THE POOR PEOPLE OF EGYPT
John Chuckman
How is it that the people of Egypt, after a successful
revolution against the repressive 30-year government of President Mubarak, a
revolution involving the hopes and fears of millions and a substantial loss of life,
have ended up almost precisely where they started?
After Mubarak’s fall, there were many comments from prominent
citizens of one of Egypt’s neighbors, the one styling itself “the Middle East’s
only democracy,” expressing great concern over the end of decades of brutal dictatorial
rule for eighty million neighbors. The comments, from many prominent Israelis,
were disturbing in tone and certainly did not welcome the idea of an expansion
of democracy in the region.
But the revolution continued, with some starts and stops,
and Egyptians voted in their first free election. By all accounts, it was a
cleaner election than many in that other great defender of democracy, the
United States, but democracy as Winston Churchill famously said is “the worst
form of government, except for all the others,” and the majority went to a
religious-affiliated party, the Muslim Brotherhood, a party which had been
persecuted and suppressed for years by Mubarak, an activity which endeared him
to democracy-loving Israeli governments.
Now, that name, Muslim
Brotherhood, undoubtedly sounds ominous to many in a post-9/11 world, a
world where fears and disinformation about Muslims have become a daily,
unavoidable part of the news in much of the Western world. But the truth is that
the Muslim Brotherhood was not radical, and in many respects the religious note
in Egyptian politics was not altogether different from that of a long history
of Christian-affiliated parties in Western Europe or Latin America, such as the
Christian Democrats.
Indeed, Egypt’s good democratic neighbor itself has been ruled
in many aspects of its national life by ultra-orthodox religious parties needed
to make a governing coalition in its heavily-splintered political system. And
these Israeli fundamentalist parties do not reflect anything like the mild religious
traditions of Europe’s Christian Democrats. These Israeli parties are composed
of people who believe in theocratic rule, in the superiority of one group over
others, in the unique truth of one set of ancient writing, in ancient views of
women’s rights, and in legalizing many practices violating principles of the Enlightenment.
As political analysts know, small parties can exert inordinate leverage on a
society where they absolutely are required to form a government, that leverage
necessarily seeming quite undemocratic to most citizens living under its shadow.
Well, Egypt’s new government did do some things that strict
secularists such as myself do not like to see, its new constitution being chief
among them. No liberal-minded person wants to live under a constitution giving
special place to one religious group over another, but then that is nothing
unusual in the world, and it is especially the case for emerging countries with
many years of political experimenting in democratic institutions ahead of them.
So Egyptians unhappy with Morsi’s brief time in government
started demonstrating against him. In doing so, they unwittingly weakened the
foundations of a fragile set of democratic institutions and played into the
hands of those who wanted the military coup we have now witnessed, with members
of an elected government under arrest and many hundreds of people on both
sides, for and against the Morsi government, killed in the streets, and a distressing
return to where Egypt was about three years ago.
The truth is that the road to a fully-functioning democracy
is always a very long one. The United States from its founding took a couple of
hundred years to achieve even the semblance of democracy we see today. America
started – despite the high-sounding words of its constitution - as a place
where the people did not elect the president (the elites of the electoral
college did), where the Senate was appointed (not changed until the 20th
century), where a massive industry in human slavery legally flourished, where
no women or blacks or even most men (those without specified amounts of
property) could vote, and where the Bill of Rights served as a mere advertising
slogan because its list of rights could not be enforced by a Supreme Court
owing strict allegiance to the concept of states’ rights. The common
sentimental view of early America is just that, sentimental.
The journey toward free and fair democratic government must
be started somewhere, and Morsi’s government was perhaps as promising a start
as is possible in a country mired in poverty and lacking democratic
institutions as Egypt is, but the re-establishment of a junta is no start at
all.
So, who are the people who wanted the coup and why did they
want it?
To answer this we must go back to some of the acts of the
Morsi government and see just who was extremely unhappy about them. One was a
new general policy towards the hostages Israel holds in Gaza, by which I mean
the million and a half people who also elected a new government some years back,
the Hamas Party, in clean elections. There is no use repeating the fairy tale
about Hamas being a terrorist organization: it most certainly is not, although
through Israel’s manipulation of the severe weaknesses in America’s political
structure (the acceptance of political donations in any amount as free speech, the
acceptance of virtually unlimited lobbying, and the duopoly party system
allowing one to be played against the other) Israel did succeed in having white
declared to be red.
Morsi’s new general policy, offensive to Israel but I’m sure
acceptable to most Egyptians, was not one of throwing open the border with Gaza
– that would have resulted in air strikes and dire threats by Israel - but it
was one of easing up on the past harshness Mubarak maintained to please Israel
and the United States, and Mubarak and his military were keen to keep them
pleased because the United States pays a huge annual bribe to Egypt to keep
just such matters under control.
Now we have the Egyptian military returning to harsh
measures: I read, for example, that they were flooding the tunnels which have served
as vital supply lines for the imprisoned people of Gaza. Before its overthrow,
Mubarak’s government was looking to build a kind of underground Berlin Wall
along the entire border with Gaza made of special steel supplied by the United
States. Perhaps now the military will take the wall-project up again, surely
bringing satisfied smiles to the lips of Israel’s brutal government. You know just
on the face of it that there is something very odd and unnatural in Egypt’s
behaving this way towards people with whom most Egyptians sympathize for the benefit
of another people with whom they do not sympathize.
I think the single most important act leading to the coup likely
was Morsi’s meeting with Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, a much-hated man in
Israel. The meeting in fact was a perfectly natural and normal thing for these two
countries to do, given their mutual interests and an ancient history of
associations. They are both predominantly Muslim and both are large countries,
on the order of 70-80 million people. But I know the meeting must have sent Mr.
Netanyahu into a sputtering dark fury and almost certainly had him reaching for
the phone to Obama within minutes.
Does Netanyahu have a special phone to the Oval Office, a
version of the ‘hot line” established between the Soviet Union and the United
States in the 1960s to help avoid a disastrous nuclear misunderstanding?
One suspects so because of what surely must be the volume of
calls made from one of the world’s smallest countries to one of its largest,
regularly asking for things – everything from increases in American aid or
access to new technologies and weapons systems or seeking support for Israeli
companies trying to land a contract or asking yet again that a damaging spy
like Jonathon Pollard be freed or setting new demands in foreign policy towards
this or that country fallen under Mr. Netanyahu’s wrath. And we have Obama’s
own words when he was caught briefly with an open microphone while talking
privately with President Sarkozy of France. Raising the eyebrows of reporters, Sarkozy
remarked that Netanyahu was a liar who couldn’t be trusted. Obama agreed that
you couldn’t trust anything Netanyahu said, and added further that Sarkozy was
lucky in his dealings with Netanyahu: imagine having to speak with him every day
the way Obama had to?
Every day? A call from the leader of 1/1,000 of the earth’s
population every day? No wonder they keep such things secret.
When the demonstrations by Egyptians disenchanted with Morsi
began, they provided the perfect opportunity and cover for a coup. Israel undoubtedly
pushed the United States – after all, Obama had intervened to support the
original revolution, something not pleasing to Netanyahu and only adding to his
stock of reasons for often expressing contempt of the President, and now Morsi
was carrying on in “I told you so” ways. The United States in turn undoubtedly
let the Egyptian military know it would not object to the overthrow of Morsi
(and it hasn’t objected, has it?), reminding the generals of what was at stake
here – namely, about a billion and a half in annual bribes for keeping the
government of Israel from complaining.
One suspects the CIA was active in stoking the fires of
discontented Egyptians, handing out money and promises and encouragement to
make the crowds larger and more aggressive. After all, that is just what the
CIA does when it isn’t directly overthrowing someone’s government or
assassinating someone’s leader or planting false stories in the press or
secretly bribing government officials in dozens of countries deemed to be
“ours.”
I heard one of CBC Radio’s lesser journalistic lights speak
of such a close election as the one in Egypt leaving so many people there
feeling the government didn’t represent them. She apparently was unaware that
Canada’s Stephen Harper is deemed a majority parliamentary government with
about 39% of the vote. Or that many American presidential elections end with margins
as close as that in Egypt, Kennedy having been elected by a small fraction of
one percent of the popular vote. George Bush received about a half million fewer
votes than Al Gore in 2000, a victorious minority made possible by America’s
antiquated constitution with its anti-democratic electoral college, a result
which has been repeated a number of times in American history.
But Americans and Canadians do not go into the streets to
overturn the results, nor would we say anything encouraging or positive if they
did. If the existing rules are followed in an election, we accept the result,
and that kind of stability is absolutely crucial to maintaining any form of
democracy. Yet it is somehow acceptable for our press to take that view when
the topic is government in the Middle East, and a struggling new democratic
government at that.
After all, there has been a steady stream of prejudiced
words and carefully selected facts about Islam and the Middle East in the
mainline press since 9/11. And ever since that event, much as the five Israeli
Mossad agents, disguised as workers for a moving company, who were reported
photographing the strikes on the twin towers from the top of their truck while
dancing and high-fiving before their arrest and deportation, apologists for
Israel have steadily encouraged the notion of Islamic and Arabic irrationality
to excuse Israel’s bloody excesses. The notion has become a handy tool to grab
whenever there are other events viewed unfavorably by Israel, as in the case of
the Egyptian election and some of the democratic government’s acts.
The political future for the poor people of Egypt is not
bright. Their prospects for democratic government and all the social changes
that it entails over time are indeed collateral damage of Israel’s endless
bristling and America’s Israeli-like sense of exceptionalism and belief that it
has the right to play God with the lives of tens of millions of others to
satisfy troubles in its own domestic politics.
