Violence overtly directed against
political protesters in Cairo reached a crescendo in mid-December 2011, and
then abated. Just as US policy
makers were breathing a sigh of relief that their bet on a democratic Egypt had
paid off, the generals pushed things up a notch. Or three. Just
the bits that made the international press are hair-raisingly disturbing: at least 74 deaths in one of the
deadliest soccer disasters in history, raids on the offices of half a dozen
organizations whose aim was supporting democratic transition, and the
indictment of 43 people—Egyptians and others—on charges of using foreign funds
to undermine the state and partition the country.
Those who believe that Egypt’s
military is under the control of the United States may want to take another
look. The ruling military council
has challenged President Barack Obama and the Congress who are most likely to
take it sitting down. Perhaps even
more important they have moved significantly to restrict the activities of
Egyptian activists concerned with human rights, the rule of law, and civil
society which have been the slogans beloved of US policy makers even when they
did little to forward them.
Field Marshal Tantawi’s initial
reaction—seconded by regime supporters—to the soccer disaster was that these
events could have happened anywhere.
He saw it as a brawl between fans (Ultras) of the visiting Ahly team and
the hometown Masri team in the industrial city of Port Said on February 2. It was, in short, the kind of thing you
should expect when the soccer hooligans who fought the police in downtown Cairo
in late November and early December took to the road. Left unspoken but certainly recognized in Washington and
Jerusalem was that the Ultras were intimately involved in the assault on the
Israeli embassy in September.
Egypt has had its share of soccer brawls but this, it must be repeated,
was not simply a case of rowdy fans tearing up the town (which indeed has
indeed happened in earlier matches between these teams); it had one of the highest
death tolls of any soccer match disaster ever. It was the kind of disaster more generally associated with
collapsing stands and massive panic than with fights between rivals. That’s
because, as long as the police play their expected role, it’s very difficult
(although not wholly impossible) to generate large casualties through
individual violence.
The violence may have begun with
rivalry and taunting or it may have begun with the activities of hired
thugs. What seems to have made it really
deadly were two contributing factors.
First, the police largely stood aside from beginning to end. Evidently the customary pre-game
searches weren’t undertaken. And
once the violence erupted the television footage of the events shows the police
standing aside. Indeed as members
of the audience erupted on to the field and chased down the Ahly players you
can see them running past a double phalanx of helmeted and shield bearing
police in the direction of the dressing rooms. And as the crowd panicked they ran into locked gates that prevented
their exit and, of course, ensured that dozens of people would die in the
crush. As of now these are not
merely press reports but have found their way into a parliamentary report and
may rise to the level of criminal negligence.
The soccer disaster is now called a
massacre. It has been widely
interpreted, by foreign observers, by many Egyptians and certainly by the
Ultras, as a deliberate attempt to get revenge for their opposition to the
regime on the streets. It is also
the kind of event for which political leaders would, in a democracy, be expected
to take responsibility whether in the form of resignations or public apologies
but Egypt’s present governors are no more inclined to either of those paths
than previous ones.
Besides increased conflict with
domestic opponents, the military council has also increased tension with its
foreign partners, notably the US by raiding the offices of half a dozen
organizations committed to building civil society and indicting 43 people. Nineteen of those indicted are American
of whom 6 are currently in Egypt and have been refused permission to
leave. One of the six, Sam LaHood,
is the son of the US Secretary of Transportation. The organizations include Freedom House as well as two foundations
funded by the US Congress through the State Department (the International
Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute) to support civil
society and democratic transition around the world. They have trained activists around the world but they have
also been involved in funding research into a very sensitive area: voter
fraud.
The American press and punditocracy
has been set back on its heels by the Egyptian army’s assault on the American
foundations. How, after all, can a
client state that has received billions of dollars from the US since the days
of Jimmy Carter turn on its patron? Leaving aside the foolish arrogance of the
question, it is worth considering that the Egyptian general staff, like the
rest of the world, follows the American media. They are aware that Barack Obama is not anxious, especially
in the period before an election, to engage in unnecessary conflict. Even if they did not follow the debt
limit debate, they have an ambassador who did. They were also aware that the Republicans in Congress were
already considering using aid as a means to pressure the new government
especially in the wake of the assault on the Israeli embassy. At some point in their military
training they were undoubtedly introduced to the idea that the best defense is
an offense and most of them were on active duty as young officers in 1967. It is therefore not so surprising that
they struck at the US before it could strike at them. Neither the Congressional Republicans nor the Democratic
president have, especially in the present regional environment, a desire to complicate
relations with Egypt. By a neat
act of political jujitsu, moreover, the generals have made it clear that the
Camp David treaty and the cold peace with Israel now work wholly to their
advantage. Leaders of the Muslim
Brothers have suggested that if US aid to Egypt ends so will the treaty. Whether that would really happen is not
something either President Obama or Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been
notably quiet about events in Egypt ever since the attack on his country’s
embassy in September, want to discover.
After some initial bluster the Republicans have said little and even the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy has been remarkably quiet about a
military regime that in other circumstances they might describe as holding half
a dozen American hostages.
Yezid Sayegh has argued that Egypt
can do without the aid. It is true
Egypt today is also a very different country than the one that first received
American aid. In 1980, American
aid of $1.5-2 billion loomed very large in an Egyptian economy whose GDP was
about $22 billion. In today’s
Egypt where the GDP was in 2010 almost $250 billion, that aid is
miniscule. It is also negligible
for the generals if they indeed, as now seems to be widely believed, control
40% of the economy. In 1980,
moreover, Egypt was extremely short of hard currency; today thanks in part to
the widely despised neoliberal reforms the Egyptian pound is convertible.
One of the puzzling aspects of the
way the military authorities in Cairo have chosen to deploy coercion in months
since the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak is how much they have used
against marginal groups of protesters and how little they have used against
protests that posed a significant threat to authority, public safety and the
economy. As many Egyptians have
noted and as I will deal with in the next entry, the government is facing a
serious challenge to both to its authority and to the coherence of its
institutions from Alexandria to Asyut.
Many, but not all, of these challenges arise from assaults on
Christians. How seriously army
commanders take the substance of these assaults is one question but they have
clearly worked to undermine and entangle state officials in a web of
anti-constitutional activity.
The arrests and closures of the
NGOs have a clear target inside Egypt as well as outside it. There is no reason to diminish the
importance of persistent attempts by the generals to deploy xenophobia. They have spoken of hidden hands and
threats to divide the country since March 2011. They have wrapped themselves in the mantle of sovereignty
since the early days of their rule and when they refused to allow the official
participation of foreign observers in the election. What is new here is that the assault on foreign funding has
a direct bearing on Egyptians and not simply those who worked for the NGOs.
In Egypt, as in Europe but unlike
the US, judges both investigate cases and provide the initial trial of facts. The press conference at which the
investigating judges explained the indictments had a certain dramatic
flair. They reiterated that they
were simply acting in accordance with existing Egyptian law and dealing with
violations. Cloaking themselves in
the mantle of law and order, they implicitly placed the US (and Germany) in the
position of either accepting the principle and the indictments or rejecting
them and thus undermining the principles they have claimed to support. It was a stance that American policy
makers will find difficult to reject unless they wish to mount a wholesale
attack on the fairness of the judicial system in the post-revolutionary
era. And since these trials will
be in the civil courts, not the military courts, it is hard to see how US
officials can reasonably oppose them in the wake of the revolution.
First, as many Egyptians have noted
the military is more concerned with foreign funds that flow to secular human
rights organizations than that flow into the coffers of the Salafis and Muslim
Brothers. I have no all-embracing answer but there
are some possibilities that have not yet been explored elsewhere.
It is not well known that the NDI
and IRI, in addition to funding workshops on political participation (which
even members of the Salafi Nour party attended), had also begun to experiment
in supporting research on voting fraud.
There have been some allegations of fraud in the recent elections (for
example by the blogger Sandmonkey) although most accounts describe the election
process as relatively fair and free of overt intervention. Electoral fraud as well as outright
repression have, however, provoked widespread anger in the last several decades
and were clearly an important ingredient in popular unrest in the wake of an
obviously fraudulent parliamentary election in 2010. This is unlikely to be an area of research that Egypt’s
political leaders are going to wish to see pursued.
Even more peculiar than the
indictments of the American foundations, is the indictment of Andreas Jacobs,
director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. The Adenauer Foundation, as its name might imply, is a
German organization of moderate aims.
Unlike the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, more closely identified with
social democracy, the Adenauer Foundation is a child of German Christian
Democracy and espouses scientific policy analysis. Jacobs is a political scientist who has headed the
Foundation’s Cairo office since 2007 and was planning on leaving soon. He wrote, for example, a brief article
for the German publication Qantara
in December 2011 that suggested the revolution had not brought about
significant structural change but by then such analyses were commonplace.
The indictment of Jacobs is,
however, a threat to Egyptians who participated in conferences he agreed to
provide funding for. Because he
was seriously interested in the country’s intellectual life this would cut a
wide swathe among intellectuals, writers, and public servants. Whether they would be legally
susceptible is less important in the current atmosphere than that they would be
politically on the defensive.
These
events are troubling enough on their own but coupled with what amounts to the
emergence of a social movement that thrives on attacking Christians and
substituting “popular” justice for the court system, they are even more so.
.
