Egypt unraveling as demonstrations against Muslim Brotherhood continue
( Too bad, so sad… _ JW )
President Morsi is facing a new round of riots, his government is teetering and the army has fired its own warning shot. Will he be able to quell the current unrest?
Facebook pages belonging to opposition movements in Egypt showed the routes to be taken by demonstrators. Plus, the demonstrations scheduled for today received a fitting name: “A Friday of Departure and Conclusion” − the reference being to the “departure” of the Muslim Brotherhood regime. This, incidentally, was the description given to demonstrations staged on February 4, 2011, a week before the collapse of the Mubarak regime.
Thousands indicated their intention to take part in Friday’s demonstrations, and the messages on the banners that will be unfurled will likely resemble those which became symbols of the revolution: “The people want the regime out,” “Morsi, go home,” and “Enough of the Muslim Brotherhood regime.”
Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi cut a day off a two-day visit to Germany this week. Before his trip, he found himself wallowing in the blood of the dozens of dead and the hundreds more who were injured in clashes held on the second anniversary of the revolution, and dealing with riots that erupted after a verdict was announced in a case involving a different tragedy. The court delivered death sentences to 21 out of 70 defendants accused of involvement in demonstrations that flared last year in the town of Port Said, following a turbulent soccer match; those riots resulted in 74 fatalities.
Responsibility this time rests with Morsi. Neither Mubarak nor the police are to blame, nor is the army, which until the beginning of the week was curbing its powers.
The tawdry political cloth stitched so arduously by Morsi has quickly begun to unravel. The Egyptian constitution, which was authorized hastily and coercively, is once again being scrutinized, and Morsi has already announced that he is prepared to incorporate revisions in the document. The new government he appointed, headed by Hesham Qandil, is liable to resign or be dismissed. And the army has now fired its own warning shot.
“Disagreement on running the affairs of the country may lead to the collapse of the state,” Defense Minister Abdul Fattah el-Sissi, another Morsi appointee, warned on Tuesday. Al-Sisi’s forces were deployed this week around important facilities lining the Suez Canal and also were used to beef up security at the Aswan Dam. The army deployments came after demonstrators in Ismailia and in the south of the country burned down police stations and Muslim Brotherhood branches, and also threatened to wrest control of strategic sites. This week, Egypt transitioned from a revolution to an intifada, and some commentators speculated that the army was poised to re-capture control of the government.
But that didn’t happen. Despite the killings, the violent clashes, the demonstrations and sit-down strikes, the current unrest is apt to be resolved via political means. President Morsi, the army, the opposition movements and the Muslim Brotherhood are united by the understanding and the fear that an immediate collapse of the governing regime could leave Egypt in a tailspin, heading toward civil war.
Striding backward
As in previous crises, in which he rescinded presidential decisions − such as those in December that sparked a huge uproar − Morsi has this time also begun to stride backward. He has announced that hours of the curfew imposed in major cities are to be reduced, while bestowing responsibility for implementing this easing of the curfew upon district governors. In any case, the curfew has not really been enforced; policemen have not opened fire against city residents who violated it.
Morsi has also agreed to change controversial clauses in the constitution that he pushed through, though this really is nothing new. A joint committee established after the December riots, and comprised of some opposition representatives and Morsi’s advisers, has worked out a series of amendments to the document which the new parliament, to be elected in April, is expected to ratify.
Yet the large opposition bloc, called the National Salvation Front − headed by Amr Moussa and Hamdeen Sabahi (both of whom vied for the presidency), and also Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei − is no longer placated by promises. As they see it, the primary struggle right now will be over the parliamentary elections; in the last round of voting, in early 2012, liberal-secular elements in Egypt failed to gain the upper hand. In those elections, a coalition comprised of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party and other movements, some of them secular, took 47 percent of the vote.
The fact that results of those elections were revoked by the country’s constitutional court due to electoral infractions gives the secular parties a new opportunity: Their chances look better than ever now that the Muslim Brotherhood has blatantly failed to manage state affairs during the seven months Morsi has so far been in power.
“President Morsi is not really here; he doesn’t have a clue as to what’s happening. He delivered a speech before us in idiom divorced from reality, as though he were living on another planet … He is responsible for all of the blood that is spilled each day on Egyptian soil,” accusingly stated the well-known writer Sonallah Ibrahim.
Opposition figures claim that instead of acting as a genuine president of Egypt, Morsi mechanically follows directives that come down from Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie.
Morsi, for his part, tried this week to reprise a well-worn practice of initiating a “national dialogue” with the opposition movements. As in the last crisis, some of them indeed showed up for the discussions, but the Salvation Front, which follows a militant line, abstained. At first, the Front’s leaders said that they were prepared to take part in a national dialogue, so long as the defense minister, as well as Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim, also become involved. This demand was a hint that these opposition leaders view the army, not the president, as the force that can guarantee that decisions reached in such a dialogue will be carried out.
Settling scores
However, on Wednesday, the leaders of the Salvation Front, in a surprise move, held an urgent discussion with heads of the Salafi Muslims’ Al-Nour Party, which is considered the Front’s ideological enemy. During a press conference, delegates from the Salvation Front and Al-Nour announced that the movements are agreed that a national unity government should be established, and that attorney general Talaat Ibrahim should be dismissed. A national dialogue can be initiated only after these demands are realized, they said.
“Despite the fact that we belong to the Islamic stream, we staged this meeting in the name of national interest and unity,” explained Al-Nour leader Dr. Younis Makhyoun.
National interest is certainly important, but the Salafi movement also has an incentive to settle scores with the Muslim Brotherhood, which refused to forge a coalition with it after the parliamentary elections. More importantly, in the event that the Brotherhood loses traction in the coming parliamentary elections, and the secular parties claim victory − it would be to Al-Nour’s advantage to have preexisting relations with the Salvation Front, and thus serve as a vital swing element in the formation of a new coalition.
Such calculations sound familiar to Israeli ears, and they are also the source of the prediction that various practical considerations will culminate in a resolution to the current political crisis. Apart from establishment of a national unity government and dismissal of the attorney general, the opposition demands that the constitution that was ratified by a December 22 referendum be suspended; and it also calls for the prosecution of persons responsible for the deaths of civilians in recent demonstrations; and, more than anything, it demands that the country’s election law be revised.
The new law, which was authorized by the Shura council (this body functions as a parliament), holds that lists of parties vying in the parliamentary elections do not need to have female candidates in their top spots. But this contravenes an agreement reached by the country’s constituent assembly. The law essentially allows parties to maintain the appearance of complying with the constitutional requirement of submitting women candidates while keeping women out of the parliament by relegating them to low places on their lists.
Still more worrisome to the secular parties is the clause in the law that details the way Egypt is divided into districts; this zoning arrangement is liable to give an advantage to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The election law has another clause that allows a parliamentary candidate to run as an independent, or on a particular party’s list, and then join still another party after the election votes are tallied. This is a controversial stipulation that might be exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood after the elections.
In the meantime, it appears that the Brotherhood has grasped that the law, which is currently under review by the country’s constitutional court, is liable to stir the opposition to mount the barricades. The Brotherhood now seems inclined to revise the law’s problematic clauses. Such revision is likely to constitute yet another political retreat for Morsi: Such a tactical retreat might extricate him from the current crisis, and preempt demands for early presidential elections.
A symbol of the rebellion against the Mubarak regime, the Muslim Brotherhood, as one Egyptian commentator put it this week, “swallowed deeply, and thought that it could gain power over every governmental sector. Now its members are choking on what they swallowed.” This commentator recalled that Morsi won 51.7 percent of votes in a second round of election balloting, garnering a total that was just 3 percent more than his rival, Ahmed Shafik; furthermore, many secular Egyptians withheld their votes from Shafik, regarding him as being too closely allied with the previous regime.
Whether the Muslim Brotherhood chokes or not will be determined in the days to come. Morsi may lack experience in running a country, but he is an expert in negotiation management, deriving from his activities in the period when Mubarak persecuted him. He knows how to drone long-winded, sometimes rhetorically aggressive, speeches, but has also shown that he knows how to beat an effective tactical retreat when he needs to.
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