Group items tagged

It is true that this president did not win by a vast margin, but there is no requirement in a liberal democracy that that be a condition of electoral success. And even if, as the protesters have also insisted, he has been acting largely on behalf of his Freedom and Justice Party rather than the country as a whole, that by and large is how politics works in liberal democracies. There is much rhetoric about “the nation” and “the people,” but electoral democracies work not in favor of all citizens but rather of special interests represented by the party that wins in the elections. 

The trouble, as I see it, is that the pro-democracy movement has not thought critically enough about how the grand alliance against Morsi has come about and how the aims of that alliance conflict with their own aims. They seem to take it for granted that, having been on the winning side in the conflict with the Morsi government, they can now successfully confront the army and its civilian allies (i.e., big business, the media, the judiciary, etc.).

there are so many forces already arrayed against them that there was not much scope for the Morsi government for independent action. Morsi could have tried military officers for crimes? You must be joking. He could have restored a bankrupt economy in a world where powerful institutions and governments, who have their own political agendas, control the flow of capital? He should have reduced poverty in a country dominated by a powerful neoliberal elite? This is not where the real evidence of their incompetence lies–especially considering the short period of one year in which he was president. In my view, their total incompetence, their total stupidity, lies in not anticipating, to begin with, that they would be demonized if they acquired governmental authority. And demonized they were, with a vengeance. Part of this can be related to the crude secularist ideas that dominate most Cairene intellectuals. They were also highly incompetent in their inability, or unwillingness, to reach out to parts of the opposition. In any case, in my view they should never have aspired to the presidency–first of all as a matter of principle, and secondly because the uprising had created colossal practical problems which would be extremely difficult to address by any government. Winning an election does not mean that you are strong, as the Muslim Brotherhood thought it was. It means you are responsible for failures of the state and economy. And, despite their electoral win, the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party are and were always weak. One of the things of which they were often accused was that they wanted totalitarian control of society, that they were on the verge of getting what they wanted, which is absolute nonsense, of course. They did not have such control, they could not acquire such control, and there is no real evidence that they wanted such control. This is one part of their stupidity: To be seen to behave as though they had real control of the state.

This controllable prosecutor-general, against which almost the entire prosecutorial corps protested and nearly succeeded in firing, was used quite clearly at will to go after the private media and the opposition as a direct extension of Morsi and the Brotherhood, while substantially legally shielding the Brotherhood at the same time.

In another breach of revolutionary consensus, Morsi and the Brotherood tightened control over state media and retained the nationally rejected role of information minister, already abolished briefly after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak. State-owned papers and channels were subjected to appointments of allied or controllable leaderships. The media often ran familiar propaganda-esque headlines that seemed taken out of the Mubarak days. Furthermore, the press did not provide neutral and balanced coverage of events, and state TV was almost always forced to host a Brotherhood guest on every talk show, or at the very least not host an opposition figure on his own. Reports of guest blacklists also began to surface once more. Charges of “insulting the president” and “contempt of religion” began to pile up against media figures, often made by Brotherhood allies rather than directly by the Brotherhood (though the presidency did press some charges before retracting them under local and international pressure). Morsi and the Brotherhood seemed to care very little about fixing the problematic legislative framework for media, and gradually appeared to find it handy, especially with a prosecutor-general that was under full control. 

Although the original claim was that the Shura Council would only rubber stamp consensus legislation until the lower house would be elected, it was turned into a full parliament. It discussed far-reaching and controversial drafts, including: a non-governmental organization law that was widely seen as capable of stifling civil society in Egypt; divisive electoral and political rights laws that were criticized as favoring the Islamists; and even a disastrous judicial reform law that would have axed around 3,500 existing judges in an already choking legal system. The latter draft was openly seen as a move to get rid of judges that were problematic to the Brotherhood’s expansionary plans, while there were wide fears of intentions to replace them with a new generation of more sympathetic judges or outright Brotherhood members.

the man who’d been the first democratically elected president in the country’s history was confined in a soundproof glass booth, and authorities made major efforts to ensure that whatever he said during his brief appearance went largely unheard.State television offered no live broadcast, instead providing a heavily edited 30-minute video of the session that fast-forwarded through most of Morsi’s appearances

another indication that Egypt’s current government, installed by the military after it toppled Morsi last July, intends to keep trying to make sure that no space is provided for Morsi or his supporters from the Muslim Brotherhood to press their cases with the Egyptian people, amid signs that the military plans to maintain its influence

There were no Morsi supporters in the court, and many journalists who’d applied to cover the trial were denied access.

As fear for the economy grows in Egypt, a comparison to the conditions faced in the ’70s and early ’80s becomes more plausible.

During the ’70s, Sadat had limited resources due to the closure of the Suez Canal and the occupation of Sinai. The tourism industry was badly hit, and cash remittance from Egyptians working abroad was not great (at least initially). He opted to manage the economy and prevent its collapse while aborting any revolts. The release of Islamists from prison in 1971 was not just intended to undermine the pro-Nasser side, but also to appease their supporters in rural Egypt. As part of his coping strategy, he turned a blind eye to their unregistered and unregulated charity works. He also assigned certain economic privileges to army personnel and policemen to guarantee their loyalties.

whatever economic policies Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood pursue, it will mostly affect the middle class — the urban communities that are already against him. Excitement about protests in this section of society has mostly dissipated and been replaced by a deep sense of despair, mainly due to divisions among the opposition. Even if some revolt, it will never be enough to turn the tide without the support of the wider rural community

The controversy surrounding the Syria conference pointed to a crippling flaw in the Morsi presidency: Though the constitution names Morsi as supreme commander of the armed forces, the military remains master of its own destiny and a rival source of authority to the country's first freely elected head of state.

For the army, the Syria rally had crossed “a national security red line” by encouraging Egyptians to fight abroad, risking creating a new generation of jihadists, said Yasser El-Shimy, analyst with the International Crisis Group.

“There is one thing we do know about the ideology of the military. That it sees itself as having a mission to the state rather than the constitution,”

The challenge Egyptians faced throughout the transition was to build an inclusive polity in the face of their deep divisions. They could resolve these divisions either by suppressing disagreements through a forceful exercise of state power or by competing at the ballot box. The former strategy requires massive state violence in the short term and almost always leads to suspension of formal democracy, without any guarantee of a return to democracy in the medium or long term. The latter strategy involves less force, establishes at least the formal elements of democratic rule, and preserves the possibility of additional democratic gains in the future, even if it requires concessions to undemocratic or illiberal political groups in the present and is marked occasionally by episodes of political violence.

The 14th century Arab Muslim political thinker Ibn Khaldūn’s tripartite typology of regimes—natural, rational, and Islamic—is consistent, in broad terms, with Rawls’s analysis. Natural states are based on relations of domination between the ruler and the ruled, restrained only by the limitations of the ruler’s actual power. Rational and Islamic states, by contrast, impose moral restraints on the exercise of political power. According to Ibn Khaldūn, rational and Islamic regimes transcend the relations of domination characteristic of natural regimes and establish overlapping conceptions of the common secular good. Ibn Khaldūn’s rational and Islamic regimes both can foster the convergence in political morality that—like Rawls’s overlapping consensus—characterizes a just constitution. Critically, this convergence or consensus must occur organically. Ibn Khaldūn argued that coerced adherence to Islamic law fails to produce virtuous subjects. Likewise, coerced imposition of even a just constitution cannot produce an effective system of justice if large numbers of citizens are incapable of freely adhering to its terms.

The real issue, however, was the make-up of the Constituent Assembly and the substance of the constitution it would draft. The parties arrived at a deal, including the semi-presidential structure of the state—with executive power shared by a prime minister and popularly elected president—but the role of religion was a sticking point. Because Parliament had selected the members of the Constituent Assembly, and because Islamists had won Parliament, Islamists dominated the Constituent Assembly. Liberals argued, not unreasonably, that those parliamentary elections exaggerated Islamists’ long-term political strength. Liberals also thought that the draft sacrificed or limited too many personal rights and freedoms in the name of religion, morality, and family values. They argued that the constitution would not be legitimate unless it was a consensual document capable of gaining acceptance by all significant social groups in Egypt.

The real answer to Egypt and Tunisia’s divergent trajectories may therefore lie in the responses of each country’s state institutions to the calls to thwart the democratic transition. In Egypt, the military and judiciary heeded and even welcomed these calls. The opposition in Egypt was able to appeal to the judiciary to dissolve the democratically elected parliament and to the military to oust the democratically elected president. In Tunisia, by contrast, the judiciary was unable and the military unwilling to perform these functions. Without state institutions to partner with, the Tunisian opposition ultimately had no choice but to come to the negotiating table with Ennahda, facilitating consensus.

The Brotherhood’s biggest mistake, however, may have been to encroach on the military’s historic monopoly over national security decisions. The National Defense Council, composed overwhelmingly of military figures under the SCAF, became majority-civilian under Morsi (and tellingly reverted back to majority-military in the 2014 Constitution). In December 2012, the Brotherhood raised more red flags by allegedly backing a Qatari-Palestinian scheme to buy land in the Sinai. The military balked, claiming that “Sinai is a red line” and Sisi took the unprecedented step of issuing a decree (typically the president’s prerogative) limiting the sale of this land.Wael Haddara, an advisor to Morsi, told me about another incident in December 2012 when he and two other Morsi administration officials were sent to Washington to meet with the Department of Defense. Intentionally or not, the Egyptian embassy in D.C. failed to inform the defense attache of their meeting, contributing to fears that Morsi was sidelining the military.

The Tunisian “success story,” then, is not that all sides wanted democracy, but rather that all sides had no choice but to settle for democracy.

the rights situation in Egypt currently appears even direr than it did prior to the revolution and the ouster of the former president. The country has merely traded one form of authoritarianism for another, albeit with some new features

The principles of the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary were undermined with the issuance of the constitutional declaration of November 2012

A “state of emergency” was announced unnecessarily and by way of a law which violates international human rights standards

In Tunisia, as in Egypt, the Islamists who came to power through the ballot box are seeing their popularity erode and are tempted to hold on to power by recourse to authoritarian measures. But they have to deal with the legacy of the Arab spring. They face a new political culture: now, one where people who disagree with the government take to the streets; where there is no reverence for established power and the army and the police no longer inspire fear.

consider the precise nature of this authoritarian turn because it bears little resemblance to the “Islamic revolution” often associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Nahda, the Renaissance Party, in Tunisia. It is, on the contrary, a conservative and paradoxically pro-western “counter-revolution”

The electoral and social base of the Egyptian regime is not revolutionary. Instead of trying to reach a compromise with the principal actors of the Arab spring, Morsi is attempting to get all the supporters of the new order on his side. The coalition he is building is based on business, the army, the Salafists and those elements of the “people” that are supposedly tired of anarchy

The government of Prime Minister Hisham Qandil is currently in the process of drafting two new laws aimed at regulating the right of street protest and combating the proliferation of thuggery

the Committee on National Defence launched scathing attack against private TV satellite television channels, taking them to task for alledgely inciting protesters to launch violent attacks on several state buildings in recent days, notably Al-Ittihadiya presidential palace in Cairo's district of Heliopolis on 1 February

The 26-article law also makes it obligatory that the interior ministry be notified of any given protest or demonstration's date, objective and site. The notification request must be submitted to the ministry five days in advance of the date of the demonstration. The interior ministry reserves the right to forbid "demonstrations" or "public gatherings and meetings" if they risk "disrupting public peace and security."

torture was repealed from the Egyptian criminal code in the 19th Century because of a decision from within the state apparatus itself, specifically the police which reached an advanced degree of professionalism. It was also a reflection of a high degree of centralisation, strength and self-confidence of the state’s administrative apparatus, at the heart of which is the police.

It is disappointing to watch the serious regression of the Egyptian state over the past 30 years; a regression back to torture practices at police stations and locations of detention in Egypt. Even more upsetting is that those in power today do not recognise the dangers of continuing to ignore this explosive issue, especially after a revolution which – in my opinion – primarily occurred to end torture and other systematic abuses by police against citizens.

Egypt’s police today, unlike in the 19th Century, cannot reform itself from within because the state’s administrative apparatus – the judiciary and forensic science – which aided the police in this difficult task in the past, has collapsed. Meanwhile, torture has become systematic and routine which makes it impossible to expect police officers and commanders to accept this mission voluntarily.

The number of “insulting the president” lawsuits filed during the reign of President Mohamed Morsi exceeds those filed under all Egyptian rulers since 1892, a report by the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) has shown