Egypt Rocked by Widespread Protests Against Sisi

By: Kayhan Int’l 

Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Cairo and several other Egyptian cities since late last Friday chanting slogans against the dictatorial regime of President General Abdul-Fattah as-Sisi.
According to witnesses, the regime has responded with harsh measures, arresting scores of peaceful demonstrators and subjecting them to violent treatment.
Security forces used tear gas in Cairo, but many young people stayed on the streets in the centre of the capital, shouting "Leave Sisi.”
Protests have become very rare in Egypt following a broad crackdown on by Sisi, who was installed in power by the Saudis and the Emiratis on the instructions of the Americans and the Israelis, after overthrowing the only elected president in Egypt’s history, Mohammad Morsi in 2013.
Protests were held in Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, Suez on the Red Sea as well as the Nile Delta textile town of Mahalla el-Kubra, about 110 km north of Cairo, according to residents and videos posted online.
There was a heavy security presence in downtown Cairo and on the famous Tahrir Square where mass protests started in 2011 which toppled longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Mohamed Ali, a building contractor and actor turned political activist who lives in Spain, called in a series of videos for the protest after charging Sisi and the military with corruption.
Mohammad Ali has called for the overthrow of the regime, and has vowed to continue the protests against state corruption.
The regime has imposed strict austerity measures since 2016 as part of a $12 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund. This has led to wide spread discontent over rising prices.
Nearly one in three Egyptians live below the poverty line on less than $1.40 a day, according to official figures released in July.
The Egyptian Muslim people also deeply resent the dependence of the regime on the U.S. and the illegal Zionist entity, as well as upon Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Most analysts believe that a volcano is about to burst to sweep into oblivion the regime, and return Egypt to the Islamic fold.

US’ standard of ‘normal nation’

The US, which is notorious for its destructive behaviour all over the world calls the Islamic Republic of Iran a ‘destabilizing’ factor in the region, an accusation which is far from facts and realities, especially when one glances at the bleak, black and bloody record of the dictatorships that Washington supports.

Stay with us for an interesting article that appeared on the ‘Lobelog’ site, titled: “US’ Standard Of Normal Nation”, by Pouya Aali-Maqaam, who teaches modern history of the West Asia-North Africa region at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On June 2, 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that the United States would be willing to engage with Iran as long as “the Iranians…behave like a normal nation.”

Aside from the condescension of talking to Iranians as if they are children who need to “behave,” Pompeo’s remark begs the question as to what it means to act like a “normal nation.” A brief look at US-Iran relations before the Islamic Revolution and a short survey of America’s long-time allies in the West Asia-North Africa region today help shed light on how Washington’s foreign policy establishment defines “normal” behaviour.

Let us take a look at Iran under the Shah. Before the revolution in 1979, Iran was ruled by Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi—an autocrat installed by Britain and the United States after they orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953. Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq had defied imperial Britain by nationalizing the country’s oil resources for the benefit of the underdeveloped nation. A trained lawyer, he even successfully defended his case at the World Court—a legal decision that the British rejected.

After the coup, the United States helped the shah establish the notorious internal intelligence agency, SAVAK. The CIA trained SAVAK personnel in the most brutal forms of modern, scientific torture to ensure the longevity of the Shah’s rule against a population that increasingly saw him as an American puppet. As a result, according to Amnesty International, the Shah’s regime became one of the world’s worst violators of human rights. The Iranian opposition, which had long reeled under SAVAK’s heavy boot, predictably blamed the United States for the Shah’s repression.

After Britain announced the withdrawal of its naval forces east of the Suez, then-President Richard Nixon went to Iran in 1972 to meet with the Shah to ensure that America’s ally in the Persian Gulf would fill the void. President Nixon offered to sell the Shah the most sophisticated American military hardware short of nuclear weapons to become the policeman of the Persian Gulf. The Shah eagerly obliged by building the most powerful military in the region. By 1976, the United States was selling more weapons to Iran than any other country in the world. In turn, the Iranian opposition criticized the Shah’s multi-billion-dollar arms purchases as a waste of the country’s wealth.

The Shah also had an interventionist record that aligned with American strategy during the Cold War. Bogged down in Vietnam, the United States looked to outsource the fight against Communism to right-wing regimes like the Shah’s. In the early 1970s, Iran dispatched soldiers across the Persian Gulf to help put down Marxist insurrections in places like Dhofar, Oman—interventions that were supported at the time not only by the Americans, but the Saudis as well.

In sum, a “normal” Iran before 1979 was an autocracy that ruthlessly repressed dissent, bought billions in American weapons, protected US interests in the Persian Gulf by intervening in other countries, and even had a Western-backed nuclear programme.

Let us look at other so-called ‘normal nations’ in the West Asia-North Africa region.

Cold War strategic considerations perhaps prompted the United States to consider such “behaviour” as “normal.” Yet, a survey of America’s allies in the post-Cold War era illustrates how the precedent of the Shah is very much consistent with what the United States considers to be “normal” today.

Saudi Arabia is an apt starting point given that US-Saudi relations go back as far as Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Today, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—with the backing of the Trump administration—are spearheading the bombing of the poorest country in the Arab World, Yemen, contributing to what the UN considers the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. The Saudis and Emiratis are also the leading force in the blockade of America’s other ally in the Persian Gulf, that is, Qatar.

They are supporting some of the most extreme elements in Syria—though this support has lessened after the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen diverted resources and attention. Mohamed bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, is also credited with ordering the assassination of the US-based Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, when the latter visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Long before the upstart Heir Apparent, Saudi Arabia had been deploying its oil wealth to spread its Wahhabi cultist interpretation of Islam across the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda and Daesh were born, in part, from this ubiquitous Saudi terroristic conditioning.

Moreover, although President Trump alleges that the Iran nuclear agreement was not stringent enough, his administration quietly signed agreements to sell nuclear technology to the Saudis. What’s more, two American allies in the region, Pakistan and Israel, the former of which borders Iran, possess nuclear arsenals.

In terms of other “normal nations,” Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories has endured for more than half a century with no signs of abating. Instead, the Zionist regime frequently announces plans to build more settlements in the West Bank.

The US sends billions of dollars in annual military aid to Israel and Egypt. The latter has jailed thousands of dissidents since the overthrow of its democratically elected government in 2013 – of President Mohammed Morsi. The home to one of the most iconic uprisings in the Arab World has become its seeming deathbed. The current Egyptian regime – of General Abdel-Fattah as-Sisi – is exponentially more authoritarian than the Hosni Mubarak regime that collapsed in 2011 after 30-years of dictatorial rule.

According to Human Rights Watch: Since President Abdel Fattah as-Sisi secured a second term in a largely unfree and unfair presidential election in March, his security forces have escalated a campaign of intimidation, violence, and arrests against political opponents, civil society activists, and many others who have simply voiced mild criticism of the regime. The Egyptian government and state media have framed this repression under the guise of combating terrorism, and as-Sisi has increasingly invoked terrorism and the country’s state of emergency law to silence peaceful activists.

The coup at home was not enough. Egypt, along with the Emiratis and the Saudis, is backing the renegade general, Khalifa Haftar, whom Trump has endorsed, as he attempts to topple the UN-recognized government in neighbouring Libya.

Another so-called “normal nation,” Bahrain—with the aid of Saudi Arabia and the UAE—repressed the most peaceful uprising of all. American support for the Aal-e Khalifa minority regime, however, remained steadfast since the island country is home to the US Fifth Fleet.

As such, “normal” today, as in the past, means pro-US dictators, supposedly religious governments but of the pro-American kind, military occupations, regimes that violate human rights, hosts to US armed forces and high-end customers of the American arms industry, and governments that intervene in the affairs of their neighbours. To be sure, none of this should actually be considered normal.

In reality, the only thing not “normal” about the Islamic Republic of Iran’s actions is that they do not align with US foreign policy goals as they did in the past – during the pro-American Shah’s regime. In other words, a ‘normal nation’ is allowed to do seemingly anything as long as its actions accord with US interests anywhere in the world.

After Bouteflika, Algeria’s youth push for radical reforms

Algerian students raise banners and placards as they take part in an anti-government protest in the capital Algiers. AFP

Is it Algeria’s Arab Spring? After weeks of people-power protests across the country, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Wednesday resigned, ending his 20-year autocratic rule. The news was welcomed by noisy celebrations by millions of young people who had been continuing their protests since mid-February. 
The scenes were reminiscent of the jubilation after the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986, the overthrow of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989, the fall of Berlin wall in 1991, and the short-lived Arab Spring victory in Egypt in 2011.  
The Algerian Spring, we hope, will not end up like the Egyptian Spring.
In Egypt, the people-power revolution ousted the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. A series of democratic elections then saw the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Freedom and Justice Party securing the presidency and the legislative assembly.  But the democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, lasted only a little more than a year.  The Morsi government was overthrown in a counter revolution backed by the Egyptian deep state, the military, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and the United States. It paved the way for the return of a military general as Egypt’s president. 

"The Algerians are politically more battle-hardened, for they won their freedom in 1962 from France after a bloody war"

With Egypt’s tryst with democracy going awry and with the Libyan and Syrian regime-change experiments ending up in prolonged bloody civil wars, the Arab Spring had given way to an Arab winter until this Wednesday the Algerian protesters forced the resignation from the 82-year-old paraplegic president.
However, it is too premature to celebrate victory.  A closer look at the events that took place in Algeria, in the days and weeks before Bouteflika’s resignation, evokes fears that what happened in Egypt, post-Arab Spring, could happen in Algeria, too.
Just as the Egyptian military chiefs played a mediatory role in persuading Mubarak to step down, Algeria’s Army Chief Ahmed Gaid Salah also took the side of the people and applied pressure on Bouteflika to resign.  But the Algerians knew that what happened in Egypt was a charade. The Algerians are politically more battle-hardened, for they won their freedom in 1962 from France after a bloody war.  Some 250,000 Algerians were killed in the eight-year independence war led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) and its armed wing the National Liberation Army.Like many newly independent African states, Algeria’s freedom flavour was short-lived.  Ahmed Ben Bella, who was elected as the first president in 1963, was overthrown in a 1965 military coup led by Col Houari Boumedienne.  (He visited Sri Lanka in 1976 to attend the Non-Aligned Movement summit and handed over its chairpersonship to Sri Lanka’s then Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike.)
Algeria, an Ottoman province till the French took over it in terms of a 1916 deal with Britain, has a chequered past.  In 1976, Boumedienne introduced a socialist constitution with the FLN as the sole political party. Islam was recognised as the state religion to pacify the Islamists who played a key role in the freedom struggle, but had, since, become disappointed with the manner in which the state was being run by the junta.  After Boumedienne’s death in 1978, Col. Chadli Benjadid took over, thus continuing with the military’s hold on politics. The country saw its first economic riots in the 1980s. It led to the lifting on the ban on political parties.  Encouraged by the development, the Islamists organised themselves under the banner of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and won the multiparty elections to the local councils in 1990. The military-backed government, alarmed by the popularity of the FIS, began a crackdown on the Islamists.  Despite the harassment, the FIS won the first round of the 1992 general elections and was predicted to win a clear victory in the second round.  The military intervened and cancelled the elections.  

"However, it is too premature to celebrate victory.  A closer look at the events that took place in Algeria, in the days and weeks before Bouteflika’s resignation, evokes fears that what happened in Egypt, post-Arab Spring, could happen in Algeria, too"

The military’s anti-democracy action, however, was supported by the United States and Algeria’s former colonial master France.  This was because by 1991, the West had serious worries about the Islamists’ threat to its geopolitical interests in the region, although the West had fathered the birth of modern Islamic radicalism as part of its policy towards defeating the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. 
The action triggered Algeria’s civil war in 1991. The ten-year war killed some 150,000 people.  With the Islamists banned from contesting the 1997 elections, military’s backed parties won the parliamentary elections.  In 1999, the military backed candidate, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, was elected as president. 
In his initial years in office, Bouteflika was seen to be doing quite well. He introduced political and economic reforms.  Under his presidency, oil-rich Algeria experienced an economic boom in the mid-2000s. But the prosperity was short-lived.  Today, in Algeria, every fourth person under 30 is unemployed.  The economy is in dire straits.  With the economic crisis worsening, the people began to see the wrongs of the ‘corrupt’ Bouteflika regime. They took to the streets in February when Bouteflika announced his intention to go for a fifth term.  As the aphorism goes, in the Arab world, presidents do not leave office, they have to be overthrown. Bouteflika is no exception.
But his resignation on Wednesday has not settled the crisis. Fearing that the military’s tough stand against Bouteflika was only a pretense, the young protesters want to end the military’s hold on politics; they want to overthrow, not just an elderly president, but the corrupt and elitist system. 
They want free and fair elections, not a Bouteflika henchman to take over as president after the 90-day transition period.  The people want a complete overhaul.  They vowed on Wednesday to keep protesting until their objective was achieved.

"In his initial years in office, Bouteflika was seen to be doing quite well. He introduced political and economic reforms.  Under his presidency, oil-rich Algeria experienced an economic boom in the mid-2000s"

The country cannot afford to plunge into another civil war.  The Algerians want to see a change similar to what happened in neighbouring Tunisia, the only country where democracy has taken root after the 2011 Arab Spring protests. 
In the 1990s, the West supported the Algerian junta’s crackdown on the Islamists.  This policy had a disastrous consequence. It made some of the Islamists to turn towards extremism. An extremist group called al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIIM) is a big threat to the country and the region.
Therefore, the West is well advised to support the pro-reform and pro-democracy protesters and put pressure on the military to submit itself to the civilian authority. The United States, which has close military and security relations with Algeria, has said the future of the country “is for the Algerian people to decide”. Russia, meanwhile, has called for a transition without foreign “interference”. There appears to be some truth in the Russian statement. 

EGYPT A spring far away

By K.P. FABIAN

February 2, 2011: Pro-government demonstrators, below, and anti-government demonstrators, above, clash in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

Events that followed Hosni Mubarak’s ouster prove that Egypt was pregnant with a revolution that was abortable. Now the military’s hold over the country is real.

WE need to answer first where Egypt has come from if we need to understand where Egypt is now, five years after the 2013 military coup that toppled the first democratically elected President, and why it is, where it is? Where do we start? Our question can be phrased differently: Why Egypt, “where it all began” as Egyptians rightly remind visitors to their historically rich country, is not yet a democracy, not even moving towards being one?

It is not generally known that Egypt made a move towards democracy way back in 1881 when Col. Ahmad Urabi (1841-1911) successfully revolted against the ruler and compelled him to proclaim a new constitution providing for a constitutional monarchy. Unfortunately for Egypt and the Arab world, the imperial powers, the United Kingdom and France, worked together and stopped Egypt’s march towards democracy. The U.K. resorted to “gunboat diplomacy”; the ruler surrendered with alacrity; and Col. Urabi was exiled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where he died. The imperial powers saw a danger to their interests in a democratic Egypt. They had lent huge amounts to the ruler, partly to support his extravagant lifestyle, and they were not sure whether a Col. Urabi-led democratically elected government would resort to the needed austerity measures to pay back the loan that was earning unconscionably high interest rates.

Similarly, the imperial powers prevented Iran from consolidating its democracy under Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953. To safeguard its unjustified hold on Iran’s oil, Britain persuaded the United States to carry out a coup in Iran when that country moved towards a constitutional monarchy. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spent about $10,000 to arrange that coup to overthrow Mossadeq and restore Mohammad Reza Shah, whose rule lasted until 1979.

President Gamal Abdel Nasser (right) with visiting Indonesian President Sukarno at Cairo airport. Nasser, who used the military to consolidate his power, was succeeded by Anwar Sadat from the military.

The next question is why Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), who led the 1952 revolution, did not set Egypt on the road to democracy. Of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru was the only true democrat. Josef Tito in Yugoslavia, admired by the West because he stood up to Joseph Stalin, Sukarno in Indonesia, and Nasser had no intention of ushering in democracy as they wanted to consolidate their personal power as rulers.

Nasser, who used the military to consolidate his power was succeeded by Anwar Sadat from the military. Sadat was assassinated in 1981 because he signed a peace deal with Israel. Hosni Mubarak from the Air Force took over and ruled until he fled to Alexandria on February 11, 2011.

Let us briefly recall the events that led to Mubarak’s fall. The virtuous virus of the Arab Spring originating in Tunisia, the first country in the Arab world to fell an uncrowned dictator, spread to Egypt, and some Egyptians demonstrated before the Tunisian Embassy in solidarity with the Tunisian revolution in January 2011.

However, even after the Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled on January 14, 2011, the West was convinced that Mubarak was invincible. The author asked some Western ambassadors in Cairo in June 2014 whether following the big demonstration in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011, they anticipated Mubarak’s fall within 17 days. Their unanimous answer was that they expected Mubarak to survive the agitation.

On January 17, 2011, Jon Leyne, BBC’s Cairo-based correspondent, reported that Mubarak was unlikely to be toppled. His argument is worth looking at:

“The simple fact is that most Egyptians do not see any way that they can change their country or their lives through political action, be it voting, activism, or going out on the streets to demonstrate. Maybe what is happening in Tunisia will change that. But, in Egypt there are decades of inertia to overcome.”

Jon Leyne was wrong in attributing so much inertia to the Egyptian people. In 1977, Egypt saw “bread riots”, provoked by a steep increase in the price of bread at the behest of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank when Sadat wanted a loan. In the riots 79 people died and 556 were injured. The price rise was reversed.

Cairo-based ambassadors had said that the BBC’s assessment tallied with theirs. Obviously, wish becomes father to thought so often in the diplomatic world as the ambassador accredited to the ruler might be tempted to believe that the ruler cannot be felled. This was the pattern in 1979 in Tehran, too, as the author knows from his personal experience when he was posted there.

Mubarak’s pledge

Mubarak used all the tricks in the trade to remain in power. The January 25 demonstration shook him. On the 28th, a “Friday of Rage”, there was a huge demonstration, and Mubarak came on television and dismissed his Cabinet. The protesters were not impressed; to their delight, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke to Mubarak urging him to “give meaning to his pledges to provide better economic and democratic opportunities to the Egyptian people”. Washington signalled that it might “review” the $1.5 billion annual aid to Egypt. An enraged Saudi Arabia asserted that it would replace the U.S. aid.

The next day, Mubarak appointed his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as Vice President to signal that he no longer wanted his son Gamal Mubarak to succeed him. Ahmed Shafiq became the Prime Minister.

The protests continued with renewed vigour. Mubarak met with the military, and that meeting was projected by the government-controlled media to prove that Mubarak had the support of the military. But, the military was facing a dilemma. It was relieved to see that Gamal, a civilian, would not succeed Mubarak. But, the military wanted a man in uniform to be President and it did not want the anti-Mubarak campaign to bring in a civilian President. Further, a large number of men were serving in the military as part of compulsory military service and getting only a pittance. Would they obey the order to shoot at people?

On February 1, there was the “millioneya”, or gathering of a million, and the army decided that it had to stop supporting Mubarak. The top leadership of the military, known as the SCAF (Supreme Council of Armed Forces), came out with a statement that the armed forces “will not resort to use of force against this great people”. This marked a turning point.

Toppled President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons, Alaa Mubarak (right) and Gamal Mubarak, behind bars during their trial at the Police Academy in Cairo on September 14, 2013.

Mubarak-supporters arranged for a demonstration in his favour, which did not fool anyone. Anderson Cooper of CNN was assaulted; he reported that it was a demonstration by “hired thugs”.

On February 10, in a long address to the nation, Mubarak promised to hand over power by September 2011. Tahrir Square demonstrators were not impressed; video screens there were hit by “a hail of hurled shoes and sandals”. That day, for the first time, the SCAF, until then always chaired by the President, met without him, sending a clear signal to Mubarak and to those occupying Tahrir Square. It was decided that the SCAF would remain “in continuous session to consider what procedures and measures that may be taken to protect the nation, and the achievements and aspirations of the great people of Egypt”.

On February 11, the SCAF came out with another communique stating that it had taken control. Hours later that day, Suleiman issued a 57-word statement announcing Mubarak’s decision to step down and asking the SCAF to take over.

President Anwar Sadat. He was assassinated in 1981 because he signed a peace deal with Israel.

We need to note that contrary to the popular impression, the SCAF took over power before Mubarak stepped down. In other words, Mubarak stepped down not because of the thunderous roar of the people from Tahrir but because the military had unseated him. Incidentally, Mubarak violated the constitution by asking the SCAF to take over. He should have handed over power to the Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament.

When Mubarak fell, it was generally assumed that he fled in response to the demand from his people. Many in Egypt and Egypt’s well-wishers the world over, including this author, were prepared to recall William Wordsworth’s immortal lines on the French Revolution, written when he was 21:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

An abortable revolution

The common notion that there was a revolution in Egypt in 2011 needs correction. Events that took place post-Mubarak proved that it would be more correct to say that Egypt was pregnant with a revolution, which was easily abortable.

There is a widespread misconception about Egypt’s post-Mubarak political journey: President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to transform Egypt into a Sharia-ruled state where Coptic Christians and women would be second-class citizens; there would be separate swimming pools for men and women in five-star hotels, damaging the country’s tourism traffic. Moreover, Egypt would cease to be Egypt under Morsi who made himself above the law by his November 22, 2012, decree. The people of Egypt revolted, and there was a huge risk of civil war and chaos and the military, which never wanted political power, was compelled to step in and remove Morsi to rescue Egypt from perdition.

The deep state

This account is historically flawed. Here is a brief account of how the revolution was aborted. The SCAF had no intention of relinquishing power and taking Egypt towards a true democratic destiny where the military would have no political power. The SCAF looked around and formed an alliance with all those who had benefitted from Mubarak’s rule; the members of that alliance were the higher judiciary, intelligence and security services, the higher bureaucracy, corporate barons and media barons. That alliance is best described as a deep state, which arranged for creating the conditions to “justify” a military coup in July 2013.

After Mubarak fell, the SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood did a SWOT (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) analysis and concluded that each benefitted from working with the other. The Brotherhood, delegitimised by Nasser in the 1950s, got legitimised and could stand for election. The SCAF came under pressure from street demonstrators to move faster towards election so that power could be handed over to a civilian government. It could play games and delay the move thanks to support from the Brotherhood. The two partners worked together for a while, but the SCAF was Machiavellian and started cheating by dissolving Parliament where the Brotherhood-led coalition had a majority on flimsy “legal” grounds when it appeared that Morsi was likely to win the second round of the presidential election. In short, the military did not want a combination of Brotherhood-dominated Parliament and a Brotherhood President. Further, days before Morsi assumed office on June 30, 2012, the SCAF promulgated a decree taking away all his powers and arrogating to itself the full gamut of executive powers.

President only in name

Morsi was President only in name. He summoned the dissolved Parliament, but the judiciary overruled him; he hastened with the drafting of a constitution by a Constituent Assembly, but his foes walked out of the Assembly and falsely complained that the draft constitution endangered Egypt.

With a non-cooperative bureaucracy, Morsi could not improve the economy. Artificial shortages of petrol were created. The deep state begat a movement called Tamarod (“revolt” in Arabic) that mysteriously appeared on the political scene. It was funded by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Naguib Sawiris, a Coptic billionaire businessman who owed $1 billion in tax. He donated $28 million to Tamarod and lent it office space. The media cooperated, and a huge disinformation campaign was unleashed against Morsi to portray him as a pharoah with absolute powers.

The intention of the deep state was to dislodge Morsi from power by the time he completed one year in office. The Tamarod arranged for street demonstrations and collected signatures endorsing Morsi’s ouster. It claimed that it had 22 million signatures. The media gave currency to that claim without any verification. Similarly, the claim that “14 to 33 million” Egyptians came on to the street seeking Morsi’s ouster was never scrutinised by the media. Max Blumenthal, an eminent investigative journalist, has exposed the myth about “these millions on the street”.

Ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in the defendant’s cage during a court hearing on charges of inciting the murder of his opponents, in Cairo. A file photograph. Morsi was president only in name.

On June 23, 2012, the SCAF gave an ultimatum to Morsi to talk to the opposition and reach a settlement within seven days. The signalling was perfect. All that the opposition had to do was to reject Morsi’s invitation to talk and it did precisely that. On July 1, General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi issued another ultimatum to the government settle matters in 48 hours. On July 3, the security guards of Morsi suddenly disappeared and he was kidnapped and removed to an undisclosed place by the military. Obviously, it was an elaborately planned military coup enacted with an impressive choreography reminiscent of a Wagnerian opera that Hitler was fond of.

Uncontested in power

El-Sisi has been in power uncontested. He was elected President in 2014 with 96.9 per cent of the votes. The only other candidate who contested was Hamdeen Sabahi, a leftist, who ran against Morsi in 2012. He was reluctant to run but the SCAF detained his daughter and blackmailed him to run. El-Sisi got re-elected in April 2018 with 97.08 per cent of the votes. It may be interesting to recall that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did a shade better than El-Sisi. Hussein got 99.96 per cent of the votes in 1995 and 100 per cent in 2002.

In 2011, Egypt showed interest in India’s electronic voting machines (EVMs), and the Indian Election Commission discussed the matter with its Egyptian counterpart. Later, Egyptian officials told their Indian counterparts that EVMs were not “suitable” for Egypt. The unspoken implication was that EVMs might make rigging more difficult.

Yet another peculiarity of the 2018 election is that El-Sisi’s rivals were either jailed, “kidnapped”, or had to withdraw. Once again there was fear that it was going to be uncontested. The SCAF compelled a long-time El-Sisi supporter, Mohammed Moustafa Moussa, who got 3 per cent of the votes to be contrasted with 7 per cent of “spoiled votes”. Moussa filed his nomination just hours before the deadline. A widely circulated video by Wael Eskander shows a man looking like El-Sisi winning a 100-metre race shooting down fellow runners though he was much ahead of them as he had a head start.

Egypt’s economy under El-Sisi presents a mixed picture. Inflation at 33 per cent in mid 2017 has come down to 15 per cent. Unemployment at 13.2 per cent in 2013 has come down to 11.6 per cent in 2017. Female literacy at 83 per cent in 2005 has come down to 68 per cent in 2015. El-Sisi devalued the Egyptian pound drastically. The national minimum wage of 1,200 Egyptian pounds a month equal to $176 in 2013 is only $68 in 2018.

While El-Sisi has had limited success in improving the economy, there are other areas where he has registered considerable success: Unleashing state terror on dissent from the Muslim Brotherhood or elsewhere; suppressing independent media; and moving Egypt away from democracy as fast as possible.

President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi at the House of Representatives on June 2, after he was sworn in as President for a second term. He got re-elected in April with 97.08 per cent of the votes. In 2014, he was elected with 96.9 per cent of the votes.

State terror

The worst manifestation of state terror was the unprovoked and unjustified firing on unarmed gatherings of protesters at two places in Cairo: Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda on August 14, 2013, killing at least 800 people. That atrocity is reminiscent of the 1919 Jallianwallah Bagh massacre, the only difference being that El-Sisi scored a point over the imperialist British by carrying out a huge disinformation campaign to convince a substantial section of the Egyptian population that the state had no option but to kill the “assembled terrorists”.

Mahmoud Abu Zeid, popularly known as Shawkan, was picked up while covering the August 14, 2013, atrocities and has been in jail since then. UNESCO awarded him the World Press Freedom Prize even as he is languishing in jail deprived of medical attention despite suffering from a serious illness.

There is no accurate statistics of journalists in prison as at times they just “disappear”. Journalists who dared to report on “vote buying” in the 2018 presidential election or interviewed opposition candidates were detained or publishers were fined heavily.

By unleashing state terror on the Muslim Brotherhood and by branding its members as terrorists, El-Sisi has taken Egypt away from democracy at a rapid pace. Morsi is in jail, accused of fabricated crimes, including selling state secrets to Qatar. One of the most absurd charges against Morsi is that he walked out of jail in January 2011. Morsi is seriously ill and he is deprived of medical care.

In short, the military, which holds that Egypt should always be ruled by a man in uniform, has succeeded in capturing and retaining power. The best description of what has happened since the January 25, 2011, revolution is best left to Shakespeare:

O, how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day;

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,

And by and by a cloud takes all away

We know that the military made the clouds. But, does it mean that the sun of democracy will not shine again in the Egyptian firmament? Democracy needs democrats, and Egypt is currently short of them though the 60,000 people incarcerated by El-Sisi gives some hope that one day the clouds will be dispelled. As the Persian adage says: This too shall pass!

THOUGHTS ON MUBARAK , MORSI AND THE ARAB SPRING

Mubarak is free now and has been released from the hospital where he was detained for three years on the ground of corruption, while he was absolved from the crime of giving orders to shoot at the demonstrators during the Arab spring. Mubarak has thus served his term and has returned to his home in Masr al Jadida to start a new life which he will begin by performing Hajj as he expressed. This is to say that the Arab Spring did not bring a new life to Egypt , there was no rebirth even if Mubarak was removed . The World Order had already chosen the successor of` Mubarak after a period of` transition made possible by the presidency of Morsi who was but the bridge over which the real successor of`Mubarak was to cross. The truth is that it would not be befitting to have a military take over after Mubarak . The so called Revolution would not have looked good to replace a despot by a military, so, there was need for a transitional period that president Morsi had to fill . Neither Morsi , nor the Muslim Brothers understood what the World Order was up to . They thought hey had been chosen for candidacy because they were suitable , they did not think they were being drawn to a trap and were being set up in order to finish them because they represented a possibility of independence and autonomy for Egypt that the other parties did not represent . There is no need to say that Morsi was not allowed to rule because this is the truth . Because, from the beginning, he was prevented from taking decisions and carrying them on , so he had to take draconian measures like expand his prerogatives and powers which caused the Egyptians to rally against him accusing him of all sort of` transgressions and violations . The truth is that he was just trying to be the president of Egypt which is why he was elected. But the World Order had decided otherwise . And like what happened in Algeria and Somalia before, where the Muslim Brothers or the Islamic parties were just brought to power in order to be removed , the same goes for the Egyptian rule whereby the`Muslim Brothers were brought to power in order to be removed in their turn. The decision had been taken long ago that Egypt will go through change in name only , and that Mubarak will be toppled only because the country could not afford his decision to install his son - Jamal - after him, and that this installing was liable to cause a real uprising that the world powers wanted to avoid at any price . This is why the Egyptian Spring was created; a false flag revolution in every respect, that ended up in a military coup arranged by the predators in favor of which they had succeeded in rallying millions of Egyptians . A strange thing to have millions of people call for a military rule which is not usually so appealing . But this has been carefully engineered by the masterminds of the foreign embassies and the NGOs ; and the Egyptian society is one of the most exposed and infiltrated societies world wide, and we have seen millions signing petitions and protesting and calling for change, ending up in bringing to rule a third rate officer who was chief of Intelligence during Mubarak's rule! This much for the Egyptian Spring. Nothing has changed really, and now, Egypt would have to wait for more than ten years to witness anything that is close to a Revolution. The Arab Spring is nothing but Operation Abortion which is the real description of what happened. This is to say that Morsi had tried his best to please the World Order by taking position against the Syrian rule and against Iran thinking that this will work in his favor , but it did not. He even corresponded with the israeli officials thinking that this will speak in his favor. He thought that he will be treated like Erdogan and promoted like him by the world powers, forgetting that Erdogan is not only a fake Muslim Brother but a real NATO asset , and forgetting that the Muslim Brothers of Egypt are strongly linked to HAMAS, and that the World Order hoped that by removing the first, he will be able to remove the second , and that the goal was to expose the Muslim Brothers and finish them in Egypt and Palestine. Now, Mubarak is not only free but he is still ruling, if not through his son Jamal like he wished and desired , he is ruling through field Marshall Abdel Fattah al Sisi, his Chief of Intelligence , a military affiliate to israel and to the World Order, brought to power by millions of Egyptians according to the World Order scheme . Mubarak is free , and has been released after 3 years of detention he spent at the hospital. But Morsi has been sentenced to life term . The World Order will never forgive a close association with an armed Resistance that is threatening to israel. - Daniel Mabsout