June truly is not January

Comparison and connection between the events of January 2011 and June/July 2013 is a very thorny topic. To revolutionaries it is very critical to ascertain that June is a continuation of January. The alternative is to admit that January 2011 was a failed revolution that did not deliver what people expected of it. This goes against the religion of January 2011 which states that the revolution was pure and bloodless but that it was subverted by innately evil outsiders. On the other hand, felool cannot admit that without January 2011 there would be no public, open, and popular denunciation of political Islamism the way there was in June 2013. For felool also have a religion that states that January is pure evil from which no good could come.

But what matters in the end is how the two events differ, and what they had in common.

Demonstrations:
January: January 2011 introduced mass rallies and occupation of public spaces as a means of applying pressure. In retrospect, the numbers in 2011 were not as huge as many people once claimed. The main reason rallies worked back then is because they were against the backdrop of so much pressure from so many sides and because of the novelty of the scene of a public square in Cairo filled to the brim with people.
June: The novelty of rallies has run out. In fact, there is now fatigue with rallies and sitins after two and a half years of constant demonstrations. To bring out numbers similar to 2011 would achieve virtually nothing since these numbers have been achieved on at least a dozen occasions over the past two years. June 30th had to turn out numbers that would blow January 2011 out of the waters, and it had to do so against a backdrop of little public sympathy for demos. June 30th 2013, delivered.

Public position on security forces:
January: Before the MB joined forces with youth on January 28th, the main focus of January 25th was reform of the police force. After some intermittent and unexplained violence on the 26th and 27th, the 28th ended with a massive simultaneous and seemingly organized attack on all police facilities in the country. Over ninety police stations were torched, over a dozen prison breaks happened simultaneously. Hundreds of prisoners, police officers, and civilians died in clashed around security offices. Attacks on security forces and Christians in North Sinai started around the end of January. The focus and turning point of January 2011 was attacks on security facilities and bringing police to  halt.
June: If there is one thing that revolutionaries that revolutionaries have a problem with June 30th for, it has to be public position regarding the MoI. It is probably not an overstatement to say that one of the main aims of June 30th in the eyes of many normal folk was to restore police. Restoration of police should not mean a return to random torture or excessive use of violence in the Mubarak era. But, perhaps due to the pressures of two years with little or no security, Mubarak era police seems to be exactly what a major section of the population wants. A year under Morsi, under a barrage of bloody rhetoric by Islamists in public and official forums, is enough to sway a lot of opinions.

Public violence:
January: Official revolutionary propaganda states that the January revolution was completely nonviolent except for violence practiced by the Mubarak regime. In fact, this wasn't true. Due to the security vacuum looting was widespread, local committees formed to guard the streets in place of police practiced extreme violence and summarily executed dozens of people. January also introduced the first occasion of warring protests in what is known as the battle of the camel.
June: The security vacuum is not as sharp. In fact, there is no security vacuum as of yet. No looting or any rise in crime can be noticed. Local committees were not formed. However, public violence features in June as much as it did in January. This time in the form of constant and consistent clashes between loosely organized MB and Islamist militia and even more loosely organized locals. This constant pitter patter plus large scale use of force by the army and the police on a couple of occasions, plus the constant armed Islamist attacks in Sinai have accumulated over 300 dead among Islamists, security, and civilians.

Local media:
January: Most public media started out highly opposed to January, then switched tone as the military switched positions. Most private media started cautiously neutral, then largely adopted January 2011. Public media used scare tactics to turn people off from demonstrating. Private media whitewashed the violence.
June: Public media started completely opposed to June, then switched again as control was given to the military. Almost all private media was fully on board for June 30th from day 1. Constant public and official threats of bodily violence by the largest Islamist groups against media figures who showed the slightest hint of opposition to the MB agenda left a lot of private media with a personal axe to grind.

International media:
January: International media was almost immediately on board, adopting the lingo of the revolutionaries and the Islamists and completely supporting the removal of Mubarak. After the removal of Mubarak, international media hailed the Egyptian revolution as an example. Whitewashing was the norm. AlJazeera started its tenure as an MB propaganda outlet in the January revolution, giving an example in skewed coverage that would inform Arab media for the years that followed.
June: International media ridiculed the demonstrations. The events on July 3rd were immediately labeled a coup. Statements by the MB spokesman were immediately echoed as fact. MB casualties were covered in depth, civilian victims of MB were completely ignored. Again, AlJazeera is setting the standard for politically charged coverage. But unlike January, a barrage of Egyptian privately owned channels have already eaten up a large portion of AlJazeera's Egyptian market share. And this local media, as stated earlier, has not too many great things to say about the MB.

International community:
January: The revolution was probably not started by any foreign power. But it was certainly approved of. Intense pressure was put on Mubarak to leave power. And after he did, gushing statements of support flowed, combined with promises of support and inclusion. When Mubarak was put under house arrest, then later tried and imprisoned, there was no official comment from any country and there was little media sympathy for him.
June: This one was definitely against most of the world. There is obviously little love for the deposition of Morsi in the US, Europe, and much of the Islamic world. Statements of condemnation flowed, and explicit demands for the release of Morsi were officially made by many nations. The EU representative insisted on visiting Morsi in his location of incarceration (compare to international position re Mubarak).

Saccharine and realism:
January: January was emotional. Hopes were high. Expectations were fantastic. Youth cleaned the square. Youth painted the pavement. Cairo airport hung billboards with the gushing statements of world leaders about the Egyptian revolution. Then the economy faltered, Islamists won the elections, and personal freedoms rotted. Egyptians replaced a constitution whose problem was term limits with a constitution that legalized child rape.
June: Nobody dared paint the pavement. Nobody dared raise expectations. The only expectation was to remove Morsi and severely wound Islamists, and then restore state institutions. Yeah there was a little gushing and swooning over the military, but that's just being Egyptian. The level of nauseating false sweetness in June is definitely orders of magnitude less than January.

Deconstruction vs synthesis:
January: Everyone who participated agreed on what they didn't want (Mubarak regime) and disagreed about everything they wanted.
June: What people didn't want (Islamists) and what they wanted (state institutions) were clear.

 

Why the Egyptian revolution wasn't quite right

Over two and a half years after the Egyptian revolution, it doesn't feel like it worked out fine. So much so that a large portion of the population felt the need for another revolution, another phase of the revolution, a coup, or whatever you want to call what happened on June 30th. There are many reasons that the revolution of January 25th 2011 backfired so badly. But the main reasons are surprisingly self-evident and shockingly simple.

Reason number one is Islamism. Political Islamists introduced straw man arguments right after the revolution to turn the transitional phase into a murky insincere identity struggle. The level of genuineness in the Islamists constant obsession with "Shariia" and the "Caliphate" varies significantly. The MB, for example, fully believes that elections give it the right to reshape the identity and culture of the entire population of the country into the image they desire. This belief that the MB are masters of the country, and its crème de la crème was constantly hinted at by MB politicians in talk shows when the pressure increased. So in order to reach electoral hegemony, through which the MB would supposedly turn everyone into cultural and social drones, the MB had to resort to Sharia and Islam. An outside observer of Egypt in 2011/2012, and even now after the removal of Morsi, would imagine that Islam is a declining religion in Egypt, constantly under threat and persecution. Islam, of course, never stopped being a dominant and domineering religion in Egypt; affecting every aspect of life.

Which brings us to the Salafists. These guys, in fact, did believe that there was an identity crisis in Egypt. They did believe that Islam was beleaguered and persecuted. The reason is that Salafists consider only Islamists to be true Muslims. This is how Morsi became known as the "Muslim president" among Islamists even though all the leaders of Egypt since the Arab expansion have been Muslim. Salafists actually believe that medieval values and norms have to be restored and that Egypt should be recreated in the image of seventh century western Arabia.

Thus, thanks to the MB and Salafists, the transitional phase was entirely consumed in inane discussions. As a very simple example, instead of discussing whether the constitution should specify a parliamentary or presidential system for Egypt, we spent months fighting to prevent and amendment by Salafists to make child rape constitutional. And we failed. The Salafists got to amend the constitution so that sixty year old men could potentially rape seven year old girls, and we don't know whether the constitution was presidential or mixed.

I don't think it's still an open question that without Islamists, Egypt's transition would have been much smoother, much more productive, and more smooth. But Islamists are not the only reasons the revolution failed. Heightened expectations also played a role.

Right after the January revolution people had such high hopes for the country. These hopes were almost entirely unfounded. The expectations were based on two assumptions: *Mubarak stole Egypt's riches, *Mubarak suppressed superior talent for fear they would threaten his rule. Both assumptions turned out to be patently false. Whether Mubarak stole or not, Egypt turned out to be as poor and resource lacking as he always warned. Egypt's most superior talent pool seemed to revolve around the pool from which Mubarak picked his cabinets. As the parliament and the cabinet of Hisham Qandil showed, instead of suppressed talent, Egypt has a surplus of people with inflated qualifications and little worth. But again, this was not enough to fail the revolution.

The last piece of the puzzle that completed the image of failure is the constant insistence on deconstruction. The January revolution was a revolution against what Egyptians perceived they did not want, not a revolution for what they knew they wanted. The revolutionary youth, with a near constant presence in media, synthesized a narrative where Egypt's number one priority was excising the regime ancien from all aspects of public life. The narrative was based on antiquated notions of revolutionary justice and legitimacy that have been out of vogue since the Bolshevik revolution. The result was possibly one of the most ham-handed and unjust group excisions of modern times. Through constitutional, legal, media, and even public action the revolutionaries managed to effectively dissociate Egypt from a large group of technocrats who had always been essential to the state and who could provide an effective counterbalance to Islamists. Islamists, of course, seized the opportunity, expanding the definition of regime ancien at first to every and any technocrat who did not agree with them and then to every politician who did not belong to an Islamist party. Thus signaling the failure of both the revolution and the MB's regime.

June 30th was a natural reaction.

State insecurity: MoI partly right

The minister of interior in his presser on the Manasa incident, mentioned in passing that several officers involved in monitoring and evaluating the activities of religious groups will be restored to National Security. Activists collectively gasped. But we need to pause here. The current minister of interior is in my opinion professionally incompetent, but this decision doesn't seem to stem from him. And it doesn't seem to be so bad after all.

State security is the internal intelligence service in Egypt, akin to the FBI. But because this is Egypt, state security of course had its fair share of violations. There are claims of torture, kidnappings, rapes, and all kinds of horrors. All the first hand accounts I've heard though, is of someone being asked to an office and asked questions by an officer. Evidence exists also that there was torture, although the extent is very difficult to judge. The extent and reach of state security in the Mubarak era is often portrayed by Islamists and activists alike to be spectacular. But this is probably a colossal exaggeration similar to the ones made about SAVAK in Shah-time Iran where activists once claimed a third of males in Iran to be SAVAK operatives (the truth turned out to be around 40,000 people!)

After the January 25th revolution, the country was essentially undone. Sectarian violence broke out in several locations, chaotic scenes spread, and attacks on police stations increased. Eager to preserve the pristine, though patently fake, image of the 18 days in Tahrir, activists and media alike scrambled to blame state security for everything. Highly respected talk show hosts made wild claims that state security officers were seen around sites of sectarian violence leading the crowds. Islamists fanned the flame of ire on state security.

The apparatus was dissolved a few months after the revolution. But this only happened after secular and Islamist activists stormed state security HQ's and extracted thousands of documents. In a ridiculous case known as "document shredding", state security officers were prosecuted (and found not guilty) for destroying printouts of classified documents before the public got their hands on it. In a Kafkaesque scene, dozens of Salafists stormed state security buildings insisting that they were tortured in subterranean cells (which never managed to materialize).

At the end of the day, the state security apparatus was essentially paralyzed. Activists claim state security never stopped functioning, but that is due to the necessity of a scapegoat upon which to hang every failing. Officers stopped working, many stopped caring, many were fired first by SCAF then by Morsi. Dozens of terrorists that the apparatus had helped capture were given presidential pardon by Morsi, any attempt to gather intelligence on Islamists was actively thwarted, and parts of the memory of the organization was lost as officers left it and documents lost their classification.

The result was a meteoric rise in weaponization and organization of terrorist groups in Northern Sinai, reaching a point where they are a veritable mini-army. Not to mention the now virtually unkown armory of Jamaa Islamiya in upper Egypt. But we also now have armed and active militia serving the MB and Hazemoon publicly in Cairo and Giza. We must recall that security attempts to warn about violence from Hazemoon was met with scorn and further calls for "reforming the MoI". People paid the price for this in neighborhoods around Nahda.

We are paying the price for the idealism and utter stupidity and inexperience of young activists today in blood. What the January 25th revolution knew was what it did not want. Everyone all of a sudden seemed to figure out that state security must go. What to replace it with, what state security actually does and how essential it is, are irrelevant questions. After all, some activists might have informed us, the principality of Monaco managed just fine without a state security officer. This whole debacle represents the nihilist, deconstructionist nature of January 25th that created the vacuum that the MB gladly stepped in to fill.

So now we are in a country where local groups openly call for civil war, carry weapons, kill people, call for foreign intervention, call for dissolution of the army, and essentially openly call for destruction of the state. All these groups without one single exception have religious overtones. When the MoI as an organization makes the decision to return a small number of officers with experience in monitoring religious groups, I think that's the least it could do. Are you afraid of illegal wiretapping or illegal detentions? If they happen and you make sure they happen point them out, in a month or so start pushing for legislation that puts legal (but reasonable) restrictions on state security, demand that the media be vigilant. But whatever you do, don't try to convince me that now and here we don't need a division in the internal intelligence service that monitors religious groups for signs of militancy!!!

What western media is getting right & wrong on Egypt

The effect of Western media on Western governments and the interest of the average westerner in what's happening now in Egypt are often exaggerated by Egyptians. However, it is interesting to take a look at Western media and try to dissect what exactly they are getting right or wrong. In Arabic language media, the situation in Egypt has virtually no neutral media outlets. The claim by one side that it is a war on religion, and by the other side that it is a war on the nation makes neutrality impossible to achieve. Thus Western media was expected to play a unique role here, which it largely failed to do. Part of the disappointment of Egyptians in Western media stems from the fact that, through trust in anything blonde and blue eyed, they over-estimate its professionalism and lack of bias.

What Western media is getting right that Arabic speaking media is not:

1-Sketch of the MB Rabea sitin. The sitin is described as it is, nothing is added, nothing is left out. Common stories about people being forcibly kept in the sitin are easily destroyed by these neutral accounts on the ground
2-The MB sitin has been largely ignored. Yes, the demands of the sitin have been largely ignored for weeks (perhaps for good reason)
3-Excessive force was used against MB marches. Despite all qualifiers, this goes without saying

What Western media got wrong:

1-MB marches are armed in ways that Egypt has never seen. Reporters often say dismissively that yeah, there may have been a shotgun or a dozen I don't know. But this is a very dangerous precedent in Egypt. Marches that carry weapons and shoot at people were introduced in Abassiya by Hazemoon (also Islamists), but they were very marginal at the time

2-The MB sitins have killed and tortured. The small sitin at Cairo University is particularly notorious for killings in almost all the surrounding areas. Residents of Bein El-Sarayat, Giza, and Manial have had roughly 30 people shot to death by the Nahda MB sitin. Western journalists invariably approach this in one of two ways: Either claim the victims fell in clashes without specifying sides, or quoting the MB that they were thugs

3-The central message of the Rabea stage. There is barely any attempt to translate or even listen occasionally to the Rabea stage microphone. It is certain and documented that the official stage is sending an extremely disturbing message from extremely disturbing people. The personalities on the stage invariably include terrorists from Jamaa Islamiya for example. The question of how do you know they are terrorists, well, they are self-confessed and proud about it. The message is almost constantly sectarian, laying the blame entirely on the Coptic church and almost explicitly calling for attacks on churches. Claims that the attacks on Sinai would stop once Morsi is restored were also made by Beltagi. Calls for the army to fracture, for foreign intervention, for Jihadists to join the cause, and prayers and curses upon all Egyptians who disagree with the MB were also made

4-Demographics. And by that I don't mean numbers, I mean types. Most Western journalists do report that most of the sitin is from the countryside, which is true. What they mostly mis-report is that the people are there for democracy or for their votes. People are there almost exclusively for religious reasons. Most of the people there see the ouster of Morsi as an attack on Islam, most are also fed bogus stories by the main microphone on how mosques are being burnt down allover the country. Denying that the sitin is largely Islamist, largely provincial, and largely poor; does not help finding a solution. After all there should be nothing wrong being these things

5-Realism of the demands and how genuine the leaders are. Yes, the demands have been ignored. But what are the demands? Morsi's return to power is the short answer. The few thousands who stay there all the time, the tens of thousands who come every night, and the leaders have all given a single message: Nothing will change until Morsi is restored to power, the constitution is restored, and the Shura council restored. Anyone with a hint of what's happening in the country knows that if any of these things happens, masses would flood the streets in protests that would dwarve Rabea. The army and the MB are striking a deal behind closed doors you say? Well, they probably are, but the MB leadership is digging itself a very deep hole by establishing as a hard fact among the sitin that there is only one hard nonnegotiable (and impossible) set of demands