Egyptians backing their country’s new transitional government have been taken aback by the disapproval of Western governments, media and human rights organisations to the new status quo.
US President Barack Obama may be fence-sitting to preserve US relationship with the country that owns the Suez Canal and maintains a peace treaty with Israel, but he is holding his nose. He has ordered a review of annual US aid and has asked the Egyptian military to free the detained former president. That call is echoed by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the European Union (EU) Foreign Policy Chief, Catherine Ashton, who recently met Muslim Brotherhood leaders before the EU offered to mediate the impasse. Subsequent to her Cairo visit, the EU withdrew a series of grants and loans to Egypt totaling $5 billion (Dh18.39 billion). The UK rapped the military on the knuckles by revoking export licenses for weapons components.
Egypt’s pro-transition TV anchors are incensed and confused as to why the US and Europe are stressing Mohammad Mursi’s legitimacy as Egypt’s first democratically-elected president without acknowledging that he trashed democracy’s core principles. “Hypocrisy” and “double standards” are the words they use when citing America’s history of cuddling despotic proxies. Conspiracy theories abound. Some commentators suggest Mursi sealed a secret deal with the US to relinquish a territory within Sinai so as to expand a future Palestinian state. Others contend that Washington fears a resurgence of Nasser-style Egyptian nationalism—currently at an all-time high—far more than a compliant semi-theocracy keeping citizens permanently polarised.
Leftist print media in the US and Britain have teamed up with Islamists to scream “coup” and were quick to characterise the confrontation between Mursi supporters and outside the Republican Guard Headquarters “a massacre.”
Guardian newspaper reports, penned by its 20-something Cairo correspondent Patrick Kingsley, are biased towards Muslim Brotherhood arguments. Kingsley took it upon himself to launch a one-man investigation into the clashes outside the Republican Guard Headquarters. He produced a 5,000-word report accusing security forces of coordinating an assault on “largely peaceful demonstrators,” ignoring the fact that many of the “demonstrators” who had marched to storm the military facility on the orders of their Supreme Guide, were caught on video shooting firearms from behind pillars and lobbing Molotov cocktails and heavy objects at soldiers from rooftops.
No army in the world will stand with their hands behind their backs if they come under attack. A glance at Kingsley’s Twitter page evidences his personal biases. He called the incident “a massacre” before his so-called investigation and actually excuses remarks made by Brotherhood leader Dr Mohammad Beltagy to the effect he would bring a halt to attacks in Sinai in the event the Brotherhood’s demands were met.
Egyptians celebrating a new start feel insulted and are in no mood to brook foreign interference. The Rebel Tamarod youth organisation refused to meet US Envoy William Burns and is urging ministers to suspend contact with Egypt-unfriendly states. Egypt’s Writers Union held a press conference last Saturday with speeches translated from Arabic to English, in an effort to explain the situation to the outside world. At one point, the translator had an emotional breakdown on hearing a delegate speak of his June 30 encounter with a group of elderly blind ladies asking passersby “Which way to Tahrir Square?”
In the meantime, the Muslim Brotherhood has backed itself into a corner. It remains intransigent over its demands that Mursi be returned to the palace. Interim President Adly Mansour has announced a national reconciliation initiative and has invited the Muslim Brotherhood to join the political process. He has been rebuffed. Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen insist the offer is not genuine when their leaders are being arrested and their television channels taken off air—sounds reasonable until one considers that the Brotherhood’s head honchos have been openly inciting jihad against compatriots, threatening the army and insulting Al Azhar.
In truth, when tens of thousands of the organisation’s following in Rabaa Adawiya square have been indoctrinated with a “Mursi, Mursi, Mursi” mantra, even if the Muslim Brotherhood was disposed to drop its demands, how would the crowd react when men, women and children have stood sweltering for weeks during the fasting month awaiting their icon? The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy is to heighten civil unrest, which its opponents view as a betrayal of the people’s aspirations.
The orchestrated finger-wagging stance of the US, the EU and Britain does nobody any favours and has elicited hostility from all sides. Last Saturday, the owner of the liberal Faraeen channel, Tawfik Okasha, encouraged his viewers to pelt US diplomatic cars with eggs and tomatoes. That same evening, a Muslim Brotherhood speaker at Rabaa Adawiya called upon the faithful to protest America’s unwillingness to use the ‘C’ word, outside the US Embassy in Garden City and the US Consulate in Alexandria.
The US and its European sycophants will be wise to accept this fait accompli, especially when their major regional allies, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Jordan, have blessed Egypt’s new start. Moreover, alienating Egypt is sheer stupidity at a time when US Secretary of State John Kerry attempts to mediate a final status agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.
With Russia and China itching to fill the gap, if the US wants to maintain its last vestiges of influence in the Middle East, Obama’s advisers should tell him: “Get over it—and fast.”
Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.
When the military seizes power then violence against them on that part of the electorate whose voice has been silenced is both to be expected and construed as legitimate.
You’re either for democracy or you’re not; you can’t have a coup d’état just because you don’t like the civilian government that’s been elected by a sizable proportion of the population, mere weeks after coming to power and before its been allowed to do anything meaningful.