Members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood have called on followers to march in protest in Cairo today after at least 525 people died when security forces raided two protest encampments filled with supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi. More than 3,500 people were injured. The Muslim Brotherhood says the death toll may top 2,000. Police and troops used bulldozers, tear gas and live ammunition to clear out the two Cairo sit-ins. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood responded by storming and torching police stations. Forty-three police officers were reportedly killed. Wednesday marked the third mass killing of Islamist demonstrators since Morsi was deposed six weeks ago. Egypt’s army-installed government declared a month-long state of emergency and imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the capital Cairo and 10 other provinces. The move came shortly after it installed 25 provincial governors, including 19 military generals and two loyalists of ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the violence, but the Obama administration announced no moves to cut some $1.3 billion in annual aid to the Egyptian military. The Turkish prime minister, Erdogan, called on Thursday for the U.N. Security Council to convene quickly and act after what he described as a massacre in Egypt. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates expressed support for the crackdown, saying the Egyptian government had, quote, “exercised maximum self-control.”
Chris Toensing talking:
in Kerry’s second sentence, he said “Egyptians inside and outside government” need to pull back, “need to take a step back,” that the implication there is that both the army, the Egyptian state, and the protesters at the sit-ins are somehow equally to blame for what occurred yesterday. And that’s simply outrageous, as we’ve heard from the very vivid reporting by Sharif and Lina on the ground. What happened in Cairo yesterday was a massacre, by any definition of the term. It was violence initiated by the army, perpetrated by the army, which was by far the more heavily armed party, and the overwhelming bulk of the casualties are among the unarmed civilian protesters. So this was a massacre.
It should have been spoken of, as Prime Minister Erdogan in Turkey did, in those terms. And it should be on the agenda of the international community at the U.N. And the United States, if it were serious about promoting human rights and social justice and democracy around the world, would be not just reviewing its aid package to Egypt, but immediately seeking its termination, until such time as a genuinely democratically elected and legitimate government is in place in Egypt, and until such time as there is accountability for what can only be described as crimes against humanity carried out by the prime U.S. ally in Egypt, which is the Egyptian army.
the U.S. does not give $1.3 billion a year to the Egyptian military in order to prop up the Egyptian military or for the good of Egypt. This is to secure what have been viewed as U.S. interests in the region—namely, the sanctity of the Camp David treaty with Israel; the prevention of another multi-front war, Arab-Israeli war, in the Middle East; keeping the Suez Canal open to commercial and—traffic and U.S. warships, not coincidentally. These are the U.S. interests that the U.S. believes will only be protected by the Egyptian army for the foreseeable future.
We need to remember American policymakers have a remarkable capacity for self-deception. I think that Secretary Kerry and his predecessors half-believe the pieties that come out of their mouths at moments like these. They would like, ideally, Egypt to be a free and democratic country, but only if the government that is produced from that process agrees with our concept of what our strategic interests are in the region. And so, the dilemma for the U.S. is that they can either have autocrats who rule in accordance with U.S. strategic vision, or they can have a democratic system that—where the outcome is uncertain. And, sadly, to this point, not just in Egypt, but across the region, the U.S. has shown that it prefers the first option: autocrats who will toe the U.S. line.
if you look at the events of the last two years, capped by yesterday’s massacre, I think what we’re seeing is a counterrevolution that’s occurring, more quickly than many people thought it might. The powers behind the throne in Egypt, who have been the powers behind the throne for some 50 years—the army, the secret police, their allied civilian politicians, their civilian faces, if you will, the so-called Egyptian deep state—is afraid of the Egyptian people. They don’t want civilian oversight over their prerogatives. They want to maintain their impunity, their ability to operate above the law. And we’ve seen what lengths they will go to to preserve those privileges.
What they’re doing is seizing the opportunity presented by political turmoil and chaos in the wake of the ouster of Mubarak and in the wake of the misrule of the Muslim Brothers and the arrogance that Morsi and his compatriots displayed when they were given a taste of power. They’re using that opportunity to sort of consolidate their grip on the country, at the same time presenting themselves as the sort of the knight riding in on a white horse to save the country from disaster.
many Egyptians, perhaps a majority, agree with the army’s version of events. That’s partly because they’re not being provided with enough information to judge for themselves, because the military has shut down any media outlets—most of the media outlets in Egypt that would actually report independently. But it’s also because there is a deep yearning among Egyptian citizens for a return to normalcy, a return to stability, and they see the army as the only force in national politics that can credibly promise such a scenario. It’s a very—it’s a very sad situation.
Sharif Abdel Kouddous talking:
it’s important to note that the police state never went away. They were killing and arresting people with impunity under the rule of Mohamed Morsi, who, let’s remember, thanked the police for their efforts after they gunned down 60 civilians in Port Said in January—also under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. What I think is that there is—the elements of the former regime, but also the security apparatus, is riding—rode this wave of popular anger against the Muslim Brotherhood and against Mohamed Morsi to reconstitute themselves and try and instill this more regressive authoritarian order.
But I think if we’ve learned anything over the past two-and-a-half years, one is that you cannot enforce stability. The idea that you can enforce stability only leads to more chaos, and we’ve seen that time and time again. And two is that I think the one thing people will not stand for, at least in the long term, is to have this kind of regressive security state inflicted on them. Once the target of this authoritarian apparatus moves away from the Islamists and starts imposing itself on other sectors of Egyptian society, then I think we might see, perhaps, once again, a popular uprising against that kind of crackdown. You know, time and again, there has been these mass uprisings against authoritarian rule. Successive state elites have tried to co-opt the old regime, including the Muslim Brotherhood. And we’ve seen these mass uprisings come up and force those in power to make changes to try and preserve the nature of the state. Having said that, we’re in a very difficult situation right now. The level of violence, the level of polarization is so deep that it’s hard to know when it’ll stop.
– source democracynow.org
Sharif Abdel Kouddous, independent journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent based in Cairo.
Chris Toensing, executive director of the Middle East Research and Information Project and editor of its publication, Middle East Report. He co-edited the book, The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt.