Daily Times Editorial Aug 16, 2013

Egypt’s conundrum The stand-off since July 3 between thousands of deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi’s supporters and the military has been ‘resolved' by a sudden and violent crackdown on the two protest camps set up in Cairo, leaving at least 149 dead (Thursday’s reports say the toll has reached more than 500), of whom 43 are reported to be security forces personnel, and about 1,500 injured. Amongst the dead was the 17-year-old daughter of wanted Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed al-Beltagui and two journalists, while many other media people were injured in the melee. Hundreds of protestors were given safe passage out of the main protest camp at Rabaa al-Adawiya while diehards stayed behind to continue fighting. The not entirely unexpected assault nevertheless came as a surprise to many since the security forces had hitherto been talking about a gradual dispersal of the protestors over many days. The violence in Cairo sparked off clashes in Alexandria and other cities and provinces. The Egyptian authorities imposed an emergency for one month and an 11-hour curfew in Cairo and other regions. Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei resigned, saying he was troubled over the loss of life that he considered avoidable. World powers, including the US, the Egyptian military’s main backer, Iran, Qatar, Turkey and the EU condemned the crackdown and the imposition of emergency and urged restraint. The US has refrained from characterizing the ouster of Morsi by the powerful military as a coup as that would trigger sanctions blocking annual aid of $ 1.2 billion. Meanwhile four churches were attacked by Morsi’s supporters, prompting Egypt’s Christian Copts to claim the Muslim Brotherhood was waging a war of retaliation against them, a reflection of the sectarian complaints against the Muslim Brotherhood during its one year in power. The Muslim Brotherhood has called on Egyptians to take to the streets in the thousands to denounce the “massacre”. Clashes also occurred between Morsi supporters and residents of several neighbourhoods in Cairo, underlining the deep fissures in Egyptian society. The Arab Spring has not played out uniformly through the Middle East, nor according to its protagonists’ expectations. If it produced relatively bloodless ousters of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, it showed its ugly side in the manner in which Libya’s longtime ruler Moammar Gaddafi was deposed with the help of western intervention and killed brutally. In Syria, it is currently reaping the deadly crop of one more indirect western intervention, ironically, as in Libya, through the very al Qaeda affiliated forces the US-led west is ostensibly fighting globally. Such expediency, as in the Afghan wars of the last four decades, has led to the unforeseen consequences of global terrorism as a fact of everyday life. When Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in the face of protests from below and the eventual abandonment by the powerful military from above, one fact was undeniable. The Egyptian military, which had been in power for six decades and was deeply entrenched through its military-industrial complex (commanding 40 percent of the country’s GDP), would remain the ‘power behind the (civilian) throne’. So it proved when, having allowed the free play of the political forces in Egyptian society through elections that brought the best organized Muslim Brotherhood party to power, the military grew increasingly restive at Morsi’s exclusivist Islamist agenda. The fruits of the Egyptian Arab Spring were meant to be shared by all the forces that had contributed to Hosni’s departure. Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Morsi in particular, alienated large sections of the liberal, democratic and progressive sections of the Egyptian people, forcing millions out into the streets and Tahrir Square once again in a replay of the movement against Mubarak. This time however, when the moment had ripened, the military intervened and overthrew Morsi, ostensibly in the name of recovering and continuing the onward march of the aborted revolution. The bloody repression now unleashed against Morsi’s determined supporters promises to plunge Egypt into further turmoil and violence, and may even reproduce the long civil war Algeria went through after its military refused to allow Islamists to take power after an election. It took Algeria the better part of three decades to get the better of the Islamists through bloody suppression. Is Egypt at this point in time ready to go through such an extended trauma? Or will the outcome be different in a context in which the Muslim Brotherhood has friends amongst Islamist governments and forces throughout the Middle East and further abroad? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain. The ill-advised violent suppression of peaceful Morsi supporters is bound to propel Egypt down the dark and narrow alley of increased violence and perhaps civil war, a prospect both frightening and troublesome.