19 December 2011. A World to Win News Service. By Samuel Albert. An Egyptian army attack on an occupation in front of the cabinet building near Tahrir Square 15 December set off yet another explosion of revolt.
Since the fact that the protesters numbered only a few hundred and sometimes less, Egypt's ruling military and their media called them an isolated minority. They probably figured they could easily crush this small but persistent sign of defiance. Yet the harder the military tried to break the rebels' back, the more support for the rebels swelled. The military found itself if not isolated, then at least losing ground.
Protesters have occupied Tahrir Square or nearby areas for a month now, at a cost so far of about 55 dead, many hundreds of serious injuries and arrests that bring torture and prison. Their numbers have ebbed and flowed from a few dozen at some moments to hundreds, often thousands and at one point tens of thousands. A major demonstration has been called for 23 December.
The movement seemed at a low point on 19 November when police swooped down on Tahrir at dawn to drive out a small group that had set up tents there. Over the next few days possession of the the square went back and forth between the police and the protesters, as young reinforcements and older activists poured in, culminating in a huge and triumphant rally. Then came days of hard fighting as youth attacked the nearby Interior Ministry building.
Along with clubs, tear gas and gunfire, the military also deployed political manoeuvres to stop the protests. They discarded their faceless prime minister and put in a more experienced politician, Kamal Gonzouri, once PM under President Hosni Mubarak before distancing himself from the regime that Tahrir brought down last February. They also held parliamentary elections and promised that next year would see a civilian president.
The smaller numbers of protesters who persisted during and after the elections moved from Tahrir to the nearby cabinet building, where they symbolically blocked the nomination of a new cabinet. They demanded Gonzouri's resignation and an immediate end to military rule.
On 15 December soldiers beat up individuals leaving the sit-in. A young man was kidnapped, taken into the adjacent parliament building and tortured. This brutality brought more demonstrators and fighting began. At dawn the next day military police attacked, firing shots into the air. Using tactics seen repeatedly in the last year, men on the rooftops of government buildings, some in uniform, pelted the crowd below with lethal objects – stones, tiles, wooden panels and furniture. People began throwing stones back at the troops on the ground.
The soldiers seized about 20 people and took them into the parliament building. They were beaten with clubs and iron bars and given electric shocks. Among them were a leading young woman activist and an Al Jazeera reporter. They did the same to a new young Member of Parliament who had signed a complaint against the head of the military junta, Field Marshall Tantawi. While torturing him they yelled, "This is what we think of your … parliament."
Eight members of the advisory council the military had just appointed to give itself a civilian cover resigned in protest against what they called the military's attacks on non-violent demonstrators. The rest voted to stop meeting.
A senior Muslim scholar who had come to show his solidarity with the protesters was shot in the heart, apparently by military police. Nine other people were also shot, two of them killed, according to the Health Ministry. The popular cleric's funeral the next day brought together thousands of people, including leading Muslim and Coptic Christian religious authorities and secular activists. Then they marched to Tahrir Square.
Fighting continued in front of the parliamentary building, and soldiers repeatedly charged the square. They invaded field hospitals set up in nearby mosques and churches, burning medical equipment, arresting doctors and carrying off patients.
They also burst into apartments and hotel rooms overlooking the square to smash and steal reporters' cameras and other equipment. On the ground anyone with a camera became a target.
Nevertheless, unbearably shocking footage was soon posted on the Net. Several clips show groups of soldiers surrounding, beating and stomping on a fallen demonstrator and then dragging the unconscious or dead body away. One shows a charging soldier drawing a pistol and shooting into a group of retreating people. Photos of mutilated bodies bear witness to the soldiers' savagery.
Although the fighting in front of the parliamentary buildings mainly involved young men and boys, there were women in the square, and they seemed to be targeted with a special fury. Probably the best-known video of the 17 December assaults shows soldiers grabbing a young woman by her head scarf and stripping her half naked. A soldier can be seen raising a booted foot to kick her in the stomach as she is dragged away. In another a well-known older woman activist is seen standing by herself, watching. Soldiers surround her and begin to club her, dragging her away as well.
At some point a petrol bomb hit the Egyptian national archives next to the parliament building where both sides were hurling them. Soldiers attacked demonstrators who tried to put out the fire and carry some of the documents to safety. The contents of the archives go back to the records of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798.
Compelled to issue a political self-defence, a spokesman for the military council denied that soldiers had clubbed or shot anyone, and proclaimed that the demonstrators were not "the youth of the revolution." This was interpreted as a reference to the large number of apparently lower class youth at the centre of the fighting, just as they were during the first Tahrir revolt that toppled Mubarak. He also said that the violence was caused by "counter-revolutionaries" and a "foreign hand", a reference to Israel and/or Mubarak regime remnants who are supposedly paying poor youth and street children to riot. This might seem like a bit much coming from a military that was built up by the US for the purpose of, among other things, protecting Israel from the Egyptian people, but portraying itself as the protector of the nation (and now the "revolution") has long been a core part of the Egyptian army's political strategy.
Although by 19 December the army had brought in the Central Security Forces, Mubarak's supposedly "civilian" anti-protest police, these clashes were unusual in that for most of the time the army alone conducted the fighting. The first time that this happened on such a large scale was in October, when soldiers assaulted marchers protesting attacks on Coptic Christians, killing 27 people. Such open people/army confrontations represent a political problem for the military, which has tried to distance itself from the almost universally hated police and claim that its solders are present at demonstrations to protect demonstrators.
These events have also been problematic for Egypt's rulers in that once again the country's turbulent political configuration has been centred on Tahrir Square. The fighting in the streets has been the main event, while the parliamentary elections taking place at the same time have been a sideshow. This is no minor setback, since the electoral process was supposed to produce a regime with some legitimacy in a country where over the last year authority at every level came to be not only despised but defied and often driven out, starting at the top and working down. The army certainly has the power, but the naked injustice of its violence has gravely tarnished the legitimacy it can't do without.
This is probably why US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was "deeply concerned" by the violence, although she attributed it to both sides, as if it were not the Egyptian regime and it alone that is attacking and killing civilians. For an official fond of calling for sanctions and bombardment of other Middle Eastern governments not to Washington's liking, it is notable that she did not threaten to cut off the US life support system for Egypt's living dead generals.
Egyptian reactionaries have tried to take up a slogan of the Occupy movement in the US and turn it upside down, taunting the Tahrir occupiers by proclaiming "We are the 97 percent, you are the 3 percent", a reference to the fact that the leftist political parties won about 3.5 percent of the seats in the first round of parliamentary elections. This is not an accurate picture of a complex and contradictory situation.
A Gallup poll conducted earlier this year proclaimed that most people had confidence in the army (not necessarily the ruling generals), but also found that almost everyone considered violence against civilians never justified, a figure not matched by Gallup surveys taken in Israel and the US, for example.
Further, there seems to be an enormous gap between many people's deepest aspirations and the political choices they feel that practicality dictates. When the regime has attacked the Tahrir rebels, the resulting polarization for-or-against Tahrir, and especially for-or-against violent repression of Tahrir, has not been favourable for the military.
So far, the military has sought to deal with this by trying to crush the rebels. They have not exhausted their potential for killing.
Some of the people arrested, tortured or shot have been well-known activists and regime enemies. The murdered cleric, Sheik Emad Effat, for example, was popular for opposing Mubarak, the junta and the authorities who dominate the religious establishment. The concern that the generals may be targeting specific iconic individuals increased when a member of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) speaking on television denounced Mohamed Hashem, the owner of Merit Publishing, as one of a handful of people behind the violence. Hashem is well-regarded in Egypt and the Arab world for his iconoclastic secularism and personal courage as well as his literary perspicacity. His standing among intellectuals is matched by the affection of Tahrir youth he sheltered in his offices near the square. Accused of handing out helmets and gas masks to youth battling soldiers, he simply replied that he would never stop helping revolutionaries. A number of artists and other prominent people signed an emergency "statement of appreciation" supporting him against the military.
But the army's political strength has not been exhausted, not only among those who fear social change but also among many who yearn for it. Even among people who consider themselves deeply committed to what they think Tahrir stands for, many feel that the military is their only hope to stop the Islamists from imposing a fully religious state.
In this highly complex situation, it is true that the various reactionary forces – including the military, the Islamists and the proudly pro-Western representatives of Egypt's private sector big capitalists – are not united. In fact, the Tahrir movement has made it harder for the people's enemies to unite. For instance, right now neither the Islamists nor secular politicians care to be associated with the SCAF, although they have demonstrated their appetite to share its power. One reason why the military employs elderly Mubarak regime members as its civilian figureheads is that no one else wants the job. The revival of the revolt has somewhat spoiled the party for the Muslim Brotherhood, the big winner in the elections for a parliament that is in danger of being discredited before it is even seated. But the Brotherhood has continued to portray itself as the the only party that can restore order.
Such divisions among the reactionaries were a source of dangerous illusions among the people when the military dumped Mubarak. They still are, even though people have gone from chanting "The people and the army are one hand" at the time of Mubarak's downfall last February to "The people want the downfall of the army" and even "The people want the execution of Tantawi" today.
But these divisions – and the persistent crisis of legitimacy that exists in a dynamic relationship with that – also still represent a favourable set of circumstances for the emergence of an entirely different political pole: a movement seeking not to reconfigure but to overthrow the existing power structure and establish a revolutionary state, one that could build an entirely different kind of society able to satisfy the people's deepest interests and aspirations. The emergence of that kind of clearly defined and scientifically guided revolutionary movement could completely transform the current political landscape.
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Samstag, 21. Januar 2012
Samstag, 3. Dezember 2011
Egypt: The importance of holding out in Tahrir Square
28 November 2011. A World to Win News Service. By Samuel Albert. As Egypt's ruling military tried to shift the country's conflicts to the electoral arena, many youth and others remained in Tahrir Square in an occupation that has cost at least 42 lives and several thousand wounded so far.
The next few days will tell whether the Tahrir protesters can manage to remain in the square if a "government of national salvation" headed by leading civilian presidential candidates is installed. Their stubbornness through the last 11 days, despite the combination of armed terror and promises of change through voting unleashed against them, took the political initiative away from the armed forces and once again put these young rebels at the centre of unfolding events, much as in the days when they sparked the revolt that toppled Mubarak.
The current battles began on the morning of 19 November when military police attacked a small group of those wounded in the original revolt who had camped in a grassy area overnight. Day after day since then, the regime tried to clear the occupation with volley after volley of tear gas and shotgun-propelled projectiles. Yet the protesters not only stood their ground but even mounted wave after wave of counter-attacks on the Interior Ministry on Mohamed Mahmoud street a few blocks away from the square.
In response to friends abroad, a young pharmacist sent an e-mail from the square: "I am OK but I have two young friends, one who died already and one who is in intensive care, shot in the head, and another who lost an eye and one who lost two eyes... This massacre is revealing the ugly face of the system and has turned this into a totally people's movement, and we are trying to catch up with that. We are in Tahrir all the time, trying to be creative in our contact with the people and getting a lot of sympathy from the people still at home."
This sentiment was repeated by others: what enabled them to stay in Tahrir Square this long has not been mainly personal courage, although there was an enormous amount of that, but the feeling that what they were doing was touching a deep chord among people all over the country and was therefore worth the sacrifice. They are also aware that the world is watching them and that their actions are in resonance with the Occupy movements in the US, UK and elsewhere. People in Tahrir know about actions in support of the Egyptian revolt that have been held in a number of American and British cities. (See nomiltrials.org)
Egyptian society is much more obviously divided than at any time since Mubarak's fall. In the name of defending the anti-Mubarak "revolution", the military is attacking the youth who drove Mubarak out. The main Islamist groups have come out against the young rebels, and many ordinary people are unsure and sometimes hostile. Commentators opposed to the revolt emphasize the conflict between "the street" (majority opinion) and "the square" (Tahrir). Yet so many people across society have shown such strong sympathy and even active support for the rebels that for the last 11 days the military has been unable to put an end to the political stalemate and the standoff around the square.
On Friday 25 November, the occupiers' numbers swelled into the tens of thousands as they were joined by various organized contingents, including people from various kinds of universities and neighbourhoods, and women chanting slogans against the Islamist parties. One feeder march was led by a young man who had lost one eye in the January and February revolt and the other eye just now. The rally brought out a socially mixed crowd of men and women, in contrast to the generally poorer young men and boys fighting the police near the Interior Ministry. (For a sharply drawn portrait of the various segments of protesters, see "The battle of Cairo's Muhammad Mahmoud Street" by Lucie Ryzova on the Al Jazeera Web site.)
That same evening a few thousand counter-demonstrators gathered at another centre-city square to chant, "Down with Tahrir, yes to the military council."
In a very unusual gesture, the chief imam of Al-Azhar mosque, Sunni Islam's highest religious authority, issued a statement of support for the Tahrir protesters.
The fear of public opinion has even forced the military – or at least two generals speaking in the name of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) – to express "regrets and deep apologies for the deaths of the martyrs from among Egypt's loyal sons during recent events in Tahrir Square."
But at the same time a military court has ordered another 15 days of detention for blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who had already spent a month in prison. He now faces a trial before a special state security court. Another blogger, Maikel Nabil, sentenced to three years in prison for writing "The army and the people were never one hand", has been on hunger strike for almost a hundred days and his retrial has been postponed. It seems that the military's plan for dealing with public opinion includes crushing opposing opinion-makers.
SCAF tried to undermine support for the Tahrir Square rebels by removing the entire cabinet they themselves had appointed to provide themselves with a civilian face. Their new chosen prime minister was Kamal El-Ganzouri, a US-trained economist who served in the same post under Mubarak at the end of the 1990s. When news of Ganzouri's appointment reached the 25 November rally, the crowd roared its rejection.
The mood was celebratory that night, because the regime seemed to be retreating both politically and in the streets around the square. People set off the coloured fireworks seen at football games. The next morning, however, when young men and women staged a sit-in in front of the cabinet building to prevent El-Ganzouri from entering, a military vehicle ran over and killed one of them, 21-year-old Ahmed Sayed. Thousands more people came to Tahrir Square the next day, 27 November, despite the first hard rain of winter. As the polls opened the next day, their numbers dwindled, with sentiments divided between boycotting the elections (mainly in hopes of holding future elections under a civilian government) and reluctantly voting now (mainly to hold back an Islamist victory).
The medical situation reveals much about the political line-up. Many doctors and other medical personnel have come to the aid of the protesters and young fighters, setting up about a dozen field hospitals in the square itself. During the revolt last January and February such hospitals were set up because of fears that the public hospital administration would report or turn over the wounded to the police. This spirit of a necessary alternative to official institutions is still at work.
The police have made these medical tents a special target for tear gas and arson. A young woman doctor died of suffocation when huge clouds of tear gas engulfed the tent where she was working. A devout Muslim, she was said to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, a party that is particularly strong in the doctors' association and that called for its members to stay away from Tahrir. Reportedly there has been no shortage of medical personnel or even supplies in Tahrir, thanks to continuing donations.
Medical attention has become more crucial than ever because of the use of new police tactics – shooting to blind people with birdshot pellets and rubber and plastic bullets. This is apparent in videos of the casualties showing wounds in the upper chest and face. One regular hospital alone reported admitting 60 people with eye injuries in the week leading up to 27 November. Their wounds included burst corneas, burst eye sockets and foreign bodies in the eye. A volunteer doctor working in the field hospital nearest to Mohamed Mahmoud Street leading from Tahrir to the Interior Ministry reported that he treated about 25 people on the morning and afternoon of 25 November. Most had been shot in the upper area of the body, especially the face, with four people hit in the eyes with birdshot. (Report by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights)
Eyewitnesses say that police taunted protesters facing off against them, "If you want to lose your eye, come over here." A notorious video on Youtube shows a police officer firing on demonstrators in Mohamed Mahmoud Street. A soldier congratulates him, saying, "Nice shot, you hit that guy right in the eye." A blogger asked what kind of army, and what kind of society, would train its soldiers to think like that.
The authorities have not hesitated to kill – another video shows men in civilian clothing wielding long clubs apparently to finish off people left unconscious by police truncheons. But shooting people in the eyes seems to have become a deliberate policy meant to cause as much pain and terror as possible while avoiding greater numbers of politically problematic deaths. In addition, according to the same report, almost 400 people have been arrested and then beaten and otherwise abused in custody, including children.
Similarly, many of the fatalities have been attributed to tear gas. Questions have been raised about what exactly this tear gas contains, although examination of the spent cartridges found so far has not revealed anything that would make it more deadly than usual. Some medical experts speculate that the deaths are caused not by a more lethal variety of gas but its concentrated and sustained use over a long period. It may be that people are suffering from cumulative pulmonary, cardiac and other damage. So much gas has combined with the dust that usually coats this desert city that in much of the downtown the slightest gust of wind sets off coughing.
This gas is primarily supplied by the United States, as anyone can see by examining the markings on spent cartridges. The US provides the Egyptian military with 1.3 billion dollars a year in direct aid, amounting to two-thirds of total US funding for Egypt (money for civilian projects is no less harmful – US "aid" obliges Egyptians to depend on American wheat imports for their daily bread). US State Department records show that the US supplied 1.7 million dollars worth of "toxicological agents" – "including tear gas and riot control agents" in 2010 alone. (El Ahram Online, 25 November.)
Youth organizations have made public documents leaked to them by customs employees indicating that the US is now in the process of shipping the Egyptian Interior Ministry an additional 21 tons of tear gas. The second of three container ships was being unloaded in the port city of Suez when these documents were released on 28 November.
While the police are a civilian body, they are run by the Interior Ministry, which is under military control. The main police units attacking the protesters are from the Central Security Forces, responsible for most of the deaths in January and February. The members of this corps are recruited from among army conscripts who volunteer for the job. The armed forces claim that they have intervened to protect demonstrators from the police, but there have been many reports of army officers and military police accompanying other police in attacking Tahrir square and in defending the Interior Ministry, often surrounded by tanks. Now the military has put up a two-metre high wall of concrete slabs across Mohamed Mahmoud street.
The US has called for a "full transfer of power to a civilian government", a move that SCAF head Field Marshall Tantawi initially rejected. On 27 November he announced that no matter what the result of the elections, "the place of the army will remain exactly as it is. It will not change in any new constitution."
While Tahrir square is united around the chant, "The people want the fall of the field marshal", there is a prevailing lack of clarity about what kind of regime could be an alternative to military rule. SCAF has become as discredited as most of Egypt's political institutions, and there is not much hope for real change from the current elections. (We Are All Khaled Said, one of the main Facebook groups behind the original revolt, asked people to vote while wearing black badges in memory of the martyrs, a call that seems to reflect a mood of bleak acquiescence to the elections due to the lack of an alternative.) Yet few people envision a revolutionary overthrow of the entire state structure, including the armed forces. Instead, most would like to hope that somehow parliamentary elections or a constituent assembly – there is debate about which – could establish a rule of law that would somehow be above society. But the Egyptian ruling classes and the US imperialists they are beholden to would never respect any legal structure that didn't reflect their economic and political interests!
The viciousness of what the movement faces can be seen in the military tactics being used against them. These tactics are not only fully enabled by the US but also seem to be in line with Washington's political goals, which are to facilitate the emergence of a regime that would both continue to be subservient to US interests and enjoy enough legitimacy to get away with crushing the young rebels and their supporters. While there may be some conflict between SCAF and Washington, it is over how best to achieve this goal.
At the same time as SCAF was expressing its "regret" for deaths on its Facebook page, the American ambassador to Egypt used her Twitter account to announce that the US was donating 100,000 dollars in "humanitarian assistance for violence victims." In light of everything else the US has done in Egypt, including building up, sustaining and arming the Egyptian military, this is like gouging out someone's eyes and then offering them eye drops.
The next few days will tell whether the Tahrir protesters can manage to remain in the square if a "government of national salvation" headed by leading civilian presidential candidates is installed. Their stubbornness through the last 11 days, despite the combination of armed terror and promises of change through voting unleashed against them, took the political initiative away from the armed forces and once again put these young rebels at the centre of unfolding events, much as in the days when they sparked the revolt that toppled Mubarak.
The current battles began on the morning of 19 November when military police attacked a small group of those wounded in the original revolt who had camped in a grassy area overnight. Day after day since then, the regime tried to clear the occupation with volley after volley of tear gas and shotgun-propelled projectiles. Yet the protesters not only stood their ground but even mounted wave after wave of counter-attacks on the Interior Ministry on Mohamed Mahmoud street a few blocks away from the square.
In response to friends abroad, a young pharmacist sent an e-mail from the square: "I am OK but I have two young friends, one who died already and one who is in intensive care, shot in the head, and another who lost an eye and one who lost two eyes... This massacre is revealing the ugly face of the system and has turned this into a totally people's movement, and we are trying to catch up with that. We are in Tahrir all the time, trying to be creative in our contact with the people and getting a lot of sympathy from the people still at home."
This sentiment was repeated by others: what enabled them to stay in Tahrir Square this long has not been mainly personal courage, although there was an enormous amount of that, but the feeling that what they were doing was touching a deep chord among people all over the country and was therefore worth the sacrifice. They are also aware that the world is watching them and that their actions are in resonance with the Occupy movements in the US, UK and elsewhere. People in Tahrir know about actions in support of the Egyptian revolt that have been held in a number of American and British cities. (See nomiltrials.org)
Egyptian society is much more obviously divided than at any time since Mubarak's fall. In the name of defending the anti-Mubarak "revolution", the military is attacking the youth who drove Mubarak out. The main Islamist groups have come out against the young rebels, and many ordinary people are unsure and sometimes hostile. Commentators opposed to the revolt emphasize the conflict between "the street" (majority opinion) and "the square" (Tahrir). Yet so many people across society have shown such strong sympathy and even active support for the rebels that for the last 11 days the military has been unable to put an end to the political stalemate and the standoff around the square.
On Friday 25 November, the occupiers' numbers swelled into the tens of thousands as they were joined by various organized contingents, including people from various kinds of universities and neighbourhoods, and women chanting slogans against the Islamist parties. One feeder march was led by a young man who had lost one eye in the January and February revolt and the other eye just now. The rally brought out a socially mixed crowd of men and women, in contrast to the generally poorer young men and boys fighting the police near the Interior Ministry. (For a sharply drawn portrait of the various segments of protesters, see "The battle of Cairo's Muhammad Mahmoud Street" by Lucie Ryzova on the Al Jazeera Web site.)
That same evening a few thousand counter-demonstrators gathered at another centre-city square to chant, "Down with Tahrir, yes to the military council."
In a very unusual gesture, the chief imam of Al-Azhar mosque, Sunni Islam's highest religious authority, issued a statement of support for the Tahrir protesters.
The fear of public opinion has even forced the military – or at least two generals speaking in the name of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) – to express "regrets and deep apologies for the deaths of the martyrs from among Egypt's loyal sons during recent events in Tahrir Square."
But at the same time a military court has ordered another 15 days of detention for blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who had already spent a month in prison. He now faces a trial before a special state security court. Another blogger, Maikel Nabil, sentenced to three years in prison for writing "The army and the people were never one hand", has been on hunger strike for almost a hundred days and his retrial has been postponed. It seems that the military's plan for dealing with public opinion includes crushing opposing opinion-makers.
SCAF tried to undermine support for the Tahrir Square rebels by removing the entire cabinet they themselves had appointed to provide themselves with a civilian face. Their new chosen prime minister was Kamal El-Ganzouri, a US-trained economist who served in the same post under Mubarak at the end of the 1990s. When news of Ganzouri's appointment reached the 25 November rally, the crowd roared its rejection.
The mood was celebratory that night, because the regime seemed to be retreating both politically and in the streets around the square. People set off the coloured fireworks seen at football games. The next morning, however, when young men and women staged a sit-in in front of the cabinet building to prevent El-Ganzouri from entering, a military vehicle ran over and killed one of them, 21-year-old Ahmed Sayed. Thousands more people came to Tahrir Square the next day, 27 November, despite the first hard rain of winter. As the polls opened the next day, their numbers dwindled, with sentiments divided between boycotting the elections (mainly in hopes of holding future elections under a civilian government) and reluctantly voting now (mainly to hold back an Islamist victory).
The medical situation reveals much about the political line-up. Many doctors and other medical personnel have come to the aid of the protesters and young fighters, setting up about a dozen field hospitals in the square itself. During the revolt last January and February such hospitals were set up because of fears that the public hospital administration would report or turn over the wounded to the police. This spirit of a necessary alternative to official institutions is still at work.
The police have made these medical tents a special target for tear gas and arson. A young woman doctor died of suffocation when huge clouds of tear gas engulfed the tent where she was working. A devout Muslim, she was said to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, a party that is particularly strong in the doctors' association and that called for its members to stay away from Tahrir. Reportedly there has been no shortage of medical personnel or even supplies in Tahrir, thanks to continuing donations.
Medical attention has become more crucial than ever because of the use of new police tactics – shooting to blind people with birdshot pellets and rubber and plastic bullets. This is apparent in videos of the casualties showing wounds in the upper chest and face. One regular hospital alone reported admitting 60 people with eye injuries in the week leading up to 27 November. Their wounds included burst corneas, burst eye sockets and foreign bodies in the eye. A volunteer doctor working in the field hospital nearest to Mohamed Mahmoud Street leading from Tahrir to the Interior Ministry reported that he treated about 25 people on the morning and afternoon of 25 November. Most had been shot in the upper area of the body, especially the face, with four people hit in the eyes with birdshot. (Report by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights)
Eyewitnesses say that police taunted protesters facing off against them, "If you want to lose your eye, come over here." A notorious video on Youtube shows a police officer firing on demonstrators in Mohamed Mahmoud Street. A soldier congratulates him, saying, "Nice shot, you hit that guy right in the eye." A blogger asked what kind of army, and what kind of society, would train its soldiers to think like that.
The authorities have not hesitated to kill – another video shows men in civilian clothing wielding long clubs apparently to finish off people left unconscious by police truncheons. But shooting people in the eyes seems to have become a deliberate policy meant to cause as much pain and terror as possible while avoiding greater numbers of politically problematic deaths. In addition, according to the same report, almost 400 people have been arrested and then beaten and otherwise abused in custody, including children.
Similarly, many of the fatalities have been attributed to tear gas. Questions have been raised about what exactly this tear gas contains, although examination of the spent cartridges found so far has not revealed anything that would make it more deadly than usual. Some medical experts speculate that the deaths are caused not by a more lethal variety of gas but its concentrated and sustained use over a long period. It may be that people are suffering from cumulative pulmonary, cardiac and other damage. So much gas has combined with the dust that usually coats this desert city that in much of the downtown the slightest gust of wind sets off coughing.
This gas is primarily supplied by the United States, as anyone can see by examining the markings on spent cartridges. The US provides the Egyptian military with 1.3 billion dollars a year in direct aid, amounting to two-thirds of total US funding for Egypt (money for civilian projects is no less harmful – US "aid" obliges Egyptians to depend on American wheat imports for their daily bread). US State Department records show that the US supplied 1.7 million dollars worth of "toxicological agents" – "including tear gas and riot control agents" in 2010 alone. (El Ahram Online, 25 November.)
Youth organizations have made public documents leaked to them by customs employees indicating that the US is now in the process of shipping the Egyptian Interior Ministry an additional 21 tons of tear gas. The second of three container ships was being unloaded in the port city of Suez when these documents were released on 28 November.
While the police are a civilian body, they are run by the Interior Ministry, which is under military control. The main police units attacking the protesters are from the Central Security Forces, responsible for most of the deaths in January and February. The members of this corps are recruited from among army conscripts who volunteer for the job. The armed forces claim that they have intervened to protect demonstrators from the police, but there have been many reports of army officers and military police accompanying other police in attacking Tahrir square and in defending the Interior Ministry, often surrounded by tanks. Now the military has put up a two-metre high wall of concrete slabs across Mohamed Mahmoud street.
The US has called for a "full transfer of power to a civilian government", a move that SCAF head Field Marshall Tantawi initially rejected. On 27 November he announced that no matter what the result of the elections, "the place of the army will remain exactly as it is. It will not change in any new constitution."
While Tahrir square is united around the chant, "The people want the fall of the field marshal", there is a prevailing lack of clarity about what kind of regime could be an alternative to military rule. SCAF has become as discredited as most of Egypt's political institutions, and there is not much hope for real change from the current elections. (We Are All Khaled Said, one of the main Facebook groups behind the original revolt, asked people to vote while wearing black badges in memory of the martyrs, a call that seems to reflect a mood of bleak acquiescence to the elections due to the lack of an alternative.) Yet few people envision a revolutionary overthrow of the entire state structure, including the armed forces. Instead, most would like to hope that somehow parliamentary elections or a constituent assembly – there is debate about which – could establish a rule of law that would somehow be above society. But the Egyptian ruling classes and the US imperialists they are beholden to would never respect any legal structure that didn't reflect their economic and political interests!
The viciousness of what the movement faces can be seen in the military tactics being used against them. These tactics are not only fully enabled by the US but also seem to be in line with Washington's political goals, which are to facilitate the emergence of a regime that would both continue to be subservient to US interests and enjoy enough legitimacy to get away with crushing the young rebels and their supporters. While there may be some conflict between SCAF and Washington, it is over how best to achieve this goal.
At the same time as SCAF was expressing its "regret" for deaths on its Facebook page, the American ambassador to Egypt used her Twitter account to announce that the US was donating 100,000 dollars in "humanitarian assistance for violence victims." In light of everything else the US has done in Egypt, including building up, sustaining and arming the Egyptian military, this is like gouging out someone's eyes and then offering them eye drops.
Egypt: still out of control
22 November 2011. A World to Win News Service. By Samuel Albert. Once again events in Egypt have taken everyone by surprise, even the actors. Through a conjunction of favourable circumstances and especially through their courage and daring, the youth who were at the core of the movement that overthrew Hosni Mubarak have regained the initiative and struck back at efforts to continue the old regime in a new form.
Many people are talking about "Tahrir reloaded". They called last Saturday, when the youth first successfully resisted police attempts to clear them out of Cairo's main square, "day 19", a return to the 18 day revolt that began last January 25. But that Tahrir moment, the days when there was a consensus throughout Egyptian society – that Mubarak was finished – will not come again. The armed forces, which dumped Mubarak with US assent, have been waging a war on the youth and made themselves that movement's main target despite initial illusions that the military might be a positive force or at least neutral. When protesters now revive the old chant, "The people want the fall of the regime", and explicitly add the name of Field Marshall Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Armed Forces Council (SCAF) that took over from Mubarak, it is in much more difficult circumstances, facing even more vicious battles at the beginning of the year, and with a much more divided population. And it is even more daring.
In retrospect, it may be that the last few months, when the movement fell back amid serious difficulties, should be considered as one of intense calm in the midst of a continuing revolutionary crisis rather than an ebbing of the revolutionary situation. While the revolt had lost the initiative, it is clear that a great many people remained deeply dissatisfied and were in fact becoming increasingly angry and desperate. When they saw a chance to act decisively, they took it.
That chance occurred in connection with a mass rally called by the Muslim Brotherhood meant to pressure the military regime to its own advantage. The Islamists are reactionaries seeking to use religion and religious rule to make acceptable the relations of exploitation and oppression that have made life unbearable for so many Egyptians. But their contradictions with the military regime created room for something entirely different, an ultimately successful attempt to "replay Tahrir" in the sense of a new occupation intended to bring down the new/old regime.
The 18 November rally started out with a different scene than witnessed in Cairo's Tahrir Square back in January and February, even if it was the biggest protest since then. That earlier Tahrir was marked by an almost utopian spirit of mutual aid, collective self-reliance and equality between ethnic groups, religions and even, to some extent, men and women. Photos show men, women and children present, and at the hours of Muslim prayers, some people kneeling in devotion and others standing up, all mixed together, with many people not praying. The Brotherhood, somewhat tolerated as well as sometimes repressed under Mubarak, boycotted the revolt in the crucial first few days. When the Brotherhood did come, their presence didn't change the movement's character.
In contrast, when the call to prayer came on Friday afternoon 18 November, hardly a head was left raised. There were some distinctions between the crowds brought out by the Muslim Brotherhood (especially strong among the middle classes, including doctors, lawyers, engineers and journalists) and the various Salafist groups (known for their support from the young urban poor), although these differences in class base are very approximate and often contradictory. There were a variety of views on whether the new government should be civil in form but Islamic-based, or one on the Saudi Arabian model (seen as a rich and modern country where Sunni fundamentalism rules supreme, as opposed to poor and backward Afghanistan or Shia Iran isolated by the West). But there seems to have been a shared sense that Islam should be considered the only source of morality and political legitimacy.
Among the youth groups and leftist parties that attended, most tried to literally keep a distance from the Islamist groups (each organized around its own podium and preachers) and maintain a distinct political identity focused on opposition to military trials and political repression, which the Islamists seldom talk about. There was debate about whether or not to try and occupy Tahrir Square. In the early evening, the Muslim Brotherhood and the main Salafist groups declared the event over and left. The 6 April Youth Organization, the best-known secular youth group, announced that instead of attempting to stay in the square they were calling for another demonstration the following Friday (the only day most people have off from work).
A previous attempt to "replay Tahrir" in July failed to gather enough momentum to prevent a police attack that cleared the square and then survive the month-long break for Ramadan in August. The SCAF had been forced to permit marches and rallies in Tahrir and elsewhere, but occupation, which has come to represent a challenge to the legitimacy of the prevailing regime, had not been permitted.
However, some youth, a few hundred according to reports, decided to stay overnight in Tahrir anyway. The next morning they were attacked by the Central Security Forces, Mubarak's well-trained and organized black-clad riot police. Twice that day, in the morning and especially the early evening, the police almost succeeded in driving them out, but thousands of youth began to pour in from around the city. At first they came individually and in small groups. Later, columns marched in from assembly points at other downtown squares and even more distant neighbourhoods, both middle class and poor. The fighting was intense; at least two people were killed. The police used tear gas, clubs, electric prods, shotguns firing rubber bullets and birdshot, and standard bullets. Soldiers on the rooftops of the surrounding tall buildings threw down tear gas canisters and other deadly objects. The underground station – one of the city's two main junctions – was closed to cut off new arrivals. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning ex-International Atomic Energy Agency head who is the country's most prominent candidate for the as yet unscheduled presidential elections, came to the square. Some Islamists, particularly youth, came back.
Other demonstrations broke out in at least seven other cities. In Suez, where people had burned down the police station and other official buildings in the first days of the January revolt, the new police headquarters was assaulted. Along with Alexandria, there were also fierce protests in several smaller cities along the upper Nile.
Tahrir remained occupied Saturday night. The police attacked even more ferociously the next day, killing at least 11 more people. Hospitals reported about 1,800 injured Saturday and Sunday. Two well-known groups of football fans ("ultras") came to reinforce the battle against the police, who have always treated them brutally. Military policemen and officers also took part in attacking people, according to some reports. But on Sunday and Monday, at times the protesters were able to take the offensive. They repeatedly marched on the Ministry of the Interior, one of the most important targets left unscathed after last January and February. Obviously they felt they had unfinished business.
Over the past months, the armed forces increasing use of naked violence, sometimes directly by soldiers as well as police, has certainly scared many people, but it has also made many conclude that the military's rule is the problem, not the solution – that an attempt to "replay Tahrir", this time against the army, is the only way out of a deteriorating situation.
Yet it was the Muslim Brotherhood and not the youth organizations and certainly none of the traditional "left" parties that issued the call for a "Million Man March" in Tahrir Square 18 November. (As it turned out, there were closer to 50,000.) It was billed as "The Day of One Demand" – that the military give up power. This might seem surprising, since the military and Islamists have been acting as "one hand" in trying to restore stability and steer people off the streets and into the polling booths for the scheduled 28 November parliamentary elections that the Islamists expect will hand them a central role in a new civilian government.
The Muslim Brotherhood's apparent conflict with the army was precipitated when a civilian minister, answerable, like the whole government, to the generals, proposed to a meeting of the major political parties that the armed forces be allowed to dictate certain constitutional principles now, choose most of the members of the panel to write a new constitution after parliament is elected, and permanently remain above civilian interference or even budgetary supervision. The Brotherhood's electoral arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, declared this a threat to the emergence of "democracy" in Egypt. Certainly a great many people saw these measures as a crude attempt to perpetuate military rule under a parliamentary fig leaf.
At the same time, however, as the Brotherhood's secular critics point out, the proposal contained articles and procedures that might make it harder to declare Egypt an Islamic republic, restrict the Islamist parties' options and of course keep them under military supervision. While the US and its Egyptian flunkies are unanimous in their belief that parliamentary elections are the only way to restore the legitimacy of state institutions, and while most observers think that an Islamist-dominated parliament is the most probable result, there may very well be contention between various forces among the Islamists and the generals.
There is another factor likely at work, although no proof has been uncovered: the US. During the period when the Brotherhood was negotiating with the military as to whether or not to call off the threatened 18 November demonstration and was also officially in contact with US State Department representatives, American government officials began to express unhappiness with the Egyptian military's efforts to formally limit the powers of a future civilian government. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "If, over time, the most powerful political forces in Egypt remain a handful of unelected officials, they will have planted the seeds for future unrest, and Egypt will have missed a historic opportunity." (New York Times, 16 November) In other words, while the US might agree with the generals' project in the abstract, its officials fear that continuing brazen military rule could undermine US interests, which require a government whose stability depends not just on violence but also on a sufficient degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
This doesn't mean that the US plans to try to do without the nearly million-man Egyptian armed forces. They are the recipient of 1.3 billion dollars a year in direct American funding, and the US has carefully cultivated its officer corps for decades. But the Egyptian military has its own political and economic interests, including a gigantic network of enterprises under its command. Roughly 40 percent of the country's economy is estimated to be controlled by a network of military and other state-owned enterprises and private companies run by retired officers.
The imperialist finance system, speaking through the IMF, has often complained that foreign investment would be better served by more "private"-sector opportunities. The US once encouraged Hosni Mubarak's son and appointed successor Gamal because he sought to expand, at the military's expense, the "private" capital sector now championed by civilian presidential candidates such as ElBaradei. (Actually, in an economy organized according to the laws of capitalism both state-owned and "private" capital are effectively private in terms of putting narrow, particular interests above the general interests of society.) The US and the Egyptian military can't do without one another, but that doesn't mean that their interests are identical.
As for the US and the Islamists, the American government's attitude seems to be "maybe". No one can say exactly where an Islamist government might lead, and US officials are certainly aware of potential problems with an Islamic government bordering Israel. But the US, which kept Mubarak in power for three decades and clung to him almost to the end, does not have a lot of options. If Egypt slipped out of American domination, that would be a disaster for US interests in the region and the world.
The basic question being fought over in the squares and streets is who will govern Egypt: Islamists, generals or those who declare themselves loyal to "human rights; and in what form, through a military junta, a parliament and civilian president, or an emir (religious political leader). These are very important questions with deep, long-term implications. But who governs and the form of governance doesn't settle the question of the content of rule – the class or classes that hold political power, and consequently the way society is organized economically and politically, for what purpose, and what ideology is promoted.
It is vital to understand that the common demand for an end to military rule covers opposing possible outcomes representing mutually antagonistic interests. The question is whether open military rule comes to an end in a way that encourages or discourages people's struggles to go further.
Even if the entire military-appointed government of the Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, a former Mubarak figure, were replaced in an effort to appease the revolt, it's likely that the military would still call the shots. Under any circumstances, no matter which civilian might become prime minister and eventually president, the armed forces would have the ultimate say, as well as control of powerful economic, social and political levers. After all, on what armed power would any other government rest?
This situation would not be changed by the resignation of the minister who suggested that the new constitution formally sanction continued military control, as the Muslim Brotherhood and other parties demanded, or even the resignation of all the ministers, an idea considered so extreme that these parties did not dare demand it Monday morning, but became a real possibility by Monday night. The SCAF may seek to "replay Tahrir" in its own way by jettisoning whoever necessary to keep from being overthrown.
ElBaradei is now proposing the replacement of the SCAF-appointed government with a government of national unity composed of all the major political parties. including the Islamists and people like himself. (According to Al Ahram, the 6 April Youth organization has endorsed this proposal.) It is also noteworthy that the SCAF's recent decision to accept IMF funds (and therefore decisions) sparked little controversy among these parties. However real their differences, they are all ultimately amenable to the global, imperialist-dominated economic system and power relations.
As long as the army is not dismantled by revolutionary force, it will continue to be the backbone and pillar of any regime. The Islamists may have their own interests and agenda, but they definitely plan on ruling with the army, not against it. (In another act of blatant hypocrisy, when their manoeuvre to use the streets to their advantage backfired, they called for an end to all street demonstrations. A prominent Brotherhood leader who came to Tahrir with a handful of supporters on 21 November was booed out of the square.)
To many people, the best-case outcome would be a government chosen by majority rule through elections. This is especially understandable in a country that has never known anything but monarchy and a military rule where the occasional opposition candidates not in the regime's pay often ended up in jail or exile. But even with real elections, parliamentary democracy is perfectly compatible with and often the best form for the dictatorship of the exploiting classes. The formal equality of citizens before the law masks and gives full play to the enormous inequalities that characterize Egypt at least as much as any other country.
Further, Egyptian experience of the last nine months is rich in examples of how a revolt unsanctioned by elections can draw ordinary people into political life and allow them to change basic things through their actions, and how the experience (and promise) of elections can strip them of their conscious, active role. It has also highlighted the limitations of a spontaneous revolt that doesn't seek state power.
The Muslim Brotherhood now argues that the latest clashes were encouraged by provocateurs to force the cancellation of the imminent elections. But maybe one factor in the current upsurge is that many people have already decided that they can't expect anything good from this electoral process, even if they haven't lost hope in parliamentary democracy in the abstract.
A few of the revolt's intellectual participants do question parliamentary democracy as a viable or even desirable alternative to the military. Some "moderate" Islamist arguments in favour of the so-called supremacy of elections are instructive in this regard. They reason that since the majority of Egyptians are practising Muslims, then it is only right for the country to become an Islamic state. This might be considered just more hypocritical opportunism – after all, these forces intend to do everything in their power to set the terms of debate in the most manipulative and coercive manner and have never relied solely on persuasion – but there is a real, inescapable point here: the majority can be fooled, and certainly what the majority might think at any given moment doesn't necessarily correspond to the fundamental interests of the vast majority of people. Those who fought to overthrow Mubarak and have continued the revolt have not always had the visible broad support they wanted.
The fact is that in Egypt, not only would parliamentary democracy be a form of the dictatorship of the exploiting classes in which the interests and deepest desires of the people do not bear any weight in basic decisions, but it would be doubly empty because life in Egypt is ultimately determined by the interests and decisions of the imperialists, the powers whose twin instruments of subjugation are their military and the global market.
To take just one example: although the Nile valley and delta where most Egyptians live is among the world's most fertile land, imported wheat and other foodstuffs are cheaper than domestic production and the world market has crushed Egypt's agriculture. Consequently the country has become the world's biggest wheat importer (American "aid" ensures that it is bought from the US). To pay for this central component of people's diet, the country must depend on revenues from the Suez canal (without which the military and bureaucracy would never have become so swollen), the export of gas (Egypt sends gas to Israel while Egyptians cook with fires or use inconvenient and dangerous propane tanks), tourism (which requires a docile population) and especially the export of people (the money sent home by Egyptians forced to work abroad). Dependence on these sectors is an obstacle to an all-around development of the economy, including employment. There are so many people hungry for work in the Nile Delta that China and Iran, in addition to the Western powers, have set up factories there to exploit cheap Egyptian labour.
Changing the country's subordinated development and its disastrous effects on every aspect of the lives of the people, including their day-to-day existence and their culture and thinking – not to mention getting rid of all the other exploitative and oppressive relations in Egyptian life – cannot conceivably happen without a thoroughgoing revolution, the forcible overthrow of the power of the exploiting classes and the establishment of a whole new kind of regime led by a party that has the goal and a plan for freeing Egypt as part of ending exploitation and oppression on a world scale.
Making a revolution in any country, including Egypt, is unthinkable unless a section of the people led by such a party can successfully navigate through a complex mix of favourable and unfavourable factors. But the current complexity of the Egyptian situation contains positive factors that are rare in the history of any country. The people's enemies have not been able to resolve a political crisis that has festered since January and now become acute. So far they have not been able to restore the legitimacy of their institutions of domination or establish new ones. If they have vacillated in choosing a course of action, it is because any choice they make entails the risk of inflaming this crisis further. For instance, beating and shooting demonstrators has been anything but a solution for them, but stopping that might allow the people's anger to boil over. Serious compromises to the people's struggle might give the rebels a taste of victory that leaves them hungry for more, now or at some later point, especially if these concessions fail to fulfil their expectations.
The persistence of youth and others – despite a difficult period in which there has been more passivity than street action, especially among the less well-off sections of the people – has proved to be a mood creating factor throughout society. It is true that this "Internet elite", as an Egyptian politician sneeringly labelled them, has not always been able to rouse the broader masses. Yet they have been a major element in preventing the military and Islamist forces from consolidating their hold and keeping alive the possibility that broader masses could once again intervene in determining the country's future, as they did during those 18 days in January and February.
As of now, a wide variety of youth, not only "the Internet elite" but also working class students and young men and boys of the lower classes in general, have become uncontrollable. They are actively supported by many thousands of other men and some women. In fact, they have won enough sympathy and support that millions may consider them more in touch with their interests and even more legitimate than the ruling regime. Their courage in the face of repression is such that many have adopted the habit of writing the phone number of their next of kin on their arm in case they are found dead or unconscious – fear doesn't stop them. The solidarity is such that amid the tear gas people have formed long lines to donate blood at two mobile stations set up in Tahrir Square.
The factors that brought about that first Tahrir moment – the inability of the ruling classes to rule in the old way and the willingness of a large section of the people to risk death rather than continue living in the old way – remain unresolved and continue to interact.
Many people are talking about "Tahrir reloaded". They called last Saturday, when the youth first successfully resisted police attempts to clear them out of Cairo's main square, "day 19", a return to the 18 day revolt that began last January 25. But that Tahrir moment, the days when there was a consensus throughout Egyptian society – that Mubarak was finished – will not come again. The armed forces, which dumped Mubarak with US assent, have been waging a war on the youth and made themselves that movement's main target despite initial illusions that the military might be a positive force or at least neutral. When protesters now revive the old chant, "The people want the fall of the regime", and explicitly add the name of Field Marshall Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Armed Forces Council (SCAF) that took over from Mubarak, it is in much more difficult circumstances, facing even more vicious battles at the beginning of the year, and with a much more divided population. And it is even more daring.
In retrospect, it may be that the last few months, when the movement fell back amid serious difficulties, should be considered as one of intense calm in the midst of a continuing revolutionary crisis rather than an ebbing of the revolutionary situation. While the revolt had lost the initiative, it is clear that a great many people remained deeply dissatisfied and were in fact becoming increasingly angry and desperate. When they saw a chance to act decisively, they took it.
That chance occurred in connection with a mass rally called by the Muslim Brotherhood meant to pressure the military regime to its own advantage. The Islamists are reactionaries seeking to use religion and religious rule to make acceptable the relations of exploitation and oppression that have made life unbearable for so many Egyptians. But their contradictions with the military regime created room for something entirely different, an ultimately successful attempt to "replay Tahrir" in the sense of a new occupation intended to bring down the new/old regime.
The 18 November rally started out with a different scene than witnessed in Cairo's Tahrir Square back in January and February, even if it was the biggest protest since then. That earlier Tahrir was marked by an almost utopian spirit of mutual aid, collective self-reliance and equality between ethnic groups, religions and even, to some extent, men and women. Photos show men, women and children present, and at the hours of Muslim prayers, some people kneeling in devotion and others standing up, all mixed together, with many people not praying. The Brotherhood, somewhat tolerated as well as sometimes repressed under Mubarak, boycotted the revolt in the crucial first few days. When the Brotherhood did come, their presence didn't change the movement's character.
In contrast, when the call to prayer came on Friday afternoon 18 November, hardly a head was left raised. There were some distinctions between the crowds brought out by the Muslim Brotherhood (especially strong among the middle classes, including doctors, lawyers, engineers and journalists) and the various Salafist groups (known for their support from the young urban poor), although these differences in class base are very approximate and often contradictory. There were a variety of views on whether the new government should be civil in form but Islamic-based, or one on the Saudi Arabian model (seen as a rich and modern country where Sunni fundamentalism rules supreme, as opposed to poor and backward Afghanistan or Shia Iran isolated by the West). But there seems to have been a shared sense that Islam should be considered the only source of morality and political legitimacy.
Among the youth groups and leftist parties that attended, most tried to literally keep a distance from the Islamist groups (each organized around its own podium and preachers) and maintain a distinct political identity focused on opposition to military trials and political repression, which the Islamists seldom talk about. There was debate about whether or not to try and occupy Tahrir Square. In the early evening, the Muslim Brotherhood and the main Salafist groups declared the event over and left. The 6 April Youth Organization, the best-known secular youth group, announced that instead of attempting to stay in the square they were calling for another demonstration the following Friday (the only day most people have off from work).
A previous attempt to "replay Tahrir" in July failed to gather enough momentum to prevent a police attack that cleared the square and then survive the month-long break for Ramadan in August. The SCAF had been forced to permit marches and rallies in Tahrir and elsewhere, but occupation, which has come to represent a challenge to the legitimacy of the prevailing regime, had not been permitted.
However, some youth, a few hundred according to reports, decided to stay overnight in Tahrir anyway. The next morning they were attacked by the Central Security Forces, Mubarak's well-trained and organized black-clad riot police. Twice that day, in the morning and especially the early evening, the police almost succeeded in driving them out, but thousands of youth began to pour in from around the city. At first they came individually and in small groups. Later, columns marched in from assembly points at other downtown squares and even more distant neighbourhoods, both middle class and poor. The fighting was intense; at least two people were killed. The police used tear gas, clubs, electric prods, shotguns firing rubber bullets and birdshot, and standard bullets. Soldiers on the rooftops of the surrounding tall buildings threw down tear gas canisters and other deadly objects. The underground station – one of the city's two main junctions – was closed to cut off new arrivals. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning ex-International Atomic Energy Agency head who is the country's most prominent candidate for the as yet unscheduled presidential elections, came to the square. Some Islamists, particularly youth, came back.
Other demonstrations broke out in at least seven other cities. In Suez, where people had burned down the police station and other official buildings in the first days of the January revolt, the new police headquarters was assaulted. Along with Alexandria, there were also fierce protests in several smaller cities along the upper Nile.
Tahrir remained occupied Saturday night. The police attacked even more ferociously the next day, killing at least 11 more people. Hospitals reported about 1,800 injured Saturday and Sunday. Two well-known groups of football fans ("ultras") came to reinforce the battle against the police, who have always treated them brutally. Military policemen and officers also took part in attacking people, according to some reports. But on Sunday and Monday, at times the protesters were able to take the offensive. They repeatedly marched on the Ministry of the Interior, one of the most important targets left unscathed after last January and February. Obviously they felt they had unfinished business.
Over the past months, the armed forces increasing use of naked violence, sometimes directly by soldiers as well as police, has certainly scared many people, but it has also made many conclude that the military's rule is the problem, not the solution – that an attempt to "replay Tahrir", this time against the army, is the only way out of a deteriorating situation.
Yet it was the Muslim Brotherhood and not the youth organizations and certainly none of the traditional "left" parties that issued the call for a "Million Man March" in Tahrir Square 18 November. (As it turned out, there were closer to 50,000.) It was billed as "The Day of One Demand" – that the military give up power. This might seem surprising, since the military and Islamists have been acting as "one hand" in trying to restore stability and steer people off the streets and into the polling booths for the scheduled 28 November parliamentary elections that the Islamists expect will hand them a central role in a new civilian government.
The Muslim Brotherhood's apparent conflict with the army was precipitated when a civilian minister, answerable, like the whole government, to the generals, proposed to a meeting of the major political parties that the armed forces be allowed to dictate certain constitutional principles now, choose most of the members of the panel to write a new constitution after parliament is elected, and permanently remain above civilian interference or even budgetary supervision. The Brotherhood's electoral arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, declared this a threat to the emergence of "democracy" in Egypt. Certainly a great many people saw these measures as a crude attempt to perpetuate military rule under a parliamentary fig leaf.
At the same time, however, as the Brotherhood's secular critics point out, the proposal contained articles and procedures that might make it harder to declare Egypt an Islamic republic, restrict the Islamist parties' options and of course keep them under military supervision. While the US and its Egyptian flunkies are unanimous in their belief that parliamentary elections are the only way to restore the legitimacy of state institutions, and while most observers think that an Islamist-dominated parliament is the most probable result, there may very well be contention between various forces among the Islamists and the generals.
There is another factor likely at work, although no proof has been uncovered: the US. During the period when the Brotherhood was negotiating with the military as to whether or not to call off the threatened 18 November demonstration and was also officially in contact with US State Department representatives, American government officials began to express unhappiness with the Egyptian military's efforts to formally limit the powers of a future civilian government. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "If, over time, the most powerful political forces in Egypt remain a handful of unelected officials, they will have planted the seeds for future unrest, and Egypt will have missed a historic opportunity." (New York Times, 16 November) In other words, while the US might agree with the generals' project in the abstract, its officials fear that continuing brazen military rule could undermine US interests, which require a government whose stability depends not just on violence but also on a sufficient degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
This doesn't mean that the US plans to try to do without the nearly million-man Egyptian armed forces. They are the recipient of 1.3 billion dollars a year in direct American funding, and the US has carefully cultivated its officer corps for decades. But the Egyptian military has its own political and economic interests, including a gigantic network of enterprises under its command. Roughly 40 percent of the country's economy is estimated to be controlled by a network of military and other state-owned enterprises and private companies run by retired officers.
The imperialist finance system, speaking through the IMF, has often complained that foreign investment would be better served by more "private"-sector opportunities. The US once encouraged Hosni Mubarak's son and appointed successor Gamal because he sought to expand, at the military's expense, the "private" capital sector now championed by civilian presidential candidates such as ElBaradei. (Actually, in an economy organized according to the laws of capitalism both state-owned and "private" capital are effectively private in terms of putting narrow, particular interests above the general interests of society.) The US and the Egyptian military can't do without one another, but that doesn't mean that their interests are identical.
As for the US and the Islamists, the American government's attitude seems to be "maybe". No one can say exactly where an Islamist government might lead, and US officials are certainly aware of potential problems with an Islamic government bordering Israel. But the US, which kept Mubarak in power for three decades and clung to him almost to the end, does not have a lot of options. If Egypt slipped out of American domination, that would be a disaster for US interests in the region and the world.
The basic question being fought over in the squares and streets is who will govern Egypt: Islamists, generals or those who declare themselves loyal to "human rights; and in what form, through a military junta, a parliament and civilian president, or an emir (religious political leader). These are very important questions with deep, long-term implications. But who governs and the form of governance doesn't settle the question of the content of rule – the class or classes that hold political power, and consequently the way society is organized economically and politically, for what purpose, and what ideology is promoted.
It is vital to understand that the common demand for an end to military rule covers opposing possible outcomes representing mutually antagonistic interests. The question is whether open military rule comes to an end in a way that encourages or discourages people's struggles to go further.
Even if the entire military-appointed government of the Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, a former Mubarak figure, were replaced in an effort to appease the revolt, it's likely that the military would still call the shots. Under any circumstances, no matter which civilian might become prime minister and eventually president, the armed forces would have the ultimate say, as well as control of powerful economic, social and political levers. After all, on what armed power would any other government rest?
This situation would not be changed by the resignation of the minister who suggested that the new constitution formally sanction continued military control, as the Muslim Brotherhood and other parties demanded, or even the resignation of all the ministers, an idea considered so extreme that these parties did not dare demand it Monday morning, but became a real possibility by Monday night. The SCAF may seek to "replay Tahrir" in its own way by jettisoning whoever necessary to keep from being overthrown.
ElBaradei is now proposing the replacement of the SCAF-appointed government with a government of national unity composed of all the major political parties. including the Islamists and people like himself. (According to Al Ahram, the 6 April Youth organization has endorsed this proposal.) It is also noteworthy that the SCAF's recent decision to accept IMF funds (and therefore decisions) sparked little controversy among these parties. However real their differences, they are all ultimately amenable to the global, imperialist-dominated economic system and power relations.
As long as the army is not dismantled by revolutionary force, it will continue to be the backbone and pillar of any regime. The Islamists may have their own interests and agenda, but they definitely plan on ruling with the army, not against it. (In another act of blatant hypocrisy, when their manoeuvre to use the streets to their advantage backfired, they called for an end to all street demonstrations. A prominent Brotherhood leader who came to Tahrir with a handful of supporters on 21 November was booed out of the square.)
To many people, the best-case outcome would be a government chosen by majority rule through elections. This is especially understandable in a country that has never known anything but monarchy and a military rule where the occasional opposition candidates not in the regime's pay often ended up in jail or exile. But even with real elections, parliamentary democracy is perfectly compatible with and often the best form for the dictatorship of the exploiting classes. The formal equality of citizens before the law masks and gives full play to the enormous inequalities that characterize Egypt at least as much as any other country.
Further, Egyptian experience of the last nine months is rich in examples of how a revolt unsanctioned by elections can draw ordinary people into political life and allow them to change basic things through their actions, and how the experience (and promise) of elections can strip them of their conscious, active role. It has also highlighted the limitations of a spontaneous revolt that doesn't seek state power.
The Muslim Brotherhood now argues that the latest clashes were encouraged by provocateurs to force the cancellation of the imminent elections. But maybe one factor in the current upsurge is that many people have already decided that they can't expect anything good from this electoral process, even if they haven't lost hope in parliamentary democracy in the abstract.
A few of the revolt's intellectual participants do question parliamentary democracy as a viable or even desirable alternative to the military. Some "moderate" Islamist arguments in favour of the so-called supremacy of elections are instructive in this regard. They reason that since the majority of Egyptians are practising Muslims, then it is only right for the country to become an Islamic state. This might be considered just more hypocritical opportunism – after all, these forces intend to do everything in their power to set the terms of debate in the most manipulative and coercive manner and have never relied solely on persuasion – but there is a real, inescapable point here: the majority can be fooled, and certainly what the majority might think at any given moment doesn't necessarily correspond to the fundamental interests of the vast majority of people. Those who fought to overthrow Mubarak and have continued the revolt have not always had the visible broad support they wanted.
The fact is that in Egypt, not only would parliamentary democracy be a form of the dictatorship of the exploiting classes in which the interests and deepest desires of the people do not bear any weight in basic decisions, but it would be doubly empty because life in Egypt is ultimately determined by the interests and decisions of the imperialists, the powers whose twin instruments of subjugation are their military and the global market.
To take just one example: although the Nile valley and delta where most Egyptians live is among the world's most fertile land, imported wheat and other foodstuffs are cheaper than domestic production and the world market has crushed Egypt's agriculture. Consequently the country has become the world's biggest wheat importer (American "aid" ensures that it is bought from the US). To pay for this central component of people's diet, the country must depend on revenues from the Suez canal (without which the military and bureaucracy would never have become so swollen), the export of gas (Egypt sends gas to Israel while Egyptians cook with fires or use inconvenient and dangerous propane tanks), tourism (which requires a docile population) and especially the export of people (the money sent home by Egyptians forced to work abroad). Dependence on these sectors is an obstacle to an all-around development of the economy, including employment. There are so many people hungry for work in the Nile Delta that China and Iran, in addition to the Western powers, have set up factories there to exploit cheap Egyptian labour.
Changing the country's subordinated development and its disastrous effects on every aspect of the lives of the people, including their day-to-day existence and their culture and thinking – not to mention getting rid of all the other exploitative and oppressive relations in Egyptian life – cannot conceivably happen without a thoroughgoing revolution, the forcible overthrow of the power of the exploiting classes and the establishment of a whole new kind of regime led by a party that has the goal and a plan for freeing Egypt as part of ending exploitation and oppression on a world scale.
Making a revolution in any country, including Egypt, is unthinkable unless a section of the people led by such a party can successfully navigate through a complex mix of favourable and unfavourable factors. But the current complexity of the Egyptian situation contains positive factors that are rare in the history of any country. The people's enemies have not been able to resolve a political crisis that has festered since January and now become acute. So far they have not been able to restore the legitimacy of their institutions of domination or establish new ones. If they have vacillated in choosing a course of action, it is because any choice they make entails the risk of inflaming this crisis further. For instance, beating and shooting demonstrators has been anything but a solution for them, but stopping that might allow the people's anger to boil over. Serious compromises to the people's struggle might give the rebels a taste of victory that leaves them hungry for more, now or at some later point, especially if these concessions fail to fulfil their expectations.
The persistence of youth and others – despite a difficult period in which there has been more passivity than street action, especially among the less well-off sections of the people – has proved to be a mood creating factor throughout society. It is true that this "Internet elite", as an Egyptian politician sneeringly labelled them, has not always been able to rouse the broader masses. Yet they have been a major element in preventing the military and Islamist forces from consolidating their hold and keeping alive the possibility that broader masses could once again intervene in determining the country's future, as they did during those 18 days in January and February.
As of now, a wide variety of youth, not only "the Internet elite" but also working class students and young men and boys of the lower classes in general, have become uncontrollable. They are actively supported by many thousands of other men and some women. In fact, they have won enough sympathy and support that millions may consider them more in touch with their interests and even more legitimate than the ruling regime. Their courage in the face of repression is such that many have adopted the habit of writing the phone number of their next of kin on their arm in case they are found dead or unconscious – fear doesn't stop them. The solidarity is such that amid the tear gas people have formed long lines to donate blood at two mobile stations set up in Tahrir Square.
The factors that brought about that first Tahrir moment – the inability of the ruling classes to rule in the old way and the willingness of a large section of the people to risk death rather than continue living in the old way – remain unresolved and continue to interact.
Report from Egypt: A complex and difficult situation – for both the people and their enemies
14 November 2011. A World to Win News Service. By Samuel Albert, Cairo. The euphoria has evaporated. While today's raucous political climate is very different than the years before Hosni Mubarak's ouster, when an enforced silence and stillness prevailed, it has also changed markedly since the period immediately preceding and following his 11 February forced resignation. Now, among the millions who participated in or supported that revolt and more broadly, there is a feeling that the situation is becoming increasingly complex, unsettled and dangerous. Marches, strikes, sit-ins and other protests happen every day, but many ordinary people are becoming more passive. There is a chill in the air that comes from more than the approaching winter.
This discouragement is largely the product of the unfolding of events since then, both what has happened and what has not. While many activists express the hope that the political awakening of the Egyptian people may lead to basic social change some time in the future, right now their foremost concern is that the situation may become more difficult and even disastrous, both in terms of political repression and a closing of minds among a large part of the people.
No one chants "The people and the army are one hand" any more, as they did when the army's refusal to fire on protesters helped make Mubarak's dismissal possible. The illusion that the army would be at least neutral toward basic change began to fade after only a few months, even if people still try to cling to it. Driven by distinct class interests and ideologies, the highly heterogeneous social forces whose convergence brought down Mubarak are now pulling the country in different directions. Everyone knows that the army is going to play a key role, even if the generals, their American paymasters and the unpredictable unfolding of events have not decided exactly what that role will be.
The armed forces in Egypt have a monopoly on organized violence, as they do in every state, and economic holdings unparalleled in most other countries, along with the support of the US and other imperialist powers. Here they also benefit from whatever legitimacy the state organs still hold in the eyes of the people. Not a few people would like to see a difference between the Mubarak-era generals in the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the army as an institution they consider patriotic. This is because of its leadership of the 1952 revolution that finally expelled the British occupiers and its role in defending the country against subsequent invasions by Britain, France and Israel.
Many hoped that Mubarak's downfall would be followed by the adoption of a new constitution that would set the framework for bringing about some sort of social change. But the idea that the "rule of law" could reflect anything but which classes and organizations dominate society received a hard blow in March, when the army, working with the Muslim Brotherhood, old regime forces and state-owned and other reactionary media, successfully pushed through a referendum approving the continuation of the old constitution with a few changes for the worse. Unexpectedly, the voter turnout was extremely high, and more than 70 percent of the ballots approved the proposal. This emboldened the armed forces to publicly discuss scenarios such as the promulgation of articles for a new constitution by its own decree, or its own selection of the bulk of the members of the committee to write a new constitution that would give the military the last say on all major questions and continue to shield it from civilian oversight.
The process of parliamentary elections is scheduled to begin in late November and last through January. At first the military promised it would govern for only six months. Now it says it will turn over power to a civilian president in 2013. Most people once saw the election of a parliament and its selection of a committee to write a new constitution as a possible peaceful pathway to change. Now a few have concluded that the real purpose of this process is to re-legitimize the state and disperse the flames that still flair up in the street, both aspects meant to make revolutionary change more difficult, without changing anything basic in society. But even those who still hold out hope for parliamentary democracy in a general way have decided that at this point, the only open question is whether the new parliament will be a circus of disparate forces unwilling and unable to change anything, or one dominated by Islamists seeking to move society backward.
Already, even those forces that identify with the revolt who are most focused on electoral activity are pessimistic about the outcome. The only ones who seem to be looking forward to the polling are the Islamists, above all the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposed the revolt in the beginning, and the Salafists, fundamentalists who hold that Egyptians should live more like Muslims in Mohammed's day, a society of women in burkas and men in beards and robes, though everyone would still have a mobile (cell phone).
An increasingly aggressive army
For many people, hopes for something positive from the army's "hand" vanished by April, when, instead of leaving it to the police, the armed forces themselves assaulted demonstrators challenging their rule, killing two protesters. But far worse occurred on 9 October, when Christians and secularists protesting the armed forces' failure to react to a wave of arson attacks on Coptic churches were themselves attacked, leaving 28 dead and hundreds of wounded and injured.
The demonstrators had marched across central Cairo to Maspero, the headquarters of the state-owned television services. Videos posted online show army armoured vehicles barrelling through the crowd, running over or crushing to death a dozen people. But the fighting was complicated, involving demonstrators, soldiers and a horde of unidentified civilians who charged the crowd and may have fought against soldiers too.
The difficulty in determining exactly what happened reflects the variety of forces at work. It also feeds the widespread feeling that mysterious dark forces are manipulating the situation and seizing the political initiative, a sentiment that leaves many former participants in the revolt paralysed and fearful.
Who were the men in civilian clothing who rampaged against the demonstrators under cover of night? Some believe that they were people from nearby slums organized by Muslim fundamentalists. Ridding Egypt of its Christian minority is a pillar of their programme, along with the institutionalization of the subjugation of women to men and the harsh punishments prescribed by sharia (Islamic law), such as cutting off the right hand of thieves.
Others believe that these men were members of the former state security service and the militia run by Mubarak's National Democratic Party, aiming to derail the people's movement by fomenting divisions between Muslims and Christians. It is sometimes pointed out that the leadership of the Coptic Church supported the old regime and continues to play a conservative political and social role. Some people argue that Israeli agents were also at work amid all this. While Israeli agents cannot possibly be a main factor in such events, as a few people would like to think, they are certainly present and active. (One was recently caught and expelled.)
A similar fog of confusion hovers around the September protests at the Israeli embassy after the SCAF failed to respond to a cross-border Israeli attack. Israeli soldiers, allegedly pursuing Palestinian fighters, killed six Egyptian policemen. Most people say that the protest was legitimate but the actual penetration into the embassy was a provocation meant to discredit the movement. Others believe that action, which forced the Israeli ambassador to flee the country, saved Egypt's honour. The feeling that there is no reliable information – even some people who were at these events say they aren't sure exactly who did what – is related, although not identical to, the question as to whether or not the movement should target the SCAF, instead of giving the military the benefit of a doubt.
But the armed forces government has made its attitude clear in regard to the Maspero incident in a way that sheds light much more broadly. During that protest, state television broadcasters called on "honest Egyptians" to come to Maspero to fight in defence of soldiers they said were being massacred by Christians. Actually, most of the dead were Copts; no soldiers were killed. In the following weeks the armed forces investigated the charges that it had murdered protesters and found itself innocent. There was not the slightest effort to identify the civilian assailants. While the armed forces' relations with the Coptic Church remain strained, the only named targets of the investigation so far have been secular youth who had spearheaded the demonstrations in Tahrir Square and had come to demonstrate against the repression of the Copts.
Plainly, whoever organized the assaults, the army is at the very least protecting them. Further, especially given these facts, there is no reason to simply accept the army's claim that its soldiers had not been issued live rounds and could not have done the shooting.
Two well-known young secular activists were brought in for formal interrogation. Both refused to cooperate. One was released. The other, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a well-known blogger and leading activist previously jailed in 2009, declared that he would refuse to answer questions because the army could not impartially investigate itself, and because the military had no right to try civilians. He was accused of stealing army weapons and destroying state property. Most people who don't support the army consider the idea that he attacked and trashed an armoured vehicle nothing but an action-film fantasy. Even more ominously, he was charged with the content of his blog itself, criticism of the armed forces which, the SCAF said, had fomented the violence.
The young man was remanded to prison for two weeks, pending a decision about what to do with him. Late on the night of 31 October, several thousand people – mostly bloggers and their readers and others mobilized at the last minute on the Net, and thus by definition mainly youth and others from the upper middle classes – marched across Cairo to a prison to support Fattah and another blogger, Maikel Nabil, who has been on hunger strike to protest his two-year sentence for having written, "The army and the people were never one hand." The military sent Nabil to a mental hospital, but the doctors, decrying this repressive manoeuvre, refused to admit him. Fattah, from the cell he shared with many common prisoners, wrote a searing and widely reprinted blog about once again finding himself in Mubarak's dungeons even after the fall of Mubarak. On 13 November the military renewed his imprisonment for at least another two weeks. There was a second, smaller march led by No to Military Trials, a human rights group that is one of the organisations most active in the streets now. (en.nomiltrials.com)
In another late October demonstration, a similar crowd, along with a small Islamist party, had marched from Tahrir Square to Maspero and back to protest the prison death of a young man serving a short sentence on minor criminal charges. The authorities claimed he poisoned himself by swallowing drugs to keep them from being discovered. The protesters, remembering similar justifications for deaths in custody under Mubarak, were inclined to believe the victim's family and a doctor at the hospital where his corpse was taken, who said that the police had forced soapy water down his throat and up his anus until it killed him. While unlike the bloggers, Essam Attah was not a political prisoner but seems to have been a victim of police repression of lower-class youth in general, these events underlined the fact that the police and armed forces are continuing and even stepping up the kind of atrocities that led people to revolt against and drive out Mubarak – and that the police and armed forces are one hand.
Military tribunals have tried bout 12,000 people for political and criminal offences since the armed forces took over. After its televised opening session, Mubarak's trial for murder and other crimes has been indefinitely postponed. The civilian courts have been discredited as utterly corrupt and part of the Mubarak '"system"and are often not able to function. During a rowdy October confrontation between lawyers and judges about proposed court procedures, the magistrates pulled their pistols and began shooting into the air to clear the room. The Mubarak-appointed judges are reviled as pirates licensed to rob the poor, middle class and even the unconnected rich.
This illustrates the broader circumstances in a society where for a half-century the regime openly or effectively appointed officials in all institutions. The authorities from top to bottom are despised as repressive, arbitrary and usually corrupt. For instance, even at the University of Cairo, surprisingly not a political hotbed, there have been important struggles to bring in independent department and faculty heads. The same almost total control that made the Mubarak regime seen invincible has produced a vacuum of legitimacy and moral authority that the generals have had great difficulty filling once people lost their fear and inertia.
A relative ebb
Yet the recent protests have been relatively small and narrowly based compared to January and February. Back then factory workers and other poor people were the first Egyptians to confront the regime's security forces, in the city of Suez. Hundreds of thousands of people of all social classes – Muslims, Copts and non-believers alike – picked up stones and sticks to fight the police and Mubarak thugs and occupy Tahrir Square in Cairo and another public space in Alexandria, Egypt's second biggest city.
Now Cairo and Alexandria witness walkouts, occupations, street blockades and other protests by scores or hundreds of people every day, but they haven't sparked the larger-scale outpouring hoped for. The biggest actions lately have been in small cities.
In Damietta, a Nile river port city north of Cairo, tens of thousands of residents blocked traffic during the first two weeks of November, demanding the relocation of a Canadian-Egyptian fertilizer plant that is poisoning the water and killing people. The army tried and failed to end the port blockade. Police opened fire 13 November, killing two demonstrators. In a concession that is not infrequent in this kind of situation, especially when faced with what are formulated as non-political issues, the government then agreed to shut the plant down, but people would not believe the authorities' promises and some stayed in the streets.
In Aswan, far to the south of Cairo on the Nile, hundreds of Nubians (a marginalized minority) marched that same day to protest the police shooting of a boatman, the third such killing in recent months. Here, too, the unrest is continuing.
Why the political movement has dwindled and even retreated overall, at least for now, despite countercurrents, is a question as complex and difficult to answer as it is important. Two reasons are obvious. One is that nine months ago there was a convergence of young bloggers and similar activists (the Facebook page of one of the main organizations had hundreds of thousands of "friends"), the urban lower middle class, workers and other urban poor, veteran leftists, a whole section of capitalists not admitted to Mubarak's inner circle, and at a certain point the US and its Egyptian generals, all convinced that Mubarak must go and that his son Gamal must not be allowed to perpetuate the regime. There is no similar consensus today about the rule of the army and especially about what kind of regime should be established instead.
Another, related reason, is that developments since Mubarak's downfall have served to drive many ordinary people, especially the most downtrodden, into passivity. Whereas for a short time they believed, correctly, that their actions could change history, now they find themselves spectators to almost all the traditional left and liberal parties' obsession with the electoral process. Deliberately or not, these forces have turned their back on the conscious actions of the broadest masses.
The self-defence committees formed in poorer neighbourhoods during the revolt to protect people and their homes from criminals freed and encouraged by the police seem to have become inactive. At the same time, the police have responded to the almost universal (and now freely expressed) hatred of them by refusing to deal with crime and even to organize traffic. Policemen can be seen idly chatting at the almost permanently gridlocked intersections and roundabouts that make driving a car in this city of 20 million both a privilege and a bit like owning a portable tomb. In the face of a daily life that feels increasingly chaotic and often scary, there is a widespread longing for some sort of order, security and stability. If daily life cannot fundamentally change, at least it could become less exhausting.
In this situation, the Islamists are considered likely to win far more votes than any other party, including leftists who try to attract the lower masses with platforms calling for a minimum wage and so on. With their combination of religious proselytizing and supplying basic social services the government fails to provide, such as health clinics and subsidized food on religious holidays, the Islamists are usually the only organized forces visible in poor neighbourhoods. They are asserting dominance among the educated classes as well.
It must be left to other occasions to more deeply examine the variety of Islamist forces and the question of Islam, the ineffectual traditional left and the fundamental questions about society that, to the dismay of the left and liberals, the Islamists have insisted on loudly raising, such as whether the patriarchal rule of men over women that characterizes every dimension of Egyptian daily life should be given the dignity of law. For now, it is enough to say that the non-revolutionary parties that call themselves socialist or communist, and the openly pro-capitalist forces like Mohammed ElBaradei (the former International Atomic Energy Agency head seen by nearly every non-Islamic party and most secularists as the only presidential candidate who could challenge the Muslim Brotherhood and former Mubarak collaborators), all basically agree on the impossibility, at least for now, of a radical change in Egyptian society. They also agree, explicitly in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, that there is no alternative to the kind of IMF-approved and globalisation-dependent economic policies Mubarak pledged to carry out. Tellingly, although the Brotherhood is very active in Damietta, it has ignored the mass movement against the fertilizer plant.
It is ironic that many, although far from all, of the young activists who provided the spark for the 25 January revolt and are still persisting in the streets call themselves "liberals". What's meant is not exactly the European definition, believers in unfettered markets, nor an analogy to the American Democratic Party, but that the achievement of "human rights" – the political liberties so cruelly denied by the Mubarak regime – would constitute a revolution sufficient to transform Egypt. This illusion is made all the stronger by the military regime's efforts to block the establishment of the kind of parliamentary political system and formal rights that characterize most of the imperialist countries. However, even if this goal could be achieved – which is still an unanswered question – it could not offer the possibility of radical economic, political, social and ideological transformation without which daily life and Egypt's fate would remain pretty much the same, whether wrapped in "democratic" or Islamic trappings or some combination.
Contradictory factors
This is a difficult situation for the Egyptian people, but also a very difficult one for their enemies, the Western powers that have subordinated the country's economy and politics to their interests and the native exploiters and would-be exploiters governing in junior partnership with the imperialists.
First of all, there has been the kind of political awakening among the people that comes only at special moments in history. Certainly nothing like the majority of Egypt's 80 million people, but certainly millions, have, literally, taken history into their own hands. This includes many of the dispossessed who are ordinarily forbidden, by force of custom, culture and sometimes arms, to have anything to say about who rules, how and for what. During the Mubarak years, no one dared discuss politics in public. Even friends held their conversations as far from other ears as possible. These days the clash of opinions takes place in many neighbourhoods and is often deafening.
At the same time, the often repeated phrase that "The Egyptian people have lost their fear", and therefore can be counted on to continue standing up no matter what, must be analysed scientifically to understand the contradictoriness of this phenomenon. If for 18 days so many people from diverse social strata were willing to risk death rather than go on living as before, that is related to the fact that they believed, and correctly so, that their actions could make a crucial difference. If today so many of these same people have adopted a "wait and see attitude", that is because this now seems like the most reasonable alternative to them – within the framework of the situation as it is presented to them. While there are disparate factors at work in making a revolutionary moment, surely the masses of people cannot be inspired to risk everything unless at least a core of people among them have been brought to a basic understanding of why their lives and the world are the way they are and how the people themselves can transform them.
Hardly anyone expected Mubarak to be brought down the way he was. The first people who came to Tahrir Square on 25 January expected to go home a few hours later after just another, if much bigger, demonstration. Now that the people have shown what they are capable of, it would be criminal if those who consider themselves revolutionaries remain content with reducing the masses' activity to choosing the "least bad" in a list of uninspiring candidates for office, or anything else that does not build on and seek to take the revolt further, and to a decisive conclusion.
As for the least bad alternative, the imperialists and their Egyptian flunkies do not have what they consider good choices themselves.
A military government, or a civilian government whose decisions are openly subject to military approval, may not be acceptable even to many people who are not remotely revolutionary, including big capitalists and other inherently non-anti-imperialist forces, but the US and its local generals may decide that the domination of the Egyptian people requires that. The Muslim Brotherhood has repeatedly expressed its willingness to maintain Egypt's economic, political and military subordination to the US, but Washington may not have decided yet whether such a relationship is feasible and desirable.
The question of Israel make this all the more complex. A fierce hatred of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and aggression, threats and interference in Egypt is a central factor in the country's political life and people's thinking, including among the lower classes. Often (although not always), it is coupled with hatred for the US for sustaining Israel, the two wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., not to mention unstinting American support for Mubarak. While scratching off Mubarak's name from squares, train stations and maps, the Egyptian military is now using the TV stations and other media at its disposal to promote Mubarak's predecessor in more than a half century of military rule, Anwar Sadat, as the only Egyptian leader able to inflict a severe military blow on Israel (in the 1973 war). At the same time the military must be painfully aware that Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Islamists within the army itself after he capitulated to Israel.
While the SCAF may consider the Muslim Brotherhood a crucial ally, and while Islam is deeply and historically rooted in the Egyptian military (unlike Turkey, whose military was long associated with the secular Kemalist tradition), the Islamist forces may not be able to produce the kind of reliable and stable Israel-tolerant regime the US needs in Egypt. Israel itself may or may not be willing or able to carry out minor compromises (such as halting the expansion of settlements and the establishment of a flimsy Palestinian "mini-state") to make such a grand compromise possible.
This international situation sets the framework and interacts with the domestic situation, including the changing moods among the people themselves. The dynamic nature of this interaction can be seen in the way that the revolt in Egypt has already posed problems for the present world order in the region and beyond, and the way international developments have reverberated in Egypt. For instance, the toppling of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, in a positive way, and, negatively, the almost universal assumption (even in the Egyptian Communist Party and among other self-identified Marxists) that the experience of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of a revolutionary pole in the world with the capitalist coup following the death of Mao in China have "proven" that socialism has failed. Everyone refers to the 25 January "revolution", but people's concept of revolution is extremely limited in scope.
In short, there are real obstacles to the establishment of a durable reactionary regime in Egypt. The future can't be predicted, but there are substantial factors that might prolong the present political instability. That is all the more reason why those who really want to free the Egyptian people from all their chains should not throw away the possibility that the movement that brought down one of the world's most powerful and hated tyrants could go on to achieve the revolutionary political power that Egypt and the world needs to see emerge from this difficult, complicated but still unsettled and potentially favourable situation.
This discouragement is largely the product of the unfolding of events since then, both what has happened and what has not. While many activists express the hope that the political awakening of the Egyptian people may lead to basic social change some time in the future, right now their foremost concern is that the situation may become more difficult and even disastrous, both in terms of political repression and a closing of minds among a large part of the people.
No one chants "The people and the army are one hand" any more, as they did when the army's refusal to fire on protesters helped make Mubarak's dismissal possible. The illusion that the army would be at least neutral toward basic change began to fade after only a few months, even if people still try to cling to it. Driven by distinct class interests and ideologies, the highly heterogeneous social forces whose convergence brought down Mubarak are now pulling the country in different directions. Everyone knows that the army is going to play a key role, even if the generals, their American paymasters and the unpredictable unfolding of events have not decided exactly what that role will be.
The armed forces in Egypt have a monopoly on organized violence, as they do in every state, and economic holdings unparalleled in most other countries, along with the support of the US and other imperialist powers. Here they also benefit from whatever legitimacy the state organs still hold in the eyes of the people. Not a few people would like to see a difference between the Mubarak-era generals in the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the army as an institution they consider patriotic. This is because of its leadership of the 1952 revolution that finally expelled the British occupiers and its role in defending the country against subsequent invasions by Britain, France and Israel.
Many hoped that Mubarak's downfall would be followed by the adoption of a new constitution that would set the framework for bringing about some sort of social change. But the idea that the "rule of law" could reflect anything but which classes and organizations dominate society received a hard blow in March, when the army, working with the Muslim Brotherhood, old regime forces and state-owned and other reactionary media, successfully pushed through a referendum approving the continuation of the old constitution with a few changes for the worse. Unexpectedly, the voter turnout was extremely high, and more than 70 percent of the ballots approved the proposal. This emboldened the armed forces to publicly discuss scenarios such as the promulgation of articles for a new constitution by its own decree, or its own selection of the bulk of the members of the committee to write a new constitution that would give the military the last say on all major questions and continue to shield it from civilian oversight.
The process of parliamentary elections is scheduled to begin in late November and last through January. At first the military promised it would govern for only six months. Now it says it will turn over power to a civilian president in 2013. Most people once saw the election of a parliament and its selection of a committee to write a new constitution as a possible peaceful pathway to change. Now a few have concluded that the real purpose of this process is to re-legitimize the state and disperse the flames that still flair up in the street, both aspects meant to make revolutionary change more difficult, without changing anything basic in society. But even those who still hold out hope for parliamentary democracy in a general way have decided that at this point, the only open question is whether the new parliament will be a circus of disparate forces unwilling and unable to change anything, or one dominated by Islamists seeking to move society backward.
Already, even those forces that identify with the revolt who are most focused on electoral activity are pessimistic about the outcome. The only ones who seem to be looking forward to the polling are the Islamists, above all the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposed the revolt in the beginning, and the Salafists, fundamentalists who hold that Egyptians should live more like Muslims in Mohammed's day, a society of women in burkas and men in beards and robes, though everyone would still have a mobile (cell phone).
An increasingly aggressive army
For many people, hopes for something positive from the army's "hand" vanished by April, when, instead of leaving it to the police, the armed forces themselves assaulted demonstrators challenging their rule, killing two protesters. But far worse occurred on 9 October, when Christians and secularists protesting the armed forces' failure to react to a wave of arson attacks on Coptic churches were themselves attacked, leaving 28 dead and hundreds of wounded and injured.
The demonstrators had marched across central Cairo to Maspero, the headquarters of the state-owned television services. Videos posted online show army armoured vehicles barrelling through the crowd, running over or crushing to death a dozen people. But the fighting was complicated, involving demonstrators, soldiers and a horde of unidentified civilians who charged the crowd and may have fought against soldiers too.
The difficulty in determining exactly what happened reflects the variety of forces at work. It also feeds the widespread feeling that mysterious dark forces are manipulating the situation and seizing the political initiative, a sentiment that leaves many former participants in the revolt paralysed and fearful.
Who were the men in civilian clothing who rampaged against the demonstrators under cover of night? Some believe that they were people from nearby slums organized by Muslim fundamentalists. Ridding Egypt of its Christian minority is a pillar of their programme, along with the institutionalization of the subjugation of women to men and the harsh punishments prescribed by sharia (Islamic law), such as cutting off the right hand of thieves.
Others believe that these men were members of the former state security service and the militia run by Mubarak's National Democratic Party, aiming to derail the people's movement by fomenting divisions between Muslims and Christians. It is sometimes pointed out that the leadership of the Coptic Church supported the old regime and continues to play a conservative political and social role. Some people argue that Israeli agents were also at work amid all this. While Israeli agents cannot possibly be a main factor in such events, as a few people would like to think, they are certainly present and active. (One was recently caught and expelled.)
A similar fog of confusion hovers around the September protests at the Israeli embassy after the SCAF failed to respond to a cross-border Israeli attack. Israeli soldiers, allegedly pursuing Palestinian fighters, killed six Egyptian policemen. Most people say that the protest was legitimate but the actual penetration into the embassy was a provocation meant to discredit the movement. Others believe that action, which forced the Israeli ambassador to flee the country, saved Egypt's honour. The feeling that there is no reliable information – even some people who were at these events say they aren't sure exactly who did what – is related, although not identical to, the question as to whether or not the movement should target the SCAF, instead of giving the military the benefit of a doubt.
But the armed forces government has made its attitude clear in regard to the Maspero incident in a way that sheds light much more broadly. During that protest, state television broadcasters called on "honest Egyptians" to come to Maspero to fight in defence of soldiers they said were being massacred by Christians. Actually, most of the dead were Copts; no soldiers were killed. In the following weeks the armed forces investigated the charges that it had murdered protesters and found itself innocent. There was not the slightest effort to identify the civilian assailants. While the armed forces' relations with the Coptic Church remain strained, the only named targets of the investigation so far have been secular youth who had spearheaded the demonstrations in Tahrir Square and had come to demonstrate against the repression of the Copts.
Plainly, whoever organized the assaults, the army is at the very least protecting them. Further, especially given these facts, there is no reason to simply accept the army's claim that its soldiers had not been issued live rounds and could not have done the shooting.
Two well-known young secular activists were brought in for formal interrogation. Both refused to cooperate. One was released. The other, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a well-known blogger and leading activist previously jailed in 2009, declared that he would refuse to answer questions because the army could not impartially investigate itself, and because the military had no right to try civilians. He was accused of stealing army weapons and destroying state property. Most people who don't support the army consider the idea that he attacked and trashed an armoured vehicle nothing but an action-film fantasy. Even more ominously, he was charged with the content of his blog itself, criticism of the armed forces which, the SCAF said, had fomented the violence.
The young man was remanded to prison for two weeks, pending a decision about what to do with him. Late on the night of 31 October, several thousand people – mostly bloggers and their readers and others mobilized at the last minute on the Net, and thus by definition mainly youth and others from the upper middle classes – marched across Cairo to a prison to support Fattah and another blogger, Maikel Nabil, who has been on hunger strike to protest his two-year sentence for having written, "The army and the people were never one hand." The military sent Nabil to a mental hospital, but the doctors, decrying this repressive manoeuvre, refused to admit him. Fattah, from the cell he shared with many common prisoners, wrote a searing and widely reprinted blog about once again finding himself in Mubarak's dungeons even after the fall of Mubarak. On 13 November the military renewed his imprisonment for at least another two weeks. There was a second, smaller march led by No to Military Trials, a human rights group that is one of the organisations most active in the streets now. (en.nomiltrials.com)
In another late October demonstration, a similar crowd, along with a small Islamist party, had marched from Tahrir Square to Maspero and back to protest the prison death of a young man serving a short sentence on minor criminal charges. The authorities claimed he poisoned himself by swallowing drugs to keep them from being discovered. The protesters, remembering similar justifications for deaths in custody under Mubarak, were inclined to believe the victim's family and a doctor at the hospital where his corpse was taken, who said that the police had forced soapy water down his throat and up his anus until it killed him. While unlike the bloggers, Essam Attah was not a political prisoner but seems to have been a victim of police repression of lower-class youth in general, these events underlined the fact that the police and armed forces are continuing and even stepping up the kind of atrocities that led people to revolt against and drive out Mubarak – and that the police and armed forces are one hand.
Military tribunals have tried bout 12,000 people for political and criminal offences since the armed forces took over. After its televised opening session, Mubarak's trial for murder and other crimes has been indefinitely postponed. The civilian courts have been discredited as utterly corrupt and part of the Mubarak '"system"and are often not able to function. During a rowdy October confrontation between lawyers and judges about proposed court procedures, the magistrates pulled their pistols and began shooting into the air to clear the room. The Mubarak-appointed judges are reviled as pirates licensed to rob the poor, middle class and even the unconnected rich.
This illustrates the broader circumstances in a society where for a half-century the regime openly or effectively appointed officials in all institutions. The authorities from top to bottom are despised as repressive, arbitrary and usually corrupt. For instance, even at the University of Cairo, surprisingly not a political hotbed, there have been important struggles to bring in independent department and faculty heads. The same almost total control that made the Mubarak regime seen invincible has produced a vacuum of legitimacy and moral authority that the generals have had great difficulty filling once people lost their fear and inertia.
A relative ebb
Yet the recent protests have been relatively small and narrowly based compared to January and February. Back then factory workers and other poor people were the first Egyptians to confront the regime's security forces, in the city of Suez. Hundreds of thousands of people of all social classes – Muslims, Copts and non-believers alike – picked up stones and sticks to fight the police and Mubarak thugs and occupy Tahrir Square in Cairo and another public space in Alexandria, Egypt's second biggest city.
Now Cairo and Alexandria witness walkouts, occupations, street blockades and other protests by scores or hundreds of people every day, but they haven't sparked the larger-scale outpouring hoped for. The biggest actions lately have been in small cities.
In Damietta, a Nile river port city north of Cairo, tens of thousands of residents blocked traffic during the first two weeks of November, demanding the relocation of a Canadian-Egyptian fertilizer plant that is poisoning the water and killing people. The army tried and failed to end the port blockade. Police opened fire 13 November, killing two demonstrators. In a concession that is not infrequent in this kind of situation, especially when faced with what are formulated as non-political issues, the government then agreed to shut the plant down, but people would not believe the authorities' promises and some stayed in the streets.
In Aswan, far to the south of Cairo on the Nile, hundreds of Nubians (a marginalized minority) marched that same day to protest the police shooting of a boatman, the third such killing in recent months. Here, too, the unrest is continuing.
Why the political movement has dwindled and even retreated overall, at least for now, despite countercurrents, is a question as complex and difficult to answer as it is important. Two reasons are obvious. One is that nine months ago there was a convergence of young bloggers and similar activists (the Facebook page of one of the main organizations had hundreds of thousands of "friends"), the urban lower middle class, workers and other urban poor, veteran leftists, a whole section of capitalists not admitted to Mubarak's inner circle, and at a certain point the US and its Egyptian generals, all convinced that Mubarak must go and that his son Gamal must not be allowed to perpetuate the regime. There is no similar consensus today about the rule of the army and especially about what kind of regime should be established instead.
Another, related reason, is that developments since Mubarak's downfall have served to drive many ordinary people, especially the most downtrodden, into passivity. Whereas for a short time they believed, correctly, that their actions could change history, now they find themselves spectators to almost all the traditional left and liberal parties' obsession with the electoral process. Deliberately or not, these forces have turned their back on the conscious actions of the broadest masses.
The self-defence committees formed in poorer neighbourhoods during the revolt to protect people and their homes from criminals freed and encouraged by the police seem to have become inactive. At the same time, the police have responded to the almost universal (and now freely expressed) hatred of them by refusing to deal with crime and even to organize traffic. Policemen can be seen idly chatting at the almost permanently gridlocked intersections and roundabouts that make driving a car in this city of 20 million both a privilege and a bit like owning a portable tomb. In the face of a daily life that feels increasingly chaotic and often scary, there is a widespread longing for some sort of order, security and stability. If daily life cannot fundamentally change, at least it could become less exhausting.
In this situation, the Islamists are considered likely to win far more votes than any other party, including leftists who try to attract the lower masses with platforms calling for a minimum wage and so on. With their combination of religious proselytizing and supplying basic social services the government fails to provide, such as health clinics and subsidized food on religious holidays, the Islamists are usually the only organized forces visible in poor neighbourhoods. They are asserting dominance among the educated classes as well.
It must be left to other occasions to more deeply examine the variety of Islamist forces and the question of Islam, the ineffectual traditional left and the fundamental questions about society that, to the dismay of the left and liberals, the Islamists have insisted on loudly raising, such as whether the patriarchal rule of men over women that characterizes every dimension of Egyptian daily life should be given the dignity of law. For now, it is enough to say that the non-revolutionary parties that call themselves socialist or communist, and the openly pro-capitalist forces like Mohammed ElBaradei (the former International Atomic Energy Agency head seen by nearly every non-Islamic party and most secularists as the only presidential candidate who could challenge the Muslim Brotherhood and former Mubarak collaborators), all basically agree on the impossibility, at least for now, of a radical change in Egyptian society. They also agree, explicitly in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, that there is no alternative to the kind of IMF-approved and globalisation-dependent economic policies Mubarak pledged to carry out. Tellingly, although the Brotherhood is very active in Damietta, it has ignored the mass movement against the fertilizer plant.
It is ironic that many, although far from all, of the young activists who provided the spark for the 25 January revolt and are still persisting in the streets call themselves "liberals". What's meant is not exactly the European definition, believers in unfettered markets, nor an analogy to the American Democratic Party, but that the achievement of "human rights" – the political liberties so cruelly denied by the Mubarak regime – would constitute a revolution sufficient to transform Egypt. This illusion is made all the stronger by the military regime's efforts to block the establishment of the kind of parliamentary political system and formal rights that characterize most of the imperialist countries. However, even if this goal could be achieved – which is still an unanswered question – it could not offer the possibility of radical economic, political, social and ideological transformation without which daily life and Egypt's fate would remain pretty much the same, whether wrapped in "democratic" or Islamic trappings or some combination.
Contradictory factors
This is a difficult situation for the Egyptian people, but also a very difficult one for their enemies, the Western powers that have subordinated the country's economy and politics to their interests and the native exploiters and would-be exploiters governing in junior partnership with the imperialists.
First of all, there has been the kind of political awakening among the people that comes only at special moments in history. Certainly nothing like the majority of Egypt's 80 million people, but certainly millions, have, literally, taken history into their own hands. This includes many of the dispossessed who are ordinarily forbidden, by force of custom, culture and sometimes arms, to have anything to say about who rules, how and for what. During the Mubarak years, no one dared discuss politics in public. Even friends held their conversations as far from other ears as possible. These days the clash of opinions takes place in many neighbourhoods and is often deafening.
At the same time, the often repeated phrase that "The Egyptian people have lost their fear", and therefore can be counted on to continue standing up no matter what, must be analysed scientifically to understand the contradictoriness of this phenomenon. If for 18 days so many people from diverse social strata were willing to risk death rather than go on living as before, that is related to the fact that they believed, and correctly so, that their actions could make a crucial difference. If today so many of these same people have adopted a "wait and see attitude", that is because this now seems like the most reasonable alternative to them – within the framework of the situation as it is presented to them. While there are disparate factors at work in making a revolutionary moment, surely the masses of people cannot be inspired to risk everything unless at least a core of people among them have been brought to a basic understanding of why their lives and the world are the way they are and how the people themselves can transform them.
Hardly anyone expected Mubarak to be brought down the way he was. The first people who came to Tahrir Square on 25 January expected to go home a few hours later after just another, if much bigger, demonstration. Now that the people have shown what they are capable of, it would be criminal if those who consider themselves revolutionaries remain content with reducing the masses' activity to choosing the "least bad" in a list of uninspiring candidates for office, or anything else that does not build on and seek to take the revolt further, and to a decisive conclusion.
As for the least bad alternative, the imperialists and their Egyptian flunkies do not have what they consider good choices themselves.
A military government, or a civilian government whose decisions are openly subject to military approval, may not be acceptable even to many people who are not remotely revolutionary, including big capitalists and other inherently non-anti-imperialist forces, but the US and its local generals may decide that the domination of the Egyptian people requires that. The Muslim Brotherhood has repeatedly expressed its willingness to maintain Egypt's economic, political and military subordination to the US, but Washington may not have decided yet whether such a relationship is feasible and desirable.
The question of Israel make this all the more complex. A fierce hatred of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and aggression, threats and interference in Egypt is a central factor in the country's political life and people's thinking, including among the lower classes. Often (although not always), it is coupled with hatred for the US for sustaining Israel, the two wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., not to mention unstinting American support for Mubarak. While scratching off Mubarak's name from squares, train stations and maps, the Egyptian military is now using the TV stations and other media at its disposal to promote Mubarak's predecessor in more than a half century of military rule, Anwar Sadat, as the only Egyptian leader able to inflict a severe military blow on Israel (in the 1973 war). At the same time the military must be painfully aware that Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Islamists within the army itself after he capitulated to Israel.
While the SCAF may consider the Muslim Brotherhood a crucial ally, and while Islam is deeply and historically rooted in the Egyptian military (unlike Turkey, whose military was long associated with the secular Kemalist tradition), the Islamist forces may not be able to produce the kind of reliable and stable Israel-tolerant regime the US needs in Egypt. Israel itself may or may not be willing or able to carry out minor compromises (such as halting the expansion of settlements and the establishment of a flimsy Palestinian "mini-state") to make such a grand compromise possible.
This international situation sets the framework and interacts with the domestic situation, including the changing moods among the people themselves. The dynamic nature of this interaction can be seen in the way that the revolt in Egypt has already posed problems for the present world order in the region and beyond, and the way international developments have reverberated in Egypt. For instance, the toppling of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, in a positive way, and, negatively, the almost universal assumption (even in the Egyptian Communist Party and among other self-identified Marxists) that the experience of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of a revolutionary pole in the world with the capitalist coup following the death of Mao in China have "proven" that socialism has failed. Everyone refers to the 25 January "revolution", but people's concept of revolution is extremely limited in scope.
In short, there are real obstacles to the establishment of a durable reactionary regime in Egypt. The future can't be predicted, but there are substantial factors that might prolong the present political instability. That is all the more reason why those who really want to free the Egyptian people from all their chains should not throw away the possibility that the movement that brought down one of the world's most powerful and hated tyrants could go on to achieve the revolutionary political power that Egypt and the world needs to see emerge from this difficult, complicated but still unsettled and potentially favourable situation.
Montag, 17. Oktober 2011
Egypt: night of terror and defiance
10 October 2011. A World to Win News Service. The political situation in Egypt has turned even more complicated and explosive in the wake of an attack on Coptic Christians. A 9 October march demanding an end to discrimination and attacks against Copts was met by a level of violence unseen since President Hosni Mubarak turned over power to the military last February. This in turn led to a fierce protest against the ruling Supreme Armed Forces Council (SAFC). The fighting that afternoon and into the night left two dozen dead and hundreds injured, according to official sources.
Although discrimination and attacks on members of the Coptic Church are nothing new, they have worsened in the last year. Fire bomb attacks on churches killed 20 people in January and 12 in May, and in March Islamic-Coptic fighting in Tahrir Square left 13 dead. With one exception, no one has even been arrested for these atrocities. The immediate incident that sparked this most recent march was the burning of a church and two Christian-owned homes in a town in the southern Egyptian province of Aswan.
While condemning the attack, the provincial governor, a general, placed the blame on the Copts for breaking the law, saying they had been praying illegally in a building not specifically licensed for Christian services as the law requires. Coptic officials pointed out that the building, burned down to prevent its renovation, had been used as a church for 80 years and that official permission is difficult or impossible to acquire. Shortly after, protests in Cairo and Alexandria demanded that the governor be fired. Some demonstrators called for the resignation of SACF head Field Marshall Mohamed Tantawi and the Interior Minister. Soldiers and riot police forcibly dispersed these early October protests. A video posted on Youtube showed them beating a priest.
On Sunday, 9 October, many thousands of people gathered in Shubra, a Cairo district with a large Coptic concentration. The majority but not all were Christians. They marched toward Maspero Square where the state-owned TV station is located. At a traffic underpass, men in civilian clothing on the bridge above began to pour down rocks on the marchers, and gunshots were heard. The crowd pushed on to Maspero Square chanting, "This is our country!" Some shouted, "The people want the fall of the Field Marshall!", the same slogan that led to Mubarak's downfall. At the square they were met with gunfire. Two armoured personnel carriers (APCs) roared out from behind military lines, their machine gun turrets whirling as they shot in all directions. Then at least one of them ploughed through the crowd, dragging a half dozen or more people under its wheels.
As the morgue in a Christian hospital began to fill with crushed bodies and gunshot victims, state television announced that the Christians had stolen army weapons and killed soldiers. The official media called on "honest Egyptians" to come defend the soldiers. But word-of-mouth and social media were also bringing people to Maspero Square and nearby Tahrir Square, ground zero for the Egyptian revolt. (Another demonstration was going on in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city.) Many came to defend the Copts and demand the end of military rule. Others, chanting,"The people want the fall of the Copts" and "There is no god but Allah", came to kill Christians.
Witnesses indicate that the police and army concentrated on attacking Copts and their defenders, some of whom were throwing stones and burning police vehicles in reaction to the attacks. But there was also fighting between Copts and Moslem fundamentalists, and even soldiers and Islamics. Instead of neat battle lines, there was chaos. According to the regime, the dead included several soldiers, although later this was put in doubt. Elsewhere in Cairo, mobs attacked Christian-owned businesses.
The army imposed a curfew, but the next day, Monday, was not calm. There were outbursts at the hospital and other places as family members came to claim the crushed and mutilated bodies of their loved ones. (Survivors said they were afraid to go to state-run hospitals, or to entrust their dead to them.) Joint police-army patrols in central Cairo stopped people and demanded ID, and beat them if their names revealed they were Christian. They even did this in media offices.
That afternoon about 20,000 people marched from the Coptic hospital on Ramses Street to the main cathedral and on to Maspero Square, chanting "Muslims and Copts are one hand!", "This is not a sectarian conflict, this is a massacre!" and "Down with military rule!" Along the way neighbourhood residents passed out water bottles to the marchers.
Military spokesmen denounced a "foreign hand" behind the disturbances and warned that there would be an investigation and arrests. Those arrested, they said, would be subject to military trials.
By the day after the massacre, much of Egyptian society had become polarized between the military and its numerous supporters, and those who believe that all Egyptians should have the same rights.
Just as the military had responded to a September march demanding an end to the use of military tribunals against civilians by arresting protesters and holding them for military trial, so now the military has responded to criticism for failing to protect Copts by stepping up both violence and propaganda against these Christians. The accusation that they serve a "foreign hand" is meant to imply that somehow the Western powers are behind attempts to "destabilise" the regime. But the truth is the opposite. For decades the US has given more money to the Egyptian military than any other except Israel's, and the Western powers are counting on it to preserve imperialist economic and political domination. The real "foreign hand" at work is the Egyptian armed forces as they fight to stabilise their rule as a servant of the West, particularly Washington.
Historically, the Copts, who comprise about ten percent of the country's population, included many landowners and figures in the urban elite. Their roots in Egypt go back much further than Islam – their language comes from the ancient Egyptian tongue. The Coptic church arose through a break with the other streams of Christianity in the fifth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth century Copts were often associated with others in what was once Egypt's large Christian population (Armenians, Greeks, Italians and many other settler communities) whose Westernized culture was both linked to the country's oppression as a British colony and kept Egyptian intellectual life tightly linked to the rest of the world. The 1952 military revolution led by Gamal Nasser that overthrew London's puppet king and drove out the British occupation forces also largely pushed Copts out of public office and much of public life.
Since then official attacks on the Copts have always been a way to hide political and economic reliance on foreign powers (in Nasser's case the US and USSR at various times) by upholding first "Arabism" and later Islam as Egypt's identity and soul, in opposition to the concept of an Egyptian nation.
In some Western countries, historically anti-Semitism served to promote an identity between antagonistic classes against an illusory common enemy. Anti-Coptic propaganda and pogroms have played a similar role at times in Egypt, but the result and often conscious aim has also been to substitute an illusory religious identity (Islamic culture versus some vaguely-defined secular/"Western" life style) for any project for real national liberation.
Actually, Nasser's successors, his fellow military strongmen Anwar Sadat and Mubarak, courted the Coptic church, even while also courting Islamics, seeing both religions as bulwarks against social unrest. The Coptic church officially supported Mubarak and instructed its followers to do likewise – in the name of avoiding an Islamic regime. If the church has not enjoyed the same relations with today's ruling generals, at least to some extent that is because its officials fear that the armed forces are ready to feed them to the Islamic fundamentalists. Yet the Pope of the Coptic Church, Shenuda III, blamed "strangers... infiltrators" for attacking the security forces.
It is revealing that although today's Coptic demonstrations often contain a strong religious current, the regime and its supporters lump Copts together with political radicals and secularists in general. That says something about how dividing lines are forming.
The Wafd party, historically the main proponent of parliamentary democracy, has unleashed an invective against the Copts that is matched only by the official media and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Wafd newspaper condemned the Copts for "aggression" against the armed forces that imperils the country's transition to "democracy".
The Muslim Brotherhood was both built up and persecuted during previous regimes. Like the armed forces, it officially condemned violence against Copts. But like the military, its criticism of both sides, Copts and their killers, is far from even handed. A Brotherhood spokesman bluntly declared that "all Egyptian people have legitimate demands, not just our Coptic brothers. This is certainly not the right time to demand them", repeating the argument that any protests against the military endangers the transition to a parliamentary regime, specifically by disrupting preparations for the first round of elections in late November. They said the same thing about demonstrations for women's rights a few months ago – to slightly veil the fact they they actually oppose equal rights for women. The women were also brutally attacked.
While there are major differences between the Brotherhood (which says it is for a "civil" and not religious state) and the Salafists (Muslim fundamentalists) who have been in the forefront of the attacks, and while the relationships between the Brotherhood, the Salafists and the military are complicated and unpredictable, there is a consensus among many reactionary forces that the new state is going to be Islamic in some form or another. In that case, Copts are not going to get equal rights with Muslims (for instance, the law forbids Muslims to convert to Christianity but not the other way). In some form or other, more than ever Islam will be a major source of legitimacy for the state and promoted as the country's social "glue".
That, of course, is meant to exclude and repress anything "anti-Islamic", including revolutionary thinking and forces, not just Coptic Christianity. One of Egypt's most prominent bloggers pointed out that with this unrestrained attack against a relatively isolated religious minority, the military was demonstrating what it could do to any serious threat to its rule. But this is being done in the name of Islam, as if it represented a change, a recovery of the people's dignity, even a part of "the revolution" the military claims to represent. It is not openly presented as part of an economic, political and ideological package that represents continuity with Egyptian society as it was under Mubarak and his precursors.
Despite the fall of Mubarak and the intense, vibrant political life that victory has enabled people to enjoy, Egypt remains a country whose economy is structured principally by the interests of US and European capital. Its people share a common national identity and need their nation to break free of foreign domination if the society is to be transformed in their interests – if they are to be fulfilled as human beings and not merely consoled by religion – and if they are to play their role in transforming the whole world.
It is important to note that the military and the Islamics have found common ground with some (but not all) supposedly secular forces like the pro-Western Wafd. Some people fear that the only alternatives are between a pro-US military regime and an Islamic regime. It is becoming clearer that the electoral process that is supposed to become the centre of all political thinking and activity for the next several years could result in a combination of both.
None of the official "choices" the electoral process is offering can satisfy the aspirations that have brought enormous numbers of people into the streets. Masks are dropping. In September the armed forces bowed to orders from the US to protect the Israeli embassy. Even some people who were against the attack on the embassy were very happy after an angry crowd forced the Israeli ambassador to flee. Now the military's unleashing of Islamic violence to rally a section of the people around it is profoundly disturbing even to many who once chanted "The people and army are one!" Events themselves are pushing many people to take stands they had once never intended to take.
Although discrimination and attacks on members of the Coptic Church are nothing new, they have worsened in the last year. Fire bomb attacks on churches killed 20 people in January and 12 in May, and in March Islamic-Coptic fighting in Tahrir Square left 13 dead. With one exception, no one has even been arrested for these atrocities. The immediate incident that sparked this most recent march was the burning of a church and two Christian-owned homes in a town in the southern Egyptian province of Aswan.
While condemning the attack, the provincial governor, a general, placed the blame on the Copts for breaking the law, saying they had been praying illegally in a building not specifically licensed for Christian services as the law requires. Coptic officials pointed out that the building, burned down to prevent its renovation, had been used as a church for 80 years and that official permission is difficult or impossible to acquire. Shortly after, protests in Cairo and Alexandria demanded that the governor be fired. Some demonstrators called for the resignation of SACF head Field Marshall Mohamed Tantawi and the Interior Minister. Soldiers and riot police forcibly dispersed these early October protests. A video posted on Youtube showed them beating a priest.
On Sunday, 9 October, many thousands of people gathered in Shubra, a Cairo district with a large Coptic concentration. The majority but not all were Christians. They marched toward Maspero Square where the state-owned TV station is located. At a traffic underpass, men in civilian clothing on the bridge above began to pour down rocks on the marchers, and gunshots were heard. The crowd pushed on to Maspero Square chanting, "This is our country!" Some shouted, "The people want the fall of the Field Marshall!", the same slogan that led to Mubarak's downfall. At the square they were met with gunfire. Two armoured personnel carriers (APCs) roared out from behind military lines, their machine gun turrets whirling as they shot in all directions. Then at least one of them ploughed through the crowd, dragging a half dozen or more people under its wheels.
As the morgue in a Christian hospital began to fill with crushed bodies and gunshot victims, state television announced that the Christians had stolen army weapons and killed soldiers. The official media called on "honest Egyptians" to come defend the soldiers. But word-of-mouth and social media were also bringing people to Maspero Square and nearby Tahrir Square, ground zero for the Egyptian revolt. (Another demonstration was going on in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city.) Many came to defend the Copts and demand the end of military rule. Others, chanting,"The people want the fall of the Copts" and "There is no god but Allah", came to kill Christians.
Witnesses indicate that the police and army concentrated on attacking Copts and their defenders, some of whom were throwing stones and burning police vehicles in reaction to the attacks. But there was also fighting between Copts and Moslem fundamentalists, and even soldiers and Islamics. Instead of neat battle lines, there was chaos. According to the regime, the dead included several soldiers, although later this was put in doubt. Elsewhere in Cairo, mobs attacked Christian-owned businesses.
The army imposed a curfew, but the next day, Monday, was not calm. There were outbursts at the hospital and other places as family members came to claim the crushed and mutilated bodies of their loved ones. (Survivors said they were afraid to go to state-run hospitals, or to entrust their dead to them.) Joint police-army patrols in central Cairo stopped people and demanded ID, and beat them if their names revealed they were Christian. They even did this in media offices.
That afternoon about 20,000 people marched from the Coptic hospital on Ramses Street to the main cathedral and on to Maspero Square, chanting "Muslims and Copts are one hand!", "This is not a sectarian conflict, this is a massacre!" and "Down with military rule!" Along the way neighbourhood residents passed out water bottles to the marchers.
Military spokesmen denounced a "foreign hand" behind the disturbances and warned that there would be an investigation and arrests. Those arrested, they said, would be subject to military trials.
By the day after the massacre, much of Egyptian society had become polarized between the military and its numerous supporters, and those who believe that all Egyptians should have the same rights.
Just as the military had responded to a September march demanding an end to the use of military tribunals against civilians by arresting protesters and holding them for military trial, so now the military has responded to criticism for failing to protect Copts by stepping up both violence and propaganda against these Christians. The accusation that they serve a "foreign hand" is meant to imply that somehow the Western powers are behind attempts to "destabilise" the regime. But the truth is the opposite. For decades the US has given more money to the Egyptian military than any other except Israel's, and the Western powers are counting on it to preserve imperialist economic and political domination. The real "foreign hand" at work is the Egyptian armed forces as they fight to stabilise their rule as a servant of the West, particularly Washington.
Historically, the Copts, who comprise about ten percent of the country's population, included many landowners and figures in the urban elite. Their roots in Egypt go back much further than Islam – their language comes from the ancient Egyptian tongue. The Coptic church arose through a break with the other streams of Christianity in the fifth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth century Copts were often associated with others in what was once Egypt's large Christian population (Armenians, Greeks, Italians and many other settler communities) whose Westernized culture was both linked to the country's oppression as a British colony and kept Egyptian intellectual life tightly linked to the rest of the world. The 1952 military revolution led by Gamal Nasser that overthrew London's puppet king and drove out the British occupation forces also largely pushed Copts out of public office and much of public life.
Since then official attacks on the Copts have always been a way to hide political and economic reliance on foreign powers (in Nasser's case the US and USSR at various times) by upholding first "Arabism" and later Islam as Egypt's identity and soul, in opposition to the concept of an Egyptian nation.
In some Western countries, historically anti-Semitism served to promote an identity between antagonistic classes against an illusory common enemy. Anti-Coptic propaganda and pogroms have played a similar role at times in Egypt, but the result and often conscious aim has also been to substitute an illusory religious identity (Islamic culture versus some vaguely-defined secular/"Western" life style) for any project for real national liberation.
Actually, Nasser's successors, his fellow military strongmen Anwar Sadat and Mubarak, courted the Coptic church, even while also courting Islamics, seeing both religions as bulwarks against social unrest. The Coptic church officially supported Mubarak and instructed its followers to do likewise – in the name of avoiding an Islamic regime. If the church has not enjoyed the same relations with today's ruling generals, at least to some extent that is because its officials fear that the armed forces are ready to feed them to the Islamic fundamentalists. Yet the Pope of the Coptic Church, Shenuda III, blamed "strangers... infiltrators" for attacking the security forces.
It is revealing that although today's Coptic demonstrations often contain a strong religious current, the regime and its supporters lump Copts together with political radicals and secularists in general. That says something about how dividing lines are forming.
The Wafd party, historically the main proponent of parliamentary democracy, has unleashed an invective against the Copts that is matched only by the official media and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Wafd newspaper condemned the Copts for "aggression" against the armed forces that imperils the country's transition to "democracy".
The Muslim Brotherhood was both built up and persecuted during previous regimes. Like the armed forces, it officially condemned violence against Copts. But like the military, its criticism of both sides, Copts and their killers, is far from even handed. A Brotherhood spokesman bluntly declared that "all Egyptian people have legitimate demands, not just our Coptic brothers. This is certainly not the right time to demand them", repeating the argument that any protests against the military endangers the transition to a parliamentary regime, specifically by disrupting preparations for the first round of elections in late November. They said the same thing about demonstrations for women's rights a few months ago – to slightly veil the fact they they actually oppose equal rights for women. The women were also brutally attacked.
While there are major differences between the Brotherhood (which says it is for a "civil" and not religious state) and the Salafists (Muslim fundamentalists) who have been in the forefront of the attacks, and while the relationships between the Brotherhood, the Salafists and the military are complicated and unpredictable, there is a consensus among many reactionary forces that the new state is going to be Islamic in some form or another. In that case, Copts are not going to get equal rights with Muslims (for instance, the law forbids Muslims to convert to Christianity but not the other way). In some form or other, more than ever Islam will be a major source of legitimacy for the state and promoted as the country's social "glue".
That, of course, is meant to exclude and repress anything "anti-Islamic", including revolutionary thinking and forces, not just Coptic Christianity. One of Egypt's most prominent bloggers pointed out that with this unrestrained attack against a relatively isolated religious minority, the military was demonstrating what it could do to any serious threat to its rule. But this is being done in the name of Islam, as if it represented a change, a recovery of the people's dignity, even a part of "the revolution" the military claims to represent. It is not openly presented as part of an economic, political and ideological package that represents continuity with Egyptian society as it was under Mubarak and his precursors.
Despite the fall of Mubarak and the intense, vibrant political life that victory has enabled people to enjoy, Egypt remains a country whose economy is structured principally by the interests of US and European capital. Its people share a common national identity and need their nation to break free of foreign domination if the society is to be transformed in their interests – if they are to be fulfilled as human beings and not merely consoled by religion – and if they are to play their role in transforming the whole world.
It is important to note that the military and the Islamics have found common ground with some (but not all) supposedly secular forces like the pro-Western Wafd. Some people fear that the only alternatives are between a pro-US military regime and an Islamic regime. It is becoming clearer that the electoral process that is supposed to become the centre of all political thinking and activity for the next several years could result in a combination of both.
None of the official "choices" the electoral process is offering can satisfy the aspirations that have brought enormous numbers of people into the streets. Masks are dropping. In September the armed forces bowed to orders from the US to protect the Israeli embassy. Even some people who were against the attack on the embassy were very happy after an angry crowd forced the Israeli ambassador to flee. Now the military's unleashing of Islamic violence to rally a section of the people around it is profoundly disturbing even to many who once chanted "The people and army are one!" Events themselves are pushing many people to take stands they had once never intended to take.
Donnerstag, 24. Februar 2011
Egypt: a great victory won, more to be done
14 February 2011. A World to Win News Service. The Egyptian people have accomplished something great. They are to be congratulated, admired and emulated. They have earned the right to a mighty celebration. Everywhere people are happy for them and for what their achievement may mean for the today's intolerable order in the region and the globe.
In a word, they have made their voices and their lives count. Because this is real, not just rhetoric, it has consequences:
- They have brought down a tyrant whose rule has been a pillar of American domination of the Middle East, the dispossession of the Palestinian people, the enslavement of Egypt to alien interests and the robbery and humiliation of its people.
- In the course of a few weeks, they have awoken to political life and surged onto the political stage in their millions, breaking the chains of hopelessness and cynicism that have held them and too many of the world's people captive.
- They have truly taken the initiative in their hands, creating a situation all too rare in today's world, one where events have been driven mainly by the struggle of the people and not the manoeuvring of reactionaries.
This has demonstrated a truth that far fewer people would have been able to see only a short time ago: that even in a region where the status quo has seemed as eternal as it is hated, the reactionaries big and small are not necessarily the masters of people's fate. Their power depends on guns, deception and the people's passivity, and now that the people have been able to shake that power mightily, we can all more clearly see how it might be possible to go even further.
In addition to revealing the weaknesses of the rulers, the Egyptian movement has also revealed something often hidden about the people themselves: their ability to transform themselves as they transform the world around them.
Without exaggerating what can be done in a few days in a few square blocks of one city, the people massed in Cairo's Tahrir Square gave themselves and the world at least a glimpse of another kind of society.
The square was once the location of a British colonial barracks. Later it was surrounded by vast buildings symbolizing the country's continuing foreign domination and the cement-worshiping, soulless might of a regime that has been foreign capital's greedy local partner. Once a venue for protests, its roundabout and roads were redesigned to exclude strollers and crowds.
But in the course of 18 days, it became a place where people demonstrated their determination to end oppression and their willingness to take risks and make sacrifices with no thought to personal reward, beginning to cherish and take responsibility for not just their own families but brothers and sisters near and far, and finding themselves able to make more individual contributions to collective strength than they every might have thought possible.
As one demonstrator told a reporter, in Tahrir Square she had a taste of the kind of society people want to live in.
Now that the door to the future has been forced ajar, extremely powerful forces are conspiring to slam it tightly shut again.
Chief among them are the imperialist powers, especially the U.S., along with the UK, Germany, France, Italy and other countries whose rulers have fattened off the looting of the countries they dominate and the exploitation of their peoples. Like Washington and London, Peking has emphasised its desire for “stability and normal order”, not change, in Egypt. (AP, 12 February)
Although imperialist hands are often all but unseen in Egypt, their grip extends throughout that society.
Economically, what Egypt produces, and how, is determined by the imperialist-dominated world market and ultimately by the interests of imperialist capital. That is why an exceptionally fertile country with a favourable climate and plentiful water went from being self-sufficient to becoming dependent on imported food, and why 40 percent of its population can barely eat even as others grow obscenely wealthy. The very so-called prosperity that Egypt has undergone in the last decade has meant ruin for many people, while the countryside has stagnated or worse and the capital has become swollen with millions of former peasants hungry for any work. Selling tourist trinkets and services has replaced any project to build up the country. One of Egypt's main sources of income has become the ten percent of its workforce who labour abroad. Educated youth and intellectuals are unable to find any permanent employment, let alone make the kind of contribution to their country's needs that could bring fulfilment.
Why, in a potentially agriculturally rich country with developed industry, one whose people have shown their desire to take care of one another, are there 50,000 children living and starving on the streets of Cairo alone?
The people's misery has been a source of wealth for some. This is not just a matter of corruption, although there has been plenty of it. The "normal workings" of capitalism in this country dominated by foreign capital have enriched the classes most closely associated with that capital, the owners of the banks and big businesses – often monopolies in their field – closely tied to foreign investment and the world market.
This economic set-up has political representatives to enforce it.
For more than half a century, the chief representative of foreign capital has been the army. The army overthrew the monarchy in 1952, bringing an end to British domination, and for several decades starting in the mid-1950s tied its fortunes to the USSR, then emerging as a social-imperialist (socialist in words, imperialist in facts) rival to the U.S.-led bloc. While the U.S. was happy to see the weakening of British influence in Egypt, it worked to make the Egyptian army an instrument of its own political domination.
For the last three decades Egypt's senior officers have been systematically trained at the National Defense University in Washington and have been in frequent contact with their U.S. counterparts. Over this period the U.S. has handed over a total of $40 billion to the Egyptian military, which ranks second only to Israel as a long-term recipient of the "aid" money the U.S. spends to protect its strategic interests.
This is not just a matter of buying influence, but of shared interests. The Egyptian armed forces directly own a significant section of the country's factories and other enterprises and real estate. Other huge state companies in industries such as textile and petroleum are run by ex-generals. The military is not just the backbone of the state, as it is in every country; it is also a key player in the country's imperialist-dependent economy.
At the same time, while the armed forces have been Hosni Mubarak's political base, his family has used their political position to extend their influence through the private sector and help it expand. These private-sector oligarchs are in their own way also dependent on the state, but friction has broken out between them and some armed forces leaders.
No one can deny that the U.S. kept Mubarak in power for three decades, even though some people in the Obama administration are now trying to blame Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and not the president for the embarrassing fact that the U.S. tried to cling to him until his next-to-last day. (The New York Times, 14 February 2011) Now it seems that even General Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's right-hand man and eleventh-hour Vice President, the man Washington officials publicly named as their second choice if Mubarak became unsustainable, may have become so closely associated with Mubarak's refusal to resign that he, too, has become politically unviable. But as Egyptians said when they heard rumours that Mubarak is dying, the dead have long ruled Egypt.
When it comes to those who represent the dead hand of the past squeezing the living, the U.S. can still count on the Egyptian armed forces. Mubarak personally appointed his generals and had the power to determine the composition of the entire officer corps. (Some people think that because 40 percent of soldiers are conscripts, the Egyptian army as an institution is "one hand with the people". Actually, the wall between officers and the rank and file is even more impervious in Egypt than most countries.)
Mubarak made the head of the Armed Forces Supreme Council now running the country, Field Marshall Mohamed Tantawi, Defence Minister in 2008, and also handed him the portfolio for the Ministry of Military Production – two posts he continues to hold. This makes Tantawi not only head of the military but also the country's chief CEO. His commitment to U.S. domination of the army, the country and the region is attested to not only by the praise U.S. officials are heaping on him by name, but by the fact that in 1991, he was head of the Egyptian forces that fought side by side with the American invaders against the Iraqi people.
(In this regard, nothing says more about American political goals in the Middle East and the world than the fact that the U.S. sent its troops to remove Saddam Hussein, but for decades did not even publicly criticise Mubarak, a bloodthirsty tyrant as hated as Saddam, and generally like his Iraqi cousin in every way but one – Saddam displeased the U.S.)
An analyst for the Whitehall think-tank Royal United Services Institute, Shashank Josji, concluded, Tantawi "embodies the reactionary forces still embedded at the heart of a regime that may have shed its figurehead but not its essence." (BBC, 12 February 2011)
A 2008 U.S. diplomatic cable made public thanks to WikiLeaks calls Tantawi "Mubarak's poodle", but the truth is that right now he is Washington's lead dog in Egypt.
As for the Supreme Military Council's second in command, armed forces chief of staff Lieutenant General Sami Enan, while he is less known to the public and not as closely associated with Mubarak, he is definitely a favourite of General Mike Mullen. During the recent upheaval, the chief of staff of the American armed forces has frequently taken time out from overseeing the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan to call Enan, despite the Obama government's supposed non-interference in Egyptian affairs. In a podcast distributed to U.S. service members, Mullen expresses great confidence in Enan. "We've had a very strong relationship with the Egyptian military for decades," the American general said. "And as I look to the future, I certainly look to that to continue." (U.S. Department of Defense Website)
Even if we didn't know these men by their friends, we would know them by their works. Along with suspending the now-irrelevant constitution that assured Mubarak's political future, dissolving the completely discredited parliament Mubarak had stuffed with members of his own party (who are resigning by the thousands to set up a new party) and declaring itself in charge, the military Supreme Council's first acts were to ratify Egypt's shameful alliance with Israel – following the explicit public demand of an Obama spokesman – and approve the cabinet that Mubarak himself had appointed, headed by Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, the head of the air force like Mubarak once was.
Immediately after the military council declared itself the supreme authority, Tantawi met with the once and future Central Bank Governor, Justice Minister and head of the Constitutional Court, and then chatted on the phone with his Zionist counterpart, Israeli Defence Minister and chief Palestinian-killer Ehud Barak. The old/new Finance Minister, Samir Radwan, announced that there would be "no change" in government economic policies.
As if this weren't enough proof that the military is determined to act as the guarantor of the continuity of the country's political and economic structures, its first actions on the ground were to use a combination of cajoling and bullying in an attempt to clear protesters out of Tahrir Square, and to threaten to ban strikes by the independent labour unions and professional associations that have broken free of government control.
Still a lot of rubbish to be removed
It's a good thing that the Egyptian people have shown their strength and determination, because they still have a lot of work to do.
They face political battles in the coming days that could be decisive, not in the sense that winning them would mean the final defeat of a whole filthy power structure and the kind of society it represents, but in that the immediate question is whether or not the forces of order are going to be able to stuff the genie back in the bottle. The movement must not loose its momentum and the initiative it has gained at the cost of such sacrifice.
There are additional immediate victories needed to survive and go forward.
Right now the question is posed of "stability" versus "instability". For the enemies of the people, "stability" is defined above all not by preventing looting, meeting people's immediate needs and cleaning up the rubble, but by the Supreme Council's repeated call that the crowds should stop making demands and go home.
That kind of "stability" would mean the end of the kind of fearless and vibrant political debate that the people have always been denied until now. It would mean an end to people meeting in voluntary forms of organisation to take collective decisions and enforce their will. The people need the streets and the square, and they are furious with the continuation of the state of emergency that has been in force with only a short interruption since the monarchy was overthrown. So far Tantawi has adopted the same hypocritical excuses made by Mubarak and then Suleiman – any consideration of dropping the state of emergency law must come later, after calm is restored. In other words, first shut up and then we'll see about your right to speak.
The emergency law is no mere formality. The military is still detaining people without charges, and in some cases torturing them. Human Rights Watch reported that they were aware of at least 119 people detained without charges by the army and the military police between the night of 28 January, when the military moved to replace the regular police, and the time Mubarak resigned. The Guardian wrote that according to testimony it has gathered, the military detained “thousands” during the three weeks of upheaval.
As part of their test of strength with remaining forces of the old regime, the people are demanding the punishment of government officials and security forces who shed the people's blood, starting with those responsible for the murder of Khaled Said. Last June the police pulled that Alexandria youth out of a cyber café and beat him to death on the spot. That murder inspired the "We Are All Khaled Said" Facebook page that helped initiate what some Egyptians are calling "the revolution of dignity".
The importance of whether or not security forces pay for their crimes can be seen in the way this issue is still being fought out in demonstrations and violent repression in Tunisia, where clearly it has more to do with the future than the past. The current struggle in that country a month after the ouster of the Ben Ali regime shows another factor just beginning to make itself felt in Egypt: some social classes tend to be satisfied now that the tyrant is gone, while many basic masses are thirstier than ever for the kind of basic change in their lives that the still-standing system can't offer. Other major immediate issues will certainly take shape shortly. In the course of these battles the people can build their understanding, organization and strength.
It is particularly important that the people do not let themselves be fooled – and not fool themselves – with the illusion that they can wield power and obtain freedom through referendums and elections. If the military really does organize new elections and fulfils its promises to hand over government to some civilians, it will be for the purpose of demobilizing the people, driving them off the political stage and robbing them of their initiative. The purpose would be to "stabilize" the real power, the dictatorship of imperialism's local partners, with the army as their core and defender, no matter what kind of suit the prime minister and cabinet members wear.
In getting rid of Mubarak, the people have inflicted a serious blow to the power structure. The U.S. and the Egyptian military tried their best to hang on to him not because their domination depended on any individual but because the people driving him out creates a dangerous and unstable situation for these rulers.
For decades the army has mainly been able to hide its fist by outsourcing most of the day-to-day work of arrests and torture to the police, and even managed to stay out of the political limelight as an institution, despite Mubarak's military base and the role of the generals. It has benefited from the popular illusions this has made possible and people's confusion about the role of the army historically due to its role in driving out the British and defending the country against Israel. It has also benefited from people's hope for some other solution other than going up against an army, especially, although not only, because they don't as yet have an army of their own.
But now, against its will and against the hopes of the masters of empire, the army has had to move to the front lines politically, and if it uses the old police, the military police or any other armed body against the people, it will squander a vital part of its political capital. This is not a good situation for the people's enemies.
In the course of fighting the immediate battles, those who most want to see Egypt freed and especially those who hate all forms of oppression and exploitation have to confront the deep causes for the misery of the country and its people and for the criminal state of the world as a whole. They need to study the experience of revolution, both the failure of so many countries to achieve liberation after the fall of their own Mubaraks, and especially the communist-led Russian and Chinese revolutions which, despite shortcomings and eventual defeat, demonstrated the possibility of moving toward breaking free of world imperialism as part of a global revolutionary movement aimed at the liberation of all humanity.
Experience has shown that real revolution is very difficult, but it has also shown that nothing else has even a chance, in the long run, of beating back the forces seeking to "stabilise" everything Egyptians hate and breaking through to the future glimpsed, if only partially and briefly, during the days and nights of combat and solidarity, great pain and great joy, in Tahrir Square.
In a word, they have made their voices and their lives count. Because this is real, not just rhetoric, it has consequences:
- They have brought down a tyrant whose rule has been a pillar of American domination of the Middle East, the dispossession of the Palestinian people, the enslavement of Egypt to alien interests and the robbery and humiliation of its people.
- In the course of a few weeks, they have awoken to political life and surged onto the political stage in their millions, breaking the chains of hopelessness and cynicism that have held them and too many of the world's people captive.
- They have truly taken the initiative in their hands, creating a situation all too rare in today's world, one where events have been driven mainly by the struggle of the people and not the manoeuvring of reactionaries.
This has demonstrated a truth that far fewer people would have been able to see only a short time ago: that even in a region where the status quo has seemed as eternal as it is hated, the reactionaries big and small are not necessarily the masters of people's fate. Their power depends on guns, deception and the people's passivity, and now that the people have been able to shake that power mightily, we can all more clearly see how it might be possible to go even further.
In addition to revealing the weaknesses of the rulers, the Egyptian movement has also revealed something often hidden about the people themselves: their ability to transform themselves as they transform the world around them.
Without exaggerating what can be done in a few days in a few square blocks of one city, the people massed in Cairo's Tahrir Square gave themselves and the world at least a glimpse of another kind of society.
The square was once the location of a British colonial barracks. Later it was surrounded by vast buildings symbolizing the country's continuing foreign domination and the cement-worshiping, soulless might of a regime that has been foreign capital's greedy local partner. Once a venue for protests, its roundabout and roads were redesigned to exclude strollers and crowds.
But in the course of 18 days, it became a place where people demonstrated their determination to end oppression and their willingness to take risks and make sacrifices with no thought to personal reward, beginning to cherish and take responsibility for not just their own families but brothers and sisters near and far, and finding themselves able to make more individual contributions to collective strength than they every might have thought possible.
As one demonstrator told a reporter, in Tahrir Square she had a taste of the kind of society people want to live in.
Now that the door to the future has been forced ajar, extremely powerful forces are conspiring to slam it tightly shut again.
Chief among them are the imperialist powers, especially the U.S., along with the UK, Germany, France, Italy and other countries whose rulers have fattened off the looting of the countries they dominate and the exploitation of their peoples. Like Washington and London, Peking has emphasised its desire for “stability and normal order”, not change, in Egypt. (AP, 12 February)
Although imperialist hands are often all but unseen in Egypt, their grip extends throughout that society.
Economically, what Egypt produces, and how, is determined by the imperialist-dominated world market and ultimately by the interests of imperialist capital. That is why an exceptionally fertile country with a favourable climate and plentiful water went from being self-sufficient to becoming dependent on imported food, and why 40 percent of its population can barely eat even as others grow obscenely wealthy. The very so-called prosperity that Egypt has undergone in the last decade has meant ruin for many people, while the countryside has stagnated or worse and the capital has become swollen with millions of former peasants hungry for any work. Selling tourist trinkets and services has replaced any project to build up the country. One of Egypt's main sources of income has become the ten percent of its workforce who labour abroad. Educated youth and intellectuals are unable to find any permanent employment, let alone make the kind of contribution to their country's needs that could bring fulfilment.
Why, in a potentially agriculturally rich country with developed industry, one whose people have shown their desire to take care of one another, are there 50,000 children living and starving on the streets of Cairo alone?
The people's misery has been a source of wealth for some. This is not just a matter of corruption, although there has been plenty of it. The "normal workings" of capitalism in this country dominated by foreign capital have enriched the classes most closely associated with that capital, the owners of the banks and big businesses – often monopolies in their field – closely tied to foreign investment and the world market.
This economic set-up has political representatives to enforce it.
For more than half a century, the chief representative of foreign capital has been the army. The army overthrew the monarchy in 1952, bringing an end to British domination, and for several decades starting in the mid-1950s tied its fortunes to the USSR, then emerging as a social-imperialist (socialist in words, imperialist in facts) rival to the U.S.-led bloc. While the U.S. was happy to see the weakening of British influence in Egypt, it worked to make the Egyptian army an instrument of its own political domination.
For the last three decades Egypt's senior officers have been systematically trained at the National Defense University in Washington and have been in frequent contact with their U.S. counterparts. Over this period the U.S. has handed over a total of $40 billion to the Egyptian military, which ranks second only to Israel as a long-term recipient of the "aid" money the U.S. spends to protect its strategic interests.
This is not just a matter of buying influence, but of shared interests. The Egyptian armed forces directly own a significant section of the country's factories and other enterprises and real estate. Other huge state companies in industries such as textile and petroleum are run by ex-generals. The military is not just the backbone of the state, as it is in every country; it is also a key player in the country's imperialist-dependent economy.
At the same time, while the armed forces have been Hosni Mubarak's political base, his family has used their political position to extend their influence through the private sector and help it expand. These private-sector oligarchs are in their own way also dependent on the state, but friction has broken out between them and some armed forces leaders.
No one can deny that the U.S. kept Mubarak in power for three decades, even though some people in the Obama administration are now trying to blame Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and not the president for the embarrassing fact that the U.S. tried to cling to him until his next-to-last day. (The New York Times, 14 February 2011) Now it seems that even General Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's right-hand man and eleventh-hour Vice President, the man Washington officials publicly named as their second choice if Mubarak became unsustainable, may have become so closely associated with Mubarak's refusal to resign that he, too, has become politically unviable. But as Egyptians said when they heard rumours that Mubarak is dying, the dead have long ruled Egypt.
When it comes to those who represent the dead hand of the past squeezing the living, the U.S. can still count on the Egyptian armed forces. Mubarak personally appointed his generals and had the power to determine the composition of the entire officer corps. (Some people think that because 40 percent of soldiers are conscripts, the Egyptian army as an institution is "one hand with the people". Actually, the wall between officers and the rank and file is even more impervious in Egypt than most countries.)
Mubarak made the head of the Armed Forces Supreme Council now running the country, Field Marshall Mohamed Tantawi, Defence Minister in 2008, and also handed him the portfolio for the Ministry of Military Production – two posts he continues to hold. This makes Tantawi not only head of the military but also the country's chief CEO. His commitment to U.S. domination of the army, the country and the region is attested to not only by the praise U.S. officials are heaping on him by name, but by the fact that in 1991, he was head of the Egyptian forces that fought side by side with the American invaders against the Iraqi people.
(In this regard, nothing says more about American political goals in the Middle East and the world than the fact that the U.S. sent its troops to remove Saddam Hussein, but for decades did not even publicly criticise Mubarak, a bloodthirsty tyrant as hated as Saddam, and generally like his Iraqi cousin in every way but one – Saddam displeased the U.S.)
An analyst for the Whitehall think-tank Royal United Services Institute, Shashank Josji, concluded, Tantawi "embodies the reactionary forces still embedded at the heart of a regime that may have shed its figurehead but not its essence." (BBC, 12 February 2011)
A 2008 U.S. diplomatic cable made public thanks to WikiLeaks calls Tantawi "Mubarak's poodle", but the truth is that right now he is Washington's lead dog in Egypt.
As for the Supreme Military Council's second in command, armed forces chief of staff Lieutenant General Sami Enan, while he is less known to the public and not as closely associated with Mubarak, he is definitely a favourite of General Mike Mullen. During the recent upheaval, the chief of staff of the American armed forces has frequently taken time out from overseeing the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan to call Enan, despite the Obama government's supposed non-interference in Egyptian affairs. In a podcast distributed to U.S. service members, Mullen expresses great confidence in Enan. "We've had a very strong relationship with the Egyptian military for decades," the American general said. "And as I look to the future, I certainly look to that to continue." (U.S. Department of Defense Website)
Even if we didn't know these men by their friends, we would know them by their works. Along with suspending the now-irrelevant constitution that assured Mubarak's political future, dissolving the completely discredited parliament Mubarak had stuffed with members of his own party (who are resigning by the thousands to set up a new party) and declaring itself in charge, the military Supreme Council's first acts were to ratify Egypt's shameful alliance with Israel – following the explicit public demand of an Obama spokesman – and approve the cabinet that Mubarak himself had appointed, headed by Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, the head of the air force like Mubarak once was.
Immediately after the military council declared itself the supreme authority, Tantawi met with the once and future Central Bank Governor, Justice Minister and head of the Constitutional Court, and then chatted on the phone with his Zionist counterpart, Israeli Defence Minister and chief Palestinian-killer Ehud Barak. The old/new Finance Minister, Samir Radwan, announced that there would be "no change" in government economic policies.
As if this weren't enough proof that the military is determined to act as the guarantor of the continuity of the country's political and economic structures, its first actions on the ground were to use a combination of cajoling and bullying in an attempt to clear protesters out of Tahrir Square, and to threaten to ban strikes by the independent labour unions and professional associations that have broken free of government control.
Still a lot of rubbish to be removed
It's a good thing that the Egyptian people have shown their strength and determination, because they still have a lot of work to do.
They face political battles in the coming days that could be decisive, not in the sense that winning them would mean the final defeat of a whole filthy power structure and the kind of society it represents, but in that the immediate question is whether or not the forces of order are going to be able to stuff the genie back in the bottle. The movement must not loose its momentum and the initiative it has gained at the cost of such sacrifice.
There are additional immediate victories needed to survive and go forward.
Right now the question is posed of "stability" versus "instability". For the enemies of the people, "stability" is defined above all not by preventing looting, meeting people's immediate needs and cleaning up the rubble, but by the Supreme Council's repeated call that the crowds should stop making demands and go home.
That kind of "stability" would mean the end of the kind of fearless and vibrant political debate that the people have always been denied until now. It would mean an end to people meeting in voluntary forms of organisation to take collective decisions and enforce their will. The people need the streets and the square, and they are furious with the continuation of the state of emergency that has been in force with only a short interruption since the monarchy was overthrown. So far Tantawi has adopted the same hypocritical excuses made by Mubarak and then Suleiman – any consideration of dropping the state of emergency law must come later, after calm is restored. In other words, first shut up and then we'll see about your right to speak.
The emergency law is no mere formality. The military is still detaining people without charges, and in some cases torturing them. Human Rights Watch reported that they were aware of at least 119 people detained without charges by the army and the military police between the night of 28 January, when the military moved to replace the regular police, and the time Mubarak resigned. The Guardian wrote that according to testimony it has gathered, the military detained “thousands” during the three weeks of upheaval.
As part of their test of strength with remaining forces of the old regime, the people are demanding the punishment of government officials and security forces who shed the people's blood, starting with those responsible for the murder of Khaled Said. Last June the police pulled that Alexandria youth out of a cyber café and beat him to death on the spot. That murder inspired the "We Are All Khaled Said" Facebook page that helped initiate what some Egyptians are calling "the revolution of dignity".
The importance of whether or not security forces pay for their crimes can be seen in the way this issue is still being fought out in demonstrations and violent repression in Tunisia, where clearly it has more to do with the future than the past. The current struggle in that country a month after the ouster of the Ben Ali regime shows another factor just beginning to make itself felt in Egypt: some social classes tend to be satisfied now that the tyrant is gone, while many basic masses are thirstier than ever for the kind of basic change in their lives that the still-standing system can't offer. Other major immediate issues will certainly take shape shortly. In the course of these battles the people can build their understanding, organization and strength.
It is particularly important that the people do not let themselves be fooled – and not fool themselves – with the illusion that they can wield power and obtain freedom through referendums and elections. If the military really does organize new elections and fulfils its promises to hand over government to some civilians, it will be for the purpose of demobilizing the people, driving them off the political stage and robbing them of their initiative. The purpose would be to "stabilize" the real power, the dictatorship of imperialism's local partners, with the army as their core and defender, no matter what kind of suit the prime minister and cabinet members wear.
In getting rid of Mubarak, the people have inflicted a serious blow to the power structure. The U.S. and the Egyptian military tried their best to hang on to him not because their domination depended on any individual but because the people driving him out creates a dangerous and unstable situation for these rulers.
For decades the army has mainly been able to hide its fist by outsourcing most of the day-to-day work of arrests and torture to the police, and even managed to stay out of the political limelight as an institution, despite Mubarak's military base and the role of the generals. It has benefited from the popular illusions this has made possible and people's confusion about the role of the army historically due to its role in driving out the British and defending the country against Israel. It has also benefited from people's hope for some other solution other than going up against an army, especially, although not only, because they don't as yet have an army of their own.
But now, against its will and against the hopes of the masters of empire, the army has had to move to the front lines politically, and if it uses the old police, the military police or any other armed body against the people, it will squander a vital part of its political capital. This is not a good situation for the people's enemies.
In the course of fighting the immediate battles, those who most want to see Egypt freed and especially those who hate all forms of oppression and exploitation have to confront the deep causes for the misery of the country and its people and for the criminal state of the world as a whole. They need to study the experience of revolution, both the failure of so many countries to achieve liberation after the fall of their own Mubaraks, and especially the communist-led Russian and Chinese revolutions which, despite shortcomings and eventual defeat, demonstrated the possibility of moving toward breaking free of world imperialism as part of a global revolutionary movement aimed at the liberation of all humanity.
Experience has shown that real revolution is very difficult, but it has also shown that nothing else has even a chance, in the long run, of beating back the forces seeking to "stabilise" everything Egyptians hate and breaking through to the future glimpsed, if only partially and briefly, during the days and nights of combat and solidarity, great pain and great joy, in Tahrir Square.
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