Al Jazeera reports: Egyptian security forces are engaged in back-and-froth street battles in downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square with thousands of defiant activists who filled the square for the second day of protests against the country’s interim military leaders.
Thick clouds of tear gas filled the air on Sunday as military police armed with batons and shields charged into the square, firing rubber bullets and forcibly clearing the area of protesters. The assault sparked panic among the estimated 5,000 protesters, many of whom had remained in Tahrir since early on Saturday.
A short time affter the offensive, however, a surge of protesters returned to the square, overwhelming security forces and retaking the area.
“This is what the Egyptian army calls protecting the revolution,” Salma Said, a democracy activist, told Al Jazeera. “We’ve lost so many people in the last nine months. We want Field Marshall Tantawi gone. We’re going to keep fighting, we don’t have any other options.”
At 5.50pm local time, Al-Masry Al-Youm reported: Protesters marching through Tahrir Square are chanting, “Tantawi is the enemy of God.” Another group is chanting Ultra football fan anti-security songs.
Meanwhile, EgyNews, an official state website, just announced that military police and security forces have completely cleared Tahrir Square of demonstrators. However, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm correspondents in the square, thousands of protesters remain.
Ursula Lindsey writes: After the police violently cleared 100 or so demonstrators (including a group of the relatives of revolutionary martyrs and injured) from Tahrir Square today, thousands more poured into the square and began clashing with the security forces, burning one police truck and trying to reach the Ministry of Interior. The Ministry of Interior denies using any bullets, pellets or bird shot, but witnesses have widely documented their use. Hundreds are injured, and one dead confirmed so far. Tens of thousands have streamed into Downtown Cairo and are demonstrating in Alexandria, Suez and Mansoura. The fighting goes on, and people are saying that it feels like January 28 all over again.
These clashes feel almost unavoidable, given the military council’s terrible performance, the increasing vocal criticism it is facing, the rising tensions of all kinds surrounding the upcoming (poorly planned, utterly confusing) elections — given the terribly unclear transition process that has been put in place, and the fact that none of the revolution’s demands, including the reform of the security forces and real transitional justice, have been met.
Islamist leaders — the Salafist sheikh Hazem Salah Abu Ismail and the Islamist presidential candidate Mohammed Selim El Awwa — have gone to Tahrir. Mohammed El Baradei is once again calling for the creation of a “national salvation” government.
James Harkin reports: On Thursday morning, I woke up in Homs, the city labelled by the international media as the “capital of the Syrian revolution”.
Homs has been in more or less open revolt since at least April, but in recent weeks what is going on here has acquired ominous new significance. Facing the full force of a crackdown on their demonstrations by the Syrian army and police, at least some of the city’s residents have taken up arms, either to defend themselves and their communities or to go on the attack.
Outside Syria and in the international media, the siege has become a cause célèbre. But events here show not only the courage and the forbearance of its citizens, but also the traps that lie in wait for an unhappy people suppressed by a brutal military crackdown.
I was lucky to get here. It’s not quite true that all foreign journalists are banned from Syria, but it was extremely difficult to get in, even before the uprising, and those who succeed are carefully shepherded around. It took me two journeys back and forth from Beirut even to get across the border into Damascus.
After a few days there, I went to the bus station and bought a ticket to Homs. A policeman was on hand to check foreign passports, but fortunately he didn’t bother to check mine carefully – it clearly indicates, by means of a Syrian government stamp, that I am a journalist.
My second stroke of luck was to have been befriended by an 18-year-old boy as we boarded the bus. An engineering student on his way back home to Homs, he was concerned that here was an idiotic tourist about to get himself into trouble. “There are no tourists in Homs,” he told me, looking serious. “My mother and father are afraid to go out. Yesterday my sister saw a body in the street, and she’s been crying ever since.”
On arrival, he ushered me past any prying eyes and directly into a taxi, going out of his way to take me straight to a hotel in the city centre. The city centre is the only safe place, he said.
Homs is a city of more than half a million people in the heart of the country. It’s where Syrians go to escape the hustle of Damascus, to let their hair down in its cafes and restaurants, or watch football: Homs boasts two football teams, as well as a museum where tourists can read about the famous battles that were fought here.
Nowadays it’s fighting another battle: the city is under total military lockdown. The hotel I’ve been taken to overlooks the main square and its now infamous clock tower, where the Syrian army apparently ran amok and gunned down peaceful demonstrators in April.
Since then, the violence has moved into the residential areas, and into the shadows. In the weeks before my arrival the death rate rose, making it the most violent place in the country.
Al Jazeera reports: William Hague, the British foreign minister, has announced that he would meet with Syrian opposition representatives in London next week in an intensification of contact with opponents of President Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian opposition members would also meet senior aides of David Cameron, the UK prime minister, at his Downing Street office, the foreign ministry said on Friday.
It said that Frances Guy, the former British ambassador to Lebanon, had been appointed to co-ordinate relations with the Syrian opposition.
The delegation would include members of the opposition Syrian National Council and the National Co-ordination Committee for Democratic Change, in meetings expected to take place on Monday, a Foreign Office source said.
“We have been having regular contacts with a variety of figures in the Syrian opposition for several months. We are now intensifying these,” the Foreign Office said.
The announcement came as the Arab league said that Syria had agreed “in principle” to allow an Arab League observer mission into the country.
The New York Times reports: Thousands of protesters chanting for an end to military rule battled riot police officers firing tear gas, rubber bullets and bird shot in Tahrir Square on Saturday, as the military-led interim government appeared to soften its demands for special powers and protections in the future Egyptian constitution.
Coming just nine days before the scheduled beginning of parliamentary elections, the clashes were the biggest outbreak of violence here since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in February, and the most violent manifestation yet of the growing anger at the ruling military council.
The clashes began midday Saturday after the police cleared out the last remnants of a large demonstration in Tahrir Square the day before. That demonstration, organized by Islamists but appearing to represent a far broader cross-section of Egyptians, drew tens of thousands of people calling for a swift end to military rule.
The fighting on Saturday began after news circulated that the security forces had moved into the square, the iconic heart of the Egyptian revolution, to force out a few hundred protesters who had spent the night. Hundreds and eventually thousands of other civilians stormed into the square to defend it, setting off battles that spread across downtown Cairo into the night.
Protesters threw rocks at police vehicles, capturing a police truck and passing out handcuffs, hats and other gear found inside. Others smashed the sidewalk into rocks to hurl at the police, and threw Molotov cocktails. Plumes of black smoke from a burning police truck wafted through the white clouds of tear gas.
Retreating riot police officers fired nonlethal weapons from their trucks to try to push back the crowd.
“Police and thugs and thieves,” the protesters chanted. Taking aim at Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who leads the ruling military council, they adapted the signature chant of the Arab Spring revolts sweeping the region: “The people want to bring down the field marshal.”
From a speech by Chas Freeman given in Macau, China, yesterday: Europe used to be boringly predictable, which was good for business. Now bits of it have reverted to being excitingly unreliable, which is bad. Repeated crises have addicted European leaders to summits, where they agree on partial solutions to problems and create new ones, then go home to think up still more ways to unnerve each other and investors. The year ahead seems certain to feature more summits and more Eurotorture of the world’s financial nervous system. The fiscal sobriety and punctiliousness of northern Europeans will not soon prevail over the bouzoukinomics and bunga bunga politics of Europe’s exuberantly irrational and overly indebted south.
More fundamentally, however, as a club of clubs, Europe has just shown itself to be much less than the sum of its far too many movable parts. In some of the clubs that make up Europe, members are seriously tired of each other as well as of the way responsibility is apportioned. The mismatch between the eurozone’s membership and that of the European Union, in particular, makes German creditworthiness, not the EU, central to the credibility of the euro. And there is an obvious contradiction between a bureaucratically administered supranational currency and the democratically exercised sovereign authority of Europe’s many nation-states.
As Greece has just demonstrated, the European project is seriously incomplete and vulnerable to disruption by reckless acts of political brinkmanship. In the absence of Europe-wide democracy, national democracy and multinational community-building no longer seem compatible. Decisions based on local interests, no matter how legitimately they are arrived at, can threaten both pan-European and global interests in market stability and economic revival. Sadly, in many ways, Europe remains more colloquium than commonwealth — more a confederation of small minds and big egos than a federal union of peoples. The incongruities and incompetencies of a still far-from-united Europe have become a problem not just for Europeans but for the world.
The destabilizing effects of financial uncertainty may now be Europe’s most notable export. But the United States seems determined to one-up the perversity of European indecisiveness. Europe has the will to act, but not the political machinery to act coherently. America has the mechanisms and the resources needed to make decisions and implement them. It lacks the wit, the will, and the spirit of political accommodation to do so. In effect, the United States now suffers from fiscal anorexia — economic self-starvation born of an obsession with curing the imagined obesity of government. But America’s civilian public sector is already too lean to sustain the nation’s socio-economic health and competitiveness. The United States is disinvesting in its human and physical infrastructure — consuming its sinews — at the very moment when it most needs to rebuild its strength. India may be the world’s largest functioning democracy but America is now seen everywhere as its largest dysfunctional one.
Ideological delusion, self-indulgence, arrogance, and unbridled greed got America — and the world economy — into their current mess. Devotion to fanciful concepts, despite their catastrophic results when actually applied, has undermined the credibility of the “full faith and credit” of the United States. Many Americans remain wedded to the bizarre notions that the redistributive functions of government are a net drag on the economy, that reducing government investment and outlays will somehow generate jobs, that financial engineering adds real value to the economy, and that unequal income distribution stimulates economic growth. In a less narcissistic political environment, people would laugh at the idea that cutting public spending — and thereby contracting the economy — could possibly create jobs and stimulate growth or that a “SuperCommittee” of the finest politicians that vested interests can keep in office could magically balance a budget that is 40 percent in the red solely by cutting non-defense expenditures, without raising revenues.
The New York Times reports: Tens of thousands of Islamists jammed Tahrir Square on Friday, demanding the swift exit of Egypt’s interim military rulers in the most significant challenge to their authority since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak nine months ago.
The huge turnout was the first time that Egypt’s Islamists had so openly and aggressively challenged military rule, ending an uneasy truce that had prevailed as long as the military appeared willing to allow the Islamists as much of a say in Egypt’s future as they could win at the ballot box.
That truce fell apart, on the eve of parliamentary elections, after the military council spelled out for the first time its intention to preserve a decisive role for itself in Egyptian politics far into the future, elevating itself above civilian control and imposing rules to protect individual and minority rights. And after sitting out many of the protests organized by liberals since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, Islamists took to the streets on Friday in a fierce backlash.
“The people didn’t sacrifice hundreds of lives in the revolution so that the military would jump over their will,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, a teacher at a religious school who traveled from Mansoura, about 75 miles away, to attend. “If they can do that, what is the point of parliamentary elections?”
The rally represented the beginning of a new battle between Egypt’s two most powerful political forces, the military and the once-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, that leaves Egyptian liberals and leftists anxious and divided on the sidelines.
Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: A number of political forces and intellectuals have prepared a lengthy memorandum that includes a drastically reformed plan for the remainder of Egypt’s transitional period.
Al-Masry Al-Youm has obtained a copy of the document, which the drafters said they will submit to the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) within days.
The memorandum suggests postponing parliamentary elections, and in their place forming a “national rescue cabinet,” having Egyptians elect a constituent assembly to draft the new constitution, holding presidential elections and fully transferring power to a civilian government. After all this, the memorandum reads, parliamentary elections should be held in accordance with the laws set out in the new constitution.
Among those involved in drafting the memorandum were former President of the Democratic Front Party Osama al-Ghazaly Harb, presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei, Coordinator of the National Association for Change Abdel Galil Mostafa, writer Alaa al-Aswany and journalist Sakina Fouad.
At Open Democracy, Paul Rogers writes: The authorities are undertaking a legal and judicial counter-offensive against the “occupy” camps that have sprung up in central locations in New York and London. But scores of camps remain across north America and western Europe, part of a diffuse and dispersed phenomenon that has acquired a life of its own within a few short weeks.
These protests echo others earlier in 2011, including the turbulent actions in Greece and the extensive mobilisations in Spain (see “A time of riot: England and the world”, 11 August 2011). They also connect with developments elsewhere: the mass student demonstrations in Chile that moved from opposition to a failing education system to a much wider campaign against marginalisation, and the protests by middle-class Israelis against their more restricted life-chances (albeit such conditions are still far outranked by the great poverty in the nearby occupied territories, notably Gaza).
This upsurge of demonstrations is largely a response to the renewed economic crisis and to the enduring spectacle of financial institutions paying huge salaries and even larger bonuses to their elites while the majority of populations bear the brunt of government-imposed cuts. More broadly it recalls the large-scale anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s, not least around the Seattle (1999) and Genoa (2001) summits. This movement receded after 9/11 and the launch of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – but it has now returned, albeit in a different guise, as a result of the accumulating economic crises of 2007-11.
These protests, demonstrations and movements may well be sustained or they may (at least in the short term) recede. Yet in a global perspective they reflect two processes that lend them deep importance. [Continue reading…]
Jonathan Steele writes: Syria is on the verge of civil war and the Arab League foolishly appears to have decided to egg it on. The spectre is ugly, as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the hawks of the Gulf, are joined by the normally restrained King Abdullah of Jordan in taking sides with opponents of Syria’s Assad regime.
Where common sense dictates that Arab governments should seek to mediate between the regime and its opponents, they have chosen instead to humiliate Syria’s rulers by suspending them from the Arab League.
It is no accident that the minority of Arab League members who declined to go along with that decision includes Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq. They are the three Arab countries that have experienced massive sectarian violence and the horrors of civil war themselves. Lebanon and Iraq, in particular, have a direct interest in preventing all-out bloodshed in Syria. They rightly fear the huge influx of refugees that would pour across their borders if their neighbour collapses into civil war.
That war has already begun. The image of a regime shooting down unarmed protesters, which was true in March and April this year, has become out of date. The so-called Free Syrian Army no longer hides the fact that it is fighting and killing government forces and police, and operating from safe havens outside Syria’s borders. If it gathers strength, the incipient civil war would take on an even more overt sectarian turn with the danger of pogroms against rival communities.
Moderate Sunnis in Syria are worried by the increasing militancy of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis who have taken the upper hand in opposition ranks. The large pro-regime demonstrations in Damascus and Aleppo over the past week cannot simply be written off as crowds who were intimidated or threatened with loss of jobs if they did not turn out.
Meanwhile, Syria’s large Christian minority cowers in alarm, fearing to share the fate of Iraqi Christians who were forced to flee when sectarian killing heightened the significance of every citizen’s religious identity and began to overwhelm non-Muslims too. In northern Syria the Kurds are also nervous about the future. In spite of the regime’s long-standing refusal to accept their national rights, most fear the Muslim Brotherhood more.
The Assad regime has made mistake after mistake. Stunned by the first protests this spring, it turned too quickly to force. It blocked international media access and censored its own press and TV, thereby leaving the field free for rumour, exaggeration and the distortions of random footage uploaded on to YouTube. Its offers of dialogue with the opposition were hesitant and seemed insincere. The attacks on Arab embassies in Damascus in recent days were stupid.
As a result, the situation has become increasingly polarised. The regime denounces the externally based opposition, the Syrian National Council which came into existence last month, as a puppet of foreign governments. For its part the council refuses to talk to the regime, insisting that Assad must go. It has started to call for a no-fly zone and foreign intervention on the Libyan model, both of which are a further incitement to civil war. The internal opposition has not gone so far but may be pushed in that direction if the situation continues to sharpen.
The need now is for international mediation before it is too late, with an agenda for a democratic transition that would include guarantees of status and protection for all minorities, including the Alawites from whom the ruling elite comes. The risk of a vengeful takeover by the Sunni majority is too great.
The New York Times reports: For the second day in a row, deserters from the Syrian Army carried out attacks on symbols of the Assad government’s centers of power, targeting the youth offices of the ruling Baath Party on Thursday after firing rocket-propelled grenades on a military intelligence base on Wednesday, activists said.
The attacks, along with fraying relations among Syria’s religious communities, growing international pressure and a relentless crackdown, prompted Russia, Syria’s closest ally, to say that the country was moving closer to a civil war.
The attacks may have been more symbolic than effective, but could mark the increased ability of a growing number of defectors to publicize their exploits. Attacks on government installations — in the southern town of Dara’a and the central city of Homs, for instance — have been reported since the start of the uprising.
The attacks themselves paled before the bloodiest episodes of Syria’s last uprising in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, insurgents stormed the office of the Aleppo Artillery School, killing 32 cadets. It was unclear whether anyone was killed or wounded in these attacks, but the constituency of armed strikes and the bold choice of targets has heightened the profile of Syria’s armed insurgency.
The Syrian government did not mention either attack, which activists reported, citing the accounts of local residents. But even without a firm picture of any damage, the attacks were, at a minimum, indicative of determination on the part of military defectors in the face of a crackdown that the United Nations says has killed more than 3,500 people.
Tony Karon writes: [While] the regime is unable to crush the uprising, the opposition still appears to lack the power to topple the regime. The core of Assad’s military remains intact, and willing to carry out the regime’s plan to shoot its way out of the crisis. In the major cities, much of the Sunni urban middle class has remained on the sidelines, while Assad maintains a substantial support base primarily among Syria’s Allawite and Christian minorities, many of whom accept the regime’s portrayal of the opposition as a sectarian Sunni lynch mob.
To the extent that Assad’s repression has pushed the opposition towards an increasingly militarized response, that actually reinforces the regime’s narrative that Syria is in the throes of a sectarian civil war, with Assad casting himself as the protector of Allawites and Christians. On that basis, the regime also appears to have divided the region, with Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen — countries with significant Shi’ite populations, and in the case of Iraq, substantial Iranian influence — having declined to back the original Arab League suspension of Syria. Also, many key leaders of Christian communities in other Arab countries appear to have come out in support of Assad.
Assad can also count on solid backing from Russia, for whom Assad’s Syria is a key geostrategic asset because it provides the Russian navy’s only Mediterranean port, and also from Iran, for which Syria has been the key Arab ally.
But other regional players are raising their pressure on Damascus. The Arab League, with Turkey in attendance, on Wednesday gave Syria three (more) days to act on a deal it claimed to have accepted two weeks ago — but ignored on the ground — to halt repression, withdraw its army from restive towns, and accept Arab monitors. The League suspended Syria’s membership, and sanctions should Damascus fail to comply. Al Jazeera’s Rula Amin reported that last-minute diplomacy by Russia and Iran averted harsher and more immediate measures by the League.
Turkey had a more menacing message ahead of the summit, with officials warning that Syria would “pay a heavy price” for continue killing of its “oppressed people”, and threatening to cut off electrical supplies following an attack on its embassy in Damascus by a pro-Assad mob. Officials in Ankara have begun to speak openly about creating a “buffer zone” inside Syria where it could protect refugees from the crackdown without having to admit them to Turkish territory. That, of course, would mean sending Turkish troops into Syria, and might presage a territorial breakup of Syria into rebel- and regime-controlled areas. But Turkey is waiting for international authorization to take such a step. “It seems out of the question for us to do that on our own,” said an adviser to President Abdullah Gul.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who once counted Assad as a personal friend, is now sending a message that the Syrian leader can’t be trusted. “No one any longer expects [Assad’s regime] to meet the expectations of the people and of the international community,” he said Tuesday. “Our wish is that the Assad regime, which is now on a knife edge, does not enter this road of no return, which leads to the edge of the abyss.”
Martin Luther King Jr leading civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965
The 99% shut down Wall Street, November 17, 2011
Students lock arms before police assault, University of California at Berkeley, November 9, 2011
After a police assault (shown in the video above) on non-violent student protesters — whose only arms were the ones they interlocked — Robert Birgeneau, the chancellor at Berkeley, issued a statement saying:
It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.
What Birgeneau objects to is resistance in any form and interlocking arms in defiance of an advancing line of police is indeed an act of resistance.
But more than that, it is an act of solidarity and nothing threatens institutional power more than unity among ordinary people.
When burly police officers thrust night sticks into the chests of young students, this is not simply what is euphemistically called a “show of force,” but instead seems to be a display of “forward panic.”
In the kind of police violence that sociologist Randall Collins has dubbed forward panic, a cauldron of pent up tension suddenly erupts. Among Collins’ insights is that because people (including police and soldiers) universally have high-threshold inhibitions that restrain them from becoming violent, when those inhibitions suddenly fall away, the targets of violence will most often be those who are perceived as weak, unwilling or incapable of hitting back. Fear targets the easiest opponent.
This is the micro-social context in which the police lash out, but at the same time there is a broader context that fuels the fear of those who have been invested with the power of the state.
In the face of mass resistance, the primary line of defense for the police is not their weapons or shields — it is an idea already under challenge: that the state is more powerful than the people. And once the fault-lines in that idea have been exposed, the power equation is in jeopardy of suddenly being reversed.
Over the last twelves months, in the Middle East, in Europe, and now in the United States, the seeds have already been planted which could grow into the most dangerous idea that ever swept the world: that we have a greater interest in uniting than we do in being set apart; that what we might gain together will far exceed what we can achieve alone.
Human solidarity — this is what now threatens governments, corporations and every concentration of power.
* * *
Protesters in New York today were joined by one former police officer who sees that it his duty to stand with the people: Retired Police Captain Raymond Lewis from Philadelphia.
This afternoon, Captain Lewis was marched away in cuffs after being arrested by the NYPD.
The New York Times reports: Brazen attempts by Egypt’s interim military rulers to hold on to power long after elections have elicited a sharp reaction domestically and for the first time have prompted Washington to warn about the potential for new unrest.
After months of mixing gentle pressure with broad support for the ruling military council, the Obama administration has sharpened its tone, senior administration officials say, expressing concern that the failure to move to civilian control could undermine the defining revolt of the Arab Spring.
The shift in tone is part of a difficult balancing act for Washington, which is keen to preserve its ties to the military and its interests in the region, chiefly Egypt’s role in maintaining peace with Israel. But Washington also hopes to win favor with Egypt’s newly empowered political opposition while avoiding the appearance of endorsing the military’s stalled transition to democracy. All things considered, some here have suggested, the change in tone may be intended to placate Egyptian public opinion rather than actually press the military to give up power.
The Daily Telegraph reports: Syrian army defectors attacked an intelligence complex on the edge of the capital Damascus early on Wednesday, following reports the country will boycott today’s Arab League meeting.
Wednesday’s attack was the first such reported assault on a major security facility in the eight-month uprising against Assad, activists said.
Members of the Free Syrian Army fired shoulder-mounted rockets and machineguns at a large Air Force Intelligence complex situated on the northern edge of the capital on the Damascus-Aleppo highway at about 2:30 a.m. (0030 GMT).
A gunfight ensued and helicopters circled the area, the sources said.
Meanwhile the rebel Free Syrian Army announced on Wednesday the creation of a temporary military council with the aim of ousting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and protecting civilians from his forces.
“Based on the requirements of this phase and the demands of the Syrian revolution, the Free Syrian Army is establishing a temporary military council,” a statement said.
Michael Hanna writes: When the deposed former president Hosni Mubarak was wheeled on a hospital bed into the makeshift Cairo courtroom hastily prepared for his trial, the process of transitional justice in Egypt appeared to have achieved an important symbolic victory. The sight of the former autocrat laid low before a court of law to be held accountable for his actions was undoubtedly an important marker of the fundamental changes that have convulsed Egypt following its eighteen-day uprising and the fall of the Mubarak regime. After numerous court proceedings against former Mubarak advisors and confidants, the start of the trial also appeared to fulfill a central demand of the uprising: that Mubarak and his cronies face justice for their past crimes. Yet, the outsized focus on the former president and the speed with which his trial was initiated also raised troubling questions about the future scope and trajectory of transitional justice efforts, converging with broader worries about the course of Egypt’s transition.
Much like the muddled political transition overseen by Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), transitional justice has been characterized by ad hoc decision-making and suffered from a fundamental lack of transparency and popular participation. The outcome of Egypt’s extended struggle for political supremacy—parliamentary elections are due to take place in November 2011 and presidential balloting at a date still to be determined—will shape the depth and scope of transitional justice efforts. Based on the reactionary posture of the SCAF during its tenure as Egypt’s ruling authority, it is a near certainty that transitional justice efforts will remain rudimentary until such time as civilian authority is reinstated. The transition to civilian authority will provide an opportunity to revisit those areas that have been neglected during SCAF’s control. Renewed focus on justice, accountability, and equality before the law would also provide a significant link to the ethos that animated Egypt’s unexpected uprising and direct attention to those lofty goals at a time when prosaic and flawed politics are becoming the central focus of the country’s attention.
Transitional justice will be highly contested within Egyptian society. The goals of these efforts are not simply retributive, although punishment and deterrence through prosecutorial action are certainly important results. Addressing the claims of the former regime’s victims would help in establishing a credible basis for political reconciliation. The creation of an unimpeachable historical record of the excesses and abuses of the Mubarak regime would play a significant role in the difficult long-term task of forming an open and accountable political culture.
The normative value of transitional justice efforts would also have political utility if implemented judiciously, as efforts at increasing accountability for past regime crimes would be an important route to ensuring the supremacy of civilian governance and bolstering the country’s democratic infrastructure. This type of initiative could also play an important part in nurturing judicial independence as a check against future official abuse.
The Egyptian military would likely be much more comfortable with a discrete focus on the excesses of Egypt’s crony-capitalist economy and the violence associated with the repression of the January 25 uprising. The military has played a less pronounced political role in recent years, but a more probing initiative that sought to speak to the systematic crimes of the former regime and its predecessors would more directly implicate the military in light of its central role within Egypt’s authoritarian superstructure. This is particularly the case for earlier periods when Egypt could be described as a military state and society, and the military and its officer corps were implicated directly in day-to-day repression. As such, the military would be averse to broader efforts seeking to document state repression during the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, in addition to the years of Mubarak’s rule. Demonstrating credibly the repression that has characterized the Egyptian state since the Free Officers’ Movement and the toppling of King Farouk in 1952, however, would have the benefits of reinforcing the imperative to break with the past and lending legitimacy to civilian efforts to limit military interference in governance.
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