As Egypt Goes, So Does the Rest of the Arab Spring… by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Ken Jensen

Posted By on January 29th, 2013

http://EconWarfare.org

The U.S. appears to acknowledge the economic and political mess that the last two years have brought to the Arab world and Africa generally in high-flown rhetoric devoid of reference to American interests. But things appear to be getting much worse quickly. We have been watching it accelerating in Libya and Syria, the Maghreb and Sahel, and now in Arab-Spring “poster-child” Egypt.

 Charles Holmes, writing for Foreign Policy,calls what’s going on “a confrontation with modernity.” Arab regimes have been repressing political opposition for a very long time, and neither Arab nationalism nor Arab socialism or Baathism has yielded an antidote to the region’s economic primitivism and potential for violence created by economic failure. Holmes likes to blame former Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-1970), and sees Morsi’s regime as the end of the line for all things Nasserite. He may be right in a way, but Morsi’s imposition of Shari’a, is unlikely to be challenged simply for being “unmodern.”

Repression of political forces riled up by economic deprivation is legion in the Arab/Muslim world, and is hardly limited to Muslim Brotherhood controlled countries. The Saudis, the UAEand Qatar have long enforced Shari’a, suppressing their subjects’ individual and political freedoms, that is, when they’ve not been busy buying off the organizations that claim to represent the dispossessed. Given recent events, and the rise of the Muslim-Brotherhood-style political movements, the ultimate question is whether the downtrodden could eventually put an end to the traditional repressive and utterly corrupt regimes of the region.

Although the Muslim Brotherhood’s power grab and constitution manipulation have surely played a role in creating the mayhem in Egypt’s streets over the past five days, the real cause of the violence and resulting repression is the country’s economic crisis. In setting up his regime, Mohamed Morsi’s error was trying to take both the military and the dispossessed in the streets out of the political equation. The Muslim Brotherhood’s taming of the military by leaving the commanding heights of the economy in its hands, may have given Morsi the ability to crack down on dissent, but the dispossessed now see the military, not only the police, as their ultimate enemies. It matters not at all to them that the Brotherhood is in control of them. Their Arab Spring revolt was against political corruption and repression, and the economic woes that characterized the Mubarak regime, which they rightly see as the cause of their misery. On the two-year anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, it’s clear to them that the Brotherhood is not only no better than Mubarak, but in fact worse.

 

That realization seems to escape the Obama Administration and the major Western lending organizations, the World Bank and the IMF. They are offering billions of dollars in aid and loans to the Morsi government, despite the fact that he rejects their conditions for economic and governmental reform. Their funds will only serve to create a buffer for the Morsi regime, which is bent not on building up, but on tearing down political and economic freedom.
Since January 24, regular contributor James Dorsey has given us a blow-by-blow account of Egypt’s riots and regime reaction. The rioters in Egypt are not simply a heterogeneous collection of malcontents. They’re organized and the forces at their disposal throughout the countryrival those of the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

The organization is the al Ahli SC Ultras. That’s right: the fanatical fans attached to the country’s Cairo-based champion soccer club. During the Arab Spring revolution, the protests by the al Ahli Ultras may have been the reason for the fall of the Mubarak regime. Before that, however, they were subject to regime repression that resulted in the deaths of some 800 of their number. They sacrificed for the revolution and now they want retribution. The Ultras blame all those deaths — even if some came at the hands of a rival soccer club — on the military and police, who they believe penetrated a soccer riot to teach the Ultras a political lesson. And they blame the Brotherhood regime for dragging its feet on bringing the bad guys to justice.

The latest riots in Port Said and two other Suez Canal cities were the result of the buildup to a court decision that was expected to come on January 26. The decision came and the rest is some very unpleasant history for Mr. Morsi. If you haven’t paid attention to the role of the Ultras, and therewith a real opposition in Egypt, read and think about what Dorseyhas to say:

“This weekend’s initial sentencing to death of 21 supporters of Port Said’s Al Masri SC soccer club and postponement until March 9 of a verdict in the case of 52 other defendants accused of responsibility for the worst incident a year ago in Egyptian soccer history has served only to reinforce deep-seated mistrust of Mr. Morsi. This is all the more the case given that the court has yet to publish its justification of the sentencing and did not include any of the nine mid-level security officials in its initial verdict.

“Supporters of Al Masri as well as crowned Cairo club Al Ahli SC [the Ultras] and a broad swath of Egyptian public opinion believe that the violence that erupted last year at the end of a match between the two in Port Said’s stadium in which mostly Al Ahli fans were killed was much more than a simple soccer brawl.

“The incident is widely seen as an attempt that got out of hand by the then military rulers of the country and the police and security forces to cut militant, highly politicized, street battle-hardened soccer fans or ultras down to size.”

In the days leading up to the verdict, both Morsi’s governmentand the Muslim Brotherhood attempted to establish themselves as champions of the Ultra supporters who died in the Port Said brawl last year. The Ikhwan website called the Al Ahli Ultras “martyrs of the revolution.” But, as Dorsey points out, this did nothing to assuage the Ultras and brought on the escalating violence of the weekend. In the end, Morsi opted for “law enforcement,” not reform, in declaring martial law in the three Suez cities.

The point in going through all this is to emphasize how and why Egyptian politics, past and present, offers no potential for political or economic change. U.S. and other Western economic assistance are surely destined for use in political repression. It’s also important to understand post-Arab Spring Middle East politics as they unfold in the streets.

The latest violent episode in Egypt has certainly put to rest the old theory that once the Brotherhood showed that it could not govern, the military would step back in. The past five days would seem to have given the military an opportunity if it had a plan for serious opposition to the current regime. Clearly, it doesn’t.

Addenda

Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, writing for the Eurasia Review has given an interesting assessment of recent Iranian news reports about Iranian-Muslim Brotherhood meetings. It bears on the matters discussed above. The question he raises is whether Morsi, et al., have begun looking to Iran as an alternative source of economic support should the Gulf States and the West don’t do enough to keep the Brotherhood in power in Egypt. Could Egypt replace Syria as Iran’s principal Middle East proxy? Doesn’t sound likely; but, if we’re right about the continuing volatile nature of Egypt, it also doesn’t sound impossible.

See below for a link to David Kenner’s Foreign Policy article on the last days of the Mubarak regime.

Further Reading

 

 

 

 

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