Already, the military is reprising Mubarak-era tactics - arresting labor leaders, intimidating human rights activists and obscuring its actions with systematic misinformation. Those who think that this terror campaign will be limited to Islamists are deluded. The incitement of the populace against “terrorists” revives the language used to demonize Islamists throughout the 1990s as the security forces waged a “counterinsurgency” centered in Egypt’s southern provinces. The killing of 20 protesters, most of them Coptic Christians, outside the Maspero state television building - and the subsequent campaign to blame the victims - are rerunning on a vastly larger scale.
One can see foreshadowing in the massacres committed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) during its 16 months in power, before the election of Muhammad Mursi. The old institutions of repression, surveillance and manipulation of public opinion are reconsolidating themselves. The Egyptian revolution, with all its possibilities, has morphed, like so many before it, into a popularly supported coup. The August 14 massacre of hundreds of protesters by Egyptian security forces marks the onset of a state-sponsored reign of terror. All the force in the world cannot extinguish that battle. It suppresses the basic challenge raised by the Egyptian revolution, the task of crafting a state that works for its people. The counter-revolution has a built-in defect. Sadly, popular collective action is more often than not defeated by elite reconstitution. If the accommodationist, conservative counter-elite of the Muslim Brothers failed to secure their perch in the state for more than a year, the chances of any real reform of the Egyptian leviathan seem nil.Īnd yet, the counter-revolutionary order is tenuous, and not because of the hopeful idea that people who have spectacularly revolted once will revolt again.
The specter of Egyptian democracy has always had many powerful enemies, in Cairo, Riyadh, Tel Aviv and Washington, and they work extraordinarily well together to subvert any serious advances on the state by outsiders. No one who understands the architecture of power in Egypt can be sanguine about the current moment. The original revolutionary project of a diverse people working to place their tribunes in the state is supplanted by a new-old arrangement, the evergreen rule of the many by the very few. And military and mukhabarat are rebranded as the rightful owners of the formidable state, brooking parity with no one. Police are recast as paladins of law and order when they were enemies of the people. January 25 is replaced by June 30 (or even July 3) in the revolutionary calendar. The July 3 coup canceled all of the hard-won, if tiny gains made on these fronts, and the US-backed military is now waging a campaign of political and physical extermination to secure its supremacy.Ī massive, state-orchestrated revaluation is underway. That means presidents control generals, parliamentarians oversee bureaucrats and people discipline police. And because it’s Egypt, the prize has always been the state, not simply in the sense of capturing it but of opening it up to democratic control. The January 25 revolution began the Egyptian version of the epic struggle between self-preserving elites and rising masses. We asked several veteran observers, all of them Middle East Report editors or authors, to offer their views of how Egypt got to this point and what the future holds. The fate of the country - popular sovereignty or no - likely hangs in the balance. Following that day’s bloodshed, Egypt is in the middle of its most severe crisis since the fall of ex-president Husni Mubarak in February 2011. Augwas a day whose events and meaning Egyptians will be debating fiercely for decades to come.