First draft of history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.