Matthew Fisher: No joy in Cairo.
Fractures between competing factions continue to widen
— Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates emphatically demonstrated Tuesday that they approve of the overthrow of Egypt’s elected president, Mohammed Morsi, and his government. The Gulf sheikdoms forked over $8 billion in emergency loans and grants to the interim regime that has taken his place.
The gift will slightly ease Egypt’s grave economic crisis, which has caused fuel shortages and power outages and was a major contributors to Morsi’s unpopularity.
Still, with hours to go before what normally would be Ramadan Kareem — which roughly translates as Happy Ramadan — there was little joy in the Egyptian capital.
The political divide here has existed for years, yet the chasm between Islamists and secular liberals somehow grows even wider every day.
No matter what the investigations led by the militarybacked interim government reveal about a Monday gunfight that left about 50 Islamists and three members of the security forces dead, Egypt’s competing factions are so rigid in their beliefs and so convinced of the righteousness of their causes, that there is zero chance the truth about who fired first and why will make any difference.
There are more beards, hijabs, prayer mats and Holy Qu’rans at the Muslim Brotherhood protests. But the endless rallies by the relatively affluent, western-oriented secular liberals and Coptic Christians in Tahrir Square and by the often poor, devout Islamists in Raba Square actually look, feel and smell a lot the same.
The gatherings in each square are exuberant. Despite the obvious dangers, each of them host an alarming number of young children who have been brought there by their parents. People and music scream from loudspeakers. Every second person seems to be wrapped in the Egyptian flag. Hawkers sell the same strong coffee and fried corn. Garbage accumulated during days and nights of protest is everywhere. The same cursory and therefore ludicrous checks for weapons and ID cards are made by young men, often carrying clubs, who have no clue what they are doing.
Something else that both crowds have in common is that they are each convinced that they — and they alone — believe in and understand democracy.
Notwithstanding these superficial similarities, nothing can alter the fact that Egypt’s two camps loathe each other. There is no hint that anybody in these parallel universes wishes to reconcile, let alone wants to seriously discuss their differences.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been in a state of shock since Morsi was ousted last week. Most of the movement’s senior leadership has been arrested or is on the run. Its media outlets have been shut down.
But the Brotherhood still has a few cards to play. Its rank and file is disciplined. It has so many leadership tiers that it feels no urgent need to replace Morsi. It continues to enjoy strong support in rural areas that has never been conveyed by the television cameras and satellite uplinks focused on Cairo.
Don’t be fooled by the recent show of unity in Tahrir, either. The organizational skills of the anti-Morsi forces remain feeble, which is almost certainly why they could not win any of the various votes over the past two years.
Nor do the liberal secularists yet have an obvious leader. Rather, they continue to be led by about 20 different egomaniacs who believe they are smarter and more patriotic than everybody else.
The Tahrir crowd is also fickle. Two years ago it hated the military and thought the Brotherhood was the lesser of two evils. For a while, anyway, the warring groups equally distrusted the generals. Because of that they even managed to briefly hold hands.
These days the soldiers are the Tahrir crowd’s heroes. The Brotherhood are villains. Almost nobody smiles about the irony of this volte-face.
The secular liberals may not like each other much, but they have an ability at the moment to get a lot more people out in the streets of Cairo than the Brotherhood can.
It was the big numbers that turned out in Tahrir Square in late June that convinced the military to drop its quasineutrality and agree to the opposition’s call to topple Morsi. But will that support translate into victory if presidential elections take place in about six months? The outcome is certainly far more likely if the Muslim Brotherhood is not allowed to contest the elections or can only do so if it adheres to ground rules set by the armed forces.
Proof that the Brotherhood won’t compromise anytime soon was provided again Tuesday when it rejected the interim government’s plans to hold elections by next January as well as the choice of economist Hazem el-Beblawi as interim prime minister. The movement now faces brutal choices. It can try to make good on its vow to stage a national uprising. This would cause havoc but it is hard to see how it can prevail when the armed forces are clearly the final arbiters of everything. An equally tragic strategy would to be try to play a longer game and do what it did for decades, going underground to conduct a low-level insurgency.
What seems most likely is continued spasms of terrible violence that will eat into the billions of dollars in aid that Saudi Arabia and the UAE will provide. This is the unhappy, fractured country that the generals are masters of today and for the foreseeable future.