shifted, giving more weight now to a thorough overhaul of the system of government and less weight to sensitivities about the dangers of military government. Despite the council's excessive caution and occasional heavyhandedness, the generals deserve some credit for convincing Egyptians that they are not a threat to democracy.
* Although some Egyptians remain worried about the consequences of a 'no' vote, the campaign for a constituent assembly appears to have momentum and the many advocates of rejection must have some confidence that their view will prevail if the referendum returns a convincing 'no' vote.

The Arabist quotes an opinion poll as saying that 49 percent of people are against the proposed amndments, 36 percent are in favour, 13 people are undecided and 2 percent won't vote. The big change is in the number who say they won't vote: in previous referendums the real turnout may have been less than 10 percent, especially if one excludes all the public-sector employees bussed to polling stations. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that people who would never have dreamt of voting in the past are now examining the arguments in detail and asking how they can take part. That would be an achievement in itself. Since the Brotherhood will vote in favour, the referendum will also be a test of the movement's real electoral weight and the mobilizing capacity of the new untested forces which the revolution has activated.

Obama and Rebellious Arabs

2011-03-11T11:33:00.000-08:00

Someone in the White House has been speaking to the big US newspapers, trying to persuade them that President Obama has a strategy for reconciling support for Arab democrats and saving Arab autocrats who have worked for US interests for decades. The Wall Street Journal says the Middle East strategy he has settled on is "(to) help keep longtime allies who are willing to reform in power, even if that means the full democratic demands of their newly emboldened citizens might have to wait." The New York Times version says: "President Obama has adopted a policy of restraint. He has concluded that his administration must shape its response country by country, aides say, recognizing a stark reality that American national security interests weigh as heavily as idealistic impulses." Both stories distort the reality of the way Obama handled the popular uprising against President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. "The more cautious approach contrasts sharply with Mr. Obama’s response in North Africa, where he abandoned a 30-year alliance with Hosni Mubarak," said the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal says Obama "pushed for immediate regime change in Egypt" and adds: "The (new) strategy also comes in the face of domestic U.S. criticism that the administration sent mixed messages at first in Egypt, tentatively backing Mr. Mubarak before deciding to throw its full support behind the protesters demanding his ouster." I fail to see what's new in the new strategy. My recollection is that in the Egyptian case the United States did its best to save the regime, right up to the last hours, by favouring a transfer of power to short-lived Vice President Omar Suleiman, who was a dependable clone of Mubarak and would probably have perpetuated exactly the same police state and the same collaboration with Israel as Mubarak himself enforced for decades. In the end Mubarak gave up power because hundreds of thousands of Egyptians refused to leave the streets and the Egyptian army decided he was no longer able to govern the country. Obama's views were very much a minor consideration in a domestic drama. Shaping policy country by country has always been a bedrock principle of US foreign policy, anyway. "We do not have a cookie-cutter approach to policy" is one of the favourite expressions of US State Department spokespeople. As I wrote during the Egyptian uprising, Obama's policy at any given juncture in any given Arab country depends on Washington's assessment of the chances that the Arab ruler will lose power and on its assessment of what threat that poses to US interests. If the White House thinks its Arab autocrat has a chance to pull off a 'reform' stunt (promise reform to win time, without any sincere intention of following through, as Mubarak did in 2005), Washington will go along with him. Once the White House knows the Arab autocrat has played his last card and failed, Obama will jump ship and start to woo his successors, in the hope of salvaging what he can for US interests. In the case of Libya, principle plays no part in US restraint: the United States has no compelling reason to save Muammar Gaddafi, despite his cooperative behaviour in recent years, but on the other hand it sees many risks in military intervention on behalf of the rebels. For the moment the White House thinks the Khalifa family in Bahrain has a chance of surviving, so it supports its 'reform' agenda. If the protests grow and the Khalifas look likely to fall, it will soon change tack. Even if the Saudi army intervenes to save the Khalifas, the White House will gauge its response, again, to its assessment that the Saudi intervention will succeed. There's nothing very reprehensible about that: Obama's making the best of the hand he inherited from years of misguided US policy in the Middle East. But the influence of the United States is severely limited in all of these countries, when the people in the streets have their eyes on freedom and the rulers have visions of exile, humiliation or worse. They are playing for much higher stakes. As the Wall Street Journal puts it: "Officials said the administration's response in Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere could change if people take to the streets en masse, rejecting offers made at the negotiating table, or if the U.S.-backed governments crack down violently."

Americans on Islam and Violence

2011-03-11T05:47:00.000-08:00

The Pew Reseach Center has put out the results of its survey on the attitude of Americans towards Islam and propensity to violence, to coincide with the congressional hearings called by Rep. Peter King. Fairly predictably, it shows a very strong correlation between rightist politics and the belief that 'Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence'. Ethnicity and religious denomination also seem to correlate, along the scales white-Latino-black and Protestant-Catholic-'unaffiliated'. The prevalence of the association between Islam and a propensity towards violence is still high among Americans (at an average of 40 percent), but perhaps not as high as one might expect by reading the online comments posted to almost story relevant to the subject. One encouraging sign is that fewer young people say they believe there is any link. What the survey does prove is the persistence and prevalence of essentialist ideas about large religious communities. Maybe it's time that educational curricula made a deliberate effort to explain the diversity of opinion within such communities, emphasizing the way that believers, as individuals and as groups, emphasize the doctrines that suit their worldly interests and political dispositions. Any religion that has existed for so many centuries across such a vast geographical expanse offers a wide range of alternative doctines, many of them incompatible or contradictory. 'Islam' as a stable unitary construct hardly exists, except in the most banal sense, however much both Muslims and their enemies might claim that it does. Only individual Muslims can endow the label with meaning, and each Muslim does so in a way that is never identical to the way other individual Muslims do so. This is widely accepted among theoreticians (Aziz al-Azmeh comes to mind - "There are as many Islams as there are situations which contain it"), but it's clearly taking quite a while for this to sink in among the general public. One day, the Pew Research Center might offer people who respond to such surveys an option reflecting this insight.

Why the US and its friends should stay out of Libya

2011-03-09T06:03:00.000-08:00

Nine good reasons why the United States, Britain, NATO and everyone else should resist any impulse to intervene in the Libyan civil war, even through imposing a no-fly zone to stop the Libyan air force bombing rebel positions:
1. If the rebels win, the next rulers will be vulnerable for the rest of their political lives to accusations that they came to power through foreign arms. Just look at Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, despite numerous elections over seven years and the reduced presence of US forces, the protest movement can still credibly claim that it is opposing a government of occupation. In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai still controls only a small part of the country and the Taliban draw much of their support from the perception that he was installed by foreign forces.
2. Britain and the United States cannot know for certain that military intervention has majority support within Libya. True, some Libyan rebels and the council in Benghazi say they favour a no-fly zone but no one has any idea how representative they are of the population as a whole. Military intervention will give credence to Muammar Gaddafi's argument that his supporters are fighting to preserve Libyan sovereignty from outsiders, and could persuade some Libyans who are now undecided to throw in their lot with the colonel. Libya had a long and bitter experience with Italian colonialism: foreign intervention will remind them of that experience.
3. Military intervention in Libya will strengthen the position of other autocratic leaders throughout the Arab world, in Saudi Arabia for example, by reframing the conflict between the autocrats and the various protest movements as one between patriots and imperalist intruders. The Egyptians who overthrew President Hosni Mubarak last month, for example, appear to be overwhelmingly opposed to intervention, however much they would like to see Gaddafi overthrown.
4. If a no-fly zone fails to achieve the objective (presumably enabling the rebels to win), the intervening powers will find themselves compelled to escalate the level of intervention. They could easily be drawn into actions such as bombing the Bab al-Aziziah barracks and other strategic locations from the sea or by air. If the conflict is protracted, they will end as full participants and will share responsibility for the outcome, possibly to the extent of helping to choose the post-conflict government. That would completely contradict the logic of the Arab uprisings, which in several cases reflect an indigenous revolt against rulers who gave the interests of outsiders precedence over the interest of their own citizens.
5. Gaddafi can be defeated from within if enough Libyans defect and enough of his military units refuse to fight. Many have already defected and his armed forces are in serious disarray. No tyrant can survive without active supporters. In the end the conflict in Libya should be decided on the basis of what individual Libyans decide is best for themselves and their country. Of course, defecting can be fraught with risks. Some Libyans will not have the courage to do so and others might be executed if they make the attempt. That is a price that Libyans will have to pay for freedom, as did many hundreds of Egyptians.
6. Military intervention by the United States and Britain would be transparently opportunistic. The governments of these same countries did their best in the mid-2000s to reach out to Gaddafi and his family, even to the extent of exaggerating the concessions he made on weapons of mass destruction, mainly so that their oil companies would have access to Libyan oilfields and so that their other companies could sell goods and services to the Libyans. Their sudden enthusiasm for overthrowing Gaddafi appears to be a response to domestic public opinion, driven by reports of heavy civilian casualties in the conflict. But the conflict has since evolved into a traditional civil war between Gaddafi's military units and armed rebels who have seized arms and ammunition from government depots. There is little evidence that government forces are now deliberately targeting civilians, rather than fighting against rebels operating in populated areas.
7. There is no basis in international law for any foreign intevention without approval by the United Nations Security Council, which the United States, Britain and France seem unlikely to obtain. The world has had enough of 'coalitions of the willing' and unilateral military actions based on spurious legal grounds.
8. Foreign intervention would play into the hands of jihadi groups such as Al Qaeda and restore some of the influence they lost when Egyptians and Tunisians proved that political action can bring down unpopular leaders. Any foreign forces on Libyan soil would probably end up as targets for such jihadi groups, as in Iraq, even if such groups do not exist inside Libya at the moment.
9. If a humanitarian crisis develops, such as severe food shortages or a complete breakdown in medical services for the casualties, the civilian agencies of the United Nations and the ICRC could step in without military intervention, as they have done in innumerable civil wars over many years.

Egyptian State Security Documents

2011-03-08T12:33:00.000-08:00

The Egyptian State Security documents which have started to leak out are a treasure trove for historians, lawyers, political scientists and anyone else interested in how power corrupts, especially when no one has challenged that power for almost 60 years. I very much hope that someone is collecting them as systematically as possible under the circumstances and that they will lead to some prosecutions. The overwhelming impression is of the banality of evil, as though the people who wrote these reports and orders were just going about their daily business, like shipping clerks or sales managers filing reports on their activities. Although many of them are marked 'secret', there's no sense that these police officers had any qualms about what they were doing, which was often diametrically opposite to the state's declared policy, for example on mistreating detainees, free elections or judicial independence. So even the hypocrisy is banalized.
The ones I have seen on the Facebook page (all in Arabic), most of which come from Beheira province northwest of Cairo, contain evidence that:
    - State Security intervened in the judiciary, drawing up lists of judges who would be 'cooperative' as election supervisors (and presumably excluding those who were not from the electoral process
    - State Security, as we long suspected, excluded candidates associated with the Muslim Brotherhood from elections. State Security gave instructions that registry clerks keep two sets of books to record candidacies, one of them complete and one with all undesirable candidates excluded.
    - State Security gave orders that detainees should be held until they had recovered from injuries inflicted during questioning, presumably so that the injuries would not show when they came out.
    - State Security hacked its way into people's email accounts, though it seems to have faced some technical problems doing so.
    - State Security obtained lists of people who had not obtained voting cards and then had false identity cards issued so that people working for the state could vote on their behalf, presumably for favoured candidates.
    - State Security sometimes determined who could appear on which television talk show, even on privately owned channels, excluding those deemed hostile.
    - Some time during the last few weeks, State Security officials proposed that the government (presumably the Ahmed Shafik government) announce the dissolution of State Security, while in fact preserving the institution under a different name.
    - State Security drafted proposals it thought could 'strengthen the position of candidates from the (ruling) National Democratic Party'.
    - President Mubarak intervened in the parliamentary elections of 2005, telling Information Minister Anas el-Fiki to help Hossam Badrawi win in the Kasr el-Nil constituency. Fiki 'mobilised' the 4,000 employees of state radio and television to that end. (In fact, Badrawi lost to another NDP candidate - Hesham Mustafa Khalil!) Fiki also edited out part of an interview with Wafd Party presidential candidate Noman Gomaa because Mubarak was offended by some personal references to himself and to his son Gamal. State Security recorded these initiatives.
    - State Security ordered its branches to start shredding secret documents on February 26, for fear that protesters might attack police stations.

Christian protests in Cairo

2011-03-08T03:02:00.000-08:00

Several thousand Egyptian Christians demonstrated outside the television building in central Cairo and closed down one of the big Nile bridges on Monday night. The background is a sad story which began with a romance between a young Coptic man and a young Muslim woman, which escalated into communal strife and ended with an attack on a church, which was set on fire. Al Ahram Online has a detailed account. It's quite a setback for the communal harmony we saw during the revolution, when Muslims and Christians made a deliberate effort to work together to bring down President Hosni Mubarak. Many Egyptians concluded at the time that the old regime had deliberately enflamed sectarian tensions to set Egyptians against each other rather than against the regime. Ministry of Interior documents, which may in fact be hoaxes or forgeries, have been circulating that suggest that the ministry had a role in the bombing of the church in Alexandria in the early hours of January 1 this year. A retired police general examined one such document on OTV a few days ago and declared it to be a fabrication, but few people at the time believed the government when it blamed the Gaza-based Army of Islam for the bombing. Hopefully the truth will out when prosecutors shift through all the State Security documents which they are examining. One of the slogans of the revolution was 'dawla madaniya' (a civil(ian) state) and enlightened Egyptians interpret that to mean a state where all Egyptians (whether born to Muslim or Christian families) have equal rights to choose their own religion, to marry anyone they choose and to build places of worships by the same rules. But resistance to 'secularism' is still strong and the term is still widely misunderstood. In this context, note what the new foreign minister, Nabil al-Arabi, wrote in El-Shorouk (Arabic only) shortly before he was appointed. The crucial passage reads:

We are at the start of a new phase in which Egypt should enjoy prudent governance which brings about sound democracy, respect for human rights and equality for all without any discimination. What is required is to establish a modern secular state governed by laws which apply to all, and this requires repealing the enormous quantity of laws drafted by what are called the 'law tailors' over the past years. The constitutional legal framework which has governed Egypt for the past 50 years must be reviewed thoroughly, seriously and transparently.

But several of the commentators on Arabi's remarks express alarm at the word 'secular', which one interprets as 'denial of religion'. Another says the reference to secularism is 'disappointing'.
The Christian demonstrators were overtly critical of the army, saying it failed to intervene to protect their church or the Christian villagers. One of the main chants last night was 'Ya mushir, ya mushir, saakit leeh?' (Field marshal, field marshal, why are you silent?). The field marshal is Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the military council which has been governing Egypt since February 11.

Cameron and Israel

2011-03-04T08:40:00.000-08:00

When it comes to Middle East policy, British Prime Minister David Cameron is moving in the same direction as his predecessor Tony Blair, who ended his term in office as a rigid Islamophobe committed to the security of Israel whatever the Israeli government does to the several million Palestinians who have the misfortune to live under its jurisdiction.

In a speech on Thursday to the Community Security trust, the British equivalent of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, Cameron conflated Zionism and Judaism in a way that is either naïve or mischievous, but certainly contradictory from the head of government of a country which espouses universal human rights.

He said that Zionists had a right to advocate their views without fear and that it is possible to be both a committed Zionist and a loyal British citizen. He spoke about anti-Semitism, a foolish and despicable racist ideology born in Europe, as though it were synonymous with anti-Zionism, a principled international movement that rejects racism in all its forms.

Here are some extracts from his speech:

It is absolutely wrong that in any of our universities there should be an environment where students are scared to express their Judaism or their Zionism freely. It is absolutely wrong that universities should allow speakers to spread messages of anti-Semitism and hate...
The point is that it’s possible – and necessary - to have more than one loyalty in life. To be a proud Jew, a committed Zionist and a loyal British citizen. And to realise there is no contradiction between them.

In 1991, under pressure from the United States, the United Nations General Assembly repealed a 1975 resolution that described Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. But there are limits to the jurisdiction of the United Nations General Assembly. If it decrees that black is white or that the Earth is flat, its decrees are meaningless. They cannot prevent reasoned debate.

Zionists maintain that the international community of Jews have a historic right to the land known as Palestine for the two thousand years until 1948, on the basis of a spurious ethno-national link to a group of people who inhabited part of that territory during the 1^st millennium BC. They say that this right overrides the rights of people who have lived on that land for many generations and who played no part in the alleged departure of the Jewish population. The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, in his recent book The Invention of the Jewish People, provides convincing evidence that most living Jews are in fact the descendants of Jewish converts who never lived in Palestine, while many Palestinians are probably the descendants of Jewish farmers who converted to Christianity or Islam over the past to millennia.

Regardless of the historical facts, Zionism only makes sense in the context of the European racism of the 19^th century, of which it is an offshoot. If Zionists do not often overtly claim ethno-national superiority over their Palestinian neighbours, it is only because excluding the Palestinians from their discourse has seemed a more promising strategy, given the stigma attached to racism. In practice, the Zionist strategy has been to pursue a process of ethnic cleansing, starting in 1948 and continuing to this day. To anyone who cares to look at the facts, Zionism is a form of racism. Cameron should know this.

The British prime minister was wrong on several other counts. He said Israeli politicians should be able to visit Britain without fear of arrest when there is little prospect that any prosecution will follow. On the contrary, we need to put politicians of all nationalities on notice that the world is watching their actions closely and that, if they implicated in serious crimes against whole populations, they will not be welcome guests and may have to face investigation by an independent judiciary, whether in Britain or anywhere else that upholds the rule of law.

On Iran's nuclear programme, which may or may not include plans to make nuclear weapons, Cameron adopted the same double standard as the United States and the rest of its allies. “We will not stand by and allow Iran to cast a nuclear shadow over Israel or the wider region,” he said. Why did he ignore the nuclear shadow that Israel has cast over the region for the past several decades with nuclear weapons the existence of which some Israeli officials have already confirmed? Israel's record as an aggressively expansionist state is well recorded, while Iran, which has no such record, is judged by outsiders' assessment of its unspoken intentions.

Cameron, like many other ignorant Americans and Europeans, recycled the ancient theory that Arab despots ranted about Palestine to distract their populations from domestic repression:

But I fundamentally believe that what we are seeing now in North Africa need not be a new threat to Israel’s security. For decades autocratic Arab regimes have used the Palestinian cause to smother people’s hopes and aspirations. Their message to their people has been: never mind the lack of democracy here, focus on the injustices being done to your Palestinian brothers and sisters. Now young people are seeing through this and seeking their own economic and political rights and in the vast majority of cases doing so peacefully.

In the cases of Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia, this is nonsense. Mubarak rarely spoke about Palestinian rights and Israeli violations of international law. He cooperated with Israel in the blockade of Gaza and in attempts to undermine the representatives the Palestinians elected in the free elections of 2006. The fact that Israel pressed the United States to support Mubarak to the bitter end is evidence enough that the former Egyptian president served Israeli interests well. The young people of Egypt and Tunisia know this and they believe that Palestinians have the same rights to freedom and dignity as they do.

When Cameron says, “I will always be an advocate for the State of Israel”, he does not speak for me. Israel must be judged by its actions and its statements. It does not deserve a blank cheque.

Carr on Friedman

2011-03-03T03:49:00.000-08:00

Sarah Carr's response to Thomas Friedman's laughable list of 'factors which contributed to the Arab uprisings' is one of the funniest pieces of satire I have read in a long time. I especially liked My Moustache and the Cooper's Hill cheese-rolling and wake event (by the way, it really exists, unless Wikipedia has also been spoofed). But the comments on Friedman's article on the New York Times website give an alarming insight into the mindset of, well, people who post comments on the New York Times website. Many of them think Friedman shows brilliant insight, and they don't appear to be writing satirically. Many want to add credit to President George W. Bush and to his invasion of Iraq. A sad reflection of American narcissism, which remains alive and well despite a decade of American decline.

Egyptian Prime Minister Resigns

2011-03-03T01:43:00.000-08:00

A couple of minutes after I posted 'Positive Signs in Egypt', news came through that Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik has resigned and the military council has asked Essam Sharaf, a former transport minister, to form a new government. I imagine that his four hours on television last night was a factor in Shafik's decision. The media can indeed be powerful.

Some positive signs in Egypt

2011-03-03T01:30:00.000-08:00

The pace of change in Egypt seems to be picking up, after a couple of weeks of uncertainty about the intentions of the ruling military council. First there was the decision last week to freeze the assets of the Mubarak family, pending an investigation into how they acquired their wealth, along with the accelerating publication of news stories about corruption in the old regime. El-Shorouk, for example, reports today that former Housing Minister Mohamed Ibrahim Suleiman assigned state land to the daughters of former Vice President Omar Suleiman at nominal prices below their market value, in violation of the normal procedures. The accumulating mass of evidence against many leading members of the old regime makes a counter-revolution less and less possible.
The military council has also been reaching out to a wider range of Egyptians. On Tuesday council chairman and acting head of state Tantawi met probable presidential candidates Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa of the Arab League, along with other leading figures. The council wanted to hear their voices on the phasing and timeframe for presidential and parliamentarian elections - a subject which is under active debate and on which there are many diverse opinions. Those who called what happened on February 11 a military coup and predicted that the generals would try to strengthen their grip should note that the council has told all visitors that it wants to leave office after six months. It is the politicians and the activists who brought down Mubarak who want to extend the transitional period so that parties can organize and so that the country can prepare a long-term constitution which is broadly accepted. The generals have preferred to patch up the existing constitution as quickly as possible but the public pressure for a more radical overhaul may be having an effect.
A positive sign of the times was a four-hour discussion on OTV television on Wednesday evening, with Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik, novelist and activist Alaa el-Aswany, businessman Naguib Sawiris (who owns OTV), broadcaster Hamdi Kandeel and public intellectual Amr Hemzawy. I only caught the last two hours but the indefatigable Zeinobia watched throughout and stayed up till 4 a.m. to tell the world about it. I doubt in the history of Egyptian television that any prime minister has submitted to such relentless and incisive criticism. Kandeel and Aswany, as politely as one can under the circumstances, told Shafik he should resign and told him that it was unacceptable that three old-guard ministers - Interior Minister Mahmoud Wagdi, Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Justice Minister Mmdouh Marei - remain in the cabinet. They also disagreed over the future of the State Security department, which the opposition wanted disbanded. Shafik argued that the country needed such an agency but the government would redefine its responsibilities and set strict limits on its powers. One worrying element was that Shafik (like all Mubarak's prime ministers) clearly has little control over those three ministries or over the choice of the ministers who run them. That's up to the military council. Aswany rightly pointed out the ambiguity this creates: the prime minister bears political responsibility for the activities and statements of those ministers but cannot get rid of them without the council's approval. So far the council has acted with great caution, making as few changes as possible, but in many cases it has eventually come down on the side of the demands of those who took part in the uprising against Mubarak.
Taken together, all these elements suggest that the process of change is irreversible for the moment and the military council is gradually wising up to political realities it faces. The demands of the protest movement will not go away and the council is beginning to listen more attentively. The movement will not be silenced.
Another healthy sign is the course of the debate within the Muslim Brotherhood over the platform for the political party which the movement plans to launch. El-Shorouk reported on Thursday that the committee drafting the platform has agreed to drop the idea of a 'board of ulema' which would have had powers similar to those of the Guardian Council of the Revolution in Iran. Liberals criticized the idea when it appeared in a draft platform for a Brotherhood political party in 2008. The committee, El-Shorouk said, has also dropped an article saying that the state should have 'a civil character with some basic religious functions'. The new phraseology is to the effect of 'a civil state, not a religious theocracy or a military state'. El-Shorouk interpreted this as a sign that the Brotherhood would accept the theoretical possibility of a Christian head of state, a possibility which the earlier draft would have excluded. The changes suggest that, as predicted, the reality of political competition in a democratic atmosphere can make the Brotherhood more flexible and more centrist.

Fouad Ajami and the Invasion of Iraq Revisited

2011-03-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Even in a moment of joy and triumph for millions of Arabs, Fouad Ajami cannot wholly renounce one of his favourite themes - that the political behaviour of Arabs has been driven by inherited pathologies which set them apart from the rest of mankind. Even when he revels with Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans at their liberation from old tyrannies, he cannot resist the temptation to hold them responsible for their own long oppression. Their liberation, he writes in the New York Times, came when they finally saw the light - his own very idiosyncratic light, abandoning Arab nationalism and the cause of Palestine:

These rulers hadn’t descended from the sky. They had emerged out of the Arab world’s sins of omission and commission. Today’s rebellions are animated, above all, by a desire to be cleansed of the stain and the guilt of having given in to the despots for so long.
There is no marker, no dividing line, that establishes with precision when and why the Arab people grew weary of the dictators. To the extent that such tremendous ruptures can be pinned down, this rebellion was an inevitable response to the stagnation of the Arab economies...Then, too, the legends of Arab nationalism that had sustained two generations had expired. Younger men and women had wearied of the old obsession with Palestine.

I disagree, not on some technicality, but profoundly and thoroughly. Individuals may sin, but to project those sins on to the whole Arab world - millions of people across several generations and more than 20 countries - is more than they deserve. Such a theory of collective guilt makes for powerful rhetoric, well-tuned to the preconceptions of Ajami's audience, preconceptions that he has made a good living out of humouring. But it's a little too close for comfort to some discredited 20th-century ideas that led to the deaths of millions. What sins did the young Egyptians who came out on the streets on January 25 have to expiate? Their failure to overthrow Hosni Mubarak when they were in their teens? Even the older generations, the ones who applauded the initiative and determination of their descendants, did not feel guilt, only regret that they had lived under tyranny so long. Most of them never connived in their own oppression. On the contrary, the main forces that conspired to oppress them were the very ones that Ajami serves and that he does not mention - the United States, the oil companies, the arms dealers, and all those who believed that ordinary Arabs should pay any price necessary for the sake of cheap oil and Israel's immunity from accountability. Ajami's reference to the demise of Arab nationalism and the 'obsession with Palestine' is a cheap shot, with little basis in reality. Arab nationalism in its traditional form has been on the decline for decades, but it may be evolving into a more pragmatic sense of Arab community, based on shared values and interests. The solidarity of the protest movements across national barriers has been striking - the common slogans, the use of each other's flags, the joy in each other's successes, the synchronicity. Whether the next governments of these Arab countries will abandon Palestine remains to be seen, but the dominant rhetoric for the moment is one of universal rights, including those of Palestinians. Ajami would like to see them pursue their narrow national interests. Hopefully they will ignore his advice.
Ajami adds:

There is no overstating the importance of the fact that these Arab revolutions are the works of the Arabs themselves. No foreign gunboats were coming to the rescue, the cause of their emancipation would stand or fall on its own. Intuitively, these protesters understood that the rulers had been sly, that they had convinced the Western democracies that it was either the tyrants’ writ or the prospect of mayhem and chaos.

A good moment to review what Ajami wrote in Foreign Affairs in early 2003, just before his adopted country invaded Iraq, and to remember that his hands are stained with the blood of the scores of thousands of Iraqis who have died in that disastrous adventure, an adventure he supported with reckless abandon and knowing disregard for the bloody consequences ("There is no need to pay excessive deference to the political pieties and givens of the region," he wrote). His great hope at the time was that invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein would undermine Arab nationalism, disengage Iraq from the Palestinian cause, offer an alternative to 'anti-Americanism' and weaken Arab despots. Specifically on Egypt, he said: "There appears to be no liberal option of Egypt, no economic salvation... As the political life of the land has atrophied, anti-Americanism has taken hold... Iraq may offer a contrast, a base in the Arab world free of the poison of ant-Americanism."

He added:

An Arab world rid of this kind of ruinous temptation (Saddam's imperial ambitions) might conceivably have a chance to rethink the role of political power and the very nature of the state. It is often seemed in recent years that the Arab political tradition is immune to democratic stirrings. The sacking of a terrible regime with such a pervasive cult of terror may offer Iraqi and Arabs a break with the false gifts of despotism.

And on why the United States had to take on this great task:

It is the fate of great powers that provide order to do so against a background of a world that takes the protection while it bemoans the heavy hand of the protector.

Some order, some protection!
Not surprisingly, Ajami in 2011 does not even pretend that invading Iraq in 2003 had anything to do with the Tunisian uprising in December 2010 and all the events that have followed. The reason is simple: it was completely irrelevant.

Syrian adviser's hypocrisy

2011-03-01T11:34:00.000-08:00

Bouthaina Shaaban, an eloquent political and media adviser to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, joins the list of Arab officials who applaud the Tunisian, Egyptian and other Arab uprisings. But she has nothing to say about the repressive policies of her own government. In a commentary on the Syrian website Champress and in at least one Gulf newspaper this morning, Shaaban writes as though she lives in some other part of the world and is merely an enthusiastic observer of a regional revolt that is long overdue. It is true that her main objective is to dispute the theory that the Arab protest movement has turned its back on solidarity with the Palestinian people - one of the pillars of the legitimacy of the Syrian government, at least in its public discourse. I would even agree with her in that. All the Arab protest movements say that they are committed to universal human rights and that the treatment of the Palestinians by Israeli racists is one of the most egregious and chronic large-scale violations of human rights in the world. Those who are banking on Arab peoples turning in on themselves and ignoring the plight of the Palestinians are deluding themselves. On the contrary, new democratic governments will have to reflect the views of the people, who are overwhelming outraged at the way their previous governments connived in the fiction that successive U.S. administrations have sought an Israeli-Palestinian settlement based on equality and justice.

But that doesn't mean we should overlook the plight of the Syrian people, who have been living for decades under a government which is just as oppressive as those in Tunisia and Egypt, if not more so. It just will not wash in March 2011 for someone working for the Syrian government to write:

With their spontaneous revolutions, Arabs are burying the mummy regimes once and for all. Enough with the age of frustration, apathy and despair! Like other Arab writers and intellectuals past and present, I laid my bets, in everything I wrote, on the fundamental nature of the values of freedom, dignity and justice for Arabs, the vitality of this people and the inevitability of rejecting the humiliation imposed by oppressive security agencies which spend more money on the equipment of oppression and torture imported from the West than on education and universities.

When it comes to 'mummy regimes' and 'oppressive security agencies', Syria comes close to the top of the table. If the Syrian mukhabarat imported their torture techniques from communist eastern Europe rather from 'the West', or indeed if they invented them for themselves, it is quite irrelevant.

She adds:

The old regimes could have reformed themselves gradually from within, as did the democratic countries themselves. But some rulers persisted in their tyranny; they ignored the will of their people and forgot their aspirations.
That is why people in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere went to the streets and demonstrations have become the only way to push the political regime and move it to the 21st century.

Hypocrisy is always objectionable. When the perpetrator cannot even see his or her hypocrisy, especially in the case of someone in public office, it is alarming. The Syrian government has reacted to protests in Syria in exactly the same way as the Arab government reacted at first to protests there. If Shaaban wants to argue that Syria is different, she should argue her case, not just pretend that Syria does not exist.

US also needs to show some self-restraint

2011-02-27T13:39:00.000-08:00

It's a very bad idea for the United States to intervene in Libya and I have no doubt that no one credible in the Libyan opposition will accept such an offer. "We’ve been reaching out to many different Libyans who are attempting to organize in the east and, as the revolution moves westward, there as well. I think it’s way too soon to tell how this is going to play out, but we’re going to be ready and prepared to offer any kind of assistance that anyone wishes to have from the United States," said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The last thing any Arab rebellion (and that is what we have in Libya) needs is the kiss of death that any association with the United States would bring. If the US administration is reacting to domestic pressures, as it did in the case of its decision to veto the UN Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements, then it should resist the temptation. Even the vague offer could do damage. Who is giving advice to these US officials, and what is driving them?

Why I Can't Say Saudi Arabia is a Haven of Peace

2011-02-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

I'm in Qatar for a couple of days for a workshop on the Egyptian revolution at the Qatar Foundation, but surprises have followed me all the way. First there was the news that a group of Qataris are calling for a Day of Rage on March 18, and a group of Saudis for a similar day on March 11. Then I heard the news of the protests in Oman on Saturday and Sunday. Then in my morning newspaper I read Rachel Bronson on why Saudi Arabia is safe for revolution, at least for the moment. She admits that 'It is dangerous business to predict events in the Middle East, especially in time of regional crisis', but on close examinations her reasons for excluding Saudi Arabia from the wave of protests look very thin indeed. Let's look at them one by one:

The country is different in some important ways. First, its economic situation is far better. Egypt's per capita gross domestic product is slightly more than $6,000, and Tunisia's is closer to $9,000. For Saudi Arabia, it is roughly $24,000 and climbing (up from $9,000 a little more than a decade ago). The Saudi regime also has resources to spend on its people. Oil prices are high and rising. On Wednesday, the king announced massive social benefits packages totaling more than $35 billion and including unemployment relief, housing subsidies, funds to support study abroad and a raft of new job opportunities created by the state. Clearly the king is nervous, but he has goodies to spread around.

Then she adds:

According to an analysis by Banque Saudi Fransi, joblessness among Saudis under age 30 hovered around 30 percent in 2009. Still, many of the king's key policy decisions - joining the World Trade Organization, creating new cities with more liberal values, promoting education and particularly study abroad - have sought to solve these problems. The country may be on a very slow path toward modernization, but it is not sliding backward like many others in the Middle East.

In fact that's a much higher youth unemployment rate that either Egypt and Tunisia and I'm not convinced that economic growth is an obstacle to revolution anyway. On the contrary, is it not conventional wisdom that autocratic governments are at their most vulnerable at times of high growth with uneven income distribution? The Egyptian economy has been growing strongly since about 2004, and the Tunisian economy hadn't been doing badly either. The Egyptian uprising was not driven by unemployed or hungry people, but by middle-class people who did not like the way their country had been hijacked by a narrow clique who ruled by rigging elections backed by police brutality.

Her second argument:

Another difference between Saudi Arabia and its neighbors is that the opposition has been largely co-opted or destroyed. For the past 10 years, the Saudi government has systematically gone after al-Qaeda cells on its territory and has rooted out suspected supporters in the military and the national guard, especially after a series of attacks in 2003. Key opposition clerics have been slowly brought under the wing of the regime. This has involved some cozying up to unsavory people, but the threat from the radical fringe is lower now than it has been in the recent past. And the Saudis have been quite clever about convincing the country's liberal elites that the regime is their best hope for a successful future.

That sounds remarkably like Tunisia, and not a whole lot different from Egypt, at least in general terms. The serious opposition in Tunisia was either in jail, in exile or silent. In Egypt the parliamentary elections of 2010 gave the ruling NDP and like-minded independents all but a handful of seats. The Muslim Brotherhood was cowed and unwilling to take on the government until the protest movement showed signs that it might succeed. In Libya the government was even more successful in eliminating any form of domestic opposition, which had hardly raised its head above the parapets for 15 years. What took people by surprise in all three countries was that the opposition appeared from nowhere, from the silent majority which was thought to be dormant.
Her next argument:

The loyalty of the security services is always an important predictor of a regime's stability, and here the Saudis again have reason for some confidence. Senior members of the royal family and their sons are in control of all the security forces - the military, the national guard and the religious police. They will survive or fall together. There can be no equivalent to the Egyptian military taking over as a credible, independent institution. In Saudi Arabia, the government has a monopoly on violence.

Sounds remarkably familiar to me from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. It took more than 300 dead, millions of people in the street and 18 days of daily protests to persuade the Egyptian military to move, but in the end they moved. Similarly in Tunisia. In Libya, Gaddafi's sons and loyalists controlled key military formations, but several of those have fallen apart. In times of domestic unrest, the loyalty of any military or paramilitary unit is fragile and can crumble into dust with remarkable speed when individual soldiers or officers face conflicting demands and loyalties. Those at the top of the command chain may also decide at any moment that an alternative ruler better serves their interests. Don't count on their loyalty, as many rulers have learnt to their cost throughout human history.
Her last argument:

Finally, a succession plan is in place. Saudi Arabia has had five monarchs in the past six decades, since the death of its founder. There is not a succession vacuum as there was in Egypt and Tunisia. Many Saudis may not like Prince Nayaf, the interior minister, but they know he is likely to follow King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan on the throne. And there is a process, if somewhat opaque, for choosing the king after him.

I don't buy that one either. If Saudis don't like the Al Saud, why would they be reassured by the knowledge that Prince Nayef will rule them one day and that the same family will govern for ever? It's true that uncertainty about the succession added to the tensions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and made it easier to challenge the legitimacy of the ruling family, but it's the legitimacy that counts. Once a ruler or his family loses legitimacy, all they have left is brute force, and that takes us back to the previous argument.
I'm not saying that the Saudi government is in trouble. I don't know and I'm not making predictions. But the events in Libya and now Oman certainly weaken the old 'rentier state' argument, which was previously one of the strongest arguments for why countries such as Saudi Arabia would be immune from the 'ripple effect' of the Arab revolts.

Tribal defections/splits in Libya

2011-02-24T12:24:00.000-08:00

Al Jazeera reports that Ahmed Gaddaf al-Dam, Gaddafi's point man for relations with Egypt and usually identified as Gaddafi's cousin, has resigned and is seeking political asylum in Egypt. By the old tribal adage 'My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger', that should be the death knell for Gaddafi. Since Gaddafi is in fact still alive and fighting, at least early today, tribal affiliation clearly is not the only factor at work in the Libyan conflict. Television stations on Wednesday night also reported the defection of a senior security official in the east of the country who was a member of the Gadhadhfa, the colonel's tribe (hence his name).
But the Egyptian newspaper al Masry al Yom carried an interesting story today about a more conventional split in the Awlad Ali, a large tribe which straddles the Libyan-Egyptian border. It quotes Mansour Awad of the Egyptian branch as saying: "Our cousins (i.e. close agnates) have been living in Libya a long time and have become naturalized. The tribe has kinship ties with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. We all used to love him and esteem him. But we are not pleased with the current situation, because he is bringing mercenaries to attack our brothers. Because of that we have taken a decision: 'My brother and I against my cousin.' We have organized a demonstration and we're waiting for the army to open the way for us to reach them there."
The report goes on to say that members of the Awlad Ali were indeed chanting anti-Gaddafi slogans at the Salloum border post and holding placards calling for him to be tried. It says that Ahmed Gaddaf al-Dam visited the border post on Tuesday and was unhappy to find people protesting against the Libyan leader. Gaddaf al-Dam then went to Siwa, it says, and found similar protests there.
Al Arabiya's English-language website has a similar report but adds that the purpose of Gaddaf al-Dam's trip to Salloum was to recruit Awlad Ali to fight on Gaddafi's side in the conflict. "(Gaddaf al-Dam) is reportedly contacting several airline companies in an attempt to obtain huge planes to transfer mercenaries from different African countries to Libya to crush the revolution. The mercenaries are said to be specifically heading for Camp 27, headed by the Libyan leader’s son Khamis Gaddafi," Al Arabiya added, without citing any source.

Libya and the Discourse of Tribalism

2011-02-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

John Hamilton in the Telegraph and Peter Apps for Reuters, along with many others, have written about the tribal element in Libyan politics and how it complicates the power structure. Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi said the same point in his speech the other night - that Libya is different because it is made up of what he called 'tribes and clans' (qabaa'il wa 3ashaa'ir) and chaos could lead to civil war. 'Complicates' is the operative word here because tribal sentiment does indeed add an extra and relatively unusual dimension to the usual equation of possible benefits and costs as each individual Libyan decides which side he or she is on, or indeed whether to stay on the sidelines. In this sense, Libya is quite different from neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt, especially Egypt, where tribalism has hardly ever existed except on the desert peripheries. Every individual anywhere lives within a mesh of loyalties of varying degrees of intensity - family, profession, class, region, ethnicity, political allegiance, religious denomination and so on. But the unusual feature of tribalism, as anthropologists have noted for at least the last century or so, is that loyalties and customary obligations are 'segmentised' - in other words, tribes can easily split at a large number of different levels, based on perceptions, often mythical, of a person's genealogical origin. In theory, the more recent the common ancestor between X and Y (in the male line in the Arab context), the tighter the bonds of solidarity between them should be. That means that, even in a theoretically 'perfect' model, tribes need not always act as a coherent unit, unless they are in direct conflict with another tribe of equal size and coherence.
In the Libyan context, this raises a host of questions about how people will in fact behave when they have to decide whether to support or oppose Gaddafi, or whether to sit on the fence. It's very hard to believe that the tribal elders of the Warfala tribe, for example, can take such a decision on behalf of all or even most of the tribe's members, said to be the largest in the country with one million members (about a sixth of the total population). For a start, the steady process of urbanization and sedentarization over the past 40 years must have weakened the tribal bonds, even if most people still know which tribe they belong to and on many occasions (when they vote, for example) take tribal affiliations into account. Most Libyans are no longer nomads living in the desert and herding camels and other livestock - a lifestyle which helps to preserve tribalism because the system acts as a deterrent to potential aggressors. Most of them lives in cities and towns where there is a functioning police force. Many of them do sedentary office jobs with administrative structures modelled on those of the modern bureaucratic state. This creates other loyalties which may well be more compelling than those of the old tribalism. They are often dependent on the state, which in theory places little value on their tribal affiliation. In fact, paradoxically for a country whose leader has always distrusted the state as an institution, Libyans may be one of the most state-dependent populations on the planet. The state provides cheap housing, subsidised food, free health care and university education, and often undemanding jobs for life. State employment has also brought geographical mobility, which tends to dilute tribal sentiment. It is probable that under such circumstances tribal affiliations would be just one of many factors Libyans are taking into account when they decide how to handle the current crisis in their country.
The fact that the opposition now controls large geographically contiguous parts of eastern Libya suggests that region is also an important factor. Judging by the tribal maps I have seen, the east of the country includes a mixture of tribes, some of which have many members in the west of the country, possibly still under central government control. The east also appears to be relatively peaceful for the moment, suggesting that none of those tribal fragments are currently in conflict, regardless of what position their allegedly paramount leaders might have taken.
My intention is not to dismiss out of hand the tribal element in Libyan politics. But I do believe that an overemphasis on tribal affiliations has been part of a mistaken Orientalist discourse that has plagued understanding of the Arab world for the past 200 years or so. Among the worst offenders in recent years have been Mark Allen (Arabs: A New Perspective) and Charles Lindholm (The Islamic Middle East; Tradition and Change), both of which gives excessive weight to ancient Bedouin concepts in order to explain a region where tribalism is the exception rather than the rule demographically. Libya is an outlier of course, because of its historically peripheral nature, but even in Libya we may be surprised to find that tribe does not count for as much as some instant analysts are predicting.

Gaddafi speech - a footnote on the audience and venue

2011-02-22T11:01:00.000-08:00

An interesting footnote to the Gaddafi speech today, for those who did not catch the end because many TV stations grew tired and moved on to talking heads. When he finished with his "Forward march! No going back!" and the right fist in the air, he walked down off the podium to his right along a pathway and there were some faint cheers of support off camera. At that point a man in military uniform came forward to kiss Gaddafi on both cheeks, then a man in civilian dress did likewise. The camera zoomed out further and a group of about 20 people came into view, apparently his audience. Gaddafi then got into a golf-cart/toktok vehicle similar to the one he was driving in the early hours in Green Square and drove off alone. For those reporters and viewers uncertain about the venue, I can assure them that this was the porch of the building in the Bab al-Aziziya barracks where Gaddafi was said to have been staying when the United States bombed the building in April 1986. The Libyan government often took foreign visitors there to remind them of the incident. Gaddafi's alleged bedroom, which contained a king-sized bed in red velvet, surrounded by large mirrors, was also on display (kitsch would be a polite description). Outside the building, the monumental giant fist crushing a US fighter-bomber has been a permanent feature for years. The venue would account for Gaddafi driving away alone: the extensive area is heavily guarded and not easily accessible to outsiders. But the small audience was puzzling, as was the poor quality of the audio and the video, which really did suggest an infrastructure on the verge of collapse.
Gaddafi's argument for the use of force against rebels was not one we often hear in polite circles. He cited the US assault on the Iraqi town of Falluja, the FBI's attack on the Branch Davidian centre in Waco, Texas, in 1993, and the attack on the Russian parliament under Boris Yeltsin, also in 1993.
It's striking how, under pressure, all three North African autocrats -- in Tunis, Egypt and now Libya -- have tried to portray their enemies as fanatical Islamists. Gaddafi went one step further, saying that al Qaeda had taken over the east of the country.

Libya and 'reform'

2011-02-21T10:06:00.000-08:00

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shows every sign of losing power rapidly, as his diplomats and at least one minister jump from the sinking ship. They are one of the best indicators possible, because they presumably have direct contacts with people inside the regime in Tripoli and I doubt they would defect unless they were confident that Gaddafi was doomed. Calls for 'reform' from U.S. and European politicians will win them no credit at this late stage, because this is clearly a regime that was always incapable of reform. I last went to Libya in early 2004, just after the United States and its allies were so thrilled by the pathetic charade of Libya abandoning what it pretended was a nuclear weapons programme. They even managed to convince large numbers of their own peoples that this was a real change of heart by Gaddafi, and the sycophantic thinktankers went along with the farce so that Bush could snatch some kind of victory from his abysmal Middle East policy. I remember at the time that U.S. Congress people and European politicians were falling over themselves for a piece of the pie (in other words so that U.S. and European oil companies could make more money) and arguing that Libya could suddenly become a liberal democracy. What they deliberately overlooked (and this was evident to anyone who ever saw the man in person) was that Gaddafi has been a seriously disturbed individual for many years. I'm not a psychologist to be able to diagnose his condition but he was clearly quite detached from reality as early as the late 1980s, when I first met him. I never managed to speak to him privately because that was a 'privilege' only available to attractive females, several of whom had to run away to escape his amorous advances. Gaddafi has driven his country into the ground and it was always shocking to see the decrepit state of government offices, which were no cleaner or better equipped than those in Egypt, where per capita GDP is about one tenth of what it is in Libya. Unfortunately recovering from 40 years of Gaddafi may well be much harder than recovering from 30 years of Mubarak. Egypt at least has the rudiments of a functioning state, whereas Gaddafi was a strange paradox -- an autocratic anarchist. He shared none of the usual objectives one might expect from the leader of such a country, such as economic development or diversification away from dependence on oil. Everything was haphazard and spontaneous, like his rambling speeches, which were 5 percent candid common sense and 95 percent histrionic fantasy.

More Wikileaks on the Egyptian Military

2011-02-20T05:47:00.000-08:00

I spent a few hours today sifting through the latest US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, specifically the ones relevant to the Egyptian military and security establishment. The impression the cables give is of a complacent and rather greedy military leadership which believes the $1.3 billion it received from the United States every year is its birthright for maintaining peace with Israel and should in fact be increased. The United States, on the other hand, has been pressing the Egyptian military, apparently with little effect, to take part in 'regional security initiatives' such as helping the Iraqi military, actions against Somali pirates, a greater contribution to peace-keeping in Sudan and vague 'counter-terrorism' activities.

For example:

Major General Fouad Arafa interjected during the discussion to note that the spirit of the Camp David accord was that there would be a 2:3 balance between Egypt and Israel's security assistance. Egypt's role was to keep a certain balance of power in the region that would not allow other parties to go to war. Egypt had fulfilled this role faithfully for the last 30 years. al-Assar added that the current ratio of 2:5 was a violation of the Camp David ratio.

And again:

Al-Assar encouraged Dr. Kahl to convince the U.S. Congress that Egypt was worth more than $1.3 billion a year. Dr. Kahl mentioned that Egypt receives the second largest amount of assistance in the world, and that during these difficult financial times in the United States, it was unlikely that annual flow of FMF would increase.

And on Defence Minister Tantawi:

In office since 1991, he consistently resists change to the level and direction of FMF funding and is therefore one of our chief impediments to transforming our security relationship. Nevertheless, he retains President Mubarak's support. You should encourage Tantawi to place greater emphasis on countering asymmetric threats rather than focusing almost exclusively on conventional force.

Another interesting detail that emerges is Tantawi's view on the relationship between the military and the civilian government:

Tantawi added that any country where the military became engaged in "internal affairs" was "doomed to have lots of problems." He stressed that countries must clearly stipulate the military's duties in their constitution and militaries should not deviate from those defined responsibilities.

The armed forces chief of staff, Sami Anan, does not appear to be fully on board when it comes to smuggling along the Gaza border:

Enan (Anan) stressed the importance of opening Gaza's borders for regular traffic, referring to the crossing points as "lungs" that must be allowed to breathe. Enan expressed doubt that Israeli air strikes could destroy the tunnels "100 percent" given the enormous financial incentive for individuals on all sides - Gaza, Egypt and Israel - to smuggle.

And here:

Ultimately, Enan said that smuggling would continue as long as Gaza was "besieged" and called on Israel to lift the blockade and open border crossings to provide the Gazans with a "normal life."

It's a little tangential but I can't resist slipping in what Mabahith Amn al-Dawla told the deputy head of the FBI about the Muslim Brotherhood. To his credit, the US ambassador, who wrote the cable, seemed a little dubious:

(State Security Investigative Service (SSIS) head Hassan) Abdul Rahman spoke at length about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB), terming the group "terrorists, not political oppositionists." During a lengthy heartfelt monologue, Abdul Rahman asserted that, "you just do not understand the MB like we do. It is an extremist group, from which all Islamic extremists have sprung, and even now, despite having changed tactics and not engaging in actual violent operations, it is still providing financial support to Hamas." Abdul Rahman opined that the MB's "weight in the Egyptian street" is actually negligible, noting that, "the strength of the MB is much less than implied by their success in the 2005 parliamentary elections." He did not provide any further information to bolster this assertion.

For an overview of the embassy's assessment of the role of the military in Egypt, you can read this whole cable on the subject, based on local analysts. It doesn't exactly corroborate the narrative of the all powerful military.

Future of Egyptian foreign policy

2011-02-20T01:14:00.000-08:00

A couple of people have asked me what I foresaw for Egyptian foreign policy after the revolution. I have been a little reluctant to make predictions, especially after saying some years ago that Mubarak's policy on Gaza was untenable. This is what I wrote on the subject for Reuters, rather tentatively since we don't know who will be in charge.

The Egyptian revolution and upheavals across the region could herald a shift in the balance of power between Israel and its neighbours, as Arabs push out autocrats who often put U.S. and European ties before their people's demands.

The revoltuion that put an end to 30 years of rule by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is still in its early days. No one can yet predict who will be holding his place as leader of the Arab world's most populous country at the end of the year.

But few of the likely outcomes include a carbon-copy extension of Mubarak's policies towards Israel, which included cooperation in blockading Gaza, hostility to Hamas and Hezbollah, and muted criticism of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

Unless the Egyptian military clings to power or elements of the ancien regime make a miraculous comeback, ordinary Egyptians will have more say in their country's foreign policy than at any
time in the 5,000 years Egypt has existed as a political entity.

Judging by opinion polls and the views of most of the main political forces, Egyptians will be more assertive than Mubarak in backing Palestinian rights and less willing to comply with requests from Israel and its allies in the United States.

No significant group, not even the Muslim Brotherhood, is calling for outright abrogation of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, a pillar of Israel's regional security strategy since late President Anwar Sadat signed the document in 1979.

But between abrogation and a continuation of Mubarak's policies, the next elected Egyptian government will have a range of options likely to put Israel on the defensive and bring to an
end the cosy relationship the Jewish state enjoyed with Mubarak.

Coupled with a recent shift in the policy of Turkey, now more outspoken in challenging Israeli policies, the Egyptian revolution marks, as Israeli politicians say they fear, a break with the strategic dominance they felt they had established.

“The Middle East’s tectonic plates are shifting,” writes Peter Beinart, associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York.

“For a long time, countries like Turkey and Egypt were ruled by men more interested in pleasing the United States than their own people, and as a result, they shielded Israel from their people’s anger. Now more of that anger will find its way into the corridors of power.”

DEMOCRATIC CREDIBILITY

A democratic transformation un Egypt, especially if it is replicated in other Arab states, would undermine one argument Israelis have made to win sympathy in Europe and the United States: that it is the sole Middle East democracy, an oasis of “Western values” surrounded by Arab despots ruling by force.

“What is at stake here is the pretence that Israel is a stable, civilized, western island in a rough sea of Islamic barbarism and Arab fanaticism," writes post-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.

"The 'danger' for Israel is that the cartography would be the same but the geography would change. It would still be an island but of barbarism and fanaticism in a sea of newly formed egalitarian and democratic states,” he writes.

Unlike their authoritarian predecessors, an Arab democracy would be able to criticise with credibility and a clear conscience Israel's conduct towards the Arabs it governs.

New Arab democratic rulers could highlight discriminatory practices towards Israeli Arabs, the use of violence to quell Palestinians challenging an occupation and Jewish settlement activity in the West Bank which major powers say is illegal.

Israel disputes such criticisms. It says Arabs in Israel enjoy more rights now than their compatriots in neighbouring states, including a right to vote for Arabs in their parliament. They also say any use of force is to stop terrorism.

Israel has, nevertheless, been watching Egypt with concern.

"Ultimately the people of Egypt are those who will decide their own fate, but Israel cannot profess a neutrality as to the outcome," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

"I cannot simply hope for the best, I must also prepare for the worst," he told American Jewish leaders on Feb. 16 in Jerusalem, in a speech in which he said Israel was committed to
peace and said he hoped Egypt would remain committed too.

Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, followed by Jordan in 1994. An interim accord was reached with Palestinians in 1993.

“It is ironic that Israel ... seems so uncomfortable in a democratizing Middle East," says Beinart, adding:

"But at root, that discomfort stems from Israel’s own profoundly anti-democratic policies in the West Bank and Gaza. In an increasingly democratic, increasingly post-American Middle
East, the costs of those policies will only continue to rise.”

There is no end in sight for the wave of protests that have been sweeping the Middle East since the start of 2011.

Egypt's uprising followed one in Tunisia, which overthrew President Zine el-Abdine Ben Ali in January. Protests have erupted in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Yemen and Bahrain.

“When and where transitions take place, they will express a yearning for more assertiveness. Governments will have to change their spots; their publics will wish them to be more like Turkey
and less like Egypt,” wrote Hussein Agha and Robert Malley.

Malley took part in the U.S. attempt to mediate an Israeli-Palestinian peace under President Bill Clinton.

GRIEVANCES

Once a stable Egyptian government emerges, the litmus test will be how it handles the border between Egypt and Gaza, which has been more closed than open since the Islamist group Hamas
took control of the densely populated territory in 2007.

Mubarak, in collaboration with Israel and in line with U.S. policy, enforced strict limits on the movement of people and goods across the border, adding to the suffering and deprivation
of the more than 1.5 million Palestinians who live there.

Egyptian state media supported the policy and took a relentlessly hostile line towards Hamas, portraying the group as troublemakers working for Iranian interests.

Yet an opinion poll by the Pew Research Center in February 2010 found that 52 percent of Egyptians were favourable towards Hamas, against 44 percent in the opposite camp.

Protests against Mubarak focused on domestic grievances of poverty, corruption and repression. When protesters addressed foreign affairs, it was usually to oppose Mubarak's Gaza policy and his close U.S. ties, seen as betraying Arab interests.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which has historic and ideological ties with Hamas, is enjoying more freedom than at any time since the overthrow of the monarchy 60 years ago. It favours opening the border wide and good relations with the Islamists in Gaza.

Even liberal democrat Ayman Nour, who challenged Mubarak in the presidential election of 2005 and then spent three years in jail, advocates a renegotiation of the peace treaty with Israel,
which was based on the Camp David accords of 1978.

“In practice the Camp David accords have come to an end ... Some people believe that some of the terms are humiliating to the Egyptian side. I belong to this group,” Nour told the Lebanese television station al-Jedid.

The treaty should go to a referendum, he said, a view shared by the Brotherhood, which says it would argue against approval.

Israeli commentator Aluf Benn said the Egyptian revolt, which overthrew Mubarak on Feb. 11, had already limited Israel's military options by making it impossible for the Jewish state to make a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear programme.

“(Mubarak's successors) will listen to Arab public opinion, which opposes a pre-emptive war against Iran. Israel will find it difficult to take action far to the east when it cannot rely on the tacit agreement to its actions on its western border,” he wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

“Without Mubarak there is no Israeli attack on Iran. His replacement will be concerned about the rage of the masses, if they see him as a collaborator in such an operation,” he added.

That Military-Industrial Complex again

2011-02-18T16:02:00.000-08:00

Now that the New York Times has latched on to the popular meme that the Egyptian military is a force to be reckoned with in the Egyptian economy, and on top of that a brake on the economic liberalisation which Mubarak favoured after 2004, it's time to set the record straight about the circumstances under which Mubarak jettisoned most of the economic group of ministers when a new cabinet was formed on January 30. My interpretation at the time was that Nazif, Rachid, Garrana, Maghrabi and Youssef Boutros-Ghali were sacrificial lambs that Mubarak threw to the rebellious masses when he was cornered and wanted to placate public opinion. On February 1, the main state newspapers reinforced that impression when they carried headlines such as 'New Cabinet without Businessmen'. The ploy failed because the protest movement had much broader objectives, especially an end to police brutality and the monopolisation of politics by the ruling party. It's possible that the decision to dismiss them had the approval of the military and that winning military support was also one of Mubarak's aims. But in the end the decision was Mubarak's and made some sense in the context of those difficult days for the regime. The investigations into corruption allegations against some of those ministers was the natural consequence of their fall from power, not necessarily an indication of the military's attitude towards businessmen as a whole.
    Rachid and Boutros-Ghali agreed to stay out of the new cabinet because they felt it would be better to start with new faces, a senior official said at the time. Those two ministers were replaced by their immediate deputies, suggesting some continuity of policy, albeit with less prominent figureheads.
    The New York Times story strikes me as a hodge-podge of hearsay and innunendo, with very little of substance in the way of signs to where the military council plans to take economic policy. For the moment the council has so much else to think about, and I doubt they have yet given it serious thought.
    It's also interesting that Rachid, who should know, says that the military's economic empire accounts for less than 10 percent of the economy as a whole. The measures against Rachid did surprise many people who know him, but until the investigations are complete, I would be reluctant to weigh in on whether they are just.
As for the theory that the army thwarted 'free market reforms' after the bread price riots of 1977, its position was surely dictated solely by public order considerations and says nothing about its economic views. Since 1977 the prices of subsidised goods have risen on many occasions without the army stepping in to freeze them.

The rules for warships in the Suez Canal

2011-02-18T15:19:00.000-08:00

In all the talk about the Iranian warships going through the Suez Canal, none of the reports I have seen mention the Constantinople Convention of 1888, which I believe previous post-independence Egyptian governments have endorsed. It is an extraordinary document, in that in theory it gives the warships of belligerent nations (belligerent to Egypt, that is) the right to transit the canal under certain modest restrictions. The extent of the convention's 'generosity' towards belligerents is evident in Article 4:

Vessels of war of belligerents shall not revictual or take in stores in the Canal and its ports of access, except in so far may be strictly necessary. The transit of the aforesaid vessels through the Canal shall be effected with the least possible delay, in accordance with the Regulations in force, and without any intermission than that resulting from the necessities of the service.

In other words, belligerent vessels do not need to wait and might take on stores 'if strictly necessary'.

Look at Article 5 too:

In time of war belligerent Powers shall not disembark nor embark within the Canal and its ports of access either troops, munitions, or materials of war. But in case of an accidental hindrance in the Canal, men may be embarked or disembarked at the ports of access by detachments not exceeding 1,000 men, with a corresponding amount of war material.

There is a let-out in Article 10, which might override the generous provisions in other parts of the convention:

Similarly, the provisions of Articles IV, V, VII and VIII shall not interfere with the measures which His Majesty the Sultan and His Highness the Khedive, in the name of His Imperial Majesty, and within the limits of the Firmans granted, might find it necessary to take for securing by their own forces the defence of Egypt and the maintenance of public order.

Unsurprisingly, the British government cited Article 10 during the Second World War to prevent Axis vessels transiting the canal and the Egyptian government used it to restrict the passage of Israeli vessels and goods from 1948 until full peace in 1979.
The Egyptian authorities might have cited Article 10 to deny the Iranian warships the right to pass through, but that would have been rather a stretch since Egypt and Iran have never been at war.
Part of the $1.3 billion the United States gives Egypt each year in military aid is in return for expedited transit through the canal. In other words, the Suez Canal Authority allows US warships to jump the queue. But since the waiting time for transit is not especially long (more than 24 hours is unusual, I believe, assuming your local agent has done his work), this concession is not as significant as it might appear. The military aid also covers the cost of securing the canal while US warships go through - in other words making sure no one with an RPG is standing on the banks.

Military spokesman and torture allegations

2011-02-17T15:24:00.000-08:00

The spokesman for Egypt's ruling military council, Major General Ismail Etman, was questioned at length by telephone on the state-owned satellite channel al-Masriya on Thursday night. The encouraging aspect was that the questioner (whose name I didn't catch) challenged him firmly on Amnesty International allegations that military personnel tortured protesters to intimidate them and to obtain information about plans for the protests. Etman, the man who reads the council's statements on television, responded however in a style reminiscent of the old Interior Ministry. Instead of saying that the allegations were very serious and that the armed forces would make a thorough investigation of the details, Etman said they could not possibly be true because military personnel did not engage in such activities. He then challenged anyone to produce evidence for such allegations, as if such evidence was not already available, even if not yet fully established. The overall impression was one of denial and evasion. He did promise that the armed forces would look into the cases of people who are still missing from the 18 days of protest which brought down President Hosni Mubarak, but even on this point his answer was formulaic rather than urgent. A few weeks ago a state television station would probably not even have brought up the allegations in the first place, but Etman's performance did suggest that old-style attitudes are still well entrenched in the military-security establishment. The youth movement has asked the military council to improve its media discourse and come forward to explain its policies to the public.

Mea Culpa

2011-02-17T06:57:00.000-08:00

For the sake of transparency, and since far more people than I ever expected took an interest in the matter, I should point out that in my posting on the Egyptian military a few days ago, I was not entirely accurate about the distribution of provincial governships between the army and police. At the time many Egyptian government websites were not working properly and I was reluctant to invest too much time in the research, which involves some digging around. Now I think I have established the facts and they are appear to be thus:

Border and Suez Canal governorates: 9 governors from the army
Other governorates: 6 police, 4 army, 10 civilian

Frankly I was surprised how many are civilian. I was at least correct in saying that the police outnumber the army in interior governorates. I have put the three Suez Canal governorates with the border governorates because of the obvious external security implications of the Suez Canal.
In the meantime I have browsed through the boards of directors of many of the public-sector companies and out of the scores of names and CVs I checked the only ex-military member I found was the chairman of the Holding Company for Maritime Transport, who is/was an admiral. Otherwise, as I expected, these people appear to be overwhelming technocrats and professionals. None of the CEOs of the state pharmaceutical companies are military, despite reports that the military has extensive interests in that sector. In fact, many of those CEOs are women.
One reader brought up the question of to what extent the military depends on commercial profits to finance its operations. The number we have seen (revenues of 2 billion pounds a year) would cover only a small fraction of the military budget, which must be at least 50 billion pounds, including the US military aid for procurement.
Most of the signs so far point to the military council wanting to give up political power quickly and return to its comfortable and cocooned existence. I heard from a reliable source that some politicians have pressed them to stay a little longer, on the grounds that six months is too short for political mobilisation, but the generals insisted on the existing timetable.

The latest from the military council ruling Egypt

2011-02-16T13:12:00.000-08:00

Here are some generally reassuring remarks by members of the ruling military council, published in the state newspaper al-Ahram on Wednesday. The council, as part of an attempt to reach out to the public, spoke to the editors of all Egyptian newspapers - state, private and opposition party. By the way, I stopped buying al-Ahram about a year ago because it was no longer worth reading most of the time. Now it's changed 180 degrees, but I suppose that's what state papers do when there's a sudden change at the top. After dismissing the protest movement for many days, the banner headline on Feb. 12 was "The people overthrow the regime". The remarks by the military are either a clever deception or evidence of a surprising openmindedness, probably the latter. I give them raw for lack of time:
    Citizens have the right to get angry, rebel and work to overthrow the regime, but no one has the right to try to bring down the state. The armed forces are not seeking power and do not wish to stay in power. They are fully aware that the current situation imposed itself on them against their will.
We are trying hard to finish our task before six months are up, so that our term of work does not exceed that period.
    The supreme council hopes to finish its mission and hand the state over to a president who is elected properly and freely in a way that expresses the inclinations of the people and to an elected legislative and executive authority properly elected by the people, so that we have a democratic republic.
     For such a process to succeed, there must be a calm atmosphere. The current atmosphere of unrest, strikes and disturbances does not help in reaching that objective.
    The Youth Revolution was clean and all its demands were natural, but now everyone everywhere is looking for a role. Thugs, highwaymen and thieves are looking for a role, and that is an obstacle to progress.
    Every sector has the right to claim whatever it sees due, but this is not the right time for that, though they do have the right to make their demands.
    The economic situation is difficult and the daily losses as a result of disruptions to business are dissipating our resources and will lead to economic collapse if they continue, so we cannot meet the demands of citizens who see their demands as a right.
    It is important that people confine themselves to accusations announced by the public prosecutor, because giving the impression that everyone is a thief has a demoralising effect, and we are at a delicate stage during which the people's morale must be maintained.
There are strict controls over the movement of private planes, and steps to prevent people smuggling money abroad.
    We do not have a magic wand to eliminate corruption, but we will not allow any new corruption. Ninety perecent of what has been published about corruption in the old regime is not true.
    All citizens hope the police force will get back to work and everyone is suffering greatly from the absence of the police. The armed forces cannot stop houses being burgled because tanks cannot be used for that purpose. The neighbourhood watch groups cannot prevent thuggery, so everyone must support the return of the police.
    Before January 25 we had supporters and opponents of the regime. Now there is no longer a regime to either support or oppose.
    Everyone must understand that former president Mubarak is gone and we must not come out and revile him in public or make up stories about a man who has a history of military and civilian achievements and who had a great role, and who also made mistakes.
    The president gave up power and saved the country from a disaster the extent of which only God knows. If he had not done so, disaster would have struck and people would have killed each other. He should be given credit for giving up power and for staying in Egypt.

Tareq al-Bishri

2011-02-15T13:31:00.000-08:00

Blogger Nisralnasr has an excellent profile of Tareq al-Bishri, the former judge who has been appointed to head the committee drafting constitutional changes for the new Egypt. I interviewed Bishri for about an hour and a half back in 2004 but unfortunately I've lost the notes. From memory, what came across very strongly (and Nisralnasr makes similar points) was the emphasis he placed on the separation of powers, on the need to dilute the powers of the overbearing presidency, and on community and civil society as alternatives and counterweights to the centralised state. The choice is a very positive one and rather a surprise coming from what many people assumed was a rather staid and unimaginative military council. The inclusion of an active Muslim Brotherhood member on the committee also suggests it is not quite as hostile to a political role for the Brotherhood as the US diplomatic cable written by US ambassador Frank Ricciardone in 2008 suggested:

In the cabinet, where he still wields significant influence, Tantawi (defence minister and now head of the ruling military council) has opposed both economic and political reforms that he perceives as eroding central government power. He is supremely concerned with national unity, and has opposed policy initiatives he views as encouraging political or religious cleavages within Egyptian society. In a speech on March 9, Tantawi said one of the military’s roles is to protect constitutional legitimacy and internal stability, signaling his willingness to use the military to control the Muslim Brotherhood in the run-up to the April 9 municipal council elections.

(A strange aspect of the memo is that the Mubarak regime, as far as I know, never used the military to control the Muslim Brotherhood during election campaigns or at any other time. That was purely a matter for the police and State Security.)
Is it possible that other voices on the military council had a say in the choice of Bishri and Sobhi Saleh of the Brotherhood?

Obama rewrites history

2011-02-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

I hope (but doubt) that the White House press corps were quick to note President Obama's attempt to rewrite history, at very short notice. It was only Jan 28 when the Egyptian government started responding to peaceful demonstations by beating, tear-gassing and firing birdshot at them. A few days later, thugs hired by businessmen associated with the Mubarak family started attacking them with clubs, rocks, petrol bombs and finally sniper rifles. More than 300 were killed.
Yet Obama, at his press conference today, turned history on its head:

Well, first of all, on Iran, we were clear then and we are clear now that what has been true in Egypt should be true in Iran, which is that people should be able to express their opinions and their grievances and seek a more responsive government. What's been different is the Iranian government’s response, which is to shoot people and beat people and arrest people.

Earlier in the press conference, he said it in slightly different words:

They (the Iranian government) have acted in direct contrast to what happened in Egypt by gunning down and beating people who were trying to express themselves peacefully in Iran.

Military decree by SMS

2011-02-15T02:54:00.000-08:00

We've had some cryptic SMSs from mysterious authorities over the past few weeks. But the one I received just now was the first to come up on screen with Armed Forces named as the sender. "The Supreme Armed Forces Council has decided to suspend the constitution and dissolve the People's Assembly and the Shoura Council," it said in Arabic. Is this the first time, I wonder, that a military junta has propagated its decrees by mass SMSs? If so, they seem to be have teething troubles. The decree is already two days old and it doesn't seem to have reached all mobile phones.

The Generals and the Young Revolutionaries

2011-02-14T06:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a full translation of the informal minutes of a meeting between two members of the Egyptian ruling military council and eight of the young people who helped organise the protest movement that brought down President Hosni Mubarak. The minutes, a historic document, were drafted by Wael Ghonim and Amr Salama from the youth movement, and so they are not endorsed by the generals:

Attendees: Ahmed Maher, Mahmoud Sami, Khaled el-Sayed, Asma Mahfouz, Amr Salama, Mohamed Abbas, Wael Ghonim and Abdel Rahman Samir

From the army: General Mahmoud Hegazi, General Abdel Fattah

Note: These points express the most prominent aspects of what happened in the meeting from my personal point of view - I and Amr Salama - and they are not binding on our other colleagues

Firstly I'll speak rather informally... I seriously felt proud because what we achieved made all the older people respect it. The reason why we were with these leaders was the millions of Egyptians who went out to demand their rights. I was there not to negotiate. I was there to understand the army's point of view and convey your point of view. I asked the army to come out on television to explain (its) points of views because the people as a whole deserve to hear what we heard from them, so that we can all feel reassured.

Frankly I'm very optimistic because of the fifth communique today and at the same time because of the way they managed the dialogue with the young people today. I felt that we were all one and we all wanted Egypt's interest.

A summary of the meeting:
- affirmation that the army does not want to take power in Egypt and that a civilian state is the only way for Egypt to progress
- the attitude of the Egyptian army was honourable and it refused to intervene or fire a single shot to kill or injure any Egyptian in spite of the pressures it was under
- the only reason for forming the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and holding a meeting was to protect the legitimate demands of the January 25 revolution
- the army defended the continued existence of the present cabinet, saying it was working fast to change it, but managing the country was essential to protect public interests
- a call on Egyptians to start a new page and to work with full force and energy to make up for the losses which have afflicted the Egyptian economy, forgetting personal objectives at the present time
- the prosecution of corrupt people, whatever their former and current positions might be, is one of the elements which the army believes to be important
- the formation of a constitutional committee of acknowledged probity and uprightness, unaffiliated with political currents, to complete the constitutional amendments within 10 days, to be put to referendum within two months
- the army encourages young people to start taking serious steps towards forming parties which express their ideas and opinions
- the army agrees to meet a spectrum of the young Egyptians who took part in the January 25 revolution in the coming period, such that the meetings will also be regular
- agreement that a campaign should start to collect 100 billion pounds to collect donations to rebuild Egypt, the donation and spending process to be under the supervision of the Egyptian army
- the army will look for all the demonstrators who went missing during the January 25 revolution and they are awaiting a final list which we will send them tomorrow
- the role of the army will be to guarantee the democratic transformation and to protect democracy. It will not interfere in the political process in any way
- the army insists on calling to account those proved to be implicated in the death or injury of demonstrators. They said they were holding more than 77 detainees they arrested for taking part in the Battle of the Camel in Tahrir
- deliberation in taking certain decisions is one of the characteristics of the military but there are many positive decisions which will be implemented in the coming period and which express the demands of the young people.
- the importance of concentrating on: Egyptians going back to work, pumping funds into the Stock Exchange to revive it and encouraging tourists to come back to Egypt
- the referendum on the articles of the constitution and the presidential elections will be done through national ID cards while the parliamentary elections will be through voting cards. We suggested finding a solution to the problem of polling stations by using technology to ensure elections by national ID cards.

Positive aspects of the meeting:
- the generals were writing and recording the ideas which the young people suggested, including changing the style of their media discourse and explaining the army's points of view more clearly
- all of us felt there was a sincere desire to preserve the gains of the revolution, unprecedented respect for the right of young people to express their opinions, loyalty to the country and a desire to protect it from foreign aggression
- the absence of a paternalistic tone in the dialogue ("You don't know what's good for you, my son"), and the first time we had sat with an Egyptian official for him to listen more than he spoke
- the pride and happiness of the Egyptian army in young Egyptians for what they had achieved. They described it as a historic achievement which had not happened since the time of the Pharaohs
- I personally feel that Egypt is in honest hands and that we are really on the right path to bring about democracy, and that now we must forget our personal interests and work for Egypt
- I hope in the end that the Egyptian army moves faster on reforms and improves its media discourse to explain its points of view more clearly to the masses through the media

Finally I say that Egypt is more important than us all

A final remark: Unfortunately we forgot to bring up the questions of the officers and soldiers who celebrated with us after the success of the revolution and who are being courtmartialled. We will do that with them.

Wael Ghonim and Amr Salama

(Thanks to Ursula for pointing this out to me)

The Egyptian Military - Myths and Reality

2011-02-14T05:07:00.000-08:00

All eyes are now on the Egyptian armed forces, which assumed power on Friday night when Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that President Hosni Mubarak was giving up the presidency. I've seen masses of analysis and speculation about the nature of the military establishment, but the sad truth is that no one knows very much about its inclinations and long-term ambitions. One indication of the paucity of hard information is the vast amount of coverage given to those few lines about Defence Minister Tantawi in the U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks some weeks ago. On top of that, journalists and commentators have dug down into their archives and revived material on the military which may have been valid in the 1990s but is almost certainly out of date.
Here are a few myths about the Egyptian military that I have seen in print since the start of the popular uprising on January 25:
- the myth that the Egyptian military controls up to 40 percent, even 45 percent, of the economy (Augustus Richard Norton cited the 40 percebt figure in an article which I can no longer trace and Josh Stacher does not rule out 45 percent). If this was ever true, which I doubt, it ceased to be true many years ago. The balance between the private and public sectors of the Egyptian economy has been shifting inexorably in favour of the private sector since the mid-1970s, and the military plays no significant role in the sectors which are now dominant -- cement, steel, oil, gas, tourism, telecommunications, banking and petrochemicals. Two often-cited examples of the military role in the economy are its ownership of mineral water bottling plants and the production of washing machines in what used to be arms factories. Both of these enterprises came about under special circumstances. The mineral water operation is in the remote oasis of Siwa, close to the Libyan border, and began at a time when that area was under military control for strategic security reasons. The washing machine operation began in the 1970s when the Arab Organisation for Industrialization (AOI) collapsed and the Egyptian government needed to find ways to use excess capacity in the arms factories. The AOI was a joint Arab project for military production but the Arab partners pulled out when Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Both these sectors are highly competitive and the army's market share (where it exists - I've never seen these washing machines in the market) is small. For a more realistic assessment of the military's economic activities, see Sarah Topol's interview with the minister of military production:

The ministry's revenues from the private sector are about 2 billion Egyptian pounds a year ($345 million). It employs 40,000 civilians, who assemble water-treatment stations for the Ministry of Housing, cables for the Ministry of Electricity, laptops for the Ministry of Education, and armaments for the Ministry of Interior's vehicles.

By way of comparison Egypt's annual GDP is about 1,250 billion Egyptian pounds and the workforce is about 26 million. Even if one includes the manpower and labour of the regular armed forces (most of whom are low-paid conscripts whose work has little economic value) and if one assumes that the rate of return on the military's commercial operations is very low (and there's no special reason to assume that), I doubt the military's share of the economy could exceed 10 or 15 percent.

- the myth that all or most provincial governors come from the military. In fact, in line with the shift of emphasis under Mubarak from external to internal security, almost all provincial governors have been former police generals since the 1990s, with the exception of those in border provinces such as North and South Sinai, Mersa Matrouh, the Red Sea and so on. This confusion may have arisen because so many have the rank of liwa (major general), which in Egypt is common to both the army and police.
- the myth that the military had a hand in routine policy making throughout the Mubarak era. Proponents of this theory need to give us examples of junctures where the military had any input into policy that was not directly relevant to their sphere of activity. When Mubarak faced an insurgency by the Islamic Group in middle Egypt in the 1990s, he relied solely on the Interior Ministry to deal with it and almost all the victims on the government side were policemen. The army stayed aloof. When Mubarak began serious ecoonomic liberalisation under Prime Minister Nazif from 2004 onwards, there is no evidence that the military made any contribution, either in favour or in opposition. Speculation that the military would have vetoed the succession of Mubarak's son Gamal to the presidency remains pure speculation, since it was never put to the test. Even in the case of Egyptian policy towards Gaza and Hamas over the last few years, there's no reason to believe that the decisions were not taken by Mubarak, Omar Suleiman and other Mubarak aides, and that the military merely followed the presidential orders.
- the myth that large numbers of retired army generals still hold key positions in state companies and bureaucratic institutions. This was true in the 1960s and 1970s, but the phenomemon has been very much in decline. No former generals have top positions at state banks, for example, where the leadership is entirely professional. The same applies to state media and publishing organisations. The pattern under Mubarak was to appoint technocrats from within the same institution. It is however true that some former generals close to the regime could carve out lucrative niches in the private sector - in security companies, for example, or in the case of Hussein Salem, in the tourism and hydrocarbon sector (gas exports to Israel). We see much the same phenomenon in the United States with defence contractors and consultants.

It's important to bear these myth in mind when assessing the likely behaviour of the ruling military council. Jon Alterman in the Washington Post, for example, paints a very distorted picture of the reality. Steve Negus's response on The Arabist is exactly right and I would have written much the same if he had not done so already.

When the Genie's out of the Bottle

2011-02-13T09:13:00.000-08:00

On Kasr el-Aini Street near where I live in Cairo, the side-effects of revolution are evident on every block. Just as in the French and Russian revolutions, every professional and labour interest is seizing the moment to bring up institutional grievances which are peripheral to the broad aims of the millions who came out to demand the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. At the end of the street there's a printing press owned by the trade union federation, and the workers there are out in the garden demanding 'the implementation of the amalgamation' and other obscure internal measures. Up the road at the headquarters of the Principal Bank for Development and Agricultural Credit, the state bank which lends money to farmers, the staff are spilling into the street, campaigning against board chairman Ali Shaker. This is just a tiny selection of the protests and sit-ins which are sweeping the country as the old regime gradually implodes. Television stations say there are similar actions under way at state television and at Dar el-Tahrir, the big state publishing house which owns el-Gomhuria newspaper. There's a rumour that the ruling military council is about to put out another communique banning such protests and telling people to go back to work. But with the state in serious disarray, the police force discredited and the army overstretched, the military council is hardly in a position to enforce such a decree. The thrust of the protests seems to be that the existing managers, appointed by the Mubarak regime, are corrupt and have embezzled public funds to the detriment of the staff. Inevitably many of those managers will lose their jobs and some will be investigated or have their assets frozen, as has already happened to several of the outgoing ministers - Housing Minister Ahmed Maghraby and Tourism Minister Zuheir Garrana and Information Minister Anas el-Fiki, for example. As such people lose power and disappear from the scene, the position of other prominent members of the 'ancien regime' will become more and more untenable. The long-term intentions of the ruling military council remain obscure. Today they answered more of the protest movement's demands -- dissolving parliament and offering a six-month timetable for a new constitution and elections. But the other demands are not going away - the release of detainees, an end to the state of emergency and the formation of a new transitional cabinet to replace the one inherited from Mubarak. At the same time Al Arabiya is reporting that the council will find a new role in government for Omar Suleiman, the former intelligence chief that Mubarak appointed vice president in late January. That sends a signal in completely the opposite direction, given that the protest movement now sees Suleiman as a prime symbol of the old regime. At this stage in the revolution each and every personnel change is important and will be carefully watched to see where the military council is taking the country. Even the changes at state companies, especially in the media, can make an incremental difference to the balance of power.

Counter-revolutionaries in Tahrir Square?

2011-02-13T06:16:00.000-08:00

Who would organise a demonstration demanding that a group of revolutionaries abandon the site of their victory, just two days after the revolutionaries thought they had triumphed? The young people who brought down Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak have already been hailed as heros by the old state media, by the military council now ruling Egypt and by several of the ministers left over from Mubarak's time. With understandable logic the protesters argued that a contingent should stay on in Tahrir Square to ensure that the military council meets their outstanding demands -- specifically a timetable for a transition to civilian government, the release of all political prisoners , the dissolution of both houses of parliament, an end to the state of emergency and a national salvation government to replace the one appointed by Mubarak two weeks ago. But in the early hours of Saturday soldiers and military policemen arrived at their encampment and started to evict them, saying they wanted to clear the square so that life in Cairo could return to normal. At about the same time the army was detaining some 40 of the protest organisers, all of whom were still missing two hours ago. So far one could give the army the benefit of the doubt and trust in its good intentions. After all, the army is not accustomed to dealing with large numbers of civilians, especially in a crowded urban context. Maybe the order came down the chain of command that they should clear the square, without specifying how they should go about the task or suggesting that the best way might be to negotiate some compromise arrangement with the organisers.
Those would be the most generous interpretations of the army's conduct in Tahrir Square this morning. In fact, as has been common over the past few weeks, the army went about its task without great resolve. By noon on Saturday military policemen had formed a cordon around a hard core of protesters but other protesters and onlookers were milling around on the roadway, thwarting the army's attempts to ease the flow of traffic. But then a strange thing happened. A group of 200 counter-protesters appeared from across the square, chanting "The people want to clear the square" - a parody of the uprising's most common slogan: "The people want to overthrow the regime". They also chanted one of the slogans which protesters had chanted earlier when they wanted to win the sympathy of the army against Mubarak: "The army, the people, hand in hand." I went to speak to some of them to find out who they were and why they felt so strongly about what might appear to be a rather trivial matter compared to the political future of the country. One of them said he worked in the prime minister's office down the road and the protesters were obstructing the way to the office. Another said he was a businessman and the protesters were giving people abroad the impression that the country was still unstable, deterring tourists and investors. What was especially strange was the vehemence with which they expressed their views, which seemed out of all proportion with their grievance. The counter-demonstration certainly added to the apprehensions of the revolutionaries, who say they are losing trust in the army and in its readiness to bring about radical change in Egypt. "They want to thwart the revolution," one member of the organising committee told a news conference. " "We want to keep a presence in the square to monitor the process of change," added Shadi Atia, another organiser who had rushed from his home in the southern suburb of Maadi on news that the army has trying to clear the square. "We are a bit worried now. What if the army is not being straight with us? What's the problem with people staying in Tahrir?" he added. I asked one of the counter-protesters if anyone had paid them to take part, as was common practice in Mubarak's time if the regime wanted to organise a loyal demonstration. "Mubarak's gone," he said, "so who would pay people now? Go ask the others who's paying them." Many of the onlookers also said they opposed the idea of continued protests, and they at least appeared to be speaking on their own behalf. Maybe the protest movement is being unnecessarily suspicious about the army's intentions, but the counter-demonstration was strangely reminiscent of the pro-Mubarak demonstrations which died away about 10 days ago.

Obama, Suleiman and U.S. decline

2011-02-12T08:10:00.000-08:00

There's always a malicious pleasure in watching powerful people with flawed policies flounder as they adapt to unexpected and unpredictable events. Washington's hesitant response to the Egyptian uprising falls into that category. At each turn - at the concessions from president Mubarak and vice president Omar Suleiman, at the survival, defiance and growing resolve of the protest movement, the United States in fact did exactly what one would expect from a distant superpower with little control over either protagonist. It tailored its message to its perceptions of the likely outcome -- it was careful not to burn its bridges with Mubarak in case he survived, it offered the protest movement vague moral support while refusing to endorse its central demand that Mubarak resign immediately, and it tried, ultimately without success, to shape events towards the outcome it appeared to favour -- the empowerment of Omar Suleiman as guarantor of Israel's security. Marc Lynch is full of praise for the way Obama and his staff handled it:

The Obama administration also deserves a great deal of credit, which it probably won't receive. It understood immediately and intuitively that it should not attempt to lead a protest movement which had mobilized itself without American guidance, and consistently deferred to the Egyptian people. Despite the avalanche of criticism from protestors and pundits, in fact Obama and his key aides -- including Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power and many others -- backed the Egyptian protest movement far more quickly than anyone should have expected. Their steadily mounting pressure on the Mubarak regime took time to succeed, causing enormous heartburn along the way, but now can claim vindication.

   I disgree on several counts. Firstly, once Egyptians saw what Suleiman stood for, the chances of him playing the role of an acceptable transition figure rapidly evaporated. US administrations have worked with the man for many years in his role as spy chief and manager of Egypt's torture cells. They must have known that he was an inflexible 'law-and-order' conservative with contempt for the wishes and aspirations of ordinary Egyptians. To Egyptians, on the other hand, in this topsy-turvy world of patron-client state relations, he was a completely unknown quantity and he did not reveal his true character until he gave his interview on Nile TV a couple of days after he was appointed. Public opinion turned against him with every step he made, while the United States continued to promote him. Secondly, Washington's advocacy of a rapid start to a smooth transition meant little in practice - there were just too many ways that might be done -- so it added nothing to the dynamics of the conflict. Both Mubarak and the protest movement gave minimal weight to pronouncements from Washington. For Mubarak, they were just irritating background noise while he struggled to cling on to power or find a way out that was not completely humiliating. The protest movement assumed from the start that the United States would try to protect Mubarak behind the scenes, and stuck to its ultimately successfully strategy of mobilising so many Egyptians that Mubarak could no longer govern. It is hyperbolic to say that "steading mounting pressure" by Obama and his aides ultimately succeeded, unless Lynch has evidence that the United States was instrumental in arranging the military takeover on Friday.
    All in all, the US response reflects its declining power and influence in the Middle East and throughout the world. Remember that many of the participants on both sides of the conflict on the streets of Egypt portrayed Israel and United States as their enemies. State television and Mubarak's National Democratic Party said Israel and the United States had financed and incited the protests. Many of the protesters, especially the Islamists and leftists, listed Mubarak and Suleiman's cooperation with Israel and the United States among their grievances.
It also reflects the flaw at the centre of Washington's Middle East policy - its support for Israeli racists whose policies ordinary Arabs are bound to oppose.
    There's a tendency in Washington thinktanks to imagine that everyone is looking to the United States for cues, ready to dance to its tune. But more and more, people outside the United States see the US administration's pronouncements on their affairs as interesting oddities addressed to US domestic opinion or the media.
This reality of declining power does not seem to have sunk in among the US establishment. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, for example, seems to think that the United States ("and its allies") can still set the terms for the policies of the new Egypt:

The U.S. and our allies must focus our efforts on helping to create the necessary conditions for such a transition to take place. We must also urge the unequivocal rejection of any involvement by the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremists who may seek to exploit and hijack these events to gain power, oppress the Egyptian people, and do great harm to Egypt’s relationship with the United States, Israel, and other free nations.

Is anyone in Egypt listening?

Political Consciousness and the Egyptian Revolution

2011-02-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

For years people said Egyptians had been depoliticised, excluded from the policy-making process for so long that they no longer took any interest. They said the last three presidents of Egypt - Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak -- killed off the lively liberal political debate that Egypt knew in its golden age -- the 20s, 30 and 40s of the last century, until politics became just a branch of government They were right. But it's striking how political consciousness (a good old-fashioned word) can rise from the ashes like a phoenix when the people feel empowered. It's evident all around at every turn, staring one in the face. This afternoon outside the presidential palace, a group of counter-protesters appeared, about 20 of them against several thousand others demanding Mubarak resign. One of them had a cryptic banner which could be read in two ways: "Awake, youth of Egypt. Save the country from destruction. We will not sell Egypt." It was in fact an appeal to the protesters to go home and let the constitutional process take its course. One of the men in the group was especially agitated, telling the protesters that they were wasting their time and should patiently sit out the next few months while the regime made constitutional changes and organised elections. "The army has given its guarantee!" he shouted. "If they renege, the army will step in!" But the truly remarkable aspect was that instead of jeering at him or having him bundled away, a group of young men, some with 25 January badges, were standing arolund listening to him and arguing back. This was happening along the line, in several small groups. Far from being intimidated, although greatly outnumbered, the counter-protesters were forceful and fearless. Then in an overcrowded minibus, with four reckless young men perched on the roof as we sped downtown, a debate broke out in the back seats about the future of the constitution, parliament, the role of Defence Minister Tantawi and the role of the United States. No crazy conspiracy theories were aired, no unrealistic expectations, no sense that the future was won and freedom would not need to be defended, and no indifference either. When one of the young men said he was going back to Tahrir Square , another asked him why. "Because we still have demands that have not been met," he replied. It's not clear how many, if any, will in fact stay in Tahrir Square for any length of time, but the Egyptian people have certainly put the military on notice that they will be watching every step and answering back if they do not like what they see.

2011/1981 Mubarak/Sadat

2011-02-11T14:58:00.000-08:00

I've been rather tied up on this historic day, mainly waiting around at the presidential palace for what might have been another prevarication. Instead I ended up walking down Khalifa Maamoun street among a throng of thousands. I doubt the celebrations would be more jubilant if Egypt won the World Cup. I was persuaded to write a story comparing the streets on the demise of Mubarak with those in the hours after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, in my capacity as one of the fairly small group of people, perhaps several hundred, who saw Sadat's dead body on its way from the grandstand to the helicopter which took it to Maadi Military Hospital on that also momentous day. Here it is:

   CAIRO, Feb 11 (Reuters) - This time people leapt for joy,
hugged their neighbours and in unison cried "Freedom" and "God
is Great". They waved their Egyptian flags, beat their drums and
headed downtown for the party of a generation.
    It was a very different scene I witnessed 30 years ago when
Egypt last lost a president, after the dramatic assassination of
President Anwar Sadat, which brought Hosni Mubarak to power.
    On Friday, the day Mubarak bowed to popular pressure and
resigned, the streets outside the presidential palace in
northeast Cairo were packed with jubilant crowds, celebrating
the success of the popular uprising.
    Fireworks lit up the sky and passing cars honked their
horns. Groups of young men posed in front of the army's armoured
personnel carriers for pictures snapped by mobile phone.
    I walked the same streets of the same Cairo suburb of
Heliopolis on Oct. 6, 1981, the day I saw Sadat's body carried
out of the back of the grandstand where Islamist militants
gunned him down at a military parade.
    That day the streets of Cairo were tense and shocked. In the
absence of satellite television, mobile phones and the Internet,
Information travelled slowly and most Egyptians knew very little
about what had happened at the parade ground.
    I was sitting about 50 metres (yards) to the left of Sadat
and Mubarak, then his vice president, both dressed in the fancy
Prussian-style uniforms which Sadat favoured. When Sadat arrived
I noticed his high-heeled cowboy boots, not standard issue but
another sign of the man's sartorial flamboyance.
    The army vehicles trundled past, celebrating the performance
of the Egyptian armed forces in the Middle East war of 1973,
seen in Egypt as a victory.

    TAKING COVER
    Then suddenly one truck stopped. A group of men jumped out
of the back and ran towards the podium where Sadat was sitting.
    I must have been looking in another direction, maybe at the
Mirage fighters swooping down towards the grandstand with
coloured smoke streaming out behind them.
    Then a grenade exploded. This was not part of the normal,
predictable act. It was followed by bursts of automatic rifle
fire. By then the people behind and above me on the grandstand
were taking cover on the floor and metal chairs were spilling
down on top of me. I put my arms over my head and crawled away.
    When I reached the left end of the grandstand I looked back
towards where Sadat had been sitting and saw a scene of
pandemonium. I did not know it at the time but Sadat and eleven
others were killed and many injured in the shooting.
    Wary of the mayhem and of so many men with guns, I walked
briskly around the back of the stadium and ran into a cluster of
men in suits carrying a body wrapped in blankets. One was waving
a pistol and shouting "Out of the way. The president's been
hit." I could see Sadat's distinctive bald crown and the same
cowboy boots protruding from either end of the blankets.
    I put my hands up and edged to the side as they put the body
in a waiting helicopter, its rotors already spinning. The
helicopter took off and headed south.
    I finally found a telephone at the gatehouse to a company's
compound and the guard let me use it. I told my colleague what I
had seen, saying Sadat was wounded and had left by heliocopter.

    TROUBLED TIMES
    All the streets were closed to traffic for the parade and
there was not a taxi in sight, so I set off on foot, finally
finding a ride to nearby Heliopolis.
    As news of the shooting spread through the city, an
atmosphere of gloom and anxiety descended. Sadat's last weeks
had already been traumatic, with mass arrests and long speeches
in which Sadat ranted against his enemies.
    Hosni Mubarak, who appeared on television later the same
day, his hand bandaged from a minor injury he sustained, was a
reassuring presence for many Egyptians in troubled times.
    As usual in such cases, many predicted he would not last
long. A former air force commander, he had little political
experience and showed few signs of ambition.
    But ruling Egypt became a habit. He never showed any sign
that he had any vision for how to steer the country away from
the autocratic system he inherited. He said he was merely
serving his country but he thought himself indispensable and
belittled the qualifications of anyone who challenged him.
    As Mubarak aged and new ideas spread among a fresh
generation of networked young Egyptians, Mubarak's paternalistic
and authoritarian approach was harder and harder to sustain.
    When Tunisians overthrew President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali
in January, Egyptians suddenly realised what was possible. The
popular uprising against Mubarak began on Jan. 25 and gathered
pace as the barriers of fear came down.
    Right up his to last full day in power, Mubarak was offering
Egyptians what he offered in 1981 and throughout his reign --
stability at any price. In the end Egyptians said the price was
too high to pay. Instead they shouted "Freedom" and rejoiced.

Armed Forces Communique no. 1

2011-02-10T07:35:00.000-08:00

If anyone expected clarity from the Egyptian armed forces' first communique, just read on air, they must be disappointed. It merely said that the supreme council of the armed forces would continue to meet. Al Jazeera's pundit said it was significant that the meeting appeared to be chaired by Defence Minister Tantawi, when Mubarak would normally preside. But now Al Jazeera is saying Mubarak might have left Cairo already!

Causality in History and the Egyptian Uprising

2011-02-10T05:07:00.000-08:00

Did anyone predict the Egyptian uprising? Great question, but one with implications much wider than Egypt and the last 18 days. Can anyone predict anything in which so many different people take part, each with their own motives and their own assumptions, most of which are not even visible on the surface?

Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post on Wednesday says that the Egypt Working Group in Washington at least saw the signs. "The White House was warned, publicly and repeatedly, that Egypt was approaching a turning point and that the status quo was untenable - not by an intelligence agency but by a bipartisan group of Washington-based experts who pleaded, in vain, for a change of policy," he writes.

Issandr El Amrani also touches on the subject, with his criticism of quantitive approaches in the poticial science establishment in the United States. "Quantitative analysis and the behaviouralist approach of most American PoliSci academics is a big steaming turd of horseshit when applied in the Middle East," he says, and I am inclined to believe him, after receiving a stream of meaningless quantitative analyses of Arab media in my part-time capacity as managing editor of Arab Media and Society.

Diehl fails to prove his case that the Egypt Working Group came close to predicting anything very specific. They did say that "Egypt is at a critical turning point" and they added: "The choice is not between a stable and predictable but undemocratic Egypt on the one hand, and dangerous instability and extremism on the other. There is now an opportunity to support gradual, responsible democratic reform. But the longer the United States and the world wait to support democratic institutions and responsible political change in Egypt, the longer the public voice will be stifled and the harder it will be to reverse a dangerous trend." But those are generalities that any sensitive observer could have made, confident that if nothing much happened, they could still say the system was untenable and heading in a dangerous direction. After all, nothing is tenable for ever and the future is always a little "dangerous".

Historians by their very nature look back at events and describe the conditions that prevailed at the start of major upheavals, such as the French or Russian revolutions. But description alone is not explanation, and as long as we cannot do control experiments, we may never be able to identify which particular circumstances were essential and which were accidental. We cannot, for example, recreate France on the eve of the revolution and then finetune any of the factors that may or may not have contributed to the revolution - food prices, say, or the level of social mobility -- to see how the changes affects the outcome.

Historians would do well to read Tolstoy, in his appendix to War and Peace, when he looked back at the death and destruction wrought by Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. “I arrived at the evident fact that the causes of historical events when they take place cannot be grasped by our intelligence… Endless retrospective conjectures can be made, and are made, of the causes of this senseless event, but the immense number of these explanations, and their concurrence in one purpose, only proves that the causes were innumerable and that not one deserves to be called the cause.”

After the uprising in Tunisia, one of my colleagues asked me whether the same might happen in Egypt. Cautiously, aware that too many people had predicted the defeat of the Tunisian uprising, I replied that such successful uprisings (and the Tunisian revolution is not yet complete) were rare and quite unpredictable. To have two uprisings, with so many common features, within the space of two months, suggests that they may not be so rare as I thought. But I still maintain that until all our brains are wired to some central processor which can cloud-compute our inclinations they will remain essentially unpredictable.

Withdrawal Symptoms from Abusive Relationship

2011-02-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

The uprising of the Egyptian people and the US administration's confused response provide an excellent opportunity to look in depth at the long relationship between the United States and successive Egyptian governments, especially with the Mubarak government over the past 30 years, and at where that relationship might be headed. US officials repeatedly call Egypt (by which they mean the government) a key ally that has been useful to US interests in the Middle East, usually couched in general terms such as preserving peace and stability and cooperating in 'counter-terrorism' activities. One of the best analyses of the military share of US aid to Egypt, which amounts to about $40 billion since 1979, was prepared by the US government's own General Accountability Office in 2006. Its breakdown is a little out of date but it remains of great interest to see what the United States receives in return for this largesse. 'Largesse' is perhaps not the most apposite word since most of the money goes to US arms manufacturers and to consultancy firms and contractors who send US trainers and specialists to Egypt to oversee the integration of hardware into the Egyptian armed forces. It also pays for training Egyptian military personnel in the United States. On top of the military aid, there has also been economic assistance for civilian projects, amounting to several hundred million dollars a year in recent years. The 2006 report listed the goals of the military aid programme as (1) modernizing and training Egypt’s military; (2) facilitating Egypt’s participation as a coalition partner; (3) providing force protection to the U.S. military in the region; and (4) helping guarantee U.S. access to the Suez Canal and overflight routes. It said the long-term outcomes were: a continued and improving collaborative relationship with the US, stability in the Middle East, no war between Egypt and Israel, and a strong relationship between US and Egypt. Between 2001 and 2005 Egypt provided over-flight permission to 36,553 U.S. military aircraft through Egyptian airspace and granted expedited transit of 861 U.S. naval ships through the Suez Canal, with all security support for the ship transits. That level of overflights, which coincided with the US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2005, works out at about 20 a day, far more than most people were aware of before the report was published. Although the military aid programme makes much of interoperability (jargon for the ability to use each other's equipment), in practice the United States and Egypt have fought side by side only in Kuwait in 1991, when Egyptian forces played the role of token Arabs in a Western campaign. So much for the military aspect.
In the security sphere, it is now common knowledge that the United States outsourced to Egypt some of the interrogation under torture of what they call 'terror suspects' it picked up in Iraq and Afghanistan or abducted here and there around the world. I have not seen a good assessment of the number of victims or of the quality and value of the information that the Egyptian torturers obtained on the behalf of the United States. Judging at least by the quality of the information the Egyptian police and state security seem to extract from their victims (evident in the Interior Ministry's detailed statements about extremist groups), I suspect it was of marginal value.
In the civilian and diplomatic sphere, the benefits to either side are even harder to quantify, since they are largely intangible. But in the years since Hamas won elections to the Palestinian legislature in 2006 and especially since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, the Egyptian government has played an ignominious role in conjunction with Israel, the United States and the Palestinian Authority in trying to undermine and destroy Hamas. It was complicit in the unsuccessful 2007 conspiracy to have Fatah defeat Hamas in Gaza by military force. It has since collaborated in the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which has caused extreme suffering and deprivation to the million and a half people who live in the densely populated territory. During the Israeli attacks on Gaza in early 2008, the Egyptian government allowed Israeli warplanes to overfly Egypt to attack targets in Gaza. These activities have been of benefit primarily to the Israeli government, and secondarily to the United States only in the sense that the United States identifies with Israel's regional objectives. At one point the United States and Israel outsourced to Egypt the task of trying to persuade Hamas to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and to endorse a common position with Fatah for peace talks. Egypt failed in both those attempts.
The United States also has commercial interests in Egypt, just like other countries, but there is no special relationship here. Egypt is no longer a significant oil exporter and it sells its gas to a diverse range of customers, including the United States (about 35 percent of LNG exports and 24 percent of all gas exports in 2009). Egypt is one of the world's biggest wheat buyers but it buys on the open market according to price and availability, with no special preference for the United States.
Taken as a whole, it is clear that from the US government's point of view Egypt's importance lies mainly in preserving the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979 (the starting point for the aid programme) and cooperating in U.S. and Israeli military operations against their common regional enemies (Hamas, al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein etc). The other elements pale into insignificance in comparison.
It is too early at this stage to say what kind of government Egypt will have in 12 months' time. The next president could be either Omar Suleiman, who would maintain Mubarak's policies, some other establishment figure, a liberal democrat such as Mohamed ElBaradei, or a unexpected populist who might emerge over the next months from the turmoil of the new Egypt. A Muslim Brotherhood president is out of the question, since the Brotherhood has renounced any presidential ambitions this time round. No president would have any interest in provoking Israel into outright conflict. The most they might attempt is to ease the blockade of Gaza, open a more balanced dialogue with Hamas and speak out more forcefully to express Egyptian views on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. These are objectives a sensible administration in Washington should accept, though they probably would not. The next Egyptian government is very unlikely in the near future to seek a review of the peace treaty, even of the clauses which require diplomatic relations and which limit Egyptian army deployments in parts of Sinai. But a new government might not want to continue receiving US aid in its present form, because of the widespread impression among Egyptians that the aid infringes on the country's sovereignty. Its economic value has been declining with inflation for the past 30 years and it would be no great loss to the country as a whole. The main losers would be the army generals, who would no longer receive a steady supply of fancy military hardware which they never use in combat.
All in all, the advent of a new Egyptian government, the first with a popular mandate since the 1950s, is something Israel and the United States can easily live with. It might even persuade the Israelis to reconsider policies based on racism and on overwhelming force. Their current state of panic is merely a withdrawal symptom from an unhealthy and abusive relationship which no one should lament.

Democracy Not Yet

2011-02-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

The United States might be having second thoughts about putting all their bets on Egyptian spy chief Omar Suleiman, the new vice president they wanted to see as successor to Hosni Mubarak. The aging intelligence agent might be good for skewering impotent Palestinians on Israel's behalf but when it comes to dealing with millions of empowered Egyptians, the man has the political acumen you would expect from someone who is used to giving orders and being obeyed, not someone who treats his compatriots as intelligent equals. His brief interview with Christiane Amanpour on ABC television contains two faux pas which politically aware Egyptians will not soon forget. Firstly his claim that "it is the Islamic current that pushed these people (the protesters)" is patently laughable to anyone who has spoken to a cross-section of the people in Tahrir Square. But the remark that is most likely to turn opinion against him was this one: "For sure everyone believes in democracy. But when will you do that? When the people have the culture of democracy." It was reminiscent of former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif's remark in 2005 that Egyptians were not yet yet "mature" enough for democracy. Interestingly both Suleiman and Nazif were speaking to foreign reporters, in the naive belief that Egyptians would never hear their remarks. Nazif's staff tried to lean on reporters to "correct" his remark, but their arguments did not stand up.
On Tuesday Suleiman spoke to Egyptian newspaper editors and revealed more of his authoritarian and security-obsessed mentality. Here are some highlights of his remarks, paraphrased by the Egyptian state news agency MENA:
The word 'departure' which some of the protesters are shouting is against the theics of Egyptians, who respect their elders and their president. The word is not only an insult to the president, but also to the whole Egyptian people. President Mubarak is one of the heroes of the October war and the military establishment is protective of the October heroes.

    (I say) no to finishing off the regime and no to a coup because that means chaos, which could take the country to the unknown which no one wants.
    The large presence of protesters in Tahrir Square and some of the satellite channels, which are insulting Egypt and understating its value, are making Egyptians reluctant to go to work.
    President Mubarak has complied with a large proportion of the demands which are possible in the time frame available... He favours a real rotation of power and there is no problem achieving this, but we have to think of Egypt's future and who will lead the way in the coming period. It's not the person of the president but his specifications and his inclinations. We don't want to find there are new requirements in every period. We want studied and stable adjustments.
    The revolution of the youth has some positive aspects but we must not slip into the negative aspects ... Pressures and effects will never be in the interests of society but will be an invitation to more chaos and for the bats of the night to come out and alarm society. We are confident that Egypt is being targeted and this is an opportunity for them and not for change, but all they are interested in is weakening Egypt and creating chaos, the extent of which God alone knows.
    There have to be conditions for those who stand for the presidency, otherwise more than 600 people for example would stand and it would be a farce for Egypt, so the constitutional lawyers must set out what is proper to the position of president.
    One element in the crisis is the shortfall in the capacity of the police after many police stations were destroyed and thousands of prisoners escaped. The ones we are interested in are some hardcore criminals and jihadi groups which threaten security since they still believe that society is 'infidel' and this is a big threat to society and it will take great effort to get them back. The General Intelligence worked hard to have these people extradicted from abroad. They are connected with foreign leaderships, especially al Qaeda.
    A million tourists have left the country in nine days and there is not a single tourist left, and this affects a major resource for the state, since tourism brings the state about $1 billion a month. Growth will fall to 3.4 percent at the most, which means more unemployment and this is one of the threats to national security.
    The president is staying in Egypt and will not leave. He is managing a road map until his term ends and when the new president comes he will make changes as he wants.
    All the youngsters arrested in the recent events have been released and there is not a single prisoner of opinion unless he committed a crime.
    The president is in good health and there is no agreement with (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel on anything. What she announced is flagrant interference in our internal affairs (apparently a reference to rumours that she invited Mubarak to Germany for 'medical care').
    The (Egyptian) media addresses the Egyptian masses, and not just the youth of Jan 25, so that they (the masses) know that the regime can still fulfil its role.

Judge for yourself.

Egyptian regime 'amazed, taken by surprise'

2011-02-07T14:27:00.000-08:00

Wael Ghoneim, the young Google executive who helped organise the January 25 protests in Cairo and has spent the last 12 days in detention with State Security, gave a very emotional interview with Mona el-Shazli on Dream TV on Monday evening. The new secretary general of the National Democratic Party, Hossam Badrawi, took him home to his family earlier in the evening. It was fascinating from a personal point of view in itself but Wael also make some interesting remarks about his contacts with Badrawi and with the new interior minister, Mahmoud Wagdi.
Badrawi told him that all the bad elements in the party had been cleaned out and the party was making a fresh start, he said. Wael was not impressed and told him the party was rotten to the core and Badrawi should abandon it.
His interrogators, apparently xenophobic and ill-informed about the mood of ordinary Egyptians, were initially convinced that there were foreign and Muslim Brotherhood elements behind the organisation of the protests on January 25 and wanted to know who they were. Wael thinks he managed to convince them that it was an entirely indigenous and spontaneous youth initiative.
I repeat in full his version of what Wagdi told him because of the light it throws on the thinking of the security establishment.

The (interior) minister said 'I've only been minister for seven days. You have achieved gains, and no one expected that. How did you do all that? All of us, those inside the party, inside the political system, were amazed, taken by surprise. We couldn't understand what was happening. Now the situation is over. We won't go back again. We are going forward. We'll all build the country, which we are all worried about it and which we love. There was a particular way (of dealing with people), but that way is changing now.'

Wael said he has blindfolded and held incommunicado for 12 days. State Security didn't even inform his family that he was alive and in their hands. He broke down in tears at the end of the interview when the TV station screened photographs of some of the young people killed by riot police and by thigs during the protests.

War of Attrition

2011-02-07T12:18:00.000-08:00

The struggle between the Egyptian regime and the protest movement has moved into a 'war of attrition' stage and there are no obvious options by which either side can break the deadlock decisively in its favour. The regime is playing on the economic disruption which the protests have caused, hoping that many people, especially small independent businessmen, will turn against the protesters because they cannot sustain prolonged losses. That is especially evident in the informal tourism sector and in the retail sector in central Cairo and other urban centres. After almost of sixty years of depoliticisation, unfortunately, many Egyptians have no idea of what good governance could be, especially those who have never travelled abroad to well-managed democratic countries. But it's unlikely that such sentiment will generate a counter-protest movement with the same commitment and energy as the protest movement itself, which has much to fear from a reinvigorated state. The regime is also reckoning on the corrosive effect of the state media, which continue to dismiss the protest movement as part of some incoherent foreign conspiracy. Behind the scenes, the state is no doubt trying to reconstitute the instruments of repression - the new interior minister today visited the premises of Central Security (riot police) in Darasa, northeast of the old city.
On the other side of the equation, the protest movement shows no signs of erosion. The turnout in Tahrir Square has been large for the last two days, as the message spreads that the area is peaceful and festive, with little danger so far that visitors will be persecuted merely for attending. On Sunday evening people who left the area were chanting "Coming back tomorrow, coming back tomorrow." But it would hard to sustain a sit-in that continues for weeks without movement, and one might speculate that the organisers are thinking of new ways to maintain the momentum they had generated.
On the international front the pressure on Mubarak has clearly eased. When US envoy Frank Wisner said on Saturday that Mubarak had to stay to oversee the 'reform' process, those who sympathised with the protesters were pleased that the State Department distanced itself from his remarks and Arabic television stations (along with 'Wise Man' Naguid Sawiris) said the administration would relieve of his position. But that dies not seem to have happened and in interviews on Monday State Department spokesman PJ Crowley gave the impression that the timing of Mubarak's departure was up to the Egyptians. It's more than a little reminsicent of the US position on Israeli-Palestinian talks -- let them work it between themselves, regardless of any principles and regardless of the gross disparity between the power of the two sides.
Josh Stacher, who knows Egypt well and whose intellect I respect, writes in Foreign Affairs:

With Suleiman at the helm, the state's objective of restoring a structure of rule by military managers is not even concealed. This sort of "orderly transition" in post-Mubarak Egypt is more likely to usher in a return to the repressive status quo than an era of widening popular participation.

That's certainly a real possibility but not a foregone conclusion. The attitude of Vice President Omar Suleiman is now relatively transparent, after his interview with Nile TV, and it's likely that armed forces chief of staff Sami Anan shares his views, but the dynamics of the relationships at the summit of power is still opaque. The behaviour of the soldiers on the streets also remains mysterious - they are checking identities more carefully and are suspicious of devices such as cameras and tape recorders.

Small acts of heroism

2011-02-06T10:44:00.000-08:00

Do read Mohammed Bamyeh's essay on the Egyptian uprising, which stitches together many of the themes evident in the protest movement, particularly the way that participation in such a movement makes people more confident, more generous, more courteous, more aware of their compatriots. It's been evident in a hundred little ways - people walking through the crowds hanging out sweets and dates to people they've never met, people standing in line and reprimanding those who try to cut in, people going around Tahrir Square and voluntarily picking up litter, people discussing the future of their country with people to whom they would not previously have given the time of day. One little incident that impressed me was at an army checkpoint after curfew time on the Nile Corniche last night when the soldier asked a middle-aged man in front of me where he was coming from. The man hesitated for just a second, then looked the soldier straight in the eye, puffed out his chest and said "I was in the square." It was a tiny gesture of defiance, not particularly brave, but I suspect that two weeks ago he would given some evasive answer, for the sake of an easy life. Then in Tahrir Square today I met one of the many minor heroes of the uprising, a middle-class architect from the prosperous suburb of Maadi, who gave me his detailed account of his adventures on January 28, the day that protesters overwhelmed the dreaded Central Security riot police and established a foothold in the square. His name was Shadi Attia, 31, and I trust he will not object if I publicise his story. Shadi told me that before January 28 he had never taken part in any political activities, but when he saw on the Internet what had happened on January 25 (the first day of protests) he felt embarrassed that the people of Maadi had made no contribution. He went to the mosque for Friday prayers without the slightest idea what would happen, if anything, and he did not know anyone there who intended to march. At the end of prayers, one man stood up in the crowd and said: "Come to me." About 200 gathered around him and the group set off. "At first it was all men, but as we went though Maadi the demographics began to change and women began to join." The first clash with the riot police took place near the Maadi Club and the officer was shocked by the size of the crowd that had coalesced. As they marched northwards towards the city centre, others joined. By the time of the afternoon prayer, the protesters prayed on al-Malek al-Saleh bridge, about four km south of Tahrir Square. They faced the toughest resistance on Kasr el-Aini, the main street running south from the square, and it was here that a U.S. embassy vehicle (he noted the registration number 185/73) drove through the crowd at high speed, killing several of the protesters (the embassy says it thinks the vehicle was stolen). Shadi saw the victims lying mangled on the roadway, and he told me in all honesty that he was of a squeamish disposition, not inclined to acts of bravery, and his first instinct was to run away. "But one of them reached out his hand and grapped me by my ankle." Shadi couldn't refuse his appeal so he picked him up and carried him on his shoulder to the nearby Kasr el-Aini hospital, where the emergency room was overwhelmed with the wounded. He then continued on his way up the street and made it into Tahrir Square after an odyssey which lasted some five or six hours and which changed Shadi for ever. On Sunday morning Shadi was helping organise deliveries of food to those who have been camping out in the square. There are thousands of similar stories out there, all of them heroic in their little ways.

Protesters have a quiet night in Tahrir

2011-02-06T05:42:00.000-08:00

I was down in Tahrir Square again this morning and the mood is even more buoyant than usual, and the turnout is strong too. The signals from the dialogue between Suleiman and others, including the Brotherhood, are very confusing, and it could take some time for the fog to clear. But there's a description I wrote for Reuters this morning (presumably their copyright):

    Morning coffee is brewing on the wood fire outside Mohamed
Awad's plastic sheeting shelter in Tahrir Square, the hub of the
Egyptian protest movement demanding the resignation of
President Hosni Mubarak.

    At a makeshift stall nearby he can buy a wide selection of
newspapers to read over breakfast. After rare light rain
overnight the sun is up, and sleepy heads are coming out of the
blankets where they have spent another quiet night.

    The thugs who attacked the protesters for three days with
rocks and petrol bombs last week have backed off and the
Egyptian army is doing its usual thing - not very much.

    A hard core of protesters, backed by a broad popular
movement which has brought millions out on the streets, say they
are determined to stay in the square in central Cairo until
Mubarak, after 30 years in office, gives up and leaves office.

    They are settling down for the long haul, in some cases
abandoning their former lives for a cause they believe in.

    People have brought in more dumpsters for rubbish, one of
them labelled "Headquarters of the National Democratic Party" --
the Mubarak party which has been a target of their anger.

    Except for two quick trips home to Shubra in north Cairo,
Awad has been in Tahrir Square most of the time since Jan. 28,
the Day of Anger when the protest movement made the transition
from a small middle-class group into a broad-based wave.

    "I'll be here till he goes," said Awad, who is 25,
unemployed and has a bandage on his forehead, a badge of honour
in Tahrir Square. The protesters want to rename it Martyrs
Square in memory of the 300 Egyptians who have died.

    Osama Karrar, 42, organises trade fairs abroad and should
have been in Ukraine on business this week. "I've given up
everything to be here. I've travelled a lot and I have seen
freedom and I want to see it here," he said.

    "Of course I'm losing money, but that's nothing compared
with the price of freedom," he added.

    Yahya Haidar, a certified accountant in his 60s and a member
of the Muslim Brotherhood, is also deeply committed, opposed
even to dialogue with Mubarak's vice president, Omar Suleiman,
who has started talks with members of the opposition on a
solution to the crisis.

    "Dialogue is a waste of time, which is what the regime
wants. We don't want Omar Suleiman. He's a military man who just
gives orders. If he stays, we will stay," Haidar told Reuters.

    The mood was grown increasingly festive as the danger of
attack diminishes and the number of participants hold up.

    Muslim-Christian unity was one of the themes on Sunday.
Members of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority said mass in the
square and many of the placards combined the Muslim crescent and
the Christian cross. "Hand in hand" was a common chant.

    The other theme was honour to the martyrs. People held up
photographs of them and said special prayers for their souls.

    Outside the enclave held by the protest movement, normal
life is beginning to resume in the city of more than 15 million.
The banks reopened on Sunday, along with some other businesses
closed for the past 10 days.

    But not everyone is happy with the disruption. "Those kids
in Tahrir are just a bunch of troublemakers and they are ruining
business. They need to go home so we can get on with our lives,"
said a Christian money changer. He declined to give his name,
saying he was frightened the Brotherhood would come to power.

The "Useful" Bogeyman and the Liberal Response

2011-02-05T15:10:00.000-08:00

The confrontation between the Mubarak regime and the people in Tahrir Square and the rest of the country is going through a relatively quiet phase. There wasn't any violence on the streets today. When a few tanks moved a few yards, it was news and everyone jumped to speculate whether they might move further. When there's a lull I sometimes just sit in front of the television and listen to what people have to say about the Egytian uprising. One thing that is beginning to irritate me quite intensely is the way interviewers don't think they have done their job properly unless they bring up 'fears' that free elections might work in favour of the Muslim Brotherhood. Every informed commentator on Egypt and Tunisia for the past month and a half has noted that Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt used their Islamist opponents as an excuse for rigging elections and excluding a significant part of their populations from the political sphere. Ben Ali went further, driving the Nahdha under ground, into exile or into prison on fabricated charges. Mubarak tried a slightly different approach, leaving them just enough space to show that they had a constituency and were more powerful than the liberal democrats. In fact, Mubarak and his new vice president, Omar Suleiman, have had a heyday in recent days, saying or hinting that Brotherhood 'infiltrators' were the driving force behind the wave of protests, which anyone on the ground could see was a blatant misrepresentation. Some reporters have engaged in 'beard surveys' to assess their presence in the crowds, as though everyone with a beard were a rabid Islamist bent on jihad. It really is time that the media laid off and listened to what Muslim Brotherhood members and leaders say, instead of trying to read their minds or asking loaded questions that reinforce the preconceptions of their audience, pandering to their Islamophobic prejudices. When the Nahdha was active in Tunisia in the late 1980s, Nahdha leaders used to call this phenomenon a 'proces d'intention' - a trial on the basis of what one thinks or intends to do. Do let's recognise that the Muslim Brotherhood represents a legitimate trend in Egyptian society and that, like any political movement, it is capable of adapting to new circumstances. It's not that I'm trying to defend the Brotherhood's views, with which I disagree, but I do believe that this obsession with the Brotherhood is unhealthy and runs the risk of perpetuating the same exclusionist approach practiced by Ben Ali and Mubarak. For decades, social liberals have hidden behind the authoritarian state to do the dirty work of keeping the Islamists out of politics. If there is be lasting change, the liberals have to take on the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology in the free marketplace of ideas, instead of fretting and running for cover. That's what democracy is about. That's why the best democracies allows communists and fascists to run for office, in the confidence that a well-educated and well-informed public will not vote for them in large numbers. Sometimes people do vote for them, but that's because the liberals and secularists have not done their work properly. Many social liberals in the Arab world, especially in highly state-dominated countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, have not fully grasped the transformative power of functioning democracy, with open debate against a background of the rule of law . Democracy requires a certain courage and assertiveness, not hand-wringing and laments about the ignorance of the masses. For all these reasons, I plan to write as little as possible about the Brotherhood until they start to formulate policies for what hopefully will be a new era in Egyptians politics. Then we can start to judge those policies on their objective merits.

First draft of history

2011-02-04T14:21:00.000-08:00

Esam al-Amin's article in Counterpunch on the Egyptian government's emergency response to the protest movement in Egypt is fascinating. I haven't often merely linked to other articles but this is a very special piece of reporting, a first draft of history that has the ring of truth. I was also jealous of his quote from Lenin at the beginning: "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." That was what I meant to say last week when I wrote: "If one week is a long time in politics, one month can bring as much change as a whole generation," but Lenin said it so much better.

The key section, describing the meeting which decided to use thugs against the protest movement, runs thus:

    Meanwhile, the last touches of a crude plan to abort the protests and attack the demonstrators were being finalized in the Interior Ministry. In the mean time, the leaders of the NPD (ruling National Democratic Party) met with the committee of forty, which is a committee of corrupt oligarchs and tycoons, who have taken over major sections of Egypt’s economy in the last decade and are close associates to Jamal Mubarak, the president’s son. The committee included Ahmad Ezz, Ibrahim Kamel, Mohamad Abu el-Enein, Magdy Ashour and others.
    Each businessman pledged to recruit as many people from their businesses and industries as well as mobsters and hoodlums known as Baltagies – people who are paid to fight and cause chaos and terror. Abu el-Enein and Kamel pledged to finance the whole operation.Meanwhile,the Interior Minister reconstituted some of the most notorious officers of his secret police to join the counter-revolutionary demonstrators slated for Wednesday, with a specific plan of attack the pro-democracy protesters.
    About a dozen security officers, who were to supervise the plan in the field, also recruited former dangerous ex-prisoners who escaped the prison last Saturday, promising them money and presidential pardons against their convictions. This plan was to be executed in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, Port Said, Damanhour, Asyout, among other cities across Egypt.

About two hours before the main assault began at about 2 p.m. on Wednesday, an acquaintance has a telephone conversation with an "old guard" cabinet minister, who was ecstatic about the way events were moving. He said that pro-Mubarak demonstrations had broken out across the country and the protest movement was as good as finished. Just by chance I came out of the Arab League building in Tahrir Square at 1.50 p.m., past the museum into Abdel Moneim Square to the northeast. The atmosphere was very tense, with scores of baltagiya thugs advancing southwards. I kept well out of the way and had a very clear view of the horses and camels coming down the ramp off the October 6 Bridge, a moment that will remain an iconic image of the uprising.
I then headed up Ramses Street. where there were pockets of pro-Mubarak people heading towards Tahrir. There were not all thugs, by any means. One image struck me as particularly odd -- a plump middle-aged woman in hijab alone in the driving seat of a smart new saloon, clearly middle-class and prosperous. She was waving an Egyptian flag and she leant out of the window as I passed and shouted "We've won!" When I failed to share her glee, she tittered "Hee, hee, hee" with pure schadenfreude. The image has been haunting me on and off for the last few days, as I tried to imagine who she might have been and what motive drove her to behave in such a way.
That set me thinking about the National Democratic Party, the party of Sadat and Mubarak, and how political scientists would define it. It was never a party in the conventional sense, just a patronage network and simultaneously the political branch of the state. In recent years it has served as a vehicle for businessmen too busy for full-time politics to have a voice in the government's economic policies, in the end with disastrous results. In television footage that day and the next I remember seeing young NDP men shouting into passing cameras slogans such as 'Hosni Mubarak is our leader', not exactly a very political message, certainly not compared with the protest movement's chants of 'Freedom'. Mohamad Abu el-Enein's commercial properties, incidentally, were prime targets in the city of Suez, where clashes between the protest movement and the riot police were particularly violent. A curious aspect of the state media campaign against the protest movement, orchestrated by Information Minister Anas el-Fiki, has been the bizarre claim that the movement is an American and Israeli conspiracy. State television has been too painful to watch for long periods, but whenever I flicked through it, I found second-tier 'celebrities' reiterating the theory. Esam al-Amin writes that Fiki took part in one of the main planning meetings for the counter-attack. Fiki is now of the protest movement's prime targets and I expect his days in power are numbered.

Constitutional chaos in Egypt

2011-02-04T10:29:00.000-08:00

In a rather narrow technical sense, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his first vice president, Omar Suleiman, are right when they say that Mubarak's sudden departure will lead to chaos -- constitutional chaos. But it's chaos of the regime's own making and the protest movement has no obligation whatsoever to help them out of the hole they have dug for themselves. The problem is that if Mubarak transfers his powers to Suleiman, elections must be held according to the existing constitution. Article 82 says he could not propose any constitutional amendments, he could not dissolve the existing cabinet (which Mubarak appointed on Saturday) and he could not dissolve parliament. Such a scenario is completely unacceptable to the protest movement and to most politically aware Egyptians. What they want is a government of national unity, the dissolution of parliament and a new constitution removing the restrictions on presidential candidates. Mubarak and Suleiman are telling the United States and the Egyptian parties willing to negotiate with them that this is why Mubarak needs to stay around for many months for the necessary changes to go through. They deserve to be ignored. It is their own arrogance, irresponsibility and greed for power that has brought about the impasse. As the regime's power slips away, all the institutions of the state are gradually losing whatever legitimacy they ever had. The president is illegitimate because the last presidential elections were rigged, the constitution is of dubious validity because it was approved in a similarly dubious referendum and the existing parliament resulted from one of the worst election fiascos in recent years -- because of massive fraud, only one opposition party won a seat in the assembly. One possible 'solution' would be to appeal to article 139 of the constitution, which gives the president the right to define the jurisdiction of his vice presidents. In other words Mubarak would issue a presidential decree that Suleiman does in fact have the authority to dissolve parliament and propose constitutional amendments. But on common sense grounds, it is an absurdity that the president could use such vague language to circumvent a ban specified in detail in another part of the constitution. Problems like this arise when you draft a constitution unilaterally without broad consultation, especially if the whole purpose of the exercise is to perpetuate your own power rather than to enshrine a neutral vision of how the state should function. But at this stage in the confrontation between the regime and the protest movement, it's the power of the streets that matters. If Suleiman can't satisfy the protest movement constitutionally, they should demand explicitly a constitutional assembly and start again from scratch.

The public face of Omar Suleiman

2011-02-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

New Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman spoke in public at length for the first time ever today, in an interview with Nile Television. That gives us more insight into his thinking than we have ever had before and the impression is hardly reassuring. Judging by what we heard, this was a replica of what the Tunisians (and the French) would call 'langue de bois' (literally, wooden tongue). The key message came right at the end -- to the effect that he thanks the young people of Egypt for initiating a process of reform but now it's time for them to stand down and trust the details to the professionals. The interviewer, who is a government employee, did not point out that the professionals would be exactly the same ones whose vision of reform over the past six years has turned out to be a succession of deceit and empty promises. He played it straight by the rule book which Mubarak, the government and the ruling National Democratic Party have written to suit their own very narrow interests. He gave no promise that his dialogue partners would have a veto over the government's proposals, constitutional amendments would have to go through the existing parliament, and he did not offer judicial supervision or independent monitoring for the next elections. He gave the interview on the eve of the protest movement's 'Friday of Departure', when they hope to muster enough support to drive President Mubarak out of office. Viewed objectively, what he said can scarcely have won the regime many defectors from the protest movement, which is no longer willing to give Mubarak and Suleiman the benefit of the doubt about their sincerity. At about the same time President Mubarak gave his first interview since the crisis began (with ABC), and he too showed no sign that he would improve on his offer of standing down in September after the next presidential elections. Apart from his 'thanks' to the youngsters, Suleiman used the same 'security establishment' logic as Mubarak, contemptuous of their political opponents and obsessed with their own exclusive role as guarantors against chaos and evil conspirators. The role of the army remains as ambiguous as it has been since tanks and troops deployed in the streets of Cairo last Friday. The army sent very mixed signals on Friday. It did set up a buffer zone between the protest movement and the pro-Mubarak thugs on the Egyptian Museum front, but the zone was so thinly manned that the soldiers could not hold it. When the army has some 450,000 troops and the Museum front is the most volatile hotspot in the country, it's bizarre that it deployed only 50 infantrymen to hold two lines about 200 metres long. One tank and a few troops then cleared pro-Mubarak people off a nearby flyover, a gesture which favoured the protesters, but by the end of the day the flyover was a battleground again, with the army back in its usual hunkered-down mode. While it did not have enough manpower to hold the buffer zone, it did have spare personnel to harass foreign journalists and human rights activists -- not usually an task for the military. The attitude of the army remains key to the outcome of this uprising. If tens of thousands of protesters march on the presidential palace 'Friday of Departure', as some of the groups are proposing, how will the army react? Perhaps the army command itself has still not decided. It could be a bloody day.

Tahrir Square Behind the Barricades

2011-02-03T12:20:00.000-08:00

Spent the day in Tahrir Square and wrote this for Reuters (their copyright). We need to record this very special atmosphere.

Beyond the barricades, beyond the sniping from the edges by people acting on behalf of President Hosni Mubarak, a new, festive and diverse slice of Egypt has suddenly appeared in the heart of the capital Cairo.
In an atmosphere comparable perhaps to the Paris Commune or Tiananmen Square, Tahrir Square has free food, free drinks, a bandstand with live music, dedicated medical staff and a sense of community which Mubarak's opponents say makes them proud of their country for the first time in decades.
When they do bag and body searches to keep out guns or knives, the volunteer security staff are friendly and apologetic. Unlike the thugs roaming central Cairo, they want everyone to bear witness to an achievement they see as almost miraculous. "Welcome" and "come in" are the usual greetings.
Even when they catch an intruder in battle, usually muscular men with papers identifying them as police or State Security, they do not give them the treatment to which Egyptians who fall foul of the police are accustomed. A posse of a dozen men surround them and escort through the crowds to a makeshift security office in a commandeered travel agency. "Peaceful, peaceful," they chant, to warn off anyone with vengeful intentions.
    The ad hoc security committee gives them a quick interrogation behind the shop window, in full view of all, to find out who sent them and for what purpose. Then they hand them over to the Egyptian army nearby. "We understand that the army then releases them," said a security official.
    Some of the protesters have now spent six days and nights in the area they seized from the government last Friday, one of the critical days in the popular uprising which is bringing the Mubarak establishment to its knees.
Some of them have pitched tents on the patches of grass in the square, which is usually a busy traffic hub in the centre of the modern city. Others sleep on the roadways at any time of day and night, exhausted from the task of mutual defence against Mubarak supporters trying to remove them.
    Around the clock people appear with trays of bean sandwiches, sacks of bread and crates of juice cartons. They give them away to anyone who wants them.
People have come from across the country, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, urban liberals and provincial farmers, leftists and Islamists -- all united behind the goal of ending 30 years of government by 'the regime', Mubarak and his narrow clique of associates.
    Some of the women wear the full face veil and long loose dresses, others wear tight jeans and T-shirts, they hair uncovered. Doctors and lawyers come in suits, the urban working class in whatever they were wearing when they felt the urge to join the movement.
Farag Abdel Samad, a 58-year-old smallholder from the middle Egyptian province of Minya, said he took the train to Cairo on Sunday when he heard what was happening in Cairo. Alone, away from his family, he said he hoped to make history.
    In his brown galabia, his hands calloused from work in the fields, he sits on the pavement in a mental state somewhere between euphoria and anxiety. "Nobody wants him," he said. "When is he going? Do you think the Americans want him to stay?" he asked.
He has never heard of Omar Suleiman, the new vice president Mubarak appointed on Saturday, but he knows what he wants. "Mubarak is a thief and a criminal. Isn't thirty years enough?" he said.
    Fawzi Khalil, an evangical presbyterian pastor who lives in eastern Cairo, said he had been coming on and off since Friday. Corruption was the driving force that committed him to the cause of the protest movement, he said.
    In this microcosm of Egypt's 80 million people, you can hear Quran recitals, inspirational lectures on the new Egypt or live guitar music and popular songs, broadcast from a bank of speakers set up close to the Mugamma building, the notorious labyrinthine heart of the country's bureaucracy.
    But it's not all fun and games in Tahrir Square. Keeping the uprising alive brings some urgent, onerous and sometimes dangerous tasks, such as prising out the paving stones for use as missiles, filling sacks with rocks to carry to the front lines, breaking up burnt-out vehicles for sheet metal to make barricades and most important of all, manning the defences when the thugs attack.
Others stand watch at the front, perched on oil drums or the flatbeds of army trucks they took over on Tuesday night when the attacks intensified. When they see their enemies approaching, they sound the alarm by banging metal bars or wooden staves on the railings and lamp posts. "Move up, guys, move up," they shout, and reinforcements pour in from the rear.
    More than 1,000 people were wounded on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, mostly with head wounds from rocks, some from live ammunition. Hundreds are walking around in bandages but many of those are still on active duty. With limited resources, they have constructed makeshift helmets with whatever comes to hand, even cardboard and plastic water bottles strapped together with strips of cloth.
So far their spirit is unbowed. They say the decisive day might be Friday, when the informal alliance have called massive protests. In hope they have called the day the Friday of Mubarak's Depature.

Egyptian army - dysfunctional, humiliated, useless

2011-02-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

Egyptians often say they are proud of their army - its patriotism, political neutrality, professionalism or whatever. One may well ask why. The events of the last few days show that it's much the same as the rest of the administration -- dysfunctional and paralysed, dare I say useless. In this case, humiliated as well. Ask the troops on the street what they plan to do or what their policy is on enforcing the curfew, for example, and they say: "We don't have orders." Not only that, but this army, which costs many billions of dollars a year, which employs hundreds of thousands of people, to which the United States gives $1.3 billion a year, has hardly done anything with any success since it overthrew the monarchy in 1952. In fact, since the Middle East of 1973, when the political-military leadership of Egypt managed to turn initial success into a stalemate close to defeat on the battlefield, it has hardly done anything at all. It rode into Kuwait in 1992 on the coat tails of the U.S. army, but it hardly fired a shot and acted merely as a token Arab presence in the coalition. The Egyptian military didn't even bother to send a warship to deal with Somali pirates when the piracy problem arose in 2008, threatening Suez Canal traffic. It left that to more asertive countries - even Malaysia sent a vessel. So what to make of the army's deployment on the streets of Cairo over the last five days? All they have done is protect government buildings which might have been the target of looters or protesters. But when it came to protecting peaceful demonstrators from a coordinated assault by thugs armed with clubs and now guns, they just sat tight in their tanks and APCs and did nothing. Yesterday I saw a young officer walking down the street with a field radio to investigate the initial assualt by the Mubarak thugs. Then he just walked back to his post, and the army did exactly nothing. Some of their vehicles were caught in the hail of bricks and rocks which the two sides threw at each other. Presumably the tank crews sat inside under the hatches, asking their superiors by radio for orders - but nothing came. For the past 18 hours it's been sitting in the middle of a civil war, doing nothing. Abandoned by the police, Egyptians execising their universal right to take part in peaceful protests but under attack by hired thugs have turned to the army for protection. To its eternal shame, the army has done nothing.

The Mubarak resignation option

2011-02-02T11:32:00.000-08:00

The U.S. administration, perhaps inevitably, has better information about the thinking at the top of the military/security establishment in Egypt than anyone other than the participants themselves, and the participants aren't speaking in public in a way that is easy to interpret. My reading is that Washington is pressing Mubarak and the Egyptian army to unite behind the immediate resignation option, which would automatically put Vice President Omar Suleiman into the presidency, an outcome which would satisfy U.S. and Israeli interests while simultaneously reducing the protest movement to a hard core of maximalists. Suleiman of course would guarantee Egyptian adherence to the peace treaty with Israel and the continuation of Egyptian policy on Hamas in Gaza, which means collaboration with Israel in the blockade of Gaza and hostility towards Hamas. That's what seems to matter most in Washington, whereas democracy and the welfare of the Egyptian people are much lower priorities. When Mubarak said on Tuesday night that he would stand down in September, many ordinary Egyptians said the protest movement had won a substantial victory and should call off its campaign to drive him out of office. In the meantime their disgust with the behaviour of Mubarak's thugs on Wednesday may have won the protest movement more allies, but it's not certain they would have the strength to mobilise enough support to challenge Omar Suleiman's legitimacy after Mubarak resigned.
Would the protest movement have gained much if Mubarak resigned? Would it have been worth all the sacrifice? It would be a mixed picture:
They would have established the right to peaceful protest and put future Egyptian leaders on notice that they can come out on the streets if Suleiman or his successors do not live up to their promises. This would strengthen their hand during the consultations over the next few months over constitutional amendments and new laws on elections and political rights. Suleiman would be in the spotlight internationally if he reverted to the thuggery and police brutality which the interior ministry has practiced under Mubarak.
The ruling National Democratic Party would be greatly discredited. Although Suleiman is (probably?) a member of the NDP, in his capacity as a cabinet member, he has not been active in the party and is not known to have close associations with the business elite who dominated the party -- people such as Mubarak's son Gamal, steel magnate Ahmed Ezz (who has resigned) and many others. In fact Suleiman, who comes from a military/intelligence background, is assumed to be unsympathetic or hostile towards that clique.
On the downside, Suleiman has never given any indication that he is a closet democrat or someone willing to share power or consult widely when he takes decisions. Suleiman has hardly ever said anything in public, but his background and his empathy with Mubarak do not suggest any liberal inclinations. Without any fundamental overhaul of the political and security system, Suleiman could hold the presidency for many years to come, possibly till he dies (he is already 74) and then transfer power to a someone from the same "security and stability" school of thought which Mubarak belongs to.
For those seeking to change Egypt into a functioning democracy, with regular changes at the top, that outcome would be a bitter pill to swallow.

The dangers of Mubarak's offer

2011-02-02T01:21:00.000-08:00

It's time someone spelled out in detail what would happen if Egyptians accepted President Mubarak's plan to step down in September and allow elections for a new president under a new constitution, and why the protest movement should be so wary of his intentions.

· The new constitution would be drafted and approved by the existing parliament, which is completely controlled by the ruling National Democratic Party after rigged elections last year. Even if the government fulfils its promise to respect court rulings invalidating the voting in some constituencies and holding a new round of voting in those areas, the opposition has no guarantee that the police and ruling party will ensure a fair vote. Even if improved elections are held, it would probably dilute the NDP's dominance only to a marginal extent. The authorities have habitually ignored court rulings that do not suit their interests.

· The government and ruling party have a long record of making merely cosmetic amendments to the constitution, as they have done twice in the last six years. Although billed as 'reforms', the amendments have even had the effect of restricting the right to stand for election, especially for the presidency, and diluting the provisions for electoral fairness. In fact, under the existing 'improved' constitution, only the NDP presidential candidate would have the right to stand.

· Mubarak did not mention the crucial question of judicial supervision of elections, which proved so irksome to their rigging efforts in 2005 and which was abolished under the subsequent amendment. Likewise, he gave no guarantee on election monitoring, either by Egyptian or international organisations. Without judicial supervision or independent monitoring, the door is wide open for more electoral abuses of the traditional variety.

· In theory, Mubarak and his vice president are offering dialogue with the opposition during preparations for elections. But past experience, not just in Egypt but elsewhere, is that dialogue without a balance of power can only end in favour of the strong. The regime would simply ignore opposition proposals that it does not like.

· Over the eight months before presidential elections are due in September, the police corps and especially the Central Security riot police would be reconstituted and would be available for use in suppressing all forms of public protest. The government has used Central Security in the past for preventing access to police stations while intimidated civil servants and NDP thugs stuff ballot boxes and perpetrate other forms of electoral fraud.

· The NDP's presidential candidate in September is most likely to be newly appointed vice president and former army general Omar Suleiman, who has been intelligence chief and is one of Mubarak's trusted lieutenants. The most likely outcome is that Suleiman would win and remain president of Egypt for at least two full six-year terms, or until he dies, whichever comes first. This is hardly an attractive prospect for Egyptians seeking a break with the past. That would leave the country in the grip of the NDP and its corrupt ion until at least 2023. If Mubarak feels strong enough when the time comes for elections, he might even consider reactivating the plan to install his son Gamal as president, though at this stage, given the damage to his credibility, this scenario seems implausible.

· With the exception of former Interior Minister Habib el-Adli, referred to the military prosecutor's office for investigation (in effect as a scapegoat for the regime's failure to crush the protest movement), no one is likely to face investigation for the killing of the 138 people who have died in the last week of protests mostly protesters killed by riot police. The investigation of Adli could easily be dropped once the situation comes down.

A very disturbing trend which has surfaced in the last 24 hours is the appearance of pro-Mubarak supporters in close proximity to where the protest movement has gathered. Television stations reported on Tuesday evening that some of those pro-Mubarak supporters attacked protesters on the margins of the 100,000-strong march in Alexandria. I heard a noisy group of them in Kasr al-Aini Street just south of Tahrir Square in the early hours of Wednesday morning but I was reluctant to investigate because of rumours about their aggressive behaviour. Some of these pro-Mubarak gangs could be armed and dangerous. Some members of the protest movement would inevitably respond in kind, leading to gang warfare and even something akin to civil war. This is a very dangerous trend, carrying the potential for large-scale bloodshed. The trend suggests some regime elements are willing to fight for their privileges and will not easily accept defeat.

Simultaneously, the exclusion of Al Jazeera as a source of information for Egyptians gives the state media and Al Arabiya a chance to set the media agenda. Al Arabiya, to its shame, has played an ignominious role as a conduit for regime propaganda, trying to frighten the middle classes with alarmist reports of insecurity and giving the tiny pro-Mubarak demonstrations coverage way out of proportion with their tiny size. Al Arabiya is of course under the influence of the Saudi royal family, which has been one of Mubarak's strongest allies. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has dismissed the Egyptian protest movement as people "who have infiltrated the people in the name of freedom of expression, exploiting it to inject their destructive hatred. The Egyptian authorities have closed down Al Jazeera transmissions on Nilesat, which it owns, in violation of its contractual obligations, and transmissions on Arabsat, which is based in Saudi Arabia and owned by conservative Gulf interests, have also been disrupted.

It is uncertain how the army would respond if gangs of armed 'loyalists' took to the streets and started to attack the protest movement. It's possible that the gangs could seriously alienate army officers against the regime, but the dynamics of the debate within the upper echelons of the military command remains entirely opaque from the outside, so it would be reckless of the protest movement to place too much hope there.

President Obama's attitude is also opaque even after the statement he made on Tuesday evening. It's not clear whether the United States is tacitly endorsing Mubarak's offer and wants to see Omar Suleiman as the next president of Egypt, as an obstacle to the Muslim Brotherhood and in order to ensure that Egypt continues to play its servile role protecting Israel's southwestern flank. If that is the case, it will be an unforgivable betrayal of the Egyptian people.

Some Egyptians found Mubarak's speech moving, especially his wish to die in the country. But as an outsider, I found it reflected the contempt for politics which has been characteristic of his career. He said, for example, that the demonstrations had "become regrettable confrontations driven and dominated by political forces seeking escalation". For Mubarak, all politics is undesirable. For him, running a country is about order, obedience, security and stability, not about dialogue, compromise and equal partnership.

Who's in Tahrir Square, and what next?

2011-01-31T02:00:00.000-08:00

The professional and managerial middle classes -- the ones who launched the Egyptian uprising last Tuesday -- remain very much a presence among the hard core of protesters in Tahrir Square, judging by my tour of the area on Sunday night and Monday morning. I met dentists, middle managers, IT engineers and businessmen, all of them committed to driving President Mubarak out of office. Except for members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are a significant but not dominant element in the protest movement, most of them did not claim to have any formal political affiliation. Surprisingly, as I am writing in my informal capacity as a contributor to Reuters, support for Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was rather unenthusiastic, though I suspect that in the end he would prove an acceptable transitional figure if people were confident that Mubarak and his associates were well and truly defeated. The key to the next few days remains the opaque manoeuvrings at the top of the military-security establishment, where the main players are Mubarak, Vice President Omar Suleiman, prime minister-designate Ahmed Shafik and caretaker defence minister Tantawi. The status of caretaker interior minister Habib el-Adli is opaque. The fact that Mubarak included him in a meeting yesterday suggests Mubarak is deaf to the street - a worrying sign.
If Mubarak is still in power at noon on Friday, it could be a very bloody day. Read the following statement from an unknown group called the Youth of the Revolution:

"We the people and the youth of Egypt demand from our brothers in the national armed forces to outline their position clearly and without ambiguity. They must either take the side of millions of Egyptians protesting or stand in the camp of the regime. We await a response to this statement from now until Thursday, February 3, bearing in mind that if no response is given, it means bias towards the regime, at which point we call on
all Egyptians to protest on February 4 for the 'Friday of Departure' after Friday prayers. Finally, we call on people to march to the presidential palace and parliament building and the state broadcast building in millions across Egypt ... to impose the wished of the Egyptian people."

I have no idea who is behind this, but the logic is unassailable and the same plan must be taking shape in the minds of those committed to seeing the revolution through. There may be no other way, despite the inevitable bloodshed. Then the army would have to come off the fence.

An overview, slightly dated

2011-01-31T00:09:00.000-08:00

This is what I wrote for the Lebanese magazine Executive 36 hours ago, with an overview of the Egyptian uprising in its regional context. It's mostly still valid, which is a stroke of luck given the volatility:

If one week is a long time in politics, one month can bring as much change as a whole generation. The spark struck in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in December first brought down President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who now languishes in Saudi exile. In a chain reaction, the sudden and unexpected collapse of authoritarian rule in Tunisia breathed new hope into opponents of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who have struggled for years to muster mass support for their democratic agenda. Now hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have risen up too, overturning the conventional wisdom that autocrats in the Arab world have mastered the dark arts of political survival more successfully than anywhere else in the world. One way or the other, the Middle East will never be the same again.

Egypt and Tunisia had much in common – high youth unemployment, brutal repression by police thuggery, economic growth that stubbornly refused to trickle down, and paralyzed political systems based on ruling parties that tried to give a facade of respectability to crony capitalism. The Tunisian opposition that helped drive Ben Ali into exile on January 14 has made great progress towards ensuring that the old guard of the ruling RCD party cannot salvage many of the privileges it enjoyed for the past 23 years. In Egypt the battle for the future is still raging, and the latest developments are strong indications that the old guard of the regime will cling to power with some tenacity, possibly at the cost of much more blood among young Egyptians determined to make a clean break with the past.

For the moment Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, 82 years old and in power for three decades, has sacrificed his own son's presidential ambitions and a prime minister with an enviable record as an economic manager, all for the sake of fending off a challenge from the streets that by Friday looked close to triumph. In only four days overt opposition to Mubarak, once the preserve of a few marginal politicians, internet activists and the cowed Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, has flourished into a mass movement with no clear leadership, little coordination and a simple agenda – “overthrow the regime”. When tens of thousands of Egyptians flooded across the Nile bridges into central Cairo at sunset on Friday, routing one of the world's largest police forces dedicated to suppressing protests, it looked like Mubarak was on the run. The headquarters of the ruling National Democratic Party was in flames and many jubilant Egyptians were welcoming the arrival of the army as their saviour.

But Mubarak, slow and stubborn but still wily, had more tricks up his sleeve. For the first time in his long reign, he appointed a vice-president, in the person of security adviser and intelligence chief General Omar Suleiman, a man whose public statements have been as rare as Cairo rain. Then he named an old air force associate, former Civilian Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafik, as prime minister, jettisoning technocrat Ahmed Nazif and his team of liberal economists. Suleiman's appointment is another nail in the coffin for any plans for his deeply unpopular son Gamal to take over the reins of power - plans that were transparent despite all the official denials.

It was a classic containment tactic, a circling of the wagons as the enemy advanced. With the army in the streets to reassure ordinary Egyptians who hated and despised the police force, Mubarak was surrounding himself with old military colleagues he trusted would think twice about advising him that it was time to follow Ben Ali into ignominious exile. He has not yet pacified the street, and opposition politicians have dismissed the appointments as too little too late, just like the last-minute concessions with which the Tunisian president tried to save his skin. For the moment the army is fraternising on the streets with thousands of protesters telling Mubarak to go. The future of Egypt, and possibly the whole Middle East, now depends on the dynamics of that fragile and shallow alliance between the army and the people. It seems unlikely that the people will just give up without violence, so will the army turn on the people or will it turn on Mubarak?

A successful revolution in Egypt, coupled with that in Tunisia, could be a beacon of light for the Arab world, even herald a shift in international geopolitics. Army-backed repression would be a throwback to the dark days of the 1950s, when the current autocratic governments were born.

Emergency plan to cling to power

2011-01-30T00:49:00.000-08:00

On the face of it, President Mubarak's decision to appoint intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as vice president and Ahmed Shafik as prime minister is hard to understand, and the analyses I have heard and seen haven't been very profound or convincing. Perhaps that's because outsiders assume that Mubarak's purpose was to placate the uprising in some way, so they have jumped to the conclusion that the appointment of Suleiman was a superficially 'honourable' way to abandon any plan to have his unpopular son Gamal succeed him. Others see it as part of a plan to arrange a safe exit for himself at some future date, under some highly speculative deal with the army which has saved him. Others, including many of the protesters, suspect that Suleiman has the approval of the U.S. government, but reactions from the United States don't corroborate that theory in any way. Certainly that theory was widespread in Tahrir Square this morning and this has given Egypt's relationship with Washington more prominence in the uprising than at any time in the last five days, when the foreign dimension was largely absent. Protesters this morning called Suleiman a U.S. agent and banners recalled his collaboration with Israel and the United States in imposing the blockade of Gaza, which most Egyptians see as criminal.
My interpretation of Mubarak's appointments starts from the basis that Mubarak is a stubborn autocrat who cannot give up power willingly. On Friday night, when he dismissed his government, his only concern was to stay in power for another day, another two days, perhaps to the end of the week. He was not thinking about presidential elections in September or the presidential aspirations of his son Gamal, perhaps even of his own 'legacy'. He was thinking that the longer he could cling on, the greater chance he would have of regrouping his forces to fight another day and maybe restoring some credibility. The greatest danger he faced in the last two days was that those around him, especially the army, would tell him he had to go, in order to save the country -- in just the same way that the Tunisian generals and government seem to have told Ben Ali he must leave. His quick fix was to lock Suleiman and Shafik, a former air force commander and Mubarak associate, into the centre of power. They at least have shown their loyalty by accepting the appointments, though one can only guess at the deliberations now underway between the rest of the military leadership. If he survives this week, then he can think again about his long-term plans. Whether this emergency survival plan will work depends, as in Tunisia, on the determination of the people in the street and on the power dynamics within the army command.

Momentous day for the Middle East

2011-01-29T04:44:00.000-08:00

Friday was a momentous day in and for the Middle East and I won't wrote at length because my part in it was insignificant and the situation is too fluid and there are too many uncertainties for me to draw too many conclusions. Mubarak surprised me with his obstinacy. When I saw some 10,000 people stream across Kasr el-Nil bridge into Tahrir Square at sunset, after a one-hour battle with riot police which made the western edge of the bridge a living hell of tear gas and rubber bullets I felt that the end had come and the revolution had triumphed. But that was premature. I had the same feeling when I ran across publisher and democrat Hesham Kassem in Kasr el-Aini Street about 10 o'clock in the evening. Hesham was ecstatic -- he has been waiting for this moment for years and was as surprised as we we all were. At the time a police truck was burning outside the parliament building up the road and thousands of youngsters were preparing for a final push towards the building (they didn't make it in the end despite four hours of trying). I concur with Issandr that the spirit of solidarity and camaraderie was extraordinary. People shared everything -- water, cigarettes, onions (for tear gas) and information. Largely there was also an amazing discipline and restraint. Whenever violence against public property looked imminent or people were about to throw rocks, others would chant 'silmiya, silmiya' (peaceful, peaceful) or 'No to violence'. I know there has been some looting here and there but in some eight hours on the street yesterday I saw none, despite ample opportunities. The bravery of those who have been on the frontlines has also been extraordinary and I hope they one day they receive the credit they are due. The youngsters really are a very diverse crowd but yesterday evening, on a street corner in the eery halflight, I overheard a well-informed debate between a group of some seven or eight over who should replace Mubarak. Two of them favoured Mohamed ElBaradei as a transitional leader, but the others were less sympathetic. The most assertive man in the crowd said ElBaradei was part of the establishment and the country needed 'new blood'.

Unrest in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood

2011-01-27T04:56:00.000-08:00

As in the case of Tunisia, a succession of commentators have remarked on the small role the Muslim Brotherhood appears to have played in the past two days of unrest in Egypt. One of the latest I have seen came from Michael Collins Dunn, the editor of the Middle East Institute yesterday. "Do you see any beards? Well, maybe a few beard-and-mustache looks of some young hipsters, but not the beard-without-mustache "uniform" we associate with the Muslim Brothers," he writes. I think Dunn is mistaken here on several counts. For a start, Muslim Brothers come in many guises, and the 'beard-without-mustache' look is hardly a Brotherhood uniform. He may be confusing Muslim Brothers with salafis, while the two groups are quite distinct, though with some overlap. From my own experience on the streets (see my earlier reports passim), I believe people are understimating the level of participation by members of the Brotherhood, though I will readily concede that they have not taken part at full strength and at a level which reflects their demographic weight. There are several possible and obvious reasons for this. Let me offer a few of them:
The Brotherhood, from long experience of confrontation with the Egyptian authorities, is always wary of commitment to street protests. It will calibrate its level of participation to its assessment of the chances of success. If it overreaches, it runs the risk of a massive crackdown. For the moment, probably rightly, it is not convinced that the protests will overthrow the regime.
The Brotherhood knows that the world (especially the United States and Europe) are watching events in Egypt closely. If the protests appear to be Brotherhood-led, the government will feel free to use much more brutal methods to disperse protesters. For the moment it suits the Brotherhood's interests to give the impression that there is a broad coalition united against Hosni Mubarak, including liberals and leftists. This explains why Brotherhood members who have taken part in the protests have refrained from chanting slogans with religious connotations. The impression of a broad coalition also helps domestically -- if the Brotherhood take the lead, it would frighten off some of the other groups.
The Brotherhood, like Islamist groups in many Arab countries, has cold feet about governing. It does not feel it is ready. This is reflected in its official strategy of concentrating on a political reform agenda which it shares with many other groups - free and fair elections, rule of law, a new constitution with checks and balances and so on. What the Brotherhood wants most in the short term is the freedom to organize and promote its ideas in a democratic environment, regardless of who is in government. The Brotherhood believes that, given freedom and time, it can win over Egyptians to its long-term agenda.
The current state of sectarian (Muslim-Copt) tensions in Egypt, especially after the bombing of the church in Alexandria at the New Year, is not conducive to a protest movement in which Islamist slogans and objectives are prominent. Such slogans would be a distraction and could backfire against the Brotherhood.
I'm not going to venture a guess at the level of Muslim Brotherhood participation but, judging from my chance encounters with protesters, any assertion that the movement is absent or very thinly represented is probably wishful thinking. By the way, many Brothers are clean-shaven, wear suits and ties and are physically indistinguishable from other Egyptians of the same class.

Cairo slums on the edge

2011-01-26T11:17:00.000-08:00

I spent a fascinating few hours this afternoon and early evening watching riot police and their opponents clash on the edges of the Cairo slum known as Boulak Aboul Ela, which lies just northwest of Galaa Street. Amazingly, for those not familiar with the topography of Cairo, this densely populated area, with narrow unpaved lanes and extreme poverty, lies only a 10-minute walk from Tahrir Square, the very heart of the modern city and the scene of the major protest on Tuesday. I ended up in the lanes because riot police were firing tear gas canisters and other unidentified projectiles along 26th July Street, apparently in response to a small group of protesters who were throwing rocks at them. The lanes gave some shelter from the gas. The group of protesters, who numbered no more than 200 (there were other groups elsewhere in the city), were clearly outsiders, wealthier and better educated than the local inhabitants. Their main chants were political - "Al-sha3b yuriid isqaat an-nizaam" (The people ... want .. the overthrow ... of the regime - an echo of the similar chant now current in Tunisia). But what struck me most was the evident solidarity of the local people with the protesters and the possibility that at some point the local people too might might come out on the streets. If that happened, the government would be hard-pressed to disperse them by their current methods. The riot police would be overwhelmed and many of the police conscripts (they come largely from among the poorest of the rural poor) would defect or disperse. Without seeing these slum areas at first hand, it's hard to imagine how many tens of thousands of people live there. The population density is comparable to that in Gamalia on the northeast edge of the old city, where there are up to 80,000 people to the square kilometre. The lanes were teeming like an ants' nest and the mood was electric. I asked a random selection of about 15 people where their sympathies lay - with the government (as they called the riot police) or the shabab (youth, as they called the protesters)? With one exception (a man who said he was neutral), everyone said they wanted President Hosni Mubarak to go. This time only handfuls of them did appear to join in, but I judged they were fairly close to the tipping point. The confrontation took a form similar to that we saw on Tuesday. When the protesters advanced, throwing rocks, the riot police withdrew in disarray, to applause and cries of jubilation from many of the onlookers. Police trucks in the rear would then open fire with tear gas and maybe with rubber bullets, driving the protesters back to the shelter of the lanes. Two young men said they had been hit with small projectiles which they said caused intense pain on the skin, one in the hand and one on the neck. I examined both of them, but in the dark it was impossible to identify the cause.
The baltagiya (government thugs) phenomenon which I mentioned yesterday was evident again today, in greater numbers. For the first time ever I noticed some of them trying on new helmets they had just been issued, and a separate group elsewhere even had riot police shields, though still in plain clothes. The government habitually uses these baltagiya to beat up individually targetted protesters. The logic, I assume, is that if anyone publishes photographs of them in action, then the authorities can dismiss the incident as a brawl between civilians. I cannot say what significance it might have for the government to issue them with helmets and shields. It's most unlikely that the government feels it is short of riot police, who continue to outnumber protesters many times over.
Television stations report other clashes on Wednesay in Tahrir Square, in Alexandria and in Suez in the canal zone, but I can only be in one place at a time.

Egypt and the Media Effects

2011-01-25T14:33:00.000-08:00

Media coverage of Egypt's 'Day of Anger' on Tuesday, some of which has been greatly exaggerated, could in fact create perceptions way out of proportion to the events on the streets. Hamdi Kandil, a respected commentator, for example, was just on Al Jazeera saying that 80,000 to 90,000 people took part in the protests. Al Jazeera itself is saying tens of thousands, which itself seems fantastical judging by what was evident on the streets of Cairo (it's hard to judge what happened in Alexandria and Suez). Television footage, by selecting the most dramatic shots and playing them repeatedly, could reinforce the perceptions that there was a true mass uprising. The main effects would be to embolden those who took part, encourage others to join future protests in the belief than there is safety in numbers, and on the other side of the equation throw the government off balance by making it sense a greater threat than initially existed. Al Jazeera interviewed Mohamed Abdel Salam, an official of the ruling National Democratic Party, who tried to be dismissive but then inadvertently hinted at the shock felt inside the regime. He called the events a 'crisis' and said the government wouldn't start talking about political changes until the crisis was over and the situation calmed down. That strikes me as a serious shift away from the usual official assertion that everything is close to perfect on the political front and the government will determine the pace of future 'reforms'. Media coverage can also make opposition demands seem more realistic, by giving opposition figures an unprecedented platform to be taken seriously as participants in the process. The news conference by Abdel Galil Mustafa, general coordinator of the National Association for Change, for example, gained much more coverage than it would under usual circumstances. Mustafa 'demanded' that Mubarak promise not to stand for another presidential term this year and that his son Gamal also renounce any presidential ambitions. If he had said the same last week, it could not have the same impact as today. Egyptians listening to him today might conclude that such demands are easily attainable.

Update on Egyptian protests

2011-01-25T12:55:00.001-08:00

It's 10.30 pm in Cairo and I'm just back from Tahrir Square, the heart of the day's protests. About a thousand people, mostly young and many middle-class, are hanging out, chatting and lying in the streets, which are closed off to traffic. An embryonic 'organisation' is trying to muster support around the slogan 'mu3tasimin hatta al-rahiil' (sitting in until (Mubarak) goes), but it's not obviously not clear what the position will be at daybreak, when the police will want to get the traffic moving. Many are using the word 'unpredecented' and it is unprecedented in the sense that many of the participants are first-time protestors and they come from quite a wide cross-section of society. But at least this evening, the proportion of women in hijab was far lower than average (maybe 50 percent v. 80/85 percent in society as a whole), which suggests a bias towards the upper strata of society. The mobile network has been seriously disrupted for hours, but I'm not in a position to say if that's the outcome of official action, rather than mere congestion. I suspect congestion, because several people in Tahrir Square were making phone calls. I spoke to several activists, who were euphoric about the turnout and the atmosphere. On the way home, I noticed a group of about 50 men in plain clothes sitting on the pavement near the US and British embassies, quite clearly 'baltagiya' (the thugs the police use for beating up protesters when all else fails, sometimes violent criminals on day-release from prison!). When I asked them what they were doing, their boss (also in plain clothes) told me to mind my own buisness and move on. But it's interesting that the police did not call them in today, as far as I have seen or heard.

Day of Anger In Egypt

2011-01-25T09:23:00.001-08:00

Just a few remarks about today's Day of Anger protests in Egypt, based on my personal oberservations. This was an important test for both the government and the opposition. The opposition -- a loose alliance of liberals, leftists and Islamists -- had to prove that the uprising in Tunisia has changed the balance of forces by showing ordinary people that they can bring about change by coming out on the streets. The government, acting as so often through the riot police, had to show that such protests are pointless and Egyptians would do well to stay away. They also had to avoid confrontations which could lead to deaths and serious injuries. The protests are continuing into the evening but the numbers of people taking part seems to be diminishing as it grows colder and people get hungry. At 7.30 p.m. a separate group of about 100 is still chanting in Kasr al-Aini street within earshot of my balcony.
The numbers were not that large. Al Jazeera said tens of thousands but that included protests in provincial cities where reporters (at least in my experience) have a habit of greatly exaggerating the turnout. My estimate, from what I saw in Tahrir Square right in the heart of the modern city at the peak, was that several thousand people took part there. There were also many spectators, with differing levels of engagement. Such numbers are not quite unprecedented. In 2005 the Muslim Brotherhood brought some 10,000 people on to the streets in Ramses Square, opposite the main train station. But for a change the protestors appeared to feel that there was at least some chance that their protests might just make a difference and might lead to a popular movement of the kind that brought down President Ben Ali in Tunis.
The police acted with a mixture of restraint and incompetence. They abandoned their usual practice of sealing off the hard core of protesters and instead let them loose to march through the streets. The riot police did form cordons here and there but the cordons melted away when protesters approached in large numbers. The riot police were ill-prepared -- when protesters threw smoking tear gas canisters back at them they had to disperse because they didn't have any masks. When protesters threw stones at them, disciple broke down and the police started throwing stones back. A few groups of police tried to use their shields phalanx-style to protect themselves but it was haphazard. The water cannon was too feeble to deter the protesters. On several occasions I saw groups of up to 100 riot police retreating in disarray, with protesters in pursuit.
The participants were a cross-section of Egyptian society, including many middle class and lower middle class, but the poorest of the poor were not there. I saw very few men wearing galabias, which is generally a class marker. The Muslim Brotherhood, which did not fully endorse the protest but allowed young member to go, was in fact very much in evidence and I saw several Brotherhood members acting as 'stewards'. When stone-throwing broke out, a group of Muslim Brothers started chanting 'Silmiya, silmiya" (Keep it peaceful). The grievances aired were very diverse, but the departure of President Hosni Mubarak was the overwhelming demand.
So what next? I don't know. I expect the government will be seriously rattled -- in effect they lost control of central Cairo for many hours. But it was a public holiday so that didn't matter too much. The riot police (Amn Markazi or Central Security) clearly have disciplinary and tactical problems which could leave them vulnerable if there are bigger protests. The opposition will be greatly encouraged, to some extent by the turnout but yet more by the atmosphere of optimism that change might be possible. This was not a Sidi Bouzid moment for Egypt, but it was quite different than the desultory and demoralized protests of about 100 people that Cairo usually sees.

The Renaissance of the Nahda (Renaissance) Party

2011-01-21T14:22:00.000-08:00

The Tunisian Islamist party al-Nahda, which is coming to the surface after 20 years in exile, in prison, in hiding or in hibernation, faces the toughest test that any Islamic party in the Arab world has faced since the military took power and closed down the Islamic Salvation Front in neighbouring Algeria in 1992. Tunisians, Arabs and the wider world will be watching al-Nahda closely to see how an Islamic party operates on a political scene which promises to be more inclusive than almost anywhere else in the Arab world. The political contest between al-Nahda and its opponents will be over the validity and popularity of the aggressively 'laiciste' ('secular') ideology promoted by the two presidents Tunisia has had since independence in 1957 - a contest which has implications way beyond little Tunisia. The contest will not, as in Iraq and Lebanon, be between rival sectarian voting blocs who use religious symbols as mobilising tools. Since Tunisia has no politically significant religious minorities (Sunni Islam is close to universal), the contest there will be over the extent to which the country's 'cultural heritage', including Islam, should count in determining government policies. If al-Nahda takes part in some post-election government, even as a junior partner, its leadership will be judged on how they translate their cultural vision into practice and on how they interact with their political opponents. Public statements by Nahda leaders over the past 23 years, starting from the brief political 'spring' they enjoyed in the first years of former President Ben Ali, have usually kept well within the parameters of liberal democracy. Now, after 20 years of oppression, Nahda leaders will be wary of giving their opponents any excuse to drive them out of politics again. The New York Times interviewed Ali Larayedh, a Nahda leader who spent 14 years in jail, in Tunis. "(Larayedh) insisted that his party posed no threat to Tunisians or to tourists sipping French wine in their bikinis along the Mediterranean beaches. Years of contemplation in prison and exile had helped his party ... to 'enlarge our views to encompass Western values,' he said. The result, he said, is a uniquely liberal version of Islamist politics, though one that remains unapologetic about its past calls for violence against American interests in the region." Party spokesman Hamadi Jebali told the Associated Press: "The Western media is frightening people, saying that 'the Islamists are rising.' But we are not to be feared. We are not the Taliban or al-Qaida or Ahmadinejad ... We will submit to the vote of the people when the time comes." On the spectrum of possible Islamist parties, al-Nahda stands roughly in the same area as Turkey's AKP, but with none of its practical experience (the AKP has been in power since 2002) and little of its political sophistication. Likeminded Islamists in Egypt have tried for years to form their own Wasat (Centre) Party, but the authorities have repeatedly denied them a licence, possibly for fear that the model would prove too attractive and would undermine the establishment's argument that all Islamists are incorrigibly dangerous.

Only one week after Ben Ali took flight, speculation about the level of support for al-Nahda among the Tunisian population is already rife, almost all of it based on anecdotal evidence or casual remarks by prominent Tunisians. At one extreme, the Daily Telegraph of London headlined: "Islamist movement at forefront of Tunisia's protests" and predicted it would emerge as the strongest political force in elections. But others have 'noted' the absence of religion-based slogans in any of the protests and hailed the Tunisian uprising as a new secular model of opposition to the aging autocrats who rule much of the Arab world. This raises two questions to which the answers will become clear as the process unfolds in Tunis.

Firstly, given that the level of support for al-Nahda in the 1989 elections was at least between 10 and 17 percent in areas they contested (and probably higher because of electoral malpractices by the ruling party and the state), would one now expect it to be higher or lower? I have read the argument that it must be lower now because Ben Ali successfully imposed his 'laiciste' model. Under the former president, those who engaged in public displays of piety were at a serious disadvantage in a number of ways, especially employment in a range of public-sector jobs. Police monitored attendance at mosques and sometimes had informers report on whether a suspect's female relatives covered their hair. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that many pious Tunisians would keep their religious commitment under wraps. But attempts to suppress religious activity elsewhere (in Soviet Russia, Albania and China, for example) have had unpredictable results, and in most of those cases the pious were living in a cultural environment isolated from correligionists speaking the same language and living in neighbouring countries.

Secondly, what can we expect to see from al-Nahda when it comes to working with others on the political scene? The events of the past month may throw some light on that. If Tunisian Islamists were living under cover and unable to organize, it is hardly surprising that they were not visible as leaders of the popular movement which overthrew Ben Ali (in fact, no leaders of any kind are readily visible). But it is more than probable that some of those who took part were Islamists, working with non-Islamists for the same common goal. For the moment al-Nahda is supporting the same political agenda as the rest of the opposition - a new government with an independent prime minister to oversee the process of preparing for elections, along with all the usual and widely accepted guarantees of fairness. If cooperation between the Islamists and the others on practical objectives continues and if there is no reversion to 'laiciste' autocracy, then the existence of an Islamist party in a fully democratic Arab country might soon appear completely unremarkable.

Egypt beset by evil forces -- the view from inside

2011-01-21T02:36:00.000-08:00

Imagine you're one of the chief propagandists for an aging Arab autocrat, writing your first weekly front-page newspaper column since a similar autocrat in a neighbouring country fled into exile, to tears of joy and sighs of relief from many of his long-abused subjects. That was the task faced by Osama Saraya of the Egyptian government newspaper al-Ahram this week, and his performance sheds light both on how Egypt's rulers see the world around them and what they think might persuade ordinary Egyptians not to follow the Tunisian example. Their vision is a grim one -- they see themselves beset by evil and mysterious enemies, some so mysterious they remain unnamed, though Iran, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood seem to be there in the mix.
Saraya entitles his 'analysis' "Egypt and the Week of Arab Crises" and his starting point is that what happened in Tunisia (never spelt out in detail) was just one of several 'crises', along with the collapse of the Lebanese government and the imminent secession of southern Sudan. Thus he tries to minimise the significance of the overthrow of an Arab ruler through street protests, something which has not happened for a generation.
What does he hope the outcome in Tunisia will be? - "We hope that Tunisia will get through the crisis, that conditions will stabilise ... We are fully confident that Tunisia can achieve this without any more chaos or unexpected surprises or foreign interference in its affairs, either overt or covert. Many are waiting in ambush to strike at stability in the region. Many want to exploit the opportunity to plant their feet here and there and to exploit in the worst possible way the anger of the Tunisian street." Stability and the status quo are his highest priorities, democracy and freedom for Tunisians do not merit any mention.
What exactly does he fear? - "We are frightened the sacrifices of the Tunisian people might in the end revert to the forces which are trying to create discord and strife, so that chaos will prevail and so they can achieve objectives it would be hard to achieve without that chaos. We are frightened that the forces of extremism will exploit the situation on the street ... (and Tunisia will end up prey to) an ideology which undoes all Tunisia's cultural and social achievements, takes it back centuries and imposes a grip which can be broken only through bloodbaths." This meshes well of course with the Arab dictator's favourite argument that people like them are the best possible bulwark against political Islam. But the fear seems highly exaggerated in the case of Tunisia.
Who exactly are those forces? - Saraya does not name them so clearly, but they are active in Lebanon ("where the situation is close to exploding into a civil war or into the suppression of the components of the nation of all sects through the arms they bear beyond the authority of the state" -- i.e. Hezbollah), and also in Iraq ("where their actions and ideas stand in the way of reaching an Iraqi consensus between all sects"). "Sudan is not far from their tricks, because they have made an active contribution towards the state of affairs Sudan has reached," he adds vaguely. In Sudan, he says later, "The West and the United States have offered northern Sudan frightening incentives (sic) to accept the dismemberment of the largest Arab and African nation."
What are these forces doing in Egypt? - They have tried various approaches over the years, including terrorism and sowing sectarian strife. Now they are trying to draw parallels between Tunisia and the sporadic protests which Egypt has seen. But these parallels are delusions. "After what happened in Tunisia, these forces, which were crushingly defeated in the last elections, have hurriedly tried to recover their status," he says, a clear reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which lost almost all its seats in parliament last year because of electoral fraud by the ruling party and government.
How is Egypt going to fend off the forces of evil? No problem. Egyptians know what a true revolution is (the 1919 uprising and the military coup of 1952), which cannot be compared with what happened in Tunisia. "Egyptians are working and changing every day. They are confronting corruption with the law. They are dealing with change and international, economic and financial crises with constant political, economic and social reforms. They understand that using the people in a game of revolutions is a game exposed to all, because coups can take numerous forms." I take the last remark to be a hint that what happened in Tunisia is just another form of coup.

What are the Tunisian generals doing?

2011-01-20T02:54:00.000-08:00

According to the French political gossip paper Le Canard Enchaîné, it was US generals who convinced their Tunisian counterparts to turn against Ben Ali. "This allegedly is what led to his fleeing the country. The French diplomatic corps and secret service were caught completely off-guard" (see France 24 for its English summary). The actions and motivations of the Tunisian military have been one of the best kept secrets of the past week and none of the Tunisian politicians I have seen interviewed have been asked about the role of the army (perhaps it's still a taboo in Tunisian political discourse?). Everyone has just been saying blithely that the army is neutral, whatever that means. Telling Ben Ali that he has to go wasn't 'neutral' and throughout the week the army command (supposedly led by Rachid Ammar, reportedly dismissed by Ben Ali and then reinstated by PM Ghannouchi) must have had some say in many of the decisions taken by the visible political leaders. In many ways, the army is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. The most important question is this: is there a limit beyond which the army will not allow political change to go? Would they take a stand, for example, if the RCD is dissolved and large numbers of former security officials are detained for possible trial? Do they have a position on the participation of leftists and Islamists in government? Are their hands so clean that they are immune from any conceivable purge, however thorough? It's noticeable that relations on the ground between police and army personnel seem to have improved in the last few days, and the army doesn't seem to mind when the police use tear gas and batons against peaceful but noisy protesters.

Zalmay Khalilzad thinks US can make a difference

2011-01-20T02:08:00.000-08:00

Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born US official who helped run the US empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, is jumping on the Tunisian bandwagon in the hope of salvaging some gains for the United States. Writing in the Financial Times, he says: "the revolution in Tunisia has opened the door for a renewed western democracy push ... Now they (the United States and Europe) must work with Tunisian liberals, both inside and outside the country – first to prevent chaos, then to ensure fair competition and that Islamists, and current ruling parties, do not outmanoeuvre the moderates. Elections must then follow, although the timing and preparations for the vote must reflect lessons learnt from other recent elections in the region."
I'm not sure that Zal really gets it. This time the Tunisians have acted without US or European support of any kind and it's not clear that they either want it or need it now. What do the United States and Europe have to do with stopping the Islamists outmanoevring the 'moderates'? Isn't that blatant interference, since 'outmanoevring' is presumably a legitimate part of political rough-and-tumble? Why is he repeating the moderate-Islamist dichotomy, when it isn't relevant to the Tunisian context? Yesterday I saw one of the anti-RCD protesters holding up a placard reading 'No to ministers nominated by the US' - clearly excessive sensitivity but indicative of some residual suspicion. Zal also advocates the same old formula - democracy as long as Arabs elect those who serve our interests. For example: "In countries in which Islamist movements are better organised than liberal ones, the west should focus on developing moderate civil society groups, parties and institutions rather than calling for snap elections." That's exactly the old Bush policy. The difference is that some of the neo-conservatives (Zal was very much in that mould) now notice that the uprising in Tunisia was not in fact the work of Islamists, so maybe it's safe to push for change again elsewhere.
Brian Whitaker of the Guardian is also promoting the 'demise of the Islamists' theme and saying it punches a hole in the old autocrats' argument that they were the only feasible bulwark against the wild hordes of rabid Islamists. It's certainly remarkable how subdued the Tunisian Islamists have been in the past week, but it's too early to dismiss them completely. The best outcome would be to have the Tunisian Islamists take part in politics in a way that reflects their significance in Tunisian society, and only the next elections can determine that. All the Islamists I have heard in the past week are singing the same tune as the leftists -- political freedom for all. It's interesting that none of the political forces excluded by Ben Ali are now calling for the exclusion of the Islamists.

Tunisian names and Anglophone newsreaders

2011-01-20T01:12:00.000-08:00

Anglophone newsreaders still seem to be having trouble with the French-style orthography of Tunisian names, especially the 'ch' in Ghannouchi and Chebbi, which is of course the equivalent of the English 'sh' and the Arabic ش shin. I wouldn't expect them to take on the 'gh' of Ghannouchi, since that voiced velar fricative does not occur in normal English, but surely their scripts are annotated to alert them to simple things like the 'ch'. I remember an Australian traveller who stayed with me in Tunis many years ago and came home to tell me he had been in 'Heady Chucker' (hɛdi tʃ ʌkə) that morning. At first I thought this was Australian vernacular possibly related to violent sports or binge drinking, but then it dawned on me he was referring to Rue Hédi Chaker (ha:di ʃa:kir), a major Tunis street. Talking of which, Language Log had a fascinating post recently on the pronunciation of the name of the contested Ivorian president, Laurent Gbagbo. 'Gb' is a doubly-articulated labio-velar stop, something I never knew existed.

"Let Them Eat Phones"

2011-01-19T23:57:00.000-08:00

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, one of the staunchest defenders of the Egyptian status quo, had another Marie-Antoinette moment in Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday. Asked if events in Tunisia had any repercussions for countries such as Egypt, he said Egypt was doing fine because '60 million Egyptians have mobile phones'. That's rather like King Farouk in the 1950s saying all was well because the fellahin could afford to buy shoes. In fact it may even be worse. New mobile phones sell in Egypt for as little as 100 Egyptian pounds ($17), about three days' wages for an unskilled rural labourer. Second-hand ones are available at half that price. In 2005, when the United States was making noises about democracy in the Arab world, Aboul Gheit famously said he didn't like to use the word 'reform' because it implied that something was wrong and needed fixing. At the time even Mubarak was promising reform (though not much has happened since).

PS I know that Marie Antoinette probably never said "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", but the myth is irresistible.

Some Tunisian tidbits

2011-01-19T14:51:00.000-08:00

Salem Mekki of the RCD, a former adviser to Ben Ali, said the party had started a process of self-criticism. "Anyone who made a mistake will be held to account," he told Al Jazeera. He added that if it would serve Tunisia's interests, the RCD would not hesitate to dissolve itself, but things are not that simple.... In the end the people would decide at the ballot box.

Al Jazeera reported that the Tunisian authorities have banned Abdallah Qallad from leaving the country. As a minister in the early 1990s Qallad was instrumental in the start of Ben Ali's repression. He stood alongside PM Ghannounchi on television after Ben Ali left the country on Friday.

In the coastal town of Nabeul, trade unionists said they had set up a council to run the town in the absence of the state. Such councils could be just a short-term expedient, but if the crisis of legitimacy continues, they may assume greater significance.

The Progressive Democrat Party (PDG) of Néjib Chebbi has split into two camps - one in favour of participation in the interim government and the other opposed. But the opponents say that they are not leaving the party and that they still hope to win over the other side to their point of view.

Imagining a year of self-immolations

2011-01-19T11:52:00.000-08:00

Blogger Issandr El Amrani of the Arabist has an unusual and provocative piece of political fiction in Al Masry Al Yom, almost in the style of Jonathan Swift or George Orwell. I can only admire his vision of the happy outcome of this grim tale -- hundreds of thousands of Arab mothers taking to the streets, laying siege to presidential palaces and parliaments, blocking traffic.

Ben Ali's family and 'clans' in general

2011-01-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

Le Monde's family tree for Ben Ali and his family is the best I've seen so far. The former Tunisian president had an unusually high proportion of female relatives -- three sisters, two wives and five daughters, compared to two brothers and one son. And PM Ghannouchi said that his wife was the one really running the country. The family tree only mentions five of his wife's family (three brothers and two nephews). 'Clan' may be the right word because of its Mafia connotation, but I have argued elsewhere that in the Arab context the word might give readers the impression that Tunisia is a tribal society, which is very far from the case. 'Arab tribalism', demographically a rather peripheral phenomenon (what percentage of Arabs can identify their tribe? 20 percent?), is of course a favoured premise for neo-Orientalist analyses of the Arab world. The prominence of Iraq in recent years has helped to reinforce that premise, though even Iraqi is only partially tribalised.

Gaddafi's management style

2011-01-19T10:40:00.000-08:00

One interesting aside from Bruce Reidel's polemic is favour of overthrowing Gaddafi/Qaddafi: "During the negotiations with Libya over the Pan Am 103 trial, I met with Qaddafi’s closest henchmen, including his chief of secret police, Musa Kusa, and his bag man in Europe who was appropriately based in Palermo, Sicily. Even they lived in fear of the Libyan leader’s whims and were always unsure what deal he would take or break and what mood he would be in when they next dealt with him."
Not very surprising in itself, but is it normal for a U.S. official, only eight years out of office, to speak so candidly about foreign officials who are still in office? And then they get upset about Wikileaks!

Ben Ali's downfall and its precedents

2011-01-19T10:24:00.000-08:00

Over the last few days, as an ordinary non-blogging citizen of the world, I sent a bundle of messages to various news organization (including the New York Times, the BBC and the Guardian) noting that Ben Ali is by no means the first Arab ruler to lose power because of street protests (they were all saying he was the first). None of them sent me a response of any kind, let alone acknowledged that they wrote too hastily. The latest example is here in The National Interest, where former US official Bruce Riedel writes: "the Arab world has never seen a dictator tossed out like Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali". The precedent I cited was of course the overthrow of Sudanese President Jaafar Nimeiri in 1985 after one million Sudanese filled the streets of Khartoum demanding that he go. The best description of events I could readily find was this (from his obituary in the London Times): "In early 1985 antigovernment discontent, mainly over rising food and fuel prices, resulted in a general strike which paralysed Sudan. Massive demonstrations followed and the army — Nimeiri’s traditional source of support — could no longer be counted on to restore order. The end came on April 6, 1985, while Nimeiri was on the way home from an official visit to Washington. He was deposed in a bloodless coup led by his Defence Minister and backed by the army. Nimeiri diverted to Egypt where he was to spend the next 14 years in exile." The only serious response was from one reader who argued that in Sudan it wasn't really people power because the army took over (rather than who in the Tunisian case? The RCD with clandestine army support?). But the army only stepped in when it was clear that Nimeiri's presidency was untenable, exactly as in Tunisia. Interesting, at least as things now stand, the Sudanese army did a much more thorough job of purging the state than Ghannounchi seems likely to do in Tunisia. The interim cabinet was led by an independent physician, Al-Jazuli Daf'allah, and, as far as I recall, none of Nimeiri's entourage stayed in power. Restrictions on political activity were waived very rapidly and the elections in 1986, exactly one year later as promised, were exemplary.
I could not help wondering why the Sudanese example has received so little attention as a precedent (with the honourablee xception of Al Jazeera). Some possibilities occur to me:

* Maybe in the media's collective memory twent-five years is just too long to be relevant

* Maybe they do not consider Nimeiri 'an Arab leader' for some reason, though he meets all the criteria I can think of.

* Maybe the media couldn't resist the hyberbole of 'unprecedented' and trusted that none of their readers or listeners would challenge the epithet.

* Maybe they believe that if a popular uprising isn't fully televised, then it doesn't really happen. Nimeiri was overthrown in the telex age, when television footage took days to emerge, and there was hardly any pan-Arab media to amplify the effect.

* Maybe they subconsciously mean that the overthrow of Ben Ali was the first overthrow relevant to the greater Middle East, that is the first model applicable to present-day realities, which may or may not turn out to be the case. If it was Bashir who was overthrown last week instead of Ben Ali, would they have drawn the conclusion that it wasn't very relevant to other Arab countries, given Sudan's very special circumstances (imminent southern secession, the Darfur rebellion, Bashir's status as an ICC indictee, his failure to monopolize Sudanese politics)?

I would welcome any other ideas on the thinking here.

What's Libya Press's Game?

2011-01-19T09:09:00.000-08:00

The website of Libya Press has some interesting material but I've no idea what to make of it. My attention was drawn when I heard of its criticism of the Libyan army as bloated and inefficient. But the site, usually described as close to Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam, has other interesting reports. For example it quotes Mustafa al-Zayedi, 'a prominent figure in the Revolutionary Committees movement', as praising 'the Tunisian revolution'. Gaddafi himself, of course, said quite the opposite -- that Ben Ali was the best leader Tunisians ever had and they should have given him time to carry out his last-minute promises. The website also reports the release of a 26-year-old Libyan man, al-Rabi al-Mabrouk at-Mestari, who was arrested some days ago for calling on the Internet for protests in the eastern town of al-Baida. France 24 (Arabic) had a speaker who linked the article on the army to events in Tunisia and predicted that many army personnel would soon be laid off. At first sight, that would seem a strange way to prepare for possible unrest. But maybe Libya Press is just stirring up trouble in the hope that its sponsors might benefit. I'd appreciate any light anyone can throw on the subject.

Tunisian uprising

2011-01-19T07:02:00.000-08:00

It took disgruntled Tunisians and the fall of Ben Ali to persuade me to resume blogging, something I did regularly and anonymously in the period 2004/5. I'm struck by several aspects of the uprising which have not received much comment elsewhere.

* Street protests don't appear to have much momentum at this stage. Maybe I'm mistaken but in a revolutionary setting you would expect more than 500 people to demonstrate in the capital against what could easily be an RCD attempt to hang on to power. What explains this? Possible answers: the Tunisian middle class (a much vaunted aspect of Ben Ali's picture-perfect Tunisia) is wary of turmoil that goes any further than this, or perhaps the capital is out of tune with the country as a whole (we have seen throughout that the provinces were more hostile to the regime than the capital), or perhaps the RCD's emphasis on the central role of the state really has sunk deep into the thinking of Tunisians (as it has in Egypt, for example) and they really do value continuity. The excluded politicians and activists are making a lot of noise, with good arguments, but do they have feet on the ground?

* It may be too early to dismiss the Islamists as a force to reckon with, as many pundits and observers are doing (Juan Cole for example, and Angry Arab). It's hardly surprising that after 20 years underground, they have been reluctant to show their faces. Don't forget that under Ben Ali the police kept tabs on everyone who merely went to the mosque to pray or whose female relatives wear headscarves. Back in the last relatively free parliamentary elections in Tunisia in 1989 (which I covered as a reporter) Nahda candidates, running as independents, won up to 17 percent of the vote by official tallies. Now it is possible that support for political Islam has declined over the last 20 years, but I can't see any obvious reason why it should have. After all, Ben Ali and the RCD didn't make secularism and state-control especially attractive. Individual Islamists might still be wary of coming out when it's still not clear whether the RCD will remain in control.

* The clumsy handling of the political manoevring over the first few days has been extraordinary, both by PM Ghannouchi and by the recognized opposition parties, especially the latter. Why did they not ask for a complete cabinet list before they agreed to take part? Logically, they should have felt in a strong position and could have demanded more concessions in the coalition negotiations. By agreeing to take part and then changing their minds the next day, they just look incompetent. Ahmed Bouazzi, a member of the executive committee of the Progressive Democratic Party, told the New York Times: “We — I, personally — did not realize the balance of forces, that the ruling party was so weak as a party” when the prime minister called about forming a unity government.