Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Egypt, back to the future: Scoring points, making none

 Marwan Bishara

Marwan Bishara senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.

Last Modified: 28 Jul 2013 18:20

Egyptians need to provide an answer on what kind of change they want.

"In summary, Egypt has much on its plate and no one party, let alone one leader or a general would be able to even begin to tackle its urgent challenges," writes Marwan Bishara [Reuters]

Awaiting history's judgment of Defence Minister Abdel Fattah El Sisi, his call for street demonstrations to support his fight against "violence and terror", is outrageous, though not terribly surprising.

Faced with mounting outcry from the Brotherhood's rank and file against the ousting of President Morsi, the general has continued to escalate his ultimatums and the use of force to quell cries for the return of the elected president.

Indeed, one wonders how Sisi, who's a deputy prime minister, makes such a bombastic declaration that calls for major escalation as if there is no prime minister or a president!

As the man in charge of Egypt's safety and stability, tasked with containing violence in the public sphere, Sisi seemed all too eager to amplify tensions and confrontations to protect his turf.

To street or not to be 

Soon after the coup and arrest of a number of their leaders, the Muslim Brotherhood concluded that the only way to protect themselves against further repression would be to retrench in the nation's streets and public squares.

Down but not out, the Brotherhood leadership called on their supporters to set up camp during the hottest month of the year, which also happens to be Ramadan, leaving them without food or drinking water throughout the day. They have remained steadfast in the hope of forcing the military to backtrack on its decision. 

The military, in response, called upon the anti-Brotherhood camp to openly and publically display their resolve.

So both the military and Brotherhood continued to score points in a heated competition, including over size, duration, passion, and exact number of demonstrators who heeded their call and turned out on the streets.

As if bringing millions more to gather would resolve anything, such incitement and the consequent building of tension in fact further destabilises the country. 

Indeed, watching mayhem and death in the streets makes clear just how counterproductive and dangerous it is to escalate strains between opposing forces. Rather than bring the country closer to a solution, whipping up and pronouncing tension only brings Egypt a step closer to chaos. 

Three interconnected challenges

If one listens carefully to what the street is collectively saying, it's quite simple to make out the message: the overall majority of Egyptians do not want to be ruled by one party, one ideology, or one force. 

They still wish for what they wanted back on January 25, 2011: "Bread, freedom, and social justice", deliverables that his detractors believe Morsi failed to accomplish, or as his supporters contend, didn't have the time to realise.

But Egypt's foremost challenges - security, economy, and good governance - cannot be resolved on the streets; nor can they be resolved in the shadow of a conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military, from which Egypt and other Arab countries have suffered for decades. 

Instead, Egypt needs to restore stability and security by starting with a de-escalation of the mass demonstrations, which importantly, must not be accomplished by force. Today's unravelling violence might seem to provide for a short term solution, yet, entangling, intractable problems will arise. 

If the Brotherhood failed on a number of important fronts and President Morsi showed little leadership on economic and social issues, General Sisi is acting quite irresponsibly. Besides, the military's record on good governance and the economy is dismal to say the least. 

In fact, none among Egypt's leaders, generals, and religious symbols to this day have proven capable of lifting the country out of deadlock. Those capable of leading have no answers, and those with answers are not leading. Indeed, the louder and the more self-righteous they are, the less constructive the leaders seem to be.

Be that as it may, now that the streets have spoken again, it is the institutions, political parties, and the greater civil society, including this new generation of youth, which need to act responsibly. This begins by depersonalising the hostilities and restraining the ambition of overtly ambitious men.

Not who, what 

Just when the Brotherhood had concluded that their fight shouldn't be about Morsi per se, but rather about defending "the legitimacy of the ballot box", Sisi made it more about himself and his personal campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood.

Having his face plastered on posters, while protesters demand an end to the era of a singular ruler, only goes to confirm worries over the return of the military men to politics. 

But after people revealed their disapproval and outright hostility toward Mubarak's one man, one party rule, and later to Morsi's attempt at the same system of rule, Sisi's attempts at one man, one military rule is far-fetched.

If the Muslim Brotherhood is inward-looking, the military is even more insular when openness to others is indispensable to governing the country. 

In retrospect, it was clear since Mubarak was on his way out in January 2011 that the big question facing Egyptians was not who replaces President Mubarak, but rather what replaces the Mubarak regime and how to accomplish the transition.

Yet, the rush to hold presidential elections while Mubarak's regime remained intact went on to split the nation and complicate the challenges facing Egypt.

In an increasingly polarised and hostile political atmosphere, any one leader is sure to become a divisive factor. And when the choice, as it's likely to be, is between an Islamist and a secular candidate, any winner will end up alienating the voters and supporters of the other side at a time when inclusion, not alienation, is most urgently needed. 

Put simply, gone are the days of one leader representing one party or of one side prevailing in Egypt. And that requires a major change in the system of governance.

As they ponder a new pluralistic constitution that befits this great land, Egyptians might want to consider replacing the Presidential System that produced pseudo modern pharaohs, with a system that would more likely produce broad coalition governments. 

The quiet deterioration of the economy 

Lost in the street noise is the silent deterioration of the economy. As Egyptians take their time to resolve their issues, they could be faced with a totally bankrupt country that is incapable of resolving any of its basic problems.

The earlier that Egyptians sober up from their disillusionment with the politics of power, and get down to the business of running their country, the more likely it will be for them to save it from total collapse.  

The $13bn pumped into the economy from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to help the military maintain its control are quite substantial; but, such funds can only go so far in beginning to heal the structural challenges facing the economy.

It's true that "man cannot live by bread alone"; yet, nor can he survive without it. And it so happens that in the Egyptian dialect, bread and life share the same word, a'ish

Indeed, those who are likely to suffer most in the future are the urban poor who are less likely to afford feeding their families. Egypt's total debt is already 87 percent of GDP and 74 percent of that is domestic. As instability and insecurity deepen, the debt is skyrocketing on top of 12 percent interest rates.

Since three quarters of the debt is owed to local banks, any default on payment is bound to affect the entire economy. In 2012-2013, Egypt paid a quarter of all the government's budget expenditures - or 147 out of 615 billion Egyptian Pounds (EGP) ($21bn USD) to service its debt.

That sum nearly equals the total of all government expenditures put toward public sector wages, or 149 billion EGP ($21.28bn), which by itself is also quite inflated by nepotism that creates unproductive jobs.

Add to all this, the Egyptian government's subsidies for fuel and food has already reached a high 167 billion EGP ($24bn), or more than a quarter of the total government budget.

Therefore, interest payments, wages, and subsidies represent 75 percent of the budget's total expenditures, leaving any future government with less than a quarter of its budget to be put toward all other important business of the state.

Moreover, if we factor in lower wages, lower productivity and lower taxes caused by instability, the next government is more likely to be bankrupt and/or incapable of fixing the deteriorating infrastructure of the country, not to speak of its schools, hospitals and social services.

Last year, public investment was as low as 47bn EGP ($6.7bn), or less than 3 percent of the economy of 1715bn EGP ($245bn).

This is no way to rebuild a country after a revolution.

Comprehensive solutions

In summary, Egypt has much on its plate and no one party, let alone one leader or a general, will be able even to begin tackling the country's urgent challenges.

Even a widely supported broad-coalition government will find it challenging to govern in the near and intermediate run, considering the need to affect painful structural transformations all the while attaining the promised social justice.

The three challenges delineated above are entirely interdependent and cannot be tackled separately. Good and collective governance is central to improving security and the economy, just as improving security is indispensable to saving the economy. 

Nations cannot live on slogans, and revolutions do not succeed without deep social and economic transformations.

Egyptians deserve representatives that are able to make the relevant points to improve life, not score points that lead to death and destruction.

Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.

Egypt, back to the future: Scoring points, making none - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

If you think you know what 'debt' is, read on

 Alex Andreou

Alex Andreou theguardian.com, Monday 29 July 2013 19.00 AEST

There is a chasm between the common perception of debt and the reality. Unless we change this, more crises will come

Buster Keaton playing cards with two cowboys in a scene from Go West

'None of the mainstream parties are offering any radical or innovative solutions to deal with the root causes of chronic debt. They simply offer versions of huge debt, carefully disguised in complex jargon.' Photograph: John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images

Few people understand what debt is. We may understand the scaled-down metaphors that politicians serve up – "household debt", or "maxed-out credit cards". But the core issues relating to debt on a larger scale – the interaction between public and private, its circular and illusory nature, its connection to money creation – are too complex for most people to get their heads around.

And yet, these are critical points in informing the debate of how to deal with debt. A recent ComRes poll revealed that only 6% of the public understand that Britain's public debt is continuing to rise – by £600bn during the course of this administration, to be precise – and is due to hit £1.4tn by 2015. By ignoring the real root causes, because they are too complex or esoteric or just plain boring, and focusing instead on fictional Romanian migrants and benefit fraudsters with drawn curtains, we deny ourselves any possibility of finding real solutions.

Fewer still seem to be asking the question: to whom do we owe this money, exactly? Even taking the government's "household in debt" comparison, any debt advice service would recommend making a list of creditors so that one may assess where high-interest urgent obligations are, the possibility of consolidation, restructuring or default, negotiated solutions – in short, an overview. Most importantly, such an overview would permit shrewd, critical analysis of how one ended up in this position and how to prevent a repeat. By avoiding the analysis, we condemn ourselves to sleepwalking into the next crisis and the one after that.

A global view is a good place to start in order to understand the illusory nature of debt. At the end of last year, according to the CIA factbook, the accumulated external world debt was $72.8tn. At the same time the gross world product (the total of countries' GDPs) was $71.8tn. Quite a milestone, you might think, all countries globally owing more externally than they produce. Yet, this is gross debt, meaning if A owes B $100 and B owes C $100 and C owes A $100, it shows as $300 cumulative debt when, in truth, it cancels itself out. On a broader view therefore, since all this money is owed to entities within this global community, it could just as credibly be said that "the world owes this money to itself", and so owes nothing.

This circularity is absolutely key to comprehending the root of the current crisis, and is replicated at national levels. An analysis of the interconnectedness of US and Japanese debt identifies Japan as one the US's largest creditors (almost 10%). Japan has the largest national debt-to-GDP ratio in the world – over 230%. It is heavily in debt, compared to its product, and yet in a position to lend to the world's largest economy. In fact, Japan's position is much more stable than countries with lower ratios. One of the key factors contributing to this stability is the fact that the vast majority of this debt is owed internally – it is Japanese citizens and companies who have been funding Japanese debt. Of what it owes externally, its largest creditor is – can you guess? – the US.

Identifying a country's creditors is, therefore, a key consideration. This is why scaremongering comparisons, between the UK and Greece for instance, are disingenuous and deeply unhelpful. Only about 30% of UK gilts (the IOUs issued by the government to generate extra money) are held by overseas investors, which is in fact down from a peak of nearly 34% immediately following the crisis. By contrast Greek government debt is overwhelmingly externally held – the minimum estimate is about 70% – especially so since the imposed haircut on private creditors. Greek bonds also attract vastly higher interest rates and have shorter average length to maturity. This means that more than 50% of the entire Greek budget goes to servicing debt in some way or another.

Nowhere is the ludicrous circularity of debt more starkly exposed than when looking at the domestic holding of UK gilts. The biggest single holder of UK government debt is the Bank of England, mainly through the programme of quantitative easing – which is essentially issuing gilts and buying them back from yourself with interest using imaginary money. Banks and other financial institutions are also in on the act. At its peak in the second quarter of 2012 their holding of UK gilts was worth £215bn. Simply put, this means that we borrowed money from the sector which needed bailing out and gave it back to them as a bailout. Not only have banks, including RBS and Lloyds, been buying gilts with the money we gave them, we specifically demanded that they do it, in order to detoxify their investment portfolio.

At this point, no doubt, some sage is already furiously typing in the comments section that we didn't just give them the money; we purchased shares in the companies. But as the sale price of Northern Rock and attempts to revalue and hurry the sale of Lloyds and RBS demonstrate, we will never make anywhere near the money we put in. So, at least some of it was a generous gift from all of us, including future "us", to the incompetent bank directors' bonus fund.

It is also important to note that while our governments are concerned about public debt to the point of hysteria, with moves afoot to even set G20 targets and limits, they are remarkably relaxed about private debt. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has revised its projection of UK household debt and now forecasts that it will rise from £1.5 tn in 2010 to £2.1 tn (or 173% of average household income) in 2015. This is a much more worrying set of figures than public debt – and much less sustainable prima facie. Still, government efforts are ceaselessly focused on encouraging consumer confidence, so that we go out and spend even more. Banks are being blamed for the lack of recovery for not lending freely enough.

In fact, if one were to look at total debt rather than just public debt and compare the UK and Greece, for instance, a staggeringly different picture emerges. It turns out that while each Greek citizen on average owes under $50,000, each Brit owes over $150,000. This is why Cameron's rhetoric of "you can't solve a debt crisis by borrowing more" rings so utterly hollow to anyone with even a basic understanding of how the system works. It creates a totally bogus consensus on debt. Because, within the current financial system that is both dependent on and addicted to debt, the only way to solve a debt crisis is precisely to borrow more.

Now there may be ideological arguments for maxing out individuals' credit cards at astronomical APRs rather than the state's at 3.5%, but nobody is voicing them. Instead we are debating a choice between debt or no debt, which is – duh – a no-brainer. It is also, unfortunately, fantasy. None of the mainstream parties are offering any radical or innovative solutions to deal with the root causes of chronic debt. They are simply offering versions of huge debt that are balanced differently between public and private and carefully disguised in complex jargon. Meanwhile our liabilities, both state and private, continue to balloon, lives are destroyed by a programme of ideologically driven austerity and nobody is looking at the underlying system.

The problem is by no means new. Thomas Edison summed it up very neatly in 1921: "[Henry Ford] thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30m of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66m – that is what it amounts to, with interest … It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30m in bonds and not $30m in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer, and the other helps the people."

Both at national and international levels, the focus continues to be exclusively on the irresponsible borrower, with complete immunity for the totally reckless lender or the enormous leech-like industry which continues to feed on the interest or "economic value" created by shifting fictional money around. On the contrary, we count such activity as growth. And things will not change as long as this industry continues to be shrouded in too-complicated-for-you-to-understand language. Because people will not feel informed, confident or courageous enough to question a fractional reserve banking system in which creating fake money, buying it from ourselves with interest and giving it away to private entities "too big to fail", is considered normal.

Instead, ideological entrenchment rules, almost creationist in its resistance to evidence. Rovers scour the surface of Mars for minerals and hadrons collide into each other in a vast tunnel underneath the Alps, while political theory and economics have seemingly advanced not one iota in 100 years. Labels like socialist, neoliberal, statist or libertarian continue to hinder the possibility of any real discussion and the identification of common ground which may lead to consensus. We all know vaguely what we are against, while having no idea what the hell we might be for. An age of "down with this sort of thing". The result is a complete absence of practical solutions to practical problems.

There is an old joke that goes: how many economists does it take to change a lightbulb? None. If the lightbulb needs changing, market forces will do it. We have given this idea its chance, for more than a century. We are still sitting in a dark room. Maybe all we need is one good electrician.

If you think you know what 'debt' is, read on | Alex Andreou | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Monday, July 29, 2013

A failed economic experiment with very human costs

By Ross Cameron 

 

We must admit that European currency union was a dumb decision, fuelled by the misty-eyed vanity of the Left.

 Photo: We must admit that European currency union was a dumb decision, fuelled by the misty-eyed vanity of the Left. (AFP: Frank Rumpenhorst)

The euro is a straight jacket, with Europe's productive north forced to pick up the tab for bailouts and the poorer south unable to return to growth through devaluation, writes Ross Cameron.

Of the great policy blunders since WWII, a single currency for Europe is among the worst.

This is a self-flagellation cult, daily tearing flesh from bone. It has replaced friendship with tension, turned peers into debtors, and is now causing a haemorrhage of southern Europe's most precious resource - its people.

Australia's leading voice at the OECD, economist Adrian Blundell-Wignall ("ABW" for short), special adviser to the OECD secretary general on financial markets, this week posed the question, "Why did Europe press the serpent of currency union to its own breast?"

ABW was addressing the Sydney Ideas Forum, hosted by Sydney University. His main topic was the causes of the recent Atlantic economic crisis (there was no crisis in the Asia Pacific) and the adequacy of the responses adopted to stop it recurring.

The OECD's view is that the global banks are smarter, wealthier and more powerful than the regulators supervising their conduct, so they continue to operate at imprudent ratios of lending to deposits.

ABW is especially worried about easy credit creation to exploit high-risk derivatives and synthetic securities - which cop the blame for the last crisis. He implies that the power imbalance between the poachers and gamekeepers is so great (especially in Europe) that German chancellor Angela Merkel wouldn't pull her Audi off the autobahn for a drive-thru coffee without permission from Deutsche Bank.

This leads into the structural inflexibility of the European economy after currency union. Failure to learn from history means repeating the mistakes of currency union between unequally yoked powers, i.e. the "sterling zone" union between the United Kingdom and Ireland from 1840-1927.

England was positioned to extract the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, while Ireland was largely bypassed as an undercapitalised, rural, subsistence economy. Over the 80 years under the sterling zone, the GDP of the UK grew by 620 per cent, whereas Ireland's GDP struggled to grow by 40 per cent. As the value of the British pound appreciated to reflect English industrial power, the Irish were unable to bring goods and services to market that were attractive to buyers when priced in sterling.

The logical remedy for a country in Ireland's plight was to devalue its currency, making its exports cheaper (as Japan has just done), but the sterling zone was a straight jacket. The preferred option of the Irish became exodus. Ireland's population halved from 6.4 million in 1841 to 3 million in 1925. The Irish diaspora was a blessing to the rest of the world but a disaster for Ireland. Restoration of the Irish pound in the 1920s applied a tourniquet to the outflow of the Paddys and Siobhans, but the structural damage was done.

Europe is now split into a productive north - nicely placed to sell turbines, satellites and Volkswagens into the Asian century - and a poorer farming, tourism and welfare economy of the south, which must compete against Asia to sell T-shirts and homestays.

None of the extant choices are easy. The north is growing weary of subsidies and bailouts. "Internal devaluation" means a painful reduction of your own prices and wages.

ABW supports creation of a "Charlemagne currency" for northern Europe, while releasing the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) to return to their own, presumably devalued, pre-union, escudo, lira, drachma and peso. (Joblessness in Spain, Greece and Portugal is 18-20 per cent).

The status quo approach is to repeat the Irish exodus. In 2012, after growth since 1946, Spain and Greece each suffered net decline of 200,000 people. This is an inflection point, hastened by abysmal birth rates, from which those countries will never recover.

So how did sane people get into this mess? The "European idea" gained momentum after two world wars (the first could be described as a European civil war) under the influence of well-intentioned people like Jean Monnet, and others, trying to avoid future intra-European conflict and build a counterweight to the US dollar.

I take no pleasure in the suffering and waste of human potential we are now witnessing. I accept that Australia has been a complacent beneficiary of its mineral wealth, now under Labor, with one of the lowest rates of productivity growth in the OECD. But we must admit that European currency union was a dumb decision, fuelled by the misty-eyed vanity of the Left. It was a failure to understand how human beings actually live and work and flourish - or fail. Hard-headed leaders in Sweden and Denmark dodged the bullet, as did the UK. And how lucky they are feeling now, as continental neighbours squirm and twist in agonies of their own making.

I think back to the abuse heaped on Margaret Thatcher and her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Brian Howe, for their plucky resistance to Britain swapping the pound for the euro. They were described by British Labor as reactionary, parochial, lacking a "progressive" instinct, xenophobic, isolationist.

Barely concealed was a view among the Left that British Conservatives were just too dumb to recognise the great windfall that currency union offered. "We are the world, we are the children ..." was their rallying cry. They wanted to throw off tired notions of national sovereignty that had served the world well since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

Support for full European integration was central to that most dangerous, expensive and self-serving belief - the moral superiority of the Left. There are parallels to Australia's Labor-Green alliance unilaterally dismantling John Howard's Pacific Solution but, unlike Europe, we will claw back the losses over a generation (we will never recover a thousand floating corpses in the Indian Ocean or the damage to relations with Indonesia and PNG).

Statecraft is not a Game of Thrones for credulous undergraduates sporting nose studs, fawning like suckers before every trending meme. The decisions of the few have ended the hopes of the many in Europe, and a clutch of once great nations are now grieving the end of their stellar role in the human story. Let us hope that Australia's leaders can do better.

Ross Cameron is a former federal Liberal MP. View his full profile here.

A failed economic experiment with very human costs - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Special report: How the Muslim Brotherhood lost Egypt

Author: Reuters

When Egyptians poured onto the streets in their millions to demand the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, few thought they would return two years later demonstrating for the overthrow of the man they elected to replace him.

The stunning fall from power of President Mohamed Morsy, and the Muslim Brotherhood which backed him, has upended politics in the volatile Middle East for a second time after the Arab Spring uprisings toppled veteran autocrats.

Some of the principal causes were highlighted a month before the army intervened to remove Morsy, when two of Egypt's most senior power brokers met for a private dinner at the home of liberal politician Ayman Nour on the island of Zamalek, a lush bourgeois oasis in the midst of Cairo's seething megalopolis. It was seen by some as a last attempt to avert a showdown.

The two power brokers were Amr Moussa, 76, a long-time foreign minister under Mubarak and now a secular nationalist politician, and Khairat El-Shater, 63, the Brotherhood's deputy leader and most influential strategist and financier. Moussa suggested that to avoid confrontation, Morsy should heed opposition demands, including a change of government.

"He [Shater] acknowledged what I said about the bad management of Egyptian affairs under their government and that there is a problem," Moussa told Reuters. "He was talking carefully and listening attentively."

Shater, a thick-set grizzly bear of a man who is now in detention and cannot tell his side of events, replied that the government's problems were due to the "non-cooperation of the ‘deep state'" - the entrenched interests in the army, the security services, some of the judiciary and the bureaucracy, according to Moussa's account.

"The message that I got after one hour was that OK, he would discuss with me, agree with some of my arguments, disagree with the rest, but they were not in the mood of changing," Moussa said. Nour gave a similar account, saying Shater did not budge. But he added that the talks might have started a process of political compromise had they not been exposed in the media.

"[Shater] is a normal person and his appearance does not do him justice. His appearance gives the impression of mysteriousness and ruthlessness, but he is well-mannered and gentle," Nour said.

The dinner on a terrace around the swimming pool of Nour's 8th-floor duplex apartment was cut short when journalists got wind of the meeting. Moussa left convinced that the Brotherhood were over-confident, incompetent in government and had poor intelligence on what was brewing in the streets and the barracks.

Yet many Egyptian and foreign observers still expected the tightly knit Islamist movement, hardened by decades of repression, to dominate Egypt and the region for a prolonged period, after 60 years of rule by army-backed strongmen. Instead, Morsy was bundled out of office and into military detention on 3 July amid huge anti-government protests, barely a year after he became the first democratically elected leader of the Arab world's most populous nation.

Morsy's failure sends a powerful message: winning an election is not sufficient to govern Egypt. Post-Mubarak rulers need the acquiescence of the security establishment and of the population at large. Upset either and your position is not secure.

Egypt's Islamists may draw the bitter lesson that the "deep state" will not let them wield real power, even with a democratic mandate. This report, compiled from interviews with senior Muslim Brotherhood and secular politicians, youth activists, military officers and diplomats, examines four turning points on Egypt's revolutionary road: the Brotherhood's decision to seek the presidency; the way Mursi pushed through the constitution; the failures of the secular opposition; and the military's decision to step in.

Mursi and some senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders, who have been held incommunicado since the coup, could not be reached for comment.

With the Brotherhood angrily resisting its eviction from power, the prospects of Egypt's second transition to democracy being smoother than the first look slight. This time, the army says it does not wish to exercise power directly as it did in 2011-12 after Mubarak's fall. But few doubt that armed forces commander General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who planned Morsy's overthrow and has since been promoted to deputy prime minister as well as minister of defense, is the man now in control.

TO RUN OR NOT TO RUN?

In the immediate aftermath of Mubarak's overthrow, the Brotherhood had no intention of ruling. It reassured secular Egyptians and the army by promising publicly not to seek the presidency or an outright parliamentary majority.

"I met Shater three times in 2011/2012 and each time it was clear that the political appetite was growing, but the first time he was extremely explicit that the Brotherhood would not seek political power right away," said U.S. academic Nathan Brown, a leading expert on Egypt at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "He was very clear to the reasons: the world's not ready for it, Egypt's not ready for it, and - the phrase he kept using - the burdens of Egypt are too big for any one political actor. Those turned out to be very sound judgments but he abandoned them."

Events began to take on a momentum of their own. The Brotherhood won control of parliament in alliance with smaller Islamist and independents, but soon found that was not sufficient to pass or implement legislation. An army council kept the keys to power.

As the frustrations grew, some members of the Brotherhood - particularly the young - began to press for the movement to change its stance and bid for the presidency and the executive power it would bring.

"The entire council of the Guidance Office of the Muslim Brotherhood was against the presidential nomination," said Gehad El-Haddad, 31, one of the leading young Islamists. So Haddad and 16 other youth activists exploited Facebook and Twitter to change minds.

"We lobbied, the youth of the Muslim Brotherhood, we literally lobbied. We put up a chart of the Shura Council members and decided which ones to pressure to change their vote," the British-educated activist, now the movement's spokesman, said in a midnight interview at a pro-Morsy protest camp outside a mosque in eastern Cairo. "The Muslim Brotherhood takes its vote from the grass roots up, even that vote."

Opponents argued that the quest for executive power was premature and would fuel suspicion and hostility towards the Brotherhood, which had long pursued a patient, gradualist strategy.

The issue came to a head at a marathon closed-door meeting of the Brotherhood's Shura Council at its four-storey headquarters in the hill-top Moqattam district that overlooks Cairo from the south.

"We remained for three days, debating, each team giving the justifications of the opinion it had, whether accepting or rejecting. And when the vote happened, the decision was just by three or four votes," said Essam Hashish, 63, a university engineering lecturer and Shura member.

It was one of the most closely contested votes in the history of the movement and went to three rounds. Just 56 of the 108 members voted on the decisive ballot to put up a candidate for president, while 52 voted against. After that, support for Shater as the Brotherhood's candidate for president became overwhelming.

The Islamists had earlier looked at nominating someone outside their movement, approaching respected judges Ahmed Mekky and Hossam Gheriyani, who had stood up to Mubarak. Both declined.

Insiders said Shater's charisma and ambition were key factors. The furniture and shopping mall magnate was the dominant politician in the movement, described by colleagues and foreign diplomats as a powerful, pragmatic negotiator used to getting his way.

But his candidacy was short-lived. The electoral commission, headed by a Mubarak appointee, disqualified him on the grounds that he had been convicted of a criminal offence in 2007, even if the charges seemed politically motivated.

The mantle of Brotherhood candidate thus fell uncomfortably on the shoulders of Morsy, a provincial engineering professor who had studied in the United States but had less political savvy and public-speaking ability than Shater.

"When we took the decision to nominate Morsy, after the withdrawal of Khairat El-Shater, he (Morsy) returned home weeping: he had been given a responsibility that he had not sought," Hashish said. "It was known that whoever took responsibility at this time would not find the road covered in roses. But we also knew that there was nobody at that time who could undertake this the way we could."

Morsy narrowly won the presidential election on the second round of voting with 51.73 percent of the vote against Ahmed Shafik, a former air force general who was Mubarak's last prime minister and faithful ally. The chubby, bespectacled Islamist owed his victory partly to the support of liberal and leftist candidates who threw their weight behind him between the two rounds. Their supporters hated Shafik and were given a string of assurances that Morsy would form an inclusive government, and involve them and civil society in drafting a new constitution.

Voters who switched from secular candidates on the first round to Morsy in the run-off were dubbed "lemon squeezers" in reference to the Egyptian tradition of making unpalatable food edible with a splash of lemon juice.

RAMMING THROUGH THE CONSTITUTION

Morsy moved swiftly to shake up the military after his inauguration on June 30, 2012. Within six weeks, he summoned Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, 76, who had served Mubarak for two decades and was interim head of state after him, and told him to retire, along with the U.S.-trained chief of staff, General Sami Enan. Morsy appointed a pious Muslim, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, as commander of the armed forces.

In one of the biggest misunderstandings of his term, the president believed he had stamped his authority on the men in uniform. In reality, the officer corps was willing to see two old retainers put out to pasture, clearing a blocked promotion ladder. "They [the Brotherhood] misread what happened. We allowed it to happen," said one colonel.

The military still viewed with deep suspicion a head of state who, they believed, saw Egypt as "just part of a bigger [Islamic] Caliphate," said the colonel.

Morsy believed the military would not act against him, especially if the Brotherhood took care of the army's economic interests when drafting a new constitution. "He thought Sisi was his guy," a senior Western diplomat said. "He didn't understand the power dynamics."

When Morsy and the Brotherhood pushed for a new constitution they clashed with secular parties and civil society groups angered by the Islamist tinge to the charter, ambiguous wording on freedom of expression, and the absence of explicit guarantees of the rights of women, Christians and non-government organizations.

After weeks of debate, fear that a judiciary packed with Mubarak-era appointees would dissolve the constituent assembly helped prompt Morsy to issue a decree shielding the assembly from legal challenge and putting the president above judicial review. It was a move borne out of the Brotherhood's deep suspicion that the judiciary was out to undo all its electoral gains. When Morsy rammed the new charter through, the opposition walked out.

"The truth is that the declaration (taking supra-legal powers) was a big mistake," said Nour. It was still possible to rebuild confidence between Morsy and the political forces, he said, "but there was not enough effort from the two sides to rebuild this confidence."

The constitutional decree was a turning point. Ministers were not consulted. Several of Morsy's own staff warned that it would set him on a confrontation course with civil society. Five senior advisers quit. But Morsy displayed the same determination and self-confidence that marked his other key decisions.

"One thing we know about this president, he is as stubborn as hell," said Gehad El-Haddad, a Brotherhood member whose father Essam El-Haddad, a British-trained doctor, was Morsy's politically moderate top foreign policy adviser and is now in detention with him.

REJECTING THE OUTSTRETCHED HAND

The constitutional decree triggered weeks of street demonstrations outside Morsy's Ettehadiya palace, which was regularly attacked with petrol bombs, rocks and metal bolts. Frustrated at the failure of the police and the Republican Guards to protect the presidency, the Brotherhood fielded its own well-drilled security guard outside the palace in pitched battles with anti-Morsy protesters on 6 December.

The protests eventually faded, but that single sighting of an organized Brotherhood force in the streets, albeit without visible firearms, further alarmed both the secular opposition and the army.

Another wave of protests rolled over Egypt starting on 25 January, the second anniversary of the uprising that overthrew Mubarak, while the main cities in the Suez Canal zone, where passions were running high over deaths in clashes at a soccer match, spun out of government control. Morsy imposed a curfew on Port Said, epicenter of the troubles. But he struggled to command obedience.

"People at night were playing football with the army which was supposed to be imposing the curfew," said Mekky, who had become justice minister. "So when I [as president] impose a curfew and I see neither my citizens nor my army that are supposed to implement the curfew are listening to me, I should know that I am not really a president."

On 29 January, the army issued the first of a series of solemn warnings that political unrest was pushing Egypt to the brink of collapse and that the armed forces would remain "the solid and cohesive block" on which the state rests. In hindsight, it was a harbinger of military intervention.

With the exception of Nour, the liberal and secular opposition boycotted any contact with Morsy and the Brotherhood's political wing after the constitution episode.

But the European Union, supported by the United States, launched a discreet diplomatic effort to try to bring the two sides to compromise on a national unity government. The aim was to trigger fresh parliamentary elections and a loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that could have unlocked stalled economic aid and investment.

For months, EU diplomat Bernardino Leon shuttled between the leaders of the six-party opposition National Salvation Front (NSF) alliance, Morsy's office and the Brotherhood's political wing, while keeping in touch with the army. By April, Leon had produced a draft deal that would have required both Morsy and his opponents to compromise.

Morsy never explicitly embraced the EU initiative, submitted to him in an email on April 11, although he never rejected it either. Events soon put a deal out of reach.

Haddad, one of the Brotherhood negotiators with Leon, suggested the leaders of the NSF were too divided to deliver on an agreement. Khaled Dawoud, the NSF's spokesman, acknowledged the coalition was full of "big characters and big egos," but said they had held together when it mattered.

Perhaps the main reason the deal foundered was that the Islamists considered the NSF politically insignificant. "There are only two players in this playground, the old regime...and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the rest just choose a camp. It is not a reality that everyone likes, but it is the reality, you can't change that," Haddad said.

When EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton returned to Cairo with Leon on 18-19 June, the situation had deteriorated. "We found President Morsy far from reality," a member of Leon's team told Reuters. "The message of the visit was to tell him, ‘Mr President, you are running out of time. The country is running out of time'."

THE COST OF LIVING

The Brotherhood had inherited a shattered economy from the military-led interim government. In the 17 months between Mubarak's fall and Mursi's inauguration, foreign currency reserves crumpled from $36 billion to $15.5 billion - hardly enough to cover three months' imports. Cairo owed international energy companies about $8 billion in unpaid bills, prompting gas producers to reduce shipments to Egypt, freeze investment and slow domestic gas output.

Tourists and investors were scared away by images of violent street protests and political instability. The military council had vetoed a first attempt after the revolution to agree a loan with the International Monetary Fund, wanting to avoid piling debt on the country or compromising national sovereignty. Insiders in the early interim governments said the generals were also scared of triggering riots if they accepted IMF demands to curb food and fuel subsidies.

A former senior finance ministry official said Morsy's constitutional decree effectively ruined any further prospect of an IMF loan. "What happened with the constitution showed the nation was split," said the official. The risk of instability deterred the IMF.

Financial support from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates dried up because of their hostility to the Brotherhood, seen as a threat to Arab monarchies. Mursi became dependent on the gas-rich emirate of Qatar, which provided some $8 billion in loans, grants and deposits under his rule, with lesser sums from Turkey and Libya, both more sympathetic to the Brotherhood.

The inefficient system of subsidizing bread, cooking gas and diesel fuel became an ever greater burden on government finances, accounting for almost the entire budget deficit. There were shortages of diesel, with long lines at gas stations, sometimes causing fights at the pumps. Power cuts worsened in the run-up to mass protests on June 30, leaving many households without air conditioning for hours as peak summer heat approached. As the Egyptian pound tumbled in value, inflation hit 9.75 percent in June.

Feeling increasingly besieged, the Brotherhood accused saboteurs loyal to the former regime of manipulating fuel and electricity supplies. Many Egyptians blamed government incompetence.

"The biggest form of obstruction was the failure of the Ministry of the Interior to do its job. Imagine a state with no security," said Bassem Ouda, 43, minister of supply for the last six months and a rising star in the Brotherhood. Interviewed at the pro-Morsy sit-in, he accused the ministry of directing criminal gangs that obstructed fuel distribution in the days that led up to 30 June.

Economic grievances fuelled public support for a petition by the "Tamarod - Rebel!" youth movement demanding Morsy's resignation and an early presidential election. Launched on 1 May by three activists in their twenties armed with little more than mobile phones and laptops, the petitions spread like wildfire.

Khaled Dawoud, the NSF spokesman, recalled attending an early Tamarod news conference on 12 May. "They held it in some miserable office ... you couldn't even breathe in that building," he said. "And then they announced, boom, inside that room, that in a matter of days, weeks, we gathered two million signatures - people saying we want early president elections."

He said that when he went to his next NSF meeting, he told his leaders: "OK, we can go on the record, these are brilliant people, we have to support them."

By 30 June, the organizers claimed to have 22 million signatures with addresses and national identity numbers. There was no independent verification, but the movement had clearly hit a national nerve. Mahmoud Badr, 28, the young journalist who co-founded the group, told Reuters that Tamarod had succeeded where others failed by dint of shoe-leather campaigning and savvy use of social media.

Brotherhood officials are convinced that Tamarod was bankrolled and abetted by Gulf money, exiled Egyptian oligarchs and the army. The reality appears to have been more spontaneous and less conspiratorial, though some unfamiliar faces with suspected links to the security services began to appear at Tamarod campaign offices in the final days.

Billionaire businessman Naguib Sawiris, who left Egypt shortly after Morsy's election, told Reuters he threw his full support behind the youth movement.

"The Free Egyptians party, the party that I founded, used all its branches across Egypt to (gather) signatures for Tamarod," Sawiris said in a telephone interview from his yacht off the Greek island of Mykonos. "Also the TV station that I own and the newspaper, Al-Masry Al-Youm, were supporting the Tamarod movement with their media ... It is fair to say that I encouraged all the affiliations I have to support the movement. But there was no financing, because there was no need."

ANOTHER FLAWED TRANSITION

Exactly when the military decided it would overthrow Morsy is disputed. Senior officers said that General Sisi, up until the last day of his ultimatum for the president to accept a power-sharing agreement, continued to hope Morsy would agree to call a referendum on the continuation of his rule. That would have given a constitutional fig-leaf to his departure.

A senior army colonel said the military had acted to save the country from civil war. "This has nothing to do with the army wanting power, but with the people wanting the army to be involved. They trust us, you know, because we will always be with the Egyptian people, not with a person or a regime," he said.

The military now faces the same conundrum it failed to solve in 2011-12: how to make Egypt work without taking responsibility, and hence unpopularity, for painful reforms?

In their first temporary stint in power, the generals presided over a period of economic stagnation, unabated human rights abuses and scant reform. They seemed almost relieved to hand the poison chalice to Morsy upon his election, even though they did not trust the Brotherhood with all the levers of power.

This time, it's different, said the colonel. The army will not govern and there will be a short, sharp transition to elected civilian government. Yet despite a sudden infusion of $12 billion in Saudi, UAE and Kuwaiti aid, the starting conditions look worse than for the previous period of military rule.

The Brotherhood is entrenched in sullen opposition, determined to prevent the new technocratic government succeeding where its own administration failed. The army vacillates between saying it wants to include the Brotherhood in a new political process and cracking down on its leaders, accused of inciting violence and betraying the country. Morsy, his closest aides and the Brotherhood's most powerful politicians are being held in extra-judicial custody by the army at undisclosed locations.

Those leaders still at large say they have begun a long march of non-violent resistance until the Brotherhood prevails over the army. But a radical fringe of Islamists may revert to armed struggle and assassinations. First signs are visible in the lawless Sinai peninsula. Others may go back to a strategy of Islamizing Egyptian society from the grassroots up, rather than the top down.

Repression will only strengthen the Brotherhood, said Haddad. "This is an organization built for 85 years under oppressive regimes. That is our comfort zone. They just pushed us back into it.

"This is a stand-off. Either we force the military's head back into their barracks, and they have to be taught a lesson not to pop their head back into the political scene ever again, or we die trying."


Source URL (retrieved on 28/07/2013 - 02:41): http://www.egyptindependent.com/node/1979311

Special report: How the Muslim Brotherhood lost Egypt

Saturday, July 27, 2013

The Egyptian army wants to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood – but in many ways they are already history

 

Robert Fisk Wednesday 24 July 2013

Many see the Brotherhood’s defeat as the beginning of the end of the Islamist ideology

When a general asks the people to go on the streets to show their support for the army in its battle against “violence”, it could be a very dodgy day. Tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters remain camped across Cairo and other Egyptian cities – “terrorists” is the tired but dangerous code word that General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi used about them yesterday – and at first reading his appeal looked like a call to the Brotherhood’s opponents to destroy what have in effect become “no-go areas” in Nasr City and Giza. The Egyptian press, ever ready to echo the general’s words, now uses “terrorism” with ever increasing promiscuity and el-Sisi’s demand for mass demonstrations in Egypt tomorrow raises some very disturbing questions.

Having been fingered for the massacre of Brotherhood members earlier this month, the army are in no mood for a repeat performance. So does General el-Sissi, self-declared Deputy prime minister, Defence minister and leader of the coup-that-wasn’t-a-coup want “the people” to do the army’s dirty work and storm into the Brotherhood’s tent encampments tomorrow? Or does he feel that the United States and Europe – who were not terribly keen on the coup-that-wasn’t-a-coup – will acknowledge the popularity of the military if millions of Egyptians return to Tahrir Square to give a further imprimatur to the army’s takeover?

El-Sisi’s talk of “terrorism” was principally referring to the daily attacks on Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai peninsula, which appear to be more the work of al-Qa’ida affiliates, smugglers and tribal leaders than any involvement by the Brotherhood. But for the moment, the existence of the Brotherhood’s camps – a ghostly mockery of the 2011 encampment that became the centre for the overthrow of Mubarak – are a constant reminder of the army’s failure to crush the movement and the Brotherhood’s continued demand to re-install Morsi. The army can bring out the people, to be sure, but what is the future of the Brotherhood itself?

Many are those who see its defeat as the beginning of the end of the Islamist “ideology”, the idea that Islam alone can right the wrongs of the world if only it was allied to political power. As Hussein Ibish, one of the most eloquent Arab columnists today, has said: “If the oldest Muslim Brotherhood party cannot maintain popular legitimacy in Egypt after only one year in office, then the ideology itself isn’t a practical model for governance anywhere.” Ibish’s line is simple: “Sunni Islamists will invariably fail in power because Islam is a religion and not a political ideology.”

It’s a bright idea, but even in the Islamic Republic of Iran – Shia, to be true – the opposition doesn’t want to destroy the Muslim foundations of their state. And the Saudi monarchy, constructed on the twin pillars of wahabism and the American dollar, is not going to deny its role as protector of the Two Holy Places. And after all, it’s not many centuries ago that the people of Europe regarded themselves as citizens of a place called “Christendom”. However politics develops, the church and the mosque and the synagogue have a habit of taking sides in national debates. The division of church and state – in France, for example – seems a very unnatural schism when you arrive in the Muslim world.

The reason is clear: Muslims – unlike the world of “Christendom” – have not lost their faith. This has in some way to be represented in the nations in which Muslims live. The challenge is whether slogans like that of the Brotherhood – “Islam has the answers” – really work. The “interim” Egyptian government, for example, has just discovered that Morsi’s administration underestimated the import of wheat necessary to sustain the population. The Koran cannot be eaten. Bread can.

These troubling equations are ever-present in the Muslim world. Many is the time I have woken in Cairo to read a diatribe in the Egyptian press about the sins of the US – often well-argued and absolutely true – but on travelling across the Nile, I have in the past found queues of Egyptians outside the US embassy, not protesting but waiting patiently in the oven-like heat. The message is obvious. The Koran is an important document. But so is a green card.

Religion is fine if we are talking about faith and values, but not so useful if we are discussing what Ibish calls “the detailed, technical problems of governance.” That, at least, is the story we are being fed by the Egyptian army and its supporters; that once Morsi picked up his 51 per cent of the presidential vote, he cared less about running Egypt than he did about empowering the Brotherhood itself. The Islamist “constitution” was to be proof of Muslim rule rather than Egyptian rule. And this led to further mistakes. Hence he could visit Muslims who had suffered from food poisoning, for example, but fail to visit the Coptic pope when Christians had been shot dead in the streets.

Ibish sniffs what he calls “a post-Islamist brand of politics in the Arab world”. I’m not so sure he’s right. When Mohamed Khatemi became president of Iran – a genuinely honourable man (one of the very few in the Middle East) – he talked of an Islam that would produce a “civil society”. Only America’s refusal to tolerate him brought us the dunderhead Ahmedinejad. The problem, I fear, is that the alternative to Islam as an ideology – which it is not – will turn out to be capitalism and superpower politics which will go on supporting corruption in Saudi Arabia and generals who call on people to demonstrate for armies which have staged coups that we cannot admit ever happened. And to encourage the use of that corrosive word – “terrorism”.

The Egyptian army wants to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood – but in many ways they are already history - Comment - Voices - The Independent

France needs to start facing up to Islamophobia

Valérie Amiraux and Marwan Mohammed

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 27 July 2013 02.29 AEST

The Paris riots over the arrest of a veiled Muslim woman reveal the ongoing tension between the police and minority populations

Paris riots

French police from the anti-crime unit patrol the streets in Trappes, a suburb of Paris after rioting as a reaction to the arrest of a veiled Muslim woman. Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

The trigger for the riots in the Parisian suburb of Trappes last weekend was a relatively ordinary one: the local police stopped a young woman for wearing the full veil in public. Ordinary, that is, since the inception, in April 2011, of Law 2010-1192 of 11 October 2010 prohibiting the concealment of the face in public space, according to which the wearing of this type of garment can lead to a fine of €150 (£129) and a "community rehabilitation programme" in the form of mandatory citizenship classes. Over the course of two years, the police have issued 705 citations.

In many ways, the arrest in Trappes was routine from the point of view of both the police and the young woman concerned. But it took a bad turn: the young woman and her husband were taken to the station, the Trappes commissioner refused to register the complaint made by the young woman's mother, who was witness to the arrest, and civil unrest erupted over the course of that Friday, followed by numerous further arrests.

The context within which this episode took place is slightly more difficult to untangle. There is an easy tendency, sustained by the media, to accentuate the extreme social precariousness in the French suburbs, the failure of national integration, the continuing problem of the suburbs, regardless of the particular political persuasion of the government in charge. Every one of these colours the context. But there is a new element in play during these incidents in Trappes: Islamophobia.

It shows up in multiple forms: attacks on mosques, desecration of religious sites, the ban on the headscarf in public schools, making it impossible for certain veiled women to access public services, to accompany their children on school outings, the rampant insults, harassment, humiliation, physical and verbal aggression they are subject to, racial and ethnic profiling and discrimination, sometimes culminating in physical attacks, such as the recent one on a veiled woman in Argenteuil, who lost her baby as a result. But the principal characteristic of Islamophobia is that it remains, at least in France, very rarely denounced. It is consistently perceived as an exaggeration, the result of victimised posturing invented by troublemaking Muslims, who are incapable of integrating and bending to the requirements of French citizenship.

In Trappes, Islamophobia has crossed another line of French political history, that of the relationship between the police and the populace, particularly the minority population. The history of the French police is inseparable from the progressive construction of the state. The police force, nationalised and centralised, emerged as a front against regional powers, and subsequently grew its power and influence against the working and anti-colonialist classes over the last century.

The security of the power structure has always taken precedence over the security of everyday citizens: the affirmation or consolidation of the state has subsequently rested on a culture that placed great importance on the maintenance of public order and on the gathering of political intelligence. As a result, there is very little that would create a rapprochement between the police forces assigned to minority areas and the inhabitants themselves. This power structure encloses all relations between citizens and police within a rigid framework, characterised by distance and defiance.

Bridging this distance between the populace and the police has been long been identified as a necessity. At the end of the 1990s, the Socialist government attempted to design a police force that would have more contact with and therefore more proximity to the population, an initiative that was quickly thwarted by the right's rise to power and the resistance on behalf of police hierarchies and unions.

Add to this environmental mix the harsh identity checks and brutal police treatment reserved for minorities and the working classes, and it is no surprise that over the past 40 years, the vast majority of suburban revolts have risen out of incidents with the police. The tradition of struggle against police discrimination in France is an old one, and one of its most recent demands – for the establishment of vouchers or documentation during identity checks in order to better fight against the practice of "ethnic profiling" – was taken up by François Hollande during his candidature only for him to abandon it once elected.

The events in Trappes are therefore not restricted to a conflict between the forces for order and Muslims. Nor is it a fight between secularism and the Islamisation of the suburbs. The tensions related to the enforcement of the ban on the wearing of the niqab straddle a much more general history of the relationship between the police and the populace.

Given that we are only a few weeks away from the primaries of the 2014 European and French municipal electoral campaigns, it is imperative that we begin to anticipate the effect that the hardships being endured by the working classes and the continuing stigmatisation of Muslims will have on the electorate.

France needs to start facing up to Islamophobia | Valérie Amiraux and Marwan Mohammed | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Bulgaria's 'class war'

 Mariya Ivancheva

Mariya Ivancheva, Sofia

The Guardian, Saturday 27 July 2013 06.00 AEST

The long-running protests in Bulgaria are not a plot led by middle-class Soros-oids – they are about social alternatives

Protests in Sofia

Protesters build barricades outside parliament in Sofia on Wednesday. A bus full of MPs trying to get away was surrounded and its windows broken. Photograph: Reuters

On Tuesday the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, witnessed a night of violence. After 40 days of protest the National Assembly was besieged amid demands that the government resign, and police stormed the peaceful crowd. A bus full of MPs trying to get away was surrounded and its windows broken, and scores of people were wounded. The next day Mihail Mikov, chair of parliament, said that "looking for solutions within the constitution becomes increasingly difficult".

A brief look back can explain why. The collapse of Bulgaria's centre-right government in February following protests against rising electricity bills led to early elections in May. These produced a coalition of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and the Movement for Rights and Liberties – the party supported by the Turkish minority in Bulgaria – under the prime minister, Plamen Oresharski.

Since 14 June protests have demanded Oresharski's resignation. He was elected on a pledge of popular reforms that would benefit the most economically vulnerable, but any trust in him dissipated with the appointment of Delyan Peevski as head of the state agency for national security. In the eyes of most Bulgarians the media monopolist was corruption incarnate.

The peaceful protests – which coincided with more violent events in Brazil, Turkey and Egypt – have been described as "middle class" by international media that have otherwise largely ignored them. This trope eclipses the reality of the people on the ground, who barely make ends meet on average incomes in the EU's poorest member state.

This rhetoric also exists in local narratives, both for and against the protests. The creation of a strong middle class as a result of Bulgaria's transition to liberal democracy and a free market was once the collective dream; now it is used to divide the country. Rightwing intellectuals present protesters as "intelligent", "moral", even "beautiful" and "smiling". This self-proclaimed "cultural and professional elite" presents itself as "European", "non-violent", "able to pay bills and taxes", as distinct from the "uncivilised" Bulgarians who staged the protests in February. By contrast, most protesters – public service workers and students – see all the protests as intrinsically related. They do not formulate, however, any economic demands or critique the IMF- and EU-inspired austerity and privatisation agendas – embraced by all Bulgarian governments – that led to mass unemployment and dismantled the welfare institutions of the socialist state.

The BSP and its media supporters have also used the "Sofian middle class" rhetoric to turn many Bulgarians against the protesters. They are portrayed as a part of a transnational elite network, connected to power centres in Washington and Brussels. It is alleged that the protesters are paid-up "Soros-oids"; the financier George Soros and the Open Society Institute are seen as masterminds of the protests. Oresharski's timid reforms are thus portrayed as fighting a world conspiracy against ordinary Bulgarians.

What really stands between the protesters and emancipatory politics is the neoliberal hegemony of previous decades, which emptied the collective political imagination. Protests are framed as explicitly "anti-communist" – and the "communism" of the BSP is expressed in its complicity with non-transparent privatisation deals and economic austerity. Talk of "anti-communism" stifles any real debate about economic and social alternatives. New legislative measures, meanwhile, render the emergence of new political actors increasingly difficult, and Bulgaria remains subordinated to local oligarchy and power blocs. As a consequence, the growing political and economic crisis and the precariousness of the majority of Bulgarians are addressed only by the racist far right, whose electoral power is slowly expanding.

Bulgaria's 'class war' | Mariya Ivancheva | Comment is free | The Guardian

Morsi being investigated over claims of 'colluding with Hamas' in uprising

Patrick Kingsley in Cairo The Guardian, Saturday 27 July 2013

Deposed president alleged to have helped Palestinian Islamists murder Egyptian police during 2011 overthrow of Hosni Mubarak

Supporters of Mohammed Morsi protest at Nasr City, Cairo.

Supporters of Mohammed Morsi protest at Nasr City, Cairo. There were also large counter-demonstrations backing the military. Photograph: Khalil Hamra/AP

The overthrown Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, is under investigation for conspiring with Hamas during Egypt's 2011 revolution, state media reported on Friday, in the first official update on his status since he was forced from office and detained by the Egyptian army on 3 July.

After the announcement, Morsi was moved from a secret military facility to Cairo's Tora prison, where his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, is also being held.

The news heightened tensions on a day when supporters of Egypt's two main factions formed rival mass protests across the country in what was billed as a showdown between people backing the army and Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood. By the evening, nine people had been killed, most in Alexandria, and at least 200 injured in clashes in five cities, according to the MENA state news agency.

Morsi is under investigation for colluding with the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, during the 2011 uprising that toppled Mubarak. The charges allege that Morsi and other senior Muslim Brothers were rescued from jail during the revolution with Hamas's assistance, and then helped Hamas to attack Egyptian police facilities and murder policemen during the ousting of Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood says the fugitives left with the help of locals and that Hamas had no role in the uprising.

"It's laughable," said Gehad al-Haddad, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood. "It's every crime that you would think of if you were looking at the 25 January revolution [the 2011 uprising] through the eyes of Hosni Mubarak. It's retaliation from the Mubarak state."

Haddad's argument spoke to the belief that Morsi's overthrow has enabled the return to influence of Mubarak-era officials and institutions who were sidelined by the 2011 revolution.

The police – a target of the 2011 uprising – have seen their popularity rise again following the anti-Morsi protests on 30  June, and they have been quick to capitalise. On Friday, police gave Egyptian flags to pro-army protesters in a show of unity.

The decision by the new government to focus first on allegations relating to events before Morsi's presidency, rather than on human rights violations that occurred during the presidency itself, indicates that it may be wary of implicating state institutions such as the police – who were also complicit in the torture and killing of protesters under Morsi.

Resurgent support for the police, who publicly backed Morsi's removal, was apparent among pro-army protesters, even from the most unlikely sources.

"The interior ministry [who run the police] have been purified of the blood of the past," said 66-year-old Magdy Iskandar Assad, whose son was killed by police officers during protests following Mubarak's fall. "There's a reconciliation now between the people and institutions like state security."

Assad was one of hundreds of thousands demonstrating in support of the army chief, General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who asked on Wednesday for Egyptians to give him a mandate to deal with what he termed terrorism. His speech was seen by sceptics as a thinly veiled attempt to win popular support for a violent crackdown on Morsi supporters. Much of the Egyptian media has spent the past month depicting the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies as terrorists. At least seven channels suspended normal programming to encourage their audience to go out to support Sisi, and thousands heeded the call – in particular in Cairo's Tahrir Square, where the atmosphere was of a military pageant.

Many wore photographs of Sisi around their neck. Military helicopters flew overhead to loud cheers from the crowd. Smiling protesters had their pictures taken with the soldiers who were securing the entrances to the square, some of them sitting on large armoured personnel carriers.

"My message to General Sisi is: what you did on 30 June was greater than what Egypt did in the 1973 war [against Israel]," said Walid Hedra, 38, a one-time Islamist who grew disillusioned with Morsi after he used dictatorial powers to force through a controversial new constitution last November.

"The armed forces are reborn again thanks to Sisi, the successor to Gamal Abdel Nasser," said Assad, referring to Egypt's much-loved dictator during the 50s and 60s. "Sisi is a courageous man who is working for the good of the country."

Egypt's pro-Sisi demonstrations also coincided with counter-demonstrations by Morsi's supporters. The Muslim Brotherhood organised 35 marches across the capital, raising fears of serious factional fighting after nightfall. By the evening, 37 had already been injured in clashes in northern Cairo – but clashes were fiercest in Alexandria, where the health ministry reported at least 100 injured.

The Muslim Brotherhood's leader, Mohamed Badie, had earlier stoked tensions by calling Sisi's overthrow of Morsi a more heinous crime than the destruction of Islam's most sacred shrine.

Many marching in Morsi's name were afraid of what Sisi's campaign against terrorism might entail. "It doesn't make sense for a defence minister to ask people to give him authority to fight terrorism," said Abdallah Hatem, a 19-year-old student from Cairo. "So his speech was a pretext for something else – a pretext to fight peaceful protesters who want Morsi to come back."

"None of us here are terrorists," added Mohamed Mostafa, a street vendor from southern Egypt, struggling nearby under the weight of a Morsi banner. "You can see that for yourself."

But not everyone on the streets accepted the binary choice of the army or the Brotherhood. A small group of Egyptians, calling themselves the Third Square, gathered in a square in west Cairo to object to the authoritarianism of both groups.

Since Morsi's overthrow, parts of Egypt have been hit regularly by violent protests and counter-protests by those supportive and opposed to his tenure. More than 200 Egyptians have already died in clashes between Morsi's supporters, opponents and security forces since protests against the ex-president began in late June.

Contrary to local media reports, which blame the Brotherhood almost entirely for the unrest, all sides have been party to violence – not least the state. On 8 July, police and soldiers massacred 51 pro-Morsi supporters at a protest outside a military compound in east Cairo. In turn, Morsi's opponents claim his armed supporters have started other fatal fights – in particular while marching provocatively through neighbourhoods south of Tahrir Square, the cradle of anti-Morsi dissent.

The fighting accompanies a surge in militancy in Sinai – long considered a hotbed of extremism – and a rise in sectarian attacks on Christians in southern Egypt.

Sisi's callout this week is considered an attempt to get the Brotherhood to leave the streets. But the movement's leaders are frightened of doing so because they fear an escalation in the current crackdown against senior figures within their group, as exemplified by Friday's charges against Morsi. Leaving the streets without securing Morsi's return to presidency – the Brotherhood's core and delusional demand – would also see them lose significant credibility among their supporters.

"It means doing the thing that the Brotherhood can't and won't do right now – giving up their claims to legitimacy," said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha centre, and an expert on political Islam. "They've been telling their supporters that legitimacy is something worth dying for. They can't just change their minds overnight."

Asked whether he would accept anything less that Morsi's reinstatement, 19-year-old Morsi-backer Abdallah Hatem said: "It's impossible."

Additional reporting by Marwa Awad

Morsi being investigated over claims of 'colluding with Hamas' in uprising | World news | The Guardian

Friday, July 26, 2013

When Egyptians are right and wrong

 Marwan Bishara

Marwan Bishara senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.

Will revolution, uprising and a coup lead to chaos, repression or reconciliation?

That defense minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi urged for reconciliation only a week before threatening the president with a 48-hour ultimatum... doesn't bode well for the future of democracy," writes Marwan Bishara [AP]

In Egypt, a country that is terribly polarised and dangerously tense, facts get in the way.

Each side claims their own truths and denies the legitimacy of others, dismissing them as fanatics or sell-outs. The Egyptian parties are busy demonising each other and in the process are turning the dream of better governance into a nightmare of horror and violence.

Charges and counter-charges of foreign interference and unacceptable methods can go a certain distance even if money, religion, coercion and manipulation have indeed been used. The engine of change in both ‘uprisings’ has been peoples’ dissatisfaction with the status quo regardless of whether their expectations were realistic or idealistic.

However, now as the parties turn on each other, we can expect more of the same, and perhaps worse, escalation of tension in the coming days and weeks, unless those who've been wrong and insist on being right, behave modestly and wisely.

Disinformation

Since January 25, 2011, when the barriers of fear were torn down and people were empowered to express themselves freely, expressions of pent-up hate and incitement, devoid of any scruples or ethics, have also found their way into the public arena in these uncertain times.

Nowadays, countless rumours, baseless innuendos and propaganda masquerade as news in and outside of Egypt. Almost all developments are being approached, framed and presented according to narrow political and ideological beliefs. That’s not to say that neutrality is realistic or even a necessary condition for clear-headed reflection. But objectivity in terms of presenting the verifiable facts regardless of their consequences, has also been absent from the present discourse in, and frequently about, Egypt.

The demonization is perhaps the worst part of it all, considering that sooner or later Egyptians from all walks of life and of every generation will need to live in proximity, peace and harmony.

Each camp is retrenching within an imaginative sense of righteousness; each side, including the military, claiming to defend the revolution, always their revolution.

It’s the responsibility of the country’s political parties that spearheaded the revolution to put their political differences aside to safeguard the revolution’s achievements and carry out its objectives.

Worse, the old regime’s vocal journalists and media outlets are further confusing the situation by claiming that the June 30 uprising will correct the mistakes of the January 25 revolution in order to return to the days of the Mubarak era.

The Brotherhood’s failures

It’s a verifiable fact that the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t start the revolution, yet became an instrumental and powerful component of the popular uprising against the Mubarak regime.

The Brotherhood, like the other factions of the revolution, rushed toward elections without arriving at a consensus regarding the enshrinement of the revolution’s goals in the state and its constitution. This rendered every idea that could have united the groups as partners, a point of contention in their political battles for power.

And it’s also a fact that the older and better-organised Islamist groups went to win elections, fair and square, against a divided “opposition”. But they could have been able to take on the remnants of the old regime in the bureaucracy, security and the military or so-called “deep state” by adopting an inclusive approach towards the opposition to create a truly, unified national governance.

They did try to appease the military, such as in November 2011 when they showed uncanny indifference to the repression and violence inflicted on the street demonstrators around Tahrir Square and Mohamed Mahmoud Street at the hand of the security forces - which led to the deaths of 40 people, some of whom were shot in the eyes.

And they didn’t show the necessary political maturity, to say nothing of the revolutionary zeal, of supporting a truly inclusive political and constitutional process. Instead, they insisted on imposing a narrow vision on the new Egypt.

The opposition is more of the same

If the January 25 revolution was motivated by the rejection of the Mubarak regime and hopes for a better, free and more prosperous life, the June 30 uprising was driven by a rejection of “Brotherhood rule” and what is perceived as their attempt at hijacking the revolution and imposing their Islamist agenda.

Well, with one important verifiable distinction: the earlier President was a dictator who won ceremonial elections while the latter one did win a free election.

The opposition’s impatience with Morsi, while understandable considering all of the above mentioned factors, shouldn’t have led them into partnership with the generals, informal and temporary as it may be. Their popular movement was putting considerable pressure on the government, and if it had persisted and evolved into nationwide civil disobedience, it could have led to the fall of the government.

Instead, they chose the shorter and perhaps the more expedient way to unseat an elected president: by force. And they remain rather conspicuously quiet as  (former) President Morsi remains in the military's custody. It’s even stranger that they expect that the Muslim Brotherhood would accept the calls for talks and join a national reconciliation process while president Morsi remains under arrest.

The banality of force

The generals are not innocent in all of this. They look at political issues and see only security problems.

Yes, the Egyptian military proved that at the time of the January 25 uprising it belonged to the state - not the regime - when it sided with the people. The military made the right decision and was celebrated for it.

This time around, however, it sided with one party over another in a rather swift and eerie manner.

Warning against chaos might’ve been justifiable. That defense minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi urged for reconciliation only a week before threatening the president with a 48-hour ultimatum, after which the military moved in, doesn’t bode well for the future of democracy. The generals were correct to warn against a total breakdown. But defense minister Sisi doesn’t seem to see any irony in telling his officers in a speech that he, a general, was merely a go-between relaying “the peoples” will to an elected President.

While Sisi justifies the rush to interfere on the need to avoid instability and violence, his coup resulted in the very escalation they presumably hoped to avoid - with potentially more to come, alas.

Despite his insistence that he didn’t betray the president, it’s more likely that what appeared to be the hasty unseating of president Morsi, concealed a longer, more deliberate process of ridding the country of Islamist rule, a process that involved destabilising tactics like fuel shortages, etc.

The fact that the generals have not and perhaps do not want to directly take the reins of power doesn’t mean that they are not leading from behind. Indeed, Sisi’s latest speech on Wednesday, calling for nationwide rallies to allow greater military powers, affirms that he’s content to lead from and by the street.

Like all militaries in the world, the role of the Egyptian military is to defend the country and its sovereignty, not to promote democracy. As I emphasised in an earlier analysis, by its very pyramidal structure, a military is an authoritarian institution.

In Egypt, where the military commands vast networks of interests and special privileges, it’s not clear why it would restore the democratic process. The military is more likely to exploit the on-going chaos to maintain its power rather than speed up the restoration of democracy, unless, of course, it comes under great popular pressure.

It’s the responsibility of the country’s political parties that spearheaded the revolution to put their political differences aside to safeguard the revolution’s achievements and carry out its objectives. This requires political maturity and parties placing the revolution and the country’s interests above their own narrow party interests.

Easier said than done? Yes, perhaps. But there is no other way. Even if it takes years and many lives, Egyptians will still need to sit down and figure out their future together.

A new realism

The optimism about a transition to democracy has proved to be wishful thinking as Egyptians take the longer route towards achieving a common vision of the new Egypt - their second republic.

History might be on the side of those who oppose dictatorship and deposed a dictator in favour of “bread, freedom and social justice”.  But while time is of the essence, the future is not tied to an egg timer.

I wrote in The Invisible Arab, that this revolution isn’t a sprint affair. It’s more like a marathon, or indeed, a relay.

“Every surge of democratisation over the last century,” wrote historian Sheri Berman in Foreign Affairs, “ […] has been followed by an undertow, accompanied by widespread questioning of the viability and even desirability of democratic governance in the areas in question.”

The lesson from two centuries of transformation since the French revolution is that dictatorships can be imposed and deposed in far shorter time than it takes to arrive at a constitutional democracy.

One can only hope that instead of repeating the mistakes of their predecessors who took too long to effect positive change, Egyptians learn from the lessons of history.

Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera

When Egyptians are right and wrong - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Egypt's army calls for mass protests, as Muslim Brotherhood warns of civil war

 

Supporters of Mohammed Morsi hold up his portrait and wave their national flag.

Photo: Mr Morsi's backers have also called for more marches in and around Cairo on Friday. (AFP: Fayez Nureldine)

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The head of Egypt's military has called for mass protests to be held on Friday as violence continues to wrack the country.

Top army commander general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, appearing on state television, asked "all honourable Egyptians" to take to the streets tomorrow to give him a "mandate to end terrorism and violence".

Since he led a coup against Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected president, the general has faced large protests by Mr Morsi's supporters, led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

General Sisi, wearing full military uniform and dark glasses during his televised address to a military graduation ceremony, said he would stick to a roadmap for a return to democratic rule drawn up by the military that envisioned fresh parliamentary elections within about six months.

"The coming elections will be decisive. If you have real weight, and public opinion supports your movement, then that will be reflected in the coming vote," he said.

However the Muslim Brotherhood said the general's call was "an invitation to civil war" and raised the spectre of a military crackdown in the country.

"This is an invitation to civil war and the spilling of the people's blood in the streets," the Brotherhood said in a statement published on Facebook, denouncing general Sisi as head of a "military dictatorship".

Key points:
  • Army general calls for mass protests to end violence
  • Call follows bombing of police station, Cairo deaths
  • Muslim Brotherhood warns of incitement to civil war
  • US delays delivery of F-16s to Eyptian military

More than 100 people have already been killed in clashes between supporters and opponents of the ousted president. And there have been several attacks on police and security compounds.

Mr Morsi's backers have also called for more marches in and around Cairo on Friday.

In response to the call, Egypt's public prosecutor has ordered the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie and eight other senior members of the movement for inciting violence.

Mr Badie and other Brotherhood figures were previously detained, but released since July 3.

Mr Morsi, meanwhile, has been held at an undisclosed military facility since his ouster.

General Sisi insisted that his call for protests was not an incitement to further unrest, and said ordinary Egyptians should rally to strengthen the hand of the army and police.

"I request that all Egyptians next Friday ... go down [into the street] to give me a mandate and an order to confront possible violence and terrorism," he told a military graduation ceremony in remarks broadcast live by state media.

US to postpone delivery of F-16s to Egyptian army

Citing the "current situation", the United States said president Barack Obama had decided to delay delivery of four F-16 fighter jets to the Egyptian army, signalling deepening concern in the West over the course taken by the Arab world's most populous country.

The protests on Egypt's street played a crucial role in the downfall of American-backed president Hosni Mubarak in 2011, forcing concessions from the generals who took power from him.

Since the fall of Mubarak as the Arab Spring revolutions took hold more than two years ago, Egypt has been in turmoil, raising concern among allies and in neighbouring Israel, with which Egypt has had a peace treaty since 1979.

Bomb, gun attacks kill several militants and soldiers

General Sisi's speech followed an overnight bomb attack on a police station in Mansoura, 110 km north of Cairo, that killed one person and wounded two dozen others.

A government spokesman condemned it as a terrorist attack.

Elsewhere, two soldiers were killed in attacks by militants in the lawless North Sinai region shortly after general Sisi spoke, and four militants died in a car bomb near a police training centre in the area, security sources said.

Twenty-four people were reported hurt in clashes in the Nile delta cities of Damietta and Menoufiya.

In Cairo, two people were killed and 23 wounded when a march of Mr Morsi supporters came under fire, security sources said. It was the latest in a line of assaults targeting Islamists.

"We think that after what Sisi has said, there will be violence on Friday. He is encouraging thugs to come and attack our peaceful protest," said Mohammed Hamdi, 24, an engineering student attending a Brotherhood vigil in the capital.

"We have no guns and don't want violence. We will keep protesting the bloody military coup," he said.

ABC/Reuters

Egypt's army calls for mass protests, as Muslim Brotherhood warns of civil war - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)