Egyptian Update... From Bad To Worse

From the very first, the coup leaders prioritized the systematic intimidation-- not to mention murder-- of members of the independent media. Independent reporting is the last thing the Egyptian security state and their American backers wanted. As we pointed out before, they had their story down and that is the only story they want out there. Even though their story is patently absurd. And killing members of the media isn't where it ends. Now they're even hauling Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt's leading neo-liberal and until last week the "vice president" of the junta's puppet regime and the best known face of the coup to the outside world, in front of a court. He faces trial on the charge of "betrayal of trust" and could get 3 years in prison. The junta is furious because they think his high profile resignation "gave the wrong impression to the international community" that they were using excessive force against the protesters. If they're putting a figure like ElBaradei on trial, this thing has spiraled out of control and is heading into an even worse confrontation.

Without the independent media that the coup leaders have tried to silence, we wouldn't know anything about what's really happening in Egypt except for the propaganda from both sides and the spin from untrustworthy U.S. corporate media. The best summation right now is available in a story from Wednesday's Guardian. It's not very optimistic.

The police lieutenant put his boots up on the desk and casually reloaded his machine gun. "The problem is," he said, nodding at a television that was live-broadcasting the siege of a nearby mosque, "these people are terrorists."

It was mid-afternoon last Saturday, and for nearly 24 hours, the lieutenant's colleagues in the police and army had surrounded the al-Fath mosque in central Cairo, inside which were hiding a few hundred supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi. On screen, it seemed like it was the soldiers doing the terrorising. But for the lieutenant, the terrorists were the ones on the inside. They had bombs, the policeman said: they deserved what they got. And a mob of locals agreed. "The police and the people," chanted a crowd that had gathered to lynch the fugitives as they exited the mosque, "are one hand."

It was a wretched scene-- but one that has become familiar in Egypt. Here was yet another symptom of the widespread hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood, which in the space of a year has gone from being Egypt's most powerful and most popular political group – to fugitives. Here, also, was brutal violence. A shortage of humanity. And above all: scant regard for the truth.

For those inside the mosque were not terrorists. An armed man may have later been filmed on top of the minaret, but the mosque's imam claimed access to it was controlled by security forces who had by that point breached parts of the building. For certain, when I visited the mosque the day before-- shortly before troops surrounded it-- it mainly housed doctors and corpses. After the police fired on nearby Morsi supporters-- who had gathered to oppose not just the 3 July overthrow of the group's scion, Mohamed Morsi, but also the massacre of hundreds of Morsi backers last Wednesday-- the mosque had been turned into a makeshift field hospital to deal with the fallout of Egypt's fourth mass killing in six weeks. "After they finish outside, [the police] will come in here," a doctor, Mahmoud el-Hout, said, "and arrest all the wounded." He wasn't far wrong, with only women and the dead later granted a safe exit.

Inside and outside the mosque, then, two parallel realities existed-- much as they do across Egypt as a whole. The country is largely polarised between, on the one hand, those who believe their livelihoods and way of life were threatened under Morsi's incompetent and divisive presidency, and that his Muslim Brotherhood are violent traitors who must be destroyed-- and, on the other, the Brotherhood and its dwindling Islamist allies, who remained camped in Cairo's streets after Morsi's ousting to defend his democratic legitimacy.

The split is not even. Millions marched on 30 June to call for Morsi's departure, and the vast majority of the country is firmly behind the army who deposed him days later. But perhaps less than 25% of Egyptians now have strong Islamist leanings, if Morsi's quarter of the vote in the first round of last year's presidential elections is anything to go by.

Here and there, activists prominent from the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak reject this binary division and express disgust at both the new fascistic army-backed regime and the authoritarianism of Morsi's own government. Army rule may be counter-revolutionary, they argue, accompanied as it is by a return to favour of figures, institutions and policies that buttressed the Mubarak era. But so too was Morsi, who tried to co-opt corrupt state institutions, rather than reform them-- and who had little interest in building consensus, reigning in police brutality, or increasing social freedoms beyond those of his once-oppressed Islamist allies.

Yet few share this nuance. Most so-called liberals have thrown their lot in with the army, since the current environment has forced almost everyone into a with-or-against-us mindset. When Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt's leading liberal politician, resigned as interim vice-president in protest at last Wednesday's massacre of Islamists, he was roundly attacked-- even by former allies. Sayed Bedawy, leader of Egypt's oldest liberal party, told a breakfast show that he didn't want to call ElBaradei a traitor-- before strongly implying that he was. "Mohamed ElBaradei is a son of a bitch," summarised one woman in the mob outside the al-Fath mosque on Saturday.

Haranguing western media's lack of support for the army's crackdown, an otherwise measured psychologist recently told me that he felt Muslim Brotherhood members-- many of whom have obediently remained in the streets on the say-so of their leaders-- were suffering from some sort of collective psychosis. Yet if the Brothers are delusional, then it seems only fair to apply the same rhetoric to their opponents, who seem to be under an equally debilitating spell.

Spurred on by a jingoistic and uninquiring media (some Egyptian television presenters cried with joy on air the day Morsi was overthrown) much of Egyptian society is convinced that the former president's supporters are wholly a terrorist force bent on making Egypt part of some wider Islamic state. "We are not against any protesters-- but we are against terrorists. We have a war with terrorists," says Mohamed Khamis, a spokesman for Tamarod, the grassroots campaign that successfully encouraged millions to march against Morsi in June.

Khamis said he accompanied the police last Wednesday, when security forces murdered hundreds at two six-week-old pro-Morsi campsites. "We asked the police officers to shoot them with pistols and the police officers refused to shoot them," Khamis counter-claimed. "Really, that was what happened. So I am surprised people died. How come so many people died then? I think it was the Brotherhood who killed them-- not the army or police."

But while the Brotherhood is no stranger to violence-- not least during clashes last December outside the presidential palace when Brotherhood members attacked anti-Morsi protesters-- their recent involvement in acts of aggression, to be fair, remains unproved. Certainly, jihadi insurgents outside the Brotherhood's command-- but nevertheless angered by Morsi's removal-- have mounted a terrorist campaign in the lawless Sinai peninsula during the past six weeks. Twenty-five police conscripts were murdered in cold blood by Sinai insurgents on Monday. Undeniably, Morsi sympathisers of some form have attacked dozens of police stations since Wednesday's massacre-- and desecrated at least 30 Christian churches, following prolonged sectarian incitement from some Morsi supporters at Brotherhood-led sit-ins over the past month. And if the crackdown against the Brotherhood and its allies continues, it is hard to see how more extremist violence can be avoided.

But the central charges-- that most Brotherhood supporters are violent, that their two huge protest camps were simply overgrown terrorist cells, and that their brutal suppression was justified and even restrained-- are not supported by facts. My experience during six weeks of reporting at Rabaa al-Adawiya in Cairo suggested the vast majority of protesters there-- including many women and children-- were peaceful. Many may have failed to face up to Morsi's own incompetence and autocratic governance, and some may have turned too blind an eye to sectarian attacks recently completed in their name. Others have actively incited them. On the day of the coup, an imam from Minya, in southern (or "Upper") Egypt, ominously said backstage at Rabaa: "It's going to be a civil war-- and it's going to be very bad in particular for the church in Upper Egypt, because everyone knows they have spearheaded this campaign against the Islamic project." Anti-Morsi sentiment stems from both Muslims and Christians, but some members of the Brotherhood have disgracefully scapegoated and attacked the latter.

But many Rabaa protesters have simple, sincere reasons for their anger: they are upset at the theft of their votes, and fearful of a return to the anti-Islamist oppression of the Mubarak era. "We all voted for democracy," housewife Aza Galal told me last week, six-year-old son Saif in tow. "And then, because some people gathered in Tahrir Square [on 30 June], they put our votes in the rubbish bins." Morsi's government hardly promoted the wider democratic values on which a successful democracy relies-- but Galal's anger is understandable: Morsi or his allies won five consecutive votes between 2011 and 2012.

"If we leave the square, it will be worse than the 90s," added Suzanne Abdel Qadir, referring to Mubarak's treatment of Islamists. "We're back to the days of oppression under Mubarak. If we go home, then the fight is over."

The pro-regime propaganda comes right from the top. On Sunday, Egypt's state information service published a public memorandum to foreign correspondents in Egypt, rebuking western media for failing to acknowledge that the 3 July coup reflected the will of the people, and for being overly sympathetic to the Brotherhood-- apparently unable to distinguish between support for Morsi's disastrous and autocratic presidency, and criticism for the flagrant human rights abuses of his successors. Among many other false claims, it justified the siege of two mosques used by pro-Morsi doctors last week to house, respectively, a makeshift morgue and a field hospital-- on the grounds that they had, in fact, harboured terrorists.

As one journalist noted, such claims would have been amusing had they not further endangered the lives of foreign journalists in Egypt (several of whom have been either assaulted, detained, or even killed last week while trying to cover Egyptian news)-- and had they not flown in the face of the truth. At the Iman mosque, where hundreds of dead bodies were taken from the site of one of the massacres on Thursday, there were no insurgents-- just corpses. Filling the floor of the mosque in its entirety, many of them had already begun to rot, and one was so badly burnt that it looked less like a body and more like a blackened tree stump. Doctors said it was the remains of a boy in his early teens-- and an old woman squatted beside it in the belief it was her lost relative. But only its sunken eye-sockets and internal organs identified the corpse as that of a human.

The next day, at the al-Fath mosque, there were again no obvious terrorists, but simply unarmed and injured protesters, many of whom were bleeding to death. One man, Mohamed Said, was carried in, barely conscious-- a gunshot wound to his back-- and leant against a pillar. Then his head slumped, and doctors rolled his eyelids shut.

Egypt has been awash with cruelty-- from the desecration of Christian churches by Islamists, to the burning of corpses at Rabaa. But perhaps the most heartbreaking sight has been the street outside the Zeinhom morgue, Cairo's main mortuary. Due to the massacres, morgue staff, already severely stretched, struggle to deal with the unprecedented number of bodies arriving for autopsies. As a result, dozens of grieving families have clogged the street outside, their dead relatives rotting in the heat. A curfew is in place in Cairo, but families dare not leave the queue until their relatives are admitted to the morgue-- decomposing though they may be. "Curse the curfew," said Atef Fatih, whose brother was shot dead last week. "We don't care about it. We will wait until they let the body inside."

Some pile the coffins high with slabs of ice to stop the rot. But the ice melts fast, leaving the ground a sludgy mess of mud, blood and corpses. To add to the injustice, many families report that the police have refused to sign off their corpses as murder. Humanity and truth are in short supply.

And nor are they the only virtues to have been sacrificed in Egypt. So too have logic and common sense. Amid the rhetoric about Islamic terrorism, few seem to recognise that most of the terrorising has in fact come from the state. The government justifies the state-sponsored violence as a necessary step towards avoiding civil war. But it does not seem to realise that its provocative brutality is the thing that makes such a horrific outcome more likely-- further alienating and radicalising Islamists, and pushing some towards violence. (One commentator suggests that this may, in fact, be the state's desired outcome-- a heightening of extremist violence, which gives the government more cover to increase their powers.) Similarly, few seem to have seen the irony in appointing a new cabinet whose primary objective is to fix Egypt's economy, but which has since given its full backing to the state massacres that have further frightened away the very investors on which a revived economy would depend.

With the state seemingly unwilling to reign in its violence, the Brotherhood unlikely to curtail its street presence, and unwilling or unable to prevent its allies and harder-line followers from violence, the future looks utterly bleak. Here and there, there are moments of fleeting dark humour. Egypt's leading private broadsheet, al-Masry al-Youm, published last week an interview with a Republican "senator", one Maurice Bonamigo, a man very approving of Egypt's controversial new domestic direction-- but one who also sadly later emerged to have never been elected to higher office.

There have also been moments of unexpected personal kindness. They range from the soldier photographed aiding a grieving woman during last Wednesday's massacres to the police lieutenant who, putting his machine gun to one side and switching off his television, handed me a carton of guava juice-- bringing to an end a two-hour-long detention at the hands of both police officers and an angry mob of vigilantes. "You are welcome in Egypt," the lieutenant said, and smiled.

I suppose if he mentioned the fact that the Egyptian military has a sordid history of burning down Coptic churches to blame it's enemies and curry favor in the West, he wouldn't be as welcome next time. Meanwhile, Obama seems pretty freaked out by how rapidly the whole project has-- as these things tend to-- careened out of control. The New Yorker's John Cassidy asserts that there is, after all, a limit to Obama's pragmatism. "In the 2008 campaign," he reminds us, "Obama talked about reshaping the international architecture, defending democratic values, and ridding the world of things like climate change and nuclear weapons. On receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2009, he spoke of 'bending history in the direction of justice.'" In reality, though, he's been less transformational and more of a pragmatic transactionalist.

Nowhere has Obama’s caution been more evident than in the Middle East, where his rhetorical embrace of the Arab Spring, combined with a reluctance to get involved in messy situations, has outraged interventionists on the left and the right. In Syria, the Administration had, until recently, more or less stood by as the Assad régime killed many thousands of people in a brutal effort to put down an insurrection. Even the recent decision to provide small arms to the rebels was a modest move: few analysts think that it will be sufficient to alter the course of the civil war. Now the focus is Egypt, where a violent crackdown continues in the wake of a coup. According to reports over the weekend, the military-backed government is now considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and banning it completely.

Obama’s refusal to truly break with the Egyptian generals who now control the country, and, in particular, his decision not to suspend U.S. military aid, is being criticized on both sides of the political divide. Last week, after security forces broke up a Muslim Brotherhood-led sit-in protesting the coup, at the cost of more than six hundred lives, the Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who travelled to Cairo two weeks ago in a vain attempt to persuade the authorities to refrain from violence, said that the military-installed government was “taking Egypt down a dark path, one that the United States cannot and should not travel with them.” Senator Rand Paul tweeted, “President Obama says he ‘deplores violence in Egypt,’ but U.S. foreign aid continues to help pay for it.” Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Democratic Senator Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, joined the calls for a cutoff in aid, saying that the Egyptian government had used the unpopularity of Mohamed Morsi’s administration as a license to restore the old military régime.

Obama's response has been criticized as too tepid, but Cassidy insists his pragmatic approach has been "the self-interested approach that the United States had adopted throughout the Middle East for decades until George W. Bush blundered into Iraq." That pragmatic approach tolerates-- to put it mildly-- "autocratic and repressive régimes that agree to promote Western interests... [I]t is Egypt’s official recognition of Israel, and its maintenance of peace with its eastern neighbor, that explains why, for years, it was the second largest recipient of U.S. aid. (Following the misadventures of the past decade, it has fallen to fifth place, behind Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, and Pakistan.) And it is Egypt’s supportive role in the 'War on Terror' that explains why so many figures in the U.S. defense establishment continue to have warm feelings towards the country’s security forces."

The real test of a pragmatic President is whether his policies hold up over time. Looking back on the first Iraq war and comparing it to the still unfolding disaster that followed the second one, most people would agree that George H. W. Bush and Scowcroft made the right decision in leaving Saddam in power and adopting a policy of containment.

In Syria and Egypt, it is too early to reach a definitive judgement on Obama’s policies... If [Sisi and the junta] make the state of emergency permanent, ban the Muslim Brotherhood, and restore the Mubarak era, Obama’s reluctance will look worse than craven. Even then, though, some realists would argue that as long as the Egyptian government sticks with the Camp David accord and opposes Islamic fundamentalism, it is in the interests of the United States to support it.

I don’t think that Obama would go that far. His hope appears to be that once the current crackdown ends, the government will abandon the state of emergency, free most of the people it has rounded up, and set in train a process for rewriting the constitution (one that was endorsed in a referendum, mind you), engaging some of the religious parties, and holding parliamentary and presidential elections. At this stage, it looks like a rather forlorn hope.

And then there's the whole "innocence" of Hosni Mubarak thing.

Egypt's former autocrat Hosni Mubarak was flown from jail on Thursday in a symbolic victory for an army-dominated old order that has overthrown and imprisoned his freely elected Islamist successor.

A blue-and-white helicopter took Mubarak from Cairo's Tora prison, where scores of his supporters had gathered to hail his release. He was flown to a military hospital in the nearby southern suburb of Maadi, officials said.

"He protected the country," said Lobna Mohamed, a housewife in the crowd of Mubarak well-wishers. "He is a good man, but we want (Abdel Fattah) Sisi now," she said, referring to the army commander who overthrew Islamist Mohamed Mursi on July 3.