Egypt’s deepening crisis

S P SETH

Egypt is once again in turmoil. The large scale popular protests,  said to have been bigger than those against Hosni Mubarak, sought nothing short of Morsi’s removal. As one protester said with jubilation, after Morsi’s removal, that, “he (Morsi) was Mubarak with beard.” What she seemed to mean was that he was simply seeking to establish dictatorship of the Muslim Brotherhood to replace the Mubarak’s system. This was the biggest fear of the people opposing Morsi. But the military’s intervention to remove a democratically elected president sets a dangerous precedent for the country’s evolving democracy.

Egypt, the Middle East’s largest Arab country and the epicenter of its culture, has been turned upside down in the last two years. What started as an inspiring revolution against the country’s three-decade old dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak seems to be losing its way, not knowing where it is headed? This is not unusual, though, because history tells us that revolutions rarely follow a straight line. A revolution generally springs from a spontaneous people’s movement with disparate leadership and a smorgasbord of causes. Hence, it is not always possible to channel or dictate its course.

This is what we find in Egypt today. A people’s movement against a much-hated dictator, Hosni Mubarak, was sought to be controlled and channeled into Islamic politics of the Muslim Brotherhood through its Freedom and Justice Party. They won the elections last year, not by a large margin, and felt that they now had the mandate to run the country to their Islamic prescriptions. They railroaded a new constitution to reengineer the country’s politics and society against much opposition. They started putting their opponents as well as critics in jail. They started stifling the media, and put their own people in charge of institutions to advance their political agenda. They found themselves at odds with security agencies, judiciary and bureaucracy. And increasingly the country lost its revolutionary élan and cohesion, polarizing people into Muslim Brotherhood supporters and the rest. Which burst out into a spontaneous people’s movement, this time focused on President Morsi of the Brotherhood who seemed to have turned many people against him in one year that took Hosni Mubarak over 30 years to accomplish.

An important reason for this was that the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party, having won the elections, believed that they had overcome the legal hurdle of being a proscribed movement for much of their existence over the decades; and now had a mandate to re-create Egyptian society and polity into their Islamic image. And they were in a hurry to do this after having gone through so many sufferings for their beliefs, with their leaders hunted down, jailed and tortured over the years.  In their hurry, they failed to realize, or didn’t want to realize, that the Egyptian revolution against Hosni Mubarak was a spontaneous popular movement of disparate causes united only by a desire to get rid of the hated dictator. Therefore, any political alternative by way of democratic elections, whatever the results, had to be a consensual arrangement, a broad church, if you like. The Muslim Brotherhood was against sharing power, as it would have involved compromising their ideology.

While the Morsi regime was busy entrenching itself in power, the economy was in free-fall; with inflation up, investments down, unemployment up, foreign reserves reaching the bottom of the barrel and the list goes on. An important source of income and employment for people in the tourist sector has virtually dried up. In other words, the Freedom and Justice Party has nothing positive to show. No wonder, the popular protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt’s main cities were reportedly even bigger than that against Hosni Mubarak.

Where will it go from here? If the Muslim Brotherhood’s public pronouncements, and the protests to bring back Morsi, are anything to go by, one might expect more trouble ahead. They strongly believe in the legitimacy of their president and do not seem in any mood to accept the military-decreed new political order. And this time it is the Muslim Brotherhood staging protests. Its supporters feel cheated of their rightful democratic victory last year. And some of them, among the throngs of its supporters, have dire warnings that the military might have unleashed a new al Qaeda-kind movement in Egypt. Some of the protesters in Sinai even carried the al Qaeda flag.

A new democratic dispensation following elections, with the participation of the Muslim Brotherhood, might bring about some semblance of order. But with the ongoing crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, with Morsi and much of its leadership being rounded up, it would appear that the military has no such plans for the near future; even if the Muslim Brotherhood were willing. In other words, the military has created a political nightmare for the country, even though the Muslim Brotherhood contributed in a big way to the country’s non-governability.

Egypt’s conundrum is that with or without Muslim Brotherhood, the country is in a dangerous political vacuum. Many Egyptians, possibly majority, are opposed to Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.   Ideally, they want a system that will resolve all the country’s problems and contradictions with the people at the centre. But what that system is or should be, and how it would be achieved, is unclear. They certainly are for democracy but not the kind that has thrown up an Islamist leader wanting to re-engineer society as prescribed by his organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a regimented prescription where minorities, many women and youth will feel excluded. It is not inclusive and is based on accentuating differences and contradictions rather than bridging them.

In the case of other parties and political personages, they are either tainted as remnants of the Mubarak regime, lack mass base and/or have spent a big chunk of their lives outside of Egypt. And in the case of the many of the country’s youth, they dislike and distrust politics and politicians, identifying them with the old Mubarak school of venality, thuggery and worst. At the same time, they neither have the inclination nor the skills to organize politically to create a new order. The country is, therefore, lurching from one protest to the other.

The revolution against Mubarak finally succeeded when the military gave notice to the dictator that his time was up. And it made the army the darling of the people, until they sought to usurp power to rule in their own right. Which put an end to the brief honeymoon with the military, virtually forcing them to call elections. That brought the Muslim Brotherhood’s political movement, Freedom and Justice Party, to power with Morsi as the country’s president.

And we now know what happened with the Morsi presidency, with his removal by the military and installation of an interim civil administration. Which is effectively a cloak for military rule. And that won’t last, as we saw when the military tried to usurp power after Mubarak was dispatched to the purgatory. In other words, Egypt’s crisis is likely to deepen.

Contact: sushilpseth@aol.yahoo.com