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| Army’s crucial role in Egypt | | | Robert Fisk | 7/5/2013 11:20:24 PM |
| In 2011, the ‘people’ were against Mubarak. Now, the ‘people’ are against each other. The army is built from both sides of Egypt’s divide – yet must now keep them apart.
THE army’s in charge. Call it a coup, if you like. But the Egyptian military — or the infamous “Supreme Council of the Armed Forces” as we must again call it — is now running Egypt. By threat, at first — then with armour on the streets of Cairo. Roads blocked. Barbed wire.
Troops round the radio station. Mohamed Morsi — at the time still the President — may have called it a ‘coup’ and claimed the old moral high ground (‘legitimacy’, democracy’, etc) but long before we saw the soldiers in the city, he was pleading with the generals ‘to return to barracks. Ridiculous; the generals didn’t have to leave their barracks to put the fear of God (metaphorical or real) into his collapsing administration.
Morsi talked of shedding his blood. So did the army. This was grim stuff. Miserable was it to behold a free people applaud a military intervention, though Morsi’s opponents would claim their freedom has been betrayed. But they are now encouraging soldiers to take the place of politicians. Both sides may wave the Egyptian flag, which is red, white and black. The colour of khaki is no substitute.
Nor will the Muslim Brotherhood disappear, whatever Morsi’s fate. Risible he may have been in power, lamentable his speeches, but the best organised political party in Egypt knows how to survive in adversity. The Brotherhood is the most misunderstood — or perhaps, the most deliberately misunderstood — institution in modern Egyptian history.
Far from being an Islamist party, its roots were always right-wing rather than religious, its early membership under Hassan al-Banna prepared to tolerate King Farouk and his Egyptian landlords providing they lived behind an Islamic façade.
Even when the 2011 revolution was at its height and millions of anti-Mubarak demonstrators had pushed into Tahrir Square, the Brotherhood was busy trying to negotiate with Mubarak in the hope they could find some scraps on the table for themselves. The Brotherhood’s leadership never stood alongside the people during Egypt’s uprising. This role was fulfilled by Egypt’s strongest secular base — the trade union movement, especially the cotton workers of Mahalla north of Cairo.
Even Nasser’s war with the Brotherhood was less about religion than it was about security; the leadership of the original Free Officers Movement found that the Brotherhood was the only party able to infiltrate the army — a lesson which today’s Egyptian generals have taken to heart.
If the Muslim Brotherhood is banned again — as it was under Nasser and under Sadat and under Mubarak — it will not lose its support within the armed forces. Sadat was assassinated by a non-Brotherhood Islamist called Khaled el-Islambouli — but he also happened to be a lieutenant in the Egyptian army.
Sayyed Qutub, the Brotherhood’s leader, attacked Nasser for leading his people back into a pre-Islamic age of ignorance (‘jahiliya) but the party was more exercised by Egypt’s growing relationship with the atheistical Soviet Union. Qutub was hanged. But persecuted, officially banned, the party learned — like all underground organisations with an ideology — how to organise, politically, socially, even militarily.
The army, as they say, belongs to the people. Mohamed el-Baradei, the former UN nuclear inspector and Nobel laureate and now opposition leader, said during the 2011 rising that “ultimately, the Egyptian army will be with the people…And at the end of the day, after anyone takes off his uniform, he is part of the people with the same problems, the same repression, the same inability to have a decent life.
So I don’t think they are going to shoot their people.”
But that was then, and this is now. Morsi may have adopted the pseudo-trappings of a dictator — he certainly talked like Mubarak on Tuesday, complete with threats against the press — but he was legally elected, as he kept telling us, and legitimacy is what the army likes to claim it is defending.
In 2011, the ‘people’ were against Mubarak. Now, the ‘people’ are against each other. Can the Egyptian army, the heroes of the 1973 crossing of the Suez Canal, stand between the two when they themselves now come — let us face it — from the ‘people’ on both sides?
Those who will now govern the nation
Adly Mansour
Adly Mansour only took up his job as chief justice of the country’s Supreme Constitutional Court on June 1, 2013, and now finds himself Egypt’s interim President.
Born in 1945, Mansour was appointed to the court in 1992, making him one of its longest-serving judges. The Muslim Brotherhood and the court repeatedly clashed during Mohamed Morsi’s clumsy attempts to force through constitutional change, with the Islamist party seeing it as an enemy and launching sometimes violent protests against its members.
Despite his control over Egypt’s political institutions, Morsi was never able to control the judiciary, many of whom were Mubarak-era appointees. In December last year, security guards had to step in after the car of Maher al-Beheiry, Mansour’s predecessor, was attacked by Brotherhood supporters fearful the court would dissolve the Islamist-dominated Constituent Assembly tasked with drafting the amended constitution.
Mohamed ElBaradei
Interim Prime Minister
Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog and Nobel Peace laureate, was a virtual unknown in his own country until a few years ago. Returning to his country in 2010 after years working abroad, he decided to challenge the then President, Hosni Mubarak.
He played a key role in protests that removed Mubarak from power, and he has since emerged as a key opposition figure.
He was to stand as a liberal, secular candidate in July’s presidential elections, but withdrew his bid in January citing concerns about the undemocratic way the military was governing Egypt.
In April 2012, ElBaradei launched a new political party which he said would be above ideology. He is now expected to take the role of Prime Minister in a technocratic government that will rule until a parliamentary election can be held.
Troubled times
2011
Jan 25 - Feb 11, 2011: Egyptians stage nationwide demonstrations against the rule of President Hosni Mubarak. Hundreds of protesters are killed as Mubarak and his allies try to crush the uprising.
Feb 11: Mubarak steps down and turns power over to the military. The military dissolves parliament and suspends the constitution, meeting two key demands of protesters.
June 16-17: Egyptians vote in the presidential run-off between Morsi and Shafiq. Morsi wins with 51.7 per cent of the vote.
June 30 – Morsi takes his oath of office.
2013
Jan 25, 2013: Lakhs hold protests against Morsi on the 2-year anniversary of the start of the revolt against Mubarak, and clashes erupt in many places.
Feb – March 2013: Protests rage in Port Said and other cities for weeks, with dozens more dying in clashes.
April 7: A Muslim mob attacks the main cathedral of the Coptic Orthodox Church as Christians hold a funeral and protest there over four Christians killed in sectarian violence the day before. Pope Tawadros II publicly blames Morsi for failing to protect the building.
June 23: A mob beats to death four Egyptian Shiites in a village on the edge of Cairo.
June 30: Tens of lakhs of Egyptians demonstrate, calling for Morsi to step down. Eight people are killed in clashes outside the Muslim Brotherhood’s Cairo headquarters.
July 1: Large-scale demonstrations continue, and Egypt’s powerful military gives the two sides 48 hours to resolve their disputes, or it will impose its own solution.
July 2: Military officials disclose main details of their plan if no agreement is reached: replacing Morsi with an interim administration, cancelling the Islamist-based constitution and calling elections in a year.
July 3: Deadline for Morsi and opponents to come to agreement, or the military says it will impose its plan. Military ousts Morsi, suspends constitution and imposes interim technocrat government. |
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