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Ed Webb

Consent of the Governors - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...stitution_military_brotherhood

Egypt politics authoritarianism MB ikhwan analysis military

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Democratic politics rest upon the guarantee that all sides understand and agree upon these rules of the game: Without such predictability, politics is no more than an endless game of Calvinball, with powerful players changing the rules at a moment's notice to suit their interests. Nobody knows from one day to the next whether their political activity, journalistic investigations, protest against injustice, or organizational membership will be a demonstration of democratic commitment or evidence of terrorism. This debilitating uncertainty helps to fuel polarization and dangerously raises the stakes of political conflict. 
  • The precedent has now been firmly established that the military will step in if it does not approve of the direction in which politics is heading. No promises to avoid future such interventions can possibly be made credible, regardless of what the constitution says.
  • the pathologies of uncertainty, unaccountability and unpredictability will continue to afflict Egyptian politics
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The military's relentless "war on terror" against the Muslim Brotherhood and the campaign of arrests against journalists and activists makes Egypt's future look even bleaker. The fight against the Muslim Brotherhood has been so far-reaching that virtually anyone who dissents from the current regime is at risk.
  • Egypt's new regime has proved all too willing to extend the terrorist label to any political opponent, whether it's youth leader Ahmed Maher or Al Jazeera journalist and occasional FP contributor Mohamed Fadel Fahmy (a Canadian citizen whose government has proven unable to help). A prominent pro-regime Egyptian journalist, Mostafa Bakry, even took to the airwaves last week to announce that the United States had a plan to assassinate Sisi -- which if completed, he warned, would cause Egyptians to "kill the Americans in the streets." And how can anyone take seriously the guarantees of rights in the new constitution when, barely a day after the results were announced, both the Salafi former presidential candidate Hazem Abu Ismail and liberal icon Amr Hamzawy face legal sanction for insulting judges -- the latter for a year-old tweet?
  • I'm not even sure that I would risk going to Egypt these days, given how easily anyone can be imprisoned if accused of Brotherhood sympathies (which happens to me, like many other Western and Egyptian analysts, roughly 50 million times a day in the ongoing performance art of the Egyptian Twittersphere).
  • maybe now there is space to contemplate releasing political prisoners and stopping the campaign of arrests and persecution of political opponents. Egyptian officials could demonstrate their willing subordination to the new constitution by turning away from the "war on terror," and Gen. Sisi could commit to not seeking political office and instead insist upon the political neutrality of the military and the state.
  • All signs currently point in the other direction, unfortunately. And that's why so few observers of Egypt see this week's referendum as anything other than the next step in the country's slow drift back into authoritarianism.
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