Adam Shatz writes: So this is how it ends: with the army killing more than 600 protesters, and injuring thousands of others, in the name of restoring order and defeating ‘terrorism’. The victims are Muslim Brothers and other supporters of the deposed president Mohammed Morsi, but the ultimate target of the massacres of 14 August is civilian rule. Cairo, the capital of revolutionary hope two years ago, is now its burial ground.

To each setback they have undergone since the overthrow of Mubarak, Egypt’s revolutionary forces have responded with the reassuring mantra: ‘revolution is a process.’ But so is counter-revolution, which seems to have prevailed for the foreseeable future. It won not only because the army and the feloul (remnants of the old regime) had superior resources at their disposal, but because they had a unified sense of their aims, something the leaderless revolutionaries conspicuously lacked. The revolution has been a ‘process’ in the manner of a 1960s happening, a meeting of different, often bickering forces that shared the stage only to go their own way after Mubarak’s overthrow. While accusing one another of betraying the revolution, both liberals and Islamists, at various intervals, tried to cut deals with the army, as if it might be a neutral force, as if the people and the army really were ‘one hand’, as people had once chanted in Tahrir Square. Neither had the ruthlessness, or the taste for blood, of Khomeini, who began to decapitate the Shah’s army as soon as he seized power. While the old regime reassembled its forces, Egypt’s revolutionaries mistook their belief in the revolution for the existence of a revolution. By the time Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power on 3 July, the revolution existed mainly in their imagination.

The triumph of the counter-revolution has been obvious for a while, but most of Egypt’s revolutionaries preferred to deny it, and some actively colluded in the process, telling themselves that they were allying themselves with the army only in order to defend the revolution. Al-Sisi was only too happy to flatter them in this self-perception, as he prepared to make his move. He, too, styles himself a defender of the revolution. [Continue reading…]

Jared Malsin describes getting caught in Egypt’s Day of Rage: There was a crackle of gunfire. Birdshot hit the buildings overhead and the crowd of demonstrators on Cairo’s 15 May Bridge took off running from the shots. I felt a dull object hit my back. It was a brake disk from a car. Thrown by whom—it was unclear. Demonstrators shouted that police were shooting from the rooftops. I kept running.

The thousands of demonstrators that filled the bridge were supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi, heeding a call for a Friday of Rage, a day of nationwide demonstrations deploring a crackdown by the interim military-backed government that at least 638 people dead on Wednesday. The initial shock of Wednesday’s killing has now worn off, and given way to bitterness and anger.

Many of the protesters knew they could be marching to their deaths. “I saw two people who were shot already, and I’m not afraid,” said Haitham Eisa, 32, a quality manager at an educational company based in Germany. He’s lived in Germany for 11 years, he said, but he flew back for the January 2011 uprising that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak. He flew back again this week to protest Wednesday’s massacre.

“I’m going because I have to protect my opinion. My opinion is democracy,” he said, jogging alongside me. “We are still fighting for democracy. Democracy should survive. Nothing else. Not military weapons.” Running past, an engineering student name Muhammad Ibrahim Younis, 21, overheard Eisa’s words and shouted, “We’re not going back even if it means death!” [Continue reading…]

GlobalPost: The irony is thick: Obama calls on Egypt’s interim government to stop its bloody crackdown on protesters, but continues to give it $1.3 billion a year in military aid.


For decades, Egypt has been one of the largest recipients of US foreign military aid, receiving everything from F-16s to teargas grenades.

So who are the companies reaping the benefits?

The list below were the 10 biggest US Defense contracts involving direct military aid to Egypt from 2009 to 2011, according to The Institute for Southern Studies.


See the table at the bottom of the page for full details of the contracts.


1. Lockheed Martin
Amount: $259 million [Continue reading…]

Shadi Hamid writes: It would be perverse if the January 2011 revolution paved the way for something worse than what it sought to replace. But that is where Egypt is headed. Under the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood was repressed, but the repression was never total. The Brotherhood, as the country’s largest opposition force, was allowed room to operate, to contest elections, and to have seats in parliament. Mubarak may have been a dictator, but he was no radical.

The current military government is much more ambitious, with its aim to dismantle the Brotherhood and destroy it as a political force. Unlike Mubarak, the generals have tapped into real, popular anger against the Brotherhood – after its many failures in power – and helped nurture that anger into something ugly and visceral. It’s no surprise when armies use force. That’s what armies do. But it is scary to see ordinary Egyptians, “liberal” political parties and much of the country’s media class cheering it on so enthusiastically.

Democratic transitions, even in the best of circumstances, are uneven, painful affairs. But it no longer makes much sense to say that Egypt is in such a transition. Even in the unlikely event that political violence somehow ceases, the changes ushered in by the July 3 military coup and its aftermath will be exceedingly difficult to reverse. The army’s interventionist role in politics has become entrenched. Rather than at least pretending to rise above politics, the military and other state bodies have become explicitly partisan institutions. This will only exacerbate societal conflict in a deeply polarized country. Continuous civil conflict, in turn, will be used to justify permanent war against an array of internal and foreign enemies, both real and imagined.

There is no need to be surprised. This is what military coups look like. The symbolism, of course, is especially striking. Egypt is the most populous Arab country and a bellwether for the region. There was a time when observers would say banal, hopeful things like “Egypt can show the way toward a new democratic Middle East.” But that was a different time.

I imagine a lot of Americans upon seeing news reports about the eruption of violence in Egypt will respond with a mixture of shock, dismay, and resignation. “This is what happens in the Middle East” — the observation that pretends to be an explanation, as though people across the region kill each other as a pastime.

And then there will be those who take note of the fact that Egypt’s security services are using Caterpillar bulldozers and Humvees — all paid for with U.S. tax dollars.

But the real enabling force behind the killing is an idea — an idea that ever since 9/11 to varying degrees most Americans have subscribed to: the idea of a war on terrorism.

Ever since that phrase was coined and popularized, it has served as currency for every dictator who wants to justify ruthless repression. And now in Egypt it serves as popular ideology as much of the population think the police and the army are now just doing their job, slaughtering members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the hundreds.

The New York Times reports: A man who sold eggs said the army had waited too long to attack the Islamists. An accountant said the police had stormed the protests with an efficiency he had not seen in years.

In the working-class neighborhood of Imbaba on Thursday, a teacher, Mohamed Abdul Hafez, said the hundreds of Islamists who died the day before mattered little to him. “It’s about the security of the country,” Mr. Hafez said.

Egypt seemed more divided than ever after a brutal day of violence here that left hundreds of people dead. Supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, mourned those killed, vowed revenge, planned their next moves. Many other Egyptians, though, directed their ire at the protesters who had camped out in the streets for weeks. For them, what occurred made sense.

“It was necessary,” Akmal William, standing in his auto-detailing shop on Talaat Harb Street, said of the raid by soldiers and police officers. “They had to be strict.”

Witnesses described a disproportionate, ruthless attack. Condemnations came from human rights advocates, a few Egyptian political figures, and from abroad. But many Egyptians viewed things differently, focusing on what they said were continuing threats from Mr. Morsi’s supporters, who were frequently referred to as terrorists. In their view, the army was the only force standing in the Islamists’ way.

Between the parallel realities, others were torn between the claims of the security forces of violent demonstrators who threatened the country — a view parroted by the state news media — and what they heard from Islamist friends about how the battle on the streets had unfolded on Wednesday morning.

In Imbaba, a neighborhood that seems to catch all the nation’s political currents in its congested alleyways, many people regretted the bloodshed. But they asserted that the alternative was worse. The Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi’s political party, was holding back the country with endless sit-ins and protests, many said. And the longer the army waited to act, the weaker Egypt seemed to them.

That conviction only grew stronger amid reports about Islamist violence, including the storming of a government building in Giza early Thursday. Mr. William, a Coptic Christian, was preoccupied by a spate of attacks on churches and Christian homes across the country, a spasm of collective scapegoating by some of Mr. Morsi’s supporters.

“They won’t go easily,” he said, adding that churches “are still being burned.”

Some people seemed to buy the relentless propaganda of the state news media, saying they had come to realize that the Brotherhood was actually the mysterious “third party” blamed by successive Egyptian leaders for all manner of evil deeds. At least one man just seemed anxious to heap praise on the country’s leaders, irrespective of their actions, as if Egypt were still frozen in its authoritarian past.

Others had arrived at their own conclusions, and explained in detail why the government had been forced to act against Mr. Morsi and his supporters, regardless of the consequences.

“I don’t like conspiracy theories,” said Ahmed Mustafa, 37, an accountant who sat in a cafe. “I’m against violence. I gave my vote to Morsi, and he disappointed me. They did things their way, and it was a false way.”

The authorities acted responsibly on Wednesday, he said, moving during daylight, so that “everything was obvious,” rather than under the cover of darkness.

“We delegated them to fight terrorism,” he said of the military. “And the Brotherhood wanted to show themselves as victims.” [Continue reading…]

On Thursday, Tom Rollins wrote: [T]he most worrying upshot of yesterday’s violence has been reactions in government and on the street.

At Nahda not long after the police rapidly cleared the site, local residents were cheering vans taking away the detritus of the one month-old occupation: air-conditioner fans, scrumpled-up Brotherhood banners and bags of rubbish that some person would have called their belongings at one point.

Nearby, four plainclothes soldiers sat around sipping tea and smoking cigarettes underneath an apartment block, chatting and watching state TV relay images of policemen clearing away protesters in Nahda. They were happy. On the street outside a trickle of policemen walked back with tear gas guns and rifles slung over their shoulders, joking with each other and carrying themselves like war heroes.

Most pro-Morsy protesters had already moved to Mohandiseen. When I got there, crowds were huddling for cover on Balat Ahmed Abdel Aziz. People were running between barricades and an up-turned police van was on fire in the middle of the street.

Inside the field hospital in Mostafa Mahmoud mosque, doctors were resuscitating a man, shot in the head, whose eyes had burst out of their sockets from the pressure. Five bodies were laid out on top of each other in a makeshift morgue too small to hold all the dead. You could tell when the next casualty was coming in from the tsunami of screams and cries coming down the corridor. Chest wounds, head wounds; all from live ammo. 22 dead.

I spoke to people who saw armed Brotherhood yesterday. But does that justify what happened? Did the fact Hamas had rockets justify what happened during Operation Cast Lead in 2008? Then too an organized security force pummelled retribution on hundreds of civilians for the alleged crimes of a few. People justified that too, sided with authority. Collective punishment on dubious charges.

Worse still, on Wednesday night, Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim thanked the police for showing “self-restraint.” He then vowed to return Egypt to the halcyon stability of the Mubarak era.

“I promise that as soon as conditions stabilize and the Egyptian street stabilizes, as soon as possible, security will be restored to this nation as if it was before January 25, and more,” he said, according to Reuters.

It’s an amazing statement. Of course Egypt could be said to have been more stable under Hosni Mubarak. Police states are good for stability. It’s the word they’ve been writing in Lucida Handwriting on the “Egypt: Good for Business” brochure handed out at US State Department events for years. But for a government supposedly acting in the name of the 25 January revolution, this takes a special dose of doublethink. Sisi and the government are getting comfortable.

And so the old regime is back, this time with a new face, new tactics. Mubarak is in prison but the security state is back on the streets with impunity.

Nine minutes of footage from Rabaa. A war zone. http://t.co/R7e89Bth7s

— Evan Hill (@evanchill) August 16, 2013

Samer al-Atrush reports: The further the black-clad Egyptian policemen tightened the noose on the Rabaa al-Adawiya protest camp, the more desperate became the search for a place to lay out the protesters felled by their gunfire.

Amid a swarm of hissing bullets, two protesters barged into the garden of the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque compound in east Cairo, carrying a man whose face was masked in blood.

Others offered them directions to makeshift morgues. “Take a left.” “No, take a right.” They stumbled with their macabre burden, leaving behind smears of blood on bystanders. “Just leave him here,” one finally advised.

The morgue of the makeshift field hospital, in one of the small buildings in the mosque compound, had filled up with corpses soon after police and soldiers began their operation to clear the protest camp, after dawn on Wednesday.

Then the corpses, some with their brains shot out, encroached on the living in the nearby field clinic, in another building.

A bearded, elderly man was brought in breathing heavily, his brain partially revealed where a bullet had landed, and his eyes wide open as if in amazement.

“Say the shahada,” a man standing over him said, referring to the Muslim profession of faith. “I’m sure he already did,” another said, scrutinising the dying man’s face, who appeared unaware of his surroundings.

More and more dead kept being brought in, some with fresh blood pouring from their heads. Soon the field hospital became part morgue part clinic.

Statement from the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists on the massacre in Cairo:

Down with military rule! Down with Al-Sisi, the leader of the counter-revolution!

The bloody dissolution of the sit-ins in Al-Nahda Square and Raba’a al-Adawiyya is nothing but a massacre—prepared in advance. It aims to liquidate the Muslim Brotherhood. But, it is also part of a plan to liquidate the Egyptian Revolution and restore the military-police state of the Mubarak regime.

The Revolutionary Socialists did not defend the regime of Mohamed Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood for a single day. We were always in the front ranks of the opposition to that criminal, failed regime which betrayed the goals of the Egyptian Revolution. It even protected the pillars of the Mubarak regime and its security apparatus, armed forces and corrupt businessmen. We strongly participated in the revolutionary wave of 30 June.

Neither did we defend for a single day the sit-ins by the Brotherhood and their attempts to return Mursi to power.

But we have to put the events of today in their context, which is the use of the military to smash up workers’ strikes. We also see the appointment of new provincial governors—largely drawn from the ranks of the remnants of the old regime, the police and military generals. Then there are the policies of General Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi’s government. It has adopted a road-map clearly hostile to the goals and demands of the Egyptian revolution, which are freedom, dignity and social justice.

This is the context for the brutal massacre which the army and police are committing. It is a bloody dress rehearsal for the liquidation of the Egyptian Revolution. It aims to break the revolutionary will of all Egyptians who are claiming their rights, whether workers, poor, or revolutionary youth, by creating a state of terror. [Continue reading…]