Editor
Editor
The Egyptian pharaoh is ruling directly while the Pakistani dictator has civilian puppets at the forefront but for all practical purposes, it is a military dictatorship. All major decisions—and even minor ones—are made directly by the army chief. There is also the putative ruler of Jordan but he is too insignificant to waste any column space on him.
Let us look at the Egyptian pharaoh’s case first. He clearly sees Asad’s ouster from power as akin to Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in Egypt in January 2011. The uprisings of 2011 came to be called the Arab Spring or Islamic Awakening. Mubarak had been in power for 30 years and installed his men in kep positions yet it took barely a month to overthrow him.
El-Sisi has been in power for 11 years. While it is still a long time, given the history of Arabian potentates, it is considered relatively short.
El-Sisi’s nervousness at what transpired in Syria is reflected in what he told military leaders and journalists on December 13 after Asad’s overthrow. “My hands are not stained with anyone’s blood, nor have I stolen anyone’s money.” Really?
Dictators and tyrants suffer from amnesia and selective memory loss, whether real or contrived. It takes gall for el-Sisi to claim that his “hands are not stained with anyone’s blood.”
It was el-Sisi who ordered the Rabaa massacre in which nearly a thousand innocent Egyptian civilians, many of them women and young girls, were shot and murdered in cold blood. They were not spared even when they sought refuge in a mosque.
Recounting the Rabaa massacre 10 years later, Amnesty International called it a “decade of shame” for Egypt and el-Sisi who ordered the massacre. The human rights organization said under el-Sisi a culture of impunity had taken hold. There is no justice and political dissent is violently suppressed.
There are over 65,000 political prisoners languishing in Egyptian jails undergoing horrible torture. Egyptian prisons are notorious for appalling conditions.
Prisoners are held in open cages in the stifling heat and even dogs are set upon them. In winter, they are not provided any blankets.
Medicines are deliberately withheld resulting in many prisoners dying. The most appalling case was that of former president Mohamed Morsi. He died in a cage while in court when he suffered a heart attack on June 17, 2019.
Both the court officials and police dismissed his plight, accusing him of faking his illness. They refused to provide any medical help resulting in his death in court. Commenting on the former president’s death, the International Bar Association said “Morsi’s death highlights inhumanity of Egypt’s prisons”.
Thousands of people have been forcibly disappeared with their loved ones unaware of their whereabouts or whether they are alive at all. Torture has been institutionalized as state policy. El-Sisi presides over one of the most oppressive regimes in West Asia (aka the Middle East).
Like all dictators in the region—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain—el-Sisi is also thoroughly corrupt. His claim that he has not “stolen anyone’s money” would be laughable were it not so cruel. He has built a $58 billion new capital city while poverty and hunger among ordinary Egyptians have skyrocketed.
Food prices have shot up; bread—the staple diet of most Egyptians—is in very short supply. El-Sisi blames the war in Ukraine. There is an element of truth in this but the larger reason is massive corruption among military officials who are an empire unto themselves.
This is where el-Sisi and his gang of generals share the same outlook with their Pakistani counterparts. General Asim Munir and his coterie of generals are as corrupt or even more than the Egyptian thugs in uniform. And both display shameless cowardice when it comes to fighting external enemies. Egypt has surrendered to zionist Israel while Pakistan has surrendered to Hindutva-ruled India.
Both the Egyptian and Pakistani militaries have killed more of their own citizens that they have killed enemy soldiers in wars. Yet they both demand the loyalty of the people. Loyalty must be earned; not demanded. The masses in both countries despise their militaries because they view them as oppressors, not defenders of the state or its borders.
If el-Sisi ordered the Rabaa massacre on August 14, 2013, Munir ordered the massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians in Islamabad on November 26, 2024. Even worse, Munir’s thugs then stole the bodies of the dead to hide their crime.
It is quite revealing that both generals—el-Sisi and Asim Munir—invoke Asad’s plight to scare people into supporting them. The vast majority in both countries have realized that their militaries are a burden far too heavy to carry.
Like Egypt, the Pakistani military is also a vast business empire with its fingers in every aspect of economic life. It owns cement, textile, fertilizers, corn flakes and milk factories and pay no taxes. They are also into real estate and continue to grab ever large tracts of land.
What both generals fear is that terrorists might be unleashed against them. They will exploit people’s genuine grievances—rising food prices resulting in mass poverty, corruption, gross mismanagement, state oppression and lack of justice in society—to target the generals and their families. They will lose power.
They are also aware that their godfather, the US, might not be so keen to bail them out any longer. America’s priorities are changing. The generals and their armies may not be the tools the US wants to use going forward.
The loss of US support and hatred of the masses gives them nightmares. Hence, their warnings that if the masses do not support their armies, the terrorists will take over. The masses know that the real terrorists are those in uniform. And most of the terrorist groups are also created by them.
One unintended consequence of Asad’s downfall may be that it has caused jitters among the tyrants in uniform. This cannot be bad even if Syria has been plunged into chaos from which it may not recover for decades, if at all.
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