Egypt is looking more and more like Algeria, writes Mohammed Adam
Driving Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood out of the mainstream will have consequences, writes MOHAMMED ADAM.
Speaking earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry observed that the Egyptian military was “restoring democracy” when it deposed former president Mohammed Morsi. At least, that is what the New York Times reported him as saying, and barely two weeks later, the Egyptian military rulers showed the world exactly how they restore democracy.
Nearly 1,000 people, mostly Muslim Brotherhood supporters, have died in a brutal clamp-down on thousands of demonstrators protesting against Morsi’s ouster. About 4,000 have been injured, and for anyone familiar with coups, last week’s events are not particularly surprising. That’s how military rulers operate, and the thing is, the worst is yet to come.
Ominously, military strongman Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi has warned that security forces who have acted with “restraint” so far (in killing nearly 1,000 people), will be allowed to use “full force.” In the coming days, weeks and perhaps months, there will be arbitrary mass arrests of Brotherhood members who will now be defined as enemies. The pattern has already started with Muslim Brotherhood protesters now defined as “terrorists.” The media would be co-opted into fanning mass hysteria against the so-called enemies and terrorists, and gangs operating under the umbrella of the security forces would be unleashed on them. The kind of incident in which 36 detainees were killed under mysterious circumstances will happen often with little consequences. And sooner or later, there will be show trials, in which people will face charges, real or imagined, and sentenced to long prison terms. The repression will continue, and now with the arrest of Mohamed Badie, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, it is quite clear Sisi’s goal is to kill off the Brotherhood. It may well be banned.
Let us, for the sake of argument, accept the widely held notion that in a country that has known only dictatorship for more than 60 years, the first democratically-elected president should get the experiment right in a year. Let us also accept that Morsi had his chance and blew it, and therefore deserved to be overthrown. What about the carnage that unfolded on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and other cities? Does the Muslim Brotherhood deserve that as well?
Here’s the big question for all those who are cheering the demise of Morsi and rationalizing the brutality against the Brotherhood: What happens if the organization is driven out of mainstream politics and forced underground? What is the endgame?
Think about it: there are 80 million Egyptians, and a sizable chunk of them — some estimates put the number at roughly the size of the Canadian population — are Muslim Brotherhood supporters and sympathizers. Now, having overthrown Morsi, kept top Brotherhood leaders behind bars, killed many of their supporters, and cut them off from political discourse, what does Sisi expect all these angry, disenfranchised people will do? Does anyone seriously believe that the Brotherhood and its supporters will meekly fade away into the Egyptian sunset?
Does anyone remember Algeria? Do people care about the lessons of history?
In a situation eerily similar to Egypt, an Algerian Islamic party known as the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won that country’s parliamentary elections in 1991, but before it could form a government, the Algerian military, staged a coup, annulling the election results and seizing power. The FIS was banned and its members persecuted, arrested and imprisoned, and before long, a brutal insurgency took hold. There were a number of insurgent groups but the main ones were Armed Islamic Group (GIA, as it was known by its French acronym) and the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), and in the ensuing civil war, they turned Algeria into a killing field as bombings, shootings and massacres roiled the country. By the time it was all over a decade later, about 100,000 people had died. The lesson of Algeria is that when you close the door to political discourse, you open the gates to a violent and deadly alternative. But the more distressing lesson from Algeria is that many of the insurgents who cut their teeth on the Algerian killing fields, ended up in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting against Western forces. The GIA was known for its brutal massacres, often of entire villages or neighbourhoods, and tellingly, a splinter group of the organization, would later team up with al-Qaida and become known as alQaida in the Islamic Maghreb.
Some experts believe that 2013 Egypt will not become Algeria of the 1990s. They argue that Egypt is a more stable, more sophisticated society with an inner strength that Algeria never had. And they say the Egyptian military is much stronger and such an integral part of Egyptian society that it will nip any attempted insurrection in the bud. Perhaps so. Indeed, one the things Egypt had going for it all these years is not that it was a revered centre of Islamic learning. The big thing was that it was a strong monolithic country without the sectarian or tribal tendencies that have destroyed such Arab countries as Lebanon, Iraq, Libya and now Syria.
But now, serious fault lines are appearing. In the wake of Morsi’s overthrow, Egyptian society has deeply fractured. Today, millions of Egyptians, including the Tahrir Square revolutionaries who forced the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, are cheering the massacre of Brotherhood members. Egyptian liberals, who should know better, have joined in the demonization of the Brotherhood, and are backing the crackdown. Mobs have taken up weapons and are attacking Brotherhood members. Even at the height of Mubarak’s long war on the Muslim Brotherhood, it was not this bad. It was government security forces against the Brotherhood, but now the reverse is true. Egyptian has taken up arms against Egyptian, and the centre is now broken. The country is sliding into anarchy, and civil war is a real possibility.
Who is to stop it or counsel restraint? The U.S. would be the obvious candidate but its influence in Egypt, whatever it was before, has waned since the overthrow of Mubarak.
Now it is completely shredded, with the Egyptian military totally ignoring any pressure Barack Obama has applied so far. The military rulers have come to realize that the U.S. actually needs them more than they need the U.S., and they have no incentive to listen to Washington. And now with the Arab Gulf bankrolling Egypt fully behind the crackdown, the voices of reason and compromise have disappeared. It is anybody’s guess now how it will all end.
Let us just hope the road travelled by Algeria is not the one taken by Egypt.